Trump Rakes in Billions in Office

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And this morning we saw an illustration of how these conflicts of interest work. For example, no other president has taken large foreign contributions or gifts. No other president. And yet today of all days, we see the maiden flight for Donald Trump on this Air Force One, which was a gift from the government of Qatar. And he is expected to try to find a way to keep the plane you're looking at because it's a foreign gift and use it for his institutions, organizations, library, or personal use after leaving office. This costs you, the taxpayer. No other presidents even tried it. Today, Democrats, experts, and even over on Fox News, we heard. The reaction to this number, and it comes, of course, politically at a bad time for the president when they are struggling in the midterm matchups, when prices are high, when the war that Donald Trump started, has not gone the way he wanted and has hurt the American consumer. So other people are paying high prices and feeling the affordability crisis in America, which creates a sour mood to hear that the president is spending his free time, self-dealing, self-enriching, selling meme coins, selling crypto. The headlines are hurting him. Two billion dollars. Most of that money comes from the crypto industry that Trump regulates $1.4 billion in those revenues. And again, it is only by being president that his meme coin and other crypto ventures seem to be so profitable. Otherwise, why didn't he do them a couple years ago? There's $300, I should say, $635 million in royalties from the meme coin alone. which is a type of sort of crypto memorabilia that may not have any value for the Trump fans who bought it. Half a billion from sales of the larger entity, what they call a flagship crypto venture. That's in the Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch own newspaper. If you want to check your sources, they're not exactly looking for ways to take cheap shots at Trump, but they are pointing out the obvious problems in this level of grift, graft, whatever you want to call it, of a president focused on making this kind of money while in office. As the time puts it, Trump is creating new business ventures profiting from actions he's taken since returning to the White House. And these are major activities. For example, they cite the pardon to the finance founder. who's the richest man in crypto, a critical business partner, to Trump's own family crypto venture. That is at blatant conflict. It raises the question of whether he abused the pardon power for personal enrichment. That would be an impeachable offense, possibly a bribe. Again, that's the kind of thing you have to investigate, but you have a pardon and then you have the money going in. Well, there's also the legislation that Trump signed the Times reports to promote a form of cryptocurrency stable coins four months after his family-backed firm introduced its stable coin. Nothing about this is subtle or hidden. The headline tonight, though, is just the massive amount of money because there are people in America or on the right who are sympathetic to Trump that might say a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there, okay.

But $2 billion in the first year alone, which dwarfs everything Trump made in the four years of the first term, the self-dealing, the abuse of government power. And this in the crypto dimension comes from an area where Donald Trump himself said the criticism that applies to his own dealings right now, which he's selling largely to either people who want access to him or people who are Trump fans. He said the thing that he's doing. is basically a scam. Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. America, the crypto capital of the world. I'm a big fan of the dollar. I'm a big fan of our currency, and I don't want to have... Other currencies coming out and hurting or demeaning the dollar. We've been pushing the market in crypto and Bitcoin and all of it, everything. I think it's a very dangerous thing. I launched it. I heard it was very successful. I haven't checked it. Where is it today? You made a lot of money, sir. And that's what it's about. No one's saying that in this great capitalist country, you can't just go make a lot of money for yourself and do self-enrichment. That's what Wall Street and fortunes are made and lost that way. That's what business is all about. But the public service in office demands something different. And so what we just showed you, Trump contradicting himself, owning himself, if you will, the guy who once said this is a scam, then realized he could make money off it off his fans, and now he's into it. and that kind of looting or profiteering is not generally acceptable in the American government. Indeed, I will just tell you, some of what he's doing is legal because, as I mentioned, we have these kind of exemptions for the president that are different than other jobs. But if you took the exact same facts I just told you about and applied them to other types of government officials, a judge, a member of Congress, you could literally wind up in jail for doing what is actually publicly reported tonight that Trump is doing. And whether there are others around him who should be investigated is an open question if we had a working DOJ. or aggressive subpoena-powered Congress, which we might get after November. We don't know. Some of Trump's crypto profits come from the half a billion dollars linked to a foreign government. In fact, just before the inauguration in that investment firm tied to the UAE government bought basically half of the Trump crypto firm, making it look like an inauguration-related effort. to get to the president, meaning they weren't interested in giving that money away to him unless and until he was about to become president again. Months later, the UAE struck a deal. The Times reports with the Trump administration over national security objections to export valuable computer chips that power AI. So Trump gets rich. Other people, though,

