Trump’s Presidency May Start With a Grift Because of Course

Donald Trump’s Bible scam may be about to hit a new all-time low.

Singer-songwriter Lee Greenwood suggested Sunday night that Trump might be sworn in on a Trump-branded Bible.

“When Donald Trump puts his hand on the Bible and swears the oath to take care of the country, and he’s the 47th president of the United States, I’m hoping it will be this Bible—” Greenwood told Fox News at Trump’s inauguration rally, holding up a special Gold Edition of Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible.

“There are only gonna be 5,000 of these. And I know he’s going to take the oath by putting his hand on several Bibles. He might do this one as well,” Greenwood continued.

It’s possible that Greenwood is just trying to sell something during his five minutes on television. Last week, Trump’s inauguration committee announced that the president-elect would use the same two bibles that he used during his first swearing-in in 2017: one that Abraham Lincoln used in 1861 and another that was gifted to Trump by his mother in 1955.

The kitschy copies of the Good Book are a joint venture between Trump and Greenwood, who popularized the song for which it’s named. As of August, the “only Bible endorsed by President Trump,” as the website boasts, had already raked in $300,000 in royalties for the president-elect.

While normal copies of Trump’s Bible usually go for around $60, special editions “commemorating the 45th and 47th president” are available on preorder for $99.99.

What better way to illustrate that for Trump, taking the oath of office has never been anything more than a money-making grift than for him to use it as an opportunity to sell Bibles?

Donald Trump has a massive lineup of executive orders prepped and ready to sign.

Trump is expected to sign dozens of executive orders after he’s sworn in around noon on Monday. They will focus on immigration, the DEI culture wars, energy, and more. Fox News estimates Trump will sign more than 200 orders, while NBC News reports he will sign at least 50 and perhaps over 100.

A source familiar with the orders told Fox News that he will declare a national emergency at the border, designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, direct the military to focus on the southern border, end Biden-era energy policies, terminate the “Green New Deal” (perhaps a reference to the Inflation Reduction Act), and exit the Paris Climate Accords.

“The president is issuing a historic series of executive orders and actions that will fundamentally reform the American government, including the complete and total restoration of American sovereignty,” the official said to Fox News.

Trump is also expected to sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship, a White House official said Monday. The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino also noted that the orders will pause refugee resettlement for “at least four months” and “end asylum.”

Semafor is reporting that one executive order will be aimed at establishing a version of the Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk and (for now) Vivek Ramaswamy, into every federal agency.

The legal ramifications of these orders—particularly ending birthright citizenship, which is a constitutional amendment—are yet to be seen.

There is no higher premium in Donald Trump’s second administration than loyalty.

The president-elect is reportedly planning to make good on his promise to save some of his most ferocious supporters, with a slew of pardons on the immediate horizon for some January 6 offenders.

Speaking at an inauguration eve rally in Washington, Trump claimed that the forthcoming pardons would make his supporters “very happy,” once again referring to the convictees—who tore through the U.S. Capitol complex in a deadly riot, halting Congress’s certification of votes in delirious support of his failed presidential bid—as “hostages.”

“And tomorrow, everybody in this very large arena will be very happy with my decision on the J-6 hostages,” Trump told the crowd Sunday. “Very happy. I think you will be very, very happy.”

CNN reported that sources familiar with Trump’s plants have claimed that a flurry of pardons are expected as part of a mountain of executive orders that Trump will sign on his first day back in office. The extent of the pardons is unclear, though Trump’s nonviolent supporters would be an easy target for the executive decision.

What’s less obvious is what Trump will do for some 174 January 6 defendants who were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon against Capitol police.

Approximately 1,270 January 6 defendants have been convicted in the years since they stormed the Capitol, though only a couple hundred are actually serving prison time for their involvement.

If Trump does decide to legally forgive those members of his base, he’d be at odds with Vice President-elect JD Vance, who told Fox News last week that Trump’s more violent supporters didn’t deserve pardons.

“I think it’s very simple, look if you protested peacefully on January 6, and you had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance told host Shannon Bream. “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there.”

In Trump’s 2024 “Person of the Year” interview with Time, the incoming president reissued his intentions to focus on his suffering supporters: “I’ll be looking at J6 early on,” Trump told the magazine. “Maybe the first nine minutes.”

Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration has reportedly turned into a real “shitshow.”

Not every lawmaker planning to attend Trump’s swearing-in may be able to squeeze into the Capitol Rotunda, four lawmakers and aides told Politico Sunday. While the invite to move inside was originally extended to those on the presidential platform and members of Congress, it’s looking like the guest list may continue to shrink.

“Simply put, there’s not enough room,” one senior Republican aide told Politico. “It’s a shitshow.”

The last-minute scramble to adjust plans for the weather has sparked confusion among lawmakers about whether they would be able to attend with their spouses, or if their guests would be moved to other locations throughout the building. Major donors, some of whom gave millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund, are also reportedly scrambling to secure a spot. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported Monday that there were roughly 1,800 seats in Emancipation Hall, where Trump is scheduled to make remarks after being sworn-in in an entirely different room.

Reasonably speaking, the Rotunda is about 7,200 square feet, which could fit roughly 1,000 people if they were sitting church-style, without accounting for a stage or other spacial concerns. Photos of Ronald Reagan’s indoor ceremony in 1985 showed that everyone was standing, while pictures of preparations for Monday’s ceremony show rows of folding chairs.

Meanwhile, NewsNation reported that the room could fit 2,000 people max, and a Trump spokesperson denied a rumor that only 99 people would be admitted. So, one can imagine it would be somewhere in the middle. But just hours before the ceremony, it was still anyone’s guess.

Lightening the load, dozens of Democrats have already said they will not be attending, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said simply, “I don’t celebrate rapists.”

Last week, the president-elect announced that his inauguration would be moved indoors due to severely low temperatures in Washington, leaving some of his supporters who had traveled hundreds of miles to see him sworn in feeling left out in the cold.

Republicans are considering removing “head of household” as an option for filing status on U.S. tax returns as part of their plan to extend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan.

The House Ways and Means Committee released a menu-like list of possible options for funding the extension, which will likely benefit corporations and raise the national deficit by as much as $15 trillion. One solution would “eliminate the Head of Household filing status.”

The head of household status was designed to benefit single parents who take on the primary responsibility of caring for a dependent, allowing them to be charged lower rates on more income. For example, in 2025, the 12 percent tax bracket begins at $11,925 for single filers, but $17,000 for head of household filers, according to the Tax Foundation.

Some believe that this creates what is known as a “marriage penalty,” meaning that if you want to get married, your tax rate will increase. Well, it seems that’s just not going to work for the pro-family Republican Party, which is set on seeing all those unmarried cat women not-so-happily wed to hyper-masculine MAGA men!

But removing this status will likely hurt another group of vulnerable people: divorcees with children. It could be especially problematic for anyone considering getting a divorce, but trapped by financial circumstances.

The change could save as much as $192 billion over 10 years, according to the list.

That’s not the only bad money-making idea Republicans are mulling over: they also pitched raising the threshold for government funded free school lunches to save $3 million, taxing tuition scholarships, and cutting Medicaid matching programs, which could potentially cause states to cut benefits and restrict eligibility.

Another billionaire chooses Trump. This time, it’s the historically liberal Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Gates told The Wall Street Journal that he was “impressed” by the president-elect.

“I had a chance to go have a long, and actually quite intriguing dinner with him,” Gates said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He noted that he talked to Trump for three hours, along with Trump aide Susie Wiles and Gates’s aide Larry Cohen.

“I spoke a lot about HIV, and that the foundation’s literally working on a cure for that. We’re at an early stage, and so he, in the Covid days accelerated vaccine innovation, so I was asking him if maybe the same kind of thing could be done here, and we both got … pretty excited about that,” said Gates. He also noted that they got excited talking about a cure to polio. “I felt like he was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation.… I was frankly impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up.”

It’s a stunning remark from Gates, one of the richest people in the world, who previously said he donated more than $50 million to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The news of the meeting comes after Trump claimed last month that the billionaire was begging to have a meeting with him.

It also comes after Elon Musk has entered Trump’s inner circle, and other billionaires trail closely behind. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are expected to sit together with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration on Monday, as is TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. This rallying of tech heavyweights around the incoming president, even in the face of his right-wing base, only reaffirms what Trump has been saying over and over again: Everybody does want to be his friend.

Donald Trump’s supporters were feeling a little left out in the cold Friday after the president-elect announced his inauguration ceremony was moving indoors due to predictions of severely low temperatures.

In two interviews Friday, MSNBC spoke with a few disappointed MAGA fans on the streets of Washington, D.C., who were coming to terms with the fact that they would not be able to watch Trump be sworn in on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

“I mean, we came all the way to Washington from Oklahoma, and you know, now we’re not going to see it?” said one man. “We might as well have stayed home and watched it on TV!”

“It’s actually something we’ve been looking forward to for historical purposes, and being a part of it, that’s once in a lifetime,” a different man said. Another man with him chimed in, “Absolutely!”

“Made all the plans, all the arrangements to come up and be a part of this event,” the first man continued. “And all of a sudden to hear that it’s being indoors, that’s—”

“We’re prepared for the weather!” interjected the second man.

While Trump’s fans aren’t pleased, everyone else just thinks it’s funny that the man obsessed with crowd size might have a severely underwhelming turnout.

Dan’s Cafe, a local Washington bar, noted on X that for Trump’s fans, the walls of the U.S. Capitol never presented much of a barrier to entry.

Others were shocked by Trump’s apparent lack of resilience.

While others thought it seemed very unpresidential to avoid the cold.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a federal law that effectively bans TikTok, the social media platform’s CEO is trying to butter up Donald Trump.

Shou Zi Chew posted a video to the platform Friday thanking the president-elect “for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States.

“We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform—one who has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives, connecting with the world and generating more than 60 billion views of his content in the process.”

By specifically mentioning Trump and his fan base on the app, Chew appears to be making a last-ditch effort to save TikTok in the U.S., with the service scheduled to shut down on Sunday if the platform’s China-based company does not divest. The actual language of the law technically just requires the platform to be removed from app stores so new users can’t download it.

President Biden said Thursday that he wouldn’t enforce the ban during the last few days of his presidency, leaving its interpretation and implementation to Trump. The president-elect has said in recent months that he opposes a ban, going against his own previous position and what used to be near-universal opposition to TikTok on the right.

A ban on TikTok may not even be effective in deterring China from collecting the personal data of Americans, and conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, while voting to uphold the ban, questioned its wisdom. But right now, the app may be functionally useless by Sunday, unless it’s sold to an American owner in the eleventh hour. Perhaps Trump has his own plans for TikTok that involve its CEO pledging allegiance to him like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Republicans are looking to gut and slash federal programs in order to afford an extension to Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan.

The extension, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit, would arrive at the expense of dozens of popular federal programs. But perhaps most egregious among the penny-pinching proposals is a plan to literally take food away from hungry children by nixing free school meal plans made available to some of the poorest families in the country.

Raising the threshold of eligibility for schools to receive the Community Eligibility Provision could save the government $3 billion over a span of 10 years, according to a menu-like list released by the House Ways and Means Committee intended to serve as cutting options for the House reconciliation package.

“The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows the nation’s highest-poverty schools and districts to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without collecting household applications,” the proposal reads. “Instead, schools that adopt CEP are reimbursed using a formula based on participation in other specific means-tested programs, such as SNAP and TANF. Currently, schools can qualify if 40 percent of students receive these programs. This proposal would lift that to 60 percent.”

It shouldn’t take much to argue that taking food away from children is a bad thing. But data shows that food insecurity has been on the rise in the U.S. for the last several decades, and it has seen a considerable spike since the pandemic, according to the USDA. It affects roughly one in seven American households, according to data from the Food Research and Action Center, affecting an estimated 47.4 million people across the country.

A 2013 survey of K-8 public school teachers by No Kid Hungry found that six in 10 teachers across the nation knew that their students were regularly coming to school hungry. Teachers in the same study reported that 80 percent of students were coming to school hungry one or more times per week and that “most or a lot of their students” relied on school meals as their “primary source of nutrition.”

And there are immediate educational benefits to supplying children with meals: A 2018 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that students who received the subsidized lunches were far less likely to need disciplinary action, such as school suspensions. Other studies have suggested that more breakfasts and lunches could improve academic performance or their health.

Donald Trump has a set of executive orders to carry out his disturbing plans ready to go as soon as he is sworn in as president on Monday.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is ready to bypass Congress with orders on the border, tariffs, and other agenda items. In a meeting with Senate Republicans that lasted two hours, Trump said he had already prepared about 100 executive orders that push the limits of presidential authority.

It’s a worrying prospect, considering Trump’s actions during his first presidential term, which included instituting a “Muslim ban” on immigration or rolling back close to 100 environment rules. This time, Trump has set the stage for even worse with the extreme promises he made on the 2024 campaign trail, from mass deportations to taking on birthright citizenship.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration used Title 42, a public emergency order, to close the southern U.S. border. During his second term, his aides are actually looking for the threat of a new disease to justify closing the border. As for the tariffs, Trump has already proposed creating a new, unnecessary “External Revenue Service” to handle their collection and is already preparing plans to tailor the tariffs to target “critical imports.”

All of these plans, even if they are successfully implemented via executive order and survive legal challenges, will have unforeseen consequences to the economy and to American life. But Trump has been emboldened by his election victory, and believes he has a mandate to force his agenda forward. If things don’t work out the way he wants, he will find someone else to blame and claim the opposite is what he wanted all along.