The Dictatorship

Trump made more than $1 billion in crypto ventures last year, financial disclosure shows

Published

1 hour ago

July 1, 2026

Trump made more than $1 billion in crypto ventures last year, financial disclosure shows

Christmas. 1, 2026, 9:10 AM EDT

President Donald Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency-related income in his latest annual financial disclosure released Tuesday, with digital assets emerging as the largest source of his personal earnings during his second term.

The 927-page disclosure, covering 2025 and filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, shows Trump earned more than $500 million from World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company he co-founded in 2024 with his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. He also reported another $635 million in income tied to sales of the $TRUMP meme coin.

Speaking with reporters Wednesday morning before leaving for events in North Dakota, Trump said that others choose his investments without his input.

“I’ve made a lot of money before I became president, and they invest my money, and I don’t talk to them,” he said. “So, I have many people… I don’t know what they call closed accounts or something. You put your money in, and that’s it. I don’t talk to them. They’re big institutions, and they run it.”

The president also earned hundreds of millions of dollars in income from several of his properties in 2025, including $122 million from Trump Doral, $77.5 million from Mar-a-Lago and $39 million from Trump Tower Chicago.

The filing lists more than $80 million in income from legal settlements with media companies including ABC, CBS, Meta, YouTube and X. Trump also reported at least $8.3 million in royalties from books and branded merchandise, including $4.7 million from Trump watches and more than $200,000 in royalties from the God Bless the USA Bible, a branded edition promoted in partnership with singer Lee Greenwood.

The disclosure illustrates a significant shift in Trump’s business portfolio. While his wealth has long centered on hotels, golf courses and commercial real estate, cryptocurrency has emerged as his largest revenue driver. Reuters previously estimated the Trump family has generated at least $2.3 billionin profits from crypto-related ventures since Trump returned to the presidency.

The report follows additional ethics disclosuresreleased in May showing hundreds of millions of dollars in securities transactions involving major U.S. companies and municipal bonds. At the time, the Trump Organization saidthose investments were managed by outside financial institutions through discretionary accounts and that neither Trump nor his family directed individual trading decisions.

Soorin Kim contributed to this report.

Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at BLN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.

Soorin Kim is a White House producer with MS NOW.

The Dictatorship

Vance contradicts Trump about bipartisan cooperation on housing bill

Published

1 hour ago

July 1, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Vance contradicts Trump about bipartisan cooperation on housing bill

As a rule, JD Vance seems to go out of his way to say whatever Donald Trump wants him to say, but from time to time, contradictions emerge between the president and the vice president.

Take the recently passed housing bill, for example, which arrived at the White House earlier this week.

As part of an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, the Ohio Republican said, “Frankly, Laura, I would love it if Democrats were willing — you know, not that they will agree with Republicans all the time — but if they were willing to work with us on lowering housing prices, on lowering gas prices, on actually making the lives of American citizens better. You know, we could have some real bipartisan compromise. That’s not what they’re talking about.”

I realize the vice president must be very busy, but it really isn’t that difficult to keep up with the basics of current events. In this case, when Vance said Democrats are unwilling to work with Republicans on priorities such as “lowering housing prices,” he turned reality on its head. It was literally last week when Democrats offered unanimous support for a bipartisan bill to address housing prices — legislation that members such as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts helped to write.

Democrats recognized that doing so would offer the GOP some election-season bragging rights, but Democrats did it anyway because they have prioritized governing and “actually making the lives of American citizens better” over partisan considerations.

But Vance didn’t just contradict reality; he also contradicted his boss.

Just one day before the vice president brazenly misled a national television audience, Trump was asked about the pending housing bill. “It’s very bipartisan; that means the Democrats like it,” the president saidwhile acknowledging that he hasn’t yet decided whether to sign it.

In other words, when Vance said policymakers “could have some real bipartisan compromise,” he seemed indifferent to the fact that we’ve already had some real bipartisan compromise — a detail that even Trump was willing to acknowledge a day earlier.