are on the losing end. We can show you a chart, Trump org reaping $2 billion. Well, investors lost over $2 billion because the things they're selling don't have a lot of value in the real market. Trump also reported over 20,000 stock trades in a whole bunch of investment accounts. That's 24 times a number of transactions previously disclosed. And the question is why, again, as I told you, someone who is supposed to be busy being president, who supposedly has enough money, why are they so actively trading, whether it's through a third party or not? Well, the details don't help Donald Trump's denials that this has nothing to do with being president and that he's not abusing power. Dell got a $10 billion Pentagon contract. That became public after Trump bought stock in the company. And Dell has been making a lot of money because of the AI and government relationships they have, but whether someone traded on inside information, like I told you, something that would be illegal and land you in jail if you weren't the president, is the big question. Trump has used his platform to praise companies that he invested in, Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft. And then there's $80 million tonight because of these disclosures that we see Trump got by shaking down these major companies that, of course, have to do business with and be regulated by the United States government. Meta, YouTube, news organizations. We've heard about that over time, but in the disclosure, you see that all in, he reaped $80 million from that alone, another 200 M in profits from his properties. The comparison there would be he's clearly making... far more from abusing presidential powers, shaking down companies and suing them, and selling crypto than from the thing that he claims his business empire was built on, being a real estate mogul. I want to show you how we got here, because part of what's happened in the second term is a kind of degradation of even the most basic baseline rules and principles. And in any modern society, There will be things that are done because we agree to do them together, what you might call the social contract. I don't mean to sound naive. And not all of them have to be enforced at the point of a gun or the threat of prosecution. And so when we talk about clean, good government, not holding a second job, not abusing your government powers to just enrich yourself or your family. Apart from the laws, that is something that, believe it or not, most presidents have refrained from, and all presidents have refrained from at the scale of Donald Trump. And we can go one better. The first presidency of Donald Trump also refrained from it. So maybe you need a psychologist or a historian to figure out why he is behaving so much worse now, having...

captured the Republican Party and degraded the Justice Department and all the things that as a news viewer you probably know, but I want to remind you tonight, in 2017, during the period where Trump had won the election, was getting ready to take office, and there were all these unprecedented questions, and he had all his business interests. He did claim then something that he's not doing now and not claiming now. He at that point felt the need to say, and he had lawyers backing up, that they were going to avoid the kind of conflicts we're living through today, and that he would step away from and not operate. his business interests. My two sons who are right here, Don and Eric, are going to be running the company. They are going to be running it in a very professional manner. They're not going to discuss it with me. He is completely isolating himself from his business interests. He is not exploiting the office of the presidency for his personal benefit. No new foreign deals will be made whatsoever during the duration of President Trump's presidency. I could actually run my business and run government at the same time. Again, I don't have to do this. Trump was claiming that he could be worse, but he wasn't going to be that bad. In other words, even 2017 Donald Trump knew that it would be bad to try to run your business and the government at the same time to be actively involved to hold those two jobs that there would be conflicts. And I want you to just take a moment and remember what he said there. He and his lawyer said there won't be new foreign deals because to even do a deal, a back and forth business deal with other countries while you're also running foreign policy is a huge conflict of interest and the American taxpayer or the American soldier could lose out. So you don't want that kind of conflict. We went from Donald Trump claiming no foreign new deals to Donald Trump taking $400 million in a free gift from a foreign government that of course expects something in return. That's how fast we've gone downhill. The $2 billion he ranked in last year is more than the previous year when he was a candidate. Trump's White House denies any wrongdoing, and they don't have really logical answers for why all of a sudden he's making so much as president, which seems to be related to the powers of the presidency and not just say his general private citizen revenue rate. And we're seeing even in conservative circles, this is too much. It's so grifty. I'm not going to lie, it's grifty. You know, the Trump family is grifty. There's been like story after story about all the money that his sons are making off of the government, these government contracts they're getting all that. I can't stand that stuff. There's this story this week, too, about his sons making money off a deal in Kazakhstan. What's the White House's position on? all these questions. That's what Americans wanted. They wanted a businessman in office. If they think that this issue is not permeating across the country with people going, huh, wait, what? Your children are involved in this. And if you remember, we spent a lot of time talking about Hunter Biden. I didn't like it when Hunter Biden was doing it. I don't like it when the Trumps are doing it.

