Tag: donald trump

Virginia Governor Declares Emergency Over Looming Loss Of SNAP Benefits; USDA Warns Funds Running Out

USDA Warns It Can’t Use Contingency Funds To Cover SNAP In November

The federal government shutdown entered Day 25 on Saturday, with cryptocurrency-based prediction market Polymarket showing odds in the single digits that Democrats and Republicans will reach a resolution before November 3. The market currently assigns a 15% probability that the shutdown will end between November 12 and 15.

We have warned readers of the potential for major disruptions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) if the federal government remains closed. Betting odds markets and limited political chatter in the Capitol Beltway this weekend (so far) suggest a resolution to the shutdown remains muted for next week.

In 2025, around 42 million people relied on SNAP benefits, which accounted for 12% of the population. This is more than enough people to create chaos should SNAP funds run dry in the coming weeks.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) warned:

Due to Congressional Democrats’ refusal to pass a clean continuing resolution (CR), approximately 42 million individuals will not receive their SNAP benefits come November 1

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Trump Pardons Binance Founder Tied to His Crypto Venture

President Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, co-founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, on Wednesday. Binance is a global trading platform that handles billions of dollars in crypto transactions each day. In 2023, Zhao, also known as CZ, pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program at Binance, a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act. He admitted that the company allowed U.S. customers to trade with sanctioned jurisdictions and ignored warning signs of criminal activity on the platform. Last year, he served a four-month prison sentence.

The pardon immediately drew criticism for Zhao’s known business links to World Liberty Financial, Inc. (WLFI). That is the president’s own crypto venture, co-founded with three of his sons, real estate developers Steve and Zach Witkoff, and several other investors.

Why Pardon Zhao?

At the White House, Trump was asked about the pardon:

Today you pardoned the founder of Binance. Can you explain why you chose to pardon him, and did it have anything to do with your family’s [crypto] business?

The president paused to confirm whom the journalist meant. He then launched into what sounded less like a legal explanation and more like a reflex — strongly evoking the “autopen” scandal of his predecessor:

I believe we’re talking about the same person, because I pardon a lot of people. I don’t know. He was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say — Are you talking about the crypto person? A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything.

He then continued,

He was somebody — I don’t know — I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. But I’ve been told by a lot — a lot of support — he had a lot of support, and they said that what he did was not even a crime, that he was prosecuted by the Biden administration. And so I gave him a pardon on request by a lot of good people.

Press-secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the move at a White House briefing. She said the president had exercised his constitutional authority and that the pardon followed “thorough” review. She added that the case was “overly prosecuted” by the Joe Biden administration.

Leavitt also issued a separate statement, reported by Politico. She argued that the Biden administration “pursued Mr. Zhao despite no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims.” She added that prosecutors had sought “a sentence so far outside the guidelines that even the judge called it unprecedented.” Leavitt said the case had “damaged America’s reputation as a global tech leader” and declared, “The Biden administration’s war on crypto is over.”

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US intel contradicts Trump’s claims of fentanyl production in Venezuela: Report

US intelligence has assessed that little to no Fentanyl trafficked to the US is being produced in Venezuela, contradicting recent claims from US President Donald Trump to justify airstrikes on alleged drug boats, Drop Site News (DSN)reported on 24 October.

Trump claimed last month that boats targeted in US airstrikes in the Caribbean were carrying Fentanyl to the US.

“Every boat kills 25,000 on average — some people say more. You see these boats, they’re stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly Fentanyl and other drugs, too,” Trump said.

US strikes on vessels operating in international waters in the Caribbean Sea since September have killed at least 32 people.

However, a senior US official directly familiar with the matter stated that Fentanyl is not being produced in Venezuela and sent to the US.

“The official noted that many of the boats targeted for strikes by the Trump administration do not even have the requisite gasoline or motor capacity to reach US waters,” DSN reported.

The lack of intelligence linking Venezuela with fentanyl production is further evidence that the strikes are driven by an effort to topple the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Trump has used allegations of Venezuelan drug trafficking, including claims without evidence that Maduro is leading a drug cartel, as the justification for overthrowing the socialist government.

In a post on social media, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth equated the alleged threat of Venezuelan drug cartels to that of Al-Qaeda.

“Just as Al-Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people,” Hegseth said, adding that “there will be no refuge or forgiveness – only justice.”

