Month: May 2025

The embrace of science fiction

Krugman points out today that the joyous April jobs numbers are for the pay period up to the 12th of the month which reflect the number of jobs just a few days after “liberation Day.” No one should get too excited although if you have a retirement account you’re probably glad to see it anyway.

But the rest of his column is about the Republican war on science:

Many of us have long noted the growing hostility of the G.O.P. to science. But my experience was that many people viewed those raising the alarm — like Chris Mooney, who wrote a 2005 book titled The Republican War on Science — as over the top scaremongers.

But at this point, can we acknowledge that MAGA is indeed waging war on science? Not just “woke” stuff, but science in general.

Nature tells us that National Science Foundation funds have been frozen, and that even if some money eventually flows again, funding will be heavily politicized:

Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” according to an email seen by Nature.

The policy prevents the NSF, one of the world’s biggest supporters of basic research, from awarding new research grants and from supplying allotted funds for existing grants, such as those that receive yearly increments of money. The email does not provide a reason for the freeze and says that it will last “until further notice”.

Earlier this week, NSF leadership also introduced a new policy directing staff members to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities”. Proposals judged not “in alignment” must be returned to the applicants by NSF employees. The policy has not been made public but was described in documents seen by Nature.

In effect, NSF, if it supports research at all, will only support research that tells MAGA what it wants to hear. Add in RFK Jr.’s savage cuts at the National Institutes of Health, budget cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, and we’re looking at a near-collapse of U.S. science. I don’t mean a hypothetical collapse a few years down the road, but the destruction of large parts of the American scientific enterprise — the envy of the world just a few months ago — this year.

Why should those who aren’t scientists care? In the 21^st century, science isn’t some esoteric intellectual affair. It’s the foundation of social and economic progress. And no, we can’t expect the private sector to fill the gap left by loss of government support. Basic research is a public good: it generates real benefits, but those benefits can’t be monetized because everyone can make use of the knowledge gained. So government support is the only way to sustain science. And that support is being rapidly ended.

But why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. Medical research may tell you that vaccines work and don’t cause autism. Energy research may tell wind power works and doesn’t massacre birds.

And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either. So they really want to destroy science.

The rubes are superstitious conspiracy mongers and the billionaire tech bros and others who pull the strings want to be able to manipulate those rubes into working for low wages and allowing them to keep all of their money. But it’s about more than money. The new wrinkle in all this is that the tech-bros, whom you would expect to be big proponents of scientific research, are a bunch of narcissistic loons who apparently know nothing about how all this works and think that scientific advances spring fully formed from their own genius so there’s no need for any kind of government support.

Seriously:

For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

They believe in science fiction, not science.

It’s real. That is Edward Coristine (born December 2005), also known by the online alias “Big Balls“, is an American college student and software engineer appointed to the Department of Government Efficiency.

WATTER: “Who is Big Balls?”

CORSTINE: “I am.”

MUSK: "That should be obvious." pic.twitter.com/3ViUi83J65

— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) May 2, 2025

Wikipedia sez:

Coristine is among a group of 19 to 24 year olds without prior experience in government appointed to the Department of Government Efficiency Coristine is the youngest member of the group He works within the Office of Personnel Management, reporting directly to Amanda Scales, a former xAI employee appointed as OPM chief of staff. OPM records list his role as an “expert”. According to Wired, Coristine has sat in on calls using a non-government email address where workers were made to “go over code they had written and justify their jobs.”

On February 3, 2025, Coristine held a call with federal Small Business Administration staff detailing the level of access wanted by DOGE, including human resources, contract and payment systems. He reportedly signed into the call from a non-government email address. His ability to pass a federal background check has been questioned.

On February 7, 2025, Bloomberg News reported that Coristine had been fired from his internship at cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for allegedly leaking internal company information to a competitor. Following his dismissal, Coristine wrote that he had retained access to Path Network’s servers, but claimed he did not exploit it. Path Network confirmed that Coristine had been fired following a security incident.

