The Perfect Judge Will Rule on Trump’s Shady $1.8 Billion Slush Fund

The lawsuit filed against President Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund has been assigned to a judge already on the president’s bad side.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon will be overseeing the case against Trump’s slush fund too. Leon has previously drawn Trump’s ire not only by delaying the construction of the White House ballroom, but also by striking down the president’s executive order to target law firm WilmerHale.

On March 31, Leon issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking construction on the ballroom, saying in his ruling, “Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!”

Just over two weeks later, Leon ruled that Trump could work on the underground, national security–related parts of the project but not on the aboveground ballroom.

“National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” Leon said in his ruling, criticizing Trump for trying to go around his earlier injunction by claiming the ballroom’s bulletproof glass, bomb shelters, and other security measures were for national security reasons.

This infuriated Trump, who called Leon a “Trump Hating” judge who was “highly political” and accused him of having “gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built.”

Now Leon will be in charge of examining whether a slush fund to pay Trump’s political supporters who run afoul of law enforcement is constitutional. Considering how much criticism is already being raised against the fund, even from Republicans, Trump may soon be writing another angry screed on Truth Social.

Donald Trump just wants to let the kids vape.

Eight days after Reynolds American, an American tobacco company with a history of government lobbying, threw $5 million at a Trump-backed super PAC, the Food and Drug Administration moved to ease restrictions on flavored vapes, allowing companies like Reynolds to roll out flavors previously banned because they were too marketable to minors.

The donation was made April 30 and revealed in a campaign finance filing posted Wednesday. It was first reported on by The New York Times.

Shortly after the $5 million donation, a Reynolds executive and two Reynolds lobbyists had lunch with Trump at his Florida golf club, and reportedly pressed the president on current FDA regulations. Trump pulled out his phone and called his appointed commissioner of the FDA, Marty Makary, to complain. Makary did not pick up.

The next week, The Wall Street Journal found that the president had become frustrated with Makary because of his refusal to approve blueberry, mango, and menthol vapes from one manufacturer due to health concerns. Under pressure from Trump, the FDA announced a few days later that it was removing some restrictions, and Makary resigned.

In his first term, Trump took some steps to control youth vaping, which was exploding in popularity. But on the campaign trail in 2024, he pulled an about-face, promising to “save vaping” in a poorly disguised effort to capture the youth vote.

Vapes from Chinese companies sold in American convenience stores and gas stations remain popular with young people, and have created a $6 billion market share. Instead of properly regulating those devices and reducing vaping rates, Trump would prefer that U.S. companies profit from the crisis, as well—and donate to his super PACs, of course.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy is now vocally opposing President Trump after losing his primary election last week thanks to the president’s endorsement of one of his opponents.

On Wednesday, Cassidy held nothing back in criticizing the White House ballroom Trump is building, complaining in particular about the president’s lack of transparency.

“There’s no architectural plans. There is no environmentals. There’s no engineering. There’s no sense of when we ask, how did it happen to cost exactly a billion,” Cassidy told CNN. “It could cost a lot less, it could cost a lot more, I just don’t get it.”

Cassidy also attacked the Department of Justice’s new $1.776 billion “weaponization” fund, designed to compensate people who say they were politically targeted by the government (read: Trump supporters).

“People are concerned about paying their mortgage or rent, affording groceries and paying for gas, not about putting together a $1.8 billion fund for the president and his allies to pay whomever they wish with no legal precedent or accountability. This is adding to our national debt. If there needs to be a settlement, the administration should bring it to Congress to decide,” Cassidy said in a post on X about the fund, created from a settlement agreement between Trump and the IRS.

It’s telling that Cassidy only feels emboldened to speak out once his political career is essentially over. He had plenty of earlier opportunities to publicly oppose Trump’s policies, especially considering he is a medical doctor and has seen some of the White House’s destructive public health decisions.

Instead, Cassidy voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine activist, as secretary of health and human services, and has refused to address Kennedy’s weakening of vaccine policies since then. In the end, it didn’t help him politically, as Trump still criticized him and backed Representative Julia Letlow in the Louisiana Senate Republican primary. Now he’s pretending to have some courage.

Donald Trump cannot be living the same reality as the rest of America.

The president aggressively dodged questions about the future impact of artificial intelligence Wednesday, claiming that nothing but good has come from the technology’s rapid implementation across industry.

“What’s your message to American families who are scared by the rise of AI?” asked a reporter on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews. “They’re worried that their kids are not going to be able to have jobs someday because AI is going to take over—”

“No, I’ll tell you, AI has been amazing because right now we have more jobs, more people working right now, in the United States by far than we ever had before,” Trump interjected.

But that’s just not true. The lowest unemployment rate in recorded U.S. history was in 1953, when a postwar boom brought rates down to 2.5 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The lowest rate in the last 50 years happened in 2023, when unemployment dropped to 3.4 percent. Today, unemployment sits at 4.3 percent—and is gradually rising.

Beyond that, the initial rollout of artificial intelligence has decimated thousands of early-career opportunities and massively disrupted myriad industries, including the higher education system, which is currently pumping out thousands of degree-bearing professionals with nowhere to go.

Hours before Trump’s remarks, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—laid off 8,000 employees in favor of the emergent technology. All in all, analysts predict that AI and automation will claim 6 percent of U.S. jobs by 2030.

Trump, however, was not willing to speak to that. Instead, he decided to harp on his handling of the Iran war, suggesting that the economy was actually thriving due to the wildly unpopular Middle East conflict.

“The stock market is higher now than it was before I started the Iran situation, and on Iran—I had no choice because they were going to have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “Oil is going to come tumbling down.”

But analysts do not predict that oil and gas costs will come crashing down—at least not anytime soon.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.55 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started.

The situation has become so dire that Trump’s Cabinet members have stopped speculating as to when prices will actually go back down. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that gas and oil costs will likely continue to climb—potentially even after midterms.

President Donald Trump’s proposed ballroom, which would boast lavish golden interiors and is totally needed for, uh, security reasons, is beginning to face backlash from Republicans as well as Democrats.

On Wednesday, Republican Senator John Kennedy told Samantha Handler of Punchbowl News that the GOP doesn’t have enough votes to provide $1 billion in taxpayer money to the ballroom project, and the amendment is expected to be removed from the budget bill going to the Senate floor this week.

Four Republican senators have publicly voiced opposition to public money going to the vanity project. They are Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

Cassidy lost his primary last week, thanks in large part to a Trump endorsement of one of his opponents, and has also vocally spoken out against Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund, which was announced Monday. Collins and Murkowski are each expected to face tough Democratic challengers in the November midterms, while Tillis is retiring.

Just these four “no” votes would probably kill the $1 billion going to the ballroom given the widespread Democratic opposition to the project. A larger group inside the GOP is privately against the ballroom, according to five anonymous insiders who spoke with Politico.

The White House originally said the ballroom would be funded with approximately $200 million from Trump and “other patriot donors.” That number soon doubled to $400 million.

Senate Republicans, at the president’s behest, then attempted to sneak in a $1 billion sum for White House security—including $220 million for ballroom security—into the larger budget bill. The allotment was deemed spurious by the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian. Trump then, of course, tried to get her fired.