ASPEN, Colo.—The senior U.S. officials who coordinated and enforced the response to 9/11 have long since left government. But the legal architecture put in place in the wake of the terror attacks remains, in many ways, more robust than ever.

How do some feel now?

Alberto Gonzales—who was White House counsel on September 11, 2001—and Jeh Johnson—who was general counsel of the Department of Defense and secretary of homeland security under former President Barack Obama—provided a rare window into that question at the Aspen Ideas Festival late last month in a conversation that spanned the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), torture tactics, and Guantanamo Bay.

“I think President Bush and certainly I were stunned, were surprised that the AUMF is still in existence and relied upon, quite frankly,” said Gonzales. That resolution—which gave the president power to use force against the nations, groups, and people involved in 9/11—has been invoked continuously to carry out counterterrorism activities in a slew of countries, even when the mission appears to have little connection to the terrorist attacks almost 25 years ago.

“We never envisioned that it would go beyond dealing with the particular threat that existed in 2001,” Gonzales continued. “I think all of us have an obligation to ensure that our branches of government are checked when they exercise power, particularly the executive branch, even in a time of war.”

This is relevant right now amid the war in Iran. “I interviewed a bunch of members of Congress who voted for the 2001 authorization and the 2002 authorization,” said Johnson. “One of them told me that once an authority is conferred, it’s almost impossible to take it back.” (This is true in many ways.) “The interpretation of the 2001 authorization is way beyond what I’m sure any member of Congress in 2001 would have envisioned….So in principle, a sunset is a good idea.” Gonzales’ answer was a bit more direct: “I think it should sunset,” he said. “If a new threat arises, go to Congress, make a case, and Congress gives another authorization or a declaration of war.”

On torture, Gonzales sought to draw a distinction between the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the George W. Bush administration and the notorious human rights abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. When it came to waterboarding, Gonzales said he takes “comfort in the fact that there’ve been sworn testimony by the director of the CIA, by the director of the [National Security Agency] NSA and by my successor at [the Department of] Justice, is that information was extracted from these interrogations that made a difference in keeping America safe.” In response to a question from journalist Mary Louise Kelly about it violating the Geneva Conventions, he responded: “That was certainly not the position of the Department of Justice.”

Johnson, meanwhile, got at one of the more eternal dilemmas: Do we prioritize freedom or feeling safe? “There’s a pendulum effect between what Americans are willing to accept by way of an imposition on our civil liberties during times of high anxiety and more security,” he said. “By 2009, that pendulum had swung in the other direction, and we wanted change….I think the big challenge for Americans is to recognize manufactured fear, manufactured anxiety spun up by our leaders.”

Yet the most sparks flew when the two were pressed about Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military base and detention camp in Cuba that has held many detainees—some of whom have long been cleared for release—for years without charge or trial. 

“It was never the intention this would be a long-term solution,” Gonzales said. “It was a short-term solution to an immediate problem.” On the subject of why they weren’t transported to the U.S. to stand trial, he conceded that “perhaps there is a basic rule of law question” but countered that “some people don’t” want them brought here, though it’s worth noting that the beauty of a constitutional right like due process is that it is not supposed to be up for a vote.

Johnson, meanwhile, admitted to being the Obama administration’s “biggest proponent of keeping that system,” but said he would not have done so “if you had told me that there had been not a single trial.”

Johnson’s most notable role, as the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was itself an outgrowth of the 9/11 response. “The thinking that created [DHS] in 2002 is way outdated. The thinking then was…we didn’t need a ministry of interior or Department of Homeland Security because we’re separated from the rest of the world by two oceans. And that all changed on 9/11,” he said. “And if we consolidate into one Cabinet-level department, the regulation of all the different ways somebody can get into this country—land, sea, and air, TSA, Coast Guard, Border Patrol, Customs—we will have kept the bad guys out. That thinking is now outdated.”

So now what? “Frankly,” he said, “I think we need to scrap it and start all over again.”

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It’s Sunday. You want to go into town to run errands and perhaps see your friends at a bar, but you stay home because blue laws have forced businesses to close on the Lord’s day. You consider going online, but there is an excise tax on data usage, and all non-essential webpages have been disabled for the day. You have been invited, however, to a city-sponsored lecture by a C-list celebrity on the importance of restoring the fertility rate. Do you want to have a baby now? Are you feeling in the mood?

This may sound like an outlandish scenario cooked up by Margaret Atwood or a pussy-hat Resistance lib, but bringing back blue laws, impeding internet access, and enlisting celebrities to promote fertility are all real proposals from the pronatalist nonprofit, the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), outlined in its 2026 State of Fertility Report released on Tuesday. 

With U.S. birth rates now below 1.6 children per woman, IFS warns that cultural and sometimes political interventions are necessary to increase the fertility rate, as “the future of liberty for all of us depends on the future of family.” And so, in pursuit of “the future of liberty,” IFS proposes a litany of social-engineering policies that restrict freedom and empower the government.

Many of the proposal’s reforms are conventional and similar to the pro-family, big-government politics of Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.): doling out baby bonus money and child caregiver credits, eliminating marriage penalties in tax and benefit programs, and incentivizing more housing. As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has noted, many of these top-down pronatalist policies often fall short of meaningfully increasing the birth rate. 

IFS not only proposes individual pro-family policies; it also proposes a holistic change to the lawmaking process itself, suggesting that Congress and state legislatures evaluate bills by their impact on marriage and fertility, “giving legislators a constant reminder that their choices have consequences for the physical survival of the nation, not only of its financial accounts.”

The other IFS proposals about changing societal fertility norms are even more bizarre, including recruiting celebrities to convince the public to have kids. One of the IFS graphs asserts, “When celebrities have more kids, their fans want more kids.” This finding is hardly scientific; instead, it demonstrates an association between a fan’s desire to have children and the number of children born to a celebrity. In other words, pro-family fans seem to like pro-family celebrities. 

Per the IFS methodology, the researchers asked respondents to “report a public figure whom they most admired and why.” They then collated the reports and identified how many kids each celebrity had based on public information. They then found “that each additional child born to an admired public figure predicts higher desired family size for the survey respondent,” and these effects were “more statistically credible” for women. 

The graph in the IFS report says it controlled for the following factors: college degree, recent household financial change, household income, sex, age, and satisfaction with housework level. Notably, the celebrity study does not appear to control for a key predictor of having children: religiosity (as past IFS studies have shown, religious Americans tend to have higher fertility rates than secular Americans). The IFS appears to acknowledge religiosity as a possible confounding variable elsewhere in the report, but does not account for it in the celebrity model. Political affiliation could also be another confounding variable, but it is not mentioned in the celebrity study. 

Based on this association (which may be caused by fans having pre-existing values that likely align with those of their favorite celebrity), IFS claims that “enlisting celebrities to promote American family life may work.” The Institute then suggests that “governments interested in boosting fertility should consider enlisting the support of celebrities popular in their jurisdictions, or perhaps even finding a way to obliquely encourage those celebrities to marry and have more children.”

What would this social engineering look like? Would taxpayers foot the bill for vapid PSAs by Abby Shapiro telling people to increase the fertility rate for the good of the nation? Could they make a more convincing case than Eric Adams, who famously encouraged New Yorkers to make babies during a snowstorm? Would a government official be responsible for secretly recruiting celebrities to have children? 

The government-sponsored baby-making propaganda team would also have to carefully select its celebrity ambassadors if IFS is to follow its own standards. The celebrity recruiting team would likely want to avoid someone like Alex Cooper because she is, according to an IFS contributor, a “grifter and a liar” for promoting hookup culture and then getting married and having a baby, although her life path is rather conventional.

IFS also suggests some more “creative options” to increase fertility rates, including forcing businesses to close on Sundays in a paradoxical effort to create “in-person community.” It also floats impeding “access to non-essential digital services on certain days or at certain hours” to push users offline and promote real-life socializing. IFS suggests these policies may increase fertility, as it claims research suggests that iPhones, pornography, and social media are negatively impacting U.S. fertility. But, as Reason has noted, the evidence supporting the smartphone theory of falling birth rates is disputable. And supposing the digital revolution is to blame for falling birth rates, this solution would curtail internet freedom. A nonprofit monomaniacally devoted to increasing the population sees no issue in suggesting censorship measures to encourage fertility, but the rest of Americans may object to this. 

In its report, IFS acknowledges that restoring the birth rate is a largely cultural and social matter. And yet, it proposes several government-enforced policies—some of which read like a bizarre Nathan for You-style scheme—to increase the fertility rate. This approach fails to recognize that Americans do not trust their government, and they most likely do not want to be manipulated into having children by technocratic policymakers.

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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.”

Say what you will about Clinton’s skeevy pardon of Marc Rich, at least it wasn’t preceded by Rich forging billion-dollar partnerships with a company owned by the president and managed by his daughter. Yet here we are in Trump’s second term, so overwhelmed by dodgy-sounding deals that any attempt to measure or characterize the scope of corruption can seem preemptively futile. The numbers are too big, the conflicts too brazen, the examples too numerous.

