Trump’s Latest Ridiculous Proposal Is a Huge Gift to Billionaires

Donald Trump promised Tuesday to give special treatment to billionaires.

“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “GET READY TO ROCK!!!”

If this strangely broad offer sounds specially designed to delight billionaire and official presidential hanger-on Elon Musk, that’s probably because it is.

“This is awesome,” Musk replied in a post on X. Yeah dude, for you—and for any other government contractor or company that plans to fill the holes created by Musk and Trump’s plot to dissolve essential features of the federal government. Yeah, those guys stand to make a killing. How “awesome.”

It’s unclear what kinds of companies or individuals would be eligible for this offer, or what kinds of projects they would produce. It’s possible that Trump plans to implement this offer as part of “Drill, Baby, Drill!” his stupidly named plan to expand fossil fuel production and gut environmental protections.

For example, in return for a hefty investment from an energy company, Trump could revoke certain pollution controls that prevent corporations harvesting natural gas from contaminating groundwater supplies.

If this proposal is approved, the responsibility for executing his lofty promises and expediting production will fall to Lee Zeldin, the unqualified loyalist Trump has nominated to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

It’s also unclear whether this would affect existing programs incentivising investment, such as the much-beloved CHIPS Act, which created subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. Trump recently called the CHIPS Act a “bad deal,” shortly before House Speaker Mike Johnson announced his intention to revoke it (though he later made a limp attempt to walk back that particular comment).

Crucially, it’s not apparent that Trump has the authority to make the offer in the first place—but he sure has done it before.

At a meeting at Mar-a-Lago in April, Trump promised oil executives and lobbyists that he would roll back crucial environmental regulations, in return for a small campaign contribution of $1 billion, according to The New York Times.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday on Trump’s mass deportation plans, Republican Senator John Kennedy, as is his wont, pestered a witness with questions he didn’t care to hear answers to.

The hearing, titled “How Mass Deportations Will Separate American Families, Harm Our Armed Forces, and Devastate Our Economy,” focused on the damaging effects of Trump’s proposed immigration agenda. But in one bizarre line of questioning, Kennedy asked the same question over and over again while pretending not to hear the answer.

Witness Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, testified that a mass deportation campaign could cost as much as $1 trillion and lead to a loss in total gross domestic product of 4.2 to 6.8 percent.

Louisiana’s John Kennedy was evidently more concerned with a November 2022 tweet in which Reichlin-Melnick criticized Texas and Louisiana for taking legal action against the Department of Homeland Security “for NOT expelling Haitian migrants to Haiti under Title 42,” when, in reality, he wrote, Title 42 expulsions were down “because Haitians stopped crossing illegally!”

“Both Texas and Louisiana have their knives out for Black immigrants,” Reichlin-Melnick posted at the time. “Once Haitians stopped crossing irregularly, it’s so telling that the plaintiffs once again demand that a federal court wield Title 42 against Haitians to stop them from entering at ports of entry too.”

Kennedy, apparently offended by the criticism from over two years ago, asked whether Reichlin-Melnick remembered the tweet. The witness said he did not recall the exact context.

“Who in Texas had their ‘knives out’ for Black immigrants?” Kennedy asked nonetheless, and Reichlin-Melnick began to respond before he was interrupted by Kennedy, who ordered, “Give me a name.”

As Kennedy spoke over him—intoning, “Give me a name. Give me a name. Give me a name”—Reichlin-Melnick answered that he was likely referring to the states’ attorneys general, mentioning Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by name.

“Give me a name,” Kennedy continued.

“I just did,” said Reichlin-Melnick.

“You don’t have a name, do you?” asked Kennedy.

“I just said Ken Paxton,” replied Reichlin-Melnick.

“You don’t have a name, do you?” asked Kennedy, again.

“I just said Ken Paxton,” repeated Reichlin-Melnick.

This is not the first time Kennedy has malfunctioned, as progressive outlet Heartland Signal put it, while badgering a congressional witness. In September, while grandstanding during a hearing on hate crimes against Arab and Jewish Americans, the senator accused Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. Kennedy spoke over Berry’s repeated denials, making headlines for telling her she should “hide [her] head in a bag.”

