I am religious and I take offense at Chump and other liars for creating a 'report' on religion that is filled with lies.
President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission released a draft report on American religious history that, according to experts, gets a lot of basic facts wrong about its purported subject.
“A new draft report from a Trump administration task force presents a competing vision of America’s tradition of religious liberty — one that argues that the founders wanted as much religion, everywhere, as possible — and that makes the case that our understanding of religious freedom has been corrupted by 20th-century European secularists and radical progressives aiming to eliminate religion from public life,” Vox’s Christian Paz wrote on Sunday. The report also claims that the Founding Fathers’ seminal documents like the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights were based explicitly on religious concepts.
Paz spoke with experts who push back against that narrative.
“The First Amendment is also about a practical response to the fact that you have 13 colonies that you need to unify, and many of them have established churches, but they’re different churches,” historian Matthew A. Sutton told Vox. “The First Amendment is not this kind of high ideal about freedom of religion. It’s simply about how can we keep these people from killing each other when we know for the last 300 years, different groups of Christians have killed each other in Europe.”
This was ultimately why the 13 colonies forming a new nation settled on the statement that in America “there will be no establishment of religion.”
He also placed in context the fact that Benjamin Franklin asked to open one of the early Continental Conventions with a prayer.
“In 1774, it’s not clear there’s going to be a revolution,” Sutton told Vox. “They have not left, and the clergyman they chose for this prayer is a member of the Church of England. They were trying to signal to England that they did want to maintain their unity, that they wanted to keep their religious bonds together. It was very practical. But this is the selective cherry-picking that the Trump people do. They didn’t have a prayer at the Constitutional Convention. So you can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to talk about when you do, you need to talk about when you don’t and see those as equally valid.”
University of Notre Dame politics and religion scholar Dave Campbell also pointed out that it is misleading to describe the “Founding Fathers” as a monolithic group, as they often had wildly varying opinions about what American religion should look like in a free society.
“It’s a misnomer to speak of the Founders as though they had one view,” Campbell told Vox. “They had different views, but they did agree, even though they had to compromise, on the wording of the First Amendment. Whatever this amorphous group that the Founders is, they disagreed, and yet they nonetheless could come to consensus that there should be no established religion, which was very novel at the time, and there should be as much latitude given to the free exercise of religion as possible.”
In contrast to this, he characterized the Trump administration’s attitude as being biased toward one particular approach to religion.
“To them, religious freedom means not respecting all religions equally, but instead ensuring that Christianity and particularly their flavor of Christianity has a favored place in the public square and in law,” Campbell said.
We do not need to establish a governmental religion. And we certainly do not need to lie in our attempts to do so.
There is nothing holy about lying.
"The Snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Jeffrey Epstein’s links to corporate America may have been broader and more costly than investors might think.
More than one in eight directors who served on S&P 500 boards between 2006 and 2026 appeared in the Epstein files, according to a new study, Him Too? Analysing the Effects of Epstein Connections.
Strikingly, much of the contact took place after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.
The study finds that Epstein acted as an important bridge between powerful people, creating a much more interconnected corporate world than would have existed without him, especially in the financial and technology sectors.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, boards with Epstein-linked directors had more ESG (environmental, social and governance) incidents. These declined sharply after those directors left or died, suggesting “tainted” directors played a direct role in companies’ ethical and legal problems.
As for investors, the key moment came when these links were made public following the release of the Epstein files in early 2026.
Posting on the social media platform X, Lutnick shared a single image of who appears to be President Donald Trump holding up the Trump Gold Card, which officially launched in September, costs between $1 million and $5 million, and grants holders permanent resident status and a pathway to full U.S. citizenship.
“If only they cared half as much about justice for Epstein's victims,” wrote MeidasTouch co-founder Brett Meiselas in response, a reminder of Epstein survivors' outrage at the Trump administration’s Justice Department for mistakenly exposing their identities, as well as the lack of prosecutions for potential Epstein co-conspirators.
The Justice Department is pushing back against a federal judge’s demand for additional disclosure in the Jeffrey Epstein files case, setting up a new test of a transparency law signed by President Donald Trump.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan had ordered DOJ to produce less-redacted versions of certain Epstein-related materials or explain why the information could not be made public. Instead, Associate U.S. Attorney General Stanley Woodward asked the court to delay the deadline by 60 days or accept DOJ’s explanation that its redactions were proper, ABC News reported.
The dispute puts the Trump Administration’s Justice Department in conflict with the public-release mandate Congress passed in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The law, approved Nov. 19, 2025, requires the attorney general to release documents and records in DOJ possession relating to Epstein. The White House said Trump signed H.R. 4405, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, into law that same day.
