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The Felon's Regime: Non-Stop Grifting and Watergate Every Week

At a time when many Americans are struggling to pay their bills and put food on the table, the sheer volume of the Felon's grifting and self-enrichment while back in the White House is shocking and reflects a behavior never exhibited by former presidents. The grifting and greed is unprecedented. Be in stock market manipulation, selling crypto currency to the suckers among his base or foreign nations seeking his favor, or granting deals relating to government contracts that enrich his children, the focus on hauling in as much money and wealth is non-stop.  As a piece at Joe Jervis' blog looks at the insider trading that would send the rest of us to prison:

The day before President Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, sending markets exploding higher, his investment accounts quietly purchased hundreds of stocks near the market low, trades that were not publicly disclosed until more than a year later despite federal disclosure requirements.

The purchases, finally disclosed in a 927-page annual financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics on Monday, reveal a churn of transactions that was quietly playing out all last year: Trump’s accounts were actively trading stocks throughout 2025 while he was making policy decisions that moved markets, and the public had no idea.

On April 8, 2025, the day before Trump announced the tariff pause, the disclosure shows 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million, one of the largest single-day stock buying sprees disclosed in the filing. . . . . The S&P 500 jumped nearly 10% the following day when Trump announced the pause, one of the largest single-day gains in the index’s history.

Again, the insider trading is just the tip of the ice berg. The New York Post editorial board writes:

Insider deals, finders’ fees and backdoor introductions to family members are business-as-usual in Third World banana republics, but these slimy practices have now been normalized in the White House, to the shame of the nation.

The New York Times reports that Eric and Donald Trump Jr., sons of President Donald Trump, and Kyle and Brandon Lutnick, sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, are tied to a billion-dollar tungsten-mining deal that the US government is financing in Kazakhstan. The prez himself actually called into a meeting between Howard Lutnick and Kazakhstan’s president as the deal was being finalized.

The Trump sons, meanwhile, are part-owners or investors in companies neck-deep in a key defense contract to mine tungsten reserves in Central Asia. It stinks to high heaven.

Meanwhile, JD Vance shrugs off the shocking corruption and even said Watergate would barely be a blip in the newsfeeds now adays, ignoring the reality that what Richard Nixon did was child's play compared to the Felon's non-stop improper behavior.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at Vance's pathetic and disingenuous remarks: 

He [JD Vance] wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

Vance went on to suggest that the scandal that toppled Nixon was no big deal, and that the 37th president was a victim of nefarious forces. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

Vance is correct about how Watergate would’ve landed today, but the lesson is not what he claims. Since 1974, Americans have become pessimistic about their leaders, deeply polarized in their partisanship, and distrustful of the media—all of which means that Watergate very well might pass quickly in today’s environment. The best evidence is that the Trump administration weathers scandals on the Watergate level routinely. As Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote of Vance’s remark, “‘We do a Watergate twice a day’ is a crazy way to confess your own corruption.”

Vance, who has previously admitted to making up stories for political purposes, also offered a bogus history of what happened in Watergate: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

Trump’s first impeachment, for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine in the 2020 election, and Nixon’s downfall share two important things: First, both men did what they were accused of, though both insisted that their actions had been fine. (Trump: “a perfect conversation.” Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”) Second, the most damning evidence against both of them came not from “deep state” bureaucrats but from their own appointed political aides. The question of accountability is where the stories start to differ: Nixon was forced to resign by Republicans dismayed by his behavior; today, lockstep partisanship means that many GOP members of Congress pulled their punches in Trump’s two impeachment trials. Now Trump, like Nixon before him, is using the muscle of the federal government to bully and persecute his political adversaries.

More than one year ago, my colleague Anne Applebaum described the Trump administration as the most corrupt in American history, and the headlines routinely provide attestation. Over the weekend, for example, The New York Times reported on how Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick struck a deal with the Kazakh government to give an American company access to Kazakh tungsten deposits, and to provide $1.6 billion in financing; the sons of both Trump and Lutnick now stand to profit from business arrangements based on the deal. A week before this, the Times reported that the administration killed an investigation into how a convicted fraudster had obtained clemency from the president—only one of many cases of what look like pay-to-play commutations and pardons.

The Wall Street Journal recently delved into how the billionaire Larry Ellison’s roughly $45 million donation to a Trump-supporting nonprofit in the 2024 election helped facilitate his son David’s acquisition of Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, which he has moved to make a media ally of the White House, and pending acquisition of CNN. (A Paramount spokesperson told the Journal that the company had made no commitments to any government body about coverage.)

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that more than half of the publicly identified donors to Trump’s intended White House ballroom have won new or larger federal contracts in recent months—totaling more than $50 billion. The president is aiming to host a major international conference at his own property—a step scandalous enough that he was forced to back down by Republicans when he tried it during his first term. No wonder the FBI has dissolved its public-corruption unit.

This is not an exhaustive list, even for the past few weeks, which is part of the point: Watergate shocked the conscience because it was so rare to have such a fetid scandal break into view. But by following Steve Bannon’s maxim to “flood the zone with shit,” Trump has avoided the monthslong drip-drip of Watergate revelations, overwhelmed the press, and desensitized the public. Hardly anyone can maintain a mental list of all the improprieties..

This would be a powerful argument coming from the vice president, who has worried about what he sees as insufficient morality in American society and has said that his role is “to try to apply moral principles in ways that get the best outcomes.” Instead, Vance has concluded that his best chance at political advancement is to hitch himself to the corrupt and unethical Trump. Such cynicism would do Nixon proud.

