<....Before our primary analyses, we also conducted preliminary multiple group measurement invariance (MG-MI) tests for both Sample 1 (white vs. minority status) and Sample 2 (men vs. women) using all study variables. These preliminary MG-MI tests provided evidence of strong (scalar) MI (see Participants) and confidence to move forward with the MG-SEMs. For the Sample 1 MG-SEM, we examined whether psychopathic propensities could account for conservative political ideology and views of Trump with a large diverse community sample of American men. Using a strong (scalar) invariance multiple-group (i.e., white versus minority status) SEM approach, we explored how SDO, RWA, and psychopathic propensities (PPs) predicted a latent variable which contained items reflecting conservative political ideology and view of Trump. We expected PPs to contribute above and beyond SDO and RWA, consistent with our previous research (Roy et al., 2021). However, an open question is whether the same associations would be uncovered for both white and minority-status men.

Another study goal was to test whether those who viewed Trump favorably (vs. those not) reported higher psychopathic (or malevolent) traits. Using a MG-MI approach, we tested whether those who were supportive of Trump’s first presidency (vs. those not) reported higher PPs, irrespective of minority status. We used the same MG-MI approach to test for differences in empathy among those viewing Trump favorably, compared to those not favorable.

We conducted similar analyses for Sample 2, utilizing an exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) approach consistent with our previous research on malevolent and benevolent dispositions (Neumann et al., 2025). Specifically, using a second large U.S. community sample and the same strong (scalar) invariance multiple group approach (men vs. women), we extended our examination to the role of both malevolent and benevolent dispositions in predicting the same latent variable as in Sample 1 (conservative ideology and view of Trump), and whether the associations differed by gender. Then, we tested whether those who viewed Trump favorably (vs. those not) reported higher latent malevolent and lower benevolent dispositions, providing further evidence of empathy-related disturbances. All moderation effects were formally tested using the Mplus MODEL TEST procedure. Follow-up multivariate analyses of covariance (MANCOVA) were conducted to check on the robustness of the pro-trump analyses.>

<President Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch, Dow Jones — the Wall Street Journal’s parent company — and two of the paper’s reporters for $10 billion over the Journal’s story about a lurid birthday card that Trump allegedly sent to the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.

Trump claims that the card, which contains arguably compromising statements, was fabricated by unnamed Democrats. He posted about “a POWERHOUSE Lawsuit against everyone involved in publishing the false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS ‘article’ in the useless ‘rag’ that is, The Wall Street Journal.”

Murdoch and Trump have had an off-again-on-again relationship over the years. Murdoch’s media outlets, principally the Journal and Fox News, after largely opposing Trump during the 2016 Republican primary, have been credited with helping propel him to the White House.

According to the Journal’s story, a letter bearing Trump’s name “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.”

“Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person,” the paper reported.

It reportedly contained a joking reference that “enigmas never age” and ended with the words, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump denied writing the note after the article was published, posting, “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures.”

The birthday note, if authentic, hints at Trump’s contemporaneous awareness of Epstein’s criminal behavior — as might Trump’s comment to a reporter less than a year earlier that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Dow Jones said it would “vigorously defend” itself against the lawsuit. “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting.” And so the issue is joined in court as well as the court of public opinion.

Libel suits have historically been gravely dangerous not only for defendants but for plaintiffs as well. Such a suit often serves only to magnify the allegedly defamatory statements.

Roy Cohn advised his clients never to sue for libel. He knew that Oscar Wilde and Alger Hiss sued for libel, and the truth, which is always a complete defense in a libel suit, led to criminal prosecution, conviction and jail. Gen. William Westmoreland sued CBS over defamatory statements about his conduct of the Vietnam War. Israeli Gen. Ariel Sharon sued Time Inc. over its reporting about his actions in Lebanon. Both came up essentially empty-handed.

Trump will have a steep uphill climb to make out his complaint against Murdoch. The venerable New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) is still good law, despite Justice Clarence Thomas’s stated desire to overrule it. A public official suing for libel must prove by clear and convincing evidence that the defamatory statements were published with actual knowledge of their falsity or a reckless disregard for the truth.

In this case, we are talking about the Wall Street Journal, not the National Enquirer. It is very unlikely that the Journal knew the birthday card was a fabrication or that they proceeded recklessly, knowing that the source of the document was unreliable. More likely than not, the document came from the files of the Justice Department.

Indeed, Trump, apart from lashing back at Murdoch, may have sued mainly to unearth via discovery the source of the leak. Trump claims that he relishes discovery in the case. “I hope Rupert and his ‘friends’ are looking forward to the many hours of depositions and testimonies they will have to provide in this case,” the president stated. Trump’s lawyers have asked the court to expedite Murdoch’s deposition while he is still alive because Murdoch is “94 years old” and “has suffered from multiple health issues.”

But those “many hours” may prove more harmful than helpful to Trump. Murdoch’s lawyers will be able to bring out just where the Journal obtained the birthday card, as well as all the torrid details of the 15-year relationship between Epstein and Trump, including such undisclosed gems as how the friendship began; how close was it; whether it involved under-age women; whether, and, if so, when Trump learned that Epstein was trafficking teenagers; when Trump learned that Epstein was engaged in criminal acts; and when there was a severance of the relationship and why....>

<....Reports have suggested Trump and Epstein had a rift in 2004 over competing bids on a Palm Beach mansion, but there may be more to the story. Peggy Noonan reminds us that Trump’s mantra is “fight, fight, fight,” and he will do so even when it hurts him. “There is no way on earth that [the lawsuit] will be a net positive for him. Which surely he knows,” she writes. “He fights even when he will hurt himself, because the fight is all.”

Trump is essentially libel-proof. What are his damages? His reputation for sexual misconduct is well known. A civil jury in New York found him liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. A New York jury convicted him of 34 counts of felony document falsification to cover up a tryst with pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels.

It is too early to tell, but Trump may not have the sort of walk in the park he’s had in his recent media lawsuits. He settled with ABC shortly after his reelection for $15 million, arising from George Stephanopoulos carelessly saying Trump was convicted of rape instead of sexual assault. Trump’s recent settlement with CBS for $16 million, arising out of the claim that “60 Minutes” left unfavorable footage of former Vice President Kamala Harris on the cutting-room floor, seemed influenced more by parent company Paramount’s need for FCC approval of its corporate merger than by the merits of the case.

The Murdoch libel lawsuit, if pressed, may be full of booby traps and surprises for Trump. It could result in disclosure of many of the documents in the possession of the Justice Department, which the Journal reported subsequently were riddled with references to Trump himself.

People in a position to know tell me that Murdoch will never settle. But he did appear to blink a little with a front-page “exclusive” Journal article Friday under the headline: “Jeffrey Epstein’s Birthday Book Included Letters From Bill Clinton, Leon Black.”>

<U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) delivered a searing critique of some of his fellow Democrats, accusing them of being “complicit with an authoritarian”—a clear reference to President Donald Trump. He also chastised a range of American institutions for “bending the knee” and “paying tribute.” He warned that if Democrats fail to unite and confront Trump and his administration’s agenda, they “deserve to lose.” But, he added, if they stand together and speak out with conviction, they can prevail.

“The heated exchange arose after Booker objected to a motion from Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, to swiftly pass a package of bills related to law enforcement,” CBS News reported. “Booker said he wanted to make a change to the bloc of measures to ensure resources are distributed equally among law enforcement agencies in response to the Justice Department’s changes to grant programs and cancellation of awards.”

Booker, standing on the Senate floor, at times almost appearing to shout, did not hold back.

“This to me is the problem with Democrats in America right now, is we’re willing to be complicit to Donald Trump, to let this pass through when we have all the leverage right now there is, to say, ‘if you’re as passionate about police as we are, then pass bills out of this body that will help the police officers in Washington, that will help the police officers in Illinois, that will help the police officers in New Jersey,'” he said, as CBS reported. “Don’t be complicit to the president of the United States.”

