The American Kleptocracy Clearinghouse

Cash Cow: How Trump's Rich Friends are Profiting from Public Lands

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:24:42 GMT

Kleptocrats view our public lands not as treasured resources but as opportunities for self-dealing. In previous editions of our Weekly Update (like this one and this one), we highlighted how the Trump administration has already reshaped the Forest Service, gutted environmental safeguards, and weakened democratic oversight. These anti-democratic tactics have created the conditions by which government officials are able to steer policy-making in directions that benefit private interests, including their own.

Control over hundreds of millions of acres of public land, as well as our tax dollars, are at stake. As the examples below illustrate, administration officials, their family members and their rich friends have made investments that position themselves to profit from the very policy agenda they set. The ethics system designed to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest has been sidelined through withheld disclosure documents, mass firings of inspectors general, gutting of civil service staff levels and capacity, retroactive ethics waivers to “resolve” conflicts of interest, and appointments strategically structured to avoid Senate confirmation.

Luxury Livestock on the Public Dime

For decades, federal government policy about ranching on public lands has effectively served as welfare for the rich. Livestock grazing is permitted on more than 240 million acres of federal land. In 2024, the Bureau of Land Management—within the Department of Interior—charged ranchers just $1.35 per animal unit month, which is a 93% discount in comparison to private market rates. In parallel, during the same year, the federal government invested at least $2.5 billion into subsidy programs, such as disaster assistance, that public lands ranchers can access.

The beneficiaries of this policy skew rich. Like ultra-rich. About two-thirds of Bureau of Land Management grazing is controlled by the wealthiest 10% of permittees. This elite group includes billionaires (and Trump allies) like Stan Kroenke and Rupert Murdoch.

Though this has been longstanding policy, we’re witnessing an acceleration under Trump’s Department of the Interior. In May 2026, the White House released a proposed rule on grazing regulations that would weaken government oversight on hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. Conservation groups have raised alarms that the administration is attempting to push through the rule without preparing a full Environmental Impact Statement.

What’s behind this proposed rule? It appears that at least one senior official in the Department of the Interior, Karen Budd-Falen, stands to benefit personally from it.

Public Office, Private Payday

Associate Deputy Secretary Karen Budd-Falen, the third highest official at the Department of the Interior, has announced plans to rewrite the federal regulations that govern public lands ranching. She was already involved in the recent overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act, which will benefit public land ranchers across the country. She’s also committing to evict bison from Montana public lands and increase the number of grazing allotments issued to ranchers, effectively expanding livestock use of public rangelands.

Yet Budd-Falen isn’t just a high-level government official. She also happens to be an owner of large-scale ranching operations, who enjoys grazing allotments on more than 250,000 acres of national public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. If approved, her proposed policy changes would almost certainly benefit her own family’s vast ranching interests, as reported by The Washington Post. Richard Painter, former chief Interior department ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, called it “a pretty slam-dunk financial conflict of interest.”

It should be noted that this isn’t Budd-Falen’s first rodeo, so to speak. During the first Trump administration, she was also a top Interior legal official. In that period, however, she was prohibited from working on grazing matters due to the conflict of interest. It’s no holds barred in Trump 2.0, however: Budd Falen has reportedly received an ethics waiver for work on grazing during Trump’s second term.

Earlier this year, another scandal surfaced. Public Domain reported that Budd Falen had undisclosed financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada—a project that the Trump administration worked to fast-track during its first term and in which it’s taken an equity stake in the second term. According to The New York Times, Budd-Falen’s husband received $3.5 million for water rights from Lithium Nevada Corp., a deal that was contingent on federal regulators approving the mine. She also met with officials from Lithium Nevada Corp. a year into her tenure during Trump’s first term, according to her official calendar.

Though her husband’s lucrative deal with the mine dated back to 2018, Budd-Falen had failed to disclose her ties on financial disclosure forms between 2018 and 2021. These ties were included in the financial disclosure she filed when she joined the current Trump administration in May, but only became public when the Department of the Interior’s Office of Government Ethics released the document after pressure from Public Domain and High Country News.

In January, House Democrats asked the Department of the Interior’s Inspector General (IG) to investigate whether Budd-Falen played a role in the federal approval of the mine that netted her family a multi-million dollar windfall. In March, Democratic Senators also called on the IG to investigate the ranching-related conflicts of interest.

No Confirmation, No Problem

Like other agencies under Trump 2.0, the Department of the Interior is using paperwork sleight-of-hand to avoid Senate confirmation hearings for controversial staff picks. In April 2025, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed a secretarial order handing effective operational control of the entire department to Tyler Hassen, a DOGE operative and former Houston oil executive. Hassen spent nearly two decades as an executive at Basin Holdings, a company involved in manufacturing and servicing oil rigs worldwide, and holds financial stakes in Albemarle Corp., which owns Nevada’s Silver Peak lithium mine.

When Secretary Burgum passed control of the agency to Hassen, Ablemarle Corp. was in the process of seeking authorization to expand its operations from the department. By February of this year, the Bureau of Land Management had approved the request.

A financial disclosure report obtained by the Associated Press suggests Hassen made millions from these companies. In the spring and summer of 2025, Hassen had not divested his energy investments or filed an ethics commitment to break ties with companies that pose a conflict of interest. Hassen avoided Senate confirmation and the ethics requirements that come with it by holding the title of “principal deputy assistant secretary” rather than assistant secretary. Though Hassen has since left the Department of the Interior, his appointment despite compelling documentation of his conflicts of interest is illustrative of how the Trump administration operates.

Remember the Ambler Road

In April, we reported on the Ambler Road in Alaska as an emblematic example of the administration’s self-dealing at the expense of taxpayers. A proposed 211‑mile industrial route through remote Alaska wilderness, Ambler Road would open access to copper and zinc deposits but cut through Gates of the Arctic National Park and lands relied on by more than 30 Alaska Native communities.

In his first and second terms, Trump’s Department of the Interior granted a right-of-way for the project. At the same time, Trump announced that the federal government would take about a 10% equity stake in Trilogy Metals, a company tied to the project. This announcement triggered a stock surge that delivered an estimated windfall of tens of millions of dollars to John Paulson, major shareholder and Trump supporter. Paulson, who owns roughly 9% of the company and raised $50.5 million for Trump at his Palm Beach home in April 2024, saw his stake rise from $30 million to about $100 million overnight. Ten Alaska nonprofits have filed suit. The federal government is now a financial stakeholder in a mining company whose permits are issued by that same government, overseen by officials who bypassed Senate confirmation and whose ethics documents remain undisclosed.

Keeping Public Lands in Public Hands

These cases make clear that public lands policy has become a vehicle for private enrichment, with officials and their allies treating forests, rangelands, and mineral rights as personal asset classes rather than public trust. Reversing that trajectory will require sustained pressure from Congress, the courts, affected communities, and voters to restore real ethics enforcement, close self‑dealing loopholes, and keep public lands in public hands.

Weekly Wins

Court Tosses Illegal Oregon Timber Sale

A federal judge ruled on May 15 that the Bureau of Land Management broke environmental laws when it approved the Blue and Gold timber sale, a roughly 3,000 acre logging project on public land near Yoncalla in Douglas County, Oregon. The judge ordered the agency to throw out the entire plan. Plans to log the Blue and Gold were finalized under the Biden administration and were moving forward under Trump. The court found the Bureau had ignored significant evidence of protected old growth trees within the logging plan, after environmental groups filed for a restraining order. This legal victory represents a direct check on efforts to accelerate logging and mining on public lands without adequate environmental review.

Federal Court Rules against Trump’s USCIS Travel-Ban Pause

Another court ruling struck down US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policies that had frozen green cards, work permits, naturalization, and even asylum decisions for immigrants from 39 “travel ban” countries, calling the measures unlawful and “pretextual” national security theater. The ruling vacates four sweeping policies, forcing USCIS to resume processing long-stalled applications and barring officers from treating an applicant’s country of origin as an automatic black mark in discretionary decisions.

86-47 Is A-OK, Says Judge

In another win for free speech, a federal judge in Washington, DC ruled that an anti-Trump protest group can keep flying its “86 47” flag near the National Mall, rejecting the Trump administration’s claim that the slogan is a true threat on the president’s life. Judge Randolph Moss held that in context, the phrase is protected political speech urging Trump’s impeachment and removal, not incitement to violence, and temporarily barred the National Park Service from revoking the group’s permit or taking down the flag.

Up in Smoke: How Donor Dollars Changed the FDA's Policy on Flavored Vapes

American Kleptocracy — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:31:38 GMT

I don’t see how this solves for anything other than a gift to companies that are eligible and allowing illegal products to remain on the market because F.D.A. is going to look the other way.
- Mitch Zeller, former Director of the Center for Tobacco Products, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), quoted in The New York Times (May 10, 2026)

Kleptocracy doesn’t just siphon off public funds into private pockets. It’s worse than that. Self-dealing drives policy decisions that cause real harm for all of us, especially the most vulnerable.

In this week’s post, we dig into the latest example: how two tobacco companies have used donations to Trump to push for a favorable policy change on flavored vapes at the FDA, and the risks it poses to our children.

Why Flavored Vapes Put Children and Teens at Risk

Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, killing more than 480,000 people every year. Though many companies market e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation tool, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns that they are not safe for youth, young adults, pregnant women or adults who do not already use tobacco. The CDC specifically warns that e-cigarette aerosols can harm the lungs and that nicotine exposure can impair brain development through about age 25. Nicotine addiction from vaping is also associated with a higher risk that young people will go on to smoke conventional cigarettes.

As a refresher, the concern about vaping peaked in 2019, when the rates of use among teens surged: about 10.5% of middle school and 27.5% of high school students reported using e-cigarettes at that time. In 2021, 70% of middle and high school students reported exposure to e-cigarette marketing. Another study found that 90% of students who vaped preferred flavored products.

In February 2020, the FDA restricted the sale of all unauthorized flavored e-cigarettes other than tobacco and menthol flavors, an approach that the Supreme Court upheld unanimously. These restrictions, combined with public information campaigns, helped lower teenage vaping rates significantly to just 8% of high school students and 3.5% of middle school students. By 2024, the director of the FDA’s tobacco division, Brian King, could say, “I want to be unequivocally clear that this continued decline in e-cigarette use among our nation’s youth is a monumental public health win.”

Yet under the Trump administration, such policy wins can be quickly undone for the right price. Let’s explore how.

How the FDA Policy Changed

Long-term efforts to protect the health of American youth can be erased in just a week. The following events last month illustrate how quickly the Trump administration pivoted on the flavored vape policy after the president had lunch with donors.

April 30: Reynolds American, one of the largest tobacco companies in the US, donated $5 million to MAGA Inc., a political action committee (PAC) backed by President Trump. This amount was on top of a $10 million donation by the company to a separate super PAC backing Trump’s campaign, as well as a contribution to the White House ballroom.
May 2: According to The New York Times, executives from Reynolds and Altria (the maker of Marlboros with investments in vapes) had lunch with the president at his golf resort in Jupiter, Florida. During the lunch, Trump reportedly called Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary for Health and Human Services, and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to complain about the FDA’s regulation of e-cigarettes. During the same weekend, Trump also called FDA Commissioner Marty Makary to “upbraid” him for moving too slowly on the approval of flavored vapes.
May 5: FDA issued new guidance that opens the door for major tobacco companies to begin selling flavored vapes. Makary resigned a few days later, following a well-documented “pressure campaign.”

Here’s an excellent overview from the folks over at @firedbutfighting and @nationalphc, who collaborated with us to amplify this story.

FDA staffers reported that they were “blindsided” by the new guidance, noting that the decision violated the rulemaking process by:

bypassing the federally required period that allows for public comment and revisions;
lacking the necessary scientific verification of health benefits for smokers before any new products are introduced; and
circumventing the staff consultation process.

Health advocates have sharply criticized the policy shift. The American Academy of Pediatrics urged the government to reconsider the authorization, calling it “a concerning precedent [that leaves] pediatricians deeply alarmed that these products will end up in the hands of young people.” Similarly, the American Lung Association condemned the decision, noting that it was “deeply troubling to see FDA ignore the scientific evidence and reverse course.”

As former director of the Center for Tobacco Products Mitch Zeller put it, “It begs the question of whether the true subject matter experts may have actually opposed this policy and were ordered to do it anyway. And that goes to the ability of the public to have trust and faith in institutions like FDA.”

Pay-to-Play as Public Policy

It may not be incidental that another potential beneficiary of the new vaping guidance is klepto-baby Donald Trump, Jr. The president’s son was named a partner in 1789 Capital just days after the election of his father in 2024. 1789 Capital is an investor in e-cigarette maker Juul, the company that played a leading role in the youth vaping epidemic.

We expect our elected leaders to put the public interest above their own self‑interest. Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigned on a platform to Make America Healthy Again, yet the policies they have adopted over the last 18 months track closely with the priorities of their donors. Trading away the health of American teenagers to please the tobacco industry is the opposite of making America healthy again. But it is entirely consistent with the assaults we have seen on our environment, federal workers, and public lands.

Under a kleptocracy, public health, like so many of our public goods and services, goes up in smoke.

Weekly Wins

Trump’s Culture Grab Hits a Wall

There have been some clear wins this week for the idea that American culture is not just another Trump-branded asset. For one, a federal judge ordered that Trump’s name be erased from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and that officials pause plans to close the venue for two years, finding that only Congress can change the Center’s name.

In the same 48‑hour span, the Trump‑backed “Freedom 250” concert series began to implode, as seven out of the nine featured musical acts pulled out rather than lend their names to a presidential vanity project. Trump responded that he is “thinking about” canceling all of the performances and replacing the show with a rally featuring...himself. Taken together, these decisions underscore that there are limits to how far a president can impose himself on the nation’s shared civic and cultural treasures.

GOP State Senators Help Sink Trump's Gerrymander in South Carolina

We also saw an unexpected win over Trump’s desire for a deeply gerrymandered map to disenfranchise Black voters. The mid‑decade redistricting push, which was designed to erase Rep. Jim Clyburn’s majority‑Black district and hand Republicans another House seat, collapsed in the GOP‑controlled state Senate after 12 Republicans joined Democrats to block the plan. Early voting for the June primary was already underway and the failed proposal would have tossed out ballots already cast and forced an August do‑over election under new lines. Senators balked at rewriting the rules midstream, despite personal pressure from Trump and a special session called by Gov. Henry McMaster. For now, Clyburn’s district—and the basic idea that you shouldn’t redraw the map in the middle of the game just because the president wants another seat—remains intact.

Legal Roadblock for Trump’s "Anti-Weaponization" Fund

US District Judge Leonie Brinkema temporarily froze the Justice Department’s $1.8 billion dollar “anti‑weaponization” fund, an initiative critics warned would operate as a slush fund to reward the president’s allies. Brinkema’s order ensures, for now, that no funds are "irreversibly disbursed" while a coalition that includes a former January 6 prosecutor challenges the scheme in court, with an expedited hearing set for June 12. It’s only a temporary pause, but it’s a clear signal that at least one federal judge is not prepared to let Trump use public money as a patronage pool without serious legal scrutiny.

From Checks and Balances to Blank Checks: How Trump Bought Immunity

American Kleptocracy — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:04:41 GMT

I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.
- Donald Trump, referring to one of his lawsuits against the federal government, quoted in the NYT (October 21, 2025)
I think it’s stupid on stilts. It will invariably put us in a position where your taxpayer dollars and my taxpayer dollars could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer, admitted their guilt, got convicted, got pardoned, and now we’re going to pay them for that? That’s absurd.
- Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), quoted in the BBC (May 22, 2026)
So, the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong—Take your pick.
- Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), quoted in Fortune (May 23, 2026)

The architects of our democratic republic were clear about the dangers of an autocratic opportunist destroying their experiment in self-government. George Washington came out of retirement to join the Constitutional Convention in 1787 over his concern that it would be commandeered “by some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his country so much as his own ambitious views.”

That fear has now become reality.

The Constitutional Convention produced a famous framework of institutional checks and balances. That framework has come under siege since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term. Since January 2025, Americans of all political persuasions have had understandable concerns about:

Congress ceding its Constitutional authority to the Executive;
A Supreme Court issuing important rulings by “shadow docket“ without any public explanation, while extending near-absolute immunity to Trump for unofficial acts and corruption; and
Federal agencies’ regulatory authority being shackled and/or weaponized by the executive branch.

In the events of last week, we’ve reached a new low: President Trump’s effort to create a billion-dollar slush fund to settle his own (likely unconstitutional) lawsuit against the federal government.

"One of the Single Most Corrupt Acts in American History”

As a reminder, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is an independent law enforcement agency tasked with ensuring that no one is above the law. This has changed dramatically under Trump 2.0. In January, Trump initiated a $10 billion lawsuit against agencies under his control—the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Treasury Department—for failing to prevent the leak of his tax returns and those of his sons (our featured klepto-babies from last week’s post). As the government’s lawyer, it was the role of the DOJ to represent the agencies in court.

The federal judge presiding over the case appeared skeptical regarding its constitutionality and had questioned whether Trump and the three agencies involved in the case were “sufficiently adverse to each other.” Just two days before the judge was expected to rule on whether a legitimate legal dispute existed, Todd Blanche, the Acting Attorney General and Trump’s former personal lawyer, announced a settlement: the creation of a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for people claiming to have been mistreated by the federal government, in exchange for Trump dropping his case.

As Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained, Donald Trump “figured out he could sue the federal government—he can basically sue himself—and then he can settle that case to make himself billions of dollars.” Under the terms of the settlement, a five-member panel will distribute the funds “largely shielded from public scrutiny, outside of any evident oversight, and answerable only to Trump and his appointees.”

Critics from both sides of the political aisle were quick to call out the settlement as a “slush fund” paid out of taxpayer money “to pay whomever they wish with no legal precedent or accountability.” Donald Sherman, president of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) called it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”

Payouts for January 6 Rioters and Immunity for the Trump Family

Many believe it is “inevitable” that funds will be channeled to the January 6 rioters, who were all pardoned by Trump last year. Further fueling this speculation, over the last week the DOJ has been “quietly” removing all press releases from its website related to charges on January 6 individuals.

Other recent payouts to Trump allies offer an alarming preview of how the new “Anti-Weaponization Fund” can be used to reward friends and rewrite the narrative of past misconduct.

