Trump is threatening military intervention against a new target... the Bond Market.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Are there any adults left in this administration?

Trump threatens to change Lake Ontario's name to "Lake America"

Stephen Marche: America Came for Canada. We Said No.

Friday, Aug. 21, may go down in history as Canada’s Liberation Day. It was the day America came for us, and we said no.

The trade negotiations between the United States and Canada had been moving forward in the weeks after President Trump first threatened 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, but just before midnight, Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the American proposal. “Last-minute changes in the U.S.-proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal,” Mr. Carney said in a statement. “Canada will match those tariffs dollar for dollar to protect our workers and businesses.”

It was a decision made, seemingly, on the spur of the moment, but the deep history of this country paved the way for this one, critical gesture — a historic “no.”  

Mr. Trump’s tariffs on some $20 billion of Canadian goods began immediately after his deadline passed. For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basketcase of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.

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Can Presidents Exempt People from US Law?

After the Supreme Court struck down his first order restricting birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, President Trump signed a new order on August 6. At first blush, the new order seems like only a blatant attempt to ignore the Supreme Court. That might be true, but there’s an alternative reading that is more bizarre and potentially frightening: The president might believe he can unilaterally decide whether US law applies to any particular person or groups of people.

The entire order rests on the assertion that presidents can decide who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and, therefore, US law. In a way, this is a far more dangerous claim. For instance, diplomats receive immunity not only from federal but also from state and local prosecution. If the president can suspend the laws—not just the enforcement of them but the laws themselves—the order would not only strip citizenship from many Americans, it would also create a massive new power for presidents to abuse.

The strange new order is already being challenged in court, but we still don’t know how the government will defend it.

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Navy may rename carrier honoring Black war hero after Trump

The US Navy is working to rename an aircraft carrier under construction that was set to honor a Black sailor hailed for his heroic actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor, three sources familiar with internal discussions told CNN.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, the Navy announced that the Ford-class carrier would be called the USS Doris Miller, recognizing an enlisted sailor who helped defend US forces from Japan’s attack.

It’s unclear what the Navy is seeking to change the name of the carrier to, though two of the sources said there have been internal conversations about renaming it to honor Trump. It would be an unprecedented move to name an aircraft carrier after a sitting president.

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The US national debt now stands at $40 trillion

Government debt has eclipsed $40 trillion, passing yet another staggering benchmark for red ink, according to the Treasury Department.

The total U.S. IOU hit $40.05 trillion as of Tuesday, some four and a half years after topping $30 trillion. Years of escalating budget deficits, pushed higher by stimulus funding during the Covid pandemic, have seen the public share of the debt near 100%.

In the most recent monthly accounting of U.S. finances, Treasury reported a $432.3 billion deficit in July, the highest monthly total since March 2021. The year-to-date shortfall is nearing $1.8 trillion, higher than the same period a year ago.

Ten years ago, the debt level was at $19.4 trillion.

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Who holds the cards?

If I were writing a book about the U.S. war with Iran, I know exactly what the title would be. It would be President Trump’s social media post of April 5, 2026, directed at the leaders of Iran: “Open the [expletive] Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!”

Wars are a crucible that very often exposes changes in the physics of the world around us — who has power, who doesn’t have power and how power is being wielded. Nothing better captures the new power equation produced by this war than Trump’s unhinged and obscene rant at the Iranian leadership for not bending to his bombs.

This new physics of war is equally present in the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, Hezbollah and Israel, Hamas and Israel and the Houthis and everyone else. My summary of this new dynamic is that the small can now act really big, really accurately and really inexpensively. And while the big can also act really small, really accurately, it is far more expensive for them to do that while bearing the burden of vast legacy arms systems.

The net advantage, for the moment, seems to be to the small. That should keep you up at night, when you think how the emerging revolution in artificial intelligence will surely supercharge this trend, enabling the small to act even bigger, mightier and less expensively.

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Trump orders Pentagon to scale back joint exercises with South Korea

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon on Sunday to scale back planned joint military exercises with South Korea, saying it declined to help denuclearize Iran and citing his good relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

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America is Losing its Credibility With Both Friends and Enemies

Last week, a minor geopolitical earthquake shook the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Turkey — two nations that have been openly hostile toward one another for much of the last decade — pledged to go to war in each other’s defense. Along with Pakistan, they signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, declaring, NATO-style, that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have long had close security ties. But Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been bitter regional rivals, clashing over Qatar, Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and, most explosively, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, which Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared to blame directly on the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

So what brought them together? President Donald Trump — or rather the two countries’ diminishing faith in him and his word.

