Tag: donald trump

US Official Threatens: We Can Overthrow ‘Any Country We Want’

The US ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, threatened to overthrow the government in Athens if it didn’t follow orders from Washington.

Referring to the contemporary collapse of Romania’s government, Guilfoyle told a Greek minister, “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here”.

The US ambassador reportedly said this at a dinner in Athens this March, which was attended by multiple US and Greek officials, according to the Washington Post.

Guilfoyle’s remarks recalled a notorious comment from the world’s richest oligarch, Elon Musk.

In 2019, the US government backed a coup against Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist president, Evo Morales.

Musk strongly supported the putsch. On Twitter, a critic responded to the oligarch and accused the US government of “organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there”.

Musk replied, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it”.

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Trump Taps Intelligence Chief Jay Clayton As AI Czar, Brushing Off Calls To Slow Down

President Trump on Sunday named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton the White House’s AI czar. Clayton will hold both jobs, keeping the DNI post while spearheading the administration’s AI strategy.

Trump announced the move on Truth Social, saying the new “Super Intelligence Force” will “ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence.” Its vice chairs are FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, OPM Director Scott Kupor and Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael. Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also sit on it, and it reports to Trump and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

The force has 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of the technology and to recommend ways to strengthen the government’s response. Its charter, according to Implicator, calls for “preventing overregulation and regulatory capture that would stifle innovation and competition.”

Clayton takes a job last held by David Sacks, who stepped down as White House AI and crypto czar in March and now co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sacks is one of two outside advisers to the force, along with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Bessent had been mentioned for the job until Trump ruled it out on Sept. 25. “Scott Bessent will not be going to be Super Intelligence (SI) Czar,” Trump wrote. “Number One, he doesn’t want to. Number Two, he’s doing such a great job at Treasury, and that’s where I want to keep him! Why would I ever make such a change? Just more Fake News!” Axios reported Friday that Trump was expected to pick Clayton instead, and Trump has described Clayton as “a good man” for the role.

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Report: U.S. removes all bombers from UK base after suspected terror plot

The United States removed its B-1 bombers from the Royal Air Force (RAF) Fairford air base after a suspected terror incident, per media reports.

Five men were arrested on September 27th over explosive charges and later on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack after authorities received reports of three suspicious vehicles heading toward the base. Fuel was discovered, though no explosives were found. The men were later released on bail.

A sixth individual, a British-Iranian national, was also arrested and later released on a bail.

On Wednesday, United Kingdom Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC that there were “strong indications that Iran played a part” in the incident over the weekend.

The United States removed all of its B-1 bombers from the air base due to security concerns of suspected plots on the facility, American officials said Sunday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed that the American bombers had been redeployed to the U.S.

“While operational security precluded ⁠us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time, we can acknowledge now that all US bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have re-deployed to their home stations in the United States,” a Pentagon spokesman wrote in an email, per Reuters.

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Trump Admin Cancels $2.2 Billion In Phony Obamacare Enrollments — And Brokers Who Facilitated Them

The Trump administration’s latest action to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the Obamacare Exchanges entailed disenrolling people from insurance plans — costing taxpayers billions — who couldn’t identify themselves with proper documentation.

It’s the kind of move that would prompt ordinary taxpayers in the heartland to ask: Why didn’t they do that sooner?

Ghost Enrollees

In a fact sheet, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it had “canceled approximately 315,000 enrollments covering over 760,000 individuals after confirmation that these enrollments were unauthorized.” The action, taken after investigations in coordination with insurance companies, will result in approximately $2.2 billion in Obamacare subsidies being refunded to the federal government.

At the same time, CMS announced it had sent “569 notices of intent to terminate Exchange Agreements to agents and brokers that submitted 2026 applications [for coverage] without identifying applicant information, such as a Social Security number.” It said 66 of those agents and brokers had already been terminated, and more will likely follow as CMS receives responses from the relevant parties.

Questionable Enrollment Persists

CMS also published an interim final rule (i.e., one taking effect immediately) imposing a six-month moratorium on the new registration of brokers and agents, allowing CMS to implement another round of program integrity measures to guard against fraud by agents and brokers. (The moratorium will not apply in states that run their own Exchanges, which set their own rules regarding insurance brokers.) The move caused some pushback from the broker community, which said this punishes the innocent with the guilty since no new broker will be able to register until next February, after the open enrollment period for 2027.

