/May 30, 2025/4:28 p.m. ETTrump Attacks Harvard With Social Media Screening for All VisasThis pilot program will soon be expanded across the country.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe Trump administration has begun carrying out its expanded vetting for student visa applicants, surveilling their social media accounts to make sure they aren’t posting anything in support of Palestine, which the administration considers antisemitic. This vetting will start with Harvard visa applicants but is expected to be adopted nationwide.Secretary of Stato Marco Rubio sent a cable to all U.S. embassies and consulates on Thursday ordering them to “conduct a complete screening of the online presence of any nonimmigrant visa applicant seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose.” That would apply not just to students but also to faculty, staff, and researchers visiting the university.The Trump administration is taking particular interest in people who have their social media accounts on “private,” an obvious, ominous crossing of boundaries.The State Department has ordered officers to examine “whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to ‘private’ or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.”This is yet another instance of Harvard serving as a test subject for the administration’s larger crackdown on free speech and international students at American universities. Trump has already revoked billions of dollars in research funding from the Massachusetts school, and even banned it from admitting any international students at all, although the latter policy was temporarily revoked by a judge. Most Recent Post/May 30, 2025/3:53 p.m. ETStephen Miller Grilled on Musk’s Drug Use as Wife Lands New GigTrump’s chief adviser seems desperate to avoid questions on Elon Musk. Does that have anything to do with his wife’s new job? Francis Chung/Politico/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesStephen Miller had a dismissive response Friday to new reports of Elon Musk’s drug use during Trump’s campaign last year. CNN’s Pamela Brown asked the far-right Trump adviser if there was “any drug testing or requests for him to drug test when he was in the White House given the fact that he was also a contractor with the government.”  A chuckling Miller ignored the question and said, “Fortunately for you and all of the friends at CNN, you’ll have the opportunity to ask Elon all the questions you want today yourself,” before he then segued into the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. “The drugs I’m concerned about are the drugs that are coming across the border from the criminal cartels that are killing hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Miller said. Perhaps Miller laughed instead of answering because his wife, Katie Miller, has left her job as adviser and spokesperson for the Department of Government Efficiency to work full-time for Musk and his companies. Miller has probably had enough of Musk, as he has also been subtweeting the tech oligarch, trying to refute Musk’s criticisms that the Republican budget bill would raise the deficit. “The Big Beautiful Bill is NOT an annual budget bill and does not fund the departments of government. It does not finance our agencies or federal programs,” Miller said, in a long X post earlier this week. Is there bad blood between Miller and Musk that has now spiraled because Miller’s wife is working for the tech oligarch and fellow fascism enthusiast? Most Recent Post/May 30, 2025/3:19 p.m. ETOld Man Trump Repeatedly Fumbles in Weird Speech Praising Elon MuskDonald Trump couldn’t keep some of his words straight as he marked the supposed end of Elon Musk’s tenure at the White House.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesHours after reports emerged Friday that Elon Musk had been under the influence of heavy drugs during his time advising the president, Musk and Donald Trump stumbled and fumbled their way through a White House press conference recognizing the end of the tech billionaire’s special government employee status.The wildly unusual joint conference featured Musk’s black eye, a giant gold key that Trump said he only gives to “very special people,” cringe-worthy regurgitations by Musk of Trump’s take on his Pulitzer Board defamation suit, and claims that Musk’s unpopular and controversial time in the White House was not quite over.But as Trump continued to praise Musk and his time atop the Department of Government Efficiency, the president’s verbal gaffes became more apparent. He claimed that DOGE had uncovered $42 million in wasteful spending, referring to expenditures related to Uganda, which Trump pronounced as “oo-ganda.” The 78-year-old also mentioned he would have Musk’s DOGE cuts “cauterized by Congress,” though he quickly corrected himself by saying they would be “affirmed by Congress,” instead. Trump’s on-camera slippage has gotten worse in recent weeks: Earlier this month, Trump dozed off while in a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That is despite the fact that the president received a clean bill of health in a medical report released in April that described Trump as being in “excellent health,” including neurological functioning.Musk, meanwhile, refused to acknowledge emerging reports of his alleged drug use. But the news of White House drug use under Trump’s helm is nothing new: In fact, if the reports prove true, it would be little more than a return to form. Last year, a report by the Department of Defense inspector general indicated that the West Wing operated more like a pill mill than the nation’s highest office. Common pills included modafinil, Adderall, fentanyl, morphine, and ketamine, according to the Pentagon report. But other, unlisted drugs—like Xanax—were equally easy to come by from the White House Medical Unit, according to anonymous sources that spoke to Rolling Stone.While other presidents were known to take a mix of drug cocktails to fight off back pain (like JFK) or bad moods (like Nixon), no previous administrations matched the level of debauchery of Trump’s, whose in-office pharmacists unquestioningly handed out highly addictive substances to staffers who needed pick-me-ups or energy boosts—no doctor’s exam, referral, or prescription required.