That's the sound of the criticism on the right. You don't need to be a political expert to see why this is terribly unpopular, and this is bad news for the president, a bad night for the president, a bad disclosure report for President Trump, because corruption is unpopular and it is unpopular in a long-term nonpartisan way. It's something that they were concerned about at the founding of this nation. And this is a fitting week to think about that as we approach the 250th July 4th. Corruption is bad. Corruption undercuts the very theory of having a government by the people for the people because the corruption undercuts that and you end up getting worse and worse people in charge who are enriching themselves and not thinking about you. There's a reason why he ran on Drain the Swamp. And if you're listening and saying, well, Ari, I knew that was BS the whole time. You knew it back in 2016. Well, you were right because he is the swamp. But something else is happening on this issue, just like Epstein, just like the war, just like the high prices, a bunch more people may be joining where you are. Or if you weren't following politics then or you didn't have that view, you might be one of those people looking up and saying, even if you like other things about some of what the Republican Party offers and elections show that people have that view in America, there is nothing that anybody who is informed would like about having a profiteering corrupt government. which ultimately is stealing from you. That's the big story tonight. We have two special guests on it next. This is a Monday.com ad. The same Monday.com designed for every team. The same Monday.com with built-in AI, scaling your work from day one. The same Monday.com with an easy and intuitive setup. Go to Monday.com and try it for free. In the U.S., there's a break in every 26 seconds. But when intruders step near, Simply Safe Home Security steps up. Stop. This is Simply Safe. Police are on the way. Using AI alerts, U.S.-based live agents help deter break-ins. SimplySafe, no long-term contracts. Save 50% on your new system with professional monitoring at Simplysafe.com slash SXM or with promo code SXM. Outdoor deterrence requires a SimplySafe Active Guard outdoor protection plan starting at 4999 a month. Visit Simplysave.com slash licenses for alarm license information, Tennessee 2012. You know what's worse than a long wait? Flipping through old magazines in a waiting room. Instead, I power up Chumpa Casino. Slots, Blackjack, Solitaire, roulette, mingo, and more. Bortem doesn't stand a chance. Take a few virtual laps with me. Let's Chumba. Play now at chumbacasino.com. No purchase necessary. VGW Group Void were prohibited by law. CTNCs 21 Plus, sponsored by Jumba Casino.

