“That’s the Way Life Goes”: Trump Brushes Off Skyrocketing Costs

President Donald Trump doesn’t care that Americans are struggling to pay the surging costs to see their favorite sports teams.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One Friday, Trump defended his planned trip to New York City’s Madison Square Garden to watch the third game of the NBA playoffs, where tickets are prohibitively expensive.

“They could watch it on television. It’s sort of semi-free to watch it on television. That’s the way life goes,” Trump said.

The president may as well have said: “Sucks to be poor! Knicks in 4!”—at least that would’ve been a little bit more festive.

Last month, Trump complained that FIFA World Cup tickets were too expensive—without actually doing anything to bring the prices down. At the same time, the Trump administration posted a chart bragging about a 10 percent decrease in the cost of admission to sporting events, but that was after the prices of tickets exploded, climbing twice as fast as the price of goods for nearly two decades.

It’s not clear just how expensive the tickets are for the upcoming game Monday. ABC News reported that the cheapest tickets for the playoffs were just under $1,000, while courtside seats went for $42,000, and that tickets on the secondary market for the first game in New York hovered around $4,000. Ticketmaster’s website simply said: “On sale date and time are in the works—please check back.”

As the president pointed out, it’s also not free to watch from home: An ESPN membership can cost $11.99 or $29.99 per month, when not bundled with other services. God forbid basketball fans want to go to a bar to watch, as buying alcohol and dining out have only become more expensive in the last year.

Now Americans are struggling to pay for anything at all, as Trump’s war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have kept energy prices high and disrupted global trade. A recent jobs report found that the economy added 172,000 jobs in May—a potentially positive sign but one that could prevent the Fed from cutting interest rates to bring inflation down.

President Trump is incensed by outgoing Republican Senator Thom Tillis’s refusal to support Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until he disavows January 6 insurrectionists.

“Tillis said he won’t support Todd Blanche’s confirmation unless Todd Blanche condemns January 6,” a reporter asked President Trump in the Air Force One press gaggle Friday. “Do you have a reaction to that?”

“Senator Tillis is a loser,” Trump replied bluntly. “That’s why he didn’t run. He didn’t run because I wouldn’t support him. And he’s just an angry man because he’s not gonna be a senator any longer. He wasn’t respected in the Senate. He fought a lot of people, he fought Pete Hegseth, Pete Hegseth turned out to be a gem. Senator Tillis is a loser. Stone cold.… He was forced to leave the Senate because I wouldn’t support him, and he quit. So now he’s trying to make trouble.

“Todd Blanche is a brilliant guy who everybody likes, everybody respects,” Trump said of his former personal lawyer. “[Tillis is] not qualified, he’s not good for the position.”

Tillis is one of three Republicans who have publicly expressed their disapproval of Blanche’s nomination for attorney general.

“He’s got good credentials—people are going to hammer him because he was the president’s personal attorney, but I’m just more about getting through the J6 stuff,” Tillis told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. “It’s not a gray area for me. Either he equivocated and said harming these Capitol police officers was an OK thing, or he didn’t, and we’ll find that in the due diligence.”

Blanche’s nomination is in real jeopardy due to his J6 support, the Epstein files disaster, and the “anti-weaponization” slush fund. Only four GOP “no” votes are needed to sink Blanche’s nomination without a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance.

On Tuesday, NPR’s Bobby Allyn reported that the Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were investigating George Santos for allegedly making fishy bets on the prediction market Kalshi. Three days later, Allyn said he received a call from Santos in which the former congressman and convicted fraudster threatened him.

“This story is going to get you a gun in your face,” Allyn claims Santos said.

Allyn used three sources to report out his Tuesday piece, which revealed that Santos had bet that he would not attend the State of the Union address in February, after posting a video where he expressed excitement at attending.

Kalshi officials informed federal authorities in the Southern District of New York and Washington, D.C., of Santos’s bets at the time, and an investigation is ongoing.

Santos had a paid partnership with Polymarket, a prediction market seen as Kalshi’s largest rival, but the company cut him off after the NPR story broke.

Santos called Allyn the day after the report was published and argued that the story was incorrect. “My lawyers have been calling the Department of Justice all day, and they can’t find any investigation,” he said. (Allyn said he typed out quotes from the call after Santos told him he could not record it.)

After Santos declined to divulge the names of his lawyers, Allyn asked whether Santos really did have attorneys. “I’m George fucking Santos, of course I have a legal team,” Santos reportedly replied, adding, “This story is going to get you a gun in your face.”

When Allyn texted Santos to confirm his phone number, Santos immediately denied the threat. “I NEVER SAID ‘this story would get a gun in your face, I said ‘it’d blow up in your face,’” Santos texted.

Santos took the initiative the next day, posting on X that Allyn “was now making things up.” (Allyn had not yet revealed what was said during the call.) Santos also claimed he would never act “aggressive and threatening” toward the press.

“He’s now demanding I disclose the names of my lawyers ‘or else,’” Santos added of Allyn. Allyn said he simply asked who Santos’s lawyers were and never used the words “or else.”

Santos’s history of peddling lies and fraud became something of a joke in his home state of New York during his time in office. That history came to a head when he was convicted of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in April 2025 and sentenced to seven years in jail. President Donald Trump, perhaps seeing something of himself in Santos, commuted the Republican’s sentence in October.

President Trump wants his new director of national intelligence to fire more people.

Trump told The Wall Street Journal Friday that he told Bill Pulte, whom he named acting director of national intelligence, that he thought the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was “unnecessary” or “too big.”

“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said, referring specifically to people hired in the Obama and Biden administrations. He said he wanted Pulte to “start the process.”

Reducing the size of the ODNI, created after the 9/11 attacks to streamline information sharing between intelligence agencies, is a concerning move for intelligence officials in the government, and suggests that Trump is trying to restrict its staff to loyalists. Trump believes that naming Pulte as acting director, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, gives him more flexibility to clean house before a permanent director is named.

“You’re less shackled,” Trump said in the interview. “It sort of gives you more power, you know, for a somewhat limited period of time.”

“Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come,” he added. “Because, if [Pulte] reduced the size, in conjunction with me … and in conjunction with possibly the person coming in … he can do a lot of the hard work and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in.”

Pulte used his authority as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (which includes the financial institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) to go after Trump’s enemies with accusations of mortgage fraud. In his new position, he now has intelligence assets, and Trump wants him to get rid of the people who might have a lot of inside information about the president.

A federal judge in Rhode Island struck down a slew of President Trump’s policies halting immigration processing and  freezing out asylum-seekers, ruling that a federal agency was motivated by “anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making.”

Following a deadly attack on a National Guard member in Washington, D.C., last November, Trump ordered an asylum freeze and an end to immigration applications for nationals from 39 countries targeted in his travel ban. That meant thousands of people were unable to apply for not just asylum or work permits but also green cards and U.S. citizenship. 

“Over six months later, many of those individuals remain without work, without legal status, and without any meaningful ability to plan for their futures,” Judge John J. McConnell Jr. wrote.

“In enacting its latest immigration policies, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services: claims statutory and regulatory authority that it does not possess; makes decisions without the reasoned explanations that it must provide; acts without regard for the reliance interests of applicants that it must consider; and justifies its actions with pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments,” McConnell continued. “In legal terms that means USCIS’s actions are contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious.” 

The president had another asylum ban attempt blocked last April.