“It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” another source told Rolling Stone in March 2024.Meanwhile, pharmacists described an atmosphere of fear within the West Wing, claiming they would be “fired” if they spoke out or would receive negative work assignments if they didn’t hand pills over to staffers.Read more about the press conference:Trump and Elon Musk Have Ominous Warning About Future of DOGEMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/3:00 p.m. ETElon Musk Gives Strange Excuse for Massive Black EyeMusk showed up a press conference with Donald Trump sporting a noticeable shiner.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesElon Musk sported what looked like a black eye during his DOGE goodbye press conference with President Trump on Friday. When asked about it, he blamed the bruise on his 5-year-old son punching him in the face. “Mr. Musk … is your eye OK? What happened to your eye; I noticed there’s a bruise there?” one reporter finally asked near the end of the press conference.“Well, I wasn’t anywhere near France,” Musk said, in a weak attempt at a joke regarding footage of French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife slapping him in the face.“I was just horsing around with [my son] little X and said, ‘Go ’head and punch me in the face,’ and he did. Turns out even a 5-year-old punching you in the face actually does—”“That was X that did it? X could do it!” Trump chimed in. “If you knew X …”“I didn’t really feel much at the time; I guess it bruises up. But I was just messing around with the kids.”Musk chose an impeccable time to show up to a press conference with a black eye. Earlier in the day, The New York Times reported on Musk’s rampant drug use on and off the campaign trail, as the world’s richest man frequently mixed ketamine and psychedelics and kept a small box of pills, mostly containing Adderall. The shiner only adds to speculation around his personal habits.More on that Times report:Elon Musk Was on Crazy Combo of Drugs During Trump CampaignMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/2:51 p.m. ETTrump and Elon Musk Have Ominous Warning About Future of DOGEElon Musk’s time as a government employee has come to an end, but his time with Donald Trump has not.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesDespite the fanfare over Elon Musk’s supposed departure from the Department of Government Efficiency, Donald Trump says that the billionaire bureaucrat isn’t really going anywhere.“Many of the DOGE people are staying behind, so they’re not leaving. And Elon’s not really leaving. He’s gonna be back and forth, I think. I have a feeling. It’s his baby, and he’s gonna be doing a lot of things,” Trump said during a press conference in the Oval Office Friday.The press conference was held to mark the end of Musk’s time as a so-called “special government employee,” a title that allowed him to bypass certain ethics requirements during his 134-day stint in Trump’s administration. The president made sure to give Musk a gaudy golden key—what it actually unlocks went totally unaddressed—to make sure he could get back into the White House. “This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning,” Musk said, promising that DOGE’s “influence” would “only grow stronger” over time.Earlier Friday, the billionaire bureaucrat shared a post on X asserting that the legacy of DOGE was more psychological than anything else. Surely, it will take longer than four months to forget the image of Musk running around with a chainsaw. Read more about Musk:Elon Musk Was on Crazy Combo of Drugs During Trump CampaignMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/1:21 p.m. ETDem Governor Vetoes Ban on Surprise Ambulance Bills in Shocking MoveThe bill had unanimous support in both chambers of the state legislature.Michael Ciaglo/Getty ImagesColorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis has vetoed a bill that would ban surprise billing by ambulance companies, over the unanimous objections of both chambers of the state legislature. Why would Polis veto a bill that’s popular with everyone, even Colorado Republicans? The governor wrote in his veto statement that drafting errors in the bill made it “unimplementable” and estimated that it would make insurance premiums go up by as much as $0.73 to $2.15 per person. “I am committed to working with proponents and sponsors to protect Coloradans from surprise bills, but I encourage all parties to work towards a more reasonable reimbursement rate that mitigates premium impacts and nets a better deal for Colorado families,” Polis wrote. In Colorado, if legislators in both chambers repass the bill with a two-thirds majority, they can override the governor’s veto, especially considering that the bill passed with the support of every single legislator. But the legislature adjourned on May 7, meaning that the bill has to be passed again when the legislature reconvenes in January.  