The Iran war has been a master class in how to squander credibility. Recall that Saudi Arabia and Qatar both received security commitments from Trump only last year. But Trump’s word is as solid with his counterparts abroad as it was with his bankers in New York. He has repeatedly declared that a deal with Tehran was just days away. By mid-June, one tally counted at least 38 pronouncements that a deal was near or that Iran desperately wanted one. Yet this week an Iranian source told Reuters that negotiations have made “absolutely no progress.” The world has learned to treat his Truth Social announcements as a mix of fact and fiction, like some of the AI-generated videos he posts.

The same pattern is visible in Europe. In May, the Pentagon announced that 5,000 American troops would leave Germany, and Trump suggested more cuts were coming. The Pentagon then scrapped a planned deployment of roughly 4,000 troops to Poland. Days later, Trump announced that an additional 5,000 troops would go to Poland. Sometimes he threatens not to defend Europe against Russia; other times he says he will. Imagine being a European defense minister trying to construct a 10-year military plan around this.

Trump declared this week that the United States had “total control” of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet ship-tracking data recorded just 14 vessels transiting in one day recently, compared with more than 130 a day before the war.

This is not simply a matter of presidential style or rhetoric. It goes to the heart of American power.

For eight decades, the U.S. built up something as powerful as aircraft carriers and squadrons of F-35s: credibility. Allies believed American commitments would endure from one administration to the next. Adversaries understood that American threats, while sometimes exaggerated, carried real weight. The system was not perfect. Washington broke promises and made mistakes. But there was a broad presumption that the U.S. was a predictable actor and the president’s words meant something.

Trump treats promises and threats as if he is playing a grand game of bluff. But unpredictability is a very different thing in an alliance than in a real estate negotiation. If allies cannot know whether troops will arrive or leave, whether tariffs will rise or fall, whether an agreement signed today will survive until tomorrow, they do not become more obedient. They become more independent.

Countries are building insurance policies. Denmark chose the Franco-Italian SAMP/T air-defense system rather than the American Patriot. Canada is reconsidering its F-35 purchases. European governments are investing heavily in their own arms industries. South Korea has become the second-largest seller of arms to European NATO countries and is helping supply the Gulf’s air defense with systems cheaper than Patriots. The Dutch central bank has moved critical cloud services to a European provider to reduce dependence on American technology. And now Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan are constructing a security architecture of their own.

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US sells 30-year bonds at highest borrowing costs since 2001

The U.S. government on Thursday auctioned $25B in 30-year Treasury bonds (US30Y) at a yield of 5.216%, marking the highest rate for this tenor since 2001.

This quarter-century high underscores investors' growing demand for increased compensation to finance the nation's expanding fiscal deficit.

While the auction met with decent demand, there were clear signs of slight hesitation from buyers. The bid-to-cover ratio slipped to 2.39 from July’s 2.44, tracking below the recent average. Additionally, indirect bidding dropped to 66.9% from a near-record 77.7% in July. The final yield also landed slightly above prevailing pre-auction market levels, indicating that overall demand narrowly lagged expectations.

This comes a day after a 10-year Treasury (US10Y) auction that drew its highest financing costs since 2007.

The broader surge in long-term yields is heavily driven by investor anxiety that rising energy prices, fueled by conflict in the Middle East, will sustain inflation and force the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates elevated.

Meanwhile, 30-year yields (US10Y) dipped by roughly five basis points to 5.21% at press time, as cooling oil prices and tame producer price data prompted traders to scale back expectations for another Fed rate hike this year. Still, that's up from 4.85% at the start of the year.

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Iran sets out steep demands for reopening Hormuz

There are no ongoing negotiations between Tehran and Washington, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday, after Tehran set out a steep series of demands for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

“The intermediaries are still making efforts to find ways to resume negotiations,” Araghchi said.

He tempered optimism stirred by Iran’s separate discussions with Oman over the future management of the waterway, saying that “changes to maritime routes in the Strait of Hormuz are a technical and legal matter and do not mean that the Strait of Hormuz has been reopened.”

Araghchi’s statement came a day after top Iranian security official Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr laid out the country’s conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, saying it would not do so “until America corrects its behavior.”

The statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council secretary, as carried by Iranian state media, stated that the U.S. must withdraw its naval blockade, pay Iran damages for the war, unfreeze Iranian assets, lift sanctions on Tehran and permanently end the conflict against Iran and its regional allies.

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Iran knows that to borrow one of Mr. Trump's favorite cliches... they "hold the cards."