We're joined now by Jay Comendori, a veteran of three presidential campaigns, including Obamas and Sarah Matthews, who served in Donald Trump's first term as White House Deputy Press Secretary and ultimately broke with the Trump administration over January 6th. Welcome to both of you. Sarah, they're not draining the swamp. They are the swamp. And as I showed, even first term Donald Trump felt the need to say they weren't going to do, he claimed, all the things they're now doing. Why do you think this issue breaks through and we're already seeing criticism on the right? Yeah, I mean, he said that he was going to be the guy to drain the swamp, but as you've laid out, he's the biggest swamp creature of them all. And I do think that there is a difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. And it's that he feels emboldened. And I think he feels like he's owed something now because he was put through so much with the legal troubles. And so he thinks, I'm going to do what I want in this term. And I think that that comes through in the corruption that we're seeing and in the policy choices that he's made. He's not acting on. any sort of competency or wise advice from people. He's just going on his own instinct. And then when it comes to the corruption of it all, I mean, come on. for the Republicans, this is just embarrassing for them when they spent years calling out Hunter Biden for corruption. And that just pales in comparison to what we're seeing happen in plain sight when it comes to Trump and his family. And look, I called it out when it came to Hunter Biden. I didn't like him profiting off of his last name. But the thing is, is that what Trump is doing is 10 times worse. I mean, you look at the crypto industry, for example, the Trump administration is actively shaping policy related to crypto. Joe, well, it's now reported that he made $1.4 billion in... his business ventures connected to the crypto industry. Or say for another example, another thing that Republicans have been highly critical of, Nancy Pelosi's stock trades. Well, as you pointed out at the top, Trump reported that he made 21,000 individual stock trades in 2025 alone. You look at Nancy Pelosi. She has averaged about 15 stock trades per year since 2012. So I would just love for more Republicans to speak up about this. And I do think that it's resonating. with voters across the country. And people are upset because Americans are struggling right now. And they look at how they're struggling to afford rent, groceries, gas, you name it. And then they look at the Trump family. And they seem to be doing pretty well profiting off of this presidency. Yeah. Che?

Yeah, I think one thing with Donald Trump is that I feel that corruption for him is not a side hustle. It's his main gig. I think corruption is his philosophy. I think it is his worldview, as the Atlantic put it, a few years ago. I think that Donald Trump believes this is a dog-eat-dog world, and he will be the big dog. I think he genuinely believes... Everybody does it. Everybody is as corrupt as he is, but he is honest about it. And that makes him more virtuous and better than a lot of other people, including previous inhabitants of the Oval Office. I also do think that this corruption issue has, like, connected him in some ways to elements of his mega base. You know, Theo Vons told Mark Cuban, the reason he supported Trump was it's a mobster's world and Trump would be his mobster. But I do think that there's a real flaw here because I think a wider electorate, you know, corruption is a terrible issue because it's not ideological. You know, good people, it's not an issue that good people can disagree about. And I think that's like the danger really poses for Republicans going into the midterm. Yeah, and it's ripping people off. It's abusing the government. And if anything, I think, you know, it's hard to make. huge generalizations, but if you look at traditional conservative thought, it is especially skeptical of centralized and aggrandized government power. And so on that basis, honest conservatives tend to say, well, yeah, we worry about the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about for the same reasons that we worry about. a bunch of people in Washington who are disconnected from everybody else and end up enriching themselves in whatever way. Sometimes it's, as I've pointed out, sometimes it's legal, but doesn't make it good. You also called in a Simpsons reference, Jay. We tried to deliver on the program and we can. This was Mayor Quimby's corruption. We will now hear suggestions for the disbursement of the $2 million. Don't you mean $3 million? Of course. How silly of me. Okay. Yeah, I mean, Mayor Quimby is very instructive when you think about Trump because Mayor Quimby's corruption was open. It was, you know, he was openly taking bribes. And it seemed to have no real impact on his support in Springfield because voters were either too apathetic or they were too cynical. And I do think that Trump is kind of relying on that. dynamic. He's relying on an electorate that is going to be cynical, that is going to be apathetic, that is going to basically believe, as he believes, that everybody does it. You know, and I think looking forward, if you look at like, you know, the speeches that Jon Ossoff has done in Georgia, you know, he's made corruption his signature issue. And I think that's important because, you know, to win in Georgia, to get 50 plus one in Georgia, you have to win Republicans. You actually have to win people who voted for Trump. And understanding that corruption is. is a non-ideological issue that can work, I think is a really good insight. You know, Jay, I've been at this a minute. I don't know that we've ever discussed the political profile of the fictional town of Springfield and the Simpsons before, but you've brought us to that place. If Mayor Quimby is Trump, then I guess Monty Burns is Peter Thiel.