One of Donald Trump’s former lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro, is in further trouble for taking part in a fake electors plot to overturn the 2020 election.

Wisconsin has filed 10 new felony charges against Chesebro, fellow Trump lawyer James Troupis, and Michael Roman, head of Trump’s 2020 Election Day operations, for their role in trying to overturn the presidential election results in the state. The charges include 10 counts of forgery, for the 10 fake electors they duped.

In June 2024, all three were charged with forgery for attempting to send fake certified elector documents—which falsely claimed Wisconsin and Michigan electors chose Trump—to Washington, D.C., ahead of 2020’s presidential electoral certification process. Tuesday’s charges come from interviews with fake electors who say that they were duped by the trio.

According to the charging documents, the fake electors were told that what they were doing was legal, with historical precedent from John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon’s election in Hawaii. None of them believed that their signatures were going to be submitted to the president of the Senate during election certification on January 6, 2021, and they did not give their consent for that, either.

Chesebro is cooperating with the state of Wisconsin but is still facing charges elsewhere. He’s a co-conspirator in Georgia’s fake elector case, where he has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the state. He’s also facing charges for fake elector shenanigans and cooperating with the state in Michigan. Since all of these cases are at the state level, Chesebro can’t be pardoned by Trump and ultimately, if he’s found guilty, could go to prison.

House Republicans are planning to have their annual retreat at President-elect Donald Trump’s golf resort Doral, Florida, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday.

This kind of corruption is nothing new for Republicans.

The Republican National Committee held several meetings at Trump National Doral in early 2020, and the first GOP meeting was held there in 2018, raking in a whopping $630,000 for Trump’s resort, The Washington Post reported at the time. The RNC spent nearly $500,000 on rental and catering alone, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

Trump’s own 2024 campaign readily poured money back into the candidate’s businesses, shelling out around $60,000 between the Doral golf resort and the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas by June.

During Trump’s first administration, foreign governments and their associated entities spent more than $7.8 million on Trump’s many businesses, chief among them being Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., according to a damning report released by House Democrats in January. Ironically, this is the very same kind of corruption House Republicans have been desperate, and unsuccessful, to pin on President Joe Biden and his family members.

In 2019, Trump had pitched holding the G7 Global Summit at Trump Doral, before bipartisan criticism caused him to back off the idea.

The retreat is currently scheduled for January 27 through 29. While not all of the 220 Republicans representatives are required to go, or stay at Trump National Doral, it’s worth noting that room rates go for between $460 to $1,000 per night. Let’s hope the president-elect can at least get them a good discount.

Kash Patel was among 43 White House staffers whose phone records were obtained by the Justice Department during a leak investigation during Donald Trump’s first term, CNN reports, citing the department’s inspector general.

The investigation, which also included two members of Congress, was conducted secretly. Patel, whom Trump has chosen to replace Christopher Wray as FBI director, was not named in the report, nor were the two congresspeople. But two anonymous sources told CNN that the phone records of Patel and Democratic Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell were among those obtained.

The DOJ also went after the email addresses of journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, according to the report. At the time, the Trump administration was desperately trying to stop leaks of sensitive information, and were focusing on people who may have had security access.

An investigation based only on “the close proximity in time between access to classified information and subsequent publication of the information … risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” the inspector general wrote, adding that this kind of investigation creates “the appearance of inappropriate interference by the executive branch in legitimate oversight activity by the legislative branch.”

Patel may have been just one part of a broad investigation, but the fact that he was among those suspected of leaks calls into question why he’s now Trump’s pick to head the government’s largest law enforcement agency. If Wray is removed and Patel is confirmed to take over the FBI, such investigations might become the norm. The Trump gadfly only has three years as a federal prosecutor to account for his law enforcement experience, and seems ready to embark on haphazard attempts to prosecute the president’s real and imagined enemies.

Already, Patel may have preemptively undermined those prosecutions with the enemies list that he’s published. Any of his legal targets could use it to make a case of malicious prosecution if Patel tried to haul them into court. Patel has already sent a legal threat to one of his critics, signaling how he’d do Trump’s bidding at the FBI without a pesky Justice Department to conduct oversight.