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Trump’s $5B Crypto Boon Is the Biggest Corruption in Presidential History
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family garnered $5 billion in paper wealth on Monday after its crypto venture opened trading of a new digital currency. The digital token, called WLFI, can now be bought and sold on the open market.
Bartlett Naylor, a financial reform advocate with Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:
“The Wall Street Journal just measured the size of the greatest corruption in presidential history — up to $5 billion, and counting.
“We have only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage that this corruption will inflict on the American people. The impact of attempts by the Trump family and others to buy and sell politics and politicians will continue to ricochet.”
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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The Biggest Applause Line From Graham Platner's Labor Day Speech Was About Ending US Bombs in Gaza
And the second biggest was about naming the enemy which his Senate campaign will seek to target: "the oligarchy."
Sep 02, 2025
Graham Platner, the Democratic hopeful in Maine looking to unseat US Sen. Susan Collins next year, received the largest applause of his Labor Day speech in Portland on Monday when he railed against the ill-spent taxpayer money used to support the Israeli genocide in Gaza—a sharp contrast with many in the party who have shied away from such direct criticism of Israeli's assault and the backing it receives from the US government.
Even as support for Israel's assault on Gaza has plummeted among US voters and Americans across the political spectrum have increasingly demanded an arms embargo on the country, a number of Democratic politicians have struggled to keep up with the electorate in recent weeks.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called the conflict in Gaza that's killed more than 63,000 Palestinians and starved hundreds of people "complicated," while Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) last week accused a Jewish comedian of "justifying antisemitism" for noting that more than 80% of people killed by the Israel Defense Forces were civilians. Both responses garnered condemnation from Palestinian rights advocates and progressive commentators.
But on Monday—before a packed house of more than 6,500 in Portland—Platner took a much different approach.
"Our taxpayer dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy them in Gaza," said Platner, leading the audience to stand up and applaud for a full 30 seconds.
Platner, a military veteran and oyster farmer who is challenging Collins—a vehement supporter of Israel—has previously spoken about Gaza in an interview for Zeteo, calling Israel's US-backed attack on the territory "the moral test of our time."
He repeated his message on social media Tuesday, saying: "It's not complicated: Not one more taxpayer dollar for genocide."
Platner was speaking at a rally hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), as part of the senator's ongoing Fighting Oligarchy tour—a project that some establishment Democrats have claimed is out of touch with the views of Democratic voters even as Sanders has filled arenas in both red and blue districts across the country.
Rep. Eliss Slotkin (D-Mich.) has claimed the term "oligarchy" is unfamiliar to Americans, but the audience of a reported 6,500 people in Portland evidently didn't have trouble understanding Platner when he named oligarchy as "the enemy" of working Americans.
The line also garnered a standing ovation.
"I've been waiting my entire life," said journalist David Sirota, "for a politician other than Bernie Sanders to just say this."
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No Kings Movement Announces Next Day of Nationwide Actions for Oct 18
"No Kings is a non-violent movement that continues to rise stronger, and we’re uniting once again to remind the world: America has No Kings and the power belongs to the people."
Sep 02, 2025
The organizers behind the anti-Trump "No Kings" demonstrations that saw millions take to the streets earlier this year announced Tuesday their next major protest will take place on October 18.
Following thousands of events nationwide on June 14 that brought millions of people out to decry the actions of President Donald Trump, the announcement for the new date, said organizers in a media alert,
comes amid President Trump’s latest escalations: threats to send militarized forces into U.S. cities, the continued detention and encampment of immigrants, and his recent remark that "a lot of people are saying, 'maybe we’d like a dictator.' The October mobilization is designed as a direct, non-violent rebuke to those authoritarian claims.
Fresh links on the website of the No Kings coalition—which includes Indivisible, the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, Public Citizen, SEIU, MoveOn, and dozens of others—include a place to 'learn more" about planned actions in your local city and ways to support the effort.
"Just picking a day on the calendar won’t be enough to generate the kind of response we need in this moment," said Invisible in a call to action sent to members on Tuesday. "A national day of protest takes time and immense resources to prepare—tech and online infrastructure, marketing materials, security investments, staging/sounds, and so much more."
With Trump "doubling down on his authoritarian tactics," the group continued, the need for sustained opposition has only grown more clear since the earlier actions.