Carter Page: Trump’s former campaign advisor was awarded an undisclosed amount in settlement from the DOJ in April 2026 for alleged illegal surveillance he suffered during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Michael Flynn: Trump’s former National Security Advisor was awarded $1.2 million in March 2026 for making false statements to the FBI during the Russia probe, even though he initially pleaded guilty to the charges.
Ashli Babbitt: Ashli was a January 6 rioter who was shot and killed as she tried to jump through a window to breach Congress. Her family members were awarded $5 million from the DOJ in May 2025.
Multiple former FBI agents: These agents had been dismissed for misconduct and later sued, claiming political bias and whistleblower status. They received up to $3 million.

Though Blanche assured a Congressional hearing that Trump and his family won’t get a payout from the fund, he did announce a different benefit the very next day in an addendum to the settlement. The one-page agreement stipulates: “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, “and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims.”

In other words, Trump and his family and their associated companies will never be audited for any of the pending claims they may face from the IRS. A former branch director in the DOJ’s civil division reacted to the decision saying, “I have never heard of the department ever being willing to grant blanket immunity.” At the very least, the IRS waiver may save the Trump family hundreds of millions of dollars in audit costs. According to reporting by ProPublica in 2024, an IRS audit over Trump’s Chicago tower alone could cost him around $100 million in disallowed deductions and back taxes.

Our Democracy in Danger

Connecting the dots is essential to understanding where we are heading in American history. The members of the Constitutional Convention intended to prevent executive impunity precisely because they understood how easily greed and ambition can metastasize into autocracy. Today’s abuses of power—from weaponized settlements and impunity for political allies to blanket immunity from financial oversight—are not isolated scandals. Rather, they are clear signals that the system of checks and balances has been pushed to the brink due to one man’s self‑interest.

Weekly Wins

Major Court Wins for Transparency, the Right to Protest, and Due Process

Presidential records: This week saw a critical win regarding presidential records. The Trump administration had sought to limit access to certain presidential records and exercise broad control over how they were handled and disclosed. US District Judge John D. Bates ruled that administration must comply with the Presidential Records Act, a 1978 law enacted after Watergate, to ensure preservation and proper handling of official documents. The Presidential Records Act formed the basis of Trump’s prosecution for taking White House records, including classified documents, to Mar-a-Lago after his first term.
Broadview 6 case: In a “stunning end to one of the Trump administration’s most highly publicized prosecutions of demonstrators,” federal prosecutors in Chicago dropped misdemeanor charges against a group of anti-ICE protesters in Broadview, Illinois. In a brief court session, the judge dismissed the case due to conduct by prosecutors during the grand jury process, including improper contacts with grand jurors and redactions made to a set of grand jury transcripts.
Kilmar case dismissed: In a notable win for due process, US District Judge Waverly Crenshaw dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García this week, finding that the case amounted to an unconstitutional and “vindictive prosecution.” Ábrego García, who had been sent to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order and later won the right to return, was indicted soon after coming back to the United States. The judge concluded that the timing and circumstances showed the government was retaliating against him for exercising his legal rights, saying that “The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power.”

Trump Targets TV and Late-Night Targets Him Back

Even as Stephen Colbert signed off from “The Late Show,” pressure from the Trump administration has not deterred other late-night hosts. Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr have repeatedly targeted shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC with threats of investigations and license challenges. Yet an analysis by The Washington Post shows that the proportion of late-night material with Trump as the target has increased in recent months and “hosts have continued satirizing and critiquing Trump over his policies, scandals and legal troubles.”

Hollywood gave us Nepo-Babies. The Trump Administration is giving us Klepto-Babies.

American Kleptocracy — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:47:16 GMT

It’s too politically dicey...There is not a single important issue of the day where I don’t feel the shadow of Trump and his sons.
- Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) when asked about the possibility of prediction market regulation

You know who they are, those famous movie-stars that are the children of other famous movie-stars. Nepotism — favoritism based on family connection — is a well‑known feature of Hollywood, where some actors are already famous before they ever step in front of a camera. Many of these so-called “nepo-babies” have likely received special favors and access based on the fame and fortune of family members already inside the circle.

Hollywood, of course, isn’t the only arena where parents tilt the playing field for their children. In kleptocracies, we find a far darker equivalent: “klepto-babies.” Across the world, children of modern kleptocrats build careers that benefit directly from their parents’ authoritarian rule and looting of state resources. Isabel dos Santos, daughter of Angola’s longtime president, amassed an estimated $3.7 billion fortune in a country where most citizens survive on a few dollars a day, and now faces money‑laundering and embezzlement charges plus an Interpol warrant. Kim Jong Un, heir to North Korea’s dynastic dictatorship, reportedly controls billions through illicit ventures such as arms trading even as his population faces chronic food shortages. Teodorin Obiang, vice president of Equatorial Guinea and son of its four‑decade ruler, has been convicted in European courts of embezzling public funds and flaunts his wealth through luxuries like a fleet of supercars, a private jet, a Paris mansion and Michael Jackson memorabilia.

Across these international cases, “klepto-babies” follow the same script: politically protected offspring enjoying ultra‑luxury lifestyles, underwritten by repression and illicit wealth gained at the expense of citizens in their home countries.

Klepto-Babies are Enriching Themselves here in the United States

Over the last year, the American Kleptocracy Clearinghouse has documented how the Trump administration is steadily converting the US political system into a kleptocracy, resembling those in Russia, Equatorial Guinea, and Venezuela. In parallel with those regimes, kleptocracy in the United States has also spawned a generation of privileged offspring who are trading on their connections to power to amass their own wealth, often at the cost of the country’s welfare.

The current administration has produced no shortage of klepto-babies, including Jared and Ivanka Kushner, Barron Trump, and Brandon and Kyle Lutnick. The true stand-outs, however, are Eric and Don Jr. who since November 2024 have seen an extraordinary surge in personal fortune, much of it through deals that align squarely with their father’s policies and the business of his administration.

According to Forbes, Don Jr’s personal fortune jumped from $50 million in November 2024 to $300 million a year later. Eric’s windfall has been even greater, with a tenfold increase in his wealth from about $40 million to $400 million during the same period.

Here is a partial list of where this wealth has come from during the last 18 months:

International real estate: Both brothers are fronting new Trump‑branded projects and licensing deals across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, often in countries where U.S. policy is directly in play—raising clear conflicts of interest as foreign partners can enrich the president’s sons while seeking favorable treatment from their father’s government.
E-commerce: In December 2024, Don Jr. joined the board of the e-commerce and payments company PublicSquare. Credova Financial, a wholly-owned subsidiary of PublicSquare had reportedly been the subject of consumer complaints and was accused of violating state consumer protection laws. In 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau closed its years-long investigation into Credova Financial. According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), companies that added Don Jr. to their board or advisory board subsequently received benefits from the Trump administration.
Defense contracts: The eldest Trump sons are betting big on drones, just as the Pentagon has taken steps to prioritize domestic production of military-grade drones. In November 2024, Don Jr. joined the advisory board of Unusual Machines, a drone maker that soon after secured it’s “largest ever government order.” Last month, the US Air Force agreed to buy an undisclosed number of drones from Powerus, where the sons have significant investments. Powerus is also offering drone intercepts to Gulf nations to defend against Iranian drone attacks, “positioning Powerus and the Trump sons to potentially profit from a war their father began.” Don Jr has also profited from his investment in Vulcan Elements, a rare earth start-up firm, that secured a $620 million Pentagon contract three months after Don Jr invested in the company. Additionally, Eric is an investor and “chief strategy adviser” to Foundation Future Industries, a robotics startup that just won a $24 million Pentagon contract under his father’s administration.
Artificial intelligence tech: Related to these defense contracts is the funding of Hadrian, an AI-powered defense manufacturing start-up. In July 2025, Hadrian closed a $260 million funding round, with 1789 Capital listed among the investors. Eight months later, the Navy opened a $2.4 billion Hadrian facility in Alabama, funded by $900 million in federal taxpayer dollars, to mass-produce components for nuclear submarines. The link to the Trump sons? Don Jr. joined 1789 Capital as a partner just days after his father won the 2024 election. After he joined, the value of the company’s assets increased by over $1 billion almost immediately, and its portfolio expanded to include defense contractors and AI startups that have benefited directly from federal contracts and regulatory decisions made by the Trump administration.
Cryptocurrency: World Liberty Financial is a crypto venture co‑founded in 2024 by President Trump and his sons, with the family entitled to about 75% of net proceeds from token sales and a significant cut of stablecoin profits. This creates a glaring conflict of interest: the president wields power over U.S. crypto regulation, enforcement, and sanctions policy, while he and his sons stand to personally benefit from the administration’s decisions. The venture also involves foreign entanglements: a UAE‑linked investment firm acquired a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for roughly 500 million dollars just months before the Gulf state won access to “tightly guarded” American AI chips.
Prediction markets: Don Jr. has become a key player in online prediction markets, serving as an investor in Polymarket and an adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi, while also helping his family’s media company plan a “Truth Predict” platform tied to Truth Social. Ethics experts warn this is a serious conflict of interest because traders on these platforms bet on events that his father’s administration controls, and Don Jr. is potentially part of a small circle with advance insight into decisions that could move those markets.
Nuclear fusion: Trump Media & Technology, where Don Jr. sits on the board, is merging with a nuclear fusion company, while the broader fusion sector is receiving boosts from the White House. The deal is valued at more than $6 billion.
Critical minerals: Last September, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told President Trump that he intended to award a major tungsten project to U.S. investment group Cove Kaz Capital. By October 31, a shell company tied to the Trump brothers had purchased a stake in subsidiary of Cove Kaz Capital. About a week after that investment, Cove Capital’s deal with the National Mining Company of Kazakhstan became public, with an announcement that they would jointly develop “the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.” The Trump brothers have also moved into into uranium enrichment, a sector the Trump Administration has explicitly labeled “critical” to U.S. national and energy security. In late 2025, they backed a $64.3 million convertible note offering for Quantum Leap Energy, which is building laser‑enrichment facilities in South Africa—positioning them to profit from a fuel cycle their father is simultaneously promoting and subsidizing through federal “critical minerals” and nuclear‑industrial‑base policy.

While they may benefit from White House policies and projects, neither Eric nor Don Jr. are government officials — meaning they are not beholden to federal ethics rules or disclosure requirements. So even as their wealth explodes on the back of federally backed ventures, there is virtually no public record of what they own or who is paying them.

Klepto-babies threaten democratic accountability

The extravagant wealth and privilege enjoyed by our current cohort of klepto-babies makes the excesses of the Gilded Age’s Robber Barons look like a basement frat party. According to a November 2025 Report from Oxfam, the richest 0.0001% in the U.S. — where President Trump sits comfortably — control a greater share of wealth than the richest of the Gilded Age. In 2025, the share of assets owned by the top 0.1% — where Trump’s kids sit comfortably — hit its highest on record since the Federal Reserve began publishing data in 1989, as did their share of the stock market (24%).

There is ample evidence that links the erosion of democracy to economic inequality. The self-dealing of Trump, his loyalists, and their klepto-babies further compounds the problem. Warnings about this corrosive mix on democratic institutions are nothing new — in fact, they date back more than 2,000 years. As summarized by the New York Times, “Aristotle warned that a government whose leaders worked to enrich themselves might still call itself a republic, and might still go through the motions, but when the aim of government shifts from public good to private gain, its constitution becomes an empty shell. The government is no longer for the people.”

Weekly Wins

In the barrage of bad news and the day-to-day — sometimes minute-by-minute — ticker of cruel and illegal actions by the Trump Administration, it can be easy to dwell on the negative (in fact, humans are hardwired to use negative information far more than positive information) and harder to zoom out to see some positive trends. Thankfully, a recent article in Politico helps us do just that. Politico's new database reveals that of the 11,000+ cases in which federal district courts reached a ruling on the Trump administration's mass detention policy and ICE's detention decisions, more than 10,000 of those rulings — some 91 percent — were against the administration and handed down by judges appointed by presidents across the ideological spectrum. You can find the article and links to the database here.

How Trump's War on Whistleblowers Opens the Door to Waste, Fraud and Abuse

American Kleptocracy — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:54:33 GMT

[The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)] has a legal responsibility to enforce the Fair Housing Act and other civil rights laws for every person in this country. But as the whistleblowers have told us, HUD is failing to do its job. Instead: They’re firing, reassigning, intimidating, and silencing staff... They’re letting corrupt landlords get away with overcharging on rent, while Donald Trump continues to break his promise to cut housing costs in half..... I’ve called for HUD’s Office of the Inspector General to launch an independent investigation into the Trump Administration’s attack on civil rights exposed by the whistleblowers’ complaints.
- Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, January 13, 2026

Last year, attorneys and staff workers at the HUD Office of General Counsel and Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity submitted a whistleblower complaint to Senator Elizabeth Warren, alleging that the Trump administration was limiting enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark civil rights law that has prohibited discrimination in housing for nearly six decades. According to their reports, Trump appointees were freezing cases and blocking staff from investigating and prosecuting landlords, real estate agents, and lenders accused of discrimination regarding housing.

In September, two of the whistleblowers, lawyers Palmer Heenan and Paul Osadebe, were summarily fired and physically escorted from their offices. Heenen’s termination letter cited “misconduct that included the disclosure of nonpublic information,” while Osadebe was accused of disclosing “nonpublic information for private gain.”

Federal employees are protected by law from retaliation when they report internal wrongdoing, yet these lawyers were punished for speaking out about efforts inside HUD to block civil rights and anti-discrimination enforcement. “This was purely for whistleblowing activity. There was nothing about conduct, performance, any of that,” Osadebe said in an interview. “They said, this is why we’re firing you, because you spoke out. They are as blatant as can be about it.”

Heenan and Osadebe are challenging their dismissal in court. Along with current and other former HUD employees, Osadebe has launched the “Dear America” website, a platform for HUD staff to anonymously share their experiences of policy violations and political interference.

Protections for Truth‑Tellers

Authoritarian kleptocrats concentrate public power in their own hands and eliminate any resistance or external scrutiny. We have documented how the Trump administration has done this through exploiting temporary powers, firing Inspectors General, and relocating federal agencies outside of Washington DC.

Whistleblowers play a critical role in upholding public integrity and protecting public resources. Their disclosures are often the first credible evidence of corruption, fraud, or abuse that never shows up in formal audits or sanitized annual reports. More than 170 countries have adopted some form of legal protections for whistleblowers. While implementation varies considerably, whistleblowers are increasingly recognized under international law as essential guardians of the public interest.

In the United States, whistleblower protections dates back to 1778, when the Continental Congress declared it the “duty” of people in U.S. service to report “misconducts, frauds or misdemeanors” by officials. Modern protections for federal employees are anchored in the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and its later enhancements, which are designed to shield most executive‑branch workers who disclose waste, abuse, or violations of law.

Stewardship on Trial under Trump

The Trump Administration is revising regulations in ways that make it far riskier for insiders to speak out. The administration has reclassified thousands of civil servants in policy‑related roles as essentially at‑will employees, stripping them of the normal civil service removal protections and appeal rights that traditionally made anti‑retaliation rules enforceable. Under a new policy issued by the Office of Personnel Management, whistleblower complaints from these reclassified employees would no longer go to the independent U.S. Office of Special Counsel, but instead be routed to internal investigators hand‑picked under each agency’s general counsel.

Covering tens of thousands of positions, the new policy effectively carves a hole in the practical reach of the Whistleblower Protection Act. According to the Government Accountability Project, the shift undermines a century of bipartisan civil servant protections and turns the Whistleblower Protection Act “into a bad joke.”

Even before the new policy was formalized, the signals were clear that the Trump Administration was silencing whistleblowers:

National Institute of Health: In April, two senior infectious-disease scientists raised concerns that Trump‑aligned health officials pressured them to downplay vaccines, froze or cancelled key grants, and divert funds away from high‑priority infectious‑disease work. When they objected and documented the resulting risks to public health and waste of research dollars, they were placed on involuntary leave and pushed out of their leadership roles, according to a complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) alleging illegal retaliation for whistleblowing.
Federal Emergency Management Agency: In August, at least 15 employees at FEMA signed a public letter of dissent sounding alarms about the agencies capacity to respond to disasters. The writers of the letter disagreed with Noem’s policy requiring all expenditures over $100,000 to be approved by her was causing unnecessary bottlenecks. The administration’s response: put them on indefinite administrative leave. Eight months later, the employees were reinstated and Noem’s policy has been rescinded.
US Department of Agriculture: During last year’s government shutdown, Ellen Mei, a specialist at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and union leader, was interviewed on MSNBC on the impact of the shutdown on federal workers and food assistance. The day after the interview, Mei was reportedly informed that she would be fired for discussing the program without prior approval. Mei argued that she had given dozens of interviews of this type during her tenure as a government employee and that she was speaking on behalf of herself and her union rather than the agency. Mei is currently fighting her dismissal.

The Cost of Silencing Truth

The firings fit a broader pattern: an administration increasingly willing to use the machinery of government to punish dissent and shield itself from scrutiny, whether from civil servants, watchdogs, or critics outside government. That shift cuts to the core of public stewardship. Whistleblower laws exist as practical tools to safeguard public resources from misuse, discrimination, and political interference. When those who expose wrongdoing are sidelined or removed, agencies meant to serve the public become instruments of control. On paper, the United States still protects whistleblowers; in practice, truth-telling is treated less as a duty than as a punishable offense.

Weekly Wins

Change in Course for ICE Recruit Training

In a rare retreat for the deportation machine, the Trump team plans to scrap ICE’s “cops on the street in six weeks” experiment and agreed to restore the longer academy course for new agents. This shift represents the administration bowing to months of pressure from whistleblowers, civil-rights advocates and even Hill Republicans who balked at a force of barely trained officers armed with lethal power and sweeping discretion. Internal documents and testimony had already exposed how ICE hacked 240 hours out of its curriculum — gutting instruction on the Constitution, use of force, lawful arrest and the limits of officers’ authority — in order to hit Trump’s goal of a million deportations a year. Now, the White House is trying to spin its policy U‑turn as a win for “elite” enforcement. The climbdown is a reminder that sustained oversight and public exposure can still force this administration to walk back its most dangerous shortcuts

Another Legal Blow to Trump’s Tariff Plan

For the second time in three months, judges ruled that the power to tax and tariff belongs to Congress. After the Supreme Court kneecapped his first global tariff spree in February, Trump tried to sneak in a 10 percent “backup” levy under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. However, the Court of International Trade branded the new duties “invalid” and “unauthorized by law.” Business groups and anti‑tariff conservatives are hailing a “major victory for American consumers,” while Trump’s lawyers have already filed an appeal.