His comments come just a few weeks after the founder of Al-Qaeda in Syria, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, met with US officials in New York. Sharaa seized power in Damascus in December, declaring himself president, with US backing.

Two sources familiar with discussions at the White House told DSN that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the driving force behind the regime change effort.

Secretary Rubio has earmarked millions of dollars previously allocated for “pro-democracy” measures in Venezuela to prepare for a war.

The sources cited Rubio’s desire to access Venezuela’s vast oil resources as the reason for seeking regime change.

On Friday, the Pentagon confirmed it was deploying the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to the Caribbean Sea, adding to the thousands of troops deployed to the Venezuelan coast.

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Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman

With the economy the way it is these days, it’s nice to have a little walking around money.

Donald Trump certainly thinks so. Since his return to the White House, the president has labeled 440 federal properties for possible sale, leased 13.1 million acres of public land for strip mining, and held a fire sale for satellites developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

In one of his wildest money moves to date, the Financial Times reports that Trump is now offering companies access to plutonium from America’s arsenal of cold war nuclear missiles.

On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) launched an application for interested parties to apply for access to a maximum of 19 metric tonnes — a little under 42,000 pounds — of weapons-grade plutonium, which has long been a key resource undergirding the US nuclear arsenal.

One of the companies anticipated to receive shipments of the fissile isotope from the DOE is Oklo, a “nuclear startup” backed — and formerly chaired — by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Earlier in October, Oklo was one of four US companies chosen by the DOE to join a new pilot program meant to rush the testing and approval of experimental reactor designs.

As the FT reports, we won’t know for certain until December 31, when the DOE announces the companies selected to purchase the plutonium, but it’s likely Oklo will be among them. That’s stirring up plenty of anxiety throughout the scientific community, who say the relaxed approach to nuclear development is a major cause for alarm.

“If there were adults in the room and I could trust the federal government to impose the right standards, it wouldn’t be such a great concern, but it just doesn’t seem feasible,” Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists told the FT.

The move comes as tech companies like OpenAI contribute to a surge in energy consumption unlike anything the US has ever seen, leading to record high electrical bills for American people. To meet demand, the Trump administration has embraced nuclear energy, which currently depends almost entirely on foreign imports of uranium into the US — a bottleneck the White House is trying to do away with.

In that light, pawning off warheads to the highest bidder is something of a stopgap solution while domestic uranium producers get things in order. In the meantime, it may have the fascinating side effect of reducing the US’ capacity to threaten its rivals with nuclear obliteration — which, to be fair, is sure to be a welcome development for many nations around the world.

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The Government Shutdown Isn’t Stopping Trump From Amassing ‘Emergency’ Powers

Usually when we’re in the midst of a government shutdown, I’m in a good mood. Sure, recent shutdowns haven’t accomplished much in terms of shrinking the cost or scope of the federal government in the long run, but it’s nice to walk around feeling a little less governed than usual.

But even that small pleasure has turned sour. Yes, fiscal restraint matters. It matters to this magazine, which has made cutting spending the subject of a greater percentage of our cover stories than perhaps any other publication. And it matters to me personally; I’ve spent the last 25 years writing about the need to take debt and spending seriously. The size of the state is inversely proportional to personal liberty in ways that are too often overlooked.

But the intense acceleration of the quest to aggregate power in the White House is now unambiguously the more immediate threat to liberty. It’s visible every day on my commute to work, as National Guardsmen linger in my D.C. Metro stop. It’s visible in the September gathering of the nation’s top military officials for something between a pep rally and a company retreat. It’s visible everywhere Immigration and Customs Enforcement is staging raids and setting up warrantless checkpoints. It’s visible in the administration’s moves to take a stake in Intel and broker a TikTok sale. It’s visible from space. (As I write this, Blue Origin is completing its 36th New Shepard flight—a bright spot in a dark month.)

The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy wrote the bible on the imperial presidency, tracing how voters of all stripes invest outsized hopes in presidents and then act shocked when presidents behave like tyrants. The durable lesson: Don’t confer powers on your team’s guy that you wouldn’t trust in the other team’s hands.