In response, CMS cited data indicating that new agents for the current (i.e., 2026) plan year had significantly higher rates of questionable enrollment — for instance, a 2.8-time higher rate of “unresolved income verification issues,” a 2.7-time higher rate of “missing Social Security numbers,” a 2.6-time higher rate of “unresolved citizenship or immigration status verification issues,” and a 1.4-time higher rate of dual enrollment in Exchange coverage and Medicaid. To CMS, these data points suggest that new brokers may be disproportionately seeking to enroll ineligible individuals primarily for the commissions, and justified the registration moratorium as a preventive measure.

Prior Government Audit

While taking action to prevent fraud is always welcome, did these particular steps come too late? CMS’s latest announcement raises questions about when and why brokers are being terminated or reinstated.

Specifically, an audit released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last December addressed this issue. It noted that, in October 2024, CMS “suspended 850 agents and brokers from the federal Marketplace [i.e., Exchange] for reasonable suspicion of fraudulent or abusive conduct related to unauthorized enrollments or unauthorized plan switches. However, in May 2025, CMS officials told us that the agency reinstated all these suspended agents and brokers to better fulfill the agency’s statutory and regulatory procedures.” 

It isn’t clear why CMS reinstated the brokers last May and whether any of the reinstated brokers were among those who received new termination notices over the summer. But the reinstatements came at a time when the federal government continued to struggle with program integrity efforts.

The recent interim final rule noted that in 2025, CMS received approximately 300,000 “complaints attesting to unauthorized enrollments or unauthorized plan switching.” A separate GAO report, released in July, disclosed a total of 299,604 such complaints last year — an increase from 258,424 in 2024. Thankfully, CMS said in the interim final rule that these trends have reversed in 2026. But given the persistence of eligibility fraud through 2025, CMS should make its reasoning behind last year’s broker reinstatements and this year’s subsequent terminations clear — and if it doesn’t, Congress should ask those questions on behalf of the American people.

As last year’s GAO report noted, a total of 19 of 20 fictitious enrollees were able to obtain subsidized coverage from the federal Exchange. Taxpayers should find that unacceptable, and most ordinary Americans would, regardless of political party. It’s why Washington should continue digging into fraud and demanding accountability. We the people deserve no less.

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President Trump Calls for Mandatory Prison Sentences for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security Fraudsters – Says Crooked Politicians Who Cover It Up Must Face Real Consequences

President Donald Trump is calling on Congress to finally put real teeth behind the government’s war on fraud, mandatory prison sentences for criminals caught stealing from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

In a video released Saturday, Trump demanded legislation establishing mandatory minimum sentences for fraudsters who loot the federal programs millions of Americans depend on.

Under Trump’s proposal, probation would no longer be an option for covered fraud offenses.

“Today, I’m calling on Congress to pass legislation to address fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs,” Trump said.

“First, Congress must impose mandatory minimum sentences on fraudsters who steal from critical benefit programs designed to take care of the sick, feed the hungry, care for our children, and protect our senior citizens’ retirements.”

“Under our proposal, probation is no longer an option for the fraudsters. If you steal from the American people, you will go to prison and for a long period of time. And the more you steal, the longer you’ll stay in that prison,” he said. “If you’re a convicted fraudster who gets caught stealing from the American people a second time, your sentence will be doubled.”

Then he went after the politicians.

“Second, Congress must make sure that crooked and corrupt politicians who willfully turn a blind eye to fraud finally face real consequences,” Trump said.

“Under our proposal, if a state or local politician knows about fraud and has the ability to stop it, but does nothing about it, they can be personally liable for the full loss of the American taxpayers’ money that they should have stopped and they should have saved.”

The White House published the president’s announcement Saturday under the title “Minimum Sentences on Fraudsters.”

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Trump DOJ to Assess Claims Watergate Prosecutors Used ‘Lawfare’ to Bring Down Richard Nixon

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is taking a fresh look at allegations of misconduct by prosecutors involved in the Watergate investigation that brought down President Richard Nixon more than half a century ago.

Former Nixon White House aide Geoff Shepard recently delivered a two-hour presentation to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility outlining his case that Nixon and other Watergate defendants were denied fair treatment.

The 78-page presentation, titled “Watergate as Lawfare,” alleged that special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski improperly communicated with judges and withheld evidence from defendants.

Shepard previously sought a DOJ investigation into his allegations, but the Biden regime declined to pursue it further back in 2022.

A DOJ spokesman stressed that the latest development does not yet constitute a formal investigation.

“Given his expertise and scholarship on Watergate, he was recently invited to give a presentation,” the spokesman said.

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Cotton fires back at Trump, says he won’t support making Daylight Saving Time permanent

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., fired back at President Trump criticizing him for blocking a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent in the U.S.

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter. Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first,” Cotton wrote.

Trump posted on Truth Social about Cotton on Saturday, prompting Cotton to respond. 

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RTX’s Raytheon Awarded $24.4B Missile Contract as Trump Finally Admits Stockpiles “A Little Bit Lower”

The Pentagon on Thursday announced a massive new defense contract at a moment many Congressional members are concerned over America’s dwindling arsenal of both defensive and offensive missiles and weapons systems.

Raytheon, an RTX unit, has been awarded a $24.4 billion contract for the accelerated production of SM-6 missiles, amid the scramble to replace them in the wake of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury bombing campaign of Iran.

A Pentagon statement described the missiles as “critical anti-air and anti-surface warfare munition” and previewed that “this five-year agreement, with two additional option years, will drive faster production.”

The announcement further described that the deal “provides the defense industry with the long-term predictability needed to expand workforce capacity and secure critical supply chains.”

Additionally, “The Navy said the multiyear contract is meant to provide a steady and reliable supply of the Standard Missile-6 interceptors, which can carry out both offensive strikes and missile defense missions.”

President Trump has stretching back over weeks and months consistently denied that the Pentagon is suffering a weapons shortage due to the Iran war. Instead, he has blamed any shortfall or stockpile concerns on his predecessor Biden and his Ukraine war policies.

But certainly the Pentagon is acting like there’s a problem, given it is quickly handing out these large contracts in order to establish “faster production” and greater “long-term predictability”. This after a mid-July report from the Pentagon’s inspector general did point to a serious and growing problem.

Trump had slammed the report as “mostly fake news” at the time; however, just this week he finally did acknowledge that some munitions “are a little bit lower” in the wake of the seven-month long Iran conflict. Trump’s new remark this week is as follows:

“Some forms of ammunition are a little bit lower than other forms,” the president said in an interview with TIME magazine published Thursday, adding: “We’re stocking up at levels we’ve never done before.“

Some critics among MAGA have underscored that the munitions crisis reveals an abandonment of ‘America First’ policy, also given the immense amounts of interceptors expected on Israel and Gulf allies of late.

Ultimately the only winners in all of this are Israel and the major defense contractors, who will continue to see huge returns with the help of the US taxpayer.

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Trump Says Inflation Will Pay Off The $40 Trillion Debt “Very Rapidly”

President Trump thinks ‘certain levels’ of inflation could take care of the $40 trillion national debt. 

“You know, inflation. Certain levels of inflation will also pay off that debt very rapidly. Very rapidly,” he told TIME in an interview published Thursday, after the outlet pointed out has grown by about $11 trillion over his five years in office. In response, Trump first blamed Joe Biden, then the Fed, then hinted at a plan he wouldn’t share.

“I know I’m the best in the world,” Trump said. “The best – I don’t want to tell you what those means are, but you can pay off the debt through other means. But the one thing that you can do is pay it off through growth, and we’ve never had growth like this.”

Later he circled back, saying “the growth is going to pay off the debt” and that the Fed’s hikes were “hurting our country more than inflation is hurting our country.”

He didn’t say what level of inflation he had in mind, or whether he wants the Fed to tolerate more of it. Earlier in the same interview, though, he blamed Biden for “the biggest inflation in history” and said he “inherited the greatest inflation in history,” adding that “the only thing I have to get down now is the gas.”

Headline CPI rose 3.4% in the 12 months through August, with core at 2.4%, according to the BLS. On Sept. 16 the Fed raised rates for the first time since July 2023 – a unanimous quarter-point hike to 3.75%-4% that included Trump’s own pick for chair, Kevin Warsh – and penciled in another before year-end. Trump told TIME he “probably would have voted against the board” if he were Warsh, and has called for rates of 1% “or less.”

On Thursday, the day TIME published the interview, the 10-year Treasury yield touched 5.34%, its highest since 2002. It closed at 5.24%.

He’s Floated This Before

None of this is new for the self-described “king of debt.” In May 2016 he told CNBC the US could buy back its own bonds at a discount if rates went up. That was widely read as a default threat, so a few days later he went on CNN to walk it back. “You never have to default because you print the money, I hate to tell you, OK?” he said.

A month before that, he told the Washington Post he could wipe out what was then a $19 trillion debt “over a period of eight years” – a debt that has since more than doubled.

Buybacks are back, too. After the debt crossed $40 trillion and long-dated yields kept climbing, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tripled the cap on the first expanded buyback to $6 billion. As we noted at the time, yields surged anyway, since $6 billion barely registers against more than $2 trillion in gross issuance a year.