Court Restores NEH Grants Axed by Algorithm

In a stinging rebuke, a federal judge this week ordered Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to restore more than $100 million in humanities funding it tried to eliminate through a DEI-targeted ChatGPT prompt. U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon called DOGE’s mass termination of over 1,400 already‑awarded National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants “unlawful, unconstitutional, ultra vires, and without legal effect,” and said the agency’s twenty‑something staffers had no statutory authority to erase Congress’s appropriations. In a 143‑page opinion, McMahon found that Trump’s team engaged in “textbook” viewpoint discrimination, targeting work they associated with diversity and “wokeness,” and inflicted “irreparable injury” by disrupting research, shuttering programs and chilling speech across the humanities.

Location, Location, Location: How the Trump Administration Moves Agencies to Dismantle Public Power

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:12:21 GMT

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down…We want to put them in trauma.
- Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Budget and Management and author of Project 2025 (ProPublica, October 2024)

One of the tools used by kleptocrats to eliminate resistance or limits to their authority is the dismantling of the public sector. It simply makes it easier to help yourself to public and private goods if the institutions designed to serve public interests are not in the way. In previous posts, we have highlighted how Inspectors General have been removed, making it harder for watchdogs and whistleblowers to call out corruption. Last year, the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and massive reduction of the Department of Education served the administration’s political objectives of transforming our foreign assistance practices for transactional ends and eliminating educational opportunities for minority, underserved, and vulnerable populations.

These were just the beginning of the administration’s drive to weaken the vast array of federal agencies that serve the public, the law, and Congress. Most are headquartered in or around Washington, DC. Trump has promised to “demolish the deep state” within the federal agencies that might resist his agenda, and he is now using relocation to do so.

Relocating Federal Agencies to Weaken the Professional Civil Service

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, corruption plagued the United States. Among the worst of this corruption was the handing out of “prebends,” or giving jobs as favors for those who helped the victor. This spoils system meant government workers’ paychecks were given out on the basis of loyalty over competence. To counter this, the United States evolved to create civil service exams, regularize hiring processes, and ensure merit-based protections. This greatly increased the professionalism and quality of the public service.

Now, the Trump administration wishes to hollow out those protections. So far, it has destroyed the independence of the board that hears employee disputes, turned many high-level professional positions into essentially political appointments, and attacked federal workers’ ability to unionize.

These attacks aren’t enough, though. Now, the plan is to inconvenience enough of our professional, nonpartisan federal workers so that they can be replaced with loyalists.

It’s a three part process:

1) Pressure enough people to quit so you can break an agency.

2) Hire for new vacancies.

3) Create a new loyalty test to make sure these new hires are sufficiently deferential to the president’s agenda.

In the first Trump term, the experiment began with the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). This 2019 relocation led to more than half the staff leaving. As explained by Mick Mulvaney, then Head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB):

Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker. I know that because a lot of them work for me. And I’ve tried. And you can’t do it. But simply saying to the people, you know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven and move you out into the real part of the country, and they quit. What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis of the relocation of the ERS and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) from DC to the Kansas City region found that productivity at both agencies suffered significantly.

In Trump’s second term, the experiment expanded. In February 2025, agencies were told to create detailed plans for reductions, which would need to be completed in just two weeks.

Since then, additional relocations have been announced, including:

USDA: Much of the workforce of the USDA will be relocated to regional offices in Colorado, North Carolina, Kansas, Missouri, and Utah. The USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service will transfer two-thirds of its headquarters staff from Washington, DC to Georgia, Iowa, or other locations. And in a final twist, the ERS and NIFA will be relocated to Kansas City again—the Biden administration had reversed Trump’s decision to move the office, which Trump is now reinstating.
Forest Service: This agency is moving its headquarters from DC to Utah and shuttering research offices.
US Space Command: The administration has ordered the US Space Command to move from Colorado to Alabama.
Small Business Administration: The SBA is removing regional offices from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York City, and Seattle.
Army Corps of Engineers: The Army Corps of Engineers’ New York District and North Atlantic Division is relocating from New York City to New Jersey. In this case, the government is pursuing an expedited timeline, initiating the request for lease proposals in March and slating the move-in to take place in August. Working across the aisle, members of the New York congressional delegation have asked the administration to address concerns regarding the timeline and disruption to ongoing projects. They are still awaiting a response.

On a personal level, each of these relocations means hundreds of home sales, less time with families, and uprooting communities. On a larger scale, this could mean losing some of the most knowledgeable and talented people in the country—and with them, the confidence that they work of all of us, not just the president.

How Current Actions are Opening the Door to More Waste and Abuse

The attempts to weaken the professional public service are not the only issue. The real estate itself is valuable. And that puts our collective public property at risk.

The federal government, like any organization, needs to be able to buy and sell property. But because it is the government and represents all of us, we need to take special care to make sure these sales aren’t being done in a way that opens the door to corruption. In kleptocracies, “asset stripping“ is a common technique, where oligarchs take productive (or unproductive) collective property and resell it to the well-connected at basement bargain rates.

The Trump administration’s decision to relocate federal agencies poses several risks.

Weakened oversight: In parallel with its push for a dramatic increase in relocations, the Trump administration has weakened the agency charged with management and oversight of the sale of buildings. The GSA’s Public Buildings Service oversees about 8,500 owned and leased government properties. Yet over the course of 2025, the division staff dropped from more than 5,600 employees to approximately 3,100.
Silencing worker voices: In 2025, Trump ended collective bargaining rights for 84% of the unionized federal workforce. Agency relocations further subvert and undermine union protections. Although the Federal Labor Relations Authority has repeatedly held that agencies have a duty to bargain over procedures for carrying out relocations and to make appropriate arrangements for adversely affected employees, the GAO report analyzing the ERS and NIFA moves found that employees were not consulted.
Facilitating the sales of public land: Relocations can compromise the capacity of federal agencies to carry out their mandates and enforce regulations. As we documented recently, relocating the headquarters of the US Forest Service under the guise of restructuring could open the door to selling off public lands.
Partisan retribution: In some cases, the strategy and selection for relocations has been used to punish liberal-leaning states and gain partisan advantage. The SBA move, for example, was touted by Administrator Kelly Loeffler as an opportunity to relocate out of “sanctuary cities.” Similarly, Trump stated that moving the US Space Command was retribution for Colorado’s mail-in ballot policy.
Weakened accounting: The relocation announcements have lacked specifics in terms of the total real costs, including rent and remodeling, as well as staff and productivity loss. During the ERS and NIFA moves, the USDA had set up an evidence-based process for relocations, but chose not to follow it. The Trump administration also refused to publicly release a full third-party cost-benefit analysis, though Democrats in Congress have proposed legislation that relocation plans include a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis.
Allowing below-market sales: The lack of full information, including market-based comparisons, leaves the administration open to criticism. For instance, when the administration moved staff from the GSA regional office to share space with another agency in DC, it sold the 900,000 square foot GSA regional office building for $24 million (or $25 per square foot), which is well below its market value. Last year, the 200,000 square foot US Courthouse in Portland, Oregon was sold to Portland real estate firm SKB for just $1.8 million (about $9 a square foot), which is significantly lower than recent sales prices ranging from $29 to $102 a square foot in that neighborhood.
Overspending on acquisitions: In contrast, money is no object when it comes to the administration’s purchases of detention centers for immigrants. In Atlanta, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent $200 million to purchase two vacant industrial warehouses. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the most recent public assessments from tax authorities put the value of both properties at a fraction of the price paid by DHS. In Salt Lake City, the administration paid almost 50% more than the property appeared to be worth: it was assessed at $97 million, and the government paid more than $145 million.

Weak accountability and out-of-the-ordinary procedures have already opened the door to waste. They also open up the door to abuse and potential favoritism.

More than Office Space

These relocations are about far more than office space. By compromising the quality of services and the talent pool that has sustained them, relocations of federal agencies are a thinly disguised effort to remake our government in a way that compromises our public services and the rule of law.

Weekly Wins

Senators Unanimously Vote to Ban Prediction Markets at Work

The Senate notched a rare bipartisan ethics win this week: in a unanimous voice vote, senators approved a new rules change banning members, officers, and staff from betting on prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, effective immediately. The move came after reporting that traders had made hundreds of thousands of dollars by correctly wagering on tightly held US military actions in Iran and Venezuela, raising obvious red flags about insider trading and the monetization of classified information. Parallel legislation is now aiming to extend similar restrictions across the federal government and to shut down markets that invite betting on war and political assassinations.

Kleptocrats' Worldwide War on Women

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:52:55 GMT

Recently, we noted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's affirmation that "woke" generals have left the military dangerously weak and "effeminate" by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yet this is not just about Hegseth's view of masculinity. Rather, it is an integral part of the Trump administration's war on women.

And it has consequences beyond federal workers: it's affecting women in workplaces around the country and the world, especially where organizations depend on federal support.

The Context

Kleptocrat authoritarians drive social divisions in order to centralize their authority and minimize any independent checks on their power or ability to steal. Attacks on women and people who don’t fit the regime’s narrow definition of “what it is to be a man” are part of that.

In the United States, the ongoing assaults on gender equality, limitations on reproductive rights and contraception, and curtailing of protections for women and sexual minorities were publicly previewed in the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation policy plan released prior to Trump’s second term. On day one of his second term, Trump signed an executive order affirming that the US government would only recognize two sexes—male and female—taking aim at what it describes as “gender ideology extremism.” Harper Seldin, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, noted the order was part of an additional effort “to push trans and non-binary people out of civic life.” The administration later worked to cut federal funding for gender-affirming care. Ever since, Trump has continued his crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion principles he considers discriminatory, threatening companies and universities with investigation and rescinding federal contracts.

The effect goes beyond the federal government. In just 15 months since the inauguration, the Trump administration has had a remarkable chilling effect curtailing progress on participatory inclusion across American society. Companies and universities that once proudly led the way on leveling the playing field or ensuring equal opportunities for women and all kinds of diverse people are either retrenching or not talking about it anymore. One previous champion of women’s advancement (at least on paper), Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, now says companies need more “masculine energy.”

That silence and self-censoring has been extended to backing away from international commitments we once thought were simply the responsible projection of US leadership on women’s rights. Earlier this year, for the first time in 70 years, the US did not sign off on the standard consensus agreement language at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which promotes gender equality and denounces gender discrimination. This type of betrayal of longstanding US leadership for women’s rights would have been unimaginable even just a year ago.

Targeting Women is Part of a Global Authoritarian Trend

The Trump administration is part of longstanding efforts to restrain progress on women’s equality and more modern ideas about who a person can be. Corrupt authoritarians around the globe have promoted traditional gender roles and limited women’s participation in public life throughout history. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 subjugated women to men. Mussolini ended women’s suffrage in Italy in 1928.

A quick survey of current authoritarian kleptocrats efforts to thwart gender equality is illustrative.

Authoritarians’ Attacks on Gender

In China, Xi Jinping has crushed feminist movements, silenced women who have accused powerful men of sexual assault, and excluded women from the Politburo’s powerful Standing Committee.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin is rolling back reproductive rights and promoting traditional gender roles that limit women’s participation in public life.
In North Korea, Kim Jong Un has spurred women to seek refuge abroad at roughly three times the rate of men.
In Egypt, President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi recently introduced a bill reasserting men’s paternity rights, their right to practice polygamy, and their right to influence whom their female relatives marry.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has argued that women are not equal to men and that their prescribed role in society is motherhood and housekeeping. He has called women who pursue careers over motherhood “half persons.”
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was just voted out of office, led a government that similarly encouraged women to stop trying to close the pay gap and focus instead on producing Hungarian children.

Quoted from “Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women”

Trump and his political allies espouse similarly misogynistic views as these authoritarians. Let’s take a look.

How the Trump Administration Aligns with Authoritarians

President Trump has made so many misogynistic comments over the years they are impossible to list here. Beyond his stated belief that he has can grab women’s private parts with impunity and the allegations that he is covering up his links to Epstein’s worldwide sex trafficking ring, Trump has consistently insulted, sexualized, and stereotyped women. In addition to dozens of allegations of sexual assault he was found liable in a civil trial for raping E. Jean Carroll.
Vice President JD Vance gained attention for a 2021 interview where he denounced leadership by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He has argued that having more women in the work force results in “unhappier, unhealthier children” and aligned himself with Trump administration calls to return to “traditional” nuclear families in which the mother is a homemaker.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s views on women are shaped by his Christian fundamentalist faith, including his own “covenant marriage,” a religious arrangement that formalizes men’s superiority and constricts women’s freedom to leave. During his tenure as Speaker, he has repeatedly alienated women Republican representatives in the House who claim he does not take them seriously.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has also been accused of sexual assault and reportedly made a confidential payment of $50,000 to his accuser. His own mother told him he was an “abuser of women” in a message she later walked back once it became public. At the Pentagon, he has questioned women’s ability to serve in combat and fired or blocked senior female officers for promotion.

So Why are Kleptocrats Focused on Gender?

Authoritarian men tend to believe the government and its resources are theirs for the taking. We call it kleptocracy: government by individuals who primarily seek personal gain at the expense of those they govern. Beyond the mere factor of greed, analysts have connected Trump to a long-standing concept of “patrimonialism,” the idea that the State is an extension of the property of the ruler and his clan.

As Saskia Brechenmacher, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, points out in Why Gender Is Central to the Antidemocratic Playbook: Unpacking the Linkages in the United States and Beyond, the political goals of these misogynistic attacks are often to:

recruit and mobilize a core constituency of conservative and sexist voters, particularly those who feel threatened by social and economic change;
centralize power by projecting traditional hierarchies along Christian religious traditions, which undermine democratic processes and institutions;
reinforce executive authority by limiting rights, including those of women and sexual minorities; and
silence and intimidate resistance by demeaning female critics with negative comments on their appearance and intelligence and “feminizing” male opponents (such as “Tampon Tim”).

Efforts to suppress women back into traditional, subservient roles limits their contributions to our society as a whole, and clearly harms children, families, men, companies, our military, and our thought leadership at research institutes and universities, not to mention our democratic resilience. But it’s more: Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks note in their article “Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women,” that “Fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian leaders.” They also note, however, that the tide of women’s emancipation from social and legal limitations, participation in public life, and rights under globally recognized normative standards are a tide that has continued to rise despite regressive, authoritarian regimes that have sought to contain them.

The United States was, up until the current president, a leader in global women’s rights based on the compelling progress for over one hundred years. Recognizing the mutual reinforcement between dismantling both women’s rights and democracy is key to reversing both.

Weekly Wins

Ethics Scandals Drive a Wave of Trump Cabinet Exits

In the space of just two months, Trump has lost three Cabinet secretaries under clouds of alleged self-dealing and misuse of office, and their departures mark real wins for basic accountability in a deeply captured administration.

Department of Homeland Security: Media reporting and internal leaks painted a picture of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem not just as a hardline immigration enforcer, but as a serial ethics offender. Investigations by ProPublica detailed how she oversaw a no‑bid DHS advertising campaign worth more than $200 million that steered public money to a Delaware shell company tied to political allies.
Department of Justice: Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi because she failed to deliver the kind of “revenge prosecutions” he wanted against political enemies. However, months of frustration over her management of the Epstein files also played a role, highlighting the critical role played by legislators along with the work of independent journalists and citizen activists in pressuring government for transparency and accountability.
Department of Labor: Detailed investigations by journalists and whistleblowers into Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s misconduct ultimately made it untenable for the White House to keep her in a role that carries sweeping authority over federal education and labor programs.

Taken together, the media scrutiny and resulting resignations of Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer don’t fix the system, but they show that exposure, documentation, and public pressure can still force consequences when abuses of power become too blatant to ignore.

Democracy Defended, Case by Case

Grassroots organizers, local officials, journalists and public interest lawyers continue to score wins in the courts. Together, their cases sketch a map of democratic resistance to Trump’s power grabs that runs from federal energy policy to bike lanes in DC.

Blocking Department of the Interior attacks on green energy: A coalition of renewable energy developers and advocacy groups won a major ruling in Massachusetts, where Chief Judge Denise Casper issued a preliminary injunction blocking a suite of Department of the Interior policies that had throttled wind and solar permitting on federal lands and waters. In five different cases this year, federal judges have struck down efforts by the Interior Department to halt construction of wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean.
Bike lanes for DC: In Washington, DC, cyclists and safe-streets advocates persuaded a federal judge to halt the Trump administration’s bid to rip out the protected 15th Street bike lane between downtown and the Tidal Basin. The court agreed that federal agencies had not followed required procedures or offered a rational explanation before tearing out a lane that has cut crashes by 91% and become a lifeline for thousands of daily riders.
White House ballroom on pause: Preservationists scored another win when US District Judge Richard Leon temporarily blocked construction of Trump’s proposed $400 million White House ballroom, siding with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Leon wrote that no statute “comes close” to giving the president unilateral authority to build the new facility without congressional authorization, and ordered work to stop while the case proceeds.
Pate’s defamation suit dismissed: In Texas, a federal judge dismissed FBI Director Kash Patel’s defamation suit against former FBI official and MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi, over a quip that Patel had been “visible at nightclubs far more than” at FBI headquarters. US District Judge George Hanks Jr. wrote, “Figliuzzi’s statement, when taken in context, cannot have been perceived by a person of ordinary intelligence as stating actual facts about Patel.” The ruling is an important affirmation of First Amendment protections for journalists and government critics in an era of retaliatory litigation.

Republicans Broke Ranks to Protect Fed Independence

The Justice Department closed its criminal probe into Fed Chair Jerome Powell, ending an investigation that raised concerns about political pressure on an independent central bank. Senior lawmakers from both parties repeatedly pressed DOJ for answers, held oversight hearings, and advanced bipartisan language reinforcing Federal Reserve independence, helping to raise the political cost of keeping the case alive. Especially critical were the growing number of Republicans—including Senate Banking Committee members Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Kevin Cramer, and Dave McCormick, along with House Financial Services Chair French Hill—who publicly criticized the investigation as a threat to Fed autonomy and vowed to slow-walk Trump’s Fed nominees until the probe ended. After the Fed’s inspector general found no evidence of wrongdoing and warned about the chilling effect on monetary policy, the DOJ informed Congress that it would not pursue charges, leaving Powell in place and reaffirming the norm of central bank independence.

