Trump’s Newest Deal is His Shadiest Yet

Donald Trump just announced a massive new deal with a man connected to a $600,000 payment to the FBI informant convicted of lying to the FBI about Hunter Biden’s business decisions.

On Tuesday the president-elect announced a $20 billion investment from Emirati company DAMAC to build new data centers throughout the Unied States, according to CNBC.

The company was founded by Trump’s friend billionaire Hussain Sajwani. He and DAMAC are pledging “at least” $20 billion toward the centers, according to Trump. “They may go double, or even somewhat more than double, that amount of money,” the president-elect said. The “first phase” will begin in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Oklahoma. Trump has overstated similar investments in the past.

In 2020 FBI informant Alexander Smirnov received $600,000 from Economic Transformation Technologies, or ETT. He began lying to the FBI about Hunter and Joe Biden that year, claiming they were engaged in bribery. DAMAC chair Farooq Arjomand is a large ETT shareholder, and has strong ties to Trump via Sajwani.

This is the second high-profile investment announcement Trump has made since his election victory, with Japanese billionaire investor Masayoshi Son pledging $100 billion in American spending in December.

Donald Trump delivered incoherent remarks Tuesday while railing against what he imagined were Joe Biden’s energy and water conservation policies.

In his first address since the results of the 2024 presidential election were certified, Trump responded to the Biden administration’s new standards requiring newly manufactured or imported tankless gas water heaters to waste less heat by using condensing technology.

So what’s the problem with that? Well, Trump couldn’t actually describe it, so he made something up.

“He wants all gas heaters out of your homes and apartments. He wants ’em to be replaced by essentially electric heaters,” Trump said.

Crucially, condensing tankless water heaters use gas, not electricity. But, let’s put that aside for a moment.

According to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, more than 60 percent of tankless gas water heaters sold today are compliant with the new standard because they already use condensing technology. It’s also worth noting that tankless water heaters are far less common than normal gas tank or electric tank water heaters, which had new standards set in April. 

So, while Biden’s new rule might make non-condensing tankless water heaters less available, perhaps compelling some to buy electric or heat pump systems, it doesn’t mean that anyone is coming to replace gas water heaters with electric models. 

That didn’t stop Trump from going on an extended rant about it, though, which is included in full because that’s how inane it all is. 

“I don’t know what it is with ‘electric.’ This guy loves ‘electric.’ We’re going to be ending the electric car mandate quickly, by the way,” Trump rambled. “This guy loves electric, and he—we don’t have enough electricity, and then we have AI where we need more. And he wants to get, he wants everybody to have an electric heater instead of a gas heater.

“Gas heater is much less expensive. The heat is much better. It’s a much better heat. Uh, as the expression goes, ‘You don’t itch.’ Does anybody have a heater, where you go and you’re scratching? That’s what they want you to have, they don’t want you to have the gas where you don’t have the problems of the electric,” Trump continued. “And the source is plentiful. They’re much cheaper to operate, they’re much better, they work much better, they look much better.”

While condensing models have a higher upfront cost, consumers may save money over the product’s lifetime because it uses its own exhaust gas to help heat the water, wasting less energy. Switching to a condensing heater will also help lower greenhouse gas emissions, something Trump, who is set on ramping up oil and natural gas production, couldn’t care less about. 

“Sixty percent of homes and apartments have gas heaters. He wants them all removed quickly, these people are crazy. There’s something wrong with ’em. There’s something wrong with ’em,” Trump muttered solemnly.

Trump wasn’t done inventing energy polices there. He went on to talk about other appliances that the Biden administration has supposedly tampered with, as well. 

“They also want to go back, and they have already started that too, when you buy a faucet no water comes out, because they want to preserve. Even in areas where you have so much water you don’t know what to do. It’s called rain, it comes down, it comes down from heaven,” Trump said.  

“And they want to do ‘no water comes out of the shower.’ It goes drip … drip … drip. So what happens? You’re in the shower 10 times as long, you know?”

He also claimed that “no water comes out of the faucet,” which is bad for when “you wanna wash your hands.”

“I, as you know, I ended that policy. You can have all the water you want, makes no difference. [inaudible] Especially in some areas, we have so much water, we don’t know what to do with it,” Trump said. 

Faucets were only the tip of the iceberg for the president-elect.

“They want very, very little water to go into your dishwasher. Almost none. And you know what people do? They just keep pressing, pressing, pressing. Keep it going. They end up using more water. Likewise, washing machines.

“We’re a party of common sense, and things that I’m telling you right now are all about common sense,” Trump said. 

Unsurprisingly, a number of water heater manufacturers that produce condensing water heaters that meet the new standards, such as A.O. Smith, Bradford White, and Rheem, supported the new requirements, a Department of Energy spokesperson told Nexstar. Also unsurprisingly, the American Gas Association criticized it, saying that it would lead to a dearth of more affordable non-condensing water heaters. 

Trump’s railing against electric appliances coincides directly with his goals of increasing oil and natural gas production—but is ultimately a bad long-term investment in an increasingly warming world that will use less and less gas every year.

This story has been updated. 

Donald Trump Jr. paid a visit to Greenland Tuesday, flying to the territory on his father’s private plane, and seemed to give weight to the president-elect’s half-baked plan to acquire it—despite the fact that it is currently an autonomous territory within Denmark.

