Corrupt Trump Opens the Door for International Bribes

The Trump Organization has opened its doors for business—with foreign private companies.

In a departure from Donald Trump’s first term in office, the president-elect’s company released a new ethics agreement Friday that no longer prohibits deals with foreign companies while he is president. The Trump Organization has already reached development agreements for hotels and golf courses in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It’s looking to make even more with Israel, hoping to look at properties to build luxury hotels in the country when its brutal war in Gaza ends.

“The scale of corruption will be orders of magnitude greater than what we saw in the first Trump administration,” ethics professor Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis told the Associated Press.

Anyone who wants to be in Trump’s good graces can simply give his business lavish amounts of money. Trump is telling the international business world that he can indeed be bought. The Trump family is also trying to reclaim the lease to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a doubly corrupt institution in which six different governments spent more than $750,000 in his first term.

Donald Trump will face virtually no legal consequences related to his hush-money sentencing, but he will have to endure some undesirable, tangentially connected ramifications as a result.

Trump received an unconditional discharge in New York Friday, stripping the possibility that he would face any fines, court-appointed supervision, or incarceration related to his criminal conviction. But while the president-elect may not be facing the music in the Empire State, Trump is reportedly at risk of losing his liquor license in New Jersey due to Friday’s proceedings.

New Jersey law prohibits the distribution of licenses to anyone convicted of a crime “involving moral turpitude.” The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control issued a notice following Trump’s hearing that the agency “will proceed in determining whether President-elect Trump is qualified to continue to hold an interest in the licenses,” according to a statement obtained by Forbes.

Liquor licenses for two of Trump’s clubs in the Garden State expired in July while state officials weighed whether his criminal conviction would prevent him from ever renewing the beverage license again.

“The final judgment of conviction that raises the prospect of disqualifying Mr. Trump from an interest in a New Jersey liquor license due to the guilty verdict in New York will not be entered until after his sentencing,” a spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general’s office told The Hill at the time, adding that the burden of proof remains on the applicant to prove they meet the requirements for the license.

The Trump Organization pushed back on the New Jersey investigation, arguing that the conviction should be irrelevant to the clubs’ operation as Trump himself is not the holder of the liquor licenses.

Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, wants to get rid of all the nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials on the National Security Council, so that the president-elect will be surrounded by loyalists and face absolutely no accountability once he’s in the White House.

Waltz told Breitbart News Thursday that he hopes to oust career intelligence officials from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, among other agencies, from the NSC. These officials traditionally help the president make informed decisions about foreign and domestic affairs.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Waltz said in a phone interview with Breitbart. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Why does Waltz want them out? Well, they aren’t all Trumpers, for one thing, so they’d be more likely to push back on the president-elect’s stupider impulses to, say, try to acquire Greenland or something. More crucially, these detailees have the tendency to report up the chain of command on the White House’s activities, a totally normal thing to do, unless you’re trying to get away with something you don’t want anyone to know about. Officials doing their jobs properly can become a huge problem when it comes time for them to testify about stuff later on.

That’s what happened with Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who joined the National Security Council as an expert on Ukraine in 2018. The next year, he testified about an “improper” phone call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, pressuring the foreign leader to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals.

According to Breitbart, “Waltz told Breitbart News that he is taking very serious steps to ensure that there are no more Vindmans.”

It’s not clear how serious Waltz’s threat is, but he shared the article in a post on X Friday, captioning it “Day 1.”

Vindman responded to Waltz’s comments in an X post of his own Friday, saying that ensuring only political loyalists could serve on the NSC set a “dangerous precedent.”

“Such an approach will have a chilling effect on senior policy staff across the government. Talented professionals, wary of being dismissed for principled stances or offering objective advice, will either self-censor or forgo service altogether,” Vindman said. “This undermines the very purpose of the NSC: to provide the president with the best possible advice as well as the coordinating team to advance U.S. national security interests.

“The implications of this loyalty-above-competence model are dire. By purging the NSC of apolitical, experienced professionals, Trump and Waltz are hollowing out the institutional expertise required to navigate complex global challenges,” Vindman wrote. “This will create a policy apparatus incapable of discerning sound policies from reckless impulses—or worse, one that actively disregards legal and ethical obligations to implement Trump’s personal whims.”

House Republicans have begun devising plans to slash health care and environmental protections as wildfires engulf Los Angeles County. 

The GOP is aiming to cut $5.7 trillion from the budget over the next 10 years, and is considering cuts to important government services like welfare, climate protections, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act to get there. They then want to use that money to pay for Trump’s draconian immigration plans and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, according to Politico. 

These potential cuts are “not intended to serve as a proposal, but instead as a menu of potential spending reductions for members to consider,” one GOP source told Politico. But the specific policies on the list, such as Joe Biden’s beta version of the Green New Deal, electric vehicle tax credits, the  Affordable Care Act, and even food stamps, seem like cruelly ironic things to cut while the country experiences yet another horrifying climate disaster. 

“The Republican ‘menu’ cuts food and health care for low income people to put more money in the pockets of the rich,” said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to Representative Don Beyer. “Even the item names are dystopian: $490B Medicare cut= ‘Strengthen Medicare For Seniors.’ Cutting food for low income people= ‘Ending Cradle-To-Grave Dependence.” 

The viability of these cuts remains to be seen, as Republicans have already experienced infighting over budget reconciliation. Speaker Mike Johnson has thus far agreed to $2.5 trillion in cuts. 

MAGA Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced Friday that it would be repealing all diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

An employee memo from Meta’s vice president of human resources Janelle Gale, which was obtained by Axios, announced five major changes to Meta’s “hiring, development and procurement practices,” amid the shifting “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States”—i.e., the return of Donald Trump.

Gale announced that Meta would scatter its DEI team, pull the plug on its equity and inclusion programs, roll back efforts to work with diverse-owned suppliers, and scrap its representation goals and “diverse slate approach” to hiring, which ensured that a diverse pool of candidates was considered for every open position.

“We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds,” Gale wrote in the memo.

Gale’s memo tops off a week of disturbing developments at the company, signaling a total meltdown on the part of “Zuckerbucks,” who seems to be giving in to his anti-woke fantasies in preparation for Trump’s return to the White House later this month. He even did a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan—marking his MAGA transformation as complete.

Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta will scrap its third-party fact-checking service in favor of community notes and allow for a larger range of opinions about issues such a immigration and gender. He also said that the company will raise the threshold for what posts need to be removed. The lack of digital guardrails now allows users to freely suggest that being gay is a mental illness, among other things that make it more disastrous to go online and dangerous to be offline.

Meta also announced that Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a close Trump ally, would be joining its board of directors. When Meta’s own employees complained about White’s hiring, the company purporting to be going all in on free speech censored them. A new era of internet speech is off to a great start, it seems!

But at the end of the day, Facebook is just a useless AI-generated content farm now, not a real website, Instagram is for ads, and Threads is for … no one? Maybe the people who are reading this article. The jury is still out on that one.