Public Lands Monetized for Private Gains

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:56:25 GMT

“The Trump administration conjured up flimsy and vacuous reasons about ‘putting America first’ to try to justify transferring public lands out of federal management to benefit billionaires...Removing protections panders to the mining industry and disregards the public’s interest in sound decision-making, community health, public land use, and transparency about how decisions get made.”
Bridget Psarianos, Senior staff attorney, Trustees for Alaska

Kleptocrats view our public lands and the environment not as treasured national resources but as opportunities for self-enrichment. In March, we highlighted how the Trump administration’s revocation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Finding, science-based evidence that has been used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change since 2009, was a gift to cronies in the oil and gas industry that will only make America more polluted.

A High-Stakes Fight in Alaska

In Alaska, that pattern is visible in the fight over the proposed Ambler Road, a 211-mile industrial route through remote wilderness. The road is intended to provide access to copper and zinc deposits. However, it also cuts through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, a region used by more than 30 Alaska Native communities for hunting and fishing and home to some of the “world’s most ecologically fragile wildlife.”

The project has been the subject of a political tug-and-war across three administrations. In 2020, Trump’s Department of the Interior granted a right-of-way, allowing the project to move forward. The Biden Administration reversed that decision in 2024, citing unacceptable risks to wildlife habitat, water quality and the Native communities that depend on natural resources. Last year, Trump directed his administration to issue the authorizations necessary to restart the project.

In the same communication, Trump announced that the federal government would acquire about a 10% stake (worth $35.6 million) in Trilogy Metals, one of the mining companies operating in the region. This investment makes the U.S. government a 10% shareholder in Trilogy Metals and includes warrants to purchase an additional 7.5% of the company. Just after the announcement, Trilogy’s stock price more than tripled, surging into the $7–$8 range in early trading. John Paulson who owns about 9% of the company, enjoyed an immediate increase in his stock value from $30 million to $100 million. One of Trump’s earliest Wall Street supporters, Paulson raised $50.5m for the president at his Palm Beach home in April 2024.

Ten local nonprofit organizations have filed suit against the Trump administration, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, and Ambler Metals LLC to block construction of the road, citing a lack of transparency, accountability and consultation with local communities.

National parks and public lands under systematic attack

The administration’s approach is not limited to Alaska. During the first eight months of Trump’s second term, the National Parks Conservation Association documented 72 specific administrative actions that weaken protections or endanger parks and public lands. Trump’s FY26 budget proposed over $1 billion in cuts to the operations, construction and preservation efforts of the park system, with many national parks being proposed for hand-over to State authorities. Though the budget cuts were ultimately rejected with bipartisan support by Congress, Trump is trying again: the FY2027 budget proposal envisions $736 million dollars in cuts to the operating budget.

Two of the most impactful policy decisions include:

In September 2025, the U.S. Department of the Interior proposed repealing the Bureau of Land Management’s “Public Lands Rule,” which has protected some 245 million acres of public lands by ensuring that conservation is a criteria for use in addition to drilling, grazing, mining, recreational and timber extraction. The Public Lands Rule concerns what goals and “uses” (including conservation) guide decisions on public lands. The Rule had been finalized only the previous year, with 90% of public commentary in favor. The Administration is reportedly in the final stages of revising and issuing the new rule.
Also under threat are the procedural regulations about how agencies across the federal government analyze and disclose environmental impacts before acting. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1970 and is the statute that requires federal agencies to analyze environmental impacts and consider alternatives before major actions. The Trump Administration has announced that it is removing NEPA implementing regulations, which will narrow impact analysis, shorten timelines, and reduce public participation.

What restructuring the Forestry Service means for our forests

The Forest Service controls 154 national forests and twenty national grasslands totaling 193 million acres, making it the second-largest land base behind the Bureau of Land Management, which manages federal rangelands. Since the start of the second Trump Administration, the U.S. Forest Service has been hit in ways that critics say weaken the agency’s scientific capacity and make it more vulnerable to privatization pressures.

On March 31, the USDA announced that the Forest Service would be restructured including moving the headquarters to Utah, and the closure of facilities in 31 states, including 57 research centers. The restructuring comes on top of an estimated 16% workforce cut imposed under Trump in 2025.

The reorganization of the Forest Service is framed as a decentralization measure, but is, in reality, a re-purposing of the agency that will enable increased land grabs by private industry. In a statement on the FY26 cuts, six former chiefs of the Forest Service said, “Are these drastic actions the first steps toward crippling the agencies so they cannot carry out their congressionally mandated mission? If so, they portend a cynical effort to divest and transfer federal public lands to the states and private interests.” By gutting the capacity of the Forestry Service to fulfill its mission it will be easier for conservatives like Senator Mike Lee (Republican - Utah) to proceed with proposals aimed at selling off private lands.

Outdoor-oriented retailers like REI and Patagonia have dissented. Patagonia released a statement saying, “By shutting down its research stations, culling its staff, and moving the headquarters to Salt Lake City, it will be surprising if USFS can effectively manage anything at all.... The only beneficiaries of the move and other rollbacks to public land policy from this past year are billionaires and extractive industries.”

Controlling the Narrative of America’s Public Lands

The attacks on the park system have also included efforts to control the stories these places tell. These attacks reflect Trump’s tactic of driving social division. Some examples include:

removing an exhibition on nine enslaved persons at the Philadelphia home of George Washington, which the City of Philadelphia sued to have restored;
removing a rainbow Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument, the New York site that commemorates a foundational moment in the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement;
flagging 80 items for removal describing the civil rights movement at the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama;
flagging for removal a Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park exhibit in Kansas that mentions “equity;”
removing signage from Grand Canyon National Park noting settlers pushed Native American tribes “off their land” for the park to be established and “exploited” the landscape for mining and grazing; and
ordering removal of materials explaining the impact of climate change on disappearing glaciers at Glacier National Park in Montana.

In February, conservation and civic groups filed a lawsuit to counter these policies. Earlier this month, as part of a lawsuit settlement with LGBTQ groups, the federal government agreed that the rainbow Pride flag could fly at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan.

Keeping Public Lands in Public Hands

You have to wonder why Trump and his cohort are so determined to destroy the park system that Americans love. Trump administration efforts fit a broader pattern: weakening trusted public institutions makes it easier to censor science, sanitize history, and open the door to privatization. Public lands are not merely assets to be extracted, sold off, or repurposed for the powerful. They are shared national resources, protected by law and sustained by the idea that they belong to everyone.

Pro-tip: For more information on the threats to our national parks, check out this comprehensive map covering proposals to strip their protections, open them to extraction, or slash their funding.

Weekly Wins

States (including the Red ones!) are holding the line against Trump’s harshest immigration bills

Trump and Stephen Miller are urging GOP-led states to copy the White House’s most extreme anti-immigrant ideas: kicking undocumented kids out of public schools, cutting off food assistance and vaccines, forcing all employers onto E‑Verify, even turning banks and churches into immigration enforcers. But this spring, that agenda is running into an unexpected wall. Business leaders, Christian groups, educators and even some Republican lawmakers are helping to kill or water down many of the worst bills in state capitols from Tennessee to Idaho and Utah. Of roughly 200 state measures targeting immigrants, fewer than two dozen have become law so far; more than 80 have died, several have been vetoed, and the rest are stalling out despite loud pressure from the Trump White House. It’s a reminder that coalitions on the ground can still defend core rights and keep public institutions from being fully weaponized against immigrant communities

State attorneys general score a win in their attempt to slow a Trump‑blessed TV takeover

Backed by a Trump‑appointed FCC majority that has steadily loosened media ownership rules, Nexstar pushed a $6.2 billion takeover of rival Tegna that would given it control of roughly 265 stations reaching about 80% of U.S. households—far beyond Congress’s intended broadcast ownership cap. Eight state attorneys general and DirecTV sued, arguing the merger would drive up prices, shrink competition, and further erode genuinely local news. This week, a federal judge in California granted a preliminary injunction, blocking Nexstar from integrating Tegna until an antitrust trial can be held and finding the challengers are likely to succeed on the merits. It’s a pointed reminder that even when Trump and his FCC are eager to stack the media landscape in favor of friendly conglomerates, state enforcers and the courts can still intervene to slow consolidation and keep some oxygen flowing to independent and local voices.

Courts reaffirm press protections in Trump–Epstein suit

Trump tried to hit Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal with a $10 billion defamation suit over a story detailing a sexually suggestive birthday letter he allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein, arguing the reporting was “false, malicious, and defamatory.” Instead, a federal judge in Florida tossed the case, finding Trump came “nowhere close” to showing the paper acted with the “actual malice” required to punish reporting on a public figure. The ruling is another data point in a growing line of cases where courts are rejecting Trump’s attempts to weaponize libel law against inconvenient facts.

Kleptocrats with Cruise Missiles: How Trump and Hegseth are Politicizing the Pentagon

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:40:40 GMT

“No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions. No more debris,” he said. “As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that shit.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, addressing generals and flag officers at Quantico, September 25, 2025

As we have highlighted over the last year, kleptocrats centralize power to evade independent scrutiny and hide their pilfering of public and private resources. But removing guardrails for accountable governance produces dangerous scenarios where leaders use the security forces, including the military, as an instrument of political power.

In kleptocratic contexts, leaders like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and Vladimir Putin have each converted the military into a partisan ally and suppressed dissent from officers in a bid to consolidate their power.

The U.S. military’s proud history of nonpartisanship

Historically, the United States has relied on a professional, nonpartisan military that serves the Constitution rather than any individual leader or political party. This tradition dates back to George Washington’s insistence that the army remain firmly subordinate to civilian authority and is backed by rules that bar active-duty personnel from speaking at campaign rallies in uniform, running for partisan office, or signaling official endorsement of any candidate. The armed forces are meant to be a neutral instrument of policy: they carry out lawful orders from elected civilians, but they do not decide who should hold power or intervene as a domestic political actor.

U.S. military doctrine has also been based on respect for International Humanitarian Law, which is designed to protect civilians and combatants (including our own service members) from atrocities and war crimes. This tradition is built into U.S. rules of engagement, training, and accountability mechanisms, which require commanders to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to take feasible precautions to minimize harm.

Hegseth’s appointment

The secretary of defense is charged with leading 1.3 million active duty and 1.4 million National Guard, reserves and civilian employees and managing an $850 million budget. Previous secretaries of defense have come to the job with high-level command or national security experience.

When Trump tapped him to lead the DoD, Hegseth lacked that level of experience, having only reached the rank of major in the National Guard. In 2021, fellow service members flagged him as a potential extremist “insider threat,” based on a Christian nationalist tattoo, and he was removed from his unit’s attendance at the swearing in of President Joe Biden. During his time as a Fox News presenter, Hegseth developed a friendship with Trump through the president-elect’s regular appearances on the show.

Hegseth’s nomination was controversial; it took Vice-president Vance’s tie-breaking vote to get him past his Senate confirmation for a number of reasons, including:

his book decrying “woke” generals who had made the military “effeminate“ by promoting diversity, equity and inclusion;
his opposition to women serving in combat;
his defense of service members accused of war crimes; and
reports of spousal abuse and public drunkenness

Just weeks into his tenure, Hegseth hit the headlines when he shared operational details of pending U.S. strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels via the unclassified app Signal, including with a journalist. The Office of the Inspector General later found that this mistake endangered both the mission and American troops.

Capturing the chain of command

Beyond Signalgate and other blunders, Secretary Hegseth has undermined the American military’s tradition of nonpartisan professionalism, while allegedly committing a series of war crimes along the way. Some of the most egregious examples include:

Purging career defense officials: Hegseth has fired top Judge Advocates General from the Army, Navy and Air Force. These officials are responsible determining the legality of military doctrine and actions, including what may constitute a war crime. Hegseth has also intervened in an unprecedented number of promotions and has fired more than a dozen senior military officers, including a disproportionate number of women and black officers. Most recently, he ousted Army Chief of Staff Randy George reportedly due, at least in part, to George’s concerns regarding Hegseth’s personnel decisions.
Driving division: Hegseth has declared war on ‘Woke-ism,” while aiming to infuse the military with his own brand of Christianity. His measures have included: banning transgender people from the armed services; ending military fellowships at universities he views as too progressive, while building relationships with universities that promote Christian nationalism; banning books with anti-racism, diversity or gender content from military libraries; and framing the war against Iran through a Christian nationalist lens.
Political partisanship: Hegseth has instilled an ethos of political partisanship at the Pentagon. Last year, he convened hundreds of the highest-ranking officers in the military for a campaign rally-style speech in which Trump suggested using the military against internal enemies in U.S. cities. At the event, Hegseth lambasted “stupid rules of engagement“ and told anyone who disagrees to resign. Hegseth also attempted (unsuccessfully) to punish Senator Mark Kelly with reduced rank, lower pay and official censure for encouraging service members to disobey illegal orders. Most recently, Hegseth reversed the suspension of two Apache attack helicopter crews that had conducted a fly-over of the home of Trump partisan Kid Rock posted by the musician. Kid Rock said, “I think it will be alright. My buddy’s the Commander-in-Chief.” Hegseth posted the video and the statement, “Pilots suspension LIFTED. No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.”
Restricting media access and delegitimizing attempts to cover the Iran war: Hegseth imposed new Pentagon media rules requiring prior approval for virtually all press coverage originating from the building, prompting nearly every major news outlet to suspend their reporting.The restrictions were subsequently overturned in court. Hegseth continues to restrict media access through a policy to escort journalists into the Pentagon only for press conferences. During the Iran campaign, Hegseth has snapped at press members and railed against what he considers to be a lack of positive coverage for the war.
And about those war crimes: According to reporting by multiple news outlets, Hegseth appears to have ordered missile strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean without due process. Experts believe that these strikes resulted in the extrajudicial killing of 163 persons who were not at war with the United States. Hegseth ousted Admiral Alvin Holsey, who led the U.S. Southern Command, for raising concerns as to whether such strikes were legal.

The buck stops at the top

Over the last 14 months, Hegseth’s leadership has been inept and destructive, but he is not acting alone. He serves at the pleasure of a president who himself has demonstrated dangerous contempt for military tradition and international law.

Last week we warned that the firing of Pam Bondi did not signal any real course correction at the Department of Justice. That assessment was quickly vindicated: in a remark that underscored the DOJ’s lack of independence, the acting attorney general publicly declared his love for Donald Trump. Even if Hegseth were pushed out, it is hard to imagine that the service members who risk their lives to keep us safe would be led by anyone willing to stand up to a president who has consistently disregarded the rules and safeguards that are meant to protect civilians and combatants in wartime.

Weekly Wins

Analysis finds more than 200+ court rulings reining in Trump’s presidency

On a wide range of issues, lower-court judges are issuing sharp rulings that block some of Trump’s most extreme power grabs on immigration, tariffs, and politicized prosecutions. Since the start of 2025, Just Security has documented more than 210 cases where courts have issued strong rulings against administration conduct in three critical areas where it found a “surge of cases”. These include: a) courts determined the administration was not in compliance with court orders in 34 instances; b) courts stated a distrust in government information and representations in 90 cases; and c) courts found arbitrary and capricious conduct in administrative action in 91 cases. These decisions from district judges appointed by both parties demonstrate that, across the country, ordinary judges still have tools to enforce legal limits on an increasingly lawless presidency.

Judge blocks Trump’s attempt to defund NPR and PBS

A federal judge delivered a meaningful win for press freedom this week, striking down President Trump’s 2025 executive order that tried to strip NPR and PBS of all federal funding as punishment for their “left-leaning” reporting. In a 62-page opinion, Judge Randolph Moss called the order “textbook unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination,” holding that the First Amendment doesn’t let presidents weaponize federal dollars to reward friendly outlets and choke off independent, critical ones. The decision can’t undo the damage already done to public media, but it does clear the way for a future Congress to restore funding by removing a hurdle that could have prevented lawmakers from allocating funding to NPR and PBS.

Pirro’s gun crackdown stumbles in courtrooms

Attorney General aspirant Jeanine Pirro talks tough on crime, but is running into a basic rule of law reality check: judges in D.C. are tossing out gun cases her office brings when they’re built on illegal searches and shaky police testimony. In case after case, federal judges have suppressed firearms evidence, blasted officers for “the most unlawful search” they’ve ever seen, and warned Pirro’s prosecutors not to lean on discredited witnesses— reinforcing that constitutional protections still apply even in an administration that treats due process as optional.

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American Kleptocracy — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:13:56 GMT

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Pam Bondi's Legacy: The Department of Revenge

American Kleptocracy — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:04:41 GMT

Over the next month I will be working tirelessly to transition the office of Attorney General to the amazing Todd Blanche before moving to an important private sector role I am thrilled about, and where I will continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration.
- Former US Attorney General Pam Bondi in a post on X (April 2, 2026)

Last week, President Trump fired US Attorney General Pam Bondi. Before mourning yet another woman cast from Trump’s orbit, rest assured Bondi will land on her feet. Despite a cryptic post citing the crucifixion of Jesus before her X account went dark, her anticipated private sector role is almost assuredly a cushy place to park someone who knows where the bodies are buried in the Epstein cover-up.

The real tragedy here is how far the Department of Justice (DOJ) has drifted from its function as an independent law enforcement institution under her tenure. In this post, we’ll review Bondi’s time as the top law enforcement official in the US and explore what the future might hold for the DOJ.

A Review of Pam Bondi’s Tenure

An independent department became a partisan tool

Bondi’s tenure was defined by efforts to align the DOJ with Trump’s political agenda, rather than with independent law enforcement priorities. Though her strategy often failed in court, it did succeed in eroding confidence that DoJ decisions were insulated from White House pressure. In a striking visual symbol of that shift, a giant banner of Trump was hung on the exterior of DOJ headquarters in February, a move widely read as a declaration that the department now answered first to the president.

This includes efforts to undermine free and fair elections in the lead-up to the midterms. Under Bondi, the DOJ filed lawsuits against more than 20 states and D.C. to obtain voter rolls and conducted an FBI raid on the Fulton County, Georgia, Elections Commission to relitigate his 2020 loss, even though multiple allegations had already debunked fraud claims there.