Are We Witnessing a "Soft Secession"

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours” and “jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Mr. Trump and ‘MAGA Republicans’ a threat to ‘the very foundations of our republic.’”

Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.

A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.

...During the past two Democratic presidencies, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, prohibiting their police forces from enforcing some federal gun regulations. (The term was a trollish play on Democratic sanctuary cities, which did the same for federal immigration policies.) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas took it upon himself to override federal immigration policy, deploying the National Guard to string the banks of the Rio Grande with coils of razor wire and ordering his troops to prevent federal border agents from helping migrants who got tangled in them. More than two dozen Republican governors endorsed the show of anti-federal strength.

Now that Mr. Trump is back in office, Democratic-led states and cities are getting almost as aggressive, overriding or ignoring federal and state policies they find objectionable. Local police departments aren’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many states passed laws to shield residents from prosecution if they are charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and several have stockpiled abortifacients in case federal law or regulations make them hard to get.

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Report: US has largely exhausted its stockpile of long range missiles in Iran War

Washington — The U.S. has used nearly all of its global stockpile of long-range precision missiles during the war with Iran, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell CBS News.

Specifically, the U.S. has used virtually all of its Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS, and Precision Strike Missiles, the sources said. Reuters was first to report that the U.S. had used "virtually all" of its long-range precision missiles during Operation Epic Fury. 

CBS News has previously reported that the U.S. has dwindling stockpiles of defensive interceptors and long-range missiles, which has become a pressure point within the administration, and that the U.S. cannot sustain the rate at which it expended precision munitions early in the war with Iran. 

U.S. officials said there are limited inventories of the ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles, and that the most pressing concern involves the number of Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, which have been used faster than the industry can replace them. 

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What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right

“You can never institutionalize the gut instincts of a great, heroic populist like Donald Trump, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Andrew Jackson,” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, told me this spring. “But the point is that, moving forward, on the evening of Jan. 20, 2029, President Trump will have left the stage. We as conservatives have to answer the question, Where is this movement going? And what it can’t do — what it must not do — is go back to 20 years ago.”

The Heritage Foundation currently finds itself engulfed in an internal struggle that mirrors the one roiling the Republican Party: how to harness the energy unleashed by Trumpism without being completely overrun by its conspiracy- and nativist-minded elements, particularly among the rising generation that has known little else. Long accustomed to placing its experts in key positions in Republican administrations, as it did in Trump’s first term, Heritage presented its Project 2025 as just the kind of master plan an uncompromising second Trump administration would need to implement its agenda.

But once Trump took office, Heritage was instead pushed to the side. As it tried to work its way back into the center of power, the foundation was consumed by a vicious in-house conflict. An old guard of establishment experts saw themselves swamped by an influx of more radical, often younger conservatives eager to remake the institution for the post-Trump right in their image: terminally online, ruthless in fighting the culture wars and vehement in rejecting the dogmas of postwar conservatism.

A watershed moment came last October, when Roberts posted a video to X in support of Tucker Carlson, who had been widely criticized for inviting the 27-year-old white nationalist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes onto his show. Condemnations flooded in from across the right, with several of Carlson’s closest allies breaking with him over his decision to turn his show into what one of them, the Israeli American philosopher Yoram Hazony, recently called “the leading clearinghouse for virulent antisemitism on the political right.” Roberts leapt to Carlson’s defense, denouncing the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and arguing that conservatives should “feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class” and the “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts later apologized to Heritage staff for his choice of words, which some had criticized as playing into antisemitic tropes, and for having “let down this institution.” But when I asked him about the video, he insisted that it was Heritage’s job to figure out how to bring together a coalition that can win elections and exercise power effectively. Roberts, who is 52, projects a friendly, confident energy. He was wearing a fitted blue suit along with alligator-style cowboy boots, in keeping with his years as president of Wyoming Catholic College. Before taking over at Heritage in 2021, his pitch to the board of trustees, according to The Dispatch, was that he could marry the conservative movement’s new populist ethos with a traditional institution like Heritage. “You can’t have a governing coalition if you’re saying, I’m not even going to talk to people who occasionally listen to a podcast by someone who’s a total goofball,” he went on, referring to Fuentes. “That doesn’t mean that we endorse what that person says. We endorse trying to convince these people of what’s right, and what isn’t right.”