While the younger Trump didn’t have any plans to meet with political leaders, he brought along pundit Charlie Kirk and Trump administration staffer Sergio Gor on a trip he described as tourism.

“We’re really happy to be here. We’re here as tourists to see this incredible place,” Trump Jr. told a local broadcaster. He said he had spoken to his father, “and he says hello to everyone in Greenland.”

Later, Trump Jr. visited a restaurant with his friends and called his father on speakerphone.

“I just want to say that it’s a very special place. It needs security for itself but it also needs security very much for the world, the location, really,” Trump said through his son’s phone. “You see the people and the ships sailing around and they’re not the right ships. They’re not the ships you want to know about. So, we need security and our country needs it and the whole world needs it.”

The visit follows a Truth Social post from the president-elect Monday night where he reiterated his plan to annex Greenland and seemed to be under the impression that its people were on board with the idea, despite the fact that Greenland’s own leaders disagree.

“I don’t want to be a pawn in Trump’s hot dreams of expanding his empire to include our country,” Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, said. Last month, Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede said that the island is not for sale.

What started as blatant trolling by Trump appears to be being entertained as a serious plan. The president-elect has also discussed annexing Canada, even inviting Canadian businessman and Shark Tank panelist Kevin O’Leary to Mar-a-Lago to discuss the plan. Trump has also floated taking over the Panama Canal zone, which was predictably met with hostility from Panama’s president. Is this what the next four years will look like?

It’s official: Mark Zuckerberg is turning Meta into yet another propaganda machine for Donald Trump and the far right. 

In a video statement published Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be enacting a series of policy changes purportedly for the purpose of fostering free speech, but his declaration devolved into an explanation of just how spineless he intends to be in the face of a second Trump administration. 

As reasons for allowing more unfettered speech, Zuckerberg declared that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” and that there has been “widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” 

He announced that Meta will end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of community notes. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Zuckberg said.

He also made sure to flag that his decision was a direct response to Trump’s return to the White House. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward prioritizing speech,” he said.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg continued. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

In a statement, Meta referred specifically to Elon Musk’s X, which has essentially become an unusable cesspool of misinformation and hate speech, as an example of the triumph of community notes. 

“We’ve seen this approach work on X—where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” the statement said.

Zuckerberg also declared that Meta would “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” 

His specific reference to these two “topics,” which encompass vulnerable communities often targeted by Trump and other conservatives, signals his complete submission to the far right’s mission to steer public discourse straight into hell. As if the repeated references to the dangers of “legacy media” didn’t indicate that strongly enough. 

Zuckerberg’s statement also demonstrates a willful ignorance of the way misinformation and hate speech about these issues endanger the lives of people offline for the sake of fostering conversation about whether all people should have the rights and dignities of others. Over the summer, Trump’s racist lies about pet-eating immigrants spread across the internet ecosystem like wildfire, and even though they weren’t based on anything at all, they were treated as if they were as worthy as any actual reporting about immigration. This is the kind of internet Zuckerberg said he hopes to foster.

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions; shut down people with different ideas,” he said in his video message. 

Zuckerberg also said he would be changing enforcement measures, relying on users to report potentially harmful content before it could be addressed, and “dialing back” content filters.

“It means we’re gonna catch less bad stuff,” Zuckerberg said. “But it will also reduce the number of innocent [people’s] posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

It remains to be seen if allowing more content will extend to LGBTQ-related hashtags, which Meta has reportedly restricted for months.

Zuckerberg spoke openly about hiding political content from users during the election season “because it was making people stressed.” But now that an authoritarian is coming into power, it seems the billionaire has changed his tune. “It feels like we’re in a new era now,” Zuckerberg explained, saying that “civic content” would be phased back in across Meta’s platforms.  

During an appearance Tuesday on Fox & Friends, Meta policy chief Joel Kaplan made it clear that the decision to roll back restrictions was a direct response to Trump. “There is a real opportunity here, with President Trump coming into office, with his commitment to free expression, for us to get back to those values,” he said. 

Zuckerberg’s feckless kowtowing comes one day after Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, one of Trump’s close allies, would be joining the company’s board of directors. 

Trump’s biggest congressional obstacle may be MAGA diehards.

Trump and the hard-right House Freedom Caucus have been politically misaligned of late, according to reporting from Punchbowl News. The rift began when some caucus members chose to endorse Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley over Trump way back in the GOP primary. It’s only gotten worse since then.

During last week’s Speaker debacle, the Freedom Caucus Ralph Norman and Keith Self had to be personally lobbied over the phone by the president-elect himself to begrudgingly cast their votes for Mike Johnson. And they also seem to have a problem with how Trump’s congressional liaison and former HFC member James Braid is conducting funding negotiations, taking issue with his calling in to a meeting to lobby members on freezing the debt ceiling. This was the same day 38 Republicans, many of whom were Freedom Caucus members, defied Trump and voted against the Continuing Resolution he had endorsed.

The debt ceiling keeps coming up as a major point of contention between Trump and HFC, as its members don’t seem to believe that Trump is serious about making the $2 trillion of budget cuts that Trump and billionaire friend Elon Musk have been talking about for months. This recent pattern of disagreement shows that the HFC won’t be so quick to blindly do Trump’s bidding—which could cause him some major problems on the way to getting his “big, beautiful bill” passed.