Latest news with #anti-MAGA
News18
01-07-2025
- Business
- News18
Finding 'Odour' In Chaos: Here's Why Trump's Victory 45-47 Fragrance Smells Fishy
This perfume is another product in the extensive list Donald Trump has marketed using the presidency's prominence Do you want to smell like Donald Trump? The 45th President of the United States, now also the 47th, has launched his fragrance—Victory 45-47. Beyond branding sneakers, questionable real estate deals, phones, bibles, guitars, and cryptocurrency, Trump now wants you to buy his new perfume. This follows his previous 'Fight, Fight, Fight" collection, released after an assassination attempt in July last year. Clearly, this perfume is another product in the extensive list Trump has marketed using the presidency's prominence. Trump announced on his social network, Truth Social: 'Trump Fragrances are here. They're called 'Victory 45-47' because they're all about Winning, Strength, and Success — for men and women." Both signature fragrances feature an iconic golden statue of the US president. A disclaimer notes, 'Trump Fragrances are not designed, manufactured, distributed, or sold by Donald J Trump," meaning they are produced under a branding license. The vendor, which claims to pay tribute to the Trump legacy, states it is not political and unrelated to any campaign. Trump has not taken an ethics pledge for his time in office, unlike most recent presidents, leading critics to argue he uses the presidency to enrich himself and his family. This has prompted anti-MAGA groups to challenge the Make America Great Again movement, accusing Trump of blatant corruption. From crypto scams to shady real estate deals, Trump phones, and cologne. He's never stopped using the presidency to enrich himself and his ahead, MAGA. Try defending this blatant corruption. — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 30, 2025 Some journalists label it 'grifting", a slang term for petty swindling. A Forbes report states Trump could have made up to 315 million dollars from his cryptocurrency $TRUMP since its launch, despite its value dropping from $27.72 to $8.73 per coin. Trump's financial disclosure revealed he earned over 57 million dollars from his stake in World Liberty Financial last year. Additionally, he made 2.8 million dollars from Trump Watches, 3 million dollars from his Save America coffee table book, and 50 million dollars from his Mar-a-Lago estate and members-only club. These financial endeavours raise concerns about conflicts of interest, especially as Trump's tax and spending bill, criticised as anti-American youth, might adversely affect lower-income households. Healthcare workers and others could suffer if the bill passes, potentially adding 3 trillion dollars to US debt over the next decade. For low-income families in rural America, who largely rely on Medicaid, cuts could impact 40 per cent of children. Federal employment has been decreasing, with budget cuts affecting various sectors, while Trump's bill is seen as favouring billionaires over the poor. This situation prompts the question of what victory Trump's fragrance represents. Is it a Trumpian economy where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Get breaking news, in-depth analysis, and expert perspectives on everything from geopolitics to diplomacy and global trends. Stay informed with the latest world news only on News18. Download the News18 App to stay updated!
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Pam Bondi's ‘Pro-Trump' Brother Loses Election by Landslide
Lawyers in the nation's capital handed a stunning loss to Attorney General Pam Bondi's brother in a heated election to lead the Washington, D.C., Bar. Ninety percent of more than 38,000 members of the lawyers' association voted to elect employment law attorney Diane Seltzer as their president, the organization announced Monday. The Seltzer Law Firm principal beat Brad Bondi, a litigation partner at the firm Paul Hastings, who garnered a measly 3,490 votes. D.C. Bar CEO Bob Spagnoletti told reporters that the 'extraordinary' 43-percent turnout was more than five times the norm in a typical election. Bondi's landslide loss appeared to be a resounding rebuke of the Trump administration's war on the legal profession, which has divided the industry. 'Right now we are in a time of governmental chaos, and our members don't feel safe to practice law,' Seltzer said in a virtual showdown against Bondi last month, adding that she planned to 'make sure that we maintain and uphold the rule of law, and that people feel they can practice law safely without worrying about executive orders, or without being targeted in any possible way by the government.' President Donald Trump waged a retribution campaign against several prominent law firms in March by issuing a flurry of executive orders that revoked the security clearances and canceled government contracts with firms he perceived as political enemies. A month later, voting began at the D.C. Bar and ended June 4th. Trump's moves drove a wedge between top firms, with some caving in to the Trump administration by agreeing to do pro bono work and others filing lawsuits challenging the executive orders against them. 'I had hoped this race would be a contest of ideas to enhance services for our widely varied members,' Bondi said in a Monday LinkedIn post. 