Hey everyone. Welcome back and happy Friday. Good to have you here.
Our top story today: The Wall Street Journal has pulled back the curtain on the President’s fundraising machine, and it is unlike anything we have seen from a sitting president. More than 800 million dollars has been raised since he took office, much of it squeezed out of corporate America by a fundraiser whose pitch is pretty blatant: “the boss wants this money.” When access to the President of the United States comes with a price tag, that is not fundraising. That is a shakedown.
We will also get into the Commerce Department taking government stakes in seven more private companies, the President walking back his promise to let Ukraine build Patriot missiles, the White House claiming a breakthrough on disarming Hamas in Gaza, and the FIFA president’s twenty billion dollar World Cup sell-off blowing up in his face.
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Let’s get to it.
1. WSJ Exposes Trump's $800 Million Money Machine
The Journal reports President Trump has raised more than 800 million dollars since returning to office. The money flows to his presidential library, the new White House ballroom, his political committees, and celebrations around America’s 250th birthday.
The person running point is Meredith O’Rourke, a Florida fundraiser Trump has nicknamed the princess of darkness. She is not a government employee. But he calls her from the White House almost every night to review who has given and who has not, and he keeps telling her to raise the asks. Some donors have been asked for as much as 50 million dollars.
Her pitch does not leave much to the imagination. She tells executives, “This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation.” And when that is not enough, she gets blunter: “The boss wants this money.”
Executives told the Journal they believed the checks bought access, and that if their company had business in front of the federal government, Trump would want to know how much they had given. One chairman of a publicly traded company said businesses understood they were either “checked on a list, or crossed off a list.”
Trump’s team calls him the most successful fundraiser in modern political history. But let’s be honest about what’s actually happening on those calls. These executives aren’t writing checks because they believe in the ballroom. They’re writing them because they’ve figured out that in this administration, that’s the price of getting your phone calls returned.
2. Trump Takes Government Stakes in Seven More Private Companies
This week the Commerce Department announced that it signed letters of intent with seven companies for 874 million dollars in CHIPS Act funding. The money backs semiconductor research: photonics, advanced memory, the building blocks of AI computing. GlobalFoundries, the chipmaker, gets up to 300 million of it. The rest goes to six smaller firms.
But the catch is in the fine print. Every one of those companies must hand the federal government a minority equity stake as a condition of the money. This follows the playbook from last summer, when the administration took ten percent of Intel. Since December, the model has spread to roughly 18 companies and nearly four billion dollars in awards.
Senator Todd Young of Indiana, the Republican who helped write the CHIPS Act, has said the law was never intended to let the government take stakes in private companies.
And here’s what I’d say to every conservative who’s fine with this, or who thinks it’s smart hardball: this doesn’t end with Trump. The precedent being set right now is that the White House can demand ownership of private companies as a condition of doing business with the federal government. That power doesn’t expire in January 2029.
Let’s fast forward a few years. President Gavin Newsom announces that any oil company that wants a drilling lease on federal land has to hand Washington a ten percent stake. President Ocasio-Cortez announces the government now owns a piece of every pharmaceutical company that sells to Medicare. How are you going to react?
We all know how. But you won’t be able to say it’s unprecedented, because the precedent is being set right now, with a Republican in the White House and almost no Republicans objecting.
3. Trump Backtracks on Letting Ukraine Build Patriot Missiles
Three weeks ago, the answer was yes. On July 8, at the NATO summit in Ankara, sitting right next to President Zelenskyy, Trump announced it on camera:
For Ukraine, it really was a breakthrough years in the making. The Patriot is the only system Kyiv has that reliably stops Russian ballistic missiles, and there are nowhere near enough interceptors to go around. Ukraine knocks down about 90 percent of the drones and cruise missiles Russia fires at it. Ballistic missiles are another story. Most get through.
And I want you to understand what “get through” means. It means a hypersonic warhead landing on an apartment block in Kyiv at three in the morning. A production license would let Ukraine build its own supply instead of waiting in line.
Zelenskyy met Trump at the White House on Tuesday and left saying the president had accepted that Ukraine would get its licenses. Two days later, Trump told the Financial Times he is “not sure.” He called the Patriot “a very extraordinary weapon” and said “we have to be a little bit careful of who we license to. We don’t really license equipment.”
In the meantime, his envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, will make their first trip to Ukraine in the coming days.