But it’s hard to break the habit of agglomerating authority when your party is in charge. This problem is cross-partisan and is older than Donald Trump—or Joe Biden, or even Richard Nixon. After Watergate, the nation briefly remembered why limits are good. But it wasn’t long before the White House started soaking up power again, and by the 2000s a cadre of executive-power enthusiasts, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, started pushing hard to “restore” presidential prerogatives. The legal and scholarly scaffolding for today’s power grabs was assembled well before the last few months.

Meanwhile, the “national security” and “federal property protection” exceptions have become a tunnel wide enough to drive an armored personnel carrier through. In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security surged hundreds of federal officers into Portland, Oregon, with threadbare training for the job at hand; internal reviews later read like warnings from the future we’re now experiencing. Surveillance of protesters and mission creep were inevitable; they were the most predictable features of an overgrown executive. But despite that mess, the boots just keep hitting the ground. Portland is once more bracing for a federalized deployment—this time National Guard troops—with state and local officials fighting back on the grounds of both necessity and legality.

Immigration enforcement shows how this logic lands in daily life. The federal government claims sweeping authority within a 100-mile border zone that covers where nearly two-thirds of Americans live. That zone has long been a gray area for warrantless stops and checkpoints, ripe for masked agents far from any actual border to nick away at ordinary civil liberties. Powers granted today will be used more aggressively tomorrow. And powers used in that 100-mile border zone will soon be used elsewhere.

The emergency is now the default. Most of the knobs and levers a modern president uses to bully companies, police speech, or move bodies around aren’t new laws—they’re standby powers that switch on with a magic word: emergency. Congress littered the U.S. Code with these shortcuts; the Brennan Center for Justice has cataloged 137 statutory powers that spring to life the moment a president declares one. (Many never fully turn off.) As of mid-2025, there were roughly 50 simultaneous national emergencies still in force; they are renewed annually, spanning everything from sanctions to tariffs. That architecture lets the White House reach for trade controls, financial blockades, and tech blacklists without returning to Congress. If you like your powers separated, this is the opposite.

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Trump terminates trade talks with Canada over Ontario’s ‘fake’ anti-tariff ad featuring Ronald Reagan

President Trump abruptly called off trade negotiations with Canada on Thursday after the Ontario government funded an anti-tariff ad campaign featuring the voice of President Ronald Reagan.

“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs,” Trump wrote in a late-night Truth Social post.

The president said the $75 million ad was made “to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts” in cases challenging Trump’s authority to issue tariffs.

“TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A,” Trump argued.

“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” he declared. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

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A Trumpian Headache

President Donald Trump’s use of the U.S. military to kill persons on speed boats in international waters, or in territorial waters claimed by other sovereign nations – all 1,500 miles from the U.S. – has posed grave issues of due process. The Constitution’s guarantee of due process requires it for every person, not just Americans. The operative language of the Fifth Amendment is that “No person… shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”

The Trump administration has claimed that it can kill whomever it designates as an unlawful enemy combatant – it prefers the political phrase “narco-terrorist” – and the due process it provides is the intelligence gathered by American spies and the White House analysis of that intelligence. This secret analysis, the government’s argument goes, satisfies the president that the folks he has ordered killed are engaging in serious and harmful criminal behavior, and somehow is a lawful and constitutional substitute for the jury trial and its attendant procedural protections that the Constitution commands.

To be fair, I am offering an educated guess as to the administration’s argument. The reason we don’t know the argument precisely is that the Department of Justice calls it classified. This is, of course, a non sequitur. How could a legal argument possibly be secret in light of well-settled First Amendment jurisprudence? It can’t. The Supreme Court has ruled consistently that there are no secret laws or secret rationales for employing the laws. Moreover, it has ruled that the First Amendment assures a public window on government behavior whenever it seeks to take life, liberty or property.

The last time we went through efforts to obtain the government’s legal argument for presidential targeted killing was during the Obama administration. When President Barack Obama ordered the CIA to kill Anwar al-Awlaki and his son – both natural born American citizens – it, too, claimed a secret legal rationale. Yet some brave soul who had access to that rationale leaked it to the press. The rationale likened killing al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son to police shooting at fleeing bank robbers who are shooting at the police.

The Obama justification was absurd, as al-Awlaki was not engaged in any violent acts. He had been followed by 12 intelligence agents during his final 48 hours of life. Those agents couldn’t legally arrest him, because he hadn’t been charged with a crime, but in the Obama logic, they could legally kill him.