“The Democratic Party needs a wake-up call,” Booker declared in his rare rebuke, before shifting his focus to institutions that, in recent months, have capitulated to President Trump.

“I see law firms bending a knee to this president, not caring about the larger principles that those free speech rights, that you can take on any client—why are you bending the knee?” he demanded.

“I see universities! They should be bastions of free speech, bending at the knee to this president. I see businesses taking late night talk show hosts off the air because they dare to insult a president. I see people who want mergers, suddenly think that they have to pay tribute to this president,” he observed.

“And what are the very people here elected to defend the Constitution of the United States, saying? ‘Oh, well, today, let’s look the other way and pass some resources that won’t go to Connecticut, that won’t go to Illinois, that won’t go to New York, that will go to the states he likes,'” Booker said, chastising his fellow blue state lawmakers.

“That is complicity with an authoritarian leader who is trashing our Constitution,” he charged.

“It’s time for Democrats to have a backbone. It’s time for us to fight. It’s time for us to draw lines.”

“And when it comes to the safety of my state, being denied these grants, that’s why I’m standing here. Don’t question my integrity,” he warned. “Don’t question my motives. I’m standing for Jersey! I am standing for my police officers. I’m standing for the Constitution, and I’m standing for what’s right.”

“And dear God, if you want to come at me that way, you’re gonna have to take it up with me, because there’s too much on the line right now in America,” Booker declared ominously.

“As people’s due process rights and freedom of the speech rights and secret police are running around this country, picking people up off the streets, who have a legal right to be here. There’s too much going on in this country.”

“When are we gonna stand together for principles that I just heard that were agreed with? When are we gonna stand together? If we don’t stand as Democrats, we deserve to lose. But if we stand united, if we stand strong, if we stand with other people, if we tell with a chorus of conviction that America, what this president is doing is wrong, if we stand up and speak that way, dear God, we will win.”>

<The Freedom of the Press Foundation expressed discontent following the approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger, calling out Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr for “meddling in broadcasters’ content.”

The FPF has been vocal about the risk that Paramount’s $16 million settlement over the “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris poses to press freedom, criticizing the media titan for cowering to President Donald Trump. In a statement to TheWrap Friday, a spokesperson for the foundation stated that they could hardly fathom that anyone could believe Paramount’s seemingly selfless claims over its reasons for the settlement.

“I’m not aware of a single person who believed Paramount’s claim that this settlement was about lawyer fees and liability risk,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement. “And if such people exist, Donald Trump has a real estate degree to sell them.”

The foundation previously called Paramount’s settlement a “spineless decision.” After 251 days, the FCC approved Paramount and Skydance Media’s $8 billion merger by a vote of 2-1 along party lines Thursday. The approval came after Skydance agreed to bring on an ombudsman at CBS to review complaints of bias and to eliminate all DEI initiatives for Paramount at large.

“If there was ever any doubt, Brendan Carr just extinguished it by approving the merger just days after Trump announce he’d received Paramount’s shakedown money,” the statement continued. “What’s worse, Carr can’t justify his actions by pointing to Skydance’s promise to appoint a bias ombudsman, because the FCC meddling in broadcasters’ content is illegal too.”

The FCC does not have permission to censor or bar broadcasters from platforming content from any point of view. Engaging in censorship would infringe the media’ First Amendment right to freedom of the press.

The press freedom advocacy group filed a shareholder information demand back in May and said in early July that it intended to explore further legal action to hold Paramount’s board accountable for what it sees as a “capitulation” to Trump that violates shareholders’ interests and the First Amendment.

“Each time a company cowers and surrenders to Trump’s demands it only emboldens him to do it again. It will be remembered as one of the most shameful capitulations by the press to a president in history,” Stern said in a statement to TheWrap July 2.

The Paramount-Skydance merger approval comes just one week after CBS canceled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” after he called his network’s $16 million settlement a “big fat bribe.”

Under the new merger, Skydance is set to acquire controlling shareholder Shari Redstone’s holding company National Amusements, which controls 77.4% of the Paramount Class A common stock outstanding and approximately 9.5% of the overall equity of the company, before merging with the Hollywood studio. The Redstone family will finally relinquish control of the media giant that they have owned since 1994 to the Ellison family and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners.>

<A coalition of cities and counties led by San Francisco is imploring a federal court to continue forcing the Trump administration to comply with a preliminary injunction and subsequent clarification – and accusing the government of expressly violating the orders in question.

In the underlying litigation, the plaintiffs sued President Donald Trump and others over two executive orders — "Protecting the American People Against Invasion" and "Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders" — issued in January and February, respectively, which threatened to cut off all federal funds for jurisdictions deemed to run afoul of federal immigration priorities.

On April 24, Senior U.S. District Judge William Orrick, a Barack Obama appointee, all-but termed the state of affairs a rerun and enjoined the executive orders with a preliminary injunction – likening the latest funding threats to a series of similarly-kiboshed threats issued during the first Trump administration.

Then, on April 28, Trump issued what the plaintiffs, in a motion to enforce the injunction, termed "yet another" executive order "which triples down on his threat to defund 'sanctuary' jurisdictions." In turn, on May 9, Orrick shut the government down again.

Now, the plaintiffs say the Trump administration is up to its old tricks.

On Friday, in a six-page reply to a recent defendants' response to the court's order, San Francisco asked the court to make sure the Trump administration is not illegally cutting funds from a specific U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program.

"This Court has clarified that '[t]he Preliminary Injunction in this case reaches any subsequent Executive Order or Government action that poses the same coercive threat to eliminate or suspend federal funding based on the Government's assertion that a jurisdiction is a 'sanctuary' jurisdiction," the motion begins. "The Court has also already reminded Defendants that '[t]he Government cannot avoid liability down the line by 'hewing to the narrow letter of the injunction' while 'simultaneously ignoring its spirit.' Yet Defendants are doing exactly that."

The latest alleged violation is due to a new condition on billions in previously-awarded anti-homelessness grants.

The new condition reads as follows:

No state or unit of general local government that receives funding under this grant may use that funding in a manner that by design or effect facilitates the subsidization or promotion of illegal immigration or abets policies that seek to shield illegal aliens from deportation.

San Francisco and the myriad other cities and counties have two major objections to this language.

First, the plaintiffs say it's yet another violation of the injunction.

"Defendants have not demonstrated any connection between the conscription of local governments into federal immigration enforcement, and the housing and supportive services funded by the [anti-homelessness] grants—nor could they, because there is none," the motion argues.

Second, the plaintiffs suggest the ensuing ordeal to defend the new, anti-immigrant language is ample parts red herring.

"Defendants point to a provision authorizing 'other' conditions that further the purposes of the authorizing statute, Title IV of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, but that statute does not relate to immigration enforcement," the motion goes on. "Defendants next argue that the grant conditions quoted above 'merely require compliance with federal immigration laws,'—a claim that lacks any basis in fact."

The plaintiffs go on to argue that the court's injunction – and clarifying order – have already dealt with the prospect of attaching immigration enforcement-related conditions on anti-homelessness funds. And, the plaintiffs say, the court has never been convinced.

"The Court's Order Regarding Disputes found that Defendants had 'not yet attempted to show the required nexus' between 'the kinds of services that the HUD [anti-homelessness] grants provide—safety-net services for the cities' most vulnerable populations, including the homeless, veterans, and unaccompanied youth' and 'immigration enforcement,'" the motion goes on. "Defendants still have not shown (and cannot show) any such nexus."

