Trump’s Newest Deal is His Shadiest Yet

Donald Trump just announced a massive new deal with a man connected to a $600,000 payment to the FBI informant convicted of lying to the FBI about Hunter Biden’s business decisions.

On Tuesday the president-elect announced a $20 billion investment from Emirati company DAMAC to build new data centers throughout the Unied States, according to CNBC.

The company was founded by Trump’s friend billionaire Hussain Sajwani. He and DAMAC are pledging “at least” $20 billion toward the centers, according to Trump. “They may go double, or even somewhat more than double, that amount of money,” the president-elect said. The “first phase” will begin in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Oklahoma. Trump has overstated similar investments in the past.

In 2020 FBI informant Alexander Smirnov received $600,000 from Economic Transformation Technologies, or ETT. He began lying to the FBI about Hunter and Joe Biden that year, claiming they were engaged in bribery. DAMAC chair Farooq Arjomand is a large ETT shareholder, and has strong ties to Trump via Sajwani.

This is the second high-profile investment announcement Trump has made since his election victory, with Japanese billionaire investor Masayoshi Son pledging $100 billion in American spending in December.

Donald Trump delivered incoherent remarks Tuesday while railing against what he imagined were Joe Biden’s energy and water conservation policies.

In his first address since the results of the 2024 presidential election were certified, Trump responded to the Biden administration’s new standards requiring newly manufactured or imported tankless gas water heaters to waste less heat by using condensing technology.

So what’s the problem with that? Well, Trump couldn’t actually describe it, so he made something up.

“He wants all gas heaters out of your homes and apartments. He wants ’em to be replaced by essentially electric heaters,” Trump said.

Crucially, condensing tankless water heaters use gas, not electricity. But, let’s put that aside for a moment.

According to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, more than 60 percent of tankless gas water heaters sold today are compliant with the new standard because they already use condensing technology. It’s also worth noting that tankless water heaters are far less common than normal gas tank or electric tank water heaters, which had new standards set in April. 

So, while Biden’s new rule might make non-condensing tankless water heaters less available, perhaps compelling some to buy electric or heat pump systems, it doesn’t mean that anyone is coming to replace gas water heaters with electric models. 

That didn’t stop Trump from going on an extended rant about it, though, which is included in full because that’s how inane it all is. 

“I don’t know what it is with ‘electric.’ This guy loves ‘electric.’ We’re going to be ending the electric car mandate quickly, by the way,” Trump rambled. “This guy loves electric, and he—we don’t have enough electricity, and then we have AI where we need more. And he wants to get, he wants everybody to have an electric heater instead of a gas heater.

“Gas heater is much less expensive. The heat is much better. It’s a much better heat. Uh, as the expression goes, ‘You don’t itch.’ Does anybody have a heater, where you go and you’re scratching? That’s what they want you to have, they don’t want you to have the gas where you don’t have the problems of the electric,” Trump continued. “And the source is plentiful. They’re much cheaper to operate, they’re much better, they work much better, they look much better.”

While condensing models have a higher upfront cost, consumers may save money over the product’s lifetime because it uses its own exhaust gas to help heat the water, wasting less energy. Switching to a condensing heater will also help lower greenhouse gas emissions, something Trump, who is set on ramping up oil and natural gas production, couldn’t care less about. 

“Sixty percent of homes and apartments have gas heaters. He wants them all removed quickly, these people are crazy. There’s something wrong with ’em. There’s something wrong with ’em,” Trump muttered solemnly.

Trump wasn’t done inventing energy polices there. He went on to talk about other appliances that the Biden administration has supposedly tampered with, as well. 

“They also want to go back, and they have already started that too, when you buy a faucet no water comes out, because they want to preserve. Even in areas where you have so much water you don’t know what to do. It’s called rain, it comes down, it comes down from heaven,” Trump said.  

“And they want to do ‘no water comes out of the shower.’ It goes drip … drip … drip. So what happens? You’re in the shower 10 times as long, you know?”

He also claimed that “no water comes out of the faucet,” which is bad for when “you wanna wash your hands.”

“I, as you know, I ended that policy. You can have all the water you want, makes no difference. [inaudible] Especially in some areas, we have so much water, we don’t know what to do with it,” Trump said. 

Faucets were only the tip of the iceberg for the president-elect.

“They want very, very little water to go into your dishwasher. Almost none. And you know what people do? They just keep pressing, pressing, pressing. Keep it going. They end up using more water. Likewise, washing machines.

“We’re a party of common sense, and things that I’m telling you right now are all about common sense,” Trump said. 