The DOJ launched "revenge" investigations of Trump's political enemies

Under Bondi, the DOJ targeted officials that Trump perceived as enemies, including members of Congress, the current Chair of the Federal Reserve, the current Attorney General of the State of New York, a former National Security Advisor, a former Special Counsel of the DOJ, and a former director of the FBI, among others. These intimidation tactics in the name of revenge, which Trump explicitly asked Bondi to pursue on social media, have largely failed due to lack of evidence and legal merit.

The DOJ revealed the identities of Jeffrey Epstein's victims while the abusers have been redacted

The DOJ has stonewalled progress on perhaps the farthest-reaching pedophilia sex-trafficking conspiracy in modern history. Despite the release of millions of pages from the Epstein files and mounting public pressure, the DOJ has brought no new US criminal cases against Epstein's associates. Lawmakers from both parties and victims’ lawyers have accused the department of slow‑walking disclosures, making “mysterious redactions,” and creating a process that effectively hides the names of alleged perpetrators while exposing victims to the public. This has prompted allegations of an institutional cover-up. In spite of Bondi's firing, members of Congress are pursuing a subpoena for her testimony on the Epstein files on April 14, in a follow-up to her acrimonious testimony before Congress in February.

The DOJ gutted key resources to combat corruption and white-collar crime

As reported week after week here at the American Kleptocracy Clearinghouse, the Trump administration is rife with shady deals. Yet, Bondi has overseen the gutting of the DOJ's anti-corruption units, the dismantling of key teams in the Public Integrity Section, and the redirection of investigative resources away from public corruption and white-collar crime. Experts say the result is “the ripest environment for corruption in a generation," where enforcement overwhelmingly targets Trump’s adversaries while allegations of self‑dealing by the president, his family, senior appointees, and major donors rarely reach indictment.

Independent oversight and whistleblower investigations decreased

Just days prior to Bondi's ouster, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department's own watchdog had apparently ignored some 20 whistleblower-flagged cases of possible Trump-era misconduct. Inspectors General are a critical accountability mechanism within the federal government. This role is designed to ensure transparency of operations and provide a secure conduit for the independent review of complaints regarding corruption. Trump's assault on these government watchdogs—firing 17 of them at the start of his term and working systematically to strip away checks on his own power—is not a side plot. This shift, along with the targeting of perceived enemies and transforming law enforcement agencies into a partisan bludgeon is how kleptocracy operates in the United States today. A Justice Department built on hollowed‑out oversight and revolving‑door loyalists will keep serving that system, with or without Pam Bondi at the top.

Trump’s Loyalists-in-Waiting

Now that Bondi is out, the important question is: who will replace her? Given Trump’s use of the DOJ for partisan and personal ends, it’s likely that the next AG will be someone loyal to Trump above the rule of law.

Here are a few of the names that have been floated so far:

Todd Blanche: Upon Bondi’s departure, Trump picked his personal lawyer and Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, to serve as Acting Attorney General. Blanche represented Trump in his New York hush money trial, which led to Trump being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. On January 30, Blanche announced “the end” of disclosures from the Epstein files, signaling that the department considered its disclosure obligations complete. And last year, Blanche oversaw the decision to move Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice and convicted child sex-trafficking offender, to a minimum security prison where she enjoys more comfortable conditions during her sentence.
Lee Zelden: Fox News reported that Lee Zeldin, who is currently doing his best to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency, is rumored to be a candidate to replace Bondi, despite not having prosecutorial experience. Trump met with Zeldin in the White House the day before firing Bondi.
Jeanine Pirro: Another contender is Jeanine Pirro, a longtime Trump loyalist who made her name hosting a reality television show and serving as a Fox News commentator. Currently US Attorney for the District of Colombia, Pirro attempted to prosecute six Democratic members of Congress for a social media post reminding military and intelligence personnel that they must refuse unlawful orders. A federal grand jury in DC unanimously rejected the effort, finding that her office had not met even the minimal probable cause standard for an indictment.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Firing Pam Bondi may look like a setback for the administration. But in practice, this change at the top will not reverse Trump’s weaponization of the DOJ for his personal and partisan goals. No matter what comes next, we need to remember that this move is not an institutional reckoning: whoever follows Bondi at the DOJ will be selected precisely to keep the department on its current path. In a kleptocratic system built on impunity and favors, personnel swaps simply rotate in new loyalists to protect insider self‑dealing.

Weekly Wins

Trump’s Jan. 6 speech isn’t immune from civil suits

A federal judge in DC rejected Trump’s latest attempt to throw out the civil suits brought by January 6 police officers and members of Congress. The judge ruled that Trump's Ellipse speech and related pressure on state officials were “unofficial” acts not covered by presidential immunity. The decision doesn’t end the cases in favor of the plaintiffs—and appeals will drag things out—but the ruling keeps alive a path for victims of the attack to question a sitting president under oath about his role in the violence that occurred that day. It also reaffirms that “acting like a candidate” while in office does not put you above ordinary civil liability.

Judge blocks Pentagon’s bid to pack press room with pro‑Trump outlets

Last month, a federal judge sided with The New York Times and struck down the Pentagon’s new press access rules as unconstitutional, blocking an attempt to rebuild the Pentagon press corps as a hand‑picked pool of pro‑Trump outlets. The ruling orders the Defense Department to restore credentials for Times reporters who had refused to sign pledges that would have restricted their ability to report fully and honestly. It also reaffirms that national security does not give the executive branch a blank check to bar critical media representatives from the press pool.

Insiders are Trading Away our Future

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:42:40 GMT

The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.
- Paul Krugman on Substack (March 24, 2026)

Credit: White House photo courtesy of Tomasz Zielonka via Unsplash

Keen observers noticed a trading anomaly early on Monday morning last week: traders moved huge volumes of oil futures roughly 15 minutes before Trump announced he would pause planned strikes on Iranian energy and power infrastructure. For context, oil futures are contracts that allow market participants to lock in a future price for oil. In this case, the trades were structured to profit if prices fell sharply after the announcement.

Let’s explore the suspicious timeline of events.

The timeline

Saturday, March 21

President Trump set a 48-hour deadline to open the Strait of Hormuz, after which he threatened to destroy Iranian power plants. (As an important aside on this threat: attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime under international law.)

Monday, March 23

6:48 am: In a span of a few minutes, traders placed about $580 million in bets against oil, shorting crude futures, according to the Financial Times’ analysis of Bloomberg data. Specifically, between 6:48 and 6:50 ET, the volume of trades rose from 20 to more than 1,650. [As mentioned above, “short selling“ means betting that the value of oil prices would fall.]

The trades stood out as “a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop...[and] as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.”

6:50 am: Investors also took a massive long position in equity futures, buying roughly $1.5 billion in S&P 500 index futures. [Taking a “long“ position means betting that prices will rise. In this context, these moves were essentially a bet that the stock market would go up.]

7:05 am: Trump posted on social media that he was postponing his threatened strikes for five days based on progress in talks with the Iranian government. Iran quickly denied this as false.

Within minutes of the announcement, two things happened that aligned exactly with these stock market bets:

The price of oil fell sharply, dropping 14 percent.
Stock futures and stock prices jumped 2.5 percent.

The resulting windfall for the mystery traders has been estimated at tens of millions of dollars. A New York Post estimate, citing derivatives professionals, puts the combined gains from the oil and stock‑index legs at roughly $40–50 million on that extremely short‑term move, depending on where the trades were closed. These estimates underline how lucrative a correctly timed bet appears to have been.

Krugman illustrated the surprise spike in oil futures trading below.

Source: Paul Krugman's Substack (March 24, 2026)

Who Could Place a Sure Bet on Our Foreign Policy?

On Saturday, it seemed all but certain that Trump would send oil prices soaring by targeting Iranian power plants. So if you had made a counterintuitive bet with your investment funds that oil prices would drop in spite of that threat, you would have made a lot of money. But would you really risk hundreds of millions on a hunch?

Ben Schiffrin, Director of Securities Policy at the financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, characterized the volume and timing of the trades as “suspicious.” He noted that “the innocuous explanation is that the traders just happened to trade right before the announcement of material information. The more problematic explanation is that they knew about the announcement before they placed the trades.”

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, was more blunt:

In one move, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 (ES) futures was bought while $192 million in oil (CL) futures was sold...let me say it again – a $1.5 BILLION BET. Bigger than any futures purchases made at the time. 5 minutes before Trump’s post...Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer? This is corruption. Mind blowing corruption.

A Pattern of Fishy Bets

This is not the first time this has happened.

There is a similar pattern of remarkably well‑timed, highly lucrative bets in the prediction markets just before major Trump administration actions.

Two of the largest platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket, offer bets on international affairs and policy outcomes alongside more traditional contracts. The Trump administration allowed Polymarket to re‑enter the US market after it withdrew in 2022 to settle an enforcement action for operating an unregistered derivatives platform.

Some of the more dubious bets of late have included:

Polymarket paying a trader $410,000 for a position that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be forced out of power just hours before the US‑backed operation took place, prompting speculation about access to non‑public information.
A trader using the handle “Magamyman” made more than $553,000 on Polymarket by betting that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be out of power before February 28, 2026. The trader placed the wagers shortly before Khamenei was killed in during the US‑Israeli strikes against Iran.
The blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps has documented how a cluster of seven linked Polymarket accounts have earned roughly $1 million over the last two years by betting with “near‑perfect accuracy” on US and Israeli strikes in the Middle East.

Taken together, the timing, scale, and repeated success of these trades raise the same basic question as the Iran oil and S&P futures bets: who knew what, and when did they know it?

Where are the Regulators?

The beneficiaries of these bets remain anonymous. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is the authority charged with regulating betting and futures platforms. Democratic senators have urged the CFTC to increase transparency, ban wagers tied to US military operations, and investigate possible insider trading on Iran‑related contracts, warning that such markets pose serious national security risks. However, no action has yet been taken: to date, no American has faced federal charges tied to insider trading on event‑driven news in prediction or financial markets.

This lack of interest in shady bets makes the United States an outlier: other countries have already brought cases. Last year, the UK Gambling Commission charged 15 people, including senior Conservative figures, for alleged cheating connected to bets based on the date of the 2024 UK general election. In February, Israel charged two of its military service members for using classified information to place Polymarket bets on military operations.

Perhaps not incidentally, the two largest betting market platforms enjoy access at the highest levels. Donald Trump Jr. works with and for both Kalshi, where he is a paid adviser, and Polymarket, where he is an investor and an unpaid adviser. Don Jr. also directs the Trump family’s social media company, Truth Social, and announced last year that it would offer its own prediction platform called Truth Predict.

Betraying the Nation

As we were preparing this week’s post, the Financial Times (FT) reported that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s investment broker looked into investing in major defense companies shortly before the US attacked Iran. According to FT, the investment discussed by Hegseth’s broker did not ultimately go ahead because the fund was not yet available for purchase. It is unclear from reporting whether Hegseth knew what the broker was doing, and how much discretion he had.

Trading insider information for profit has incredibly high stakes. We should all be concerned at how persistent and pervasive these bets are, particularly at the highest levels of Trump’s inner circle.

In his post, Krugman emphasizes that leaking insider information about national security decisions is not just a routine conflict of interest, but also approaches treasonous behavior. The core democratic norm here is straightforward: officials entrusted with decisions about war and peace—and those in their orbit—must not be allowed to exploit that access for personal gain.

As Krugman notes, if someone is willing to profit from secret plans for war, it is not a stretch to worry that they might also be willing to sell those secrets outright.

Why is profiting from insider information about national security decisions effectively a form of treason? First, it’s hard to think of a more fundamental principle for officials we entrust with important decisions, especially those that involve national security, that they or people they know should not be allowed to exploit their positions for personal gain.

The potential harms extend to service members and operational security. If foreign governments learn that US insiders routinely tip their hand via predictable, profitable trading patterns, they can watch financial and prediction markets for signs of imminent strikes. Telegraphing attacks through a visible wave of profit‑seeking trades undermines the element of surprise. Even a few minutes’ warning can allow defensive adjustments that put US and allied personnel at greater risk.

As kleptocracy in the United States reaches previously unimaginable levels, we have to ask when enough is enough. Are we now just another asset for a tiny circle of self‑dealing elites to monetize?

We deserve to know who is profiting off of pain as we mark the first month in the war with Iran. Getting to the bottom of these insider leaks is critical for national security and the future of our democracy.

Weekly Wins

“No Kings” rallies show collective power

The March 28 “No Kings” protests were a reminder that democracy is not a gift from leaders, but the product of organized, collective pressure from below. Across all 50 states and in several countries, over 8 million people showed up to insist that no one—president, family, or cronies—stands above the law. By turning out together in such numbers, they were not just airing outrage. They were signaling to institutions, donors, and would‑be collaborators that the project of entrenching Trump‑era impunity will face sustained public resistance. Collective action is the way to fight a kleptocracy.

Chicago’s ICE resistance becomes a blueprint

Chicago’s “all‑of‑government” resistance to Trump’s ICE crackdowns is now a template for other cities and blue‑state governors. Chicago’s measures have included:

banning federal agents from using city property for operations;
directing Chicago police officers to work with demonstrators to manage protests rather than shutting them down; and
pushing Chicago police to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by federal agents.

Those tactics are now being used by dozens of municipalities across the country facing similar, unwanted immigration enforcement actions. For example, in Philadelphia, City Councilmembers drafted restrictions on federal immigration enforcement in the city, such as forbidding ICE agents from accessing local facilities. Governors in Oregon, California, Minnesota and Illinois are also trading legal strategies and protest‑safety playbooks, officials are learning from each other and treating rights protection as a collective project.

Internal review clears CISA career staffers of wrongdoing

There was also a largely unnoticed but significant win for election administration this week: an internal review cleared seven career staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The staffers had their clearances suspended and were placed on administrative leave because they arranged a counterintelligence polygraph exam that the agency’s former acting director failed. According to reporting by Politico, CISA director Madhu Gottumukkala had reportedly sought unusual access to highly classified information from another agency that required a need-to-know and a polygraph test. In addition to the failed polygraph, Gottumukkala also earned headlines for uploading sensitive files into a public version of ChatGPT. In late February, the scandal-plagued official was removed from the CISA post and reassigned to a position at DHS headquarters.

Exploiting Public Power for Private Gain: On Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:12:20 GMT

Last week, we profiled how Russia has become the unlikely economic beneficiary of President Trump’s war of choice in Iran, potentially helping it to stave off a financial crisis and further enabling its war of aggression in Ukraine. This week, we highlight how Trump’s family and former business associates are both informing and benefiting from the president’s empire-building exploits.

Just two days prior to Trump’s military “excursion“ into Iran, Special Envoy Steven Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner held indirect negotiations with Iran’s Foreign Minister in Geneva on Tehran’s nuclear program, ostensibly to avoid war. Despite the fancy titles—”Special Envoy” for Witkoff and voluntary “Special Peace Envoy” for Kushner—they are decidedly not diplomats. They are real estate developers with no experience in peace negotiations, nuclear arms control, or any kind of international relations beyond their business interests in the Middle East.

Their influence on decisions that affect the well-being of citizens around the globe and the width of their own wallets stems purely from their close relationship with the president. Witkoff is a billionaire golfing buddy who originally befriended Donald Trump decades ago by giving him cash for a ham sandwich. Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. Their relationships revolve around opportunities for financial gain as much as (or more than) any strategic capacity for protecting our national security.

Mixing business and policy

We profiled Witkoff’s Russian conflicts of interest in May 2025. As founders of the crypto-scheme World Liberty Financial (WLF)—with day to day management overseen by Witkoff’s sons—Steven Witkoff and Kushner appear to have benefited from quid pro quo arrangements with individuals and countries seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration. Just two weeks after WLF received a $2 billion investment from United Arab Emirates Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, for example, the Trump administration gave the Sheik’s company G42 access to thousands of the most advanced AI computer chips.

And while we may question Kushner’s diplomatic bona fides, even without Witkoff by his side, he’s proven over and over again that he’s more than capable of currying favor and raising serious conflict of interest issues all on his own.

Here’s a quick review of Kushner’s business interests in the region.

In February 2024, Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, benefited from a $2 billion investment from a sovereign wealth fund controlled by the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a repressive dictator who ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Then last week, The New York Times reported that Kushner was seeking an additional $5 billion for Affinity Partners, including from its original Saudi investors, while simultaneously playing a role in regional peace negotiations on behalf of the US government. These unsavory business deals while Kushner is representing the administration abroad raise serious questions about his motivations, especially given the Saudi Crown Prince’s pressure campaign on Trump to continue attacking Iran (more on that below).
In December 2024, after Trump had already won the presidency and before he took office, Kushner told a podcaster he had “preemptively” raised another $1.5 billion from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund “to avoid any conflicts” and make sure Affinity would “not have to raise capital for the next four years.”
As Special Peace Envoy, Kushner has also been involved in negotiations in the Israel-Gaza conflict, in which an estimated 75,200 Palestinian civilians have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces and the population of two million Palestinians remains at risk of starvation and disease. At the same time, Kushner is the face of the Trump administration’s plans to “rebuild” Gaza in a way only real estate developers could love: as a luxury, waterfront buildings. In January 2026, he presented the Trump administration’s “master plan,” stating that “I’m a real estate person at heart, and it’s all about location, and I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people.” The administration’s plans to profit from the conflict while participating in negotiations to end hostilities is concerning, to say the least.

On March 11, 2026, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a civil society group dedicated to transparent governance, sent a request to the White House that Mr. Kushner be subject to financial disclosure rules just like other public servants.

Outsourcing our foreign policy to other interests

The foolishness of Trump’s military adventure in Iran is becoming clearer as we enter the fourth week of an intervention without clear goals or any appearance of an exit strategy. To date, 13 U.S service members have been killed and 200 injured, while over 2,500 people are estimated to have been killed in the region, including up to 168 school girls killed in an apparent hit by a U.S. Tomahawk missile. The Pentagon is now asking Congress for an additional $200 billion to continue the war.

Our impetuous President has stumbled us into a global cataclysm after being advised by several individuals in his inner circle who appear to have had personal motivations for supporting a war.