Beatrice Keul, 55, a former Miss Switzerland and Miss Europe contestant, told the Daily Beast's new Punch Up Substack that she believes Ivana acted as a "madam"-style figure in Epstein's social world, on par with his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
In the final part of a three-part interview, Keul said she believes "Ivana played a major role in this whole cosmos, bringing in women in the same way as Maxwell."
The billionaire financier pursued a yearslong relationship with the woman, influencing both her decision to attend Penn and her year on campus pursuing a Master of Laws degree, according to messages in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice and reviewed by The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Let's move over to Chump's corruption that netted him over 2,000,000,000.00 dollars last year alone. Last Thursday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent declared to CBS' Kelly O'Grady, "I don't think there's an appearance problem." He is wrong, so wrong. Ryan Mancini (THE HILL) reports:
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) on Sunday said there “is something wrong” with President Trump making $1 billion in cryptocurrency.
“I do have an issue with some of the ways that we’ve now seen how we deal with cryptocurrency,” Moore said on “Fox News Sunday” with host Shannon Bream. “The President of the United States has made more money on crypto than crypto companies in the past year.”
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC “THIS WEEK” ANCHOR: Two hundred and fifty years later, that system is under stress, tested by a president determined to wield power and buck norms in a way his predecessors did not. Perhaps most brazenly, this week, President Trump’s financial disclosure forms revealed that he collected more than $2 billion in revenues during the first year of his second term from investments in some industries he regulates, fueled in part by payments from foreign powers and a steady steam of -- stream of stock trading, including stakes in companies he promotes.
The president and his team insists this is not a conflict of interest. Democratic critics and many ethical experts disagree. One thing is certain, no other American president has ever acted this way or amassed money like this while holding the supreme office of public trust.
Jay O’Brien starts us off.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAY O'BRIEN, CAPITOL HILL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): This week, the money Donald Trump has made since returning to the White House coming into clearer focus, staggering profits unprecedented for an American president. New, mandatory financial disclosure forms, released by the Office of Government Ethics, show Trump reported making at least $2.2 billion last year, triple what he earned in 2024, before the start of his second term.
MEGAN GORMAN, TAX ATTORNEY & AUTHOR, 'ALL THE PRESIDENTS; MONEY': What we’ve not seen is someone who is proactively growing their wealth while president.
O’BRIEN (voice over): Money making on an historic scale, says Megan Gorman, who chronicled presidential wealth in her book “All the President’s Money.”
O’BRIEN: Have you ever seen a president make money on this scale while in the White House?
GORMAN: I’ve never seen a situation where someone has been proactive like this.
O’BRIEN (voice over): Trump pointing to the stock market to explain his gains.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don’t get involved in my personal. We have funds that run my money.
REPORTER: To critics who say you’re profiting off the presidency. Mr. President.
TRUMP: Well, you know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up. Everybody’s profiting.
O’BRIEN (voice over): But the more than 900 pages show a Trump family business empire that’s expanded alongside the president’s time in office, extending from real estate holdings, to merchandise, to the biggest recent profit driver, cryptocurrency. Trump raking in upwards of $1.4 billion from crypto ventures alone last year. According to the documents, more than 630 million in profits came via the president’s meme coin, the sales of which generate revenue for Trump and his family, even as the value of the coin itself has plummeted from a high of $74, just before Trump was inaugurated, to trading under $2 today. An analysis found that nearly a million people who have invested in Trump’s meme coin lost a combined $3.8 billion.
TIM MASSAD, HARBARD KENNEDY SCHOOL FELLOW & FORMER CFTC CHAIR: Investors who bought the coin, many of them have suffered losses. Think of it like a baseball card. I
think a lot of people bought it who may simply like the present, wanted to support the president. I think there are others who bought it to try to buy influence.
O'BRIEN (voice over): The other big dollar crypto profits coming from World Liberty Financial, a firm founded by Trump’s family and that of his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, which the disclosures show earned Trump well north of $500 million last year. World Liberty Financial has brokered a series of controversial overseas deals, including accepting a half a billion dollar investment just days before Trump’s second inauguration from Shaykh Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who heads the United Arab Emirates’ state investment fund and serves as national security advisor. Months later, the Trump administration approved something the Sheikh and others in the UAE had long coveted, the sale of hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge American artificial intelligence chips. A spokesman for World Liberty Financial later telling ABC News, quote, “any claim that this deal had anything to do with the administration’s actions on chips is 100 percent false.
But through that deal, in a flurry of branded real estate projects, Trump made roughly $300 million from the Middle East alone according to the disclosures, more than any other region in the world. And the president’s crypto profits coming as the industry itself has teetered. Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, losing over half of its value since last October.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We’re going to be the undisputed crypto capital and bitcoin superpower of the world.
