Trump Is Breaking Boundaries of Constitution With Chips Payoff Deal

Disregarding the Constitution’s export clause, the Trump administration has struck an unprecedented arrangement to take a 15 percent cut of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices’ chip sales to China.

Under the deal, first reported on Sunday, the companies will pay the U.S. government for sales of chips used for artificial intelligence—Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips—in China in order to obtain export licenses to the country, despite national security restrictions.

According to the Financial Times, the arrangement is unprecedented, as “no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licences.” Several media reports have called it “unusual.”

“Unconstitutional” would evidently work just as well. As Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration official and current fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as many other observers, noted, the move disregards the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on export taxes. The export clause states: “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.”

The administration can be expected to characterize the arrangement as something other than a tax. It may ultimately be up to the courts, if the move faces legal challenges, to tell this like it is.

Constitutional concerns aside, this development represents the latest in an ongoing saga of Trump flip-flopping on chips, as the administration previously reportedly planned to ban the export of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, before having a change of heart in April after the company’s CEO paid $1 million to dine with the president at Mar-a-Lago.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance and the Trump administration tried and failed to shift the accountability for the Epstein files onto Democrats, only reinvigorating calls for their release. 

“I laugh at the Democrats who are now all of a sudden so interested in the Epstein files. For four years, Joe Biden and the Democrats did nothing about this story,” Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires, and now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this, and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him, and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.” 

Vance’s line of argument is willfully obtuse. Epstein killed himself in prison while Trump was president. He had plenty of time to start a “transparent” investigation, and arguably had even more reason to do so then, given the circumstances of Epstein’s death.   

And Trump has been anything but transparent on this. Attorney General Pam Bondi essentially lied to the entire country about the “Epstein list,” initially claiming she had it on her desk and then later stating no such list existed. Trump himself has called the entire process “bullshit,” questioned his biggest supporters for still caring about it, and has had Republicans pussyfoot around the issue in Congress. This is simply not how a transparent inquiry into this–or any issue of this gravity—should look.  

Another thing Vance fails to understand is that to normal Americans outside of the MAGA/Qanon spectrum, the Epstein case is still about the victims he abused, not about playing politics or revealing some liberal cabal. Epstein has been connected to prominent leftists like Fidel Castro and Noam Chomsky, as well as liberals like former President Bill Clinton, and conservatives like Donald Trump. What does it matter?  It isn’t some gotcha if the point here is justice, which it obviously isn’t for Trump and Vance. 

“Fine. Release all the files. With victims and survivors’ names and PII redacted,” conservative Bulwark editor Bill Kriston wrote on X. “But no redactions of clients, enablers, and see-no-evil associates.” 

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau also chimed in. 

“Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files and @JDVance has been plotting with the AG and FBI Director to cover it up. Release the names! Democrats, Republicans, billionaires, or not,” he wrote. “What are you afraid of, @JDVance?”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is once again openly touting the far-right, Christian nationalist views of his favorite pastor, Doug Wilson.

“All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote Friday in a post sharing an interview that Wilson did with CNN the day prior. In the video, Wilson proceeds to describe his theocratic, patriarchal vision for America, which has clearly had a significant influence on Hegseth.

“I’d like to see the town be a Christian town, I’d like to see the state be a Christian state, I’d like to see the nation be a Christian nation, and I’d like to see the world be a Christian world,” the Moscow, Idaho, pastor said. “Every society is theocratic. The only question is who’s ‘Theo’? In a secular democracy, it would be Demos, the people. In a Christian republic, it’d be Christ.”

Wilson also bans women from leadership roles in his church and believes that they should not have the right to vote, arguing they should only be mothers and homemakers.

“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” he told CNN’s Pamela Brown in the clip shared by Hegseth.

“So you just think they’re meant to have babies, that’s it? They’re just a vessel?” Brown responded.

“No, it doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce biologically. The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three, or four, or five eternal souls.”

“I’m here as a working journalist and I’m a mom of three—”

“Good for you.”

“Is that an issue for you?”

“No, it’s not automatically an issue.”

Wilson holds some of the extreme views on gender on the Christian right. In the past, he’s written that men have a sexual right to women and that unsubmissive women are at fault for any sexual violence committed against them. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.… A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” He also posits that God created women “to make the sandwiches” and thinks that giving women the right to vote led to “a long, sustained war on the family.” This is the man the U.S. defense secretary is enthusiastically platforming.

