Hey everyone. Happy Wednesday, and welcome back.
Our top story today: Donald Trump’s new financial disclosures show he pulled in at least 1.4 billion dollars from crypto last year, ironically most of it from a meme coin with his own face stamped on it. This is the President of the United States getting rich off the presidency, and it feels like he’s not even trying to hide it.
We’ll also get into House Republicans leaving town for a two week vacation, the missing congressman that has reappeared in D.C., the scramble on the right to gut birthright citizenship after they lost at the Supreme Court, and a Republican convention in Dallas to save Trump’s candidate in a tightening Texas race.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump Rakes In Billions From Crypto While In Office
On Tuesday, Trump released his annual financial disclosure to the Office of Government Ethics. It runs 927 pages. For a little perspective, Barack Obama’s final disclosure was 8 pages. Joe Biden’s was 11. Even JD Vance’s last one was 17.
In 2025, his first year back in office, the president reported at least 1.4 billion dollars in crypto earnings. His total income for the year topped 2 billion.
Most of it came from two places. More than 635 million dollars of that came from a licensing deal tied to the Trump meme coin. He got another modest 500 million from World Liberty Financial, the crypto company he runs with his sons.
Well, you’d think it’s pretty obvious that the president is profiting off the presidency, right? A reporter thought so too, and asked him about it. Take a look at our president’s totally humble reaction:
Wow! Seems like the president hadn’t been thanked in a while and needed to hear it, so he resorted to thanking himself. That’s one way to cope.
If anything, public office is supposed to be a place of debt. You’re meant to owe the American people, work for the American people, and ensure your constituents are the ones benefitting from your policies and time in office.
But this president is different. No one who has held this office has ever made anything close to what Trump has while serving in it. He is profiting off the presidency, plain and simple. It’s disgusting, and it should outrage both sides of the aisle.
2. House Republicans Skip Town, Leave Troop Pay Behind
On Tuesday, GOP leaders sent House members home early for the Fourth of July recess. Lawmakers aren’t coming back until July 13th. And this is the second week in a row they have left town early.
Here’s why. Fourteen Republicans tanked a procedural vote, 198 to 224. That vote was supposed to set up the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual must pass defense bill. This is 1.15 trillion dollars that funds the Pentagon and includes a pay raise for the troops.
But here’s the Trump effect moment: they blew it up over the SAVE Act, the president’s election reform bill that he keeps holding everything else hostage for. Speaker Mike Johnson tried to attach the SAVE Act onto the defense bill through a procedural trick. GOP Congresswoman Anna Luna called it a procedural head fake and demanded it be written straight into the text.
And guess what? Like we’ve said countless times, none of it even matters, because the SAVE Act can’t get through the Senate. It needs 60 votes it does not have, and it gets stripped out in conference no matter how they attach it. So a faction of House Republicans got grumpy, froze the defense bill and a troop pay raise to lobby for a bill they know deep down is going nowhere. But it keeps daddy Trump happy with them.
And listen to how one Texas Republican, Congressman Troy Nehls, talked about heading back to his district while most of the country is, you know, counting every dollar:
He literally just said maybe the 60 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck don’t work as hard as he does. That’s the answer of Nehls and probably most of those Republicans gleefully going home for the week on a Tuesday.
They couldn’t fund the troops before the holiday, but they made it home in plenty of time for recess. And they’ll spend it exactly like Nehls plans to. Well fed, well rested, and convinced the people struggling back home just aren’t trying hard enough.
3. Missing Congressman Resurfaces After Months Away
On Tuesday, Congressman Tom Kean Jr., a Republican from New Jersey, walked back onto the House floor for the first time since March 5th. He had missed more than 140 votes. For months his office would only say he was dealing with a personal medical issue, and the silence had set off all kinds of speculation.
On the floor, he told everyone where he had been and what the medical issue was. Here is part of what he said:
Let me be clear about something. Depression is a real and serious illness. Millions of Americans deal with it. Kean did the right thing by getting help and by saying so out loud, and telling millions of people that asking for help is something that takes real courage.
But there is another truth here too. Being a member of Congress is not a personal possession. It is a job. His some 700,000 constituents had no vote in the House for nearly four months and, for most of that time, no explanation at all, even as he ran for reelection. When Senator John Fetterman went through this same illness back in 2023, his office told the public within days. Kean’s constituents were left guessing for months.