O’BRIEN (voice over): At the same time, his family crypto business is flourished, Trump, who once said bitcoin, quote, “seems like a scam,” now promising to be the most crypto friendly president in history, rolling back enforcement of the industry, something crypto advocates argued was necessary to prevent overregulation.
O’BRIEN: As someone who was intimately involved in this kind of enforcement, what do you make of a president personally profiting off of an industry that he also has his administration regulating?
MASSAD: I think it’s absolutely reprehensible. We’ve never seen a president do anything like this, to my knowledge.
O’BRIEN (voice over): In a statement, White House Spokesperson Anna Kelly saying, “neither the president, nor his family, has ever engaged or will ever engage in conflicts of interest.” And the White House repeatedly insisting the president only acts in the best interest of the American people, and pointing out that President Trump’s assets are in a trust, but not a traditional blind trust run by a third party. Instead, one managed by his children.
TRUMP: Well, I don’t do anything having to do with my business. My kids run it. My son, Eric, handles it. I don’t talk to him about things such as this.
O’BRIEN (voice over): Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., have invested in a flurry of ventures that could also have business before their father’s administration, from military drones, to Donald Trump Jr.’s investment in a company seeking to sell guns through the mail, to mining. Both of Trump’s sons have repeatedly disputed their father is involved in any of their business dealings. Donald Trump Jr. saying this at a summit in Saudi Arabia last year.
DONALD TRUMP JR., TRUMP ORGANIZATION EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT: We understand we’re outside of government, obviously, but over the last ten years we’ve been embroiled in it. We’ve been in that fight. We understand what the administration wants to do because we helped craft some of that messaging. So, we can be on the outside but still have that understanding of what they plan to do. And that’s logical.
O’BRIEN (voice over): The new financial disclosures also shedding light on the stock trades made by the president’s financial advisors on his behalf. More than 21,000 last year, earning Trump a stake in some 1,600 companies, many of which are directly involved in deals tied to the administration.
On April 8th of last year, over 300 trades of various securities made on Trump’s behalf, just a day before he announced a surprise pause on the sweeping tariffs he had unveiled a week earlier. Trump has said he’s not directly involved in trades made on his behalf. All of the documents made public just as the president took his new Air Force One for its inaugural flight this week, a $400 million gift from Qatar, which some legal experts and Democrats charge could violate the Constitution’s prohibition on federal officials taking gifts from foreign countries.
White House staffers posting pictures inside, showing off the plane’s large rooms. To serve as the president’s personal aircraft, the jet also retrofitted by the Pentagon, estimated to cost hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
TRUMP: It will cost very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way.
O’BRIEN (voice over): And while Trump has called the plane a gift for the country, the jet is subject to a highly unusual arrangement that will transfer its ownership to Trump’s presidential library, not to the next commander in chief, when he leaves office.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
O’BRIEN (on camera): And, George, while the president and vice president aren’t subject to the same ethics laws as other members of the administration or even members of Congress, Democrats are promising that if they take back the House come November, they’ll use the power of the legislative branch to investigate President Trump’s family business dealings and hold him accountable if necessary.
This follows a New York Times report that details the losses to investors from Trump's cryptocurrency "meme coin" issued around his second inauguration.
That report estimated a loss of $3.8 billion — but more than that, Krugman noted, "even more surprising is the number of people who were in effect suckers here — almost a million. That’s really amazing."
The celebration of the 250th anniversary of America’s independence was marked with the pomp and outsize circumstance that President Trump promised, and throughout it he paid homage to the person he cast as an embodiment of patriotism: himself.
Mr. Trump capped off the weekslong celebration with a speech on Saturday night on the National Mall, where he praised those who founded the country and shed blood fighting for it. But as he had in virtually every other commemoration speech, he couldn’t help but dwell on his own battles and portray the state of the union as stronger than ever under his leadership.
“Unlike so many others in the world, in this country we have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal justice under the law — although I wasn’t treated that well,” Mr. Trump said. “But we won’t get into that.”
“We had the American dream,” he added. “We never had the American dream, however, like we have it right now.”
The sky is actually falling at the Great American State Fair.
The stage for Freedom 250’s July Fourth celebration fell apart during rehearsals Thursday, with a large component of the structure’s ceiling falling roughly two stories down and landing behind a group of dancers and musicians. Miraculously, no one appeared injured.
Online commenters were quick to flame the stage’s apparently dangerous construction.
“That’s what happens when you don’t consider merit in hiring,” wrote one X user.
“This is why you never let Trump select the subcontractor based on percentage of kickback,” commented another.
If Donald Trump’s address on 3 July from Mount Rushmore will be remembered at all, it will be because that was the day of competing speeches, and competing visions, of the United States. Earlier on 3 July, the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivered a speech that was about half as long as Trump’s 28-minute address, but one that offered a far different assessment of the challenges facing his city and our nation.
