Trump 2.1 July 5 2026-

15 July
How Trump Became ‘Grifter-in-Chief’: Let Us Count the Ways
Donald Trump and his family are setting a new standard for how to profit off a presidency.
By Timothy L. O’Brien -Bloomberg July 2026

13 August
Trump has amassed staggering wealth in ‘most openly corrupt’ presidency
Peter Stone in Washington
Ethics experts and Democrats express alarm as Trump uses office to grow his personal fortune to ‘unprecedented’ level
(The Guardian) Donald Trump’s use of his second presidency to grow his personal fortune has alarmed legal and ethics experts and congressional Democrats as he has reaped an “unprecedented” $2.2bn in 2025 revenues by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.
Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June. Simultaneously, about one million investors in a Trump crypto scheme suffered almost $3.8bn in losses as their volatile crypto holdings tanked in value.
Monetizing his presidency further this summer, Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month, which top Democrats and public interest groups say pose serious conflict of interest and corruption issues.
On another monetization front, critics raised red flags about how Trump tapped his justice department to forge a potentially lucrative and sketchy deal to settle a $10bn lawsuit by Trump against the IRS about a leak of his tax returns that gives him and his family immunity from IRS audits of prior tax returns and could save him $100m.
Likewise some analysts are troubled by how Trump has circumvented the constitution’s prohibition on foreign emoluments by accepting a $400m plane as a gift from Qatar, and how other wealthy foreigners have backed some Trump family hotel and golf deals abroad.
Beyond his personal enrichment, Trump’s monetizing his office and transactional governing style has proved lucrative to his sons, some top advisers, billionaire buddies, big donors and other allies, say critics. …
Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University. “In just the first year of this term, he reported his business holdings earned over $2bn.”
Noble added: “While Trump’s second term is less than half over, it already looks like the most openly corrupt administration in our history.

10 August
Contradicting public statements, Trump took secret flight from Turkey amid Iranian threat
The White House said the president was aboard Air Force One as he left a NATO summit. Instead, his departure included an elaborate ruse that concealed his travel.
An Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump prompted an extraordinary operation last month in which he flew secretly from Turkey on an alternate military aircraft while the White House said he was aboard Air Force One, The Washington Post has learned.
The clandestine mission, which has not been reported previously, was carried out unbeknownst to journalists and some White House staff members who believed they were on the same plane as the president, according to material reviewed by The Post, a U.S. official familiar with the operation and another person with knowledge of the president’s travel. These people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the matter.

17 July
Trump’s Plan for November Is Failing
His efforts to subvert the 2026 midterms have largely come up short.
By David A. Graham
(The Atlantic) Last night, President Trump delivered a rare prime-time speech, but his address fell well short of the hype. Purportedly, the president was going to make a major statement about election integrity, but in reality, the speech was dense and hoarsely delivered. As my colleagues report, he provided no evidence to back up his long-standing lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The White House also released four tranches of documents meant to support the speech, but Trump’s claims were a farrago of recycled information, misrepresentations of evidence, and tendentious claims based on materials too heavily redacted to parse. Major news networks, apparently concerned that Trump would mislead, declined to air the address live.

13 July
Judge says Trump IRS lawsuit was filed for ‘improper purpose,’ refers lawyer for possible discipline
(AP) — President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose,” a judge said Monday as she referred one of his lawyers for potential disciplinary action and characterized the $10 billion complaint as an exercise in self-dealing.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams accused Trump and his lawyers in a scathing ruling of having manipulated the court system when he sued a federal agency under his control, bypassing a requirement that parties in a lawsuit must have adverse interests. The lawsuit ended in a settlement that granted the president immunity from tax audits and established a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they have been unjustly persecuted.

10 July
Seriously, Where Does Trump’s Power Come From?
Not from where you may think
Robert Reich
Trump’s power comes from his willingness to violate all the norms, rules and laws about how US presidents are supposed to act – to do anything that helps him accumulate more wealth, power and glory, and wreak vengeance on anyone who has tried to get in the way.
Whether it’s NATO, Iran, the World Cup, the 2020 election, making billions off his presidency – or anything else – he’s unconstrained by norms, rules, treaties and laws. …
We’ve been missing the boat by characterizing Trump as breaching ethical standards. Ethics assumes some sort of agreed-upon standards against which a breach can be defined and measured. But Trump doesn’t have any standards at all. His entire approach to life, to business, and now to the presidency, has nothing whatever to do with standards. It’s about winning at all costs. Whatever it takes.
Trump isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.
It’s hard for most of us to conceive of living in a Trumpian world without standards, norms, rules, or laws — a world composed only of transactions and calculations in which the only test is what’s in it for me and at what cost.
And that difficulty most of us have of imagining such a world is itself the key to Trump’s power.

5 July
How Donald Trump’s second term is totally different than his first
(CBC Sunday Magazine) He’s reshaped the United States federal government, executive power and foreign policy… and that’s just in his first year-and-a-half back in the White House. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan got a rare inside look at how Donald Trump has wielded his presidential power through hundreds of insider interviews. The New York Times White House correspondents join Piya Chattopadhyay to share what those conversations revealed about Trump’s strategy in his second term, and how the consequences will linger long after his presidency ends.
A President Using Super Glue and Irked About Epstein: Takeaways From a New Trump Book
A new book by two New York Times reporters describes President Trump’s efforts to bend the federal government, cultural institutions and news cycles to his will.
The book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times, ““Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Trump pushed to drastically expand his power.