San Francisco accuses the Trump administration of trying to claim a relationship – between the HUD funds and immigration law – that does not exist. Rather, the plaintiffs say, the government is simply paraphrasing one of the enjoined executive orders to make it sound like the purported statutory condition....>

<....From the motion, at length:

Contrary to Defendants' assertion that the HUD [anti-homelessness] grant condition "merely requires recipients to comply with federal immigration laws," that grant condition is plainly based on the enjoined Executive Orders and directs the withholding of funding based on lawful policies that limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The HUD [anti-homelessness] grant condition is pulled nearly word-for-word from the fatally ambiguous language of Section 2(a)(ii) of Executive Order 14,218.

The U.S. Department of Justice, for its part, also argues the recent landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that narrowed down the pathways to nationwide, or universal, injunctions is relevant to the dispute over the anti-homelessness funds.

"Defendants note the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc. provides that injunctive relief must be limited to the parties in a litigation," the government's motion reads. "On that basis alone, extending this Court's preliminary injunction to HUD as a non-party is improper."

San Francisco says this argument essentially gets the high court's decision not entirely unlike exactly backwards.

"Defendants misconstrue CASA," the plaintiffs' filing goes on. "That case addressed jurisprudential concerns about extending relief to plaintiffs who are not party to a lawsuit. Here, unlike in CASA, the Court did not issue a universal injunction but instead limited relief to the Plaintiffs. In order to ensure that Plaintiffs obtain complete relief, the Court enjoined 'named defendants and any other agency or individual acting in concert with or as an agent of the President or other defendants to implement' the enjoined Executive Orders."

In other words, San Francisco explains how the justices issued an opinion about the propriety of fashioning injunctive relief for too many plaintiffs – coming down against broad relief. The DOJ, however, appears to be trying to extend the CASA ruling into a rule about extending the reach of an injunction to another defendant. This, San Francisco notes, is not at all what the Supreme Court addressed.

The Trump administration, in a related argument, also says allowing the plaintiffs to challenge the immigration language amounts to "overreach" that "would impermissibly expand this lawsuit far beyond what Plaintiffs have pled."

San Francisco says both of these arguments are irrelevant – because the court did not ask for such briefing – and incorrect.

Again, the motion, at length:

Defendants' non-responsive arguments about notice pleading and the propriety of nationwide injunctions are meritless. As this Court has held, Plaintiffs' claims for relief—upon which they are likely to succeed—are based on ample pleadings and evidence regarding the Executive Orders' explicit threat to end all federal funding "to the Cities and Counties (the plaintiffs in this case)." Accordingly, the Court's Preliminary Injunction fairly reaches any federal agency "action to withhold from, freeze, or condition federal funds" to Plaintiffs on the basis of the Executive Orders. Moreover, because the Court's relief applies only to the Plaintiff Cities and Counties, Trump v. CASA is inapplicable.>

<Back in late February — a month after Donald Trump returned to the White House — Forrester.com posted an article headlined, "X-tortion: How Advertisers Are Losing Control of Media Choice." Forrester, in the piece, addressed advertisers' right to decide for themselves who they will and won't advertise with.

Trump is now half a year into his second presidency. Journalist Julia Angwin, in an op-ed published by the New York Times on July 30, warns that the Trump Administration "is trying to stop advertisers and brands from boycotting right-leaning businesses."

"The latest maneuver comes from the Federal Trade Commission," Angwin explains. "Last month, it announced that it would approve the merger of two of the biggest ad agencies in the world only if the parties agree to an unusual condition: The merged company cannot refuse to place ads on websites for political reasons. The move was a sharp break from its traditional practice."

Angwin adds, "The FTC is usually focused on such concerns as consumer protection and monopoly power; now, it's trying to dictate where businesses advertise their products. While the move would theoretically affect platforms of any political persuasion, there’s little doubt that it is a thinly veiled attempt to prop up X."

The journalist points out that X, formerly Twitter, "suffered an advertiser exodus after" billionaire Tesla/SpaceX leader Elon Musk acquired the platform and "began using it to promote right-wing talking points, including antisemitism and conspiracy theories."

"In 2023," Angwin notes, "dozens of advertisers suspended their spending after two media watchdog groups, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters, revealed how X was profiting from accounts that spread hate and misinformation and that major brands’ ads were appearing near pro-Nazi content. X responded by suing both the watchdog groups, as well as an advertising trade group and several leading advertisers it accused of illegally boycotting its business."

Angwin continues, "Then, in May, the FTC began investigating roughly a dozen advertising and advocacy groups, including Media Matters, to determine if they were engaged in a conspiracy or collusion by encouraging advertisers to boycott X and other websites. Media Matters has since sued the FTC, but in the meantime, the organization has dialed back its criticism and is considering closing in the face of steep legal fees. The FTC's recent efforts essentially bolster X’s legally dubious argument that advertisers don't have the right to freedom of expression…. Faced with the threat of having to prove they are not boycotting outlets for political reasons, advertisers may find that their best defense is to place ads in right-wing publications. ">

<Reports of X CEO Linda Yaccarino tying appeals for increased advertising commitments to X lawsuits and Congressional oversight reads as extortion and requires advertisers and agencies to take steps to maintain their fiduciary imperative to direct media investments.

Let’s back up… Over the past 6 months: X filed a federal antitrust lawsuit in August, alleging the World Advertising Federation and several large advertisers colluded to deny X advertising dollars. In October, the Judiciary Committee notified Dentsu Group about concerns for anticompetitive activity concerning its brand safety initiative, Dentsu Coalition. In December, the Judiciary Committee contacted both Omnicom Group and Interpublic of Companies, raising anticompetitive concerns for their proposed merger could impact advertising spend on platforms like X. On February 1, X notified the court of its intention to add several large enterprises to its existing anti-trust lawsuit. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that X chief executive Linda Yaccarino made appeals for large advertising commitments from both advertisers and agency holding companies, alluding to X’s lawsuit and congressional oversight.

Whether intentional or not, X’s actions threaten the solvency of the advertising industry because they:

Contradict common-sense media practices. Publishers have no right to advertising dollars unless prior commitments are made. And advertisers have every right to make media choices. A free-market economy necessitates that the best publisher win, and a lesser one work to earn a spot on an advertisers’ media plan. Testing campaigns across publishers and tech products is how advertisers and agencies continually look for ways to reach and engage their target audiences. The growth of TikTok as an advertising platform is due, in part, to advertisers, agencies, and the publisher testing and learning in the name of media choice.

Compromise advertisers’ and agencies’ fiduciary responsibility. When investing media dollars, advertisers and agencies have a fiduciary obligation to company and shareholder value. Agencies make publisher recommendations to advertisers and, in turn, advertisers make business decisions based on a publisher’s efficacy — to deliver targetable audiences at scale, with efficient rates, and on-brand context. If media investments don’t meet those standards, advertisers and agencies are responsible to shift media dollars. Bud Light’s influencer campaign targeting the trans community conflicted with its brand and core customers’ values, making it a questionable use of media dollars.

But just as agencies and advertisers have a right to media choice, so does X have a right to pursue legal action. And the US House Judiciary Committee has the right (and constitutional obligation) to conduct oversight. The courts will adjudicate, and Congress’s lawful oversight will continue.

Forrester recommends three actions for advertisers to keep control of media choice:

Lean into non-binding advertising commitments with X. This might sound counter-intuitive but hear us out: Proactively make an “endeavor” deal with X that gradually increases advertising spend to a specified goal or target — identifying tiered spending thresholds that you must meet based upon the publisher (in this case X) also meeting specific requirements. Structure the deal contingent around X addressing three fundamental platform capabilities: (1) improved audience targetability to allow advertisers to pinpoint audiences; (2) better filtering to allow advertisers greater precision in selecting contextual environments. These filters should include language, violence, pornography, news, and political spectrum. (3) APIs that align with how agencies purchase digital media enabling for more efficient activation and optimization. The good news? X appears to have the technology and engineering savvy to meet these requirements making for a win-win-win for advertisers, agencies, and X.....>

<....Explore principal media solutions for X upfront deals. Consider using agencies’ principal media capabilities to meet commitments to increase X inventory. For those not in the know, principal media is a buying tactic in which an agency purchases advanced inventory at a sizeable discount in order to re-sell that inventory to its clients.