For one, Trump appears to have been overly reliant on the advice of family and friends with financial interests at stake and backed by unqualified political appointees and junior officials. In a damning report, the Arms Control Association, a national nonpartisan organization that promotes public understanding of and support for effective arms control policies, concluded:

Trump’s dissatisfaction and impatience with the negotiating process appear to have been fed, in part, by Witkoff and Kushner’s accounts of the U.S.-Iran talks. Comments made by Witkoff in two background briefings with reporters on Feb. 28 and March 3, as well as media appearances since the strikes began, made clear that Witkoff did not have sufficient technical expertise or diplomatic experience to engage in effective diplomacy. His lack of knowledge and mischaracterization of Iran’s positions and nuclear program throughout the process likely informed Trump’s assessment that talks were not progressing and Iran was not negotiating seriously.

For another, Trump also appears to have been swayed by the cynical interests of repressive, potentially criminal, leaders from other countries. For example, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visited the White House a record-breaking six times over the last year and commented that attacking Iran was something he has “longed to do for 40 years.” The Saudis were also pushing Trump to punish Iran, with the Crown Prince reportedly making multiple phone calls to the president to advocate for the attack and continuing to call Trump repeatedly to push for prolonging the war this week.

Far from draining the swamp of institutional corruption in Washington DC, Trump and his cronies have set an unprecedented standard of mixing international affairs with self-dealing grift that is rotten to the core. Our latest military interventions may destroy the reputation of the United States and the alliances in the Middle East and beyond, which could make our global economic transactions and national security more expensive and insecure for years to come.

Weekly Wins

Let the Wild Rumpus End

In our September 12, 2025 weekly update, we examined all of the ways that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was failing at his own stated agenda of fostering “radical transparency” and removing conflicts of interest at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). We also highlighted the real-world impact of Kennedy’s actions on the well-being of everyday Americans, including disjointed vaccine guidance, increased confusion about vaccines, a drop in vaccination rates for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella, and an increase in reported measles outbreaks.

This week, in a decision hailed by the American Academy of Pediatrics as a welcome outcome for children, communities, and pediatricians everywhere, US District Judge Brian Murphy put a hold on the decisions made by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). In June 2025, according to The New York Times, Kennedy fired all 17 doctors and scientists that comprised ACIP and replaced them with people who largely share his views on vaccines. According to NPR, Judge Murphy ruled last week that Kennedy and the Committee had made arbitrary and capricious decisions, ignoring a long-used, well-regarded scientific process for developing vaccine policies. The judge wrote, “The government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”

The Unlikely Winner of the Iran War: Moscow

American Kleptocracy — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:04:43 GMT

Trump’s war of choice caused an oil shock. Now it is quietly refilling the Kremlin's war chest.

There is a bitter irony running through America’s war on Iran. The United States launched its bombing campaign partly to contain Iran, a key Russian ally. But week two of the conflict has produced a result that would make any Kremlin strategist smile: Russia is emerging as one of the biggest economic winners of the chaos.

Here’s how it happened.

Oil and the wrong side of the Strait

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow channel through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil flow every day. It accounts for about 20% of the world’s supply. Since the war began, that flow has been effectively shut down, as Iran has threatened (and attacked) any ships moving through the channel. Oil market analyst Rory Johnston joked that this is the scenario analysts used to give to new trainees as a radical thought experiment, in order to understand what would happen if the world economy broke.

The problem is that virtually all of the world’s stored oil and chemicals are sitting on the wrong side of the Strait of Hormuz, in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Those countries can’t sell their oil if they can’t ship it through the strait. Iraq has already been forced to shut down over three million barrels per day of production, a volume equivalent to the feared Russian supply loss that sent oil above $120 a barrel after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Enter Moscow

So who has oil to sell and is on the right side of the Strait? Russia.

Before the Iran war, Russia was on its back foot, mired in a stalemate of a war with Ukraine. The Trump administration had spent months squeezing Russian exports. India, one of Russia’s biggest customers, had slashed purchases of Russian crude in half after the United States sanctioned Russia’s two largest oil exporters and imposed punitive tariffs on countries buying Russian oil. Initially, Washington’s pressure campaign appeared to be working. While India didn’t quit its Russian oil habit entirely, it sharply reduced its purchases in favor of supplies from the Middle East.

That pressure has now evaporated. With Gulf supplies cut off, the United States granted Indian refiners a 30-day waiver to buy Russian oil. After months of White House pressure to stop buying Russian oil, India is now being given a pass to do exactly that, with the proceeds continuing to bolster the very war chest Washington spent a year trying to deplete. Analysts at Kpler, a company that tracks global freight and commodity markets, predicted India will go back to pre-sanctions levels, buying as much as 50% of its crude from Russia. The Iran war has also given Russia more leverage and momentum because of the oil price hikes. Now they can clear their backlog of ships at sea and sell at elevated prices.

Congressional Democrats called the waiver “dangerous, self-defeating, and indefensible” and “an inexplicable act of material benefit to the enemy.” And if you don’t identify with that side of the aisle, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has also made clear that Russia is giving intelligence and training in drones to kill American soldiers and their allies.

The upshot is that Russia stands to profit even as its ally is under bombardment. For a president who says collaboration with Russia is all a hoax, it is strange how often Trump’s words and actions end up helping his fellow kleptocrats in the Kremlin.

The drone twist

The irony runs deeper still. The United States is also running low on its stock of weapons, especially defensive ones, which are far more expensive than offensive weapons.

This comes at a time when Ukraine is on the brink. While in the middle of its own war, the country has dispatched drone interceptors and military personnel to Jordan, as Middle Eastern countries fend off Iranian Shahed drone strikes on infrastructure and US military assets. Ukraine’s expertise in defending against these types of drone strikes comes at a high price: Russia has used the Shahed drones to attack Ukrainian cities for years.

Nearly seven months ago, Ukrainian officials tried to sell the US their battle-proven technology for downing these Iranian Shahed drones. They even made a PowerPoint presentation showing how it could protect American forces in a Middle East war. The Trump administration dismissed the Ukrainians at the time, only to reverse course last week.

So Ukraine is now helping defend the United States in the Middle East, even as the oil windfall from that same war flows to Moscow, giving Russia more money to keep fighting in Ukraine.

A conspiracy of dunces

It is not clear that there is a real conspiracy at foot in terms of aiding Russia. But it is clear that poor planning and “victory disease,” where you overestimate your ability to reproduce a previous triumph, are working out well for the world’s most corrupt man. (No, we don’t mean Trump here.) And Trump does not exactly have a strong record of containing Russia. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

A strike meant to weaken a Russian ally has handed Russia an economic lifeline at exactly the moment the United States has been tightening the screws. And in the end, consequences are more important than words. Incompetence, venality, and greed are strengthening the hands of autocrats.

Weekly Wins

Judicial Patches in the Constitutional Dike

The courts continue to play a vital role in pushing back on Trump’s lawless, corrupt agenda. On Friday, March 13, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to continue funding the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). In the ruling, the judge found that the administration’s arguments relied on a faulty interpretation of the law and were an end run around Congress’s intent to shield the CFPB “from this exact transparent display of partisanship.” Tasked with protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices and taking action against companies that break the law, the CFPB has been in the Trump administration’s crosshairs since early last year. To date, the administration has moved to close the CFPB’s offices, fire staff, and abandoned legal actions against companies such as Capital One (alleged deceptive tactics), Rocket Homes Real Estate (alleged kickback scheme), and Heights Finance (accused of taking advantage of struggling borrowers).

On the same day, another judge shut down what appeared to be a politically motivated criminal investigation of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. Calling out yet another example of the Trump administration attempting to use the criminal justice system to target perceived enemies, the judge said that “The Government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the President,” supporting the claim that the investigation was simply a pretext to force Powell to cut interest rates. The judge also wrote, “There is abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will.”

Trump’s War on Anthropic and the Future of Rights-Respecting AI

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:54:57 GMT

I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!“
- President Donald Trump on February 27, 2026

The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot...We haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump.
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in an internal letter, following the termination of the contract

In kleptocracies, or countries ruled by thieves, the line between government and the private sector is blurred. Companies do the government’s bidding or they face severe penalties or are shut down. At the American Kleptocracy Clearinghouse, we call this a protection racket. Some examples are Vladimir Putin’s expropriation of Rosneft/Yukos, Russia’s biggest oil company, to punish the company’s owner for being disloyal to his regime. Another is Hugo Chavez’s nationalization of Venezuela’s oil production, which diverted profits to state coffers. As these examples from the right and from the left show, protection rackets do not know an ideology other than power.

This week, we’ll take a look at why the Trump administration’s fight with Anthropic, one of AI’s most powerful companies, is testing the limits of the separation between government and private companies, consistent with trends that we have seen in kleptocracies worldwide.

Testing the Limits of Legality

The Trump administration, especially through the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, has been actively surveilling US residents using a combination of publicly available data and artificial intelligence. This tech is built on a combination of an interface from Palantir, data from Thomson-Reuters, and artificial intelligence from Anthropic. This use of data has already resulted in the detention of numerous US citizens, including children, and is part of a broader campaign to intimidate immigrant communities. The US is not supposed to surveil US citizens without a warrant, but AI and the easy availability of public data has allowed government agencies to circumvent this basic protection. And when it’s easier and faster to access such information, it’s hard for us to keep track of these violations and to fight them in the courts.

A similar pattern is emerging in US foreign policy. The administration has pursued a policy of “decapitation warfare,“ which is the targeted killing of individuals in power. This is considered illegal under international law. The most visible case is the killing of the Supreme Leader of Iran in the last few weeks, although the ongoing US killing of alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean—or fishermen, depending on who you ask—shows that what’s happening in Iran is part of a trend. AI, especially if it does not have guardrails, could make assassination extremely easy. We’re already seeing this play out in the streets of Iran: Anthropic’s Claude, as an essential part of the Palantir-built system that powers the Department of War’s current bombing campaign, suggested “hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance.”

Even though there are laws governing these things, what does a law mean under a lawless presidency? Let’s take a look at the conflict between the Department of War and Anthropic as a case study.

What Happened with Anthropic

Companies often backstop their contracts with government, stating which kinds of actions they will or won’t take, according to their ethics, brand, and risk profile. Anthropic inserted two specific safeguards into its contract with the Pentagon: its technology could not be used to power mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The contract was first signed by the Biden administration and reaffirmed by the Trump administration.

Yet, in the final week of February, negotiations between the Department of War and Anthropic collapsed dramatically. At the time, Anthropic was the only AI company that could be used on the Pentagon’s classified systems.

The Department of War offered Anthropic new contract conditions, which removed the safeguards for surveillance of citizens and use of AI for autonomous killing technology. Anthropic missed the Pentagon’s deadline to accept these conditions on February 27.

The administration’s response was confused and confusing. But what is clear is that the administration had an unprecedented level of interference with the private sector. For libertarian AI expert Dean Ball, a senior policy advisor in the Trump administration from April to August 2025 and the primary drafter of America’s AI Action Plan, the administration had four choices:1

Cancel the contract with Anthropic.
Declare Anthropic a supply chain risk, like they do with Huawei or other companies that may represent a rival power. (Anthropic would be the first US-based company to be designated as such).
Prevent all other Department of War contractors from working with Anthropic.
Invoke the Defense Production Act, which amounts to a “soft nationalization” of the company.

The administration has chosen all of the above at different times over the past few weeks.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth first announced he would terminate the company’s $200 million contract and classify the firm as a “supply chain risk.” He then went a step further and said that no government contractors should be able to work with Anthropic, amounting to what might be a form of corporate strangulation.

Even before the deadline had passed, President Trump had announced cessation of US government use of Anthropic’s technology. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei claimed in an internal memo that his company was punished for not giving “dictator-style praise” and donating to Trump.

A Suspicious Pivot to OpenAI

Just a few hours later, OpenAI, a fierce competitor of Anthropic, announced that it had reached a deal with the Pentagon for the same work.

Facing public backlash and a campaign to boycott ChatGPT, its flagship product, OpenAI announced on March 2 that the agreement had been amended so its AI “shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”

For any readers of this blog, it should not come as a surprise that OpenAI’s President, Greg Brockman, very publicly donated $25 million to Trump’s Political Action Committee last September.

What Comes Next

As UCLA Professor Safiya Umoja Noble warns, we are now faced with either managing data in our society or becoming a society where we are data points that are managed. The United States lacks a comprehensive data protection law, and our Fourth Amendment right to not to be subject to illegal search and seizure may not extend to private companies. The Constitution also does not explicitly protect us against the use of data harvested from the open internet or our cell phone records.

This becomes especially difficult when the government strongarms companies whose tech it likes, but that don’t let it break the law. Or when it only does business with those companies that it knows will go along with its lawbreaking.

The quest for rights-respecting technology, however, is not lost. In the midst of the confrontation with Pete Hegseth’s Department of War, Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, a non-profit aiming to promote regulatory frameworks that ensure safeguards for artificial intelligence. Creating pro-social applications of artificial intelligence and limiting the potential for abuse will depend on the same mechanisms for accountability that our current kleptocrats threaten to undermine.

It matters when companies stand up to government abuse. In fact, it’s one of the biggest predictors of whether autocracy takes hold. Whatever comes next, we all have a role to play in holding companies to account for their choices, while showing our support as consumers for those that choose to act responsibly.

Weekly Wins

ICE Queen Ousted: Kristi Noem’s DHS Reign Ends

Kristi Noem’s firing from DHS is a win for accountability. She faced so many allegations of corruption, abuse of power, and deportation excesses that even some Republican senators began raising concerns. Her removal appears to be driven by her mischaracterization of President Trump’s support for her actions, rather than for any wrongdoing itself. Nevertheless, this might be a signal that there are limits to how far a DHS chief can stretch the law, abuse contracts, and weaponize deportations, even in this administration.

In parallel, across the nation, the justice system handed ICE a series of stinging defeats, sharply rebuking the agency’s lawlessness and overreach.

In Minnesota, a judge ordered ICE to return personal documents and belongings to released detainees or face civil contempt and daily fines, underscoring how cavalierly the agency treats basic rights and court orders.
In Washington, a judge forced ICE to provide a bond hearing for an Iranian Kurd it was trying to deport to a war zone, pushing back against attempts to fast‑track expulsions without meaningful review.
In Texas, a judge ordered ICE to give a long‑detained immigrant a bond hearing or release him, citing serious due process concerns about prolonged detention without individualized justification.
In New Jersey, a federal judge, alarmed that ICE had repeatedly ignored court orders, will now require immigration officials to formally acknowledge those orders in writing and has warned they could face criminal contempt if they keep violating them.

Make America Polluted Again. And Again.

American Kleptocracy — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:03:07 GMT

This is corruption, plain and simple. Old-fashioned, dirty political corruption...This is an agency that has been so infiltrated by the corrupt fossil fuel industry that it has turned an agency of government into the weapon of the fossil fuel polluters.
- Sheldon Whitehouse, US Senator for Rhode Island, at a rally outside the EPA building (February 11, 2026)

In August last year, we warned of efforts by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin and fossil fuel industry-aligned activists to rescind the Endangerment Finding, the science-based evidence that has been used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change since 2009.

On February 12, President Trump granted their wishes, erasing the scientific justification that allows the EPA to regulate emissions from vehicles, oil and gas facilities, and large industries.

Trump’s action is expected to have severe, long-term consequences. The move wipes out federal greenhouse gas standards for new cars, trucks, and other engines, and destabilizes existing limits on major industrial sources like power plants and oil and gas facilities. Public health experts and environmental advocates warn that this rollback will lock in high-emitting energy sources for decades to come, worsen air pollution, and accelerate climate change, with long‑term health impacts that fall hardest on already overburdened communities. This comes at a moment when climate change impacts are already affecting people’s lives in the United States and are expected to become exponentially more severe in the coming decades.

Pay to Play for Fossil Fuel Companies

The deregulation of policies to limit pollution follows a pattern documented extensively in our previous posts on the American Kleptocracy Clearinghouse: public policy is shaped by the interests of the president and his cronies. It’s happened with presidential pardons, control of the media, foreign policy, and even basic infrastructure like the US-Canada bridge.

The return on investment for extractive industries also follows this pattern. Here are just a few examples:

Fossil-Fueled Donations

During his re-election campaign in 2024, Trump asked 20 oil and gas tycoons for $1 billion in donations, eventually receiving about $500 million, to ensure the installment of industry-friendly political appointees, like Lee Zeldin, and favorable policies once in office. Eliminating the Endangerment Finding, the federal government's cornerstone mechanism for regulating emissions from oil and gas wells, power plants, and automobile exhaust, is a boon to these donors.

Liquified Regulations

As documented by The Guardian, Kelcy Warren, the executive chairman of the fossil fuel corporation Energy Transfer, was one of Trump’s top donors during the 2024 campaign. After Trump’s win, Warren kept the contributions coming, donating another $25 million to the president’s political action committee (PAC).

Warren was one of the first beneficiaries of Trump’s first administration in 2017, when Trump signed an executive order in his first week in office allowing construction to proceed on the company’s controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. During the first day of Trump’s second term, Warren again reaped the benefits: an executive order that ended Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, enabling Energy Transfer to proceed with a long-sought-after LNG project in Lake Charles. A few months later, Trump’s Federal Energy Commission (FERC) also granted a three-year extension for the LNG project. In the week after the FERC decision, Warren (already a billionaire) saw his wealth increase by 10 percent.

Creative Accounting

Cheniere Energy, the largest US exporter of liquefied natural gas, also appears to have benefited from its campaign donations. The company’s CEO Jack Fusco attended Trump’s 2024 Mar‑a‑Lago fundraiser where fossil fuel executives were pressed for major campaign donations. Cheniere’s PAC also donated at least $250,000 to Trump campaign committees in 2024.

On February 27, the Trump administration handed a $370 million “alternative fuel” tax break to Cheniere Energy through the IRS. The tax credit was designed for small vehicles and boats, not for companies like Cheniere Energy, which supply gas to massive LNG takers. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) said the tax refund is an example of President Donald Trump rewarding the fossil fuel companies that bankrolled his re-election, describing the payment as the “latest in a pattern of pay-to-play donations leading to favorable treatment by the Administration.”

How Kleptocrats Deal with Climate Truth-Tellers

Polluters are not simply satisfied with fewer regulatory limitations. They also want to muzzle anyone who might hold them to account. Since Trump took office for a second time, his allies have moved in lockstep to weaken, delegitimize, and even criminalize environmental advocacy itself.

