Trump Wants to Retake One of His Biggest Corruption Tools in D.C.

Donald Trump is looking to reclaim one of his most useful tools of corruption: the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the president-elect’s real estate company is in negotiations to take back the hotel, which is owned by the federal government but currently leased to the Hilton hotel chain. Eric Trump met with the bank in control of the hotel’s lease at Mar-a-Lago this week, according to sources who spoke with the Journal, although the discussions were inconclusive.

The Trump International Hotel was a hotbed for corruption and foreign conflicts of interest during Trump’s first term. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, for example, spent at least $259,724 at the hotel in 2017 while he was under investigation for money laundering. He used the presidential suite, which at the time was $10,000 per night.

Saudi officials spent at least $164,929 from late 2017 through 2018, and Trump approved a $1.3 billion weapons sale to the country shortly afterward. In all, at least six governments spent more than $750,000 at the hotel during Trump’s first administration.

“Anyone looking to curry favor with his administration could simply walk over to his namesake hotel a couple of blocks from the White House and flash cash,” executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Noah Bookbinder said in 2021.

The hotel is now a Waldorf Astoria. The Trumps could reacquire it for at least $300 million.

Immediately after Donald Trump was finally sentenced in his hush-money case, the president-elect decided to try and make some money off it.

On Friday morning, after Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to unconditional discharge, a sentence without imprisonment, fines, or probation, the president-elect fired off a fundraising email to supporters asking them to “stand with him.”

“They’re trying to sabotage the Presidential Transition process. They’re trying to END the presidency as we know it—just before I take office,” Trump wrote. “But together, we will put a stop to the LAWFARE and make our country GREAT once again.”

The email linked to a website with the message “After my RIGGED SENTENCING, do you still Stand with Trump? RESPOND TO TRUMP,” with suggested donations ranging from $10 to $3,300 listed below it.

It’s hard to see how a sentence that carries no real penalties would “end the presidency,” but Trump has repeatedly claimed that the case, which resulted in 34 felony convictions, was rigged against him. The president-elect has not hesitated to use news about him, even negative developments, to solicit money from his supporters, and is not above inciting rage for money.

After he was found guilty in the hush-money case in May, Trump also sent out a fundraising email right away. The president-elect used the July assassination attempt against him to sell grotesque themed merchandise, including gaudy sneakers. He invoked guillotines in a July fundraising email, and even used a Valentine’s Day message to his wife, Melania, to raise money last February.

Trump has never missed an opportunity to grift, and his second term will likely be no different. And now that he has escaped consequences in all of the criminal cases against him, there won’t be any limits on how low he will stoop to make a dollar.

Republicans aren’t interested in providing disaster aid to Californians suffering from the devastating wildfires, unless those Californians are ready to do exactly what they say. 

During an interview on Fox Business Friday, Representative Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, said GOP lawmakers would be reluctant to help Californians who had been affected by the wildfires because they don’t agree with California’s policies. 

“People are losing their home insurance coverage for fire because of policies that the state government’s doing, and if they want the money, then there should be consequences where they have to change their policies,” said Davidson.

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo noted that Warren’s Californian colleagues would continue to push for aid to “states prone to disasters” to have money allocated to dealing with those disasters.  

“Yeah, but California wants the money without changing the policies that are making the problem bad or worse, and I don’t see how Republicans could possibly support that,” Davidson said. “I mean, we support the people that are plagued by disaster, but we have to put pressure on the California government to change course here.”

It’s important to note that there are no “states prone to disasters” anymore, there are only states. Every corner of the United States, even those that are not historically affected by severe weather, will only continue to experience escalating natural disasters as climate change worsens. Earlier this year, Asheville, North Carolina, which was previously considered a potential climate safe haven, was devastated by catastrophic flooding after it was struck by Hurricane Helene.

It seems that Republicans such as Davidson, ready to play politics with disaster aid, are taking a page out of Donald Trump’s book. While he was president, Trump was reportedly hesitant to send aid to areas where people voted against him, such as wildfire-stricken California. Trump had to be shown a map of Trump voters in Orange County before he agreed to send help. 

Bartiromo asked Davidson whether there had been any Republican “pushback” against sending aid to California. 