Whether the vice president will suffer for publicly contradicting the president remains to be seen.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The Dictatorship

GOP officials eye restrictions on pregnant travelers following Supreme Court ruling

Published

1 hour ago

July 1, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

GOP officials eye restrictions on pregnant travelers following Supreme Court ruling

The ruling wasn’t as lopsided as many legal observers expected, but in Trump v. Barbara, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the idea that a president can override the 14th Amendment to the Constitution with an executive order. Although the 5-4 ruling left in place a status quo that had existed for generations, much of the right did not respond well to the news.

Much of the outrage from conservatives was tiresome and predictable, but one element of the pushback to the high court’s ruling stood out, for unfortunate reasons.

A couple of hours after the decision was issued, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado argued by way of social media that the State Department “should immediately cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants.” Soon after, one of her colleagues went a step further by announcing plans for a legislative solution.

Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee said Tuesday he’s moving forward with plans for legislation that he’s calling the Anchors Away Act, which would ban certain pregnant foreign women from entering the United States.

“So, I have a bill; it will be called ‘Anchors Away,’ which, look, if you’re not a U.S. citizen, if you’re not a green card holder and you have a child on U.S. soil, today, that child will be a U.S. citizen,” Ogles said in a video posted to social media. “Under my bill, under my legislation, we fix that. … So in short, what this bill does is, if you are a pregnant woman, you can’t come into this country. You got to be a citizen, be here, you have to be a green card holder. So if you’re pregnant and you don’t have one of those statuses, no admittance allowed,” he continued.

As HuffPost noted“The ‘anchor’ part of Ogles’ bill refers to the pejorative term, ‘anchor babies,’ used by many conservatives to describe children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants.”

The Tennessee Republican also took his pitch to Fox News. “Look, if you’re pregnant and you’re from a foreign nation, you know what?” Coal says. “It’s time for Congress to pass a law saying you can’t come here.”

And while Ogles and Boebert aren’t exactly known for their legislative prowess, even if the House were to pass such a measure, it would never clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

As the day progressed, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller also appeared on Fox News, and when asked whether the U.S. is prepared to start “banning pregnant women,” Miller didn’t say no, replying instead that there are “a lot of things” the Trump administration will take “a hard look” at.

On Wednesday morning, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also said the administration is prepared to “look at” restrictions on pregnant travelers to the U.S.

I won’t pretend to know what, if anything, will come of this, but I do have a question for proponents of these restrictions: How exactly would U.S. officials go about determining whether someone entering the country is pregnant?

The Dictatorship

The authoritarian power play happening at the Supreme Court

Published

1 hour ago

July 1, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Christmas. 1, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

While many are tracking Supreme Court rulings as wins or losses for President Donald Trumpwhat they should be watching is a broader and more disturbing trend: For several years, and at an accelerating pace this term, the Supreme Court has been seizing power for itself — from the lower courts, from Congress and from the voters. Whichever way it rules for Trump, the court always rules for itself. The Supreme Court, the one branch of government that can’t be voted out, answerable to no one, is making itself the branch that rules all others.

This is Supreme Court authoritarianism, built to outlast any president.

Start with the ruling on birthright citizenship. When Trump loses (though barely; three justices were ready to deny citizenship to children born on U.S. soil) most court-watchers exhale — and miss the danger already taking hold: a high court wresting power from the courts beneath it and the supposedly co-equal branches beside it.

When Trump loses most court-watchers exhale — and miss the danger already taking hold: a high court wresting power from the courts beneath it and the supposedly co-equal branches beside it.

Consider last term’s ruling on nationwide injunctions. What many commentators scored as a win for Trump did far more for the high court. For centuries, courts’ power to fashion a remedy that fits the harm has been flexible by design — it’s what courts do. In Trump v. CASA Inc.the Supreme Court declared that centuries-old power fixed and frozen: A federal court may only order from a short catalog of remedies that the Roberts Court says an English court could award in 1789. In his concurring opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito warned that the Supreme Court wouldn’t trust lower courts with other long-standing tools as well. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the Supreme Court itself, not the lower courts or Congress, would be the “ultimate decider” — not just of a remedy for a wrong but of which federal policies take effect nationwide, even while their legality is in doubt.