Unsurprisingly, a number of water heater manufacturers that produce condensing water heaters that meet the new standards, such as A.O. Smith, Bradford White, and Rheem, supported the new requirements, a Department of Energy spokesperson told Nexstar. Also unsurprisingly, the American Gas Association criticized it, saying that it would lead to a dearth of more affordable non-condensing water heaters. 

Trump’s railing against electric appliances coincides directly with his goals of increasing oil and natural gas production—but is ultimately a bad long-term investment in an increasingly warming world that will use less and less gas every year.

This story has been updated. 

Donald Trump Jr. paid a visit to Greenland Tuesday, flying to the territory on his father’s private plane, and seemed to give weight to the president-elect’s half-baked plan to acquire it—despite the fact that it is currently an autonomous territory within Denmark.

While the younger Trump didn’t have any plans to meet with political leaders, he brought along pundit Charlie Kirk and Trump administration staffer Sergio Gor on a trip he described as tourism.

“We’re really happy to be here. We’re here as tourists to see this incredible place,” Trump Jr. told a local broadcaster. He said he had spoken to his father, “and he says hello to everyone in Greenland.”

Later, Trump Jr. visited a restaurant with his friends and called his father on speakerphone.

“I just want to say that it’s a very special place. It needs security for itself but it also needs security very much for the world, the location, really,” Trump said through his son’s phone. “You see the people and the ships sailing around and they’re not the right ships. They’re not the ships you want to know about. So, we need security and our country needs it and the whole world needs it.”

The visit follows a Truth Social post from the president-elect Monday night where he reiterated his plan to annex Greenland and seemed to be under the impression that its people were on board with the idea, despite the fact that Greenland’s own leaders disagree.

“I don’t want to be a pawn in Trump’s hot dreams of expanding his empire to include our country,” Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, said. Last month, Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede said that the island is not for sale.

What started as blatant trolling by Trump appears to be being entertained as a serious plan. The president-elect has also discussed annexing Canada, even inviting Canadian businessman and Shark Tank panelist Kevin O’Leary to Mar-a-Lago to discuss the plan. Trump has also floated taking over the Panama Canal zone, which was predictably met with hostility from Panama’s president. Is this what the next four years will look like?

It’s official: Mark Zuckerberg is turning Meta into yet another propaganda machine for Donald Trump and the far right. 

In a video statement published Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be enacting a series of policy changes purportedly for the purpose of fostering free speech, but his declaration devolved into an explanation of just how spineless he intends to be in the face of a second Trump administration. 

As reasons for allowing more unfettered speech, Zuckerberg declared that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” and that there has been “widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” 

He announced that Meta will end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of community notes. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Zuckberg said.

He also made sure to flag that his decision was a direct response to Trump’s return to the White House. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward prioritizing speech,” he said.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg continued. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

In a statement, Meta referred specifically to Elon Musk’s X, which has essentially become an unusable cesspool of misinformation and hate speech, as an example of the triumph of community notes. 

“We’ve seen this approach work on X—where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” the statement said.

Zuckerberg also declared that Meta would “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” 

His specific reference to these two “topics,” which encompass vulnerable communities often targeted by Trump and other conservatives, signals his complete submission to the far right’s mission to steer public discourse straight into hell. As if the repeated references to the dangers of “legacy media” didn’t indicate that strongly enough. 

Zuckerberg’s statement also demonstrates a willful ignorance of the way misinformation and hate speech about these issues endanger the lives of people offline for the sake of fostering conversation about whether all people should have the rights and dignities of others. Over the summer, Trump’s racist lies about pet-eating immigrants spread across the internet ecosystem like wildfire, and even though they weren’t based on anything at all, they were treated as if they were as worthy as any actual reporting about immigration. This is the kind of internet Zuckerberg said he hopes to foster.

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions; shut down people with different ideas,” he said in his video message. 

Zuckerberg also said he would be changing enforcement measures, relying on users to report potentially harmful content before it could be addressed, and “dialing back” content filters.

“It means we’re gonna catch less bad stuff,” Zuckerberg said. “But it will also reduce the number of innocent [people’s] posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

It remains to be seen if allowing more content will extend to LGBTQ-related hashtags, which Meta has reportedly restricted for months.

Zuckerberg spoke openly about hiding political content from users during the election season “because it was making people stressed.” But now that an authoritarian is coming into power, it seems the billionaire has changed his tune. “It feels like we’re in a new era now,” Zuckerberg explained, saying that “civic content” would be phased back in across Meta’s platforms.  

During an appearance Tuesday on Fox & Friends, Meta policy chief Joel Kaplan made it clear that the decision to roll back restrictions was a direct response to Trump. “There is a real opportunity here, with President Trump coming into office, with his commitment to free expression, for us to get back to those values,” he said. 

Zuckerberg’s feckless kowtowing comes one day after Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, one of Trump’s close allies, would be joining the company’s board of directors. 