Trump, said Invisible, "is disappearing immigrants to sprawling concentration camps, sending troops into our cities, threatening to interfere in elections, rigging maps to steal power from the voters, and orchestrating a massive giveaway to his billionaire allies as families struggle. Trump is ramping up his attacks on our rights and democracy, but we’re not backing down. On October 18, we're taking to the streets in more cities and in larger numbers to remind Trump, his cronies, and those on the sidelines looking for hope: America has no kings."
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'A Mockery of Science': Experts Slam Trump DOE's Climate Report in New Paper
"The goal is clear," said one of the experts. "To justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
Sep 02, 2025
The US Department of Energy's July climate report is "biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking," according to a comprehensive review released Tuesday by a group of 85 scientists who reviewed the document independently.
The department's "Climate Working Group" drew up the report as part of the effort by US President Donald Trump to fatally undermine the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) determination, commonly known as the "endangerment finding," that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives by warming the planet.
"If successful," Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says, "this move could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules."
The Energy Department's nearly 150-page paper, titled "A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate." Dessler describes its five authors as "climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science." The team behind the report, he argues, was "hand-picked" by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to lend legitimacy to the Trump administration's predetermined conclusions about climate science.
The DOE report's five authors seek to contradict the much more rigorous analyses conducted by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports have been written by over a thousand researchers and which cite tens of thousands of academic studies.
The multinational panel has concluded that human fossil fuel usage has considerably warmed the planet, causing increased amounts of extreme weather, threatening food and water security, destroying ecosystems, and risking dangerous amounts of sea-level rise.
The Energy Department's report advances the main idea that climate scientists like those at the IPCC broadly "overstate" the extent of the human-caused climate crisis as well as its risks. Unlike other research of its kind, the department crafted its report in secret, which prompted the expert response.
"Normally, a report like this would undergo a rigorous, unbiased, and transparent peer review," said Dr. Robert Kopp, a climate and sea-level researcher at Rutgers. "When it became clear that DOE wasn't going to organize such a review, the scientific community came together on its own, in less than a month, to provide it."
Their review found that the Energy Department's report "exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics."
For instance, the report claims that there is "no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise" even though the number of days of high-tide coastal flooding per year has increased more than 10-fold since the 1970s.
It also attempts to portray CO2 emissions as a net benefit to the environment, particularly agriculture, by pointing to its benefits for crop growth, but ignores that the impact of increased droughts and wildfires far outweighs those benefits.
And it attempts to pick out isolated historical weather events like the Dust Bowl during the 1930s as evidence that dramatic climatic changes happen very frequently within short amounts of time and that the unprecedented increase in global temperatures over the past century and a half is not worthy of alarm.
"My reading of the report uncovered numerous errors of commission and omission, all of which slant toward a conclusion that human-caused climate change poses no serious risks," said Kerry Emmanuel, a meteorologist and climate scientist who specializes in hurricane physics. "It seems to work backward from a desired outcome."
Dessler notes that over 99% of the literature included in the IPCC's report was simply ignored by the Department of Energy. He described the report as a "mockery of science" akin to a "Soviet show trial."
"The outcome of this exercise by the Department of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding," he said. "Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense."
In 2025, the US National Weather Service issued a record number of flash flood warnings, while 255 million Americans were subject to life-threatening triple-digit temperatures in June. The previous year, 48 of 50 US states faced drought conditions, the most ever recorded in US history, while nearly 9 million acres burned due to wildfires.
"We live in a world where the impacts of climate change are increasingly being felt by citizens all around the globe—including communities throughout the US," said Andra Gardner, a professor of environmental science at Rowan University.
"This is perhaps what makes the DOE Climate Working Group report most astounding," she continued. "In a country where we have the tools to not only understand the impacts of climate change but also to begin meaningfully combating the crisis, the current DOE has instead decided to promote fossil fuel interests that will further worsen the symptoms of climate change with a report that turns a blind eye to the established science."
According to an analysis from Climate Power published in January, oil and gas industry donors gave $96 million in direct donations to the campaign of Donald Trump and affiliated super PACs during the 2024 election, while spending $243 million to lobby Republicans in Congress.
The result has been an administration that has purged climate science information from federal websites, laid off thousands of EPA employees, and gutted government funding for wind and solar energy.
Becca Neumann, an associate professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Washington, says that "the goal" of the report "is clear: to justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
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