'Instead, I am disgusted by how rabid partisans lurched this election into the political gutter, turning a professional campaign into baseless attacks, identity politics, and partisan recrimination.' Bondi accused his opponent of 'smearing' him over his ties to the Attorney General and 'peddling conspiracies' about his intentions. Alicia Long, a prosecutor who was an adviser to the failed U.S. Attorney nominee Ed Martin and is now working with Jeanine Pirro, also lost her bid to become the D.C. Bar's treasurer. Long and Bondi's candidacies sparked alarm among Washington lawyers in March, when a 'high alert' obtained by NBC News and blasted on social media described the duo as 'Trump/Pam Bondi loyalists' who were 'making a bid to take over the D.C. Bar.' In April, conservative lawyer and anti-MAGA activist George Conway weighed in on the D.C. Bar election and accused Pam Bondi of helping Trump punish law firms in an 'extraordinarily perilous moment' for the legal system. 'I'm not admitted in D.C. but I have a request of those of you who are... Vote against Brad Bondi,' he said in an Instagram post. 'Ordinarily, I wouldn't hold the views or conduct of someone's relative against them... But these are not ordinary times. The Department of Justice under Pam Bondi has engaged in a full-scale assault on our Constitution and on the rule of law.'
New York Post
31-05-2025
- Business
- New York Post
Tesla shareholders thankful to have Musk back after his time with DOGE
Americans should be thankful that Elon Musk devoted his time to DOGE and shining a spotlight on government waste. Tesla shareholders have less reason to cheer. I say this not as a Musk hater, but an admirer of his brilliance and patriotism to his adopted country. Yet in announcing last week he's totally done with the aforementioned Department of Government Efficiency, Musk did underscore a blind spot in his day job running Tesla, the world's preeminent electric vehicle company. It is mostly Tesla that makes him the world's richest man, with an estimated net worth of $425 billion, according to Forbes. It is Tesla and the stock he holds that made him an opinion leader, using the currency to buy Twitter, rename it X and establish the platform as maybe the most important news operation in the world. SpaceX is revolutionary, as is Starlink, and maybe soon, his AI application, xAI, but Tesla is at the heart of Musk Inc. for now and maybe forever. And there's good evidence that Musk has taken Tesla for granted, including disregarding its many critics, the short sellers who have been warning for years about holes in the company's business model and his erratic management style. Musk outlasted most of the shorts, many of whom (like the renowned James Chanos) long ago threw in the proverbial towel on their bet the stock would plummet to reflect their version — maybe the most accurate version — of Tesla's operating reality and the weirdish ways Musk has at times run things. This is a company with a stock that is tremendously overvalued by traditional metrics, yet its CEO took a sabbatical to hang out in the White House while things were starting to go sideways back at the office. Tesla has so-so profits of just around $7 billion in 2024, but eked out just $400 million in the first quarter of 2025, a significant two-year low. Herd on the Street Investors are the ultimate herd animal. The Musk is brilliant meme (and forget everything else like Tesla's sometimes weak operating performance), and his odd, very un-CEO-type quirks have been in the herds' collective head for years now, propelling the stock ever higher no matter what Musk says or does. With that attitude, investors largely ignored Musk's antics, like the time he oddly blurted out that he had a buyer for Tesla at a significant premium and none emerged. Or when he (over)paid $44 billion for Twitter (it was worth closer to $4 billion), and also how he tried to wiggle out of the deal after realizing he screwed up. The herd thought it was brilliant when Musk turned politically right, endorsed Donald Trump for president, and then became a key adviser. Shares of Tesla exploded on the bet that fanboying Trump would make Tesla invulnerable to the anti-EV strains in the MAGA movement and the GOP in general, and of course, a rebellion from Tesla's lefty, tree-hugging, anti-MAGA customers. The optimism ebbed when reality set in as business slipped while Musk was spending all his waking hours in the White House and tweeting about politics (or whatever they call it now on X), not exactly habits that CEOs worried about production metrics indulge in. The costs to shareholders are adding up. EV deliveries dropped sharply in Q1. A sometimes violent consumer backlash of Elon haters ensued with boycotts and vandalism. Shares have recovered more recently as Musk signaled he was moving away from Trump and DOGE, and back to Tesla, but the underlying issues with the company remain. Keep up with today's most important news Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters Consider Tesla's China conundrum. Tesla builds a lot of its cars in China, approaching nearly half its units sold by some estimates, as it seeks to tap into the massive Chinese consumer base. At first the thinking was that Musk could soften Trump's anti-China trade position. Ditto for the general GOP disposition to end Biden-era tax breaks for EVs. Let's just say Trump is as much of a China trade hawk as ever (in response, Mainland consumers are now opting for EVs from China's BYD), and the GOP is still looking to zero out Biden's clean-energy tax credits that include breaks for EVs. Gordon Johnson, a longtime Musk and Tesla critic, sees other headwinds for Tesla and its shareholders. 