Here’s a brief timeline:

March 2025: Corporations have increasingly used Strategic Litigation against Public Participation (SLAPPs) to weaken the ability of environmental activists to impede their projects. Last year, following a flawed jury trial in North Dakota, Greenpeace was ordered to pay $345 million to Energy Transfer, the same company mentioned above, for having allegedly “masterminded” the historic, Indigenous-led Dakota Access Pipeline protests—even though Energy Transfer produced no evidence at trial linking the environmental nonprofit to any wrongdoing. Greenpeace has vowed to appeal the decision.
April 2025: Trump threatened to issue an Executive Order targeting the tax-exempt status of environmental non-profits.
June 2025: During a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting, Republican Senator Ted Cruz alleged without any proof that there was “a coordinated assault by the radical left, backed and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party...to weaponize litigation against US energy producers...in order to undermine American energy dominance.”
August 2025: As documented by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last summer, corporate interests and repressive governments around the globe are coordinating to criminalize climate and environmental activism through anti-protest laws, lawsuits, disinformation, and even acts of violence against environmentalists.
February 2026: The Supreme Court announced that it had agreed to hear a major climate lawsuit in which the oil/gas industry is claiming it shouldn’t be sued in state courts over its role in global warming. The petitioners include Exxon Mobil and Suncor, a Canadian energy giant. In the same vein, in June, 16 Republican State Attorneys General had sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi requesting legislation to grant legal immunity for oil and gas companies for their role in worsening climate change impacts.
February 2026: Last month, 19 Republican attorneys general also asked the Department of Justice to investigate dozens of US-based nonprofits for potential violations of federal foreign agent laws, because they receive funding from foreign-based climate foundations.

If the agencies like the EPA no longer have the will or authority to protect us from climate impacts, then the rights of civil society organizations, communities, and environmental defenders to publicly resist dangerous policies is essential. This is why the Trump administration, like other kleptocracies, has invested time and effort to undermine these rights.

Known Horrors Await

Most Americans are too young to remember the environmental debacles of the 1970s: smog that choked cities like Los Angeles, contaminated rivers catching on fire, hundreds of toxic industrial sites so poisonous that they had to be cordoned off for clean up, and nuclear accidents that rattled public faith in government. The Endangerment Finding was an important piece of environmental protection architecture that allowed the EPA to protect us from air pollution based on scientific evidence regarding the impacts of greenhouse gases and climate change.

Why would our billionaire leaders and their billionaire cronies implement a policy change that all but guarantees a return to those outcomes? On the surface, it makes no sense.

But if when you line up the donations, the profits, and the silencing of anyone who objects, the answer is clear who is benefiting and why we’re racing backwards to undo such hard-won environmental protections.

As always: follow the money.

Weekly Wins

From Pews to Courtrooms: Pushing Back on the Deportation State

There are two big wins on the immigration front this week, driven by people and institutions refusing to let Trump’s deportation machine operate in the dark. In Washington, DC and around the country, thousands of congregations are dragging ICE into court over the administration’s quiet decision to rip up long‑standing protections for churches, synagogues, gurdwaras, and temples—arguing that turning houses of worship into potential raid sites guts the First Amendment and chills immigrant communities out of public life. Judges are starting to agree: in Chicago, a federal court ordered ICE to let clergy back into a local holding facility to offer ashes and Communion after finding that the agency’s new rules “substantially burdened” religious exercise, and similar challenges are moving forward in Minnesota and at the DC Circuit.

Meanwhile in Boston, a federal judge just torched one of the administration’s most lawless tactics—“third‑country” deportations that whisk people to places they’ve never lived—holding that DHS has to try to send people home first, give them meaningful notice, and stop using secret diplomatic deals as a shortcut around basic due process. The ruling pauses the policy for at least 15 days and catalogues multiple instances where officials tried to rush people onto planes with less than a day’s warning. This bench‑slap will be Exhibit A the next time the White House claims its mass‑removal agenda is just about “enforcing the law.”

Case against Democratic Officials Falls Apart

US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro just hit a wall in her bid to criminalize six Democrats for a social media video telling troops to refuse unlawful orders. A DC grand jury unanimously balked, and now the office has shelved the case. It’s a rare but important win for basic rule-of-law norms, after months of Trump publicly branding the lawmakers “traitors” and demanding prosecutions for what is plainly protected political speech.

Trump's Tariffs: How to Win Friends and Influence People

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:21:11 GMT

I have seen the terrible treatment you are receiving at the hands of an unjust system turned against you...I have strongly voiced my disapproval both publicly and through our tariff policy.
- President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post addressed to Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president who was sentenced to 27 years in prison a coup plot

The Supreme Court Hits the Brakes on Trump's Tariff Power

In a landmark decision last Friday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Trump does not have authority to unilaterally impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The decision represented a rare rebuke by the Court: throughout Trump’s second term, the justices have consistently ruled in favor of his efforts to expand presidential power.

The ruling delivered a major blow to the cornerstone economic weapon that Trump has used to threaten and coerce trading partners and competitors. He has shattered the previous stability of the global trading system, holding the world economy hostage with ever-increasing tariffs that are often triggered by perceived slights from foreign leaders. During a trade dispute with China, Trump raised tariffs on many Chinese goods to 145 percent. He has also played tariff chicken with the United States’ other largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, including the threat of scrapping the trade agreement he signed with them during his first term.

Just an hour after the ruling, Trump lashed out at the Supreme Court, calling the conservative justices who ruled against the Administration “disloyal, unpatriotic” and “fools and lapdogs.” He also announced a “Global 10% Tariff on all Countries” under a different law: Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. A day later, he proclaimed that the global tariff would be raised to 15 percent. That move has exacerbated the tariff chaos, with the European Union now reportedly reconsidering last summer’s trade deal.

Separating Fact from Fiction

Before examining how tariffs can be a tool of kleptocracy, we wanted to first take a moment to explore some of Trump’s false claims about tariffs since he first announced his policies last year. To understand how this machinery works—and whom it really serves—we have to look at what the tariffs do and who actually pays.

Fiction: Trump says that tariffs are necessary to correct trade balances by falsely portraying countries with trade surpluses as ripping off the United States.

FACT: Trade surpluses are the result of complex supply chains and consumer choices, which actually result in lower prices for consumers. While some egregious practices are employed by producers like China, such as flooding markets with underpriced goods to gain market share, the vast majority of trade surpluses reflect economic efficiencies in a globalized economy.

Fiction: Trump has justified the tariffs as being paid by foreign entities.

FACT: American companies pay the tariffs and the rest of the costs are passed on to American consumers in the form of higher prices. The Tax Foundation found that the tariffs cost the average American household $1,000 in 2025 and that amount is likely to rise to $1,300 in 2026.

Fiction: Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick claimed last year that the revenues from tariffs will be so abundant that American families with incomes less than $150,000 will no longer need to pay taxes.

FACT: Tariff revenues have been lower than Trump claims. Congressional Budget Office analysis also found that the tax reforms in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” disproportionately benefit the richest 10% of the country.

So if Americans are paying higher prices and not seeing a dime in revenue, then what are the tariffs for? Looking at the Trump administration’s behavior over the last year reveals a clear pattern of behavior: tariffs are a useful tool to enrich Trump’s friends (and himself) and punish his enemies.

How Trump is Using Tariffs for Personal or Partisan Gain

Under President Trump, economic policy is designed for the benefit of his family, friends, and donors, as extensively documented here on the American Kleptocracy Clearinghouse.

There is ample evidence that tariffs have been deployed to benefit Trump’s allies.

Vietnam: During high-stakes trade talks with Vietnam in June 2025, the country’s prime minister attended a groundbreaking ceremony with Eric Trump for a planned $1.5 billion golf resort. The project was touted by both sides as a symbol of deepening ties and future economic cooperation between the two countries, blurring the line between public negotiations and private profit. Just weeks later, the Trump administration slashed the tariff rate for Vietnam from 46 percent to 20 percent, a dramatic reversal that raised questions about whether favorable treatment of Trump’s business interests influenced US trade policy.
Brazil: In August 2025, Trump slapped a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, even though Brazil runs a trade deficit with the United States. The move was widely understood as punishment for Brazilian legal proceedings against former President Jair Bolsonaro, who attempted a coup after losing elections in 2022. By weaponizing tariffs in response to another country’s domestic accountability efforts, the administration signaled that loyalty to Trump and his ideological allies could matter more than economic logic or support for democratic norms.
Starlink: According to The Washington Post, trade negotiations around the world have been leveraged to lobby a range of nations—including Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Lesotho, Pakistan and Vietnam—for regulatory approvals and licenses for Starlink, which is owned by Elon Musk. Negotiators in India, for instance, viewed Starlink deals as “an important lubricant” to facilitate a trade deal. In these cases, the promise or threat of tariff relief became intertwined with the business ambitions of a wealthy Trump donor and supporter, reinforcing a pattern in which US trade policy is used to advance private enrichment and political favoritism rather than a coherent national economic strategy.

Walking Back a Tariff Cash-Grab: A Note on Cantor Fitzgerald

In July of last year, Wired also highlighted the risk that administration insiders were preparing to profit from Trump’s tariff chaos. The magazine reported that Cantor Fitzgerald, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s investment firm that is now run by his sons, was about to embark on a lucrative scheme: the firm would buy the rights to potential refunds from companies that have paid Trump’s tariffs. Cantor was reportedly offering 20 to 30 percent of the value of those payments, effectively betting that companies would later receive full refunds if the tariffs were ruled unlawful. In August 2025, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden, who sit on the Senate Banking and Senate Finance Committees, sounded the alarm regarding conflicts of interest inherent in such a plan. Following last week’s Supreme Court announcement, however, a Cantor Fitzgerald spokesperson denied any trading or positions taken by the firm on the tariffs. According to the spokesperson, the company has “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.”

The fact that Cantor ultimately didn’t pursue this scheme suggests at least some sensitivity to the optics of Lutnick’s role in the administration. Perhaps some of the scrutiny around his numerous overlapping conflicts of interest is starting to have an effect—such as how public-private sector connections have reportedly enriched his sons’ investments in data centers; his potential windfall if the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is privatized; his investment interests in Greenland; and his role in persuading Trump to block a bridge to Canada.

Together, these episodes trace a pattern: Lutnick sits at the intersection of public power and private gain. Given the growing visibility of that pattern, the tariff buyback scheme may have been a bridge too far.

What Comes Next

The Supreme Court ruling offered no guidance on whether the $133 billion dollars collected so far will ever be refunded. Given the shell game Trump has already played—using opaque structures, backdoor deals, and misleading public claims—it is reasonable to expect more subterfuge ahead, especially if there is money to be made by insiders while the public is left holding the bill.

Weekly Wins

Chipping Away at ICE

State governments and local communities racked up a string of consequential wins against Trump’s deportation machine this week.

Maryland and New Mexico joined a growing bloc of states cutting off ICE’s 287(g) pipeline and detention contracts, directly shrinking the agency’s reach into local jails even as the administration tries to warehouse migrants in converted factories and distribution centers across the country.
A federal judge vacated Trump’s mass detention framework, ordering that migrants who have long been warehoused without individualized review are in fact entitled to bond hearings. This forces the government back toward the due process obligations it has tried to sidestep.
Case after case against anti‑ICE protesters is collapsing as agents’ testimony unravels under scrutiny, exposing just how thin the government’s “violent agitator” narrative really is.
On the ground, students and community members are testing legal limits in the streets and school hallways. In Northern Virginia, hundreds of high schoolers walked out and accepted suspensions rather than stay silent about ICE’s abuses. And around the country, even Trump voters are opposing new detention centers.

Taken together, it’s a reminder that resistance is not just symbolic: each state law passed, lawsuit won, and protester acquitted chips away at the infrastructure of fear that ICE and the White House are counting on to make mass deportation possible.

Why Trump is Burning Bridges with Canada

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:46:00 GMT

As everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades...Canada is building a massive bridge between Ontario and Michigan...I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them.
- President Donald Trump in a Truth Social post (February 9, 2026)

The Ambassador Bridge—the aging, privately owned structure that has long monopolized truck traffic between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario —sits at the heart of the Moroun family’s billion-dollar transportation empire. To protect this monopoly along one of the busiest trade corridors between the US and Canada, heir to the family fortune Matthew Moroun has spent years trying to kill or delay the Gordie Howe International Bridge project. As a publicly owned competitor that would be owned by both the US and Canada, the Gordie Howe Bridge poses a direct threat to the Mouron family’s significant toll revenue.

What’s a billionaire to do? The Detroit Metro Times reported that Moroun, a longtime Republican donor, asked for help from some friends in high places.

Billionaire Old Boys’ Club

According to reporting by the New York Times, Moroun met with billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on February 9. Lutnick then phoned billionaire President Trump. Within a few hours of the call, Trump posted the Truth Social message threatening to block the opening of the Gordie Howe crossing later this year.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and we’ll get to that in a bit, but first: Trump’s sudden opposition to the bridge is noteworthy because Trump himself is the one who first allocated US dollars to help pay for the bridge during his first term. He even called it a “vital economic link between our two countries“ at the time.

But when a donor asks for help protecting his monopoly? Trump seems all too happy to reverse course, no matter the cost to the rest of us.

Debunking Trump's Lies about the Bridge

Trump’s Truth Social rant about the bridge is a case study in policy by tantrum, at the behest (and to the benefit) of his cronies. So let’s walk through the highlights to separate fact from fiction.

Fiction: "Canada is building a massive bridge"

FACT: The US and Canada agreed that Canada would pay for construction based on the opportunity to recuperate the investment through tolls, with revenues to be shared equally once the construction costs are repaid.

Fiction: "[Canada] owns both the Canada and the United States side"

FACT: Michigan owns half the bridge.

Fiction: "President Barack Hussein Obama stupidly gave them a waiver so they could get around the BUY AMERICAN Act, and not use any American products, including our Steel"

FACT: 25% of the steel used for the bridge was from the United States.

Fiction: "What does the United States of America get—Absolutely NOTHING!"

FACT: The new bridge will ease the bottleneck at the Ambassador Bridge and increase trade flows between the US and Canada.

Fiction: "The revenues generated because of the U.S. Market will be astronomical"

FACT: This is perhaps the only truthful statement in the post. Painting this as a negative, however, is telling: the real issue, of course, is that the revenues generated will not benefit Mr. Moroun.

After more than 2,000 days of construction, endless environmental and economic studies, and more than $4.6 USD billion in investments—all fronted by Canada—the Gordie Howe Bridge is nearly complete. The good news for anyone who likes functioning infrastructure: Trump’s Canada‑bashing is not popular. Americans still hold very favorable views of Canada overall, Congress just voted to overturn Trump's Canada tariffs, and early coverage suggests his bridge tantrum is turning into a liability for Michigan Republicans heading into the midterms.

Using Federal Funding to Punish Blue States

Trump’s sudden opposition to the Canada–Michigan bridge fits another broader pattern: using federal spending as a weapon against disfavored states, even though the Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse.”

Here are some other recent examples:

In October 2025, the Trump administration shut down at least $28 billion in infrastructure projects in the Democratic-led states of New York, California, Maryland, and Massachusetts. Although dozens of states have clean energy projects underway, Trump exclusively targeted 16 states that voted for Kamala Harris and whose senators voted against the Republican’s short-term bill to fund the government.
In January 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services similarly froze access to federal child care and family assistance funds for five Democratic-led states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York.
In recent months, Trump has also carried out a “revenge campaign“ against Colorado Governor Jared Polis. To pressure Governor Polis for the release of former Mesa County elections clerk Tina Peters (who was convicted of orchestrating a data breach during the 2020 elections), Trump has denied the state federal disaster assistance, vetoed a bipartisan bill for clean water funding serving 50,000 people, and defunded the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.

When you add it up, Trump is effectively governing for half the country—the half that voted for him—and using federal funding as a weapon against those deemed insufficiently loyal.

The Price We Pay in a Kleptocracy

Democracy rests on a promise to serve all of “We the People,” regardless of who they voted for. Kleptocracy, by contrast, redirects public resources to “our people”—donors, loyalists, and the politicians who keep the patronage machine humming.

Gordie Howe, a Canadian legend beloved by Detroit hockey fans, is a symbol of what cross‑border cooperation can look like. A bridge bearing his name, jointly owned by Canada and Michigan, should be a straightforward win for both economies. Instead, it’s being threatened to protect a billionaire’s monopoly and to feed a president’s need for constant, performative conflict with an ally.

This week, it’s a bridge. What else will we sacrifice as we go forward?

Weekly Wins

While the Trump administration made some disastrous policy decisions this week by attacking the Gordie Howe Bridge and rolling back environmental protections, the countervailing forces advocating for integrity and democracy scored some big wins.

Legal Wins for Senator Mark Kelly

A federal judge rejected Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to make an example of Senator Mark Kelly by blocking the Pentagon from docking his rank or pension over a video reminding troops they can refuse illegal orders. In the same week, a DC grand jury refused to indict Kelly and five other Democratic legislators for that “illegal orders” clip, treating it as protected civics rather than sedition. The latter is another example in a wave of grand jury rulings pushing back on the Trump administration’s attempts to suppress dissent and seek revenge against perceived political enemies.

Judges Block Retaliatory Funding Cuts

In New York and New Jersey, a federal judge forced the Trump administration to restart funding back for the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel, ordering transportation officials to release at least part of the $205 million they’d been sitting on and putting 1,000 laid‑off union workers on a path back to the job site. A day earlier, another judge froze Trump’s plan to claw back roughly $600 million in public health grants from four Democratic‑led states, calling the cuts arbitrary retaliation.

Immigration Wins in the Courts

ICE’s retreat from Minnesota is a victory for the thousands of residents who organized to denounce the abuses and cruelty of Trump’s mass deportation program. In parallel, the courts continue to rule against Trump’s immigration policies as well. A Trump‑appointed judge in Minnesota rebuked ICE for holding immigrants in an overcrowded, no‑lawyer limbo and ordered the agency to immediately restore access to attorneys. In the same week, another federal judge ordered the administration to pay to bring back Venezuelan men it secretly deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega‑prison under the Alien Enemies Act. Yet another judge in Boston gave the government two weeks to retrieve a Babson College freshman it wrongfully deported to Honduras in defiance of a stay.