For some reason, ending surprise ambulance billing nationally is not the slam-dunk issue it should be. Congress ended most surprise medical bills in 2020 but exempted ground ambulances from the bill. Was Polis’s veto due to badly drafted language and a (seemingly modest) price hike in insurance premiums, as he said, or was it for a different, more nefarious reason? We might not know unless and until the bill is reintroduced next year. More on surprise ambulance bills:Congress Doesn’t Care About Your Surprise Ambulance Bill Most Recent Post/May 30, 2025/12:21 p.m. ETTrump’s Pardons Since Jan 6 Spree Show an Infuriatingly Corrupt TrendSince his January 6 pardon spree, Donald Trump has tended to grant clemency a little closer to home.Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty ImagesA good chunk of the white-collar criminals pardoned by Donald Trump after his massive “Day One” pardoning spree either have a political or financial tie to him.The president has issued 60 pardons since he offered political forgiveness to some 1,600 individuals charged in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. But out of those subsequent 60 unrelated to the attack, 12 people—or roughly one in five—were already in Trump’s orbit, according to ABC News.They included several politicos, including former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted on several counts of corruption, including for an attempt to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat after he left the position for the White House; former Republican Representative Michael Grimm, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud; former Nevada gubernatorial candidate Michele Fiore, who allegedly stole public funds intended to commemorate a slain police officer; and former Tennessee state Senator Brian Kelsey, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud in 2022.Trump also pardoned major financiers of his presidential campaigns. Trevor Milton, the founder of the Nikola electric vehicle company, donated nearly $2 million toward Trump’s 2024 campaign. Imaad Zuberi, who has donated to both parties, issued “at least $800,000 to committees associated with Trump and the Republican Party,” ABC reported.Others helped Trump advance his retribution campaign against his political enemies, or helped advance his own image in the broader Republican Party. Devon Archer and Jason Galanis, both former business partners of Hunter Biden, accused the younger Biden of leveraging his father’s name and influence in order to conduct business overseas. Archer had defrauded a Native American tribal entity, while Galanis was serving time for multiple offenses. Trump also forgave Todd and Julie Chrisley—reality TV stars known for their show Chrisley Knows Best who were sentenced to a combined 19 years on fraud and tax evasion charges—after their daughter Savannah Chrisley spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.Speaking to press Friday after her parents’ release, Savannah Chrisley said that the “biggest misconception right now is I either paid for a pardon or slept for a pardon—,” but she couldn’t finish her sentence before Todd interjected: “That’s something I would have done,” he said.Read who else Trump is thinking of pardoning:Trump Considering Pardons for Men Who Tried to Kill Gretchen WhitmerMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/12:04 p.m. ETTrump Knew He Was Deporting Innocent People to El Salvador All AlongMany of the people deported to El Salvador have no criminal record, and Donald Trump knew it.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesDonald Trump’s administration was well aware that many of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it shipped off to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador had no criminal records at all, according to a Friday report from ProPublica.  While Trump officials claimed that the deportees were brutal gang members and “the worst of the worst,” only 32 of the deportees had actually been convicted of crimes, and most of them were minor offenses such as traffic violations, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security reviewed by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and a team of journalists from Venezuelan media outlets. One of the men, 23-year-old Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, faced a misdemeanor charge after he was arrested in 2023 for riding his bike and drinking a can of beer.Little more than half of the deportees, 130 of the 238, were charged only with violating U.S. immigration laws. Twenty of them had criminal records from other countries. The U.S. government data showed that 67 individuals had pending charges, with only six being for violent crimes. In several cases, the government data about the pending charges differed from what ProPublica was able to find. In some cases, the men had actually been convicted, and in one, the charges had been dropped. But in many cases, these individuals were remanded to a foreign prison before their criminal cases were ever resolved. The Trump administration has touted allegations of gang affiliation as a justification for denying the deportees their due process rights. But none of the men’s names appeared on a list of roughly 1,400 alleged Tren de Aragua members kept by the Venezuelan government, ProPublica reported. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan tried desperately in March to downplay reporting that many of these individuals did not have criminal records. “A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, just like a lot of terrorists in this world, they’re not in any terrorist databases, right?” Homan said on ABC News. But the methods the government relies on to classify individuals as gang members—such as identification of gang-affiliated tattoos—have been disproven by experts. Not only were many of the men who were deported not proven gang members, they weren’t even criminals, and by denying them the right to due process, they were remanded to a foreign prison notorious for human rights abuses without ever getting to prove it. Trump has continued to pressure the Supreme Court to allow him to sidestep due process as part of his massive deportation campaign, claiming that the judiciary has no right to intrude on matters of “foreign policy.” But immigrants residing on U.S. soil—who are clearly not the bloodthirsty criminals the administration insists they are—are still subject to protections under U.S. law. Read more about the deportations:Trump Asks Supreme Court to Help Him Deport People Wherever He WantsMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/11:41 a.m. ETJoni Ernst Stoops to Shocking Low When Told Medicaid Cuts Will KillSenator Joni Ernst had a disgusting answer when confronted by a constituent at her town hall about Trump’s budget bill.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesRepublican Senator Joni Ernst had a particularly unhinged response to questions from her constituents at a town hall in Parkersburg, Iowa, on Friday.Ernst was asked about the GOP’s budget bill kicking people off of Medicaid, and her condescending answer quickly became callous and flippant as the Iowa politician smirked at the audience.“When you are arguing about illegals that are receiving Medicaid, 1.4 million, they’re not eligible, so they will be coming off, so—” Ernst began, before an audience member shouted, “People are going to die!”“People are not—well, we all are going to die,” Ernst responded, as the audience drowned her in loud protests.What was Ernst thinking with that answer? Almost every Republican town hall this year has gone badly for the politician holding it, thanks to President Trump upending the federal government, and Ernst surely knew that choosing death over Medicaid wouldn’t go over well with the crowd. Earlier this week in Nebraska, Representative Mike Flood was heckled after he admitted that he didn’t read the budget bill.Ersnt’s town hall wasn’t even the first one in Iowa to go badly for a Republican. On Wednesday, Representative Ashley Hinson was met with jeers and boos, with audience members in Decorah, Iowa calling her a fraud and a liar. But at least Hinson had the good sense not to seemingly embrace death over a vital, lifesaving government program. More on Trump’s bill:Here Are the Worst Things in Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Most Recent Post/May 30, 2025/11:35 a.m. ETKetanji Brown Jackson Blasts “Botched” Supreme Court Ruling on TPSSupreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a scathing disssent, called out the rest of the court for allowing Trump’s harmful executive order to stand.Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesSupreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson thinks the Supreme Court “botched” a decision to allow the Trump administration to revoke the Temporary Protected Status protections of about 500,000 Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan immigrants.Jackson and fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor were the only two dissenters.“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today. It requires next to nothing from the Government with respect to irreparable harm,” Jackson wrote in the dissent. “And it undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives of and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”TPS is a long-standing program that allowed those 500,000 immigrants to stay in the U.S. after they fled violence and risk in their home countries. After the Supreme Court’s ruling, all of them are at high risk of sudden deportation. “It is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage,” Jackson wrote.Read the full dissent here.View More Posts

How Deepfakes Are Created Generative AI models enable the creation of highly realistic fake media. Most deepfakes today are produced by training deep neural networks on real images, video or audio of a target person. The two predominant AI architectures are generative adversarial networks (GANs) and autoencoders. A GAN consists of a generator network that produces synthetic images and a discriminator network that tries to distinguish fakes from real data. Through iterative training, the generator learns to produce outputs that increasingly fool the discriminator¹. Autoencoder-based tools similarly learn to encode a target face and then decode it onto a source video. In practice, deepfake creators use accessible software: open-source tools like DeepFaceLab and FaceSwap dominate video face-swapping (one estimate suggests DeepFaceLab was used for over 95% of known deepfake videos)². Voice-cloning tools (often built on similar AI principles) can