“Yeah I think so, and I think, how do you do that?” Davidson replied. “Because you don’t want to send the message to families, ‘Oh, we’re not going to take care of you!’ They certainly didn’t have a problem saying that to the people in western North Carolina, uh, in the Biden administration.

“Instead, the Biden administration said, ‘Oh, we’re gonna take care of everything! And so, different response when it’s out there where the Hollywood elites live. So that’s disappointing from the Biden administration. Help is on the way from President Trump and a new administration,” he continued.

“But when it comes to congressional funding, the idea that we’re going to have an open checkbook, no matter how bad your policies are, is crazy,” Davidson added.

It’s unclear what Davidson is referring to here. The Biden administration approved more than $300 million for emergency assistance across North Carolina, which included $118 million in individual assistance to more than 87,600 households. The only people convinced that they weren’t providing aid were the GOP politicians hoping to use Hurricane Helene as political fodder for the forthcoming election. 

Also, for what it’s worth, the only one threatening not to take care of people suffering from disaster is Davidson. If Davidson doesn’t want to give the impression that that’s his “message,” one possible way to get around that is to say something else.

The Supreme Court signaled on Friday that it is considering upholding Congress’s ban on TikTok until the platform separates itself from its parent company, Chinese-owned ByteDance.

The court declined to pause the law while deliberating the case, implying that a decision could arrive before the ban is slated to take effect on January 19.

TikTok’s lawyer Noel Francisco explained the impact of the law in blunt terms before the court on Friday: “At least as I understand it, we go dark,” Francisco said, according to Forbes. “It’s essentially gonna stop operating, I think that’s the consequence of this law.”

TikTok has argued that the law banning its presence in the United States is a violation of its First Amendment rights, while the government has claimed the app’s erasure from the American market is a matter of national security.

Justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum appeared skeptical of TikTok’s arguments, pointing out that the law did not target free expression on the app itself but rather ByteDance’s foreign ownership and the residual implications of a powerful foreign algorithm in the U.S.

President-elect Donald Trump filed a brief with the court last month, urging the bench to pass on ruling on the ban until he takes office, when his lawyers argue he could “pursue a political resolution that could obviate the Court’s need to decide these constitutionally significant questions.”

But Trump has not always been on TikTok’s side. Before he left office in 2020, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order. He claimed that the video-sharing platform threatened “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

ByteDance announced shortly after President Joe Biden signed the ban—which gave TikTok an ultimatum to either sell its I.P. to an American owner or stop operating within the U.S.—that the company didn’t “have any plans to sell.” But that may have changed since the law passed at the start of the year. Last month, James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told NPR that China could be willing to trade off TikTok and its proprietary algorithm to American investors in exchange for a better deal from Trump on his massive tariff proposal.

Some of Trump’s allies could be waiting in the wings for that to happen. Major Republican donor Jeff Yass reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has business ties to the Chinese media industry, and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin revealed his own plans to acquire the social media company via an investor group just a day after the ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House.

Donald Trump, who sought to downplay the Covid-19 pandemic during his first term as president, is now trying to inflate the threat of a new disease in order to close the southern U.S. border.

The New York Times reports that the president-elect’s advisers have spent months looking for something to justify declaring a public health emergency and shutting down the border. The problem is that there’s no major outbreak of disease right now. But that hasn’t stopped Trump’s team, who considered conditions including tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases. They’ve even asked the Border Patrol what illnesses they’ve seen in migrants.

Trump officials are trying to replicate the public health restrictions of Title 42, which was invoked in 2020 as Covid-19 broke out around the world. In doing so, they are tapping into racist ideas that foreigners and minorities carry unfamiliar diseases with them. It’s no surprise that they can’t find a dangerous, easily spread illness like Covid, only isolated sicknesses and fear based on bigotry.

Even in 2020, the use of Title 42 was not clear cut—public health officials and the courts viewed immigration restrictions with skepticism, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the immigration hard-liners Trump is bringing with him for his second term also served in his first term—people such as Stephen Miller, who will be his deputy chief of policy, and Tom Homan, who will serve as the “border czar.”

These officials not only pushed for Title 42 but also came up with the horrific policies such as family separation and the “Muslim ban,” and they are clearly planning to revive or ramp up these efforts as soon as Trump is sworn in again. This time around, it seems that they’ll be looking for weaker justifications than Covid.

Back in 2019, before the pandemic, Miller tried to close the southern U.S. border over a mumps outbreak in immigration detention centers. It didn’t work, and technically, neither did the restrictions that came from Covid—Biden administration officials say migrants regularly tried to cross the border despite Title 42. But that’s not likely to stop nativist Trump and his cronies.

Donald Trump is promising “unlimited water” to quell the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles, but his plan isn’t exactly adding up.

In an address Thursday night, Trump put the blame for the fires—which have so far ravaged a land area larger than Manhattan—on Gavin Newsom, falsely claiming that the California governor had allowed some of the region’s fire hydrants to run dry. In actuality, the power lines generating the hydrants had been temporarily shut off by utilities in order to prevent electrical fires from sparking.

“If you notice yesterday the hydrants were empty, they didn’t have any water, many of them,” Trump said. “They said 20 percent, but now I just heard 50 percent, and now none of them have water and that fire is still raging.

“When he turned that down, I was gonna give him unlimited water. It would—it really comes down from the north, way up north, including parts of Canada,” Trump said, referring to the nation he’s mocked for several weeks as being on the precipice of becoming the country’s fifty-first state. “So much water that they wouldn’t know what to do with. Just the opposite would have happened. And that’s the reason that this happened.”

Exactly where Trump would obtain “unlimited water,” however, isn’t clear.

“And we’re going to force that upon him now, but it’s very late, because I think it’s one of the great catastrophes in the history of our nation,” Trump said.

Trump then turned his attention to the real estate value of some of Los Angeles’s mansions that succumbed to the flames, lamenting $400 million homes that no longer exist before using the occasion to take another potshot at Newsom.

“I don’t know that they ever go back, either,” Trump said, abstractly referring to upper-class Angelinos who lost their houses. “Because you know they weren’t happy with California, they weren’t happy with Gavin Newsom.”

Canada, meanwhile, has been sending planes to dump water over the inferno, which so far has claimed the lives of 10 people.

“Canada is mobilizing to help fight the wildfires in southern California. Canadian water bombers are already in action. 250 firefighters are ready to deploy,” outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote on X Thursday. “To our American neighbours: Canada’s here to help.”

Trump is claiming victory after becoming the first convicted felon who will enter the White House.

Judge Juan Merchan on Friday sentenced Trump to unconditional discharge, or a sentence without imprisonment, fines, or probation, saying that this was the “only lawful sentence” he could deliver.

Merchan was careful to note that it was the office Trump was about to take, and not his own crimes, that led to this wrist-slap of a sentencing for falsifying business records to cover up his hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. But Trump viewed it as a win nonetheless.

He wrote on Truth Social shortly after the sentencing:

The Radical Democrats have lost another pathetic, unAmerican Witch Hunt. After spending tens of millions of dollars, wasting over 6 years of obsessive work that should have been spent on protecting New Yorkers from violent, rampant crime that is destroying the City and State, coordinating with the Biden/Harris Department of Injustice in lawless Weaponization, and bringing completely baseless, illegal, and fake charges against your 45th and 47th President, ME, I was given an UNCONDITIONAL DISCHARGE. That result alone proves that, as all Legal Scholars and Experts have said, THERE IS NO CASE, THERE WAS NEVER A CASE, and this whole Scam fully deserves to be DISMISSED. The real Jury, the American People, have spoken, by Re-Electing me with an overwhelming MANDATE in one of the most consequential Elections in History. As the American People have seen, this “case” had no crime, no damages, no proof, no facts, no Law, only a highly conflicted Judge, a star witness who is a disbarred, disgraced, serial perjurer, and criminal Election Interference. Today’s event was a despicable charade, and now that it is over, we will appeal this Hoax, which has no merit, and restore the trust of Americans in our once great System of Justice. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

But as Merchan stressed, there was a case and the president-elect is guilty. And even though Trump will walk free and take his oath of office on January 20, he still is and will always be a convicted felon.

Donald Trump gloated that the Americans “don’t need anything” from Canada, even as the Canadian government sent firefighters and supplies in response to the devastating wildfires in California.  

“Canada is mobilizing to help fight the wildfires in southern California. Canadian water bombers are already in action. 250 firefighters are ready to deploy,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote in a post on X Thursday. 

“To our American neighbours: Canada’s here to help.”

But that same day, Trump had a very different perspective on the relationship between neighbors: “We don’t need anything,” he said during a press conference in Palm Beach, Florida, not speaking about the wildfires specifically but just generally complaining because that’s what he does.

“We don’t need their fuel, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need their oil and gas. We don’t need anything that they have,” Trump continued. 

“And I said to Trudeau, I said, ‘Why are, why are we subsidizing you 200 a—250 billion dollars a year? And he said, ‘I really don’t know.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know either.’ I said, ‘What would happen to Canada if we didn’t?’ He said, ‘Canada would be obliterated.’ I said, ‘Well, then Canada should be a fifty-first state.’”

Canada has actually been helping fight the fires all week through the use of water bombers operating around Los Angeles. One Canadian “Super Scooper” aircraft, two of which are loaned annually to the U.S., was grounded Thursday after colliding with a civilian drone—resulting in a loss of more than 1,500 gallons of ocean water per flight that could have been dropped on active fires.

But Trump doesn’t think we need any help at all. Take lumber, for example, an industry of which Trump clearly has a highly technical understanding: “We don’t need Canada for lumber ’cause we have big forests, that we have, you know, not utilized. In some cases they’re protected, which I can take that protection off. And you can take down that tree and grow a better tree. And you know that’s pretty common.”

Elon Musk is already sparking chaos in the federal government, sending representatives from his Department of Government Efficiency to agencies across the federal bureaucracy.

The Washington Post reports that employees from DOGE, which will be headed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are already beginning to interview federal employees as part of their plan to decrease the size of the federal government. DOGE has interviewed workers at the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services.

Musk and Ramaswamy already have 50 employees working out of the Washington, D.C., offices of Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, according to the Post, with plans to have 100 people in place by January 20, when Trump is sworn in as president. But their plans are already meeting skepticism from civil servants and members of Congress, including Republicans.

According to two government employees who spoke to the Post, Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s comments about the federal workforce have made them “wary” of the DOGE effort. The pair have cited a controversial Supreme Court ruling, Loper Bright v. Raimondo, that they say will help them enact sweeping budget cuts across the federal government—but the federal bureaucracy seems all but destined for a clash with the fast-moving, “disruptive” culture of Silicon Valley.

However, in recent days, Musk has been tempering his statements on DOGE, conceding that his goal of cutting the federal budget by “at least $2 trillion” probably won’t happen. Plus, since DOGE isn’t an official government agency and Musk and Ramaswamy aren’t actually federal employees, they can’t make any changes themselves. The most they can do is recommend changes and budget cuts to Congress and the president.

Still, Musk and Ramaswamy will at least attempt to make a big show of appearing to be slashing the size of government, and regardless of how it goes, will attempt to claim victory. If there are negative consequences, rest assured that they will find some way to blame somebody else—likely their critics.

President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday morning in his hush-money case, after becoming the first president to be convicted of multiple felonies.

Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to unconditional discharge, or a sentence without imprisonment, fines, or probation, saying that this was the “only lawful sentence” he could pass down.

Merchan made clear that Trump was receiving this sentence only because he is returning to the White House in a few days. It is the legal protection of the office that determined the sentence, not the occupant of the office, Merchan stressed in delivering the sentence.

It’s a whimper of an end for the historic case, in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, with whom he had an affair. Still, it’s a national embarrassment. Trump is now the first convicted felon to be sworn in as president.

Appearing virtually in the courtroom Friday, Trump complained that he did nothing wrong.

“I was the first president in history to be under a gag order. I’m totally innocent. I did nothing wrong,” Trump claimed. “They talk about business records, but they were extremely accurate and I had nothing to do with them.”

Undeterred, Merchan accused Trump’s lawyers of trying to create a “chilling effect” on the Supreme Court in pressing for the sentencing to be waived.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass also warned that Trump’s actions during the case were an attack on the rule of law. “Such threats are designed to have a chilling effect, intimidate those who have the responsibility to enforce our laws in the hopes that they will ignore the defendant’s transgressions because they fear [Trump] is too powerful to be subjected to rule of law like the rest of us,” Steinglass argued, according to Lawfare reporter Tyler McBrien.

Trump tried very hard to stop this moment from happening, leaning on his presidential immunity, but to no avail.

“Sir, I wish you godspeed as you pursue your second term in office. Thank you,” Merchan said as the sentencing concluded.