Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 31, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Company headed by Trump-pardoned Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy wins $106 million federal prison contract
[Guardian, Drop Site Daily: May 28, 2026]
LEO Technologies, a Texas-based AI company founded and led by Elliott Broidy—a Republican fundraiser pardoned by President Donald Trump on his last day in office in 2021, days before Broidy was to be sentenced for secretly lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests—won a $106 million contract from the Bureau of Prisons to translate, transcribe, and monitor prison phone calls using artificial intelligence last month, the Guardian reported. The contract marks LEO’s first with the federal government. Broidy, who has twice pleaded guilty to separate criminal offenses.
The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.
Robert Faturechi, May 28, 2026 [propublica.org]
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Are Running a $1.2 Billion Felony Fraud Scheme that is Fully Prosecutable in New York.
Christopher Armitage, May 24, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Other crypto founders are serving eight, twelve, and twenty-five years in prison for the same conduct. The only thing that separates the Trump sons from those men is their last name.
How Trump Created a Slush Fund for His Allies – The President may have committed the rare offense that turns Republican lawmakers against him.
Ruth Marcus, May 24, 2026 [The New Yorker]
Trump’s Jan. 6 slush fund is right from Hitler’s playbook! This is not a coincidence
Dean Obeidallah, May 25, 2026
It was about a year after Jan. 6 that I first raised red flags in both articles and on my SiriusXM radio show that Donald Trump would be increasingly defending and even praising the Jan. 6 terrorists. That was way before Trump was calling them “patriots,” pardoned them or recently erased their crimes from the DOJ website and created his $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund to reward them.
The reason I raised that concern is not because I’m some type of political version of Nostradamus. Rather it’s because I have read a great deal about the history of fascist leaders and spoken to many experts.
That history was telling us that Trump would not reject the J6 terrorists but instead embrace, celebrate and honor those who helped him wage his failed coup. After all, it’s exactly what Adolph Hitler did after his 1923 failed coup known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.”….
Here’s the Real Reason Pam Bondi is Returning to the Trump Regime
Dean Obeidallah, May 28, 2026
On Wednesday, we learned that fired Attorney General Pam Bondi was returning to work for the Trump regime. However, this time no longer as the corrupt administration’s top attorney but as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that will focus on Artificial Intelligence….
But why would Bondi—who has no experience in the AI area—be appointed to this board by Trump and get a hero’s welcome?! Well former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner has a theory—and it’s one that resonates with me.
Glenn’s view it’s likely two reasons. First, “This is probably a wonderful opportunity to grift Should someone be interested in doing just that,” Kirschner commented.
And second—and this is the big one—”Pam Bondi knows where all the Epstein bodies are buried and Trump wants to keep her close.” Ding! Ding! Ding! That sounds like a winner. This is especially true given Bondi will testify Friday, May 29 before the House Oversight committee. (Obviously, the timing of the new gig is not a coincidence!)
And as I have written about in the past, Bondi served as Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019 at the very time Epstein was operating his massive child rape and women sex trafficking ring in that very state. Yet Bondi NEVER investigated Epstein despite there being more one thousand victims. That was clearly a decision by her in an effort to protect Trump and other powerful men….
We also discussed Trump DOJ’s latest actions to cover up the Jan. 6 crimes. This comes in the form of Acting AG Todd Blanche deleting a massive number of Jan. 6 related files from the DOJ website about the people charged and convicted of crimes—including those who brutally beat up police officers like Michael Fanone.
Some of the records Blanche deleted–as NPR reported— include:
- Daniel Rodriguez, who pleaded guilty to driving an electroshock device into the neck of former Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone, and who was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.
- Thomas Webster, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting law enforcement with a metal flagpole, tackling a police officer to the ground and trying to remove the officer’s gas mask. Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
- Peter Schwartz, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting police officers with pepper spray and throwing a metal chair at law enforcement. Schwartz was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
And DOJ is bragging about this erasure of records saying in a statement they are “proud” to strip the “DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.” The goal in deleting these records is not just part of the effort to rewrite Jan. 6. It’s also to make it more difficult for the media and public to uncover the crimes committed by Trump’s followers—especially since he is on the verge of giving them a huge pay day with his $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund….
How the War on Terror Created the Age of Trump (W/ Matt Kennard)
Chris Hedges, May 27, 2026
Matt Kennard shows in his new book that the bipartisan War on Terror laid the groundwork for the Trump presidency and the rise of fascism — now, with extremists empowered, we face the consequences.