mimic a person’s speech from minutes of audio. Commercial platforms like Synthesia allow text-to-video avatars (turning typed scripts into lifelike “spokespeople”), which have already been misused in disinformation campaigns³. Even mobile apps (e.g. FaceApp, Zao) let users do basic face swaps in minutes⁴. In short, advances in GANs and related models make deepfakes cheaper and easier to generate than ever. Diagram of a generative adversarial network (GAN): A generator network creates fake images from random input and a discriminator network distinguishes fakes from real examples. Over time the generator improves until its outputs “fool” the discriminator⁵ During creation, a deepfake algorithm is typically trained on a large dataset of real images or audio from the target. The more varied and high-quality the training data, the more realistic the deepfake. The output often then undergoes post-processing (color adjustments, lip-syncing refinements) to enhance believability¹. Technical defenses focus on two fronts: detection and authentication. Detection uses AI models to spot inconsistencies (blinking irregularities, audio artifacts or metadata mismatches) that betray a synthetic origin⁵. Authentication embeds markers before dissemination – for example, invisible watermarks or cryptographically signed metadata indicating authenticity⁶. The EU AI Act will soon mandate that major AI content providers embed machine-readable “watermark” signals in synthetic media⁷. However, as GAO notes, detection is an arms race – even a marked deepfake can sometimes evade notice – and labels alone don’t stop false narratives from spreading⁸⁹. Deepfakes in Recent Elections: Examples Deepfakes and AI-generated imagery already have made headlines in election cycles around the world. In the 2024 U.S. primary season, a digitally-altered audio robocall mimicked President Biden’s voice urging Democrats not to vote in the New Hampshire primary. The caller (“Susan Anderson”) was later fined $6 million by the FCC and indicted under existing telemarketing laws¹⁰¹¹. (Importantly, FCC rules on robocalls applied regardless of AI: the perpetrator could have used a voice actor or recording instead.) Also in 2024, former President Trump posted on social media a collage implying that pop singer Taylor Swift endorsed his campaign, using AI-generated images of Swift in “Swifties for Trump” shirts¹². The posts sparked media uproar, though analysts noted the same effect could have been achieved without AI (e.g., by photoshopping text on real images)¹². Similarly, Elon Musk’s X platform carried AI-generated clips, including a parody “Ad” depicting Vice-President Harris’s voice via an AI clone¹³. Beyond the U.S., deepfake-like content has appeared globally. In Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election, a video surfaced on social media in which a convincingly generated image of the late President Suharto appeared to endorse the candidate of the Golkar Party. Days later, the endorsed candidate (who is Suharto’s son-in-law) won the presidency¹⁴. In Bangladesh, a viral deepfake video superimposed the face of opposition leader Rumeen Farhana onto a bikini-clad body – an incendiary fabrication designed to discredit her in the conservative Muslim-majority society¹⁵. Moldova’s pro-Western President Maia Sandu has been repeatedly targeted by AI-driven disinformation; one deepfake video falsely showed her resigning and endorsing a Russian-friendly party, apparently to sow distrust in the electoral process¹⁶. Even in Taiwan (amidst tensions with China), a TikTok clip circulated that synthetically portrayed a U.S. politician making foreign-policy statements – stoking confusion ahead of Taiwanese elections¹⁷. In Slovakia’s recent campaign, AI-generated audio mimicking the liberal party leader suggested he plotted vote-rigging and beer-price hikes – instantly spreading on social media just days before the election¹⁸. These examples show that deepfakes have touched diverse polities (from Bangladesh and Indonesia to Moldova, Slovakia, India and beyond), often aiming to undermine candidates or confuse voters¹⁵¹⁸. Notably, many of the most viral “deepfakes” in 2024 were actually circulated as obvious memes or claims, rather than subtle deceptions. Experts observed that outright undetectable AI deepfakes were relatively rare; more common were AI-generated memes plainly shared by partisans, or cheaply doctored “cheapfakes” made with basic editing tools¹³¹⁹. For instance, social media was awash with memes of Kamala Harris in Soviet garb or of Black Americans holding Trump signs¹³, but these were typically used satirically, not meant to be secretly believed. Nonetheless, even unsophisticated fakes can sway opinion: a U.S. study found that false presidential ads (not necessarily AI-made) did change voter attitudes in swing states. In sum, deepfakes are a real and growing phenomenon in election campaigns²⁰²¹ worldwide – a trend taken seriously by voters and regulators alike. U.S. Legal Framework and Accountability In the U.S., deepfake creators and distributors of election misinformation face a patchwork of tools, but no single comprehensive federal “deepfake law.” Existing laws relevant to disinformation include statutes against impersonating government officials, electioneering (such as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which requires disclaimers on political ads), and targeted statutes like criminal electioneering communications. In some