Yeah, and I think like Peter Theo, Monty Burns has a quest to live forever. So I don't, you know, that's a whole other subject that, you know, people can Google, but that is also an obsession of Monty Burns that he wants to use his money to buy not only politicians and power, but also that he should be freed from the sufferings of mortality as well. That's something that happens, you know, corruption, money corrupts. I mean, Sarah, I would turn to you and say, what the hell happened to this segment? Now we're just talking about The Simpsons. But it's, you know, it's that kind of show. It's freewheeling. I'll turn it back, Sarah, to what we discussed on the right. You have Donald Trump's enrichment. And you have a lot of other people who are actually losing out, as I mentioned. And so given that you worked there and you've seen this pattern before, what happens to those people who bought the meme coin thinking, oh, great, Trump's good at business and they lost money? Or the people who we've got that there. You see a lot of money was lost by regular folks who said, oh, Trump told me to buy this. And folks who are watching sort of a high gas price summer and a lot of problems. as the backdrop to Trump and his family getting richer. Do you, do you see that as Trump's approval crashes? Do you see that meaning that some of the Republican faithful are changing their mind? Yeah, I think that it's really telling of Trump as a person that when you look at that meme coin of how him and his family profited so much and others lost so much. But they don't care because all that matters to Trump is lining his own pockets. And at the expense of hardworking Americans, too, it's all a grift for him. And that's why he wanted to be an office again. It's why he ran for president again. I think he wanted to make money and profit off the presidency while keeping himself out of jail. So it was a twofold. there. But I do think that this is going to backfire on him and voters because I think that people are really upset because it flies in the face of everything that he campaigned on. We were already facing an affordability crisis in this country. And Trump has exacerbated it with his disastrous policies, whether you look at his asinine terrorists or his war of choice in Iran. And then on top of that is enriching himself and his family. I mean, there's really nothing more out of touch than that. And he even said today, well, everyone's profiting. Look at your 401k. I don't think that that. That speaks to people because, one, he overinflated the number of how much 401ks have gone up. And not everyone in this country has a 401k. And so I think that him, he's just completely out of touch. And, you know, he's a billionaire, so obviously. But he also just lacks empathy. So he doesn't care that people are struggling right now and that people can't pay their rent or afford groceries or fill up their gas tank because he's never had to worry about any of those things himself.

Yeah. Sarah and Che, thanks to both of you. Coming up, we will look at what has become a brutal summer for Republicans, red state polling, crashing, the infighting, and we'll show you the state fair that wasn't. Also, Trump did get a couple losses of the Supreme Court in a mixed sort of end of the term, and there has been quite a set of reactions from Trump officials to their losses. But next we turn to an expert who can really cut through everything here. The Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman. We're going to get into what's happening in the markets and what you need to know next. In the U.S., there's a break-in every 26 seconds. But when intruders step near, Simply Safe home security steps up. Stop. This is SimplySafe. Police are on the way. Using AI alerts, U.S.-based live agents help deter break ins. SimplySaf, no long-term contracts. Save 50% on your new system with professional monitoring at Simplysafe.com slash SXM or with promo code SXM. Outdoor deterrence requires a SimplySafe Active Guard outdoor protection plan starting at $49.99 a month. Visit Simplysafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012. Monday AI agents took over my work. And I absolutely love it. Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind now. They live inside Monday.com. So they see the full picture. My work, my team, the whole company. And I don't have to worry about the data. It's safe, which means I'm free to focus on the big stuff, knowing everything runs smoothly in the background. It's completely shifted the way we work. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday.com. Yo, it's Jay Uso from WWE, and I'm Jimmy Uso. Chumba Casina and WWE are hype for the biggest event of the summer, SummerSlan. I know I can't wait. There's nothing better to do while we're waiting than playing Chumba Casino. Sign up today and you could win a VIP experience. With Chumba Casino and with WW4 SummerSlam. So what are you waiting for? Play Chumbo Casino and enter for your chance to win. Let's Chumble. Yeat. No purchase necessary. VGW Group void were prohibited by law. CT&C's 21 Plus, sponsored by Chumba Casino.