It’s also important to note that Kean was still trading stocks while hospitalized. Almost 200 thousand dollars worth. And his campaign was still fundraising. That isn’t a good look regardless of what he was going through.
Compassion for what he went through and honesty about the job he was elected to do are not mutually exclusive things. In no other job would somebody have been able to get away with going dark for that long.
And don’t even get me started on paid medical leave, because Kean has consistently voted against it. But he doesn’t play by the same rules as everybody else.
4. The Right Melts Down Over Birthright Citizenship Loss
Our top story yesterday was Trump’s big loss at the Supreme Court, as they struck down his order to end birthright citizenship. He reacted about as well as you would expect, complaining about the decision on Truth Social and telling Republicans that they can, quote, “easily make it up in Congress through Legislation”.
But there’s a catch. The majority ruled the Constitution itself guarantees birthright citizenship. One justice, Brett Kavanaugh, did leave open that Congress might carve out narrow exceptions by law. So there may be a fight to be had at the margins. But the sweeping thing Trump is promising, ending it outright through Congress, runs straight into the Constitution.
The rest of his party understood that, so they went looking for other ideas. You could say that they got creative:
And Miller was not alone. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert wrote that the State Department should “immediately cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants”. Congressman Chip Roy said the country had “no choice but to stop all immigration”. And Sean Davis, the CEO of a popular right-wing magazine called The Federalist, laid out a perfectly reasonable list of options that included sterilizing all foreign visitors and seceding from the United States.
And what is this panic even about? Birthright citizenship has been the law for more than 150 years. It was the law yesterday, it is the law today, and all the Court did was confirm it will stay that way. Nothing even changed.
But today, Todd Blanche took the meltdown seriously:
So MAGA’s wish list was not just noise, because now the Justice Department is pointing federal agents at pregnant travelers. And it will just keep getting crazier and crazier until they get exactly what they want.
5. GOP Scrambles as Texas Senate Race Turns Into a Coin Flip
With thin majorities in Congress to defend, Trump announced yesterday that Republicans will hold a midterm convention in Dallas this September. It’s a first for the party, designed to reverse their pattern of underperformance in years without Trump’s name on the ballot.
But the President’s approval is sinking by the day, and it’s showing up in midterm races you wouldn’t typically expect. It’s no secret why they chose a convention in Texas, where no Democrat has won statewide in over 30 years. This year’s Senate race should have been a lock for Republicans, but right now it looks more like a coin flip.
Why is it so close? Well, Trump’s record is damaging enough on its own, but the scandal-plagued candidate he handpicked over longtime incumbent John Cornyn keeps making it worse. Lately, it doesn’t even seem like nominee Ken Paxton likes the state of Texas at all:
Texas Republicans excuse a lot from their candidates, but I don’t think declaring love for California is going to fly. Especially when Paxton decides to vacation in Iceland with his alleged mistress instead of staying on the campaign trail.
If a Texas senator skipping out at the worst possible moment sounds familiar, it should. Remember when Ted Cruz flew to Cancún while millions of his constituents sat freezing in the dark? I sure do. Even though Republicans in Washington desperately want to focus on Texas for November, at this point, leaving the state behind is practically a MAGA tradition.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Two federal judges struck down the Trump administration’s new restrictions on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program yesterday, one day before the rule was set to take effect. The rule would have let the Education Department strip loan forgiveness from public workers if it deemed their employers to have a “substantial illegal purpose”, but the judge in Boston found that it threatened to revoke eligibility from borrowers who lawfully assist immigrants, teach diversity practices, or facilitate gender-affirming care. Congress created PSLF in 2007 to cancel federal student loans after 10 years of government or nonprofit work, and more than a million borrowers have received relief since.
The House passed the bipartisan Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act on Monday in a 267-117 vote, sending the sweeping online safety package to the Senate. The bill would require new parental controls, age verification for explicit sites, guardrails on AI chatbots, and limits on targeted advertising aimed at minors. Republican Brett Guthrie and Democrat Frank Pallone, who wrote the package together, hailed it as the strongest set of protections for kids online that Congress has produced. But a similar bill cleared the Senate 91-3 back in 2024, and stalled in the House over free speech concerns. This version dropped its most contested piece, the “duty of care” standard that would have held tech companies legally responsible for harm to young users. Now it heads to the Senate, where leading Democrats have already signaled their opposition to the weakened bill.