Bipartisan Vote to Reverse Tariffs against Canada

Finally, we’re seeing more cracks in the GOP wall. Six Republican House members sided with their Democratic counterparts in voting 219–211 to reverse Trump’s tariffs against Canada. Though the measure is mostly symbolic, because Trump will veto the bill, it’s politically telling. Even in a GOP‑run House built on gerrymanders and fear of primaries, there are now enough Republicans willing to put an end to Trump’s weaponization of tariffs.

American Leadership Abroad: Clearing the Way for Grift

American Kleptocracy — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:52:18 GMT

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I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it...I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them...I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.
- President Donald Trump commenting on his family’s potential conflicts of interest related to his office

US interest in Greenland coincides with serious investment in mining and extractive companies by Trump’s wealthy cronies.

For decades after World War II, the United States aspired to be a beacon of democracy—often falling short, but still providing global leadership on human rights and rule of law. Yet under President Trump, those ideals have been tossed out the window. His first year back in office reads like a how-to manual for dismantling longstanding American values in favor of profiteering disguised as foreign policy.

Here are the moves his team made in 2025 to turn US foreign policy into an investment portfolio for American kleptocrats.

Weaken US efforts to fight corruption abroad

The Trump administration has systematically dismantled the United States’ international anti‑corruption posture. This has meant gutting institutions, weakening regulations, downgrading multilateral cooperation, and eroding long‑standing norms.

This backsliding doesn’t just tarnish US credibility: it makes the country more vulnerable to foreign money and influence in two key ways:

It gives the world’s other kleptocrats a green light to launder illicit wealth through US markets and businesses.
This is also a signal to corrupt governments abroad that they can shake down US-based businesses. It’s bad for business and bad for the citizens in their countries.

A recent analysis by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace details the breadth of these reversals and how sharply they depart from the previous bipartisan support for robust anti‑corruption efforts. We highly recommend giving it a read in full, but it identifies four key areas of anti-corruption backsliding last year:

Dismantling institutions, like USAID, various corruption-focused initiatives at the Department of Justice, and the Office of the Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption;
Weakening regulations, like the Corporate Transparency Act Beneficial Ownership Information requirements (which would have limited shell companies), as well as the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (which would have prosecuted both the extortion of American companies and companies that pay bribes);
Reducing engagement with international efforts to fight corruption, such as disbanding Task Force KleptoCapture, which focused on returning money to countries where their leaders had stolen it;
Eroding public anti-corruption norms, such as rescinding executive branch ethics requirements and adopting a more permissive conflict-of-interest policy for the Trump Organization.

Redesign our national security strategy to enrich Trump and his friends

In November 2025, the White House issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS) laying out an “America First” doctrine that marks a sharp departure both from prior administrations and Trump’s own first term.

The document abandons the traditional emphasis on democracy promotion and values‑based competition with China and Russia, and instead casts key Western European allies as bigger obstacles to US interests than Moscow. Meanwhile, the NSS is a boon for autocratic Gulf rulers. It explicitly refers to “America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government,” for example. Given Trump’s documented closeness with Gulf nations in his family’s personal business ventures (more on that below), this new position is not surprising.

The Strategy also announces a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine reaffirming hegemonic control of the Western Hemisphere, with demands for un-competed, no-bid contracts for US companies conveniently managed by Trump cronies (see “Venezuela” below). Instead of supporting the region’s fragile democratic development, the Strategy prioritizes “commercial diplomacy.”

Use national security policy to benefit Trump and his cronies

The reframing of the national security strategy and assault on anti-corruption mechanisms open the door for driving our foreign policy efforts, including the military, towards ripe opportunities for self-dealing. Here are just a few examples of how the recent policy shifts have played out in practice.

Greenland

Trump’s push to acquire Greenland also risks destroying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance originally but decreasingly centered on US leadership, which has provided security for the West since 1949. Though Trump has tried to justify his Greenland obsession in national security terms, a recent analysis in The New Republic provides another explanation. Greenland is rich in critical minerals and high-value resources like zinc, copper, gold, oil, uranium, and platinum.

If the US gains control of Greenland’s resources, billionaire Trump donors and investors stand to make a mint through a “circle of grift.” In fact, many tech moguls, hedge funds, and fossil fuel companies have already invested in mining and extracting companies around Greenland. Of course, they can profit only if Trump takes control of the island, thereby cutting off Denmark from regulating or restraining their work.

Here are a few interesting highlights of who’s pouring money into Greenland:

Investments in KoBold Metals have been made by Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Marc Andreessen (Andreesen-Horowitz), and various hedge funds.
Investments in Critical Mining Corp have been made by Cantor Fitzgerald. Though Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick formally stepped down from Cantor Fitzgerald when he joined the administration, he retained significant financial interests in the company and gave control to his two sons. Other investors in Critical Mining Corp have also invested in Trump Media.

Many of Trump’s wealthy supporters in this “closed loop“ have also invested in or advocated for the development of Greenland as a “post-state” libertarian enclave for the tech elite, allowing them to evade financial, regulatory, or democratic accountability.

Venezuela

In January 2026, the Trump administration issued licenses for two companies to purchase and sell $500 million worth of oil previously blocked from sale by sanctions. The companies were “tapped” by the Trump administration, meaning they were not required to compete in an open bidding process. Both companies have a history of convictions and fines for corrupt practices:

Vitol, whose executives contributed $6 million to Trump committees during the 2024 election campaign, paid $135 million in criminal penalties in 2024 for bribes paid in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico.
Trafigura reached a federal plea agreement in 2024, in which it had to pay $126 million in fines and forfeitures for a bribery scheme with a Brazilian company.

It is unclear what—if any—legal authority the Trump administration is using to broker oil deals. Through these agreements, the Trump administration is rewarding donors, while building a profit pipeline with firms that are comfortable with ignoring compliance and accountability standards.

Department of War

Trump donors Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their respective companies SpaceX and Blue Origin have profited repeatedly from government defense contracts. Most recently, both companies won a $13.5 billion contract from the Pentagon for its National Security Space Launch last year.

Last Monday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth met Bezos at Blue Origin facilities in Cape Canaveral as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour. The tightly knit circle of billionaires benefiting from our national security investments embodies “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that President Eisenhower warned about in 1961.

From democracy to kleptocracy

Our national security is increasingly driven and distracted by the profit motive of our president and his cronies. Estimates of the Trump family profits over the first year of his second term have ranged from $1.4 billion to $4 billion. No other president in American history has undertaken this level of purposeful commandeering of the functions of government for personal enrichment.

The $500 million World Liberty Financial grift from the United Arab Emirates came to light early this year, raising the specter of what other presidential profiteering remains uncovered. The select group of billionaires in the Cabinet and those enriched by the Trump administration’s policies are arguably the clearest threat to our 250 year experiment in democratic governance since the Civil War.

Weekly Wins

Judge to Trump: You Can’t Shut Down the Hudson Out of Spite

A federal judge has ruled that Trump can’t pull $16 billion in infrastructure funding just because he’s mad at blue state governors. In New York and New Jersey’s suit over the Gateway rail tunnel, Judge Jeannette Vargas temporarily blocked the administration from freezing federal disbursements. She also signaled that using funding as a weapon against political enemies is likely illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act. Her ruling is a lifeline for thousands of union jobs and the hundreds of thousands of commuters who rely on the century‑old Hudson River crossings every day. The ruling is an early test case for how far Trump can go in turning the federal purse into a tool for retribution. For now, the courts are saying there are at least some lines he can’t cross.

When Judges Say No to Weaponizing Welfare

In a separate but related win, five Democratic‑led states persuaded a federal judge to extend an order stopping the Trump administration from choking off more than $10 billion in social service funding under the guise of fighting “Minnesota‑style fraud.” The court barred Trump officials from yanking Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, child‑care subsidies, and disability supports from California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington.

Streaming Kleptocracy: Melania, Sponsored by Amazon

American Kleptocracy — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:32:17 GMT

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First Lady: Hi Mr. President. Congratulations!
President: Did you watch it?
First Lady: I did not. I will see it on the news.
- Trailer for the Melania documentary

We agree with The Daily Show: the Oscars should introduce a new category, "Best Bribe Disguised as a Documentary." Melania has emerged as a clear frontrunner. Is this documentary really just a bribe in disguise? We invite you to review the evidence below and judge for yourselves.

Amazon Paid Top Dollar to Pander to our First Lady

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, now the world’s third richest man, has worked hard to curry favor with Donald Trump. Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for the rights to make this “documentary” about the First Lady and an additional $35 million in promotional activities, making it the most expensive documentary in history. According to The New York Times, Amazon’s bid was $26 million more than the next highest bidder, Disney. Of the total budget, $28 million goes straight to Melania Trump.

The film’s flashy promotion kicked off with a White House preview that Bezos attended, just hours after the shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis. A few days later, the premiere at the newly named “Trump-Kennedy Center” was a who’s who of members of the administration and Trump cronies offering adulation to the president and Melania.

The Corporate Connection

Amazon’s business interests are deeply intertwined with Trump and the crony network he has constructed upon the back of US taxpayers dollars and institutions. Bezos and Trump have not always been so cozy though. In 2018, Trump reportedly threatened to go after Amazon for not paying enough in taxes (oh the hypocrisy!) and taking advantage of the US Postal Service for deliveries during Trump’s first administration. In 2019, Amazon sued the Pentagon for “unfair bias” after Microsoft was awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract.

Yet after Trump won the 2024 election, Bezos changed his tune.

The Washington Post: Our previous post noted how Bezos has altered the editorial stance of The Washington Post, which he owns, seemingly to appease Trump. In October 2024, he intervened to kill an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris just days before the election—right after a meeting between executives of Blue Origin (which he also owns) and Trump. In February 2025, Bezos announced that the Post opinion section would focus exclusively on "personal liberties and free markets." Since the 2024 election, The Washington Post has laid off one third of its workforce and lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers as well as much of its national relevance. Democracy dies in darkness, as they say.
Donations: Soon after congratulating Trump on his “decisive victory,” Bezos made a $1 million donation to the inaugural fund and attended the inauguration alongside fellow tech titans such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Since then, Amazon has also contributed to Trump’s questionably legal demolition and renovation of the East Wing of the White House.
Collaboration with ICE: As part of a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the National Security Agency, Amazon has been working with Palantir to support ICE since the first Trump administration. Under Trump 2.0, ICE has spent more on cloud services from Amazon than ever before, according to federal contracting records. In September of last year, ICE made a $25 million purchase of Amazon Web Services’ cloud systems. On top of this are the deals with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), whose resources have shifted to assisting ICE. CBP purchased nearly $39 million worth of AWS cloud services—a record for Amazon.

Against that backdrop, paying top dollar for Melania looks less like vanity and more like strategy. Given the billions in government contracts that Amazon holds with the US government, an over‑priced documentary is just another line item. Think of it as an investment to cement Bezos’s place inside the small, comfortable circle of billionaires feeding off public resources while helping to hollow out the democracy that’s supposed to keep them in check.

Culture Wars

Authoritarians do their best to create a cultural narrative to justify their monopoly on power. Melania is an attempt to cast its subject as a kind of twenty-first-century Eva Perón or a Camelot-era Jackie Kennedy. But rather than humming “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” in Slovenian, you’re left wondering what, if anything, is behind the gowns and soft-focus lighting. Critics have already dismissed the documentary as “insipid propaganda” and a “shameless infomercial.”

It’s probably no accident that this is Brett Ratner’s first directing credit since multiple women accused him of sexual violence in 2017, turning Melania into a comeback vehicle for a man championed by conservatives as a victim of Hollywood cancel culture. Not surprisingly, the Melania film—just like the memoir of the same name—avoids any reckoning with Melania’s marriage to a man accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, who paid a porn star for extramarital sex, and who boasted about crotch-grabbing women in a media interview. In the end, the Ask E. Jean documentary likely provides greater insight into the character of Melania’s husband than Melania dares to.

What Melania Distracts Us From

Melania also serves the purpose of diverting attention from the Epstein files, which have been decried as a hoax by Trump. In the most recent document dump, there are emails exposing Melania’s chummy relationship with convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, despite aggressive attempts by Melania’s lawyers to distance her from the scandal.

The documentary also lands just as Amazon is completing a massive reduction in force that will impact tens of thousands of workers. Bezos is proud of his performative salary cap of $80,000 at Amazon as proof that he’s just another worker bee, even as his personal fortune climbs tops $250 billion and the company posts quarterly profits above $21 billion. Last October, Amazon laid off 14,000 employees. And as Melania was opening this month, another 16,000 workers were getting their pink slips.

And of course, there are the business deals to come. Days after the premiere, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited Blue Origin facilities in Florida to announce new contracts with the Bezos-owned company, on top of the billions of dollars in defense spending it already receives.

Keep Your Eye on the Prize

We look forward to seeing if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences takes up The Daily Show's recommendation of creating this new Oscar category. And if Melania doesn't win, don’t worry: as we learned from the Nobel Peace Prize saga, this president has no qualms about browbeating the actual winner until they hand over the trophy.

Weekly Wins

In a week when corruption and corporate capture appear to be reaching new heights, it's easy to get discouraged. In reality, however, courageous citizens and ethical judges have scored important gains this week for political integrity.

Protests against ICE Spread Beyond the Twin Cities

The Twin Cities coalition, including faith-based organizations, union leaders, immigrant-led groups, students and so many others, have sustained their homegrown infrastructure of resistance. On Friday, January 30, protesters around the country followed their example, convening a national day of action called "ICE Out of Everywhere" that included protests, strikes, and boycotts against retailers collaborating with ICE. While efforts are ongoing, there are some signs of partial success. Border Czar Tom Homan says he has ordered a "drawdown plan" in Minnesota and Senator Susan Collins claims that ICE will end its large-scale operations in Maine. Meanwhile, companies are feeling the heat. Following intense civic pressure, a Canadian company cancelled the sale of its Virginia warehouse to ICE, while Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt announced that a similar deal had fallen through there. Civic groups in Florida and Georgia are now mobilizing to block new ICE facilities in their communities.

Immigration Wins

The courts are also standing up for constitutional rights (and basic humanity). Immigrant detainees, often with pro bono or movement‑backed lawyers, are filing an unprecedented wave of habeas challenges that have forced courts to halt mass transfers, reopen asylum claims, and demand basic facts about who is locked up where and why. One highly publicized example is the case of 5‑year‑old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who a judge ordered released from ICE custody. The judge called out the administration’s “ill‑conceived” deportation quotas and its reliance on paper “warrants” that no judge ever signed.

Another judge also blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end the temporary protected status (TPS) of hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants living in the United States. In her scathing opinion, Judge Ana C. Reyes wrote that “The record strongly suggests that Secretary Noem’s decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation was motivated, at least in part, by racial animus.” If allowed to proceed, the removal of TPS would have opened the door to mass deportations of this group.

And Judge James Boasberg—targeted by the Trump administration for forcing deportation flights to turn around—also prevailed in court, where a federal appeals court threw out the Department of Justice’s misconduct complaint against him.

Judge Blocks Trump’s Executive Order on Elections

November 3 is a long way away, but an intense battle is underway to shape the course of the midterms. President Trump suffered a setback this week when Judge Colleen Kollar‑Kotelly permanently blocked the core of his March 25 executive order on elections. On the grounds that election-rule power belongs to Congress and the states, Judge Kollar-Kotelly ruled against the executive order's provisions that imposed documentary proof of citizenship onto the federal registration form and required agencies to screen people’s citizenship before handing out that form. For millions of voters who don’t have a passport sitting in a drawer—and for the organizers who sued on their behalf—that means one very concrete win this week: Trump can’t unilaterally rewrite who gets to register to vote and how.

The American Kleptocracy Clearinghouse

Cash Cow: How Trump's Rich Friends are Profiting from Public Lands

Luxury Livestock on the Public Dime

Public Office, Private Payday

No Confirmation, No Problem

Remember the Ambler Road

Keeping Public Lands in Public Hands

Weekly Wins

Court Tosses Illegal Oregon Timber Sale

Federal Court Rules against Trump’s USCIS Travel-Ban Pause

86-47 Is A-OK, Says Judge

More Links, More Kleptocracy

Build a Protection Racket

Bribes and influence peddling

Cronyism and favoritism

Sending a signal from the top

Decentralized violence and surveillance

Get Rid of Independent Checks on Power

Executive power grabs

Centralizing executive authority

Targeting civil society and subnational government

Scientific integrity and academic freedom

Drive Division

Driving social division

Control the Media and Suppress Free Speech

Censorship and retaliatory litigation

Data production, stewardship, and privacy

Coordinate with Kleptocrats Abroad

Aligning with kleptocrats on the international stage

Manipulate Elections

Up in Smoke: How Donor Dollars Changed the FDA's Policy on Flavored Vapes

Why Flavored Vapes Put Children and Teens at Risk

How the FDA Policy Changed

Pay-to-Play as Public Policy

Weekly Wins

Trump’s Culture Grab Hits a Wall

GOP State Senators Help Sink Trump's Gerrymander in South Carolina

Legal Roadblock for Trump’s "Anti-Weaponization" Fund

More Links, More Kleptocracy

Build a Protection Racket

Bribes and influence peddling

Cronyism and favoritism

Decentralized violence and surveillance

Get Rid of Independent Checks on Power

Executive power grabs

Centralizing executive authority

Targeting civil society and subnational government

Scientific integrity and academic freedom

Drive Division

Driving social division

Control the Media and Suppress Free Speech

Censorship and retaliatory litigation

Manipulate Elections

From Checks and Balances to Blank Checks: How Trump Bought Immunity

"One of the Single Most Corrupt Acts in American History”

Payouts for January 6 Rioters and Immunity for the Trump Family

Our Democracy in Danger

Weekly Wins

Major Court Wins for Transparency, the Right to Protest, and Due Process

Trump Targets TV and Late-Night Targets Him Back

More Links, More Kleptocracy

Build a Protection Racket

Bribes and influence peddling

Cronyism and favoritism

Decentralized violence and surveillance

Get Rid of Independent Checks on Power

Executive power grabs

Centralizing executive authority

Targeting civil society and subnational government

Scientific integrity and academic freedom

Drive Division

Driving social division

Control the Media and Suppress Free Speech

Data production, stewardship, and privacy

Manipulate Elections

Hollywood gave us Nepo-Babies. The Trump Administration is giving us Klepto-Babies.

Klepto-Babies are Enriching Themselves here in the United States

Klepto-babies threaten democratic accountability

Weekly Wins

More Links, More Kleptocracy