Most principal media programs involve client opt-ins, audit rights, clear benefits (like cost or performance), separate contracts, and labeling on plans. In other words, principal media solutions are highly scrutinized and often bring financial benefits to the advertiser and agency.

In this instance, X will need to provide increased inventory levels at a substantial discount in order to fit within the principal media pool the agencies manage. When this happens, it’s another win-win-win for all three stakeholders.

Require X to meet media performance thresholds. Structure your partnership with X to include performance requirements that unlock continued or increased investment. Leverage incrementality testing to prove whether X can deliver equivalent or more value than other media platforms. Media professionals are tasked every day with building media plans that balance reach, efficiency, and impact. When placements don’t perform, they optimize—meaning they move the investment to new tactics, audiences, or channels. X isn’t exempt from this same level of scrutiny. Historically, X (including when it was “Twitter”) hasn’t been of material significance on most media plans for several reasons: the reach isn’t notable, their ad products lack performance, and targeting capabilities are nascent. If X wants more ad dollars now, it needs to prove the platform’s efficacy. Make them earn their spot on your media plan, just like any other publisher.

In our capacity as a neutral adviser to our clients, Forrester offers this guidance solely as a means to help advertisers, agencies, and publishers navigate the changing marketplace and confront its business significance.

Forrester believes that “media choice” is a fundamental underpinning of the advertising industry and we urge organizations like the ANA, 4As, and WARC to advocate for this.>

<....To directly balance out the normal hip flexion position (think: curling in a ball at night or sitting rounded forward during the day), Brusovanik suggested doing hip extensions.

To do a hip extension, lie flat on your back with your knees bent in front of you. Place your hands on the floor under your lower back, then lift your hips as high as you can in a “bridge” pose.

Doing this stretch is “paramount to counter loss of disc height that is due to disc degeneration,” according to Brusovanik. He added that it’s “key to both maintaining upright posture as well as having the ability to keep a long, healthy stride during walking and running.”

In addition to the “bridge,” Hamer suggested incorporating stretching routines or exercises, like yoga or Pilates, into daily life, as they can “significantly help maintain joint mobility” by stimulating circulation and lubrication.

“While aging inevitably changes our bodies, taking proactive steps to preserve hip flexibility can significantly improve the quality of life,” he explained. “By embracing regular exercise routines that prioritize joint mobility and health, individuals can potentially mitigate the effects of aging on hip stiffness and maintain an active lifestyle for years to come.”

Hamer recommended six additional stretches to try if you want to work on your hip flexibility even more:

Forward crouch: Stand in front of a sturdy chair with your feet hip-width apart. Hold the back of the chair and squat down, bending your knees and keeping your back straight. Breathe out as you go down until you feel your butt and thighs working, then breathe in as you come back up, repeating 10 times. Wide crouch: Stand with your feet wider than hip-width apart and your knees and feet turned out. Hold the back of a sturdy chair and squat, making sure to keep your butt out and your back straight. Do the same breathing as before, repeating 10 times. Side lunge: In a wide stance, place the chair to your side. Bend your knees, shifting your pelvis away from the chair and leaning your shoulders toward the chair. You should feel the stretch on the inside leg closest to the chair. Breathe out and add a little more stretch, continuing for 30 seconds and repeating twice on each leg.

Forward lunge: With the chair still at your side, position your feet in a lunge position with your front foot farther away from the chair. Bend your forward knee 30 degrees and angle your back foot toward the chair. Raise the arm not holding onto the chair up toward the ceiling, then draw the hip on your forward leg back. Hold for 30 seconds, repeating twice on each leg.

Seated figure-four: Sit at the edge of a sturdy chair, putting one leg straight out in front of you and crossing the opposite ankle over the straight leg’s shin. Use your hands to pull the ankle up toward your hip as much as you can. Then, with your hands behind your back, lean forward at the hips, breathing in and out and leaning forward a little bit more. Hold for 30 seconds and repeat twice on each side.

Butterfly: Sit on the floor with the soles of your feet facing each other and touching. Your knees should be out wide to your sides and your back should be tall. Lean forward at the hips, placing your hands on your back for support, and stretch as much as you can with each breath in and out. Hold for 30 seconds and repeat twice....>

<Last week, top officials in Donald Trump’s version of the Justice Department, including Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal criminal attorney, paid a visit to Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite turned sex trafficker. Maxwell is currently serving 20 years for her role in helping the financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse women and girls; according to a 2022 pre-sentencing memorandum in her case, Maxwell also abused some girls herself, fondling and groping their breasts to normalize the hyper-sexualized environment that she and Epstein had created. While no notes or details about last week’s meetings have been released, it’s exceedingly clear that the Trump administration is hoping their conversation with her will pry loose some new names of Epstein associates—and end the scandal that’s engulfed the administration and the president for the past several weeks.

Trump hoped and expected his base would move on, as has happened countless times with scandals involving the president.

At this point, Donald Trump is dealing, still, with a nearly unprecedented situation: the real and undiminished fury of a good portion of his base over his own administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Since July 6, when his FBI and Department of Justice released an unsigned memo declaring that Epstein died by suicide, did not maintain a “client list,” and was not blackmailing powerful people, that anger has gone on and on, bolstered by a number of very stupid steps the Trump administration has taken to try to quell it. Trump himself is said to be “exasperated” by the ongoing scandal, having hoped and expected that his base would have moved on by now, as has happened countless times before with other scandals and controversies involving the president.

Instead, as the Epstein controversy drags on, interviewing Maxwell is one of the ways that the Trump administration is clearly hoping to finally put the Epstein headlines behind them. Seeing an opening, Maxwell’s attorney David Markus is also urging the Supreme Court to overturn her conviction while appealing to Trump for a pardon. The president himself has refused to rule out the idea of pardoning her, telling a press gaggle recently, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.” On Tuesday, Markus said that while Maxwell has signaled a willingness to testify before Congress, she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination during that questioning if she’s not granted “formal immunity.”

Maxwell could agree to name names in her conversations with Trump’s DOJ, identifying other powerful people who haven’t previously been publicly accused of engaging in sex crimes with Epstein, while at the same time declaring that Trump himself never engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior.

But hammering out such a deal carries its own risks, says Mike Rothschild, an author and journalist who studies conspiracy theories, given that Maxwell’s attorney has made clear that she expects what her attorney has called “relief”—widely taken to mean a pardon or sentencing reduction—in return for such cooperation.

“I would imagine that every Republican running for office next year is begging him not to just outright pardon Ghislaine Maxwell,” Rothschild says. “They’re going to have to spend the next year and a half trying to justify something with no justification to voters who think she’s nothing more than a convicted trafficker. He doesn’t have to run again, but they do. And if a Maxwell pardon really does shatter his base and peel off a big number of Trump-only voters, they’re the ones who will have to pick up the pieces.”

The facts will complicate any effort by Trump or his defenders to position Maxwell as a brave truthteller who has now decided to blow the whistle on Epstein, her former boyfriend and co-conspirator. As ABC News recently pointed out, prosecutors said in Maxwell’s 2022 pre-sentencing memorandum that she’d neither been forthcoming nor remorseful ahead of trial, accusing her of having “lied repeatedly about her crimes, exhibited an utter failure to accept responsibility, and demonstrated repeated disrespect for the law and the Court.” As Rothschild notes, “Even the fact that it’s possible Maxwell might get clemency or some kind of voided conviction is shaping up to be one of the biggest political scandals in American history.”....>

<....Recent history, and Trump’s long-established patterns, suggest other possibilities for how he and his allies could try to divert attention from the Epstein case. One avenue that Trump’s prominent friends have already attempted is to simply declare the story to be over—something that’s so far had limited success. As Slate pointed out, multiple news outlets declared last week that Trump had successfully convinced his MAGA base to stop being mad at him about Epstein, including the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, and CNN. Every story cited the same prominent source: Trump ally and former White House official Steve Bannon. (In other words, and now more than ever, just because Bannon says something does not make it true.) This month, Trump himself called the Epstein controversy a “hoax” and “bull****” and castigated his supporters for believing it, which also did not work to make it go away.

