Hey everyone. Happy Friday! Today marks one month since we started this daily show, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I hope you are too. Thank you for all of the support thus far.
We have some good news heading into the weekend as a federal judge just hit the brakes on Donald Trump’s plan to use your tax dollars to pay his closest friends and strongest supporters.
We will also get into the CDC begging its own staff to volunteer and help with Ebola screenings at the airport, Wall Street analysts warning that the next surge in energy prices is on the way, a cabinet secretary bragging about kicking more than four million Americans off food stamps, and Trump’s so-called Board of Peace routing its money through a private bank account it promises to open up “when appropriate.”
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1. Judge Blocks Trump's Slush Fund (For Now)
A judge in Virginia ordered the administration to stop all work on what it calls the Anti-Weaponization Fund. No money in. No claims taken. No payouts. The commission that was supposed to hand the money out was never even seated, and now it cannot be.
But here is the catch. The judge set a hearing for June 12 and gave the Justice Department until next Friday to put its legal case on paper. Nobody has won anything yet. The clock just stopped.
The part worth sitting with is who stepped in here, and who did not. Deciding how the government spends your money is supposed to be Congress’s job. It is right there in the Constitution. And Congress had this fund sitting right in front of it.
We told you last week what they did with it. They ran. Rather than take a vote, the House and the Senate both skipped town for the Memorial Day break, and they were willing to blow up Trump’s own immigration funding bill on the way out just to avoid going on the record.
This is not some partisan ambush either. Some of the loudest objections are coming from Republicans. They know it’s bad policy. They know it’s bad politics. They just would not say so with a vote, yet.
So the branch built to control this kind of thing took the week off, and left a judge in Virginia as the only thing standing between your tax dollars and the people who attacked police officers.
The recess ends Monday, and Congress will be back in session right up to that June 12 hearing, so we are about to find out whether lawmakers finally act, or pass again and leave it in the hands of the courts.
2. CDC Asks Employees to Volunteer for Ebola Outbreak Response
The acting director of the CDC emailed staff this week seeking volunteers to screen travelers arriving from Central Africa. He is sending people from across the agency to airports to check arriving passengers for fever and flag anyone who looks sick.
The reason is an outbreak the International Rescue Committee warns could become the deadliest on record. More than 900 suspected cases, over 220 deaths, and it is now spreading to major cities in Central Africa, not just the countryside. The strain is a brutal one. The usual tests struggle to catch it, there is no approved vaccine, and in past outbreaks it killed between a third and half of the people it infected.
When your plan for a virus that kills up to half the people it touches is to email the staff and hope enough of them raise their hands, you are not running a response. You are desperate.
We did not stumble into this. Over the past year, this administration has gutted the workers and programs who specialize in catching outbreaks at the border. In January, we walked out of the World Health Organization, the very body leading the global response, so we are chasing this virus from the outside, with less data and fewer partners than we had a year ago.
And let’s not forget that the people left in charge were picked for loyalty, not expertise.
3. Experts Predicting Next Energy Price Surge
Since the war with Iran started in late February, the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively shut. More than a fifth of the world’s oil moves through that one narrow waterway, and when it closed, prices took off. The International Energy Agency compared it to living through both oil shocks of the 1970s at the same time.
Now analysts are raising their forecasts again. They are not betting on more war. They are betting on a slow recovery. And the next wave of price shocks could be two to three weeks away.
Even if the ceasefire holds, even if a deal reopens the strait, the oil does not just come roaring back. Shut-in wells take time to restart. Tankers take time to return. The fear premium gets baked into the price and lingers for months.
We talked yesterday about the Iran deal Trump keeps promising is almost done, the one that would reopen the strait and let Iran sell its oil again. This is the part nobody puts on the poster. Even the best case scenario is a slow, partial climb back, and you pay for the wait at the pump.
And it is not just what it costs to fill your tank. Diesel is what moves the freight, the trucks hauling your groceries to the shelf, and it has been hit even harder. So this leaks into the price of nearly everything, while families are already stretched thin.
The president can announce a deal any day he likes. The relief at the gas station will show up on its own schedule, and experts are telling us the recovery will not be quick.
4. Trump Admin Celebrates Kicking 4 Million Off SNAP, Can't Say Why
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been busy celebrating that more than four million people have been kicked off SNAP in about a year. She says it proves the economy is booming and people are trading welfare for the American dream. Then someone asked her how she actually knows that:
So basically, she does not know. She moved four million people off the rolls, and in the same breath she admits she has no idea why. No numbers. No proof. Just a hunch that it is, as she put it, “probably significant.”
Here is what we do know. Real fraud in SNAP runs under 1%, which is nowhere near enough to push millions off the rolls. What actually did, experts say, is the law Trump signed last summer, the one that piled new work requirements on people who used to qualify and cut $186 billion from the program, the largest cut in its history.
So here we are. The same government that is trying to hand nearly two billion dollars to the president’s friends is taking food off the table for four million families and calling it a victory. And Rollins says this is only the beginning.
5. Trump's Peace Board Will Disclose Its Finances 'When Appropriate'
You may remember the Board of Peace as Trump’s big plan for postwar Gaza. There is an official fund for it, set up through the World Bank and built to be transparent. Four months in, according to the Financial Times, it has taken in exactly zero dollars.
So where is the money going? Into a private JPMorgan account the board set up on its own, with none of the reporting rules the official fund would carry.
A board official waved it off, saying donors just “chose other options,“ and promised the board would show its finances to its own executive board, the one packed with Trump insiders, “at a time deemed appropriate.“
Translation: just trust us.
But this is not some private charity. Trump has floated ten billion dollars of taxpayer money for this thing. So Americans could be bankrolling a fund whose books are controlled by the president’s friends, run through a private account with no oversight.
Meanwhile the real money trickles in around the edges. Morocco put up twenty million dollars. The UAE pledged a hundred million.
When the transparent account sits empty and the private one fills up, “when appropriate” is just a different way of saying never.
Okay, that is the show for May 29th.
Thanks for being here. If any of this hits home, like it, share it, and send it to someone who needs to see it. Hope everyone has a great weekend. See you Monday.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
For more than a week, detainees inside the Delaney Hall immigration jail in Newark have been on a hunger strike. They say the food is spoiled, medical care is denied, and the showers run hot enough to burn. Relatives and members of Congress say guards answered the protest with pepper spray and batons, then started transferring the organizers out and cutting off family visits. The Department of Homeland Security flatly denies all of it, insisting there is "no hunger strike" and no bad conditions. The place is run for profit by the GEO Group, and when Governor Mikie Sherrill tried to send state health inspectors in this week, they were turned away.
The Pentagon announced Wednesday that Dell won a $9.7 billion contract to supply software across the entire U.S. military. Here is the timeline that matters. Back in February, Trump bought between one and five million dollars of Dell stock, then told a Georgia rally crowd to "go out and buy a Dell." He kept buying shares and praising the company at the White House, right up until the contract landed and the stock jumped. The White House says his "only interest is doing what's best for the American people," and the Pentagon insists it was a competitive bid.