The Supreme Court is also taking the power to find facts, a power that has long belonged to the lower courts for good reason: The evidence is before them. Higher courts may set those findings aside only for clear error, and almost never do. In Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP, the high court cast that deference aside: A three-judge panel had found, after a nine-day trial, that the state sorted Black voters by race. Yet the justices reweighed the evidence, reversed and chided the lower-court judges for “hurl[ing] accusations at the political branches.” Elsewhere, the Supreme Court overturned a trial court’s factual finding that a public school coach’s prayers were public and coercive, recasting them as private and quiet, weakening the wall between church and state. Last week, it ignored a lower court’s factual finding that the Trump administration had stripped migrants of protected status out of racial prejudice. Now, with no evidence before them, the justices simply find the facts they want.

On Tuesday, the court went further still. Its opinion on transgender athletes didn’t overrule a trial court’s fact-finding — it cut the trial court off before it could even consider the facts of the case. Instead, the justices issued a sweeping general policy from the bench, cloaking the fiat in the language of deference to the legislatures meant to grapple with the hard questions at stake.

As the Supreme Court diminishes other judges’ powers to uphold the rule of law, trial judges across the country are using what they have left to block this administration’s unlawful acts: One ruled this month that the administration could not rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Artssaying only Congress can; another blocked a Justice Department plan to create a $1.8 billion settlement fund for the president as unlawful spending. Earlier this year a federal judge ordered deportation flights turned around; they flew anyway.

Without a court to halt it, an unlawful executive order becomes a terminated job, a shuttered clinic, a stalled cancer trial. For the work they are trying to do, many federal judges are targeted. The U.S. Marshals Service recorded 564 threats against federal judges last year, and Trump frequently calls out by name those who rule against him — he branded one a “hater” and another a “Radical Left Lunatic” who “should be IMPEACHED.”

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is also disarming Congress. Consider: This spring, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s initial tariffs — a rare time it told the president no. The statute Trump leaned on simply doesn’t let a president tax the whole world’s goods, and the court said so. The words of the law were enough. That’s the normal rule: When Congress writes in plain words, the court must follow them. But some justices went further and sought to change the rule — so that clear words are not enough and the court can ignore Congress whenever it decides the stakes are high.

The court has made grabs against the legislative branch before: ruling in 2021 that Congress cannot say what harms Americans may bring to court. It did so this term in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections: Prison guards shaved a man’s head, forcing him to violate his religious faith — a plain breach of federal law. Yet the Supreme Court held that no court anywhere could award him a remedy — it read that power out of the law Congress wrote. The rights that Congress provides may live on paper but die at the courthouse door. The lesson is plain: This court can second-guess what Congress enacts whenever it likes, on a standard of its own making.

Then there are elections. The rule most Americans know — courts do not meddle once voting is underway — has a name: the Purcell principle. For years the Supreme Court invoked Purcell against lower courts. This spring the justices said that rule applies to everyone but themselves — then turned around and wielded it as a club against a lower court.

First, in Callais v. Louisianathe justices reached into an election already underway, breaking the Supreme Court’s own rule against late interference. Then, in an unsigned order issued on the court’s “shadow docket,” the justices invoked the Purcell rule to do the opposite in Alabama: stopping a lower court and letting the state run its 2026 midterms on a map that three federal judges — two of them Trump appointees — had found intentionally discriminatory against Black voters. The rule that ties a lower court’s hands turns out not to bind those at the top. The result is that voters will cast ballots within districts their own courts condemned.

These are not scattered rulings; they are one move, made over and over.

These are not scattered rulings; they are one move, made over and over. The Supreme Court now holds the power to find facts and to halt an unlawful act, both once the lower courts’; it holds the power to define rights and wrongs, which once belonged to Congress; and an election’s freedom from any court’s reach, once absolute, is also now the Supreme Court’s. Every institution losing power is one Americans can vote for; the one gaining it cannot be voted out.

These wins are built to last: The court has wrapped these takings in the Constitution, placing them past anyone who could undo them.

Power split among many hands is the oldest check against tyranny; a single hand gathering is a threat all its own. The lower courts are holding the line nearly alone. The Republican-dominated Congress won’t act — and the Supreme Court is making certain that if the legislative branch ever did, it could not. The head of the judicial branch is taking the other courts’ power. Built to sit atop one branch, the Supreme Court is sitting above all — above every court, above the elected branches, answerable to no one.

J. Maria Glover is the Carmack Waterhouse professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.