In a companion piece to this one, Senior Editor Jacob Sullum drills down into the tawdry details of the president’s most audacious self-dealings, from having the federal government settle his own lawsuits to selling access to himself and his memecoin in a dinner that raised an estimated $148 million. Here, to visualize the contours of the overall problem, we work backwards from whataboutism, dividing up the greatest scandals in American history by category, then checking in on Trump 2.0 to see how he compares. The results reveal a pattern: The 47th president has serially exceeded the most infamous corruptions in U.S. history while generating a fraction of the outrage.

Molehills Out of Teapot

At its heart, the otherwise complicated and multi-stage Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s, which until Watergate was considered the greatest federal government scandal of all time, was about secret bribes to an administration official that lubricated lucrative regulatory outcomes. In 1921, Interior Secretary Albert Fall clandestinely accepted $404,000 ($7.6 million in today’s money) in cash and no-interest loans from two oil executives, who then became recipients of no-bid leases to exploit oil fields in California’s Elk Hills and Wyoming’s Teapot Dome. As part of the scheme, Fall had previously convinced the secretary of the Navy to transfer authority over those lands to the Department of the Interior. The no-bid contracts were legal (at the time, anyway); the bribes were not, and the secrecy exploded upon revelation.

Fast forward a century. Four days before Trump’s second inauguration, a company called Aryam Investments 1 signed a deal with the president-elect’s son Eric to buy a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial for a reported $500 million, half of it in cash up front. The Trump family received $187 million overnight, and the family of World Liberty Financial co-founder Steve Witkoff, who by then was already conducting sensitive Middle East diplomacy on behalf of the incoming president, received an additional $31 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Amazingly, the transaction was made in secret, revealed only one year later.

Did Aryam Investments have any pressing regulatory business in front of the U.S. government? Quite a bit, yes. The firm is owned by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the national security advisor for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), brother of the nation’s president, and head of the country’s $800 billion sovereign wealth fund. Tahnoon’s artificial intelligence company G42 had been prevented by the Biden administration from acquiring advanced Nvidia AI chips over national security concerns that it might share the technology with China. That was reversed with a bang in May 2025, when Tahnoon received what The Wall Street Journal described as “a coup for the U.A.E.’s ruling family”—an agreement from Washington to send the UAE 500,000 high-powered AI chips per year, including to the previously verboten G42. “Enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters,” the Journal noted.

So a foreign government official’s secret $500 million deal that personally enriched the president and his family, plus a key Mideast diplomat and his family, preceded by six months a massive regulatory reversal that will further enrich said official and his country. But that’s not all. In December 2024, Tahnoon’s asset management firm Lunate was one of two entities to inject $1.5 billion into the investment firm owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (who has co-led Mideast diplomatic initiatives with Witkoff). And we are still not done. Remember that aforementioned $2 billion Trumpcoin-denominated investment into Binance by the UAE company MGX in May 2025, just prior to the UAE chip deal? MGX is owned by none other than Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Albert Fall was found guilty of bribery and served a year in prison. The Supreme Court nullified the no-bid oil leases on the grounds that they had been corruptly obtained. President Warren G. Harding had been oblivious to the Teapot Dome scheme, yet he nonetheless was tarred from his 1923 death onward as an enabler of corruption. The Trump family net worth increased by more than $1 billion as a direct result of Sheikh Tahnoon’s frenetic and sometimes secret investments in the six-month run-up to producing a long-sought diplomatic and economic victory for his country. Will school children 100 years hence know the name World Liberty Financial?

From Billy Beer to Burisma to Billions

In 1938, The Saturday Evening Post published an exposé of James Roosevelt, son of President Franklin Delano, under the headline “Jimmy’s Got it.” What Jimmy had was a family name and connections he could leverage by selling insurance policies to prominent individuals (such as oil magnate Harry Sinclair) and corporations (such as CBS), even while holding a number of key positions in the White House. “My name got me into a lot of places I might not have got into if my father hadn’t been President,” he acknowledged in response, while releasing tax returns showing annual compensation from 1933–1937 that averaged an inflation-adjusted $850,000 per year. “And that’s all right, too….If you want to do business with a man you get in to see him by whatever legitimate means you can.” Defiance notwithstanding, Roosevelt resigned from government by the end of 1938.

Billy Beer was more punchline than scandal, but it was still seen as unseemly that the shambolic brother of the rectitudinous Jimmy Carter lent his name in 1977 to a low-rent lager that quickly went bankrupt.

Hunter Biden was shambolic too, but also brazen enough to serially cash in on his father’s name and office, including $4 million in compensation (around $5.5 million in 2026 money) to work for the Ukrainian oil company Burisma from 2014 to 2019, and another $4.8 million ($6.5 million) from a Chinese energy tycoon seeking to expand U.S. operations. These malodorous foreign dealings, which would not have been imaginable had Joe Biden not served as vice president, then leading presidential candidate, then president, became the subject of congressional hearings and Justice Department investigations that started under Trump’s first presidency and continued under Hunter’s father. Until the moment that a lame-duck Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon of all his son’s activities from 2014 through 2024, Hunter faced prison time, further prosecutions, and a seemingly permanent stink of scandal.

These three most famous examples of familial influence-peddling are dwarfed to the point of miniaturization by the business Donald Trump’s heirs conduct on a daily basis, right out in the open.

Jared Kushner, as Jacob Sullum recounts, has amassed north of $6 billion in his Affinity Partners private equity firm since launching in 2021, the bulk of which has come from the leadership of the same Middle Eastern countries he has been a senior negotiator with during both of his father-in-law’s presidencies. Companies owned by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have forged deals with Dad’s government in the hundreds of millions. Eyebrows barely get raised anymore when the president, during official overseas, trips cuts ribbons on his latest golf course.

A financial disclosure report released June 30 showed just how good it is to be the president: “Trump’s revenue in 2025 jumped to at least $2.2 billion, compared with a minimum of $622 million in 2024 before he returned to office,” The New York Times noted. “It is,” All the Presidents’ Money author Megan Gorman told the Times, “completely unprecedented.”

Richard Nixon Wasn’t That Bad

“I’m actually fascinated by [Richard] Nixon as a character in history,” Vice President J.D. Vance said at the Nixon Library in June. “His historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so….[I]f Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And, by the way, if you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

Watergate, the only Washington scandal that impelled a president to resign and the English language to add a suffix, was a 26-month news story, stretching from the break-in at the Democratic National Committee by Nixon loyalists through President Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor. One of the reasons the saga lasted so long is that the perpetrators, employers, and intended beneficiaries of the burglary—very much including Richard Nixon, beginning immediately after the initial arrest—could not stop lying their faces off about it, destroying evidence, concocting schemes to quash the resulting investigations, and (if they had the power) just straight-up firing the most nettlesome investigator. Nixon attempted to use the Deep State to make it all go away, ordering the CIA to tell the nosy FBI that its inquiry would jeopardize national security. In the end, 48 people were convicted or pleaded guilty, including Nixon’s attorney general, chief domestic advisor, and chief of staff.

Still, you could see why Vance might want to minimize Nixon’s transgressions. Each of the 37th president’s most notorious Watergate-related infractions have analogue comparisons unflattering to Vance’s boss.

In the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox over the latter’s court-backed insistence that the president hand over tapes from a secret White House recording system. Richardson refused, then resigned; his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, also refused, then resigned. Only third-in-command Robert Bork was willing to carry out the defenestration. Trump’s obvious first-term comp was when he fired FBI Director James Comey for investigating links between Russia and the Trump 2016 election campaign.

But there have been massacres aplenty during Trump’s second term, albeit without the added frisson of a president fighting for his political life. Not one, not two, but 10 federal prosecutors resigned in 2025 rather than carry out an order from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to dismiss federal corruption charges against then–New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in part because the “prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to illegal immigration and violent crime.” The first resignation, from Danielle Sassoon, the Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a longstanding member of the Federalist Society, was withering: “The reasons advanced by Mr. Bove for dismissing the indictment are not ones I can in good faith defend as in the public interest and as consistent with the principles of impartiality and fairness that guide my decision-making,” Sassoon wrote. The mayor’s lawyers, she added, “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.”

One of the bombshell moments in the Watergate hearings was the revelation of a Nixon administration “enemies list,” upon whom (in the contemporaneous words of then–White House counsel John Dean) “we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Suggested punishments included Internal Revenue Service audits and the manipulation of “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.” The very concept and name was shocking enough to those who expect presidents to faithfully and impartially execute federal law, even if no corresponding audit activity was ever detected.

Trump, on the other hand, nominated as FBI director a man who vowed in 2023 that a second MAGA administration “will go out and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re gonna come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re gonna come after you.” Jacob Sullum details the results of the president going after his enemies; one new wrinkle this time is how open he is about it. Trump in September 2025 mistakenly posted on Truth Social what was intended to be a private excoriation of then–Attorney General Pam Bondi for not going hard enough after his enemies: “all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” he wrote. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Nixon incurred a generation’s outrage and mockery for insisting to interviewer David Frost that, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump, within the first month of his second term, asserted on social media that, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a formulation frequently attributed to Napoleon. When asked the previous month by The New York Times whether there were any constraints on his power, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” These statements are much closer to reality than they were during his first term, thanks to a 2024 Supreme Court decision, Trump v. United States, granting presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions for the exercise of “core constitutional powers,” plus lesser forms of immunity for “official acts.”