When those of us who monitor the government’s infidelity to the Constitution publicly pointed out the flaws in the Obama argument, it reverted to the argument that I suspect the current administration is secretly using. Namely, that its secret internal deliberations are a constitutionally adequate substitution for traditional due process.

It gets worse.

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The Sordid History Of US “Aid” To Colombia

President Donald Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the US government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen. Trump has boasted of the killings by the US military but claims all the targets were drug smugglers. He has threatened to suspend all US government handouts for the Colombian government. Trump warned Petro that he “better close up” cocaine production “or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”

Tapping his own psychiatric expertise, Trump proclaimed that Colombia has “the worst president they’ve ever had – a lunatic with serious mental problems.” Is anyone in the Trump White House aware of the long history of U.S. failure in that part of the world? In 1989, President George H.W. Bush warned Colombian drug dealers that they were “no match for an angry America.” But Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer despite billions of dollars of US government anti-drug aid to the Colombian government.

The Bill Clinton administration made Colombia its top target in its international war on drugs. Clinton drug warriors deluged the Colombian government with U.S. tax dollars as they literally deluged Colombia with toxic spray. The New York Times reported that U.S.-financed planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren, making many of them ill. Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared last year that the crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, “We can’t permanently fumigate the country.”

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White House Savages Biden, Obama and Clinton with New Major Events Timeline

The White House on Thursday unveiled a new “Major Events Timeline” – and it’s one for the history books, literally.

The Trump White House took a shot at former President’s Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden on its official website.

Bill Clinton- Monica Lewinsky Scandal

“President Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed, leading to White House perjury investigations. The Oval Office trysts fueled impeachment for obstruction.”

Obama Muslim Brotherhood visit

“Obama hosts members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that promotes Islamist extremism and has ties to Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood is a designated terrorist organization by nearly a dozen nations.”

Cocaine Discovered at the Biden White House

“During Biden’s administration, a U.S. Secret Service agent discovered a small, zippered plastic bag containing cocaine in the West Wing entrance lobby. Speculation has pointed to Hunter Biden, an admitted drug user. Additional evidence includes a laptop, seized in 2019, which contains photos of frequent drug use alongside emails about foreign business dealings (Ukraine, China) involving his father, Joe, while he was Vice President.”

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Smoke, Mirrors, and the Pfizer Deal

Iam a mother. I have never been vaccinated myself. I believe deeply in informed consent. And I want to say clearly that I am hopeful about Bobby’s leadership at HHS. I want to believe that he can bring real transparency and accountability to a government that has too often cozied up to the corporations it is supposed to regulate.

But when I read the headlines about Trump’s “landmark” deal with Pfizer, I don’t feel hopeful. I feel misled.

We are told that Pfizer has committed $70 billion to research, development, and production here in the United States. That sounds impressive, like a historic victory for the American people. But the truth is, Pfizer already spends billions every year on research and development. That is simply the business they are in. Without that constant pipeline, they do not survive.

So what is really new here? Nothing at all. It is the same budget they were already going to spend, repackaged and sold as a bold new commitment. The difference now is that Pfizer gets something in return: tariff relief, political cover, and a government-backed direct-to-consumer program called TrumpRx.

That is what makes this deal so frustrating. Pfizer is not changing its behavior. They are not suddenly sacrificing profits or doing more for patients. They are being rewarded for business as usual, only now with added advantages that strengthen their market position even more. And we are being asked to celebrate it as if it is some great victory for ordinary families.

Every producer wants to cut out the middleman. I know this from my own life. As a meat producer, I do not want to pay one. As a vegetable producer, I do not want to pay one. As a content creator, I do not want to pay one. Nobody does. And now Pfizer, of all companies, is getting the official blessing of the US government to do exactly that.

This is the same Pfizer that misled the public during Covid. That is not a rumor, it is documented. Whistleblowers from trial sites described falsified records, patients who were not properly followed up after adverse events, and unqualified staff handling sensitive data. State attorneys general have accused Pfizer of downplaying serious risks, including heart inflammation in young men and pregnancy complications in women. 

Kansas has even claimed the company hid internal studies that showed risks while telling the public something different. And the most central promise of all, that the vaccines would stop transmission, simply was not true, even though the marketing never caught up to that reality.

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