“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” Mamdani said, while seated at George Washington’s desk and flanked by newly naturalized American citizens. “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world – one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.”
Mamdani’s speech was rich with historical references, beginning with his mention of the Lenape people who lived on the land of what we now call New York City before the Europeans arrived. (As far as I know, Trump never mentions the Indigenous nations of this land.) Mamdani’s address made a (too) brief nod to American chattel slavery, before celebrating American immigration, noting: “Irish immigrants [who] arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty” along with “Jewish people escaping pogroms”.
[. . .]
The latter half of Trump’s 3 July address and parts of his 4 July address were basically a stump speech for Republicans, as they face a tough midterm election season ahead.
Trump, clearly rattled by the success of the left wing of the Democratic party in New York and across the country, has decided to return to the 1950s. He is now brazenly resurrecting cold war rhetoric, repeatedly labeling his opponents “godless communists”, as he did on Friday.
Trump delivered yet another speech on 4 July and in Washington DC. This address, besides being almost rained out, felt more like a strange mix of a State of the Union Address and a 1970’s game show, as Trump kept wheeling out old flags and centenarian veterans onto his stage as if they were all up for auction. Human and non-human props aside, his actual 4 July lecture offered, perhaps surprisingly, less substance than the one he had given the day before.
[. . .]
Trump’s hubris is legendary (he has suggested he wants his face on Mount Rushmore), and he obsessively repeats, as he did in this speech, that the United States was “laughed at, mocked”, and seen as a “nation in decline” just two years ago. “And today,” Trump says, “We are the hottest country anywhere in the world. Everybody respects us like no nation.”
But the polling doesn’t bear any of this out. The Pew Research Center recently found sharp declines in US favorability around the globe. And what I imagine must really upset the president is that democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani polls at a significantly higher approval rating (48%) than Donald Trump does (39%).
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), along with Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), opened an investigation into reports that Softbank Group’s (Softbank) recently donated $50 million to the Trump Presidential Library — the largest publicly disclosed contribution to the Library and a possible attempt to curry political favor.
“The Trump Administration is the most corrupt in the nation’s history, and one apparent nexus of that corruption has been tens of millions of dollars that have been given by corporate interests to the President’s pet projects including his gold-encrusted ballroom,” wrote the lawmakers.
On May 22, 2026, Politico reported that SoftBank Group had donated $50 million to President Trump’s Presidential Library project, making it the largest publicly reported contribution to the Library. The donation followed a December 2024 Softbank announcement that it would invest $100 billion in the United States during President Trump’s second term. On March 11, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission also greenlit Softbank’s $4 billion acquisition of DigitalBridge, a data center investment firm.
The $50 million donation came before President Trump weakened an executive order regulating the AI industry. Softbank is “one of the largest AI investors in the world,” raising questions as to whether the donation was an attempt to buy political favors. The reported donation is the largest publicly disclosed contribution to the Trump Presidential Library to date.
Softbank has previously contributed to the Presidential Libraries of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but only after the Presidents had left office. This time, reports indicated that Softbank quietly made the contribution while President Trump is in office, and before any presidential library has been constructed.
“These circumstances [under which the donation was made] raise concerns about the potential for bribery and whether donors are seeking favorable treatment from the Trump Administration through contributions that personally benefit a sitting President,” wrote the lawmakers.
The lawmakers asked the Softbank CEO, Mr. Masayoshi Son, to explain the company’s decision to contribute and whether it was made in exchange for any promises by the Trump administration.
Senator Warren has led the fight to prevent the Trump family from using the Trump Presidential Library for corrupt pay-to-play deals:
- In April 2026, Senators Warren (D-Mass.) and Blumenthal (D-Conn.), along with Representative Stansbury (D-N.M.), released new responses from Big Tech CEOs indicating that they have no public explanation for where as much as $63 million in settlement money to Donald Trump’s now-dissolved Presidential Library fund has gone. The lawmakers followed up with a new letter to President Donald Trump pressing for answers to solve the ongoing mystery of the missing millions.
- In March 2026, Senators Warren (D-Mass.) and Blumenthal (D-Conn.), along with Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), pressed ABC, Meta, X, and Paramount on their settlements with President Donald Trump, in which the companies promised to donate as much as $63 million to President Trump’s future Presidential Library.
- In July 2025, Senators Warren (D-Mass.) and Blumenthal (D-Conn.), along with Representatives Moskowitz (D-Fla.), Raskin (D-Md.), and Stansbury (D-N.M.) unveiled the Presidential Library Anti-Corruption Act to close loopholes that allow presidential libraries to be used as tools for corruption and bribery.
- In July 2025, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a new report exposing how companies, special interests, and foreign governments may be pledging donations to President Trump’s future Presidential Library as a corrupt tool to secure favorable outcomes from his administration.
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