Greenwater All the Way Down

John J. Cafaro looks like a mafia don from a bad TV movie. Hefty frame crammed into a double-breasted suit, thick shock of black hair with matching mustache, giant cigar as often as not. Cafaro, a longtime Republican and friend of Trump (who calls him a “fantastic man“), lives next door to Mar-a-Lago and was previously best known for pleading guilty to bribing the former Ohio congressman James Traficant. Until now: Cafaro’s company, Greenwater Services, received a $1.7 million no-bid contract from the Department of the Interior this spring, at the suggestion of the general manager of Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, to renovate the water purification system of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Twinned with another no-bid contract for $14.7 million to paint the bottom of the pool a fetching “American-flag blue,” Cafaro’s rush job was touted by the president as a historic fix to a longstanding eyesore on the National Mall, just in time for America’s 250th birthday.

Things did not turn out that way. Within days, the blue water bloomed with greenish-brown algae, clumps of new sealant splintered off, and a furious Trump blamed antifa vandals and other n’er-do-wells for a construction project gone horribly wrong. Some political metaphors are a bit too perfect to ignore.

Americans have cycled in and out of corrupt eras: the blatant patronage of Tammany Hall, the lobbying Christmas trees of President William McKinley’s tariffs, the ’60s–’70s outrages from the security/surveillance state. These rotted systems never self-corrected with a collective national shrug.

Donald Trump and his family are executing corruption at a scale never previously contemplated in the American experiment. If we are to ever graduate from this era of brazen graft, the first step is to notice.

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“I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” President Donald Trump told reporters a few days after he sued the IRS. He wasn’t kidding: His January 29 lawsuit, which alleged damages caused by an IRS contractor’s illegal leaking of Trump’s tax returns, pitted him against an agency he oversees, represented by Justice Department lawyers who also answer to him.

The result of Trump’s admitted self-dealing was not pretty. The “settlement” that the president reached with himself, which Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on May 18, included $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for purported victims of the Biden administration’s “lawfare and weaponization.” It also included protection from liability for tax violations and any other federal offenses that Trump or his family might have committed.

Neither of those provisions had anything to do with Trump’s claims against the IRS, which in any case were legally barred because he missed the statutory deadline for filing his lawsuit. But Trump, who prides himself on being a tough negotiator, has a soft spot for himself.

Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which was designed to reward his political allies, provoked a fierce bipartisan backlash that persuaded Blanche to abandon the scheme two weeks after announcing it. The sweeping immunity deal got less attention, and Blanche says it remains in place. Judging from just one IRS dispute involving Trump’s claims of business losses, that dispensation could save him more than $100 million in taxes, interest, and penalties.

Under the pretext of a bogus lawsuit, Trump obtained favors for himself, his family, and his supporters, approved by underlings eager to please their boss. And that jaw-dropping scam is just one example of the many ways Trump has used his office for personal gain. He has shown a complete disregard for the appearance of impropriety, conflicts of interest, the ethical implications of self-dealing, and even the rule of law. His corruption is so flagrant and multifaceted that previous presidential scandals in this category pale by comparison.

The IRS Settlement Gave Trump Immunity From Federal Tax Claims 

The May 18 “settlement agreement,” which was signed by IRS CEO Frank Bisignano, Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr., and Trump’s personal lawyers, described the Anti-Weaponization Fund as a response to abuses of “government power” by “Democrat” officials. It complained that “the Biden Administration” had “target[ed]” people for “improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.”

Although Trump himself would not have been eligible for compensation, he counts himself among those victims. The agreement noted that he had filed “two claims for relief pursuant to the Federal Tort Claims Act” based on the federal investigations of his 2016 campaign’s alleged ties to Russia and his handling of classified documents that he took with him when he left office in January 2021.

Trump sought financial compensation from the Justice Department for “the Russia-collusion hoax” and “the unlawful raid of Mar-a-Lago.” Those claims were “pending at the administrative level,” meaning that officials serving at the president’s pleasure were deciding how much taxpayer money he should get to make up for his ordeals. Their boss thought $230 million was about right, but he magnanimously dropped his claims in exchange for a much bigger payout: $1.8 billion in rewards for his friends and followers.

According to the agreement, the five members of the board charged with doling out that money would be appointed by Blanche and could be dismissed by Trump at any time for any reason. The board would not be required to publicly disclose its procedures or decisions, and it would stop accepting claims a month and a half before the inauguration of the next president.

Trump made it clear who the intended beneficiaries were. “I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!” he explained four days after the “settlement” was announced. Those “others” presumably included the 1,600 or so Trump supporters charged with participating in the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, since Trump had already pardoned them and had frequently portrayed them as victims of government persecution.

Trump confirmed that impression in a Meet the Press interview a few weeks later. “People have been hurt so badly by radical-left lunatics that worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe,” he said. The rioters “were destroyed by dirty cops and by weaponization,” he added, and “many of those people should be compensated.” Including rioters who had been convicted of assaulting police officers? Trump did not rule it out, even though that prospect had dismayed the Republican legislators who objected to the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

By that point, Blanche had declared that “we’re not moving forward with the fund, period.” But he said the “separate attorney general order” that he issued on May 19 was unaffected by that change of heart. Blanche’s order, which he presented as an addendum to the “settlement agreement,” barred the IRS from pursuing claims against Trump or his family based on their past tax returns.

The protection went beyond the IRS. The addendum said “the United States” is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump or his family regarding “any matters currently pending or that could be pending” before the IRS, the Treasury Department, or “other agencies or departments.”

DOJ’s Handling of the IRS Case Reflects Clear Conflicts of Interest 

The immunity deal resembles a preemptive self-pardon, except that it extends further, encompassing civil violations as well as criminal offenses. No president has ever attempted to pardon himself, and it is not clear whether such an act of clemency would be legal. It would certainly generate a vociferous political response, since it would create the appearance that the president is above the law and contradict the principle that no one should be a judge in his own case. Blanche’s order, which shields Trump and his family from the penalties that ordinary Americans face when they run afoul of federal law, is outrageous for the same reasons.

Neither the immunity deal nor the promise of payouts to Trump’s allies was logically related to his complaint that the IRS had failed to properly supervise contractors entrusted with confidential tax information. And Trump obtained those huge favors even though his lawsuit was fatally flawed.

Trump preposterously claimed the disclosure of his tax returns had caused “at least” $10 billion in damages. In addition to offering that improbable estimate of the injury he had suffered, he filed the lawsuit more than two years after learning about the leak, exceeding the time limit set by the statute he invoked. That law covers unauthorized disclosures by “any officer or employee of the United States.” So even if Trump had filed his lawsuit on time, he would have faced the challenge of arguing that a contractor employed by a consulting business fit into that category—a point that the Justice Department has disputed in other cases involving similar claims.

Despite those legal weaknesses, the Justice Department never bothered to contest Trump’s claims, in sharp contrast with the way it usually treats such lawsuits. That failure highlighted the conflicts of interest created by a case in which both sides were represented by lawyers who worked for Trump. Further compromising the Justice Department’s ability to defend the IRS, an executive order that Trump issued in February 2025 bars the government’s lawyers from taking legal positions at odds with the president’s.

The situation was so bizarre that Kathleen Williams, the federal judge overseeing the case in the Southern District of Florida, questioned whether it involved a genuine controversy between adverse parties, as required for the lawsuit to proceed. Trump dropped his case two days before the deadline for briefing on that issue, so Williams never resolved it. Nor did she have a chance to review the settlement. But on May 29, Williams ordered Trump’s lawyers to address “grievous allegations” about that cozy arrangement, including “charges of collusion” and “the assertion that the dismissal in this case was premised on deception by the Parties.” Williams was mulling “whether the case should be reopened because the Court was the ‘victim of a fraud.'”

In a June 12 response to that inquiry, Trump’s lawyers insisted that the Justice Department had reached “a fully proper government settlement” after weighing the merits of their client’s claims and assessing the cost of defending against them. They conceded that “no Defendant ever filed an answer, a motion for summary judgment, or any other responsive pleading” at “any point in this case.” But they said “the absence of filed appearances” and the government’s “decision not to assert defenses that were available in parallel litigation” did not count as evidence of collusion.

Responding to that brief a week later, 35 retired federal judges, including former 4th Circuit Judge Michael Luttig and several other Republican appointees, said it “only underscores the need to investigate whether the parties have perpetrated a fraud on this Court and corrupted the integrity of the judicial process.” The suggestion that the Justice Department thought opposing the lawsuit would cost more than settling it, Luttig et al. noted, was “laughable given the facts of this case: a settlement worth nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer funds plus a capacious and extraordinary general release that purports to forfeit claims for substantial sums in unpaid taxes and other potential damages and fines.” Such “monumental relief,” they noted, “dwarfs any conceivable ‘cost of defense.'” 

35 Retired Federal Judges Slam Trump’s ‘Laughable’ Defense of His ‘Obviously Collusive’ IRS Settlement

Blanche “did not want the Justice Department to go into court and fight the suit, as it normally would, but also did not want to settle it by paying Mr. Trump directly,” The New York Times reported in May. According to the newspaper’s unnamed sources, Blanche thought “ending the case by funneling taxpayer money straight to the president” would be “politically untenable.”

Blanche evidently perceived an important distinction between handing Trump $100 million and saving him the same amount (or more) by protecting him from IRS claims. But the upshot is the same. In any event, Trump himself clearly does not feel constrained by such concerns.