Coristine used the moniker “bigballs” on LinkedIn and @Edwardbigballer on Twitter, according to The Daily Dot.

On February 7, 2025, security journalist Brian Krebs reported that Coristine had previously been active in online communities known as “The Com,” a network of Discord and Telegram channels associated with cybercrime activities. According to Krebs’ article, The Com members have questioned Coristine’s technical abilities, with one member asserting that he is “not a good dev” and he “couldn’t print ‘hello world’ if his life depended on it.”

On February 10, 2025, The Washington Post reported Coristine became a senior advisor in the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology of the United States Department of State. The Post also reported that Coristine is a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and had a position in the United States Agency for International Development.

As of February 19, Coristine was a staff member at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. More information about the context around Coristine’s time at Path Network came out in late February with CNN reviewing internal text and voice messages.

In March 2025 Reuters published a story alleging that Coristine’s online content delivery network DiamondCDN had facilitated the work of the cybercriminal group EGodly.^[35][36][37]In 2023 Egodly thanked Coristine saying “We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” Egodly has claimed involvement in a number of crimes including email hacking, theft of cryptocurrency, and the harassment of a former FBI agent.

I feel like crying.

A federal judge says the Alien Enemies Act does not apply.

Finally. While due process for the Trump administration’s immigrant detainees has been vitally important for the courts to address and it was a relief that the Supreme Court weighed in with the order that all detainees must be allowed the right of habeas corpus, until yesterday no judge had ruled on the underlying applicability at the heart of their policy: the invocation of the 1789 Alien Enemies Act. A Trump appointed Federalist Society federal judge in Texas named Fernando Rodriguez Jr., ordered all deportations in his district to stop basically because it’s ridiculous to define the presence of Venezuelan gang members in the country as an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.”

He admitted that he could not question the administration’s contention that the gang was operating at the direction of the Venezuelan government (a contention disputed by Trump’s own intelligence community ) but he made the effort to check the historical record and delve into what the law was meant to apply to:

“The historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms. As a result, the Court concludes that as a matter of law, the Executive Branch cannot rely on the AEA, based on the Proclamation, to detain the Named Petitioners and the certified class, or to remove them from the country.”

The Proclamation to which he refers is the one that declared the Tren de Aragua gang to have invaded the country and was therefore subject to immediate deportation. The judge wrote:

“The President cannot summarily declare that a foreign nation or government has threatened or perpetrated an invasion or predatory incursion of the United States, followed by the identification of the alien enemies subject to detention or removal.”

Thank you Judge Rodriguez. The use of this ancient wartime power, which was only used three times before and grievously abused in the case of the Japanese internment, is an attack on common sense. Of course we are not at war with Venezuela, the entire assumption is absurd, and the fact that our legal system has been dancing around it for months now is frustrating. Knowing how quickly the Supreme Court can act when it wants to one hopes they will take this up very quickly and put this nonsense to rest once and for all.

At worst these gang members are common criminals, something the United States justice and immigration system deals with every day. And, as we’ve found out, some of these alleged gang members are actually just ordinary immigrants in the country either legally protected or waiting for their cases to run their course. Trump’s “deal” with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to lock these alleged gang members in a notorious gulag with no hope of a trial or any other due process makes the policy an even more grotesque assault on human rights.

It’s worth taking a look back at how this thing got started. Unsurprisingly, it began with Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller. The New York Times published a long piece a few days ago about the deportation agenda, noting:

Mr. Miller had long been interested in the Alien Enemies Act, a law passed in 1798 that allows the U.S. government to swiftly deport citizens of an invading nation. The authority has been invoked just three times in the past, all during times of war. He saw it as a powerful weapon to apply to immigration enforcement.

The law “allows you to instantaneously remove any noncitizen foreigner from an invading country, aged 14 or older,” Mr. Miller told the right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk in a September 2023 interview, adding: “That allows you to suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding.”

