Hey everyone, welcome back and happy Monday. Hope you had a great weekend.
Our top story today: the President’s hyped-up war on fraud just got exposed as a fraud itself. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the White House’s fraud squad is a mess, with its own officials saying that the numbers are fake and pointing fingers at one other. And instead of chasing real fraud, they’re chasing ice cream trucks in Democratic states while the biggest self-dealing in modern history is happening right in the Oval Office.
We’ll also get into a Trump-appointed regulator approving a Trump family bank, the strange power of White House aide Natalie Harp, the President siding with Kim Jong Un over a long time ally, and some good news for the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, amidst Trump’s claims that they aren’t dong enough.
Let’s get to it.
1. Trump's Fraud Squad Fakes Its Own Numbers
You may remember that Vice President JD Vance took it upon himself to launch a National Fraud Enforcement Division at the Justice Department, promising to hunt down waste and cheating. And they talked so tough. Their top fraud prosecutor put out a message to the fraudsters of America, quote, “our team is getting bigger, our resolve is getting stronger and your time is getting shorter.”
Well, the Wall Street Journal just pulled back the curtain on the operation, and to nobody’s surprise, it’s a complete mess. Inside the department, this so-called fraud squad keeps fighting with each other. They’re in a turf war over which office even gets to use the word “fraud” in its name. That’s a real thing they’re fighting about. And it gets worse. DOJ officials in the task force are accusing each other of completely making up their numbers, inflating their stats to make the effort look way more successful than it actually is. A fraud unit... doing fraud?
Court records show that many of the cases this division bragged about were charged long before the unit even existed. Some of them even before Trump was sworn in. They stood at podiums holding press conferences, taking credit for convictions that were already finished.
And the craziest part of this is that reporting shows they’re not going after Wall Street or major criminal fraudsters. They’re going after small businesses, even ice cream trucks, over relatively tiny amounts of fraud. That’s all they’re able to get. And where are they focusing their operations geographically? In Democratic states like Minnesota.
If this were a serious anti-fraud effort, they would be following the money to the biggest thieves no matter who or where they are. This one chases ice cream trucks in states the President doesn’t like and brags with numbers its own people say are fake. That’s not fighting fraud. That’s trying to use fraud as a weapon and doing a clumsy job at it.
All of this is an act. They know the most fraud is coming right out of the White House, and this is an attempt to try and deflect that by doing meaningless work and attacking ice cream trucks. Which, funnily enough, brings us to our next story.
2. Trump's Crypto Company Gets Its Own Bank Charter
On Friday, a Trump-appointed federal regulator granted preliminary approval for the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, to become a bank. That’s another first for a sitting president’s family, and it’s the latest expansion of the most profitable side business in presidential history. Last year alone, the President’s crypto ventures earned him more than a billion dollars. Even some of his longtime supporters, like Joe Rogan, are getting suspicious:
And a bank license would take their whole operation to another level. World Liberty’s digital dollar is currently issued by an outside company, which also holds four billion dollars in cash and Treasury bonds to back it. But now, the Trump family’s company could mint the coins, hold the reserves, and settle the payments itself, all under one federal license. No middleman taking a cut.
So the President appoints a regulator, that regulator approves a banking charter for the President’s family, and the President gets richer. There was a time when arrangements like this were unthinkable. Because of Trump, that time is over.
In the meantime, your rent is still high. Your groceries didn’t get cheaper. Your gas is still four dollars. And that’s because the only operation in this administration that’s running smoothly is the one that lines their pockets. Not yours.
3. Ossoff Exposes Trump's Closest Aide, Natalie Harp
At a rally in Atlanta this weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia gave a blistering speech about the President that took off online almost instantly. Ossoff, who’s been on a roll lately as he’s seeking re-election in Georgia, had a specifically good moment that’s going viral. Take a look:
Did you hear that? Ossoff finished landing that punch by naming a specific person. He said the President would rather travel with, “Natalie on his flying palace”. And within hours, the name Natalie was trending on X, with the whole country asking the same question. Who is Natalie Harp?
Harp is a 35-year-old White House aide, and apparently the most constant presence in Donald Trump’s orbit. Staff nicknamed her a “human printer” because she follows him everywhere with a portable printer, feeding him documents and typing and posting his social media messages for him. Look at how she did this during the 2024 election cycle:
And it wouldn’t be something about this administration if there wasn’t a deeply disturbing twist in the story. According to reporting from the New York Times and others, Harp has left the President handwritten letters in his private spaces that are jaw- dropping. In them she’s written things like, quote, “you are all that matters to me”, and called him her guardian and protector in this life. Trump, for his part, has reportedly boasted that she’ll never leave him. Harp’s own brother has publicly called the relationship, in his words, “very unhealthy.”
I have no idea what’s going on there. With this President, given everything we already know about how he treats women, I doubt it’s something normal.