cases ordinary laws have been stretched: the NH robocall used the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and mail/telemarketing fraud provisions, resulting in the $6M fine and a criminal charge. Similarly, voice impostors can potentially violate laws against “false advertising” or “unlawful corporate communications.” However, these laws were enacted before AI, and litigators have warned they often do not fit neatly. For example, deceptive deepfake claims not tied to a specific victim do not easily fit into defamation or privacy torts. Voter intimidation laws (prohibiting threats or coercion) also leave a gap for non-threatening falsehoods about voting logistics or endorsements. Recognizing these gaps, some courts and agencies are invoking other theories. The U.S. Department of Justice has recently charged individuals under broad fraud statutes (e.g. for a plot to impersonate an aide to swing votes in 2020), and state attorneys general have considered deepfake misinformation as interference with voting rights. Notably, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is preparing to enforce new rules: in April 2024 it issued an advisory opinion limiting “non-candidate electioneering communications” that use falsified media, effectively requiring that political ads use only real images of the candidate. If finalized, that would make it unlawful for campaigns to pay for ads depicting a candidate saying things they never did. Similarly, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) have signaled that purely commercial deepfakes could violate consumer protection or election laws (for example, liability for mass false impersonation or for foreign-funded electioneering). U.S. Legislation and Proposals Federal lawmakers have proposed new statutes. The DEEPFAKES Accountability Act (H.R.5586 in the 118th Congress) would, among other things, impose a disclosure requirement: political ads featuring a manipulated media likeness would need clear disclaimers identifying the content as synthetic. It also increases penalties for producing false election videos or audio intended to influence the vote. While not yet enacted, supporters argue it would provide a uniform rule for all federal and state campaigns. The Brennan Center supports transparency requirements over outright bans, suggesting laws should narrowly target deceptive deepfakes in paid ads or certain categories (e.g. false claims about time/place/manner of voting) while carving out parody and news coverage. At the state level, over 20 states have passed deepfake laws specifically for elections. For example, Florida and California forbid distributing falsified audio/visual media of candidates with intent to deceive voters (though Florida’s law exempts parody). Some states (like Texas) define “deepfake” in statutes and allow candidates to sue or revoke candidacies of violators. These measures have had mixed success: courts have struck down overly broad provisions that acted as prior restraints (e.g. Minnesota’s 2023 law was challenged for threatening injunctions against anyone “reasonably believed” to violate it). Critically, these state laws raise First Amendment issues: political speech is highly protected, so any restriction must be tightly tailored. Already, Texas and Virginia statutes are under legal review, and Elon Musk’s company has sued under California’s law (which requires platforms to label or block deepfakes) as unconstitutional. In practice, most lawsuits have so far centered on defamation or intellectual property (for instance, a celebrity suing over a botched celebrity-deepfake video), rather than election-focused statutes. Policy Recommendations: Balancing Integrity and Speech Given the rapidly evolving technology, experts recommend a multi-pronged approach. Most stress transparency and disclosure as core principles. For example, the Brennan Center urges requiring any political communication that uses AI-synthesized images or voice to include a clear label. This could be a digital watermark or a visible disclaimer. Transparency has two advantages: it forces campaigns and platforms to “own” the use of AI, and it alerts audiences to treat the content with skepticism. Outright bans on all deepfakes would likely violate free speech, but targeted bans on specific harms (e.g. automated phone calls impersonating voters, or videos claiming false polling information) may be defensible. Indeed, Florida already penalizes misuse of recordings in voter suppression. Another recommendation is limited liability: tying penalties to demonstrable intent to mislead, not to the mere act of content creation. Both U.S. federal proposals and EU law generally condition fines on the “appearance of fraud” or deception. Technical solutions can complement laws. Watermarking original media (as encouraged by the EU AI Act) could deter the reuse of authentic images in doctored fakes. Open tools for deepfake detection – some supported by government research grants – should be deployed by fact-checkers and social platforms. Making detection datasets publicly available (e.g. the MIT OpenDATATEST) helps improve AI models to spot fakes. International cooperation is also urged: cross-border agreements on information-sharing could help trace and halt disinformation campaigns. The G7 and APEC have all recently committed to fighting election interference via AI, which may lead to joint norms or rapid response teams. Ultimately, many analysts believe the strongest “cure” is a well-informed public: education campaigns to teach voters to question sensational media, and a robust independent press to debunk falsehoods swiftly. While the law can penalize the worst offenders, awareness and resilience in the electorate are crucial buffers against influence operations. As Georgia Tech’s Sean Parker quipped in 2019, “the real question is not if deepfakes will influence elections, but who will be empowered by the first effective one.” Thus policies should aim to deter malicious use without unduly chilling innovation or satire. References: https://www.security.org/resources/deepfake-statistics/. https://www.wired.com/story/synthesia-ai-deepfakes-it-control-riparbelli/. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107292. https://technologyquotient.freshfields.com/post/102jb19/eu-ai-act-unpacked-8-new-rules-on-deepfakes. https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/we-looked-at-78-election-deepfakes-political-misinformation-is-not-an-ai-problem. https://www.npr.org/2024/12/21/nx-s1-5220301/deepfakes-memes-artificial-intelligence-elections. https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-elections-disinformation-chatgpt-bc283e7426402f0b4baa7df280a4c3fd. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/new-and-old-tools-to-tackle-deepfakes-and-election-lies-in-2024. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/regulating-ai-deepfakes-and-synthetic-media-political-arena. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/political-deepfakes-and-elections/. https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/deceptive-audio-or-visual-media-deepfakes-2024-legislation. https://law.unh.edu/sites/default/files/media/2022/06/nagumotu_pp113-157.pdf. https://dfrlab.org/2024/10/02/brazil-election-ai-research/. https://dfrlab.org/2024/11/26/brazil-election-ai-deepfakes/. https://freedomhouse.org/article/eu-digital-services-act-win-transparency. The post The Legal Accountability of AI-Generated Deepfakes in Election Misinformation appeared first on MarkTechPost.

New York City’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is falling apart. Built between 1946 and 1964, the urban highway runs 12.1 miles through the heart of the two boroughs to connect on either end with the interstate highway system—a relic of midcentury car-oriented infrastructure, and a prime example of the dwindling lifespan of roads built during that time.  The degradation is most visible—and most pressing—in a section running alongside Brooklyn Heights known as the triple cantilever. This 0.4-mile section, completed in 1954, is unique among U.S. highways in that it juts out from the side of a hill and stacks the two directions of traffic on balcony-like decks, one slightly overhanging the other. A third level holds a well-loved park, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.  This unusual layer cake of a freeway was a marvel of engineering in its day, though not without controversy. Masterminded by Robert Moses, the city’s all-powerful, often ruthless city planner for more than four decades, the roadway bisects working-class and immigrant neighborhoods that grapple with the health and environmental fallout to this day. Like the reputation of the man who built it, the triple cantilever has aged poorly. Its narrow width, (33.5 feet for the roadway in either direction) has made all but the most basic maintenance incredibly difficult, and its 71-year-old structure is constantly battered by the ever heavier automobiles and trucks. Designed to accommodate around 47,000 vehicles per day, it now carries more than three times that amount. Deteriorating deck joints and failing steel-reinforced concrete have led many to worry the triple cantilever is on the verge of collapse. An expert panel warned in 2020 that the triple cantilever could be unusable by 2026, and only then did interim repairs get made to keep it standing. [Photo: Alex Potemkin/Getty Images] The mounting concern comes amid a 50-year decline in direct government spending on infrastructure in the U.S., according to a recent analysis by Citigroup. Simply maintaining existing infrastructure is a challenge, the report notes. Meanwhile, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ grade for the country’s infrastructure has improved, from a D+ in 2017 to a C in 2025. Now even private credit firms are circling: As reported in Bloomberg, Apollo Global Management estimates that a boom in infrastructure deals help could grow the private debt market up to a staggering $40 trillion.   Independent urban designer Marc Wouters has an idea on how to fix BQE’s cantilever. He’s been working on it for years. “My process is that I always interview people in the community before I do any drawings,” he says. “So I really have listened to pretty much everybody over the past few years.” Unsolicited and developed in his own spare time, Wouters has designed an alternative for the triple cantilever that he named the BQE Streamline Plan. BQE Streamline Plan [Image: courtesy Marc Wouters | Studios/©2025] His concept, based on decades of experience in urban planning, infrastructure, and resilience projects in communities across the country, is relatively simple: extend the width of the two traffic-bearing cantilevers and add support beams to their outside edge, move both directions of traffic onto four lanes on the first level, and turn the second level into a large freeway cap park. Instead of major rebuilding efforts, Wouters’s proposal is