You’ll recall that as the campaign was heating up last year Trump was having some trouble getting traction on his signature issue after he blew up the bipartisan border bill, making it clear that he did it purely for political purposes. President Biden had severely tightened up the border and Trump was having to rant incoherently about numbers and statistics and it just didn’t have the juice it used to have. But then something happened that played right into Stephen Miller’s plans.

A video went viral on Fox News and The NY Post in August showing armed men in the hallways of an apartment house in Aurora, Colorado and in the words of the NY Times’ Jonathan Weissman, it”metastasized into grandiose stories of whole buildings, whole sections of town and, in Mr. Trump’s telling, the whole city of Aurora being taken over by migrants carrying weapons of war.” It turned out that the story was made up by the slumlord who owned the building to excuse his neglect and some of the locals who had pumped up the story later recanted.

But that idea of armed migrants carrying weapons of war was the hook Miller had been looking for and soon Trump was talking about the Alien Enemies Act at his campaign rallies, saying that the gang had “invaded and conquered,” America which he called an “occupied state.” He spent the rest of the campaign building up this idea of America being invaded by criminals.

When Salvadoran president Bukele came to visit a couple of weeks ago he made the case for the deportations by suggesting that the United States was comparable to his country back in 2022 when it was called the murder capital of the world. He said:

 [Y]ou have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That’s the way it works, right? You cannot just free the criminals and think crime’s going to go down magically. You have to imprison them, so you can liberate 350 million Americans that are asking for the end of crime and the end of terrorism.

The United States is not El Salvador then or now. We are not at war with Venezuela or any country. Crime has been going down for years now, especially violent crime. (We do have a sickening amount of gun violence but that’s the last thing Trump wants to curb and it’s hardly an immigrant problem.) 350 million Americans are not clamoring to be “liberated” at least not from some obscure street gang that nobody had heard of until Stephen Miller and Donald Trump made them into poster boys for their anti-immigrant crusade.

One would hope that the Supreme Court will rule that this misuse of the Alien Enemies Act is illegal, as anyone who can read English can see. If their past behavior is any guide, I’d guess it’s going to be a while before they do it. But at least we have one judge, whom nobody can claim is a biased lefty, finally saying the obvious. It’s about time.

State Supreme Court seat still in limbo

We might have anticipated that when Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) denied President Obama a U.S. Supreme Court appointment in 2016 that the GOP might try similar gambits out in the provinces. Republicans in North Carolina, one of David Pepper’s “laboratories of autocracy,” have worked for over a decade to solidify their grip on the state by legislatively locking out Democrats. They won another victory against democracy on Wednesday.

Democracy Docket:

North Carolina’s second-highest court Wednesday upheld a Republican effort to gain control of the state’s election board, boosting the GOP bid to undo Democrat Allison Riggs’ narrow victory in the state’s 2024 Supreme Court race.

A three-judge panel for the North Carolina Court of Appeals granted Republicans’ request to stay a lower court ruling that halted a measure passed by the GOP last year that would change how members of the board are appointed.

In lame duck legislation last November, the GOP-controlled legislature passed a bill stripping appointments to the State Board of Elections from the incoming governor.

Under the measure, the governor would no longer be allowed to make appointments to the five-member board. Instead, that power would be given to the state auditor, a Republican. North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein (D) sued Republican legislative leaders over the measure, arguing that it violated principals of separation of powers in the North Carolina Constitution.

Shortly after the court of appeals granted the GOP’s stay request Thursday, Stein asked the North Carolina Supreme Court for a brief administrative stay so he can file a formal request for the court review of the case.

Stein posted to Twitter on Wednesday on how this move increases chances that Republicans steal the Supreme Court seat won in November by incumbent Justice Allison Riggs:

Jefferson Griffin lost. When you lose, you work harder the next time to win. You do not try to change the rules after the election is over. Today’s Court of Appeals decision about the Board of Elections poses a threat to our democracy and the rule of law. The Supreme Court should not allow it to stand.

I fear that this decision is the latest step in the partisan effort to steal a seat on the Supreme Court. No emergency exists that can justify the Court of Appeals’ decision to interject itself at this point. The only plausible explanation is to permit the Republican State Auditor to appoint a new State Board of Elections that will try to overturn the results of the Supreme Court race.

Indeed, the state Supreme Court did not rule in time. Boliek did not waste his. He announced appointments on May 1, the day current Board appointments expired. Boliek appointed a Republican majority:

Auditor Dave Boliek announced three Republicans and two Democrats for the board, picked from lists provided by the state parties. His actions came just a week after trial judges agreed with new Gov. Josh Stein that a law finalized in December by the Republican-controlled General Assembly stripping the governor of board appointment authority violated the state constitution. Stein and Democratic predecessor Roy Cooper sued to overturn the law.

Boliek, who was elected last fall to the post, made the appointments after the intermediate-level Court of Appeals on Wednesday said the appointment switch could still be carried out while broader legal questions are reviewed on appeal.

On appeal to a 5-2 Republican Supreme Court Riggs still sits on while Griffin contests her win. With state issues settled in Griffin’s favor, Riggs has appealed to federal court.

Why should you care? (Axios):

Between the lines: Democrats, voting rights activists and legal experts have warned that if Griffin succeeds, it could give way to more candidates moving to change election rules long after a race is over.

• “The big story here,” said Anne Tindall, a lawyer with Protect Democracy told The New York Times, “is that never, ever, ever before have we seen a court, months after an election, change election rules to retroactively disqualify a class of voters and flip the results.”
• “If you can do that,” she added, “no election is safe — period.”

If Griffin and the NC GOP succeed in stealing this state Supreme Court seat, they’ll be on track to do the same with any close election anywhere in the country where they control the courts. Donald Trump announced that strategy in October 2016.

Trump speaks like a mob boss, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen told the House Judiciary Committee in 2019. “He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders. He speaks in code …” Underlings then go out and execute his non-orders.

Except there was no code in the speech excerpt above, Trump was telling followers exactly how they should approach elections they lose. Like he would. Only accept the will of the voters if you win. It’s a mockery of the democratic process outlines in the Constitution and amendments where “vote” and its variants appear 39 times and “majority” makes 14 appearances.

In MAGAstan self-governance is heads, I win, tails, you lose.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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Be sure he knows

What Rod Serling might have done with a morality tale like this. Donald John Trump, a life-long con man desperate to be liked, with an insatiable need for adulation. An ignorant man who believes he is the smartest, most successful person in every room. He runs for president and, improbably, wins, becoming the most reviled person on the planet. And in the Twilght Zone.

On International Workers’ Day 2025, the world expressed its rejection of Trump the Ignorant. How ignorant?

Watch: A declaration of unity, love and respect.
Trump hasn't read the US Declaration of Independence and he doesn't understand what was explained to him in grade school. The founding document of the USA is a list of 27 grievances and an eloquent fuck off to King George III and… pic.twitter.com/vSX9Jxdq9x

— Chris Borkowski (@cborkowski) May 1, 2025

CBS News:

Many demonstrators at May Day protests around the world united in anger over President Trump’s agenda as they marked International Workers’ Day.

CBS includes photos of people protesting Trump in Germany, Italy, Philippines, and Japan.

Axios:

For the third time in a month, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, government buildings and the White House in a nationwide rally against the Trump administration.

Driving the news: Thursday’s May Day protests fall on International Workers’ Day and are calling attention to policies that affect working people, including threats to Social Security and union protections.

CNN:

Thousands of people attended May Day protests across the country Thursday in response to the Trump administration’s controversial moves against immigrants and federal workers over its first 100 days.

Scores of people filled the streets in cities including Los Angeles, New York City, Denver, Chicago and Washington, DC, for May Day – or International Workers’ Day – to protest what they call an assault on immigrants, workers and students exercising their right to free speech.