The cherry on top is that Harp was one of the handful of people Trump pulled into that catering truck during his secret plane swap out of Turkey, the stunt we covered last week. So somebody almost no one had heard of, with no traditional national security role, is in the President’s most protected inner circle at the most sensitive moments.
Credit to Ossoff for bringing up this woman’s name. It shows that Democratic candidates really have a chance to hurt this President if they get their hands a little dirty. But the bottom line is that someone with this much influence on the President should have been in the public eye before a political opponent was forced to bring it up. I wonder how many more skeletons Trump has in his closet. He must be running out of space in there.
4. Trump Scales Back South Korea Drills To Please Kim Jong Un
Yesterday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he’s substantially reducing our joint military drills with South Korea, just hours before exercises were set to begin. He wrote that the exercises are “totally inappropriate and hostile to North Korea.” He called the North Korean regime “unthreatening and respectful,” citing his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.”
Remember, this is the same Kim Jong Un that Trump once threatened with “fire and fury” and mocked as “Little Rocket Man.” But then Kim started sending Trump flattering letters, and everything changed. Because for this President, the test was never whether a dictator threatens America. It’s whether he likes Trump. Listen to him back in April:
And what has all that flattery bought Kim? Everything. He kept his nuclear weapons. He kept his prison camps. He’s supplying Russia with missiles and soldiers to use against Ukraine. And even after he threatened to respond to these joint drills with “the most powerful and overwhelming force,” they get scrapped anyway. Meanwhile, the party that screams communist at every Democrat says nothing about their leader embracing an actual communist dictator.
But that’s not even the worst of it. In the same announcement, Trump complained that South Korea refused to join his war against Iran. So this is not only capitulation to our enemies, it’s retaliation against our own allies. Simply because they stayed out of the mess that Trump started.
Everything that has kept us safe since World War II rests on allies believing that when it counts, America shows up. Pull back from South Korea to flatter Kim Jong Un, and our friends across Asia will start asking whether they need their own nuclear weapons. And honestly, I wouldn’t blame them. This is generational damage to America’s reputation, and someday our kids will pay the price.
5. Trump Says Sailors' Deployment "Not Nearly Long Enough"
Here’s some good news about the USS Lincoln, the ship we told you guys about last week. Sailors spent months on the Lincoln in terrible conditions– facing malnourishment, mold outbreaks, and a mental health crisis that has sent men overboard.
After 260 days, the Navy is finally sending relief. Another carrier, the USS George Washington, is steaming toward the Middle East to take the Lincoln’s place.
But listen to what the President said when reporters asked him about the concerns those families have been raising. Asked if the Lincoln’s nearly nine-month deployment had gone on too long, here’s his answer:
“Not nearly long enough.” And he flatly denied that the families had any concerns at all, even as those very families shared conversations about the conditions their kids faced.
I wore the uniform. And the deal is that the people who send our kids into harm’s way have to treat that sacrifice as something holy. When a father tells the country his kid is breaking down at sea in atrocious conditions, the Commander in Chief’s job is to say, “I hear you, we’re doing something about it”. Instead, we have a draft- evading President with “bone spurs” claiming that our troops aren’t doing enough.
That relief ship is coming only because the public is outraged with the administration’s indifference towards the people sacrificing everything to further Trump’s war with Iran. Not because the President cared. Remember that. Change happens when the people stand up for it, not when the man at the top grows a conscience.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
OpenAI signed a 20-year lease this week for a massive data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, with Nvidia backing up to $105 billion of the financing. The site sits on a decommissioned federal uranium enrichment plant and will eventually run on 10 gigawatts of new power generation, enough for millions of homes. OpenAI and Nvidia are framing this as proof of real demand, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly insisting it isn’t circular financing because “OpenAI will pay the lease.” But OpenAI still doesn’t turn a profit, which is exactly why it needed Nvidia’s guarantee to make the deal bankable in the first place. This follows a pattern across the industry, where the same handful of companies keep investing in, financing, and buying from each other to build out AI infrastructure at a scale nobody has tried before.
A new Financial Times poll released this week found that more than 53 percent of registered voters say they’re financially worse off since Trump returned to office, including nearly a quarter of Republicans and 57 percent of independents. The White House has leaned on the argument that inflation is cooling and that the economy just needs more time. But the numbers tell a rougher story: nearly two-thirds of voters say the economy is headed in the wrong direction, and for the first time in years, voters trust Democrats over Republicans on jobs and the economy. That erosion is showing up in places like Iowa, a state Trump has carried comfortably three times, where Republicans are now trailing in a top statewide race as tariffs, stagnant grain prices, and the fallout from the Iran war squeeze rural voters. Trump’s own net approval among Republicans dropped eight points in a single month. And look, you can’t tariff your way to lower prices and then act surprised when the people who trusted you feel it in their wallet.