Another clear possibility is that the administration finds an internal scapegoat to blame the Epstein mess on. That would most likely be Attorney General Pam Bondi; as the face of the Justice Department, Bondi has been the target of the most focused MAGA outrage: the House GOP, including Speaker Mike Johnson, have already made clear that they’re dissatisfied with Bondi’s handling of the case. Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, a popular far-right podcaster turned political appointee, has also made clear that he’s been feuding with Bondi, reportedly threatening to quit several weeks ago if she wasn’t fired, a promise he has thus far not made good on. If the Trump administration chose to fire Bondi and appoint someone new who declares they are investigating the whole mess from scratch, it could at least quiet the headlines for several weeks or months.

An unlikely fourth option is a large document dump, as the administration recently did with files relating to the assassinations of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; the King files also further detail the FBI’s years-long surveillance of the civil rights leader before his murder, and were released despite objections from King’s children.

“Every Republican running for office next year is begging him not to just outright pardon Ghislaine Maxwell.”

But there are reasons this probably hasn’t already been done, despite Bondi’s promises to release more, and her failed February stunt where conservative influencers were handed binders that turned out to contain previously released information from Epstein’s flight logs and address book. Releasing more information carries significant privacy risks, as well as legal ones. Any Epstein files would certainly contain the names of living people, who could then be threatened by vigilantes accusing them of sex crimes; it could also breach the privacy of Epstein victims who haven’t chosen to publicly come forward. Bondi has also said the Epstein files contain images and videos of child sexual exploitation material; releasing that would be a criminal offense and would also re-victimize the people depicted in them. And, of course broader disclosures could draw in the president: as Bondi reportedly told Trump in May, his name is mentioned in Epstein files, although it’s not clear in what form....>

<....The fifth and most likely option is a version of what is already playing out, to limited success: trying to find another scandal that will appeal to—and distract—the MAGA base. Since the Epstein scandal broke, Trump officials have promised to criminally investigate former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. More recently, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has started promoting a contorted scandal accusing the Obama administration of criminal conduct. Right-wing and conspiracy outlets like Infowars have tried to play along, touting headlines that President Obama will soon be charged with “treasonous conspiracy.” Thus far, though, there’s very little sign that the broader MAGA base is excited—or distracted—by these announcements.

As these many and chaotic possibilities continue to unfold, Trump officials are struggling to keep the positive attention and loyalty of their base. Chief among them is Bongino, who announced in a cryptic tweet this week that shocking things are taking place behind the scenes—a promise that he and other administration officials have made multiple times.

“During my tenure here as the Deputy Director of the FBI, I have repeatedly relayed to you that things are happening that might not be immediately visible, but they are happening,” Bongino tweeted, in a statement that might have occasioned deja vu for his readers. “The Director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations. It is a priority for us. But what I have learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters, has shocked me down to my core. We cannot run a Republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.”

Bongino’s promise of new revelations at some unspecified future point seemed designed to reassure his impatient followers. While that may have worked before, it’s less clear that it’ll have its intended effect this time—leaving Trump and his administration, again, desperately looking for a new way out.>

<Texas Republicans are betting big on their recent gains with Latino voters, releasing new congressional maps that heavily favor the GOP and create four red, majority-Hispanic districts in the process.

Wednesday’s issuance of the redrawn lines is touching off a fierce partisan battle over the ethics of mid-decade redistricting, forcing Democrats to respond to President Donald Trump’s aggressive action in Texas. It’s also exposing the importance each party is placing on one of the most coveted demographics in the country as they fight for control over the House next year.

The GOP’s maps indicate the party is bullish on Latino voters continuing their rightward political shift even without Trump atop the ballot. It’s a move that doubles down on a strategy Republicans were already implementing across the country, targeting heavily-Hispanic House districts as they seek to capitalize on their recent gains with a group of voters who have the power to carry them to a majority come 2026. In 2024, 48 percent of Hispanic voters cast their ballots for Trump, compared to 36 percent in 2020, according to Pew Research.

“Hispanic communities are sick and tired of radical Democrats turning their backs on them time and again,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Hispanic press secretary Christian Martinez.

The strategy comes with a lot of risk.

Despite shifting toward Trump last year, Latino voters — in Texas and elsewhere — were more likely to split their tickets and back downballot Democrats. And polls show voters have soured on Trump’s handling of the economy, after inflation under former President Joe Biden drove Latino support for Trump last year.

“Trump had the shortest honeymoon ever with these voters,” said Republican strategist Mike Madrid, who published a book last year on Latino voters. “It lasted a couple of months, but the day he started talking about tariffs and started rattling financial markets and everything that Latinos were voting for him on, which was overwhelming affordability and economic issues, they moved away from him just as rapidly as they moved away from Joe Biden for the exact same reasons.”

Six of the 13 congressional districts that went for Trump and a House Democrat in 2024 were at least 40 percent Latino, including two in Texas represented by Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar. Texas Republicans redrew those two districts in the proposed overhaul, replacing them with ones that have a slightly-higher Trump bend.

Trump outperformed Republicans among Latino voters throughout Texas last year. Across counties that were at least 75 percent Hispanic, Trump ran 8.6 points ahead of Sen. Ted Cruz, indicating Latino voters were more likely to cast their ballots for both Cruz’s Democratic rival, Colin Allred, and Trump.

If Latino voters show similar openness to downballot Democrats candidates without Trump on the ballot next year, it could spell trouble for Republicans. The redrawn 28th and 34th districts, which are 90 percent and 77 percent Latino respectively, backed Trump by more than 10 points last year. But Allred came within 0.2 points in the 28th and 2 points in the 34th. (In his 2022 gubernatorial bid, Beto O’Rourke would have won the 28th and lost the 34th by 1 point.)

The new 35th district, which includes part of Bexar County along with solidly-Republican areas east of San Antonio, is 53 percent Latino and supported Trump by 10 points and Cruz by just under 4 points.

The pending map, drawn by Republicans at the urging of Trump and GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, could be changed before Aug. 19, when the state Legislature is expected to recess for the remainder of the summer.

Democratic strategists are warning that Republicans erred by basing their designs on Trump voters.

“[Republicans] are confusing the gains that Trump the individual made with support for the Republican Party,” said Matt Barreto, who polled Latino voters for the Biden-Harris campaign and testified during a Texas redistricting hearing. “There is a Trump effect that is not transferable to Republicans.”....>

<....Polling shows some Latinos have soured on Trump, especially his handling of the economy, which ranked as a leading issue for voters last year.

“In Texas in particular, Hispanic voters are more loyal to their paychecks and Texas than they are to a party,” said Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “That’s part of the appeal of Trump. But when he’s not on the ticket, some of that support erodes.”

The proposed seats do not present easy pickup opportunities for Democrats, either. Madrid, the Republican strategist, said Democrats should work on their own message after several consecutive elections of losing ground.

“Where Democrats failed in the past is not having an aspirational, uplifting economic agenda,” he said. “Latinos don’t believe that Democrats deliver to working class people. They have to get back to a working class economic message that’s not just about government spending.”