more of a reinforcement and expansion, with a High Line-style park plopped on top. Though he’s not an engineer, Wouters is confident that his design would shift enough strain off the existing structure to allow it to continue functioning for the foreseeable future. (What actual engineers think remains to be seen.) “What I’ve done is come up with a plan that happens to be much less invasive, faster to build, a lot cheaper, and it encompasses a lot of what the community wants,” he says. “Yet it still handles the same capacity as the highway does right now.” So what will it take for this outsider’s idea to be considered a viable design alternative? This idea had been brewing in his mind for years. Wouters, who lives near the triple cantilever section of the BQE in Brooklyn Heights, has followed the highway’s planning process for more than a decade.  As complex infrastructure projects go, this one is particularly convoluted. The BQE is overseen by both the state of New York and New York City, among others, with the city in charge of the 1.5-mile section that includes the triple cantilever. This dual ownership has complicated the management of the highway and its funding. The city and the state have launched several efforts over the years to reimagine the highway’s entire length. In winter 2018, the city’s Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) released two proposals to address the ailing cantilever. Not seeing what they wanted from either one, Brooklyn Heights Association, a nonprofit neighborhood group, retained Wouters and his studio to develop an alternative design. He suggested building a temporary parallel bypass that would allow a full closure and repair of the triple cantilever. That proposal, along with competing ideas developed under the previous mayoral administration, went by the wayside in 2022, when the latest BQE redesign process commenced. Wouters found himself following yet another community feedback and planning process for the triple cantilever. The ideas being proposed by the city’s DOT this time around included a plan that would chew into the hillside that currently supports the triple cantilever to move the first tier of traffic directly underneath the second, and add a large girding structure on its open end to hold it all up. Other options included reshaping the retaining wall that currently holds up the triple cantilever, moving traffic below grade into a wide tunnel, or tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding from scratch. Each would be time-consuming and disruptive, and many of them cut into another well-loved public space immediately adjacent to the triple cantilever, Brooklyn Bridge Park. None of these options has anything close to unanimous support. And any of them will cost more than $1 billion—a price tag that hits much harder after the Federal Highway Administration rejected an $800 million grant proposal for fixing the BQE back in early 2024. BQE Streamline Plan [Image: courtesy Marc Wouters | Studios/©2025] Wouters is no highway zealot. In fact, he’s worked on a project heading into construction in Syracuse that will replace an underutilized inner-city highway with a more appropriately sized boulevard and developable land. But he felt sure there was a better way forward—a concept that would work as well in practice as on paper. “I just kept going to meetings and waiting to see what I thought was a progressive solution,” Wouters says. Unimpressed and frustrated, he set out to design it himself. Wouters released the Streamline Plan in March. The concept quickly gathered interest, receiving a flurry of local news coverage. He has since met with various elected officials to discuss it. But as elegant as Wouters’s concept may be, some stakeholders remain unconvinced that the city should be going all in on a reinterpretation of the triple cantilever. What might be more appropriate, critics say, is to make necessary fixes now to keep the triple cantilever safe and functional, and to spend more time thinking about whether this section of highway is even what the city needs in the long term. A group of local organizations is calling for a more comprehensive reconsideration of the BQE under the premise that its harms may be outnumbering its benefits. Launched last spring, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Environmental Justice Coalition wants any planning for the future of the BQE to include efforts to address its health and environmental impacts on neighboring communities and to seek an alternative that reconnects communities that have been divided by the corridor. One member of this coalition is the Riders Alliance, a nonprofit focused on improving public transit in New York. Danny Pearlstein, the group’s policy and communications director, says implementing a major redesign of the triple cantilever would just reinforce car dependency in a place that’s actually well served by public transit. The environmental justice coalition’s worry is that rebuilding this one section in a long-term fashion could make it harder for change across the length of the entire BQE and could increase the environmental impact the highway has on the communities that surround it. “This is not just one neighborhood. This is communities up and down the corridor that don’t resemble each other very much in income or background who are united and are standing together for something that’s transformative, rather than doubling down on the old ways,” Pearlstein says. [Photo: ©NYