Trump Whines About How His Gift From UAE Isn’t Good Enough

Donald Trump complained about a gift he received from the United Arab Emirates by making a joke Friday morning during his visit to the country.

Trump’s hosts presented the president with a plaque containing a drop of the country’s oil, and while accepting the present, Trump said, “This is the highest quality oil on the planet and they only gave me a drop of it, so I’m not thrilled, but it’s better than no drop, can you imagine?”

The joke was met with laughter from onlookers and Trump’s UAE hosts, but carries a more negative tone in the context of the president receiving a much bigger gift ahead of his Middle East tour: a luxury airplane from Qatar that is being described as a bribe. Trump has bristled from criticism over the jet, which he claims is free but will probably cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars to modify for presidential standards.

The airplane gift was preceded by Trump’s businesses cutting a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar earlier this month. In the UAE, the Trump family has also cut a number of recent deals, with an Emirati-backed firm recently spending $2 billion on Trump’s stablecoin to the unveiling of Trump International Hotel & Tower Dubai last week. And in Saudi, two Trump Towers are in the works. It seems the president should have little to complain about with all of the money he’s making, not to mention the deals that he claims to be cutting in the Middle East for U.S. industries.

After months of baseless claims about “extreme levels of fraud” within the Social Security Administration—even going so far as calling it the “biggest ponzi scheme of all time”—Elon Musk and DOGE have only found two likely fraudulent claims out of over 110,000 at the Social Security Administrations, according to Nextgov.

Musk and other DOGE workers were claiming that 40 percent of calls to the agency were fraudulent.

DOGE instructed the agency to install anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone. That policy impeded the agency’s retirement claim processing, while finding less than 1 percent rate of calls were potentially fraudulent. The two likely fraudulent cases make it a rate of .0018 percent. So DOGE found virtually no fraud and made a system integral to our country’s inner workings less efficient in the process.

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” an internal agency document read. The SSA is now weighing changing the policy entirely.

“The Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told Nextgov. ““Every one of DOGE’s so-called ‘mistakes’ is a backdoor cut to people’s benefits.... There’s nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed.”

“It seemed like a solution in search of a problem,” said Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “So many of these policy changes—the proposals, the reversals, the things that SSA has done over these past several months—seem to have been fueled by misinformation from people like Elon Musk.”

Donald Trump has the presidency, but now he seems to want Paris Hilton’s crown.

The president did very presidential things on social media Friday morning, including roasting Taylor Swift by deeming the notoriously litigious pop singer as not “hot.”

“Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump likes to dredge up his obsession with Swift every so often, especially during critical policy moments. During a closed-door meeting between Trump and House Republicans in June—his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection—Trump insisted on discussing the pop phenom, lamenting that she might endorse President Joe Biden while he was still in the race. Days before the meeting, Variety reported that Trump had spoken at length about Swift in a one-on-one interview, describing her as “unusually beautiful.”

Swift has already found herself at the epicenter of A-list drama this week, after she was subpoenaed into her reportedly ex-BFF Blake Lively’s harassment lawsuit against It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni. Another scandalous, Swift-related detail emerged from the case this week when Baldoni’s attorneys submitted a letter accusing Lively’s team of extorting Swift by threatening to release “ten years” of private texts with the popstar unless she expressed public support for Lively. A federal judge struck the letter from the docket Thursday, warning Baldoni’s team not to “promote scandal arising out of unproven potentially libelous statements.”

But the 35-year-old chantress isn’t the only singer beefing with Trump. Shortly after calling out Swift, the president took a stab at Bruce Springsteen, snubbing the singer of “Born in the USA”, one of his favorite rally tracks, as “highly overrated.”

“Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy—Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country,” Trump posted. “If I wasn’t elected, it would have been GONE by now!”

“This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!” Trump added.

The jab followed remarks Springsteen made at a concert in Manchester, England Wednesday. The rock star said that the Trump administration was “taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers,” and that the richest men were “taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death.”

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll, in dangerous times,” Springsteen said. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.”

“They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society,” he continued. “They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”

This story has been updated.

An Instagram post from former FBI Director James Comey has drawn a massive backlash from the right, which is accusing him of calling for Donald Trump’s assassination.

Comey on Thursday posted a picture of seashells arranged on beach sand reading “8647.” He claimed that he came across the shells, already arranged, while taking a walk, and assumed that it was a political message. Conservatives immediately started attacking Comey, a critic of Trump who was fired by the president during his first term.

“Just James Comey casually calling for my dad to be murdered. This is who the Dem-Media worships. Demented!!!!” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, wrote on X Thursday, pinning it to the top of his profile.

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer also freaked out in multiple X posts, claiming, “This is a call for the assassination of President Trump by the former FBI Director!” And on Fox News Thursday night, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called for Comey to be jailed, calling the post concerning in light of Trump surviving “two assassination attempts on his life.”

But how dangerous was Comey’s post? According to Merriam-Webster, the verb “86” can mean “to eject, remove, or dismiss” a person. The “47” in the picture presumably means Trump, the 47th president of the United States. Though some use the term 86 to mean “to kill,” many also use it to simply mean to get rid of something.

Regardless of what Comey meant, conservatives are acting in bad faith when they call for his prosecution. The phrase was also used against Joe Biden, with conservatives selling “8646” merchandise. Trump’s own social media posts have far exceeded Comey’s post, such as his 2024 post of a video showing Biden hog-tied in the back of a pickup truck. All of this is just another case of the right crying wolf.

Once again, new polling has President Trump’s approval rating underwater on nearly every single issue.

Just weeks after multiple polls showed him tanking with Americans everywhere—and young people in particular—data from Verasight U.S. for Strength In Numbers makes it clear that those numbers didn’t lie.

The poll, conducted between May 1 and May 6 with 1,000 adults, showed that 56 percent disapprove of the overall job that Trump is doing as president. Trump is also sitting on multiple net negatives. He is -32 on inflation and -17 on jobs and the economy, policies that were central to the promises he made in his reelection campaign. He is -16 on foreign policy and -15 on education.

The only exception was border security, where 52 percent approved of his signature policy. But on immigration more broadly, 49 percent still disapprove of the president compared to 47 percent who approve.

While each poll has its own level of bias and margin of error, multiple polls have shown the president to be in dire straits, especially with young people, independents, and Latino people—groups that were absolutely crucial to his victory last November. Even as Trump’s numbers remain robust among conservative voters (around 72 percent according to Verasight) these early patterns certainly raise questions regarding how his reputation will impact critical downballot races in the 2026 midterm elections.