Foreign Governments Curried Presidential Favor at Trump’s Hotel

According to a recent YouGov survey, 59 percent of Americans think Trump “is using his office for personal gain.” That poll was mostly conducted before the Anti-Weaponization Fund was announced, and it was completed before Blanche revealed Trump’s immunity deal. The public’s impression nevertheless was well-grounded in Trump’s prior record.

Two weeks before Election Day in 2016, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., had its grand opening. The luxury hotel, which occupied the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, less than a mile from the White House, was open for business throughout Trump's first term, charging $500 to $900 a night for standard rooms and upward of $1,000 for suites.

The hotel's customers included Republican political organizations and a long list of trade groups, such as the National Mining Association, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the National Confectioners Association, and the Vapor Technology Association, whose interests might be served by currying favor with the president. The Trump International Hotel also took money from the governments of foreign countries, such as Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, and Romania, that likewise may have been investing in Trump's goodwill.

That situation extended to other Trump properties, and it provoked several lawsuits based on the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause, which says federal officials may not receive "any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind" from a "foreign state" without congressional approval. Those cases, which ultimately fizzled after Trump left office, hinged largely on the meaning of "emolument." Trump argued that the term should be read narrowly, encompassing benefits received in exchange for official acts but not market transactions that happen to enrich the president. The plaintiffs argued that any "profit, gain, advantage, or benefit" received from a foreign government counted as an "emolument."

Regardless of how you define emolument, the potential for conflicts of interest was clear. Trump "has a financial interest in vast business holdings around the world that engage in dealings with foreign governments and receive benefits from those governments," one lawsuit noted. In addition to hotel and golf resort revenue, those benefits included rent from tenants of Trump Tower in Manhattan, licensing fees for The Apprentice, trademarks granted by the Chinese government, and regulatory approval of Trump projects around the world. But Trump's hotel in Washington was the most conspicuous illustration of the ethical issues raised by his business interests.

"Believe me, all the delegations will go there," a "Middle Eastern diplomat" told The Washington Post after Trump's election. "Why wouldn't I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, 'I love your new hotel!'" an "Asian diplomat" said. "Isn't it rude to come to his city and say, 'I am staying at your competitor'?" The Embassy of Kuwait, which had previously held its annual National Day celebration at the Four Seasons, reportedly canceled its reservation there and switched to the president-elect's hotel under pressure from the Trump Organization.

Trump saw no problem with any of this. "The law is totally on my side," he told The New York Times in November 2016. "The president can't have a conflict of interest." He reiterated that take at a press conference nine days before his inauguration. "I have a no-conflict situation because I'm president," he said. "I have a no-conflict-of-interest provision as president."

Trump presumably meant that no law required him to sell his assets or eschew profits from his businesses while he was president. If we leave aside the question of constitutional constraints, he was right about that: The federal statute governing official acts "affecting a personal financial interest" exempts the president and the vice president. But ethical requirements go beyond the letter of the law, which is why Trump's recent predecessors had taken steps to separate their official duties from their financial interests. 

Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush placed their assets in blind trusts while they served in the Oval Office. Barack Obama opted for "a mix of bank accounts, treasury notes, index funds and college savings" that "was unlikely to pose a direct conflict of interest," Forbes reports. Even Richard Nixon, hardly known for his ethical rectitude, bragged about selling all his stocks before entering the White House. Joe Biden took a similar approach.

Even as Trump insisted that he could not possibly have a conflict of interest, he contradicted himself by making a show of transferring the Trump Organization's operational control to his sons. "They're going to be running it in a very professional manner," he said. "They're not going to discuss it with me." Trump also promised that the Trump Organization would avoid new foreign deals during his term, and he said he would donate the profits from money spent by foreign governments at his hotels to the U.S. Treasury.

Walter Shaub, director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, described those moves as "meaningless." The problem was that "the president of the United States is also the ultimate owner of a worldwide business enterprise," Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer said. "There is such an entanglement between the president and these businesses that in my view it's going to be completely unmanageable. He doesn't solve this problem by saying his sons are going to manage the business."

Even when it came to hotel revenue, Trump's solution fell short. It did not address the money he was taking in from various domestic interest groups or his ability to enrich himself by encouraging Republican organizations or other federal officials to patronize his businesses. One example of the latter: Vice President Mike Pence and his party stayed at Trump's golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, during an official trip in 2019. Although Trump insisted he "had nothing to do" with that decision, critics perceived a violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause, which says the president may not receive additional compensation from the federal government beyond his official salary.

Trump also invited criticism by declining to disclose his tax returns, as every president since Nixon had done. Trump's determination to keep that information under wraps not only made it harder to track potential conflicts of interest, but it also provided the excuse for his brazenly corrupt "settlement" with the IRS. 

Trump Uses His Status To Sell Bibles, Sneakers, Phones, and More

The main lesson Trump drew from those first-term controversies was not that he should do more to address concerns about conflicts of interest. To the contrary, he concluded that any gestures in that direction were not worth the cost to his bottom line.

Twelve days before his second inauguration, Trump said he regretted the constraints he had placed on his family's international deals during his first term. "I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it," he told The New York Times. "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." The conviction that "nobody cared" seems to be driving Trump's business ventures during his second term, which include many attempts to capitalize on his status as president.

Trump, whose business model depends largely on licensing his brand, has a long history of attaching his name to things, including Trump Tower, the Trump National Golf Club, the Trump Taj Mahal casino, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump: The Game. Last December, he followed that pattern by adding his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. A federal judge nixed that revision in May, saying Congress had clearly established the center's name and only Congress could change it.

Another Trump vanity project, the huge White House ballroom he wants to erect on the site of the demolished East Wing, also ran into a judicial roadblock. In March, a federal judge said the project cannot proceed without congressional approval because "no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have." The president is "the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families," wrote U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush nominee. "He is not, however, the owner!"

Most of Trump's exercises in shameless self-promotion have been less clearly illegal. They are nevertheless unprecedented attempts to generate income based on his official position, and they create opportunities for favor seekers eager to ingratiate themselves with Trump by spending money on his presidential products.

You can buy Trump's "God Bless the USA" Bibles for $60 each or, for just $40 more, invest in a "Presidential Edition" embossed with Trump's official seal. The other $100 options include a "First Lady Edition," a "Vice Presidential Edition," a "Golden Age Edition," an "Inauguration Day Edition," and a "Veteran Edition." The "Signature Edition," which bears the president's autograph, will set you back $1,000, but that's only $90.26 a month if you opt for the 12-month payment plan at 15 percent interest. And if you buy two or more Bibles, Trump will throw in a "singing gift bag" that plays the Lee Greenwood song to which the brand's name alludes.

In addition to ordinary MAGA enthusiasts, Trump's Bibles appealed to Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, who wanted to buy 55,000 of them for classroom use. Walters' department, which had set aside $3 million for the purchase, was specifically interested in Bibles featuring the King James text, leather or leather-like binding, and copies of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance—criteria that happened to uniquely qualify Trump's product. Walters thought better of the plan after it provoked widespread criticism.

God Bless the USA also hawks Trump guitars for $1,500 and Trump jukeboxes for $2,500. Cheaper items include a Donald Trump Record Player decorated with his signature and the presidential seal ($150),  MAGA T-shirts and hats ($30), and a Trump squeeze toy ($30), which "Thousands of Patriots Love."

Wait, there's more: Trump Sneakers sells "Official President Donald Trump Footwear," including Never Surrender low tops ($199), Trump Fight for America boots ($299), and the Trump Presidential Golf Shoes ($499). A bottle of Victory 47 cologne, topped by a golden Trump idol, goes for $249. Ordinary Trump Watches cost $499, and you can preorder a "special edition" celebrating the man along with the nation's 250th anniversary for $899. Trump Mobile, a phone service launched in June 2025, charges $47.45 a month without a contract and offers customers golden Trump phones for just $100.

Trump-branded Bibles, guitars, watches, footwear, fragrances, and NFTs earned him about $8 million in 2024. Last year, he received $4.7 million in licensing fees for Trump watches, plus another $3.3 million from various other products and publishing deals, including his Save America coffee table book.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) noted that the online Trump Store "launched at least 168 new products" from Election Day through Inauguration Day, which was "168 more items" than any previous president-elect had offered for sale. As of April 2026, CREW later reported, the Trump Store had introduced "at least 622 products" since the beginning of the president's second term. Although "it's not normal for a president to profit off of the presidency," CREW says, "Trump has done so blatantly before and even more unabashedly this time."

Trump Sells Access to Buyers of His Meme Coin

Those Trump Store products do not include the $TRUMP meme coin, a cryptocurrency that Trump launched three days before beginning his second term. The coin's price immediately quadrupled, and its market capitalization hit a peak of $15 billion on the Sunday morning before Trump's inauguration. At that point, Axios noted, about 200 million of 1 billion coins had been sold, and the rest were still owned by "Trump-controlled entities," meaning "Trump's crypto holdings were worth as much as $58 billion on paper."

Pretty flimsy paper, it turned out. The price of the meme coin fell from $27.38 on Inauguration Day to $1.65 as of July 6, 2026. Still, the Financial Times reported that the initial $TRUMP sale had generated "at least $350 million" in revenue, and Trump continued to earn fees on subsequent trades. According to his latest financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics, revenue from the meme coin totaled $636 million in 2025. 