J.C. Polanco, an attorney and independent political analyst based in New York City, said that Latino’s shifts to Trump are a reflection of Democrats’ moving to the left. “We’re going to see a lot of that as Republicans realize Latinos have a disdain for socialism,” Polanco said.

GOP vote share among Hispanics has steadily increased in recent years, going from 29 percent in 2018 to 43 percent in 2024, according to Catalist data. Republicans point to that data as reason to think that even without Trump on the ballot, Latinos will still vote for the party.

Even as some of Trump’s support among the population erodes, Democrats are yet to win them back, as the party continues to face low favorability across the board.

It will be up to both parties to make a convincing pitch ahead of next year’s midterms.

“Everything we know about Latino voters tells us that they are highly persuadable and have in the last few election cycles made decisions based on who they believe will address their economic concerns and priorities,” said Melissa Morales, president of Somos Votantes, a Democratic-aligned group that focuses on Latino voters.>

<Donald Trump took a day off yesterday from digging himself deeper into a hole on the matter of Jeffrey Epstein. But you’ll be glad to hear that one of his top aides as well as the speaker of the House stepped up to the plate.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, sought to assure us that Trump’s relationship to Epstein should give us no cause for concern: “The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club for being a creep to his female employees.”

Actually, the fact remains that Donald Trump remained a great “pal” of Jeffrey Epstein for years after Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein took a then-16-year-old Virginia Giuffre from his club, and—as Trump acknowledged Tuesday—other girls, as well.

Leavitt described Epstein’s behavior as “being a creep to [Trump’s] female employees.” That seems generous. Working in the Trump White House, Karoline Leavitt surely knows plenty of “creeps.” Epstein wasn’t a creep. He was a criminal sociopath.

But Leavitt’s description of Epstein is revealing. The fact is that deep down—and not so deep down—neither Trump nor his lackeys describe Epstein’s crimes with the severity they deserve. That’s because the thing they take seriously is the threat Trump’s previous relationship with Epstein—and his current coverup of that relationship—poses to his political well-being.

The Epstein coverup also poses a threat to Trump’s supporters. And so, yesterday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told Jake Tapper the following:

I want everything to come out about the Epstein evils. . . . I’m pushing aggressively for the full release of everything that is possible, and, by the way, so is the president. We’re using every mechanism within our power to do that, and to do it as quickly as possible.

This is Orwellian. Two weeks ago, Speaker Johnson recessed the House in order to avoid a floor vote on a resolution calling for the release of the files. On July 17, the Rules Committee passed with bipartisan support House Resolution 589, “Providing for the release of certain documents, records, and communications related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.” Johnson panicked and sent the House home early for summer recess. That hardly qualifies as “quickly as possible.”

And how’s that recess going for Mike Johnson? Well, earlier this week, a state representative from Johnson’s own 4th district of Louisiana, a fellow Republican, took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement condemning Johnson.

State Rep. Danny McCormick of Oil City pointed out that Johnson “shut down Congress early to dodge the vote.” He went on: “It’s one thing to be silent. It’s another to actively stand in the way of truth and justice. That raises serious questions about who he’s really protecting.”

Whoa.

The White House spin notwithstanding, Epstein wasn’t just a creep. The Speaker’s spin notwithstanding, so far Republicans in Congress have been part of the coverup.

And the issue isn’t going away. The August recess should be interesting.>

<This isn’t an investment letter and I’m not an investment advisor. But I want to warn you. The financial economy — stocks, bonds, and their derivatives — is in for a big reality check, and I think it will happen soon.

The real economy is showing worrisome signs. Yesterday’s Commerce Department report about the U.S. economy’s performance in the second quarter — April to June — revealed serious strains.

Although consumer spending is up from the first quarter, the 1.4 percent rate of growth in the second is nothing to write home about. It’s slower than the growth rate throughout most of the Biden administration.

Also worrisome is that U.S. exports fell during the second quarter, particularly in the auto sector.

And real final sales to private domestic purchasers — which reflect consumer spending and private investment — increased just 1.2 percent in the second quarter. That’s down from the first three months of the year.

And remember: Trump’s big tariffs haven’t hit yet. They go into effect tomorrow. That will cause prices to rise and consumers to pull back. Trump has set a 50 percent tariff on semi-finished copper imports. He has also imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods, following through with his threat to punish the country over several political disputes. Canada will see tariffs on many of its exports to the United States increased to 35 percent from 25 percent.

Yet despite all this worrisome news, investors are going nuts buying up super-risky assets.

The financial economy is immersed in the kind of wild gambling we saw leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. We’re seeing it all over again — this time with cryptocurrency tokens, meme stocks, junk bonds, shares of Meta and Microsoft, and the reemergence of blank-check entities (better known as SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies).

I attribute all the high-risk gambling to the high-risk gambling of the gambler-in-chief who sits in the Oval Office. He’s into crypto and meme stocks, and has done well with his own blank-check entity. Plus, he’s a conman’s conman.

Investors figure he must know what he’s doing — and even if he doesn’t, he’s shown no compunctions about using every lever of government power to keep the party going. So investors are following him, although more and more of these investments look like pyramid schemes — whose return depends on recruiting ever more people into buying and selling them, until some schnooks are left holding the bag.

Meanwhile, investors are pouring money into AI, without knowing what it is or which if any corporation will come out on top. Meta’s revenue jumped 22 percent year over year to $47.5 billion and beat Wall Street’s targets by the widest margin in more than four years. Microsoft has also made huge investments in AI.

The AI gold rush started three years ago with the launch of ChatGPT, and most of the financial rewards so far have gone to Nvidia — whose revenue has jumped 10-fold since ChatGPT’s launch, with its market cap crossing the $4 trillion mark earlier this month.

This does feel like a gold rush. And it’s taking place on top of the most blatant corruption this country has witnessed since the first Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

As Trump and his family make hundreds of millions of dollars off of crypto, Trump is pushing crypto and changing the laws to encourage more use of it. In a landmark report issued yesterday, the Trump regime laid out a series of recommendations aimed at further promoting cryptocurrency markets....>

<....Senator Elizabeth Warren and two Democratic colleagues questioned the nation’s new stablecoin regulator, newly confirmed Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould, over how he’ll respond to pressure from Trump as the agency begins overseeing the stablecoin market — where the Trump family business is now a player with its own stablecoin.

Gould is in the early stages of implementing the new stablecoin regulatory regime created under the GENIUS Act, which Trump signed into law earlier this month. The legislation gives the Comptroller expanded oversight of nonbank stablecoin issuers.

It’s starting to feel as if the financial economy is no longer moored to the real one. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went so far yesterday as to characterize the new “Trump accounts” — tax-deferred investment accounts created in Trump’s sweeping Big Ugly tax law earlier this month — as a “transformative tool” for building long-term wealth and a “backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

Hello? So the Trump regime wants us to give up on Social Security and become gamblers in the stock and bond markets? At the very time when the finance is becoming so frothy that such gambling is exceptionally risky?

Well, you know the outcome: The little guys will get hurt and the biggest gamblers will get away with it because they’ll get out just in time or they’ll get the government to bail them out. That was the story of 2008. It’s likely to be the story again.

So, my friends, please beware. I’m not suggesting you cash in your stocks and bonds, but if I were you I wouldn’t follow the crowd into more risky investments. Again, I’m not an investment advisor, but there’s so much wild gambling going on right now that I fear we’re soon in for another financial crisis.>

<Poor Josh Hawley! Missouri’s senior senator is a simple man: All he wants is to pass populist-posturing America First laws taking aim at our dastardly elites. That’s what Republicans are into these days, right?

Take congressional stock trading. Republican influencers have long shaken their fists (and not without reason) at lawmakers’ penchant for remarkably canny stock trades. So when Josh Hawley drew up a bill banning the practice, he surely thought he was hitting on both a policy and PR win. He even named it the PELOSI Act as a red-meat coup de grâce!