Bessent, for his part, prefers to talk about growth. In June 2025 he told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that “everything has been alarmist” on inflation and that the US would never default. And the day after Treasury reported the $40 trillion milestone, he went on CNBC to say there was “nothing magic” about the number and “we can grow our way out of that.”

The Part He Left Out

Last year we ran a piece arguing Bessent was effectively putting the national debt on an adjustable-rate mortgage by leaning on floating-rate financing, which also projected the debt would top $40 trillion by the end of fiscal 2026 – it got there in mid-August, about six weeks ahead of schedule.

Back in April 2025, Bloomberg’s Simon White made the case that higher inflation and a weaker dollar – where US policy seemed to be headed – were consistent with a falling debt burden. But he warned that unlike Britain’s post-WWII “beautiful deleveraging,” erratic policymaking could wreck trust in the dollar system, spark capital flight and end up adding to the debt.

Nick Giambruno spelled out the mechanics in July: financial repression, where the government keeps interest rates below inflation and the difference quietly moves wealth from savers to the Treasury. With 9% inflation and 4% rates, he noted, that’s a 5% transfer every year, and it compounds.

It has worked before. A 2011 BIS paper estimated negative real rates wiped out debt worth 2-3% of GDP a year in the US and UK between the late 1940s and the 1970s. But that was under Bretton Woods, with interest-rate caps, captive domestic buyers and capital controls – and the paper found financial repression works best “when accompanied by a steady dose of inflation.”

The catch is that it only works if the Treasury can borrow below the inflation rate. Right now it can’t: the 10-year yields nearly two points more than headline CPI, interest on the debt already runs over $1 trillion a year, and everything that matures gets rolled at today’s rates.

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Clinton-Era Laws Passed 30 Years Ago Enabled Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda. Here’s How We Turn the Page.

The more the American public sees of President Donald Trump’s hardline, anti-immigrant policies in action — the deaths, military-style invasions of neighborhoods, and mass detention and deportations — the more his approval on the issue drops.

If this trend sounds familiar, it’s because a similar wave of disapproval played out in Trump’s first term. Despite that backlash, Trump returned to office embracing even more extreme measures.

We must finally confront and uproot the core of the U.S.’s anti-immigrant underbelly, which is largely reflected in the racially motivated notion of criminalization.

Trump was not the first politician to exploit the concept of criminality, and he certainly won’t be the last. Criminalizing narratives are deeply planted in the American psyche, and they have commonly acted as the vessel through which white supremacist rhetoric and policy are ingrained into our culture and laws.

In the late 1980’s, criminalization went mainstream in the form of racist dog whistles, particularly those hinging on vile anti-Blackness deployed by politicians seeking to activate white voters. In the decades since, conservative and liberal leaders alike more purposefully extended this criminality framework to immigration — so much so that it’s now perhaps the primary driver of the public immigration debate.

Consider how Americans of all political stripes are often presented with the binary choice of supporting the “right” type of immigrant. In this oversimplification, immigrants fall into categories like “good” or “bad,” “legal” or “illegal,” “deserving” or “undeserving.”

Trump did not invent these narratives. They’ve underpinned both major parties’ politics of immigration for several decades, despite their basis in fiction and fear-mongering rather than evidence and compassion, or the fact these narratives are weaponized against non-white immigrants who for centuries have disproportionately faced restrictive and punitive policies for the act of seeking relief in this country.

But Trump’s partisan opposition, despite its massive opportunities in the face of unpopular, hardline policies, has repeatedly failed to capture the public’s long-term support on immigration. Too often, Democrats repackage the same old criminalizing narratives — often in softer terms, but always in line with the oversimplified good-or-bad thinking. This lack of imagination is reflected in the nearly annual bipartisan votes to increase funding for federal enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, as well as Democratic leaders’ messaging and policies.

Take, for example, former President Barack Obama’s push to deport “felons, not families”; Joe Biden squandering his mandate to reverse the cruelty of Trump’s first term by continuing many Trump policies, like Title 42 and the backing of for-profit immigrant detention; or Kamala Harris, in her presidential bid, focusing much of her immigration rhetoric on “securing” the border.

It’s a toxic cycle: The public rightfully disapproves of the atrocities of anti-immigrant policies; in response, liberals roll out unimaginative plans hinged on outdated narratives; and finally, in the vacuum created by the lack of any tangible, pro-immigrant vision, the right recaptures the public’s attention with fear mongering and a sensationalist focus on crime and the border.

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