The long slide of Trump's meme coin was interrupted in April 2025, when the top 220 $TRUMP holders were invited to "an intimate private dinner" with the president on May 22. The "top 25 coin holders" were promised "an Exclusive Reception before Dinner with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT," plus a "Special VIP Tour" of the White House the next day. The coin's price rose by more than 50 percent immediately after that announcement.

"Since the announcement, crypto investors around the world have raced to expand their holdings of $TRUMP," The New York Times reported 10 days before the dinner. "Certain buyers, in interviews and statements, have said they bought the coins or entered the dinner contest with the intention of securing an action by Mr. Trump to affect United States policy."

In response to complaints that Trump was openly selling access to him, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said he was "abiding by all conflict-of-interest laws"—i.e., the laws Trump had repeatedly emphasized do not apply to him. "I can assure you the president acts with only the interests of the American public in mind, putting our country first and doing what's best for our country, full stop," she added.

NBC reported that the coin investors who attended the dinner, which was held at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, had collectively spent $394 million on $TRUMP. On average, that worked out to about $1.8 million a plate.

"This is my president that we're talking about, but I am willing to say that this gives me pause," Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) said a few weeks before the dinner. "In abstract," Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.) allowed, the event "is hard to understand." Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) drew an analogy: "I don't think it would be appropriate for me to charge people to come into the Capitol and take a tour."

Donald Sherman, CREW's executive director, was blunter. "This is one of the most blatant and appalling instances of selling access to the presidency I've ever seen," he said.

Trump Invests in Cryptocurrency While Overseeing Its Regulation

The sale of access is by no means the only way Trump's cryptocurrency ventures, which include investments via family companies as well as the $TRUMP offering, are ethically problematic. Trump is earning money from the industry even as he plays a leading role in setting the policies governing it.

"I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money," Trump tweeted during his first term, saying their value "is highly volatile and based on thin air." In a 2021 Fox Business interview, he said cryptocurrency "seems like a scam." But he had become an unabashed enthusiast by the time he ran for president in 2024, when his campaign attracted $22 million in support from the cryptocurrency industry.

Trump appointed crypto-friendly officials, including Paul Atkins as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and David Sacks as the White House "AI and crypto czar." The SEC under Atkins later dropped a bunch of crypto-related cases, and the Justice Department disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.

Six days after launching $TRUMP, the president issued an executive order aimed at "strengthening American leadership in digital financial technology." The goal, the White House explained, was to "establish regulatory clarity for digital financial technology and secure America's position as the world's leader in the digital asset economy, driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans." Through sensible regulation, Trump promised, the United States would become the "crypto capital of the planet."

The following month, the SEC announced that meme coins like $TRUMP would no longer be subject to its regulation. In July 2025, Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which likewise made asset-backed "stablecoins" such as Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC exempt from regulation as "securities" or "commodities." Trump did that four months after World Liberty Financial, one of his family's cryptocurrency businesses, introduced its own stablecoin, USD1.

Last October, Trump pardoned billionaire crypto tycoon Changpeng Zhao, who had served four months in federal prison after pleading guilty to money laundering offenses. The New York Times noted that Zhao's firm, Binance, had recently agreed to a business deal that promised to "generate tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trumps and the family of Steve Witkoff, the president's top Middle East adviser." That deal also involved MGX Fund Management, an investment firm owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Leavitt portrayed the pardon as a repudiation of the Biden administration's crypto policies. "President Trump exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency," she said. "The Biden Administration's war on crypto is over."

Whatever your take on the inherent merits of these moves, Trump's financial interests in the industry clearly gave him a personal stake in the decisions he made. In June 2026, Reuters reported that "the Trump family has made $2.3 billion" from four cryptocurrency ventures: the meme coin, World Liberty Financial, AI Financial Corp., and American Bitcoin. In 2025, according to Trump's disclosure, he earned about $1.4 billion from his family's cryptocurrency businesses. That accounted for the lion's share of his income that year, which totaled at least $2.2 billion, up from at least $622 million in 2024.

Trump's Stock Buys Contradict His Support for Banning Trades by Legislators

Trump intermittently acknowledges that policymakers should not personally profit from their decisions. In April 2025, he said he would "absolutely" sign a ban on stock trading by members of Congress. He reiterated his support for such legislation during his 2026 State of the Union address, saying it was necessary to "ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information." But as is often the case, Trump does not feel obliged to follow the rules he thinks should apply to other people.

Trump "went on a stock-buying spree in early 2026," NOTUS reported in May. According to Trump's official financial disclosure, he bought $1 million to $5 million in Nvidia stock on February 10, "only a week before Nvidia announced a major computer processing power deal with AI and social media giant Meta." Trump had previously bought $500,000 to $1 million in Nvidia stock on January 6, "a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China." Trump also bought stock in government contractors such as Palantir Technologies, Axon, Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, and Alphabet.

KFF Health News noted another eyebrow-raising purchase: Trump "bought as much as $680,000" in Eli Lilly stock. The transactions coincided with "several favorable government decisions benefiting the drugmaker's GLP-1 business, including progress toward a long-held goal: qualifying the drugs for reimbursement from Medicare" when "they are prescribed for weight loss."

Leavitt insisted there was nothing inappropriate or suspicious about the president's stock purchases. "President Trump's assets are in a trust managed by his children," she told NOTUS "There are no conflicts of interest."

Since fathers do sometimes talk to their children, that defense seemed less than ironclad. It is doubtful that Trump would accept similar assurances from legislators, who he thinks should not be allowed to buy stocks at all. When Trump endorsed that policy during his State of the Union speech, Rep. Mark Takano (D–Calif.) offered a suggestion: "How about you first?"

The stock purchases are not the only Trump investments that have raised ethical questions. A shell company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump recently merged with Cove Kaz Capital, which has a 70 percent stake in a Kazakh tungsten mining operation that last year received $1.6 billion in funding from the U.S. government. The month before the merger, the Financial Times reports, Cove Kaz Capital sought an additional $400 million from the Defense Department's Office of Strategic Capital.

Last November, the Office of Strategic Capital announced a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, a manufacturer of rare earth magnets partly owned by Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm. The Pentagon and Donald Jr. said he played no role in that agreement. But in May, ProPublica reported that presidential adviser Peter Navarro, a friend of Donald Jr.'s, had greased the skids for the deal. According to an unnamed Defense Department source, "The call came from the White House: We have to get this done."

The Pentagon also figures in the business plans of two drone manufacturers tied to the president's sons. In April, the U.S. Air Force agreed to buy interceptor drones from Powerus, a company in which Donald Jr. and Eric had acquired a stake the previous month. Donald Jr. also has invested in Unusual Machines, which lists him as a member of its advisory board. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Unusual Machines was negotiating a possible funding deal with the Defense Department. After that news broke, Bloomberg noted, the company's stock price rose by 57 percent, reaching "an all-time high."

During a CNBC interview on July 2, Trump conceded that his sons "have inside information" regarding "almost anything they do." Although "I tell my kids, 'Stay away from as much as you can stay away from,'" he said, "they also have a life." 

Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, is also cashing in. Last March, The New York Times reported that Kushner, "one of the U.S. government's chief negotiators in the Middle East," was trying to raise "$5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm." The potential investors included "Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which invests the proceeds of the kingdom's vast oil reserves" and is headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner had previously received a $2 billion investment from the fund, which its board approved in July 2021, six months after he left his position as a presidential adviser during Trump's first term.

That was not the only Kushner deal involving Middle Eastern investors. In April, the Times reported that Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, had approached Syrian billionaires Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat about investing in "a multibillion-dollar resort in Albania." At the time, the Al-Khayyat brothers were lobbying the U.S. government to lift economic sanctions against Syria that were imposed before the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime. Trump removed those sanctions in June 2025.

The president, who during his first term thought a moratorium on his family's foreign business ventures was appropriate, or at least politically advisable, now says he sees no reason for such restraint. Last year, for instance, Trump earned $14 million in licensing fees by lending his name to properties in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Shortly before Trump's second inauguration, an investment firm backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, national security adviser to the UAE government, secretly agreed to pay $500 million for a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial. "At the same time that the crypto deal came together," The New York Times reported, "the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to power A.I. technology." 

Trump has not been shy about accepting favors that look like attempts to influence U.S. foreign policy. In May 2025, the government of Qatar offered to let him use a luxury 747 worth about $400 million as a replacement for Air Force One. Trump saw no reason to pass up that gift.

"I could be a stupid person and say, 'No, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane,'" Trump told reporters. "I thought it was a great gesture." About a year later, the State Department approved $5 billion in arms sales to Qatar. Around the same time, the U.S. Air Force said Trump's new plane, described as a "palace in the sky," had been modified to accommodate the president and would be ready to fly this summer.

Trump's Vendettas Deliver Quantifiable Personal Benefits

Sometimes the personal benefits that Trump has obtained thanks to his official position are less tangible than a flying palace. When Trump perverts the criminal justice system to punish his enemies, as with his attempts to imprison Democratic legislators and former FBI Director James Comey for saying things he did not like, the payoff is whatever pain he manages to inflict. But in other cases, Trump's pursuit of his vendettas has reaped quantifiable rewards.

Beginning in February 2025, Trump issued a series of executive orders aimed at punishing law firms for representing clients or causes he despises. He suspended the security clearances of lawyers at those firms, barred them from federal contracts and government buildings, and suggested that anyone doing business with them might also suffer reprisals. Those penalties posed an existential threat to the firms. Some of Trump's targets responded by fighting him in court, successfully arguing that his retaliation for constitutionally protected conduct violated the First Amendment. But nine major firms folded, granting concessions in exchange for presidential mercy.

Those concessions included promises of pro bono legal services valued at nearly $1 billion, to be used on behalf of Trump-favored policies, causes, and clients. That coerced legal work reportedly has included helping the Justice Department with immigration cases, assisting the Commerce Department in trade negotiations, and representing police officers accused of misconduct.

Last year, The New York Times reported that "White House officials" thought "some of the pro bono legal work could even be used toward representing Mr. Trump or his allies if they became ensnared in investigations." In December, the watchdog group American Oversight sued the Justice Department and the Commerce Department under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking records that might further illuminate how the dragooned lawyers have been deployed.

We also have a dollar figure for the benefit that Trump obtained last year after suing CBS over a pre-election 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris: $16 million in legal expenses and funding for Trump's presidential library. That was just 0.08 percent of the $20 billion in damages that Trump claimed CBS had inflicted by editing the Harris interview in a way that made her seem slightly more cogent. But it was $16 million more than he should have received.

By Settling Trump's Laughable Lawsuit Against CBS, Paramount Strikes a Blow at Freedom of the Press

Trump's lawsuit, which alleged violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the federal Lanham Act, was patently preposterous. After he filed the original complaint in October 2024, CBS accurately noted that it was "completely without merit" and vowed to "vigorously defend against it." But Paramount, which owned CBS, decided to settle eight months later, apparently because its executives were anxious to avoid retaliation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Before the 2024 election, Trump said the FCC should punish CBS for the Harris interview by yanking its broadcast licenses. After Trump appointed Brendan Carr as FCC chairman, the agency became a willing tool of the president's vengeance. Among other things, it reopened an absurd "news distortion" investigation of CBS based on its allegedly deceptive editing of the Harris interview. And when Paramount agreed to settle Trump's lawsuit, the FCC was deciding whether to allow the company's merger with Skydance Media, which it finally approved a few weeks later.

Paramount's payout to Trump was small change compared to the original terms of Trump's "settlement agreement" with the IRS and the Justice Department, which involved more than 100 times as much money. Even without the Anti-Weaponization Fund, the immunity deal could be worth much more than Trump got from Paramount, and it directly benefits him, as opposed to a Trump-glorifying library.

Both lawsuits were fundamentally phony. But the resolution of the CBS case at least involved an actual agreement between adverse parties, although one of them was acting under intense government pressure. And Paramount used its own money, while the Justice Department was playing with funds forcibly extracted from taxpayers who had no say in the matter.

It is not hard to see why the Cato Institute's Walter Olson has suggested that the IRS "settlement" may be "the most corrupt act ever taken by an American president." Maybe the attention it has attracted will renew interest in the long train of unethical conduct that preceded it.

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On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled in favor of Ausencio Martinez, finding that Illinois State Police Trooper and K9 handler Anthony Muzzillo had violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures by using an administrative inspection of Martinez’s semitruck as a pretext to engage in a criminal search.

At 3:16 a.m. on October 7, 2021, Muzzillo and another K9 officer—acting on a tip from an unnamed law enforcement agency—pulled over Martinez. The two weren’t on regular patrol and had been waiting on the side of the highway for “​​at least thirty minutes,” looking out for Martinez’s semitruck. 

Under Illinois’ Motor Carrier Safety Law, state police are authorized to “stop and inspect” commercial vehicles or drivers “at any time” to ensure they comply with state regulations. The statute empowers officers to conduct administrative inspections at seven varying levels of intrusion. Muzzillo and the other K9 handler conducted a Level 3 search on Martinez, which included a review of his driver’s license and other documents, as well as an interview. 

Even though a Level 3 administrative inspection does not include a search of a person’s vehicle or effects—and administrative inspections cannot substitute for the normal procedure of obtaining a search warrant where no probable cause exists—police searched Martinez and his vehicle. Through a K9 drug sniff, the police found narcotics in the truck, and charged Martinez with possessing cocaine with intent to distribute, and sentenced him to 120 months’ imprisonment. 

Martinez appealed and filed a motion to suppress the evidence, but the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois denied the motion. In its ruling, the 7th Circuit found the district court had wrongly reasoned that Muzzillo’s “subjective intent” for stopping Martinez was irrelevant. 

Martinez argued that Muzzillo used his authority to conduct an administrative inspection “solely” as a pretext to investigate the tip he received, circumventing the Fourth Amendment’s protection against warrantless searches. 

The 7th Circuit agreed, finding that Martinez’s motion to suppress turned on “whether the stop was, in fact, pretextual.” The 7th Circuit also rejected the government’s argument that, even if Muzzillo’s search was pretextual, it was still permissible under the exclusionary rule and its good-faith exception—a judicial doctrine that allows the government to use illegally obtained evidence in court, provided the police were acting in an “objectively reasonable” manner.

For Muzzillo to have been acting in good faith, the 7th Circuit ruled that the government would have had to “sufficiently rebut” the claim that the initial stop was not based solely on the narcotics tip. As the 7th Circuit notes, the Supreme Court has for decades allowed warrantless administrative inspections only “in furtherance of the administrative scheme, not as a pretext for criminal investigation.”

But Muzzillo’s own words give away his intent. 

When he first approached Martinez’s truck, Muzzillo stated he noticed an “overwhelming odor of air freshener” and surmised Martinez was trying to hide the smell of drugs. Muzzillo described Martinez as “extremely nervous” during the inspection, noting that he was breathing heavily and had a “dry mouth.” 

He later testified he only stopped Martinez because his truck was “possibly carrying large-load narcotics,” all but confirming he always intended to use the administrative inspection as an excuse for a criminal investigation. 

It’s unclear whether Martinez will be retried now that the evidence against him has been suppressed. 

Still, with administrative inspections en vogue at the state and federal levels—and the Supreme Court’s inconsistent rulings on privacy—the 7th Circuit’s decision is a win against warrantless government searches.

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It’s over for Graham Platner. Maine’s Democratic Senate candidate is officially dropping out of the race, which will give the party until July 27 to find a replacement.

This is the best move for the party, as Platner’s poll numbers had collapsed following revelations of a serious sexual assault allegation. A different candidate will likely stand a stronger chance of defeating incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

It’s also the best thing for the country. Platner was a deeply flawed candidate with no special qualifications to serve in office and a long history of bizarre behavior: from the Nazi tattoo to the edgy Reddit posts to the alcoholism and mistreatment of past girlfriends. Even if some of this stuff could plausibly be excused—he claimed he didn’t know about the tattoo when he got it—taken together, that’s just too many red flags.

But it’s worth noting that beyond his personal issues, Platner was also running on a far-left platform of dubious electoral viability. It’s true that Democratic primary voters are happy to select socialist and quasi-communist political figures, though that probably reflects anger at the party establishment rather than specific enthusiasm for seizing the means of production. Whether statewide voters in a general election are excited about socialism remains to be seen.

Platner did not identify as a democratic socialist, but his entire campaign was geared around supposed populist outrage at oligarchs and “the Epstein class,” whoever that is. Indeed, when Platner initially came under scrutiny for alleged violence toward women, he announced that this was a concerted effort by the Epstein class to get rid of him. His platform reflected the progressive left’s notion that very wealthy people are responsible for all of the misery in society, and they need to be destroyed.

Ironically, this is a view that mostly attracts support from affluent, highly educated people—not the working-class voters that someone like Platner apparently speaks to. Working-class people should be more than a little offended that a cabal of far-left Democratic consultants—Morris Katz and Rebecca Katz (no relation) seem to deserve most of the blame—decided that their own idiosyncratic crusade against billionaires would serve just fine as a policy agenda to appeal to working-class voters. All they needed was a rough-around-the-edges sort of guy with a deep voice and…a penchant for violence? That’s downright insulting.

So good riddance to Platner, and with any hope, good riddance to the class of political operatives who see socialism as both the solution to the world’s problems and the obvious winningest campaign strategy.

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This Week on Free Media and Freed Up

I spoke with Christian Britschgi about the Platner situation and a plausible conspiracy theory involving Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.).

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Worth Watching

I finished Pluribus, which is one of the best television shows I’ve watched in years. Highly recommend!

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There are moments when history reaches across the centuries with startling clarity. Standing in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy, and looking at Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government, I had one of those moments.

Nearly 700 years old, the series of fresco paintings includes a depiction of a bustling city that illustrates the effects of good government, as well as representations of the decay that results from arbitrary and unjust rulers. The visual treatise on political economy holds important lessons for us today.

Lorenzetti’s city isn’t thriving because its government is energetic or ambitious. It’s thriving because a wise government knows its place.

The people creating its wealth aren’t politicians. They’re merchants opening shops, artisans practicing their crafts, builders raising new homes, farmers bringing goods to market, families walking safely through the streets, and a couple getting married. Prosperity comes from their voluntary cooperation. The government appears as the guardian of the rules that make prosperity possible: justice, security, predictable laws, and limits on arbitrary power.