What he certainly didn’t expect was the Truth Social response he got from Donald Trump. Apparently outraged that Hawley’s bill would also ban future presidents from trading stocks beginning in 2029, the president decried Hawley as a “second-tier senator” who was “playing right into the dirty hands of the Democrats.”

“I don’t think real Republicans want to see their President, who has had unprecedented success, TARGETED,” Trump wrote.

It was a remarkable outburst against a guy who has spent more time than most sniffing Trump’s throne. But it also tells us something bigger about the current moment. The MAGA populism that both Trump and Hawley claim to embody has yet to crystallize around a shared policy vision. And the breakdown is not just about whether presidents should be scrutinized for the stocks that they trade.

Take two other bills that Hawley is backing. One of them he introduced this week. It would give a $600 “rebate” to most Americans, supposedly tied to the massive wealth being generated—in both Hawley’s telling and Trump’s—by the administration’s tariffs.

“Americans deserve a tax rebate after four years of Biden policies that have devastated families’ savings and livelihoods,” Hawley said in a statement. “Like President Trump proposed, my legislation would allow hardworking Americans to benefit from the wealth that Trump’s tariffs are returning to this country.”

On the surface, this is a straightforward piece of propaganda, designed to give the impression that Trump’s tariffs are doing what the president insanely claims they do: generate incredible sums of free-lunch revenue for the U.S. at the expense of other countries, no drawbacks, no tradeoffs. In that way, it’s a lot like the “DOGE dividends” Elon Musk was floating earlier this year. The fact that such a DOGE rebate would have cost many times more than DOGE ever saved was irrelevant: the point was to give the impression that DOGE had saved enormous sums of money.

But below the surface, the bill tells a potentially different story. Hawley recognizes that there are costs to real consumers—in this case, the working class voters he wants to court—that come with the tariffs Trump is implementing. Pay no attention to the enormous costs of our new protectionist regime, he is suggesting. Please do not notice that you are actively paying higher prices. Instead, look over here at this pile of your money I’m preparing to hand BACK!

The other notable bill from Hawley came two weeks ago. It was, in the words of his office, to “invest in rural hospitals and prevent any future cuts to Medicaid hospital funding.” Those are certainly pursuits that fall under the banner of the new MAGA populist movement. But they also are in direct contrast to the “big beautiful bill” Trump pushed and congressional Republicans passed earlier this summer. Hawley voted for that bill, which makes dramatic cuts to Medicaid. But unlike the president, he’s not spending the subsequent weeks insisting it’s the world’s finest piece of legislation. He’s actively trying to undo the damage he has done.

Is this why Trump lashed out at Hawley yesterday? The White House didn’t respond to my request for comment.

But it’s hard to imagine that it didn’t factor into the president’s decision to go nuclear. You would think Trump would maybe admire Hawley’s bill to send tariff-generated rebates to voters. You could even make the case that, intellectually, Trump would support a bill to protect rural hospitals, too. At a minimum, you’d imagine that Trump might appreciate the years of servitude that Hawley has shown.

But the president’s outburst was a good reminder that if you’re a Republican lawmaker, you can’t ever stockpile a reservoir of goodwill with the guy. You can be a world-historical toady all your life, and Trump’s still going to nuke you from orbit if he decides your version of MAGA populism doesn’t align with his.>

<Even though he's term-limited, President Donald Trump is still raising large sums of money and amassing a significant war chest ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, when the opposition party typically makes big gains.

That's according to a Friday article in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that Trump and his aligned political action committees (PACs) have so far brought in more than $1.4 billion in financial commitments, which is approximately what Trump, his super PACs and the Republican Party raised cumulatively in 2024.

The Journal's sources said Trump's "aggressive" fundraising was meant to give Republicans the ammo necessary to compete effectively in next year's congressional elections.

Trump's fundraising haul comes partially from $1 million per-person fundraisers at both his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and his Bedminster, New Jersey golf course. And another significant source of funds is small-dollar donations from his supporters via online solicitation campaigns. The emails typically come with gimmicks, like offering a White House badge to anyone donating at least $35, and a separate July fundraising email promised donors would be designated as a "Trump White House Advisor" after sending money and completing a poll.

The blitz of email solicitations comes at about five per day, for more than 700 donation asks since Trump began his second term in January. Donors are frequently offered campaign-style merch as a thank-you gift, which in June included a t-shirt with Trump's face and the word "DADDY" for donors who gave at least $35. David Axelrod — who was a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama — told the Journal that Trump's rapid-pace fundraising efforts signify that he is hoping to avoid a repeat of the 2018 "Blue Wave" midterms which saw Democrats retake the House of Representatives.

“He understands the odds are not with him, and I expect he will go at it with full fury and desperation,” Axelrod said. “The question is can he change history here?”

Currently, Trump's web of PACs and fundraising committees have roughly $350 million in cash on hand as of the end of June. And not all of that money is going toward 2026 general election efforts. According to the Journal, some of Trump's aligned PACs have already been spending money to run ads in Kentucky's 4th Congressional District, which is represented by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Trump singled Massie out after he voted against his multitrillion-dollar tax and spending legislation.

Earlier this week, Politico reported that three Trump-aligned billionaires — hedge fund magnates John Paulson and Paul Singer and Dallas Mavericks owner Miriam Adelson — have so far put up $2 million to oust Massie.

However, the Kentucky Republican also has a large war chest of his own, with $1.7 million in his campaign account as of last month.>

<President Donald Trump's recent snap decision to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) could end up blowing up in his face, according to one analyst.

In a Friday essay for the Atlantic, columnist Jonathan Chait wrote that Trump's sacking of BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer over a less-than-flattering jobs report gives Americans a distinct window into how the second Trump administration governs. Chait wrote that Trump's firing of McEntarfer was an emotionally driven "lizard brain" decision after the July 2025 jobs report showed not only sluggish job growth of just 73,000 new jobs added, but a downward revision of previous jobs numbers by 258,000 — the worst period of job growth since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Chait wrote that Trump's reasoning that bureaucrats were scheming to undermine falls apart upon closer inspection.

"Revisions of past numbers are a normal part of BLS methodology. Every monthly report is a projection based on limited information, so the Bureau continues to update its findings," he explained. "Last August, the BLS revised previous months’ job numbers downward. This was obviously a bad thing for the Biden administration, but Republicans decided that it was in fact evidence that the BLS had been cooking the books to make the economy look good."

According to Chait, McEntarfer's sudden firing can also shed light on Trump's ongoing feud with Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell over Powell's refusal to lower interest rates. He argued that, similar to how Trump lacks an understanding of how the BLS routinely adjusts data, he also fails to grasp why interest rates are lowered in the first place.

The Atlantic columnist pointed out that the Fed typically only lowers interest rates when the economy is struggling, in order to stimulate more economic activity. And when the economy is strong, the Fed keeps interest rates higher as a means of preventing the economy from overheating and causing inflation to spike. After breaking that down, he likened Trump's frustration with Powell as claiming that the economy is stronger than it actually is, while pushing Powell to do things that suggest the economy is weaker than it actually is.

"He is obsessed with propaganda, and has had phenomenal success manipulating the media and bullying his party into repeating even his most fantastical lies," Chait wrote. "But, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports. They judge it on the basis of how they and their community are doing. You can’t fool the public into thinking the economy is better than it is with fake numbers. All fake numbers can do is make it harder for policy makers to steer the economy."

"The president’s mad rush to subject the macroeconomic policy makers to the same partisan discipline he has imposed on the power ministries is less of a coup than a temper tantrum," he added. "He thinks he wants loyalists and hacks running those functions. He might not like what happens when he gets his way.">

<Top Pairs Are The Kings of Small and Medium-Sized Pots

The goal when you flop this type of hand is to keep the pot small to medium-sized. Once either you or your opponent starts driving the pot toward a larger size, your hand’s equity and playability begin to deteriorate.