Associated Press:

Hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. and around the world rallied Thursday in May Day protests that united many in anger over President Donald Trump’s agenda from aggressive tariffs that are stoking fears of global economic turmoil to his administration’s immigration crackdowns.

The AP includes dispatches from protests featuring anti-Trump sentiment in France, Spain, and Taiwan. Also:

In Bern, Switzerland, thousands marched behind banners denouncing fascism and war — part of a wider backlash against the global surge of hard-right politics.

And this brilliant, Swiss-tidy mockery of Trump and Trumpism.

Neutral Switzerland 🔥

I love this so much… pic.twitter.com/UaMRNsmeZO

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) May 1, 2025

Be sure he knows. Of course, he knows. It’s why in lieu of being liked, Trump and his thuggish henchmen have settled for being feared.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Truly inspirational:

Trump: If you look at some of these internet people, I know so many of them. Elon is so terrific. A lot of them all hated me and my first term and now they are kissing my ass. It's true, all of them. It's true pic.twitter.com/xRqx38neCi

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2025

Trump at Commencement Address: 2020.. The election was rigged pic.twitter.com/SM25fyxHEv

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2025

Trump: He retired, lost his momentum. He retired and led a beautiful life. He had a wife. It was his second wife. A trophy wife, what can I say? I don't like telling you everything but we are all friends, can we talk? He had a trophy wife. pic.twitter.com/8SF9Sms7qe

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2025

Trump: He was at a party on fifth avenue. I will never forget. It was a party of a very powerful man in a magnificent apartment overlooking the park. I walked in there were 50 or so people. All the big business people in the world. Very glamorous. I was young and I was doing… pic.twitter.com/uC3Iz29NGP

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2025

Trump: I said a number of times, tariff is the most beautiful word in the world. I got absolutely decimated by the fake news. They said what about love? What about your wife? What about your parents? pic.twitter.com/4wmvGUZXVw

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2025

Complete lunacy https://t.co/mHyft6PSqk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 2, 2025

Trump: Judges are interfering, supposedly based on due process, but how can you give due process the people who came into our country illegally? They want to give them due process. I don't know. pic.twitter.com/pOX3ZsnWTl

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2025

Update —The greatest whiner in the history of the world says:

President Donald Trump spoke at the University of Alabama on Thursday night ahead of their official commencement ceremonies starting Friday, and urged students not to consider themselves a “victim” in their futures, noting that far too many young people think that way. 

You cannot make this shit up.

You may have heard that NSC Mike Waltz has been fired promoted to UN Ambassador and Li’l Marco is going to be the National Security Adviser AND the Secretary of Defense. Clearly Marco’s ostentatious ass-kissing has bought him Trump’s full trust but this also means that Witkoff is going to be the guy in charge overseas and that’s not good.

We all know that Signalgate upset Trump not because of the security threat but because Waltz included his nemesis Jeffrey Goldberg on the call. But Trump had let that slide until now. So what’s the reason?

Axios writes:

 Waltz didn’t work as well with other Cabinet and White House officials as was hoped.

On a trip to Greenland in March, Vice President Vance counseled him about “working more collaboratively,” a senior White House official told Axios at the time.

The former congressman and Green Beret also treated Wiles with a dismissive attitude, two officials said.”He treated her like staff and didn’t realize he’s the staff, she’s the embodiment of the president,” one of them said. “Susie is a deeply loyal person and the disrespect was made all the worse because it was disloyal.”

Then came Loomer, the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist and social media influencer who has crusaded against what she claims are “disloyal” people and “neocons” who never should have been hired in Trump 2.0.

In a meeting with Trump a month ago, Loomer urged him to fire some of the staffers Waltz had appointed, and shared an old video of Waltz criticizing Trump years ago.

Friction point: Waltz didn’t fire everyone Loomer targeted — including his chief of staff Alex Wong, who is also now on his way out — but he acted like and was a diminished figure in the administration, the sources told Axios.

