Zelenskiy Tries Not to Roll His Eyes as Trump Rants About Ballroom

President Trump couldn’t stop raving about his planned White House ballroom while taking questions from reporters alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy Tuesday at the United Nations. 

Trump was bragging about “one of the papers reporting” that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the White House later this week was “the hottest ticket that they’ve seen in a long time.”

“Almost as hot as when Zelenskiy comes into town,” Trump said to laughs, to which Zelenskiy quipped, “I’m glad,” as Trump chuckled and playfully patted the Ukrainian president’s knee.  

Trump lamented the fact that his White House ballroom was not ready yet, otherwise he could have hosted 2,000 people for the occasion. When a reporter asked if Trump would bring Zelenskiy to the ballroom for a future visit, Trump replied, “Well, we might have that, yes.… It’s under budget and ahead of schedule.” 

Throughout the exchange, Zelenskiy was struggling not to roll his eyes or look annoyed. It’s completely understandable why, as the Ukrainian leader is in the midst of leading a war against Russia’s invasion of his country and needs Trump’s support. However, Trump is more concerned about his own vanity projects, focusing much of his time and speeches on his ballroom and other unnecessary construction in Washington, D.C. 

It’s a sign that Trump’s cognitive decline is getting worse, as he is increasingly “obsessed with things that reflect glory on him,” as Dr. John Gartner, a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, told The Daily Beast in June. And no one is stopping Trump for wasting his time (or taxpayer dollars) on these types of projects, least of all the Supreme Court. It seems that Trump is using his remaining time in office to stroke his own ego, defying any attempts to check his power. 

President Trump’s long, dramatic relationship with billionaire Elon Musk seems to be back on good terms, as the president just bought and sold tens of thousands of dollars in the tech tycoon’s SpaceX rocket company.

Financial disclosures the president signed earlier this month reveal that he purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of SpaceX shares on July 10 and sold between $1,001 and $15,000 ⁠in shares on July 17. SpaceX holds multiple federal contracts and is set to make millions of dollars off of them—yet Trump is allowed to buy and sell shares because he claims that his investments are managed by an independent third party.

This also reveals that even as Trump and Musk’s personal and political relationship has been exceptionally rocky, their financial one remains strong.

The president made over 1,100 stock trades this July, totaling between $79 million and $270 million, according to a CNBC analysis. The biggest transactions were sales of up to $25 million in Amazon and Microsoft, as well as smaller sales in Oracle and Nvidia. Previous presidents would either divest or use blind trusts or diversified funds to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. But Trump is well past that.

Even Donald Trump’s most loyal political disciples are jumping off the president’s sinking ship.

Florida Representative and Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds dropped all mentions of Trump from his campaign website Tuesday, peeling himself away from the president’s wake for the first time.

Donalds’s campaign materials were previously littered with mentions of Trump, according to recent versions of the page saved by the Internet Archive Project. Prior to the change, Donalds wore the president’s endorsement like a badge. “Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds,” read the top of Donalds’s website.

“ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP!” the page used to emphasize in a bright yellow banner. “TRUMP-ENDORSED Proven Conservative Fighter. BYRON DONALDS.”

Donalds also removed an image of himself and his wife, Erika Donalds, standing beside Trump.

Instead, Trump’s full-throated endorsement was severely downgraded, turning into just another voice in a large choir of conservative support backing Donalds. “RUN, BYRON, RUN!” the side-scrolling placard currently reads, quoting the president’s 2025 comments in which he reworked a famous line from Forrest Gump to support Donalds’s candidacy.

Donalds also refashioned his campaign priorities, shifting them away from MAGA talking points. The list previously mentioned “Enact[ing] the Trump Agenda” as Donalds’s chief priority, reported The Miami Herald. Today, that line only mentioned affordability.

Before, the second line item promised that Donalds would “Fight Illegal Immigration.” Now, Donalds pledges to “stop taxpayer handouts to illegal immigration”—though the promise’s placement has been demoted to a tangential issue under his seventh listed priority, “Law and Order.”

The three-term Floridian lawmaker had done quite a lot to curry the president’s favor. Most notably, he voted against certifying the 2020 election vote in Arizona and Pennsylvania. He has repeatedly spread the MAGA conspiracy that there was election fraud in those states, long after state officials found no evidence of fraud.

In the years since the far right’s attempted insurrection on Capitol Hill, Donalds has refused to declare whether he would have certified the 2020 results if he were in former Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes. When asked at an Axios event in 2024 how he would handle the situation if he were the vice president during a future presidential election, Donalds said he would not certify the results if he believed state officials had violated election laws.

That same year, Donalds’s ex-wife Bisa Hall spoke out publicly against him for grandstanding for the president, claiming that Donalds had always been “very opportunistic” and that Donalds’s willful participation as a “poster child” for the MAGA movement “makes some people feel better about Trump.”

If that’s true, then Donalds’s break means Trump may soon have little to convince the masses that there’s anything good about him at all.

Kalshi, one of the largest U.S. prediction markets, is asking the Trump administration to help it attract more big bettors.

In a filing with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, Tuesday, the company’s internal clearing house, Kalshi Klear, sought approval to offer margin trading on event contracts, CNBC reported.

If Kalshi is permitted to offer margin trading, then traders will be able to borrow funds from the company itself in order to gain or lose more than they invest—potentially exposing investors to a dangerous level of financial risk.

The addition of margin trading is viewed as crucial for attracting bigger institutions that already use the practice on traditional stocks and futures.

While sportsbooks derive their profit from losing bets by their customers, Kalshi gets its revenue from transaction fees for each wager placed. Bigger bettors means bigger bets, and more money for the house.

State gaming commissions have always limited credit given to bettors on sporting events contracts, but prediction market companies have argued that their sports-related products are the same thing as derivatives, and therefore can only be regulated by the CFTC. Michael Selig, the commissioner of the CFTC, has readily come to the defense of prediction markets.

A Kalshi spokesperson told CNBC that the company would refrain from allowing margin trading on sports-related event contracts, as well as on culture and the “mention” markets. Rather, the company said that margin trading would be applied to markets with expiration dates that are far in the future. As the expiry date approaches, the price to obtain this leverage would increase. The service would only be available to traders who use Kalshi Klear.

President Trump thinks the answer to skepticism about artificial intelligence is to try and change its name.

At the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday, Trump told the audience that the “United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now.”

“Here and after officially called ‘super intelligence’ changing the name and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake, it’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful,” Trump said. “In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.”

Trump said that all U.S. government documents “and hopefully the world’s” would be changed to mention “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.”

“In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence—S.I. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better, it is much better, and it’s much more accurate,” Trump said, before ominously hinting that he’d push hard for it. “Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re gonna find out pretty soon.”

Trump appears to have gotten “super intelligence” from a poll he put on his Truth Social account Monday, in which he asked his followers, “Which name do we like for the new phenomena—SUPER INTELLIGENCE VS. SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE? President DONALD J. TRUMP.” “Super intelligence” won the very unscientific poll of his fan base by 30 percent.

It’s unclear why Trump believed this would be a good use of his time at the United Nations, but if he thinks trying to change “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence” is going to win over an American public increasingly opposed to corporate misuse of AI and the proliferation of data centers, he is severely mistaken. All that this lame rebranding attempt will do is open the president—and the U.S.—up to more ridicule.