Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
Donald Trump is making roughly $1.1 million an hour grifting the American people. Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to pledge he’d act independently of the White House. ICE shot journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias in the elbow and has held him for nearly 300 days with a festering wound. And a registered Republican from Apollo, Pennsylvania cast presidential ballots in both Alaska and Pennsylvania in 2024.
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Trump Made $1.1 Million an Hour in His First Year Back
Donald Trump has finally found a business that even he can make profitable.
The president has personally gained upwards of $2.2 billion during his first year back in the White House. Broken down over a 40-hour work week, that comes to about $1.1 million an hour. And that’s generous, because it assumes he spends 40 hours a week working rather than golfing.
The federal minimum wage, which the Trump-GOP has kept frozen, still sits at $7.25 an hour. Trump made $7.25 roughly every twenty-three-thousandths of a second.
Most of the $2.2 billion came from cryptocurrency ventures, including a company partially bought by the UAE for nearly $500 million the same month Trump took office. The $TRUMP memecoin he promoted to his own supporters has since lost 97% of its value, costing roughly 810,000 retail investors a combined $2 billion.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called it a “culture of corruption.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote: “$2.2 BILLION for the Trump family. Higher costs for the American people.” Meanwhile, a carton of eggs will cost you about nine bucks.
Todd Blanche Won’t Promise to Act Independently of Trump
The last person this committed to not being independent was every guy on The Bachelorette.
Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday declined to commit to always acting independently of the White House. He insisted Trump has never asked him to cross a legal or ethical line, and that the Justice Department will “prosecute without fear or any sort of favor.”
“No, I’m not going to pledge that, and no attorney general should ever pledge that,” he told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press.
He then stated that he would take the president’s views into consideration on individual prosecution decisions.
When asked about the story he loves to tell in which Trump called him up and said “Todd, go prosecute this,” Blanche claimed it was an exaggeration. This did not explain the Comey indictment, the James indictment, and Trump’s public call to revisit the Reflecting Pool case.
Blanche previously said the administration may ask the Supreme Court to force states to hand over their voter rolls, and has declined to guarantee that January 6 rioters won’t collect government money through a claims process he wouldn’t rule out.
Next time someone tells you crime doesn’t pay, remind them Blanche’s comes with direct deposit.
ICE Shot a Journalist and Treated His Wound With Bengay
Carlitos Ricardo Parias has spent nearly 300 days at the Adelanto detention facility while his arm turns purple from a gunshot wound.
Parias is a journalist who goes by the handle Richard Noticias LA on TikTok, where he has over 100,000 followers. In October, unmarked vehicles boxed in his small car near downtown LA before agents began smashing his windows. One fumbled his gun, juggling it between his hands on bodycam, then shot Parias in the elbow. He also hit a U.S. marshal.
The agents then scurried into a nearby strip mall’s security office, downloaded the surveillance footage onto a thumb drive, and deleted it from the system. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli then posted a single screenshot from that lone copy and claimed Parias had “rammed his car into agents’ vehicles.”
A judge eventually threw out all criminal charges with prejudice, finding the government had violated Parias’s constitutional rights. DHS transferred him to immigration detention anyway.
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove visited Parias in May, and found his wound was being treated with vitamin D and Bengay. She said the arm looked “on the verge of being amputated.”
Even locked up, Parias has kept reporting, exposing the cockroaches and the contaminated water at Adelanto. So the government now plans to ship him to San Diego, farther from his family and lawyers.
He surpassed the record for the longest a journalist has ever spent in U.S. custody months ago.
Pennsylvania Republican Charged After Voting for President Twice
The party that’s spent six years screaming about voter fraud finally produced some.
Federal prosecutors have indicted 65-year-old Jeffrey Pope of Apollo, Pennsylvania, accusing him of voting for president in two states in the November 2024 election. He is a registered Republican.
Pope, who has been registered to vote in Pennsylvania since 1999, bought a property in Alaska in 2023. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, he mailed in an Alaska presidential ballot around October 18, 2024, then mailed in a Pennsylvania ballot for the same office around October 22.
Meanwhile, a review of 28 double-voting referrals from the 2024 election in Arizona found that 15 were registered Republicans, four were Democrats, and the rest were independents. Watchdog groups tracking voter fraud cases across multiple election cycles have consistently found that the majority of those actually charged are registered Republicans.
Pope now faces up to 10 years in prison, a fine of around $250,000, or both. It’s more time than anyone has served for trying to overthrow the election.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
US Courts Will Start Publishing How Often the Government Uses Spyware. For decades, the FBI has deployed hacking tools and spyware with essentially no accountability. That changed this week, when the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden that it will begin tracking a new “spyware/hacking” surveillance category in the 2028 Wiretap Report. The data will reveal how many times judges authorized wiretaps carried out with hacking tools to intercept communications like Signal and WhatsApp messages. As the EFF’s Eva Galperin put it, it’s hard to claim spyware is a surgical tool once a public report shows you deployed it tens of thousands of times.
Community Solar Opens on a Former Coal Mine in Illinois. On June 16, two community solar projects opened in Minonk, Illinois on the reclaimed site of a 150-year-old coal mine. The projects use 16,950 solar panels across about 40 acres, capable of powering nearly 1,650 homes and saving money for 650 local subscribers, including Rush University Medical Center and the College of DuPage. This spring, solar surpassed coal in total U.S. electricity generation for the first time, making up 12.8% of the nation’s energy against coal’s 12.2%.
Idaho Must Allow Abortions to Preserve Women’s Health, US Judge Rules. A federal judge ruled that Idaho’s near-total abortion ban is unconstitutional because it only allows abortions to save a woman’s life, not to protect her health. U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill wrote that a pregnant woman’s health “is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim.” It’s the first federal ruling to recognize a constitutional right to abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. The ruling blocks two laws that prevented doctors from providing abortion care to patients with serious medical conditions, including mental health conditions that raise the risk of self-harm.
First Test Flight of the Largest All-Electric Aircraft Used Just $5 of Electricity. On August 12, Heart Aerospace flew an all-electric aircraft for nearly half an hour at Plattsburgh International Airport in upstate New York on about five bucks’ worth of electricity. A conventional regional jet would burn around $500 worth of fuel on the same flight. The plane weighs 25,000 pounds, seats roughly as many people as a small regional airliner, and runs on four electric motors mounted to the wings. The test will inform Heart’s planned ES-30, a 30-seat hybrid-electric airliner that United Airlines has committed to buying 100 of.
