Trump Wants to Send in Troops to Save … Commercial Real Estate?

Donald Trump’s latest excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act: commercial real estate vacancy in downtown Chicago.

“The Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Chicago, once considered our Nation’s BEST, now has a more than 28 percent vacancy factor, and is ready to call it quits unless something is done about the murder and crime, which is prevalent throughout the City,” Trump posted on Truth Social after midnight Tuesday, misnaming Chicago’s Magnificent Mile shopping district.

“CALL IN THE TROOPS, FAST, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE! ‘Just the News,’” the real estate mogul added.

The nineteenth-century law would let Trump utilize the military for domestic purposes, allowing troops to police and arrest citizens. If Trump invokes it, he would be able to deploy active-duty forces in order to enact his agenda, which involves federalizing the law enforcement agencies of Democratic-led cities.

Trump has floated the idea of leveraging the Insurrection Act for years, though it has picked up steam since his inauguration earlier this year.

Late last month, Trump told U.S. troops stationed in Japan that he was prepared to send “more than the National Guard” to American cities to safeguard and enforce his presidential agenda—a threat that he said could involve any branch of America’s armed forces.

“And I’d be allowed to do whatever I want, but we haven’t chosen to do that,” Trump said at the time. “And the courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved. And I can send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I can send anybody I wanted.”

The legal loophole has been used by 17 presidents but has not been invoked since 1992, when President George H.W. Bush used it to subdue riots in Los Angeles after the local police force brutalized Rodney King.

In an apparent bid to justify the legal grounds, Trump and his associates have tried to fabricate a fictitious bedlam that they claim has taken over Democratic cities. Instead, they seem to be the ones instigating the chaos.

The state-sanctioned violence has been nearly nonstop in Chicago over the last few months. Last month, agents used tear gas in residential areas “multiple times without audible warnings,” court documents said, surprising families with the painful chemical irritant. A couple of weeks later, federal agents allegedly tear-gassed a group of school-age children on their way to a Halloween parade, in a residential Chicago neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Trump’s most militant supporters are ready and willing to thrust themselves into his violent fray as soon as he gives the signal: Stewart Rhodes said Sunday that he’s “relaunching” and “rebuilding” the Oath Keepers, the armed white supremacist organization that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

President Donald Trump is so deeply out of touch on what life is like for everyday Americans that even Fox News host Laura Ingraham had no choice but to correct him on her show Monday.

Trump, who over the weekend debuted a widely derided 50-year mortgage plan on Truth Social (where he compared himself to FDR), sat with Ingraham to clear things up.

“Your housing director has proposed something that has enraged your MAGA friends, which is this 50-year mortgage idea,” said Ingraham. “So—significant MAGA backlash, calling it a giveaway to the banks, and simply prolonging the time it would take for Americans to own a home outright. Is that really a good idea?”

Trump, in classic form, dismissed her concerns: “It’s not even a big deal. I mean, you go from 40 to 50 years—”

Ingraham corrected him: “Thirty to 50.”

Trump pressed on, saying, “And what it means is you pay something less, from 30—some people had a 40—and now they have a 50. All it means is you pay less per month, you pay it over a longer period of time.”

As Ingraham pointed out, the standard number of years for a mortgage is 30—not 40. And according to many economists, lengthening the time it takes to repay your mortgage by 20 years is, in fact, “a big deal.”

Trump is right that longer mortgages would result in smaller monthly payments. But the overall interest payments would skyrocket.

CNN maps it out like this: If you have a $450,000 home with a 30-year mortgage at a 6.25 percent interest rate, your monthly payment is about $2,771. By the time you’ve paid off your loan, you would have paid more than $547,000 in interest. If you had a 50-year loan at the same rate, your monthly payment would be slightly lower—$2,452—but your total interest would swell to around $1.02 million. That’s 87 percent more than on the 30-year loan.

Plus, it’s likely that the interest rates for a 50-year mortgage would be even higher than for a 30-year one, because a 50-year loan is more risky and it’s harder to anticipate how inflation will affect the economy that far into the future.

But Trump, of course, knows none of this.

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham took a light jab at President Trump’s gaudy, gold-lined Oval Office decorations during a White House tour Monday evening, asking him if he’d got the ornaments from Home Depot.

“Why not silver?” Ingraham asked while Trump gave her a tour.

“You can’t imitate gold, real gold,” the president replied, brushing off her question about the silver. “There’s no paint that imitates real gold.”

“So these aren’t like, from Home Depot?” Ingraham said dryly.

“Nooo, this is not Home Depot stuff.”

“No? Not stuff you buy?”

“This is not Home Depot.”