Trump’s $250 Greenback Is a Gift to the Criminal Class
Timothy Noah, May 28, 2026 [The New Republic]
National Park Entrance Fees Are Funding Trump’s D.C. Projects
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
Strategic Political Economy
GRAPH: Not All Oil Is the Same (types of oil)
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
The Mystery Gasoline Surcharge: How Oil Incumbents Are Trying to Maintain Fossil Fuel Dominance
Matt Stoller, May 29, 2026 [BIG]
Among American elites, there appears to be an aggressive embrace of new technologies, whether crypto, generative artificial intelligence, or automated systems in war. But there is an important exception. If you deploy energy systems at scale that compete with fossil fuels, you will be ignored. The reason is both the narrative power of oil companies, and the Trump administration’s view that fossil fuel infrastructure is a deep source of American strength.
What’s interesting about this dynamic is that clean tech systems – batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles – are having real impacts, far more measurable than crypto or AI. Here is a chart of annualized gasoline sales in California, which has dropped by 2.5 billion gallons a year since 2019, despite more cars on the road. And California is leading the way in America; a quarter of new cars there are electric….
[TW: I have not yet come across a book that, imho, adequately explains the proper principles of political economy for a republic. I have been pondering these principles since it became clear around 2009-2010 that President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership had no intention of imposing accountability and justice on the financial predators who had created the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Among the principles of political economy of civic republicanism I have identified are
[1. Scientific and technology progress are fundamental and essential to a republic’s economic health (note I do not use the term “economic growth” here).
[2. Because private enterprise, in reality, is mostly risk averse and therefore unwilling to invest in breakthrough science and unproven technology, one major responsibility of the national government is to encourage and support scientific endeavors and the development of new technologies — including outright funding. First Secretary of the Treasury was explicit about this in hid December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures, which carefully and thoroughly refuted the “free enterprise” and “free trade” nostrums of British empire factotum Adam Smith. Point number 2 is reflected repeatedly in the history of how nations actually industrialized, including
- USA’s deliberate seeding of new armory machine tool technology into the rest of the economy in the early 1800s (which created the bases for modern industrial mass production);
- the massive land giveaways that supported the development of nationwide rail networks in the mid-1800s;
- outright national funding of the telegraph and infant electricidal industry;
- agricultural research and development, including fighting pests and diseases, and identification and support of new crop breeds;
- outright government funding of the road and highway network that made possible the widespread use of automotive technology;
- early funding and continued support for aviation and aerospace technology;
- the development of transistors, integrated circuits, computers and the internet.
[To use Marxist phraseology, it is the political superstructure — the government — that most often creates and determines new means of production — the exact opposite of the disastrously erroneous Marxist view of reality.
[3. Unfortunately, though it is government support which creates new industries, new companies and huge private fortunes, the human faults of avarice, lust for power, pride end up transforming these new industries, new companies and new private fortunes into opponents of further change to the means of production. When this inevitably occurs, Marxist analysis of how the means of production determines the political superstructure tends to reflect reality with more fidelity than other forms of economic analysis.
[4. Therefore, a republic must always take steps and impose measures to limit the accumulation of wealth, the translation of wealth into political power, and misuse of the political system by concentrations of wealth and the morbidly rich. The argument that every billionaire is a policy failure must be fleshed out by developing this framework of civic republican political economy. Much of the history of neoclassical and Austrian economic thinking is a series of case studies in how concentrations of wealth and the morbidly rich used academia to develop schools of political economy which justified selfish behavior and concentrations of wealth, and in effect suppress and bury a decent exploration and consideration of civic republican political economy.
[5. Civic republican political economy therefore demands making moral judgements about what is good and bad for the preservation and development of human existence. Preserving the use of fossil fuels endangers human life istelf and is therefore bad. Remember that two of the basic principles of civic republicanism are justice, and the General Welfare. Gambling, prediction markets, crypto, and artificial intelligence should all be rigorously subjected to moral judging. Markets cannot and will not do this. The essence of the evil of neoliberal and neoclassical economics is that they use mathematical certainty as a facade to evade moral judgement.
[Though it omits any consideration of government’s role in supporting the early development of the petroleum industry, Stoller’s article is an excellent case study of how an industry, once mature, becomes a force for oligarchy and against republican governance. – TW]
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