“He’s like a beaten dog that keeps doing the same trick so he doesn’t get beaten again. It’s a little sad,” the senior White House official said in mid-April.

“When you stack everything on Waltz, he just couldn’t survive. Laura Loomer gets a confirmed kill,” an administration adviser familiar with the discussions said.

Jesus that’s pathetic. Laura Loomer is certifiably insane. And she’s celebrating:

Loomer, 31, claimed credit for the firing of Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, whom she targeted in a flurry of critical posts in March that accused him, the son of Chinese immigrants, of advancing Chinese interests over America’s.

Loomer shared a later post about Wong’s firing with the word “SCALP.” Loomer reacted to Waltz’s firing with a one-word text to Politico: “Loomered.”

Oy vey…

“Hopefully, the rest of the people who were set to be fired but were given promotions at the NSC under Waltz also depart,” Loomer wrote on Thursday.

Loomer shared a later post about Wong’s firing with the word “SCALP.”

Is this the change people voted for?

From the ashes of World War II, President Harry Truman presided over the creation of global institutions that have defined the international order for the past 80 years.

“It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure,” Truman said as he spelled out his doctrine in a 1947 speech to Congress.

In a few short years, the U.S. helped establish and lead the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. helped rebuild Europe with assistance funneled through the Marshall Plan, and it also funded the reconstruction of Japan.

Democratic and Republican presidents supported these institutions for generations. They sometimes grumbled at the cost, yet they believed the institutions ultimately strengthened the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower.

But 100 days into his second term, President Trump is moving aggressively to scale back the United States’ role in the world, based on his “America First” agenda. Trump sees this web of alliances, treaties and soft power as expensive, outdated relics that restrain America’s ability to act decisively on its own.

I’ve been warning about this since the morning after Trump was elected in 2016. It’s always what he had in mind. It’s not that he wants to withdraw from the world, far from it. He wants to dominate the world through economic and military force.

I always issue the disclaimer that says there’s no need to continue that post-war order forever but Trump’s vision is nothing but ignorant WWE style posturing and idiotic policies that have alienated all of our allies, spooked the world economy and given our adversaries everything they ever dreamed of. It’s a nightmare. He is not the answer to anything.

We are about to see how his “doctrine” (if you want to call it that) works economically. His tariffs are his first serious attempt to put that to work and it’s not going well, to say the least. We had better hope that the real estate dope Trump has put in charge of foreign policy, Steve Witkoff, can do some kind of a deal with Iran and that China doesn’t make a mistake or that Putin doesn’t get ahead of himself because I am quite sure he’s anxious to swing his tiny appendages around just to prove he can.

America First has always meant America Uber Alles. Don’t kid yourself.

This should freak out everyone who isn’t a full-fledged member.

holy shit — they ARE NOT beating the cult allegations pic.twitter.com/Uws2kJrU7A

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2025

You have to love the smirk on his face as he sits there watching people bowing and praying before him.

You wonder why he’s morphed from a malignant narcissist into a full-fledged megalomaniac?

I just don’t know what to say about this (gift link)

Sitting in front of a packed auditorium in Dubai, a founder of the Trump family cryptocurrency business made a brief but monumental announcement on Thursday. A fund backed by Abu Dhabi, he said, would be making a $2 billion business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins.

That transaction would be a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump’s private venture — one that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. And it is a public and vivid illustration of the ethical conflicts swirling around Mr. Trump’s crypto firm, which has blurred the boundary between business and government.

Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, revealed that a so-called stablecoin developed by the firm, would be used to complete the transaction between the state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX and Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world.

Virtually every detail of Mr. Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest.

Yes, that’s Trump’s foreign envoy Steve Witkoff’s son. Just wow.

The good news is that none of these people were involved with a foreign company in Ukraine years ago. That would immediately trigger years of congressional investigations and a Special Prosecutor.

This is just fine. It’s all fine. Move along…