And this isn’t the first time. Hegseth and Wilson go way back. The defense secretary has attended Wilson’s services, posted in support of his private Christian schools, praised Wilson for not masking during the pandemic, and went on Wilson’s Association of Classical Christian Schools–affiliated CrossPolitic podcast shortly after his nomination. Wilson is a mouthpiece of a militantly regressive wing of Christianity with a very specific agenda, and the man leading the U.S. military continues to be one of his strongest advocates. Only time will tell just how much influence Wilson will continue to levy over the next three years.

Donald Trump is replacing Billy Long as IRS commissioner, after just two months on the job.

Long was confirmed to the role in June, but his near future will no longer involve fronting the tax agency. Instead, he is expected to be nominated to an ambassador position, reported The New York Times.

There is no clear permanent replacement for Long yet, though Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will double time as acting commissioner until one is in place, according to a senior administration official who spoke with the Times.

Long, a former congressman from Missouri, had been an unexpected choice for the revenue service, with no background in tax policy. As a lawmaker, he sponsored legislation to completely axe the IRS. Long was confirmed by the Senate in June by a 53-44 vote amid an agency-wide staffing purge, with all Democrats voting against his appointment.

He was the subject of an inquiry by Senate Democrats in December—when his name was first floated as an option to front the IRS—over his support for a “fraud-ridden” pandemic-era tax credit that cost Americans “hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to a memo from the Senate Finance Committee.

The 69-year-old was the fifth individual to run the IRS this year after the rapid-fire turnover of several interim chiefs, including Doug O’Donnell, Melanie Krause, Gary Shapley, and Michael Faulkender.

Despite its shrunken workforce, the IRS has been tasked by Trump to diversify its focus to advance the White House’s agenda, asking the tax agency to help it identify and deport immigrants as well as scrutinize universities.

Trump’s downsizing at the IRS has been a complete 180 for the agency, which saw funding boons and new hiring efforts under the Biden administration to expand revenue collection services and to investigate potential tax cheats.

This story has been updated.

Far-right commentator Candace Owens thinks President Trump and JD Vance should be rushing to defend her as French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, sue her for defamation. Owens has been running a monthslong harassment campaign, or “transvestigation,” against Brigitte, claiming she was born a biological man.

The Macrons’ lawsuit, filed in Delaware, alleges that Owens has “used this false statement to promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money.” This includes Owens’s Candace podcast and her eight-part YouTube series on Brigitte’s gender, Becoming Brigitte.

“After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,” Owens posted on X in March 2024.

Now, as the lawsuit approaches, Owens is grasping at straws and begging for help, to no avail. She even went so far as to reveal that Trump called her on the phone to tell her to drop the transgender allegations.

“You have a literal European leader that is basically saying ‘eff you’ to the American Constitution, right? Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte are saying, ‘You know what, we don’t like that podcaster in America, and we are gonna launch a lawsuit that’s never been launched before, an unprecedented lawsuit, to impoverish her for speaking,’” Owens opined. “And both JD Vance and Trump have not issued a statement.

“In fact, where are the journalists even asking them to make a statement, OK?” she continued. “A state leader—a state leader is speaking about your constituent, and launching a lawsuit and saying they’re gonna impoverish them for executing a First Amendment right. Where are you? If you are Trump, the first thing you should have done, if you purport to care about America and our Constitution … you would come out and you would say ‘I don’t even know whether I believe that she’s a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter,’ right?”

“He could even say, like he said to me on the phone, that ‘I looked at her real close in the Eiffel Tower, and it looked like a woman to me.’ OK, you can say all those things, but you should say it’s unacceptable,” Owens continued. “That this leader would threaten the First Amendment in any way.… The job of the federal government is to defend us against foreign invaders, and I would pretty much say Emmanuel Macron right now is being a foreign invader. But no, they’re silent. They are silent.”

This is a real “hit dog hollering” moment. Owens claimed for months that the first lady of France is a biological male, based a significant portion of her million-dollar podcast content on that baseless lie, and is now crying for the president to save her while the Macrons gear up to sue the hell out of her, and rightly so.

Piers Morgan somehow said it best: “You kind of know [the rumor about Brigitte] is not true, but you’ve ridden the wave of conspiracy theory about it because it’s been so lucrative,” he told Owens on his show on Wednesday. “That is why they’re suing you, because ultimately they know you’ve been amplifying this massively more than the journalists had in France.”