We're joined now by Paul Krugman, the longtime author, a longtime New York Times columnist, Nobel Prize winning an economist, and he now writes the Paul Krugman substack. Welcome back. Hi there. We talked earlier in the program about what is wrong with Trump's corruption, how it also violates his own claims and past vows. I thought I would start by asking you in plain English. As an economist, what is the cost to the rest of us, the public, if the government is corrupt or captured, separate from the morality? Yeah. So there's an old phrase actually comes from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, but everybody uses it, crony capitalism, which is kind of summarized. Actually, people in my parents' generation used to say, it's not what you know, it's who you know. It's where success in business depends on having the right connections and, you know, having the favor of the leader, Supreme Leader, whatever. And that's extremely destructive. It does mean that all of the incentives on business are to... to curry favor, not to actually be good at, you know, at your business. And it's especially bad if what it tastes at curry favor is just who is best at funding money for the president's family and his friends. And here we are just abrupt collapse of all of the norms, all of the... All of the things that we're supposed to, just from an economic point of view, mean that we rewarded actual productivity. We rewarded creation of actual value as opposed to just making the White House happy. Right. And in the kind of casual conversation about markets or capitalism, There's usually the assumption of, oh, well, hard work gets you there. Risk will be punished or rewarded. But underneath that, professor, at the risk of me oversimplifying, is some sort of assumption that the regulated markets are working, that they are efficient, that they're protected. And when we look at crypto, which whether or not we know whether crypto has value, I think reasonable people can agree if it is fairly regulated. with no corruption from the government, that will be fairer to any potential investor than if the government is self-enriching and saying, well, we like it lawless because we're making money and we don't care who loses money. But I'm sure you could put it with more precision. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, crypto is not, you know, the question of whether crypto is actually good for anything except crime is still very much. up in the air or I would say even, you know, it's very questionable. But what is certainly true is that when you have a lot of people buying Trump coins and Melania coins, which are nothing but ways of transferring money to the president's family, that is making a mockery of markets. Let me give you a bit, a different example, AI. So AI, you know, AI is everywhere, and we're all talking AI. And so there are two.

big players there. There's OpenAI with chat GPT and Anthropic with Claude. And then there's a very third-rate player, which is Elon Musk's grok, which is by all accounts. I've never tried to use it, but by all accounts really pretty bad. All right, let the best model win. except that's not what's been happening. The Trump administration is trying to force agencies to use GROC, even though it is by all accounts really, really horrible, and it may have actually been partially responsible for the debacle in Iran. And for a while now, they just reversed course. I'm not sure what's going on there. For a while, they basically tried to cripple, anthropic, tried to cripple Claude because, you know, I've been a number of reports to say that that... that Anthropic doesn't... I'm trying to find a way that I could say this on air, but Anthropic does not do enough. It does not employ a Trump whisperer. It does not throw a lot of money at the president's ballrooms and all of that. And... They really seem to be doing all they could to just plain, cut the best AI off at the knees. And this is being replayed in many, many businesses because all restraints are off. The Supreme Court essentially empowered Trump to turn every federal regulatory process into a purely partisan, purely Trump-lacking process, which means not just that you can't get approval to do stuff unless you... pay off the right people, but you can also be sanctioned, prevented from doing business if you don't pay off the right people, which does not favor the people who are best at doing business. It favors the people who are best at corruption. Right, right. And that goes back to the Who You Know point you made. Looking at how labor is doing these days, as we hear about the markets rebounding or doing well in the Wall Street, here's the headline that I think people are already feeling. Corporate profits soar at the same time, workers, labor, that's most of us, most regular people, hit the lowest share of income ever recorded. So they're at 54% in 26, a new low. And I want to put that against the AI backlash, which I'm sure you've seen. Employers who laid off workers citing AI regretting it. Companies rapidly changing their minds that AI can do it all. Ford rehiring hundreds. Bank of Australian IBM refocusing on what they call human capital. Strange times, Paul, that we talked this way. But people, after making layoffs for AI, what do you see going on there? And do you see any silver lining potential? You don't spend enough time around economists who use weird terms like human capital all the time. But anyway. All the time. No, but the reality, okay.