Put yourself in Zelenskyy’s position. You sat next to this man at NATO while he announced it to the world. You left the White House on Tuesday believing it was settled. And by Thursday you’re finding out from the Financial Times that it might all be off. Your cities are under missile attack while you wait to learn whether America’s answer is still America’s answer. That is what it means to be an ally of the United States in 2026. Every promise comes with an asterisk.
4. Trump Claims Another Historic Deal in the Middle East
Yesterday, President Trump announced that his Board of Peace had reached what he called a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and every other armed group in Gaza. In his words, “a monumental step toward lasting peace and security.”
But officials describe a roadmap, not a finished deal: a 15-point framework to be refined in the coming weeks. Sound familiar? A new transitional authority would take over governance and hold a monopoly on weapons. An international stabilization force would dismantle the heavy weapons and the tunnels, train a new Palestinian police force, and step in as Israeli troops pull out.
Hamas says nothing moves unless Israel stops its strikes, pulls back, and lets aid flow. Israel, for its part, has said nothing publicly, after telling mediators it wants Gaza fully demilitarized before any withdrawal. The Washington Post points out that today, both sides were conspicuously quiet.
Look, I hope this agreement ends up being the real deal. But we’ve seen this over and over again from this administration. Big announcement of a supposed historic deal. Followed by backpedaling, confusion, and silence. At this point we need to wait for Israel and Hamas to say we have a deal. Not Trump. Because as we’ve seen, his words don’t mean anything.
5. Europe Votes to Boycott FIFA Over the Kushner World Cup Deal
Just days after this year’s tournament finished, Trump buddy Gianni Infantino was prepared to create a 20 billion dollar commercial subsidiary to run future World Cups and sell 20% of it to private investors. The anchor investor was a firm run by Joshua Kushner, Jared’s younger brother. The scheme was reportedly born in secret talks between Infantino and Kushner last year, and others close to the Trump administration were rumored to be involved.
That idea leaked on Tuesday, and the rejections have been piling up ever since. Yesterday, all 55 countries in Europe’s soccer federation voted to boycott every FIFA competition if it goes forward. The North and Central American and Asian federations came out against it soon after. Altogether, almost 140 of FIFA’s 211 member nations were opposed to the plan within days, which would have needed a majority to pass.
And that failure had consequences. This morning, Infantino’s own senior adviser, who served on Trump’s White House World Cup task force, resigned in protest. He walked away saying he had no part in this plan and that the rest of FIFA’s leadership should speak up too. By the end of the day, open calls for Infantino himself to resign were spreading across Europe, by all sides of the political spectrum.
Step back and look at what happened this week. The world got a clean look at Trump-style cash grab, and took three days to reject it. Not left versus right. Everyone. The rest of the world still knows corruption when it sees it. America needs to wake up and do the same.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Senate leaders are deciding whether to use the coming stopgap funding bill to block President Trump from finalizing a rule that would put political appointees in charge of approving federal grants. Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins said yesterday that she opposes the rule and hopes the Senate takes the opportunity to delay it, though she noted the decision rests with leadership. The Office of Management and Budget has framed the rewrite as a way to improve government-wide grant policy and strengthen transparency and accountability. The proposal lets agencies terminate grants at any time without notice, and hand final sign-off to political appointees instead of expert peer review, for billions of dollars a year flowing to states, schools, hospitals and nonprofits. Forty-seven senators have already written OMB Director Russ Vought demanding he pull it back, and Collins wrote the first letter from a senator opposing it. Majority Leader John Thune says he wants the funding bill passed next week, ahead of the September 30 shutdown deadline.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted 13 to 9 on Thursday to advance a bipartisan bill that would stop Trump’s Education Department from handing its core programs to other Cabinet agencies. The measure is led by Tim Kaine of Virginia and cosponsored by Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the heads of the six agencies absorbing her department’s work sent congressional leaders a letter the same day arguing the interagency agreements cut red tape rather than create it. The department is currently moving 148 programs to those six agencies through agreements Congress never approved, with most K-12 work going to the Labor Department, special education headed to HHS under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and civil rights enforcement shifting to the Justice Department. Thirty disability advocacy groups backed the bill ahead of the vote, pointing to more than 8 million children with disabilities who depend on those protections. The bill still faces a hard path, since a House committee voted two weeks ago to codify the administration’s changes instead.