'Tesla has objectively lost its product edge, with many competing cars now offering better' range, interiors and faster charges, Johnson said, basing his criticism on consumer surveys. He also noted that Tesla for years hyped the proprietary nature of its battery technology, which may be true only in the most narrow sense, because it sources its battery parts elsewhere. Sure, the nasty political backlash of tree-hugging progressive EV buyers who hate that Elon worked with Trump hurt sales, but losing the product edge has also hurt. Johnson said China sales — again, a big part of Tesla's revenues — are now declining sharply because of Trump's trade war with the Mainland that will likely persist through any framework that is reached. Tesla bulls out there like my good pal Dan Ives say it's the future we all should be looking at when it comes to Tesla, not the past. And that future is a potentially transformative technology in autonomous vehicles that will meld all the stuff Muskis really good at, like AI and robotics. Musk himself said in 2022 that the company is 'worth basically zero' without a functioning self-driving car. He says he's been testing them for June delivery and they look like they're functioning well. Ives said it could add $1 trillion to Tesla's market value. Johnson isn't so sure. One problem, according to Johnson, is that even though Musk is done with DOGE, he 'continues to spend far more time on Twitter than he does on Tesla.'
Mint
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
MAGA's assault on science is an act of grievous self-harm
Editor's update (May 22nd): The Trump administration revoked Harvard University's ability to enroll international students. The attacks have been fast and furious. In a matter of months the Trump administration has cancelled thousands of research grants and withheld billions of dollars from scientists. Projects at Harvard and Columbia, among the world's best universities, have been abruptly cut off. A proposed budget measure would slash as much as 50% from America's main research-funding bodies. Because America's technological and scientific prowess is world-beating, the country has long been a magnet for talent. Now some of the world's brightest minds are anxiously looking for the exit. Why is the administration undermining its own scientific establishment? On May 19th Michael Kratsios, a scientific adviser to President Donald Trump, laid out the logic. Science needs shaking up, he said, because it has become inefficient and sclerotic, and its practitioners have been captured by groupthink, especially on diversity, equity and inclusion (dei). You might find that reasonable enough. Look closely at what is happening, though, and the picture is alarming. The assault on science is unfocused and disingenuous. Far from unshackling scientific endeavour, the administration is doing it grievous damage. The consequences will be bad for the world, but America will pay the biggest price of all. One problem is that actions are less targeted than the administration claims, as our special Science section this week explains. As Mr Trump's officials seek to stamp out dei, punish universities for incidents of antisemitism and cut overall government spending, science has become collateral damage. A suspicion that scientists are pushing 'woke" thinking has led grant-makers to become allergic to words like 'trans" and 'equity". As a consequence, it is not only inclusive education schemes that are being culled, but an array of orthodox science. Funding has been nixed for studies that seek, say, to assess cancer risk factors by race, or the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases by sex. The attack on elite universities takes this to an illogical extreme. Because the White House sees colleges as bastions of wokeness and antisemitism, it has withheld funding for research at Harvard and Columbia, no matter in which subject. Overnight, projects on everything from Alzheimer's disease to quantum physics have been stopped. When scientists warn of the harm this does, they risk being seen as part of a scornful anti-MAGA elite that has been protected for too long. More fundamentally, the claim that Mr Trump will stop groupthink is disingenuous. maga reserves a special hatred for public-health and climate researchers, whom it regards as finger-wagging worrywarts determined to suppress Americans' liberties—as they did in lockdowns and school closures during covid-19. The consequence is that spending on vaccine and climate research will be gutted most viciously of all. With the stroke of a pen, officials are trying to impose new rules that tell scientists what areas of inquiry they may pursue and what is off-limits—a shocking step backwards for a republic founded on the freethinking values of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, genuine problems with the way science works in America are being neglected. Mr Kratsios is right that there is