Oklahoma Uses Schools to Line Trump’s Pockets in Shameless Bible Grift

Donald Trump’s Bible grift is about to pull in some stateside cash.

Oklahoma’s Department of Education on Monday opened bids to fill a 55,000 unit order of Bibles for classrooms across the state, but Superintendent Ryan Walters’s parameters for the allowed Bibles has become eyebrow-raisingly specific.

Bid documents indicate that the Bible must meet strict expectations, including that the text itself be the King James version, that it includes both the Old and New Testaments, and that the copies include core, historical elements of the U.S. educational system, including the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Oklahoma is also stipulating that the text be bound in leather or a leather-like material.

Curiously, that narrows the pool of applicants down to just one apparent choice: Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible.

“The RFP on its face seems fair, but with additional scrutiny, we can see there are very few Bibles on the market that would meet these criteria, and all of them have been endorsed by former President Donald Trump,” Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice Executive Director Colleen McCarty told The Oklahoma Watch.*

Trump made some quick cash on the rollout of the limited-edition, $60 Bible earlier this year when he co-promoted it alongside “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood. Another version, signed by the Republican presidential nominee, retailed for $1,000 a pop. The selling point for the print boiled down to a callback to Trump’s campaign: “We must make America pray again.” Prior to the Oklahoma bid, the far-flung grift raked in $300,000 in royalties, according to financial disclosures released by the former president.

In July, Walters unveiled new guidelines for teaching Bibles in classrooms—and consequences for districts that refused to participate.

“Every teacher, every classroom in the state, will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” Walters said at the time.

* This post originally misidentified the outlet that obtained the quote.

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has reportedly chatted with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman several times since leaving the Trump White House.

A source familiar with the discussions told Reuters that Kushner had discussed normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but would not specify whether the conversations were before or after the start of Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza.

Last month, Saudi Arabia said that it would not recognize Israel until the creation of a Palestinian state, which if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to be believed, is a long way off. This is in sharp contrast to Kushner’s pitch to move Palestinians to the Negev Desert and transform Gaza’s “very valuable” “waterfront property.”

Kushner served as a top Middle East adviser during Trump’s time in office, and was instrumental in installing the Abraham Accords, which saw Israel normalize ties with two other Gulf countries.

Kushner’s cozy relationship with MBS highlights how Donald Trump might choose to work with Saudi Arabia should he be reelected in November. Three sources close to Kushner said that they expect Trump’s son-in-law to be involved in any Saudi talks in an unofficial capacity. A spokesperson for Kushner denied that he was seeking any such role.

It’s not clear, however, that Kushner has any leverage in his relationship with MBS.

Last month, the Senate Finance Committee found that Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, had yet to return any profit to its foreign investors after receiving billions from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other foreign governments.

In his report, Senator Ron Wyden wrote that “sovereign wealth fund investments and prospective real estate deals give foreign governments leverage over the Trump family.”

Wyden explained that “a potential future Trump administration will have financial motives to make foreign policy decisions that may be counter to the national interest in order to ensure Kushner and Ivanka Trump continue to collect millions of dollars in fees from foreign governments through Affinity.”

When asked for more details about Kushner’s friendship with MBS, the source with knowledge of their conversations declined, saying, “It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to share that.”

In Idaho, a Republican state senator shouted, “Go back to where you came from” at a Native American candidate at a political forum Tuesday. 

Senator Dan Foreman was asked by an audience member at a bipartisan “Meet Your Candidates” event in Kendrick, Idaho, if discrimination existed in the state. He replied that it did not, Boise State Public Radio reported.

Trish Carter-Goodheart, who is running for a state House seat and is a member of the Nez Perce tribe, took issue with Foreman’s contention, and spoke up.

“When it was my turn to speak, I calmly pointed out that just because someone hasn’t personally experienced discrimination doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Racism and discrimination are real issues here in Idaho, as anyone familiar with our state’s history knows,” Carter-Goodheart said in a statement issued after the forum. 

“I highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality,” said Carter-Goodheart, whose words were corroborated by others in attendance at the event.  

Foreman then became agitated and shouted, “I’m so sick and tired of this liberal bullshit! Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” He reportedly then stormed out of the event.

The Nez Perce tribe, along with other Native tribes, have lived in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years, while Foreman was born in Illinois. The senator has a reputation for publicly shouting and using profanity, having yelled at students lobbying for birth control in Boise in 2018. 

Native American voters were pivotal in 2020’s election, proving to be a decisive factor in battleground states such as Wisconsin and Arizona. Racist outbursts won’t help Republicans win key votes even in small-town Idaho.

Melania Trump has come out as staunchly pro-choice—and her MAGA husband is pretending he agrees with her.

Ahead of the release of her upcoming memoir, Melania, the former first lady posted a video to her X account defending the “individual freedoms” of women to do what they wish with their bodies.

“Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard,” Melania said in a clip released Thursday. “Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth: individual freedom. What does ‘my body, my choice’ really mean?”

That stance was, apparently, totally fine with the aggressively anti-choice Republican presidential nominee. During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump casually confessed that he had encouraged his wife to “write what you believe” with regard to the new book.

“I said, ‘You have to stick with your heart,’” Trump told the conservative network. “I’ve said that to everybody, ‘You have to go with your heart.’ There are some people that are very, very far right on the issue, meaning without exceptions, and then there are other people who view it a little bit differently than that.”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Trump said he told Melania.

But that simple line caught significant backlash from his critics, who argued that his campaign, Project 2025, and the Republican Party have worked overtime to tell every other woman in America exactly what they should do with their bodies—whether that’s fighting for a national abortion ban or celebrating the encroaching stateside restrictions on other, adjacent reproductive procedures, such as IVF.

“Oh, so Melanie gets to choose but not millions of other women. Got it,” posted The Atlantic writer Jemele Hill.

“He has no problem with states telling your daughters what to do with their body, though,” posted national security attorney Bradley Moss.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed a preposterous conspiracy theory Thursday that someone at the very top created Hurricane Helene.

While many Republicans, like Donald Trump, have been quick to criticize the federal response to Hurricane Helene, Greene has started pointing fingers as to who could possibly be behind the weather event, which most normal people would understand to be caused by hot air and cold air.

“Yes they can control the weather,” Greene wrote in a post on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Many online were disturbed by Greene’s vague use of “they,” because outlandish accusations about controlling the climate are typically antisemitic conspiracy theories—to which Greene is no stranger.

Earlier that evening, Greene posted a photograph in an attempt to further push conspiracy theories about the area impacted by the deadly Category 4 storm. 

 “This is a map of hurricane affected areas with an overlay of electoral map by political party shows how hurricane devastation could affect the election,” she wrote.

It seems that Greene believes that Democrats somehow created the storm to try and harm Republican voters. This is a significant, and grotesque escalation from Trump’s already wild theory that the Biden administration purposefully neglected Republican areas in its federal response to the storm.

Of course, the only person who had ever done something like that is Trump himself, who reportedly withheld aid to California after the deadly wildfires in 2018, until his team could provide polling that people there had in fact voted for him.