That distinction is everything. America did not become the richest nation in history because Washington, D.C., was exceptionally good at directing the economy. It thrived because its institutions largely prevented Washington from interfering. The rule of law and constitutional limits have allowed millions of individuals to make sound decisions that no central authority could possibly coordinate.

Lorenzetti understood that institutions shape incentives, and incentives shape civilization. When political institutions protect a people’s liberty, property, and contract rights, they will invest, innovate, trade, build, and cooperate. When institutions become vehicles for arbitrary power, society reorganizes itself around politics instead of production, and everything decays.

That’s why the most troubling trend in American politics today isn’t just how remarkably bloated the government has become. It’s that both major political parties are now comfortable using their power to direct private economic life, and they seem unbothered by whether this undermines the rule of law.

Federal spending and debt continue their relentless rise because politicians prioritize today’s voters over future generations. They support industrial policy to prop up their favorite industries. The Trump administration is taking equity stakes in companies like Intel and USA Rare Earth, with some members enriching themselves in the process.

Meanwhile, many Democrats champion taxes on held wealth and unrealized capital gains, challenging the principle that property exists independently of political permission. Genuine socialists who aspire to subordinate property rights and voluntary exchange to political power are now winning elections.

Today, Democrats and Republicans share an understanding that the government should actively allocate resources, direct investment, and determine economic outcomes, which can translate to votes, campaign contributions, or other benefits.

That’s a shift Lorenzetti’s frescos implicitly warned against. The danger is not poorly executed government; it’s that society’s rules eventually begin to break down. Businesses learn that political influence matters as much or more than serving customers. Investors devote increasing attention to Washington rather than to innovation. Entrepreneurs spend more time competing for subsidies than for customers. Citizens become clients of the state instead of participants in a free society. Political discretion displaces voluntary cooperation.

This transformation rarely arrives dramatically. It instead comes one exception at a time: one bailout, one industrial policy, one new entitlement, one emergency spending bill, another emergency bill that no one feels any need to repay, one “golden share,” one creative tax hike. Together, these changes reshape the relationship between citizen and state.

Lorenzetti’s companion depiction of a bad government is often interpreted as a portrait of tyranny. Justice lies bound at the feet of a horned, demonic ruler, her scales broken and cords cut. Around them, the city decays: Buildings crumble, the streets are empty of commerce, stores are looted, and the only workshop still doing business belongs to the armorer. Soldiers seize a woman—a dark reflection of the happy bride processing through the city on the opposite wall—while a man lies slain at her feet.

Similarly, in one painting of the countryside, the figure of Security, guaranteed by law and not by whim, flies above cultivated fields. In another, Fear hovers over villages burning and barren ground. Same land, same people, different institutions.

But tyranny isn’t simply oppression. It’s the condition under which political power, no longer constrained by enduring principles, becomes society’s organizing force. That’s where bad becomes worse. High taxes become levies meant to punish and confiscate. Regulating industries becomes the locking down of an economy. Constraints on speech become censorship and book burning.

That’s why institutions matter. A constitutional government’s purpose is not to directly produce prosperity. It’s to prevent political power from suffocating the countless acts of creativity, exchange, investment, and cooperation through which free people produce prosperity themselves.

America’s greatness has never rested on the brilliance of its politicians. It rests on institutions that leave enough room for people to flourish. The lesson from Siena is that we must restore and preserve what keeps political power in check. Without it, the government does not merely redistribute wealth; it coarsens and corrupts the character of the people, leading to its destruction.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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In 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, causing an 11-month blackout in some parts of the island. In the years since, the federal government has allocated billions of dollars to fix the grid. However, only a quarter of this funding has actually reached the island, according to a new government report.  

A federal audit released last week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that of the $14 billion obligated for grid repair and modernization in Puerto Rico since 2017, around 75 percent, or $10.7 billion, remains undisbursed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was the slowest mover of funds identified in the report, with only $2.7 billion of its total $11.1 billion in obligated funds disbursed. According to the GAO, a measly nine FEMA-funded projects have been completed as of December 2025, while 249 are “at different stages of completion.”

Approximately half of the island’s frequent outages are caused by vegetation growing too close to transmission and distribution lines. Luma Energy, the island’s private utility, estimated that clearing vegetation around power lines, substations, and facility access roads would cost $1.2 billion. The utility has submitted funding requests for 34 vegetation-clearing projects to FEMA as of December, but FEMA has obligated only roughly $103 million for nine of them. And, thanks to the many layers in the federal bureaucracy, numerous environmental reviews, and complex permitting, most of these projects are still less than halfway complete. Overall, federal funding has cleared only 400 of the 16,000 miles planned for vegetation clearing, according to the GAO.

With the island’s antiquated power plants unable to generate about a third of the electricity needed during peak demand last year, upgrading Puerto Rico’s aging power generation is critical to ensuring reliable electricity for the island. However, here too, the federal government has been slow to provide a solution.

As of December 2025, FEMA had obligated about $1.3 billion to 24 generation projects, only seven of which were complete. Part of these delays was due to the island’s aging infrastructure; as some stakeholders told the GAO, given the age of Puerto Rico’s generation assets, finding replacement parts often requires “reverse engineering or long wait times, sometimes up to 2 years.” Luma officials have identified substations as a key area for grid stability, yet just one of 32 substation projects for which FEMA has obligated almost $482 million has been completed. FEMA has also obligated $44 million for a project to upgrade Puerto Rico’s energy management system, which was only about 65 percent complete as of late 2025. According to one stakeholder, these and other grid projects continue to face delays due to FEMA’s lengthy review process, which includes “conducting an environmental and historic preservation review.”   

Operators also have to contend with the growing number of Puerto Ricans who have switched to rooftop solar panels—which generate over 10 percent of the island’s electricity—to provide a buffer against the grid’s instability. Consequently, the rapid growth of decentralized rooftop solar creates grid-management challenges for an aging system, especially if the grid lacks the smart inverters, storage, and controls needed to balance variable output.

However, it is not just the federal government that has failed the Puerto Rican taxpayer; the Puerto Rican government is also at fault for actively inhibiting the timely use of recovery funds and basic grid repairs. This includes legislation passed in 2024 to levy a construction excise tax on federally funded recovery projects—resulting in higher project costs and slower grid repairs—and a series of legal battles between the Puerto Rican government and Luma Energy, which has compounded the delays and mismanagement of the island’s grid recovery. 

The GAO, with federal concurrence, outlines several recommendations to address the island’s grid woes. These include streamlining FEMA’s environmental review process and establishing strong mechanisms to facilitate coordination between the federal and Puerto Rican governments.

While not mentioned in the report, another clear fix would be repealing the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. Often called the Jones Act, this law requires any goods shipped between two U.S. ports to be transported on an American-built ship manned by a mostly American crew. Since there is only one Jones Act-compliant ship for liquefied natural gas, which accounts for a significant portion of the island’s electricity generation, the law has forced the island to pay more for American liquefied natural gas than its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, and regularly slowed down hurricane recovery.

In March, President Donald Trump issued a Jones Act waiver, which has allowed “bulk propane shipments [to reach] Puerto Rico from Texas and Pennsylvania for the first time ever,” writes the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow. Repealing the law would ensure that shipments like these become a regular thing and allow Puerto Rico to deliver more affordable electricity to its grid.  

Government infighting and incompetency have condemned 3.5 million Puerto Ricans to suffer under what is perhaps the worst power grid system in the Western world. Even without accounting for natural disasters, customers in Puerto Rico experienced an average of 27 hours of power grid interruptions per year between 2021 and 2024. For the continental United States, that number is only two hours. Yet, despite this abysmal quality, Puerto Ricans continue to pay electricity bills up to 31 percent above the national average. 

As Washington drags its feet and San Juan plays politics, ordinary Puerto Ricans are left paying high rates for a grid that routinely fails them, while mainland taxpayers fund what has essentially become an endless money pit.

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Sen. Bernie Moreno (R–Ohio) recently announced that he was working with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) to eliminate the cap on Social Security taxes. Moreno would be a very odd Republican if he thinks this is a good idea, or else he simply doesn’t understand the math.

Under current law, employees and employers each contribute 6.2 percent in Social Security payroll taxes on the first $184,500 in income. By eliminating the cap, that 6.2 percent tax would become a new top marginal tax rate. For example, a taxpayer in California would pay a 37 percent federal income tax rate, a 13.3 percent state income tax rate, a 1.45 percent Medicare tax, a 0.9 percent additional Medicare tax, and a 6.2 percent Social Security tax, for a top marginal rate of 58.85 percent. For self-employed people, who pay both sides of payroll taxes and Medicare taxes, the top marginal rate would rise to 66.5 percent—among the highest marginal rates in the world.

We should be having hard conversations about the future of Social Security. Of course, this has been true for a while. With collapsing birth rates and rising life expectancy, a declining pool of workers will be unable to generate enough revenue to support an ever-increasing class of benefit recipients. Everyone knows this.

The big question is what to do about it. There are only a handful of ways to shore up the program:

1. We can raise the retirement age.
2. We can reduce benefits.
3. We can raise the cap on Social Security earnings.
4. We can raise Social Security tax rates.
5. We can means-test the program.
6. We can privatize it.
7. We can do away with it altogether.