too much bureaucracy. America's best researchers say they spend two out of five days on form-filling and other administrative tasks, instead of in the lab. Research is becoming more incremental. New ways of funding, such as lotteries, are worth trying. So far, however, the White House has not set out plans to make science work better. Indeed, when scientists are uncertain whether their work will still be funded, or if they take to the courts to challenge arbitrary grant terminations, American science becomes less efficient, not more so. Congress and the courts may yet act to limit the scale and the scope of these anti-science endeavours. Even so, the damage of the past few months will soon be felt. Savage cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration mean worse weather-forecasting, making it harder for farmers to know when to plant their crops, and for local authorities to prepare for natural disasters. Those to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention will make it harder to monitor, and thus curb, outbreaks of disease. There will also be longer-term harm. Although Mr Trump hopes his tariffs will lure businesses to invest in America, their research spending is unlikely to fill the same gaps as publicly funded basic work, much of which may not be commercialised for years, if ever. As funding is frozen, the danger of a brain drain looms. In the first three months of the year the number of applications for overseas jobs from American scientists rose by a third compared with the same period in 2024; foreign researchers applying to come to America fell by a quarter. The country's reputation for welcoming talent will not be so easily regained. If the belief that academic freedom is curtailed takes hold, the scientists who remain could self-censor their lines of inquiry for years to come. The consequences will be felt around the world. America is the planet's biggest backer of public research; it is home to half of all science Nobel laureates and four of the ten best scientific-research universities. The knowledge uncovered by American scientists and resulting innovations such as the internet and mrna vaccines have been a boon to humanity. When America retreats, everyone is robbed of the fruits of this ingenuity. Exit, pursued by an elephant It is America, however, that will feel the pain most of all. At the beginning of the 20th century there was no branch of science in which Uncle Sam led the world. At the century's end there was none where it did not. America's triumphs—its economic prowess, and its technological and military might—were interwoven with that scientific success. As America pulls back, it will cede ground to authoritarian China as a scientific superpower, with all the benefits that confers. maga's assault on science is not just about dei, nor is it about universities. It is first and foremost an act of self-harm. For subscribers only: to see how we design each week's cover, sign up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter. © 2025, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on
American Military News
09-05-2025
- American Military News
Fmr. NFL player sentenced for murdering girlfriend
Kevin Ware Jr., a former National Football League (NFL) player, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to the murder of his ex-girlfriend in 2021. According to Harris County court documents obtained by Fox 26 Houston, Ware Jr. pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of murder and tampering with evidence as part of a 30-year prison sentence plea deal. The outlet noted that the 41-year-old former NFL player was indicted in June of 2022 for the death of Taylor Pomanski, his 29-year-old ex-girlfriend, after Pomanski's remains were found in 2021 and identified in April of 2022. NBC Houston reported that Pomaski's last known location was at a party in her Houston home on April 25, 2021. The outlet noted that Pomaki disappeared under suspicious circumstances. According to ABC 13 News, Ware Jr. was pulled over for driving 115 miles per hour in Montgomery County just days before Pomaski's mysterious disappearance. The outlet reported that law enforcement officials found multiple guns, including a loaded AK-47 rifle, cocaine, and methamphetamine in Ware Jr.'s vehicle during the traffic stop. READ MORE: Viral Video: Fmr. NFL star arrested after anti-MAGA protest Following the traffic stop, the former NFL player was charged with the possession of a firearm by a felon and for possession with intent to deliver/manufacture a controlled substance, according to ABC 13 News. While Ware Jr. was sentenced to 15 years in prison, he was released on bond before Pomaski disappeared. According to The New York Post, Pomaski's remains were later found in a ditch in Harris County in December of 2021. The outlet cited court documents that claimed the former NFL player had 'cut her with a knife, hit her with a blunt object, strangled her and then burned her corpse.' Eric Zuleger, Pomaski's ex-boyfriend, told KHOU 11 News that he believed the 29-year-old was trapped in an abusive relationship at the time of her mysterious disappearance. 'Taylor reached out to me many times throughout the month of April,' Zuleger said. 'We were talking about her getting out of there, getting back on her feet, getting herself set and stabilized.'