The Home Depot remark clearly irked the president a bit, especially given just how much time he’s put into making the White House look like Mar-a-Lago, or one of his many other luxury hotels and resorts. Crown molding, golden cherubs, a demolished rose garden, and of course the upcoming $200 million ballroom that he’s treating like some act of service.

All of this is meaningless, especially to the working-class voters Trump promised to fight for on the campaign trail. Sure, SNAP benefits were lost and inflation is up and owning a home is just a dream for many, but at least Trump can stick it to the libs with a gold-plated fireplace that is not from Home Depot. A Democrat, especially a woman, would get absolutely slammed for playing HGTV while the country runs on fumes.

And perhaps even more worrying—these feel like renovations for someone who plans to spend the rest of their days in the White House, not just the next three years.

Can’t afford to buy groceries? President Donald Trump says you’re a chump who’s getting duped.

During an interview Monday evening on Fox News, host Laura Ingraham asked Trump about voter concerns about affordability, which was a key issue in the state elections Democrats swept last week. “Is this a voter perception issue of the economy, or is there more that needs to be done by Republicans on Capitol Hill, or done in terms of policy?” she asked.

“More than anything else it’s a con job by the Democrats,” Trump replied.

Trump proceeded to wind an outrageous conspiracy theory that the Democrats put out memos for liberal news outlets instructing them to fearmonger to Americans about prices—and the media did. His evidence? He claimed that they’d all started to use the word “manufactured.”

“It’s a ‘manufactured’ economy. Nobody uses that word!” Trump ranted.

But the only one attempting to control the media is Trump. Just moments earlier, the president hadn’t even let Ingraham get through a list of products that had seen price increases during his time in office. As she listed beef, coffee, and auto repairs, Trump actually tried to shush her.

“So, are you saying that voters are misperceiving how they feel, or … ? ’Cause you said Biden did that too,” Ingraham asked.

“Well Biden, and let’s say it’s synonymous. Biden and Kamala, because you didn’t know who the hell was campaigning, it got to a point,” Trump said. He proceeded to ramble about how unfair it was that Democrats had sought a new presidential candidate more than a year ago, never actually answering the questions about the issue plaguing voters today.

As inflation and layoffs have surged, grocery prices have soared, and SNAP benefits have been cruelly cut off, Trump has repeatedly insisted he doesn’t want to hear about affordability concerns.

Donald Trump has pardoned another criminal tied to his administration.

The president wiped the criminal slate Monday of Bob Harshbarger, who pleaded guilty in 2013 to health care fraud and the distribution of unauthorized Chinese drugs. Harshbarger is married to one of Trump’s congressional allies, Tennessee MAGA Representative Diana Harshbarger.

The pardon was not announced, but rather appeared on the White House website Monday.

An unidentified White House official told The New York Times that Bob Harshbarger was not granted the pardon because of his last name or for his affiliations. But Trump has been very vocal with his praise for Diana Harshbarger, endorsing the Tennessee lawmaker as an “unapologetic conservative Trump Republican.”

Trump’s use of the presidential pardon to free his friends and associates is “unprecedented” and “damaging to the rule of law,” according to at least one former Justice Department pardon attorney.

Liz Oyer told The Bulwark’s podcast Monday that she was “gobsmacked” by Trump’s recent choices on whom to pardon, including crypto billionaire and Binance exchange co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who was sentenced to four months in prison last year on charges related to money laundering.

Zhao and Trump’s family are financially tied. The presidential family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, has generated some $4.5 billion since the 2024 election thanks in large part to a partnership with PancakeSwap, an online exchange platform administered by Binance, The Wall Street Journal reported in August.

Last month, Trump publicly played dumb about Zhao, claiming he couldn’t recall the name of the person he had pardoned the day before.

“So that was truly stunning, and then even more stunning to hear the president claim on national television that he doesn’t know who this is,” Oyer said. “It was just a very bizarre moment.”

Another recent controversial pick, according to Oyer, was former Republican Representative George Santos, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for a litany of crimes before his detention was commuted by Trump for no clear reason other than the prolific fraudster’s undying loyalty to the president.

“Trump pardons a lot of people in whom he sees something of himself,” Oyer told The Bulwark.

Oyer also blasted Ed Martin, her successor as the DOJ’s pardon attorney, as someone “who does not even seem to have a basic understanding of how the Constitution works, how pardon power works, how federal law works, how the Justice Department works.”

Martin “is not a serious lawyer,” Oyer said.

The president issued a tsunami of pardons Friday for his alleged co-conspirators in the Georgia election interference case, including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Boris Epshteyn, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, and 72 others tied to the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

Martin shared details of the pardon on his personal X account Sunday night, replying to a post he made in May that read: “No MAGA left behind.”

It’s unclear, however, exactly how impactful Trump’s pardons will be for the presidential election conspiracy cronies, none of whom were charged with federal crimes.