In terms of the math, eliminating the cap on Social Security earnings unsurprisingly has the largest impact and can actually go a long way toward making the program solvent. But is it worth having top marginal tax rates in the 60s to preserve the program? This is a hard question we need to answer.

The last time marginal tax rates approached this level was in 1979, when a 70 percent tax rate applied to income above about $215,400 (which would be just over $1 million in today’s dollars). Back then, it was understood that with all the available deductions and credits, even very wealthy people paid nothing close to the 70 percent top rate. Even in the 1950s, with a top rate of 92 percent, the effective rate for those in the top tax bracket was about 42 percent. Marginal rates in the 60s today, by contrast, would be inescapable—there are very few deductions and credits available to offset them. The government’s take as a percentage of gross domestic product would go to European levels and beyond.

If we find that unappealing, we could simply raise the payroll tax rate by a percentage point or two, which would also have a measurable impact. This would be preferable to abolishing the cap altogether, and as a side benefit, lower-income workers would be contributing more as well, so the burden would not entirely fall on the wealthy. But again, this has a much smaller impact than doing away with the earnings cap and would only be a temporary fix.

Conservatives are generally in favor of raising the retirement age, which is eminently reasonable, because not only are people living longer, they’re staying healthier for longer. The minimum retirement age is currently 62, and if you know any 62-year-olds, they’re probably in pretty good shape. The idea that someone could or would stop working at age 62 nowadays seems hard to justify. People reach full retirement age at age 67, and we could easily raise the full retirement age to 70, perhaps grandfathering in people born before an arbitrary date, such as 1980.

When Social Security was first implemented, average life expectancy was much lower, the ratio of workers to beneficiaries was much more favorable, and the actuarial mathematics behind it worked. However, raising the retirement age, while worthwhile, has even less of an impact than raising tax rates.

What’s interesting is that people are starting to have some honest conversations online about actually reducing benefits, the ultimate political third rail. But the reality is that Social Security benefits can be very generous. If you had a hypothetical married couple who each retired at the maximum age of 70, they’d collectively be receiving about $124,000 a year in benefits in retirement, assuming they were high earners during their working lives. Benefits are much lower for those who retire earlier, but it’s important to understand that baby boomers, as a class, are fabulously wealthy. And yes, while there are those who are indigent, the vast majority of them don’t necessarily need the benefits. Reducing benefits could have a large impact on the solvency of the program, but politically, it is the hardest to accomplish.

One very popular idea is means-testing the benefits. For example, if a hypothetical senior citizen had assets in excess of $2 million, they would then be ineligible to receive Social Security. Many years ago, billionaire Ken Langone was a big proponent of means-testing benefits. There are a few problems with this. The first is that if one has paid into the system for decades, it seems unfair to then deprive them of benefits, no matter how well they have handled their financial affairs. The other is that in order to do this, you’d have to create an entire bureaucracy at the IRS for determining someone’s wealth. (Once you have the IRS in the business of counting assets, it is just a hop, skip, and a jump to wealth taxes.) Also, means-testing benefits is mostly symbolic—it doesn’t do much to preserve the solvency of the program.

People have been talking about privatizing Social Security for years, going all the way back to 2005, when President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary John Snow actually made an honest attempt at it. The idea was that we would all contribute to personal retirement accounts that would be invested in stocks and bonds. There was an enormous backlash to the proposal, and Bush retreated on it.

From an academic standpoint, privatizing Social Security makes much more sense than the current system. The annual return on a 60/40 portfolio of stocks and bonds has averaged about 9 percent in the last 50 years, while the rate of return on Social Security is negligible. We would all be richer in the end. But there is an aspect of this that the privatization proponents haven’t considered: Stocks and bonds can lose value, and if we have a protracted bear market, and people experience a drawdown in their retirement savings, the politics around that will be a nightmare. The capital markets do not reliably return 9 percent a year—sometimes it is more, sometimes it is less. There have been long periods of time when the stock market has returned zero or negative. The fact is that we aren’t all cut out to be investors. Having said that, Canada has a public pension program that invests in private financial markets, managed by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which has done quite well. It is a superior system to ours, so it can be done.

Finally, we could simply abolish the program altogether—the most libertarian and radical of the proposals. People would be responsible for saving for their own retirement. Of course, some people wouldn’t, and they’d be living at a subsistence level in old age. The interesting thing is that most people have been operating under the assumption that Social Security won’t be around forever, so they have been contributing aggressively to tax-advantaged retirement plans such as IRAs and 401(k)s. Many people are anticipating using Social Security as a supplement to retirement savings, not a replacement for them. And there is a certain social Darwinism to abolishing it that is attractive to some people.

Outside of abolishing Social Security or privatizing it, all of the choices are unappetizing, and many people would argue that taxes are high enough, for crying out loud. Raising the cap on Social Security earnings, as Moreno and Warren want to do, would seem to be a nonstarter. But these ideas are gaining traction in today’s political climate. There are only so many more years that we can kick the can down the road.

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Lines at Rhode Island grocery stores are about to get a whole lot longer.

In late June, Rhode Island became the first state to limit grocery self-checkout lanes after Democratic Gov. Daniel McKee signed the Restrictions on Self-Service Checkout Stations Act. The legislation mandates that every grocery store in the state have at least one staffed checkout for every three self-checkouts operating. The law takes effect on January 1, 2027, and failure to comply can result in fines of up to $500 per day.

“Today, we’re protecting jobs and strengthening customer service,” McKee said in a press release. “Whether it’s helping a customer with an issue, assisting a senior or ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities, this law is about preserving choice and keeping people at the center of the shopping experience.”

The bill’s supporters frame the policy as both a consumer protection and job protection measure. State Rep. Megan Cotter (D–Exeter) argued that self-checkout lanes are “specifically used to reduce the number of people that stores employ, and the number of hours that their employees work.” Cotter also accused “big corporations” of trying to get customers to gradually accept the shift toward self-checkouts when “many people still want the advantages of checking out with a real human being.”

Yet survey data suggest that many shoppers do, in fact, value self-checkouts. A 2024 NCR Voyix survey of 1,133 U.S. shoppers found that 43 percent of consumers prefer self-checkout over traditional checkout, with that preference rising to 53 percent among shoppers ages 18 to 44. Their 2025 Commerce Experience Report found that among shoppers who prefer self-checkout, 77 percent say they do so because it is faster, while 36 percent cite shorter lines and 43 percent say they prefer bagging their own items. A 2026 CapitalOne Shopping Research report found that 79.3 percent of consumers use self-checkout regularly, and among them, 61.4 percent use it for most or all purchases.

The legislation was also supported by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which argued that self-checkout has led grocery chains to cut cashier hours. Domenic Pontarelli, secretary-treasurer at UFCW Local 328 (which represents Rhode Island workers), said in a press release that grocery workers are “often overburdened, having to monitor too many self-checkouts while shoppers face delays,” and that “staffing ratios fix this issue for all parties.”

Rhode Island grocers, on the other hand, described the bill as an “egregious” attempt to micromanage how stores staff their checkout lanes. The Rhode Island Food Dealers Association, which represents chain and independent grocery retailers and other food-related organizations, argued in a March letter that the bill “puts Rhode Island grocers at a significant competitive disadvantage.” The bill’s arbitrary staffing requirements “severely limits our members’ ability to properly utilize their staff as needed.”

“This bill while labeled as a restriction on self-checkout is in fact a ban on self-checkout. There is no way a grocery retailer would be able to keep self-checkout with these restrictions,” the group added.

Indeed, while policymakers often portray grocery stores as “big corporations” that make massive profits, they are usually operating on razor-thin margins. The Food Industry Association says the average net profit for food retailers was just 2.1 percent in 2025. This means that costly regulations risk pushing up prices for customers and threatening the viability of many of those businesses altogether.

Self-checkout restrictions have been tried before. Last year, Long Beach, California, introduced a similar law in 2025 in an attempt to combat theft. Two weeks after the city approved its “Safe Stores are Staffed Stores” law, which requires larger grocery stores and pharmacies to staff at least one employee for every three self-checkout stations, Vons closed self-checkout lanes at all four of its Long Beach locations, according to the Long Beach Post. Signs at Vons told customers the lanes were unavailable “due to a new City of Long Beach ordinance (25-0010) regulating self-checkout operations.”

“There was an unusually long line at Whole Foods self-checkout today. Of 10 self-checkout kiosks, only 2 were working,” claimed one Reddit user in late 2025. When the shopper asked an employee why so many kiosks were down, the employee allegedly replied that it was because of “a new law in Long Beach.” Another shopper said the self-checkout area at a Target on Bellflower Boulevard was “completely closed,” leaving “long lines everywhere.”

Now Rhode Island is on track to repeat Long Beach’s mistakes. The fundamental question is why lawmakers think they should be deciding how grocery stores organize their checkout lanes in the first place. Every store has different customers, staffing pressures, and peak hours. Some shoppers may want a human cashier, and others may want to scan their groceries more quickly with a self-checkout. A functioning market can and does accommodate both preferences.

At a time when Americans are already worried about food prices, potentially making a basic necessity more costly and grocery shopping more stressful is a strange way to help them.

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