Trump’s biggest congressional obstacle may be MAGA diehards.

Trump and the hard-right House Freedom Caucus have been politically misaligned of late, according to reporting from Punchbowl News. The rift began when some caucus members chose to endorse Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley over Trump way back in the GOP primary. It’s only gotten worse since then.

During last week’s Speaker debacle, the Freedom Caucus Ralph Norman and Keith Self had to be personally lobbied over the phone by the president-elect himself to begrudgingly cast their votes for Mike Johnson. And they also seem to have a problem with how Trump’s congressional liaison and former HFC member James Braid is conducting funding negotiations, taking issue with his calling in to a meeting to lobby members on freezing the debt ceiling. This was the same day 38 Republicans, many of whom were Freedom Caucus members, defied Trump and voted against the Continuing Resolution he had endorsed.

The debt ceiling keeps coming up as a major point of contention between Trump and HFC, as its members don’t seem to believe that Trump is serious about making the $2 trillion of budget cuts that Trump and billionaire friend Elon Musk have been talking about for months. This recent pattern of disagreement shows that the HFC won’t be so quick to blindly do Trump’s bidding—which could cause him some major problems on the way to getting his “big, beautiful bill” passed.

Amazon is paying Melania Trump a hefty amount of cash to produce a documentary about her.

Puck reports that the media and retail giant is releasing a documentary about the once and soon-to-be first lady as part of a whopping $40 million deal—a staggering amount of money for any figure, let alone one who commands relatively little public interest. It will be directed by Brett Ratner, who hasn’t made a Hollywood movie since being accused of sexual harassment by multiple women in 2017.

The deal includes the documentary, which will be released in theaters and later on Prime Video, and a short documentary series of two to three episodes to follow up on the film. Amazon outbid rivals Disney and Paramount for streaming rights to the project, and Trump stands to receive a hefty amount of cash in the deal.

The Amazon deal raises questions about some of executive chairman Jeff Bezos’s decisions in the last few months. In late October, the Bezos-owned Washington Post refused to make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election, spiking an editorial that would have backed Vice President Kamala Harris.

Following Trump’s election victory, the billionaire posted a fawning message of congratulations on X, hailing Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback.” Last month, Bezos joined the many wealthy donors to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee by pledging to contribute $1 million, giving him the perk of six tickets to pre-inauguration events, including a black-tie ball, a candlelight dinner with Trump and his wife, and a reception with Cabinet nominees.

Did Bezos make all of these gestures because of the streaming deal he made with the president-elect’s wife? Or are these overtures and the deal part of a new strategy from Bezos to avoid being attacked by Trump? Either way, Bezos and Trump don’t seem to be enemies anymore.

Donald Trump is somehow still harping on his vanity projects to acquire Greenland and Canada, and every day, the trolling feels more real.

In a Truth Social post Monday night, the president-elect published some propaganda to make it seem as if the people of Greenland were completely onboard with his plan to acquire the world’s largest island.

“I am hearing that the people of Greenland are ‘MAGA,’” Trump wrote. “My son, Don Jr, and various representatives, will be traveling there to visit some of the most magnificent areas and sights. Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation. We will protect it, and cherish it, from a very vicious outside World. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”

It’s not clear that Trump’s oldest son has any plans to meet with officials while in Greenland, but it’s always nice to share your kid’s vacation plans.

Beneath the post, Trump shared the video of an unidentified man in a MAGA hat urging Trump to buy Greenland. “We don’t want to be colonized by the Danish government anymore,” the man said, as he requested a new colonizer.

“We are the richest nation in the world, and we don’t get to use it! Denmark’s using us too much,” he continued, implying that through purchase, the wealth of Denmark would somehow return to Greenland’s small population of 57,000 people and not disappear into the imperialist machine Trump hopes to steer.

Greenland has long sought independence from Denmark, and all of Trump’s ramblings about buying the place seem to have revitalized that conversation. But that doesn’t mean the people of Greenland would have any interest in becoming part of the United States. Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede recently expressed his desire for “ownership and control” over the island, but reiterated that the country isn’t for sale.

Meanwhile, billionaire technocrat Elon Musk cheered Trump’s efforts to convince people that Greenland wants to be part of the U.S., writing in a post on X, “The people of Greenland should decide their future and I think they want to be part of America!”

It’s worth noting that Musk owns the exact kind of popular opinion machine that might work to generate this kind of sentiment, and Trump has a tendency to turn his tedious trolling into reality through sheer repetition and normalization.

Trump’s idea to acquire the territory, which is not only of great strategic importance to the U.S. but contains a wealth of natural resources and minerals, isn’t popular with everyone.

