The Trump Administration Is One Big Reality TV Show Now

The Trump administration is dipping its toe back in reality television.

The Small Business Administration announced Tuesday that the agency’s Million Dollar Pitch Competition would be concluded with a “live finale event” in Washington D.C. on September 18.

Five small manufacturing companies from across the country are set to go head-to-head for cuts of a $1 million prize pool furnished by Clover Network Inc., a point-of-sale and payment-processing platform. Think Shark Tank but way more boring.

The program will be presided over by a panel of Trump sycophants and scam artists, including Nicki Minaj, the rapper-singer who took a hard-right turn when her vaccine skepticism hit the MAGA mainstream; Grant Cardone, a get-rich-quick influencer accused of misleading investors; and Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, who currently leads a group of DOGE goons running federal websites. The event will be hosted by actor Dean Cain, once Superman, now fanboy for the president.

This is the Trump administration’s second foray into reality television, after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy debuted his flop travel show last month. It’s not yet clear where the SBA’s show will “air,” but if Duffy’s project was any indication, it will be quietly dumped on YouTube and immediately forgotten.

President Donald Trump’s latest grift appears to be selling $1 coins for more than $2 apiece.

Beginning at noon Wednesday, the U.S. Mint is selling $1 commemorative gold coins emblazoned with Trump’s face on its website for the country’s 250th anniversary—for the low, low prices of $61 for 25 coins or 100 coins for $154.50. Interest from Trump supporters appears to be so high that an online waiting room was set up.

Among the minted coins are 250,000 coins pressed on July 4 that carry a “July 4” privy mark, according to a U.S. Mint press release. The coins feature Trump’s official White House portrait, a move that should be illegal under the Presidential $1 Coin Act, which states that no coin shall “bear the image of a living former or current President” until at least two years after their death.

The Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 also states that living people can’t appear on the back of a coin, but the Trump administration claims that the act allows the president to create memorial coins celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

The coins aren’t even made of gold but have a “gold-like finish,” according to the Treasury Department. That won’t matter to Trump supporters, who shell out their cash for anything that the president sells, from gaudy golden sneakers to Trump-branded Bibles made in China. He’s also sold unsightly watches and overpriced fragrances bearing his name.

Trump has made more than $2.2 billion since being sworn in as president last year. While most of that is from cryptocurrency, he’s still making a pretty penny on merchandise, and now he’s got the U.S. Mint hawking his likeness on actual currency. It seems that there’s nothing Trump won’t do to make a buck, ethics be damned.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was sent scrambling to get his party members in line on Tuesday after two Democrats voted to advance the Republican legislative agenda.

Jeffries, joined by Democratic Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, announced a probe into Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine who rescued a procedural rule vote Republicans were set to lose.

“The decision by two of our colleagues to blindside the entire House Democratic Caucus and join with the Republican majority to pass a procedural rule on the brink of failing represents a significant breach of trust,” the statement said. “It is an action that necessitates a serious response, and we have asked the Committee on Caucus Rules to take this up in short order.”

The procedural rule would allow a vote on a number of measures, including a resolution to denounce socialism and praise the Save Act, Donald Trump’s disastrous voter repression measure, as well as a measure to bar federally funded universities from boycotting Israel.

Golden advanced the rule in order to pass a bill protecting Maine lobstermen from new regulations involving the North Atlantic right whale.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s reasoning was much more opaque. “Working America is hanging on by a thread, trying to feed our families without being beholden to big government or big business. Standing around pointing fingers, debating -isms and making people photocopy their birth certificate every time they cast a ballot is not the job,” she wrote on X following the vote.

Of course, this vote had absolutely nothing to do with passing a continuing resolution.

The apparent defections are a humiliating blow for Jeffries, and his public response indicates a heightened level of effort in the struggle to maintain party discipline.

Health care has emerged as the chief priority for Democrats should the party wrest control of the House and Senate this November.

In an interview with NBC News published Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined four policy goals that he believed would attract “uniform Democratic support.”

“We have to reverse the Medicaid cuts. We should extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Jeffries said. “We should restore congressional authority as it relates to tariffs, because the Trump tariffs are making life more expensive for the American people. And we should end, decisively, if it’s still going on, Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East.”

But there’s still a long road ahead. Virginia Representative Don Beyer told the network that while there’s consensus that the party’s first post-election bill should focus on affordability, there’s little agreement on exactly what that should look like.

“In the affordability debate, nothing’s more central to it than health care,” Beyer told NBC News. “My expectation is that it’ll very much be about affordability one way or the other.”

Yet a growing contingent of Democrats—including the party’s emerging cohort of democratic socialists—want the party to aim higher on health care than the low-hanging fruit of reversing Trump’s unpopular cuts.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a rumored 2028 presidential candidate—said it would “absolutely not” be enough to restore Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

“Of course, we need to take immediate action on those ACA subsidies and making sure that we lower those prices immediately,” Ocasio-Cortez told NBC News. “But it doesn’t fix the deeper systemic issue that has led health care to be one of the primary drivers of inflationary costs over the last decade, frankly.”

“We need to be doing a lot more to take on corporate power, to break up a lot of these monopolies that are rolling up—Big Pharma, insurance, private equity entering the space of health care unchecked,” she continued. “I think there’s a lot here for us to really dig in on, to work on.”

Successfully enacting the agenda (and unravelling Trump’s Project 2025 victories) will be dependent on the size of the party’s Election Day wins. If Democrats fail to win a significant number of seats in either chamber or are forced to contend with a thin majority, they’ll face seismic challenges in passing any sort of anti-Trump legislation.

President Donald Trump is clueless as to why the Iranian people won’t rise up against their government, oblivious to the fact that his bombing campaign isn’t exactly inspiring.

“I’m not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table, as ABC Fake News reported. I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement. I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing,” the president posted on Truth Social Tuesday night. “They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight? President DJT.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. bombed the Iranian city of Kuhestak in Sirik County near the Strait of Hormuz overnight Tuesday, hitting a wedding ceremony in one of the strikes and killing at least five civilians, most of them women and children, according to the Iranian government. A nearby communications tower is believed to have been the target. In response, Iran fired missiles at U.S. bases around the Middle East.

“The United States’ catalogue of atrocities against the nation of Iran is now complete: a residential home in Kuhestak, #Sirik, was brutally attacked tonight while families were celebrating a wedding. More than 50 innocent men, women and children were martyred or wounded,” Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote on X. “This cruelty cannot be separated from the chain of atrocities that preceded it in #Minab, #Lamerd, Qeshm and elsewhere nor from the strikes on military targets that were dressed in deceptive justifications.”

To the Iranian public (and elsewhere), pictures and videos of such attacks are likely to help the Iranian government’s cause much more than Trump’s. For all Trump’s talk of wishing to help the Iranian public against their government, the death of innocent civilians sends an entirely different message.

Iranians haven’t forgotten the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab at the start of the war in February that killed 200 people, mostly schoolchildren. They aren’t going to forget that a wedding was bombed, something that seems to be a recurring theme of American military misadventures. Trump is delusional if he thinks that this will win over the Iranian people.