Many employees and experts at Heritage appeared to disagree with the premise that such people belonged in their coalition, and especially that anyone was trying to set them right. Longtime Heritage employees told me that the people they usually collaborated with in congressional offices, circuit courts, foreign embassies and other institutions no longer wanted to be publicly associated with Heritage and what they perceived as its fidelity to Carlson. In a resignation letter later made public, Josh Blackman, a legal scholar who had for years been working on a new edition of “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,” said the volume’s contributors pulled out of an event promoting the book and refused to sign copies. Judges who had spoken at the foundation, Blackman wrote, said “they would no longer affiliate with Heritage.”

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Why Trump is Afraid of International Law

President Donald Trump and his aides rarely go easy on their perceived enemies. But their attacks on the International Criminal Court — describing it as, among other things, filled with “lunatics” and pledging to destroy it — are hyperbolic enough that you have to wonder:

Are they afraid the court will prosecute them?

That’s the conclusion many former government officials and legal scholars are reaching. They point not only to Trump’s anti-ICC campaign but also his administration’s broader efforts to defund, abandon or otherwise damage a range of global mechanisms that enforce human rights laws, from treaties to United Nations organizations.

Those moves come as the Trump administration is accused of a series of abuses, from killing Iranian schoolchildren to deporting asylum-seekers. At the same time, Trump is going to great lengths to protect his backers from domestic justice, including through his extensive use of pardons.

“They’re doing everything they can to evade accountability as they attack the very institutions and advocates charged with holding rights abusers to account,” said Uzra Zeya, a former Biden administration official who is now president of Human Rights First.

Spokespeople for the White House and the State Department deny such assertions. In statements to me, they reiterated complaints that the ICC threatens U.S. sovereignty and cast their campaign against it as squarely within Trump’s America First agenda.

“All of the administration’s actions are lawful and in line with the agenda that President Trump was elected to implement,” stressed Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the White House.

But when it comes to the ICC in particular, Shakespeare might say the administration “doth protest too much.” By wildly overstating the court’s power, it is feeding the notion that it is genuinely worried.

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Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The stunning admission offered an unvarnished glimpse into the way President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

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The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History, by the Numbers

Ask historians or laymen to name the most blatantly corrupt pardon over the first 230 years or so of American presidenting, and most will likely arrive at the same answer: Marc Rich.

Rich, a multiple-passport-holding, proudly amoral oil trader who specialized in sanctions-circumventing commerce with the likes of Nicolae Ceaușescu and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, fled to Switzerland in 1983 rather than face a potential life sentence and $1.6 million in fines on 65 counts of wire fraud, trading with the enemy, and tax evasion. (It was the biggest tax evasion case to date in U.S. history, at $48 million—around $150 million today.) Yet Bill Clinton, in the final minutes of his presidency, gifted Rich a midnight pardon.

All normal pardon protocols had been circumvented. The Justice Department was blindsided, and the longtime fugitive—a veteran of the FBI's Most Wanted List—had never expressed the customary remorse. Reporting soon revealed that Rich's ex-wife, the songwriter Denise Rich, had donated $1.1 million (roughly $2.3 million in 2026 dollars) to Democratic causes during the Clinton presidency, including (in nominal dollars) $450,000 to the Clinton Library, $120,000 for Hillary Clinton's Senate race, and $25,000 to Al Gore's Florida recount effort. "Not just a large donor," Sen. Russell Feingold (D–Wisc.) noted at the time, but "a huge donor."

Rich's last-ditch clemency drew widespread bipartisan condemnation. "Disgraceful," judged former President Jimmy Carter. Added New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The fact that Bill Clinton and Eric Holder engineered a pardon for him—without input from me, as the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted him, or Janet Reno, as Attorney General, will forever be a blemish on our justice system."

You have likely never heard the name Trevor Milton, yet in a couple of key respects his 2025 pardon by President Donald Trump was worse. The founding CEO of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola Corporation, Milton in 2022 was convicted on three counts of investor fraud that could have brought him four years in prison and a staggering $676 million worth of mandated restitution to shareholders. Among his more notorious stunts was a 2018 promotional video of a supposedly functional prototype Nikola truck that was not in fact operational but had instead been rolled down a desert hill. Milton, represented in court by the brother of then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, was still awaiting final sentencing when he got the call from Trump announcing an unconditional pardon, no restitution (or remorse) required. When asked about the clemency, the president said: "They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president….He supported Trump. He liked Trump." Milton and his wife, The Wall Street Journal reported, had donated "at least $3.2 million to Trump's 2024 election and to political groups and people in Trump's orbit." The couple had not previously demonstrated a financial interest in politics.