Jim Townsend, a former senior Pentagon official who worked on NATO and Arctic defense policy, told Politico that Trump’s statements are resulting in a diplomatic headache. “Pissing everybody off by saying we’re just going to buy them outright really bruises our bilateral relationship with the Danes and more importantly ruins any kind of way for us to work this out with Greenlanders,” said Townsend.

Trump also doubled down on his outlandish pitch to make Canada the fifty-first state of the U.S. Monday, following the news that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would be resigning.

Canadian M.P. Charlie Angus was quick to nip Trump’s trolling in the bud. “Canada has something called democracy. It means the leader is accountable to Parliament and can be replaced,” he wrote. “I bet Americans wish they had that now.

“And convicted sexual abusers don’t get to lead our nation. We’re decent folk,” Angus said. “Ps. Button up. We’re sending frigid cold your way. love Canada.”

Incoming State Department spokesperson and Fox News host Tammy Bruce has spent years insulting her new boss, Marco Rubio.

Politico reported at least seven instances of Bruce making a mockery of Senator Rubio, whom Trump has nominated for secretary of state.

In 2014, Bruce referred to Rubio as an “inexperienced senator who’s never run a thing in his life.” The next year she lambasted him as an establishment insider. In 2016 she called him “the kid waving frantically in the back of room trying to prove relevance.” And that same year she admitted to muting him on X.

Bruce has since changed her tune, saying that she’s “thrilled” to be working alongside Rubio. But even if she’s being sincere, her past feelings are another example of the very real rift that exists between the more traditional conservative and the MAGA wings of the GOP.

Republican leaders in Congress are having a tough time figuring out how to pass Donald Trump’s agenda.

Since Trump’s election, congressional Republicans have been divided over how to proceed: Write one giant, sweeping bill containing more or less everything in Trump’s agenda—immigration and border security, tax reform, and energy policy being three key blocs—or proceed via two or more smaller bills. Speaker Mike Johnson prefered one bill, Politico reports, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune thinks tax policies should be in a separate bill.

Trump, however, told Johnson that he wants “one big beautiful bill,” the speaker told his caucus Saturday, but Republicans in the Senate said that they were still figuring out the right strategy.

“We’re working through all that,” Thune said. “The process issues to me are a lot less important than the results.”

Other Republicans in the House, such as Representative Jason Smith, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, also favor the one-bill approach. Trump said publicly on Sunday that he wanted one large bill, but only hours later confusingly seemed to signal he’d be open to two bills.

Whatever ends up being the final approach, it’s going to divide Republicans in one or both of the chambers. Historically, the one-bill strategy hasn’t worked well for either party, as Democrats who backed the “Build Back Better” bill under Biden remember. That bill was supposed to pass in 2021 but ended up being weakened, only passing in the form of the scaled-down Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022.

There’s also the problem of the looming debt limit, which many Republicans oppose raising. The next budget now has a condition of a $2.5 trillion spending cut thanks to the last budget deal made last month. That will put a lot of Trump’s wishes in jeopardy and could result in another government shutdown if it isn’t prioritized.

Republicans can only afford to lose one vote in the House, and three in the Senate, making the odds of getting full agreement on a big bill pretty slim. Can Trump help everyone iron out their differences to help him get what he wants? History shows that he hasn’t been a unifying leader, even in his own party.

Rudy Giuliani was held in contempt Monday for failing to comply with discovery requirements in his ongoing defamation case brought by two Georgia election workers.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman slammed the disgraced politico for his “blithe disregard” of court orders, and said his behavior during discovery had been “preposterous.” Giuliani had been ordered to pay 2020 election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss $148 million for repeatedly defaming them as part of Donald Trump’s election fraud conspiracies. But the ex-mayor was less than forthcoming in forking over the money and assets that he owed.

Liman said that Giuliani “has testified that he did not respond because he suspected the motives of plaintiff’s counsel. That is not an excuse for violating the court’s orders.”

“More important, as the Court informed the defendant, if there was reason to believe the plaintiff’s counsel misused discovery or would misuse discovery, he could raise that with the court. It was not an excuse to take the law into his own hands,” Liman continued.

It seems that Liman had had enough of Giuliani’s screwing around Monday. At one point during proceedings, Giuliani’s attorney asked if he could “explain whether he violated any court orders,” according to MSNBC’s Adam Klasfeld. When the plaintiffs’ lawyers objected, Liman allowed it, noting that the “witness’s self-serving statement carries limited weight.”

Last week, Giuliani appeared in court to determine whether he needed to hand over his $3.5 million Florida condominium to the plaintiffs. He’d claimed that the condo was his permanent residence, granting it homestead protections from debt collectors, but lawyers for Freeman and Moss argued that he was lying about the property. For his part, Giuliani seemed more worried how his courtroom sketch would turn out.