First of all, stock market, the stock market is a terrible gauge of anything because it's very speculative and it's animal spirits and all of that. But to the extent that it's anything, the stock market is a claim on future profits. And if you have an economy in which profits are soaring but wages are falling, yeah, you expect the stock market to look okay, but that is not the measure. In some ways, the rising stock market is actually a measure of how badly the economy is performing in terms of actually rewarding American workers. And then, yeah, AI, I mean, there's, this is something, it's kind of like a bubble that's looking like, except it's more of a kind of a fad, a giant exercise and fear of missing out in which a lot of companies rushed to use AI, told their workers you must use AI, even if you can't figure out what to do with it, and then all of a sudden realize, oh, this is sort of not working and it's costing too much money. And so, yeah, we, I mean, This is a really impressive new technology, and it will no doubt do a lot in the future the same way that the Internet did. But in terms of the likely misallocation of money, this is probably making the dot-com bubble look like a small diversion. Wow. And so you do see it as largely the makings of a bubble. Well, it's not necessarily even, it's not even so much the stock prices, which is what happened in the dot-com year. A lot of it is just that you have all of these companies feeling that they must go all in on AI because everyone else is doing it and what will the markets think and each of them believing that the other companies must know what they're doing and rushing into AI. And it certainly has, you know, the technology. The nuts and boats and dollars and cents is really hard to parse out. But the psychology of the business people doing this is very obvious. And it's very clear that if I'm not quite sure what you do with AI, for sure, a lot of the companies that are throwing billions of dollars at it are not sure what to do with it, but they've heard that that's what you're supposed to do. And I'm not sure that this is especially a Trump thing, but we are kind of in that era when in general, you know, it's, it's vibes and feelings and never mind actually. you know, doing the math. Yeah. All fair points and broadening beyond sort of the news of the day, I think it was really interesting to get your perspective. Professor Paul Krugman, thank you again. Thank you. Absolutely. Good to see you. Coming up, Donald Trump's obsessed with crowd sizes, so he's not going to like what happened at the National Mall Fair. But first, I'm going to show you how conservatives and some in the MAGA universe are taking those losses at the Supreme Court. We'll even get to the Statue of Liberty reference that shouldn't have been.

Donald Trump has gotten all kinds of special benefits and exemptions from the Supreme Court, but even he found that trying to rewrite the Constitution by himself was too much, and he was dealt that big loss this week, the court upholding citizenship the way it's always been, meaning he doesn't get to rewrite it or water down or change birthright citizenship. And that has some conservatives who, if they follow the law at all, could have seen this coming, but they're still upset. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld birthright citizenship, and that is a legal abomination. Chief John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett siding with the liberal justices. Samuel Alito was furious. I think we're used to getting betrayed by John Roberts, but I mean, Amy Coney Barrett, she, like. I'm sick of Amy Coney Barrett. I'm sick of this. Are we banning pregnant women from America? Are we banning foreign pregnant women? You have to now think very carefully about who you let into your country, even on a temporary basis. It's the legalization of an invasion of America. This is all at best misinformed noise. At worst, they're lying to you. The Constitution says what it says. And conservatives have often held themselves out as the ideological view that you hew to that. They call it originalism or textualism. And we are a country that defines citizenship by being here. So if you're born here, you're an American citizen. You don't have to then do a loyalty test or prove your religion race or other things that in the old days and in some other countries, they do. And people know that. Everybody knows that, but Trump has demanded this kind of performance, and maybe some people, as I said, ultimately started to believe it. I can't tell you what's in their minds. I can just tell you that they are wrong on the law, which is why a coalition on the Supreme Court that includes Republican justices... landed by saying the court said the Constitution says what it says. Presidents don't get to just change it. That's why we have a Constitution. All of this fairly straightforward. Meanwhile, one Republican went all the way into the famed references of the Statue of Liberty. We got to put a bed sheet, a big bed sheet over the Statue of Liberty. 10 years, 10-year moratorium on immigration. She's going to go to sleep for a while. She got to go to sleep for a while because we're not letting anybody in anymore. Well, some people think of bad. We got, I'm not saying it's dad. What I'm trying to say is, is that instead of having a torch, maybe needs a stop sign.