Even if we strip away the exploitative or psychological layers and focus purely on the math, the principle still holds. Let’s break it down into two perspectives—two sides of the same coin:

1. You’re the one pushing the action

By betting and raising, you’re filtering your opponent’s range toward stronger hands. This is a natural consequence of how poker works: your opponent only needs to defend with a specific portion of their range to avoid being exploited. As the pot grows, weaker hands—like top pairs with weak kickers—start to fall behind the increasingly strong hands that continue.

2. You’re the one facing the heat

Now you’re on the defensive. When your opponent applies pressure, you’re no longer obligated to continue with the bottom portion of your range. As the pot gets larger—especially on certain runouts and against specific sizing—top pairs with weak kickers often fall into that bottom tier of your range, meaning they become more frequent folds.

Examples From Top Pros

The following examples are taken from the World Cash Game Championship on CoinPoker, and they demonstrate that even top players apply this same framework.

Hand #1 – Riggeddeck vs KevinPaque

Riggeddeck open-raises from the Button with Ad 9d, and KevinPaque calls from the Big Blind.

The flop comes Ah 8c 7s. KevinPaque checks, and Riggeddeck checks back.

Quick Analysis:

This is a strong hand on the flop, but the connected nature of the board means straight draws are live and likely to complete on later streets. That makes top pair with a weak kicker more of a bluff-catcher as the hand progresses. Checking back to pot control—or betting small to deny equity—is completely reasonable here.

The turn is the 8h.

KevinPaque checks again, Riggeddeck bets around 25% pot, and KevinPaque makes the call.

Quick Analysis:

The turn pairing slightly weakens Riggeddeck’s hand, but it’s still strong enough to value-bet—especially at a small size. Many of Kevin’s strongest hands would have led out (probed) on the turn, so his checking range is slightly capped. That said, checking back is also a solid option, as Kevin has plenty of hands that are drawing thin or dead, which may either bluff the river or improve into worse value hands that can bet or check-call.

The river is the Qh.

KevinPaque checks, and Riggeddeck fires a 75% pot bet. KevinPaque folds.

Quick Analysis:

The river completes the backdoor flush draw—a hand class well represented in the Big Blind’s range through suited 7x and some Kx of hearts. It also reduces the relative value of Ad 9d, since it now chops with nearly all of Kevin’s Ax. While the hand is likely still ahead, the 75% pot bet is arguably a slight overplay in theory, given the runout and limited ability to get called by worse.

Hand #2 – Enlight vs Riggeddeck

Enlight open-raises from the Button with Kd 9s, and Riggeddeck calls from the Big Blind with Jc 9d.

The flop comes Jh 6h 3d.

Riggeddeck checks, and Enlight checks back.

Quick Analysis:

Riggeddeck shouldn’t donk into this flop—Enlight holds the range and nut advantage as the preflop raiser. From Enlight’s perspective, this is a standard c-bet candidate, but checking back is also part of a balanced GTO strategy. While it feels great for Riggeddeck to flop top pair, this isn’t a hand that wants to face big bets; he’s mostly hoping Enlight either checks back or bets small....>

<....The turn is the 4h. Riggeddeck checks, and Enlight checks back.

Quick Analysis:

Riggeddeck’s top pair is still worth a bet or two—depending on sizing plans and the river card. The turn completes both a flush and a straight, which slightly weakens the value of Jc 9d.

However, since it’s a low card, it’s less likely Enlight improved. That’s because most of his flush draws and hands like 7h 5h would typically c-bet the flop. A small bet or a check are both reasonable here.

The river is the Ad. Riggeddeck checks, and Enlight checks back.

Quick Analysis:

The river significantly devalues Riggeddeck’s top pair. Its equity drops from around 75% to closer to 50%. This is no longer a hand you can value-bet. The best play is to check and aim to reach showdown as cheaply as possible.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, top pros understand that the value of top pair–weak kicker hands lies in keeping pots small to medium-sized. They often choose pot control lines or opt for small bets to manage risk and protect equity.

While it may seem like elite players are constantly making ultra-thin value bets or wild bluffs, the reality is more grounded. The best players are simply excellent at calibrating their strategy to match their hand’s equity and structural strength. In other words, they make fewer mistakes than their opponents—consistently. There are deeper patterns at play, of course, but that’s a topic for another time.

By applying the framework shared in this article, you’ll already be ahead of 95% of your opponents.>

<It’s all anyone wants to talk about.

At a time of unprecedented media fragmentation - where there are fewer and fewer shared cultural moments, because we’re all consuming content in deeper and deeper silos - the Coldplay affair has united us all.

Last Wednesday night, a man named Andy Byron was standing in the audience of a Coldplay concert in Boston. The band was playing “The Jumbotron Song” while a kisscam roamed around the stadium, landing on members of the audience and streaming their live reactions to 55,000 people.

There’s a sense of anonymity in a crowd of that size. I remember being a child at a basketball game and being terrified of the camera finding me. I didn’t want to see myself on the big screen, to have strangers watch as my cheeks went red and my mouth made the shape of an uncomfortable smile. I still have that reaction as an adult. <Please don’t land on me. Please don’t land on me>.

Andy Byron was probably thinking the same thing, albeit for slightly different reasons. But the camera did land on him. He happened to have his arms wrapped around a blonde woman, both of them staring adoringly at the stage. The moment they caught themselves on the giant screen, with the entire stadium’s attention on them, they jumped apart. Andy Byron ducked out of the frame, and the woman he was with - Kristin Cabot - turned around to hide her face. Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, commentated from behind his microphone. “Whoa, look at those two,” he said. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy. I hope we didn’t do something bad.”

It turns out, Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot <were> doing something bad. They were indeed having an affair, as pieced together by some of the millions of viewers who watched the video when it was posted to social media. It was quite easy to figure out who this man was, and from there, quite easy to discover that the woman he was with was not his wife and the mother of his two children. Then came all the other things you can find out about a person from their online footprint. Byron was the CEO at Astronomer, a New York-based company that provides software solutions for data management. A company that, according to a trending post on LinkedIn, has a severe lack of gender diversity. His educational history suggests he might be Catholic (THE IRONY!), his social media shows he has two sons (WHAT A ROLE MODEL!), The Economic Times estimated his net worth to be between USD20 million and USD70 million as of 2025 (THE PRIVILEGE!), and his career trajectory paints a picture of someone with a reputation for aggressive growth and profitability (PSYCHOPATH!).

Of course, when a story goes viral, anyone who knows anything about content wants to find a way to be a part of it. I saw a video from a man who said he worked with Andy Byron years ago, and claimed Byron left young, naive people out of pocket when a business venture failed. Then there’s the fake apologies from people pretending to be Andy Byron, fake statements from his workplace, fake videos from his ‘daughter’. There’s power, now, in having something to say about this man. In being able to tear him down in a new way, a way that makes you part of the narrative.

It’s classic schadenfreude - pleasure in another person’s misfortune. But in the internet age, it’s also more than that. We’ve collectively decided that Andy Byron - a white man with lots of money who had the audacity to cheat on his wife in a stadium full of people - is a bad person. It’s astoundingly simple. Because he’s a bad person, there’s no limit to what we expect him to withstand. The memes and the commentary and the AI-generated statements, his photo plastered on the front-page of news sites around the world. He had no reasonable expectation of privacy at that concert, lawyers say (yes, lawyers are now weighing in). The further we dig, the worse this man becomes. Byron wasn’t only cheating, but cheating with the Head of HR. There was a rumour (which turned out to be a lie) that a woman standing beside them on the kisscam was also an employee at Astronomer, and had received a promotion very recently. Was he abusing his power to hide his affair? I mean, he’s the kind of man who cheats on his wife, so… probably!>