What Caught My Eye forJuly 2 - 8 (#21)

President Donald Trump’s most recent financial disclosure reveals that he earned more than $1.4 billion in income from his cryptocurrency businesses alone last year. These crypto-related ventures account for more than half of the $2.2 billion in income Trump reported overall, through an unprecedented self-enrichment scheme that has made him and members of his family fabulously wealthy while investors who bought into his projects have lost money hand over fist.

It’s all a grift.

Apparently, it is not a conflict of interest that Trump has just reported over $1.4 billion in income from an industry that his administration directly regulates. His policy decisions have enabled his crypto businesses to operate in ways that would have been prohibited, or at the very least legally risky, under the previous administration — the Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, did a complete U-turn on whether tokens like $WLFI should be considered securities, directly enabling Trump’s more than half a billion in profits from World Liberty Financial. The SEC and CFTC, led by Trump loyalists, have dropped enforcement actions against practically every major crypto company, including Coinbase, Gemini, Justin Sun/Tron, and Kraken. All of these have been significant Trump campaign donors, have engaged in business deals with Trump firms that have been highly lucrative for the president, or both.

Hernandez: I think one of the things that we have to understand better, and this is going to take time, is what is the effect of trauma? Right? I mean, what you’re doing here is you’re essentially creating an economy of fear. When a business closes, you can’t just snap your fingers and open it back up, right? Workers have moved somewhere else. The capital is gone. It takes a while for us to recover that. So, I think if anything, the larger long-term effects could be more damaging. I’m thinking not just of business closure but think of how much are people going to invest in a community? Think of innovation, right? Think of people who are willing to bring new ideas, new businesses, new products to a location. We don’t even know what the effect on that is going to be.

The Trump administration is probably salivating at seeing their ability to do economic damage to their perceived political enemies. But it continues to show that immigration is tied closely to economics and the success of our country and economy.

When the NYT story dropped on June 4th describing “unsettling” behavior alleged by three women Platner had dated in the past, people who I considered political heroes insisted continuing their support. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders stuck by Platner, even when there was already more than enough evidence that he was not fit to be the Democratic candidate. Both Warren and Sanders finally pulled their support this week after the rape allegations were published, but it shouldn’t take a woman sharing details about a grotesque intimate experience to knock a man off his pedestal.

All the red flags that came up should’ve gotten him kicked to the curb when they came out. Marisa is right, it should never have gotten to this point and those who continue to support him need to take a long, hard look in the mirror (to put it very mildly).

When someone shows you their Nazi tattoo, believe them.