Yes, it's all metaphors, but putting the Statue of Liberty to sleep isn't something you usually hear from politicians in any party because, you know, it's a symbol of America and what we stand for on our best days. I will mention... that the lawmaker is well within his policy arguments to say that there should be lower immigration or zero immigration. A lot of American businesses oppose that because they want all kinds of skilled workers, technical workers, AI, smart people from around the world. And a lot of other folks have arguments for immigration you're probably familiar with. But yes, consistent with this ruling, the government could lower the amount of immigration they allow in any given year or the amount of visas or citizenship applications they accept. All this ruling is about is... honoring the fact that our Constitution already says, if you're born here, you're an American. You don't get born here and then have to prove it. The court ruling was on one matter relatively close. It was within a single vote of actually going the other direction. And that, again, remember, it says all persons born are naturalized in the U.S. and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the U.S. So the fact that there were four votes to go in a different direction despite the plain English there shows you, as I mentioned in our initial coverage, that apparently there are now four Trump-friendly votes who will say up is down or rewrite the Constitution at his request. And if they'll do that on immigration, they might do that when it comes to your voting rights or whether we have free and fair elections. As for it being a close call, here was the vice president. I do actually think there's a really big silver lining here. The fact that this case was a five to four decision effectively means that the concept of birthright citizenship, which is an absurdity to the 14th Amendment, that concept is hanging by a thread. We actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision, just as we've reversed so many bad decisions throughout the generations.

That is the sitting vice president's take. They lost. They lost with Republican justices ruling against them. They lost with a Trump appointee ruling against them. But he says, hey, we could still find some way to reverse this. That's what you're up against if you are a believer in the Constitution and the Supreme Court's rule of law. When we come back, why the midterm panic is going up on the right. Trump has long obsessed over crowd sizes as he's throwing this Independence Day fair, and they're having a little trouble with it on the National Ball. If you're going to show who's there, and you can see some of these photos, then you're going to see with your own eyes what's going on, and that kind of attendance posed some trouble even for the often Trump-friendly Fox News. Happy early birthday America. We're celebrating already at the great American State Fair. Man, we've got thousands of people celebrating this birthday with us. And it's because there's tons of people here. It's a huge space, and it's just going to get more and more crowded as the week goes on. Sometimes the pictures really don't tell the full story because if you look behind us, you see, okay, there are a couple hundred people back there, but the truth is when you make your way over here and you're in this lot, you're in a wash of people. I mean, it's like, you know, we came all the way down here so we could have this shot behind us, and now we're going to tell you why what you see behind us, the empty field, isn't really what to focus on. Somewhere, there's more people. That was a kind of distortion in real time, a matter that is small, but goes to credibility. Insiders say Trump is livid. at the obviously low turnout, which can't be masked. As for the media trying to basically avoid offending an audience of one, well, South Park mocked and maybe predicted this. This is 60 minutes. Oh boy. Oh. Oh, God. The small town of South Park, Colorado is protesting against the president. The townspeople claim that the president, who is a great man? A great man. Great guy. We know he's probably watching, and we are just reporting on this town in Colorado that's being sued by the president, and they are fighting back. And just to be clear, we don't agree with them. No, no, no, no. No, no, don't be mad at us, or we swear there's people back there somewhere. The jokes write themselves, but the punchline is... evidently pretty serious because we have to have facts if we're going to govern this country together and we might need leaders who are concerned about more than just their personal popularity and crowd sizes. We'll be right back.

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