Milton's family paid more in political donations than Rich's. He had exponentially more in fines and restitutions taken off the table, and he has spent his post-clemency life not in humiliated exile but in lavish Washington excess, hobnobbing with the president and Cabinet members at investment conferences and black-tie events to gin up interest in his latest schemes. Such is the rule, not the exception: When it comes to plausibly pay-for-play pardons, Trump in his second term makes Bill Clinton and every other president look like pikers.

Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive who'd pled guilty to spending his employees' federal tax withholdings on such baubles as a $2 million yacht, was in May 2025 on the verge of commencing an 18-month sentence and paying $4.4 million in fines when Trump issued his get-out-of-jail-free card. On his pardon application, Walczak made the explicit pitch that his mother, Elizabeth Fago, had raised millions of dollars for Trump and the GOP in 2024 campaigns, and additionally assisted the president by publicizing embarrassing revelations from the diary of President Joe Biden's daughter Ashley. Less than three weeks before the pardon, Fago accepted an invitation to attend a million-dollar-per-head fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, crowned by a one-on-one with the president.

Trump's second-term pardons and sentence commutations have wiped away more than $2 billion in fines and restitutions. The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2025 that the president's forgiveness spree "has spawned a pardon-shopping industry where lobbyists say their going rate is $1 million." The Atlantic in June 2026 set the updated price at $2 million. Whereas Bill Clinton conceded within 15 months that the Marc Rich clemency had been a mistake (even while hotly denying that political donations had anything to do with it; he claims to have been persuaded by testimony from high-profile Israelis such as Ehud Barak), the always-unapologetic Trump barely feigns interest in the process, even while his family and Cabinet members forge business deals with the ex-cons and their companies.

Queried by 60 Minutes in October 2025 as to why he had just pardoned Changpeng Zhao—the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who had already served four months in prison and had his company pay $4.3 billion for money laundering—Trump said: "I have no idea who he is." The president might have asked his son Don Jr., who had recently introduced his dad to Zhao's pardon lobbyist and in the preceding months had contracted Binance to exclusively host and build the blockchain technology for the Trump family crypto trading platform World Liberty Financial. (That company's stablecoin, USD1, was used in May 2025 as the currency for a $2 billion investment into Binance by the United Arab Emirates company MGX, a transaction that, according to The Wall Street Journal, "rocketed USD1 up the rankings of largest stablecoins," thereby "pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.") When asked about the controversial clemency, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a one-size-fits-all denial: "Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest."

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See also...

Trump’s 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Marks a Pattern of Trying To Profit From the Presidency

Trump calls for revocation of ABC, NBC licenses over speech snub

President Donald Trump said TV networks that did not feature live coverage of his primetime address on election security should have their broadcast licenses revoked.

CNN, ABC and NBC opted against live coverage of the speech in which Trump claimed China illegally accessed millions of voter files as part of a broader effort to manipulate U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020.

Other outlets, including CBS, MS NOW and Fox News, chose to broadcast the speech at least in part. NBC and ABC aired Trump’s remarks on their streaming channels.

Trump called out NBC and ABC during his remarks, accusing the networks of covering up what he labeled election fraud.

“In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about,” he said. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.”

TV networks are not required to air presidential remarks in primetime. Past presidents have traditionally reserved such major addresses for national crises or critical moments. Outlets have traditionally provided live coverage, but there have been exceptions.

Multiple networks declined in 2022 to broadcast President Joe Biden’s address on threats to democracy. ABC, CBS and NBC did not air President Barack Obama’s 2014 primetime speech on immigration.

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Todd Blanche Defends Trump's Blatantly Corrupt IRS 'Settlement'

"I'm his lawyer," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, describing his relationship with President Donald Trump. Blanche quickly corrected himself: "Was his lawyer," he clarified. But the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche's nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump's personal interests?

Probably the latter, judging from Blanche's central role in Trump's brazenly corrupt "settlement agreement" with the IRS, which a federal judge this week condemned as the "improper" product of blatant self-dealing. That cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers' expense.

One of those favors was a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund," which was designed to reward the president's allies and supporters by compensating them for their alleged persecution by the Biden administration. Blanche approved that scheme and repeatedly defended it. But it provoked an intense bipartisan backlash that persuaded him to ditch the plan two weeks after announcing it.

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CATO: A Familiar Pattern: White House Self-Dealing in US Trade & Investment Policy

President Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure landed last week showing more than $2 billion in income, roughly triple 2024’s figure. Cryptocurrency alone accounted for $1.4 billion, most from meme-coin royalties and token sales tied to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial. Read against the deals cataloged below, the filing paints a sordid picture of self-dealing within the upper echelons of the White House—or at the very least, the appearance of such.

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