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Ukraine’s Plan to Unnerve Putin

With the constant chaos generated by the Felon and the endless grifting by the Felon and his family, not to mention the Felon's poorly planned war of choice against Iran, the media has under reported Ukraine's successes in bringing Vladimir Putin's war of choice against Ukraine home to the Russian population. Putin has drawn military recruits from the hinterland for canon fodder in Ukraine trying to isolate residents of Moscow, St. Petersburg and other large cities from the realities and inconvenience of Putin's war which, much like the Felon's, has not gone according to plans for a quick, decisive victory. Now, with drone attacks striking around Moscow and disrupting oil facilities and sending huge plums of smoke into the air, Putin's efforts to hide the war from population centers is falling apart and more and more Russians find themselves faced with gas rationing and worries of where the next Ukrainian drone strikes will occur. While not yet a serious threat to Putin's survival as a dictator, Ukraine continues to remind Putin - who like the Felon is a bully - that the best laid plans can fall apart.  One can only hope the Ukrainian drone campaign continues and causes more economic turmoil on the Russian home front. A piece at The Atlantic looks at Ukraine's successes. Here are highlights:

Over the past two weeks, Ukraine has launched a series of drone attacks on targets deep inside Russian territory—most consequentially in and near Moscow. Last night, near the Russian capital, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian weaponry attacked the Dubna Space Communications Center, which Russia uses to collect intelligence and coordinate operations by its army units in occupied Ukraine. This was Ukraine’s second strike on the Dubna facility in about a week.

Zelensky’s announcement of the latest attacks taunted Vladimir Putin, declaring matter-of-factly that “relevant actions are also being prepared against other similar enemy facilities.” The intended message to the Russian public is that the drone campaign, which Ukraine coyly describes as “long-range sanctions” against the country that invaded its territory, is nowhere near plateauing.

The recent focus on Moscow-area targets reveals how the Ukrainian government and military, in addition to trying to defend their territory from Russian aerial attack, are now taking the war to Putin’s doorstep. They are trying to put political and economic pressure on Putin’s regime and disable his war machine by starving it of money, supplies, and soldiers. Recent attacks on the Dubna facility and on a major Moscow oil refinery typify distinct parts of the Ukrainian strategy to make the war unsustainable for the Russian dictator.

The refinery, which was targeted as part of a mass Ukrainian attack on the Russian capital on June 18, produces about 40 percent of the Moscow region’s fuel market and has reportedly been put out of action for the remainder of 2026. This attack worked on a number of levels to embarrass and undermine Putin.

First, the attack created, almost certainly intentionally, a massive fire that released a thick plume of black smoke that was visible across Moscow. The point was unmistakable: Ukraine is here and can hit even the most important economic targets. Muscovites, your days of pretending the war is far away from your own comfortable existence are over. Indeed, Ukrainian strikes on oil infrastructure have created major gas shortages that are bedeviling much of the Russian hinterland. Similar pain may soon be in store for the capital.

The Moscow-refinery attacks also point to another Ukrainian goal: threatening Putin’s access to the money that he needs to keep fighting. Putin’s war has already burned through much of Russia’s once-large sovereign wealth fund. A fascinating recent report from a German think tank concludes that the Russian economy is approaching its “endgame,” as “growth has come to a standstill and fiscal buffers are largely exhausted.” To fund the country’s armed forces, Russia is almost entirely dependent on selling oil and other petroleum products to the rest of the world.

The Ukrainian strikes on oil facilities have presented Putin with a dilemma. The gasoline shortage is plainly creating public discontent. But if Russia limits exports to preserve domestic oil supply, it will also reduce the amount of money it can pour into the war. Less money coming into government coffers also means fewer goodies for the population of Moscow, whose acquiescence Putin desperately needs.

Just as the refinery attack sent a warning to Russia’s economic policy makers and the general population, the two strikes on the Dubna facility speak loudly to the Russian military. Since its full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has already suffered more than 1.3 million casualties, and Ukrainian mid-range weaponry has badly disrupted Russian military logistics. The invaders’ command-and-control systems were lumbering even before Ukraine began attacking them in earnest. Now the Ukrainians are saying: Not even your most important facilities deep in Russia are safe. Your poor performance in the field is going to get worse.

Perhaps Russia will adapt to Ukraine’s nimble deployment of rapidly advancing drone technology. But its efforts to do so should not inspire much confidence among the Russian public. Putin’s regime has reportedly been shifting air-defense systems to Moscow from elsewhere in Russia. Ukraine has still managed to penetrate those defenses, and may now have an easier time hitting targets outside Moscow.

For the past few days, Ukraine has been insisting that the future will only get worse for Russians. On June 25, Zelensky announced “a 40-day influence operation” meant to compel the “aggressor state” to end the war.

The recent attacks probably won’t force Russia out of the war quickly, and Zelensky surely knows this. But even if Ukraine’s drone strikes do not immediately end Putin’s rule, they have dispelled the idea that Putin can defend Moscow, protect the Russian economy, and look after the Russian military. By revealing the limits of Putin’s power, Ukraine has to be making his allies and flatterers very nervous.

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Hampton Roads Pridefest Boat Parade

Pride events have been going on over the past week in the Hampton Roads/Tidewater area of Virginia,  The main event was yesterday at Norfolk's Town Point Park which kicks off each year with a boat parade in lieu of a parade down city streets.   The husband and I participated aboard a 50 foot yacht owned by friends - we actually know the owners of most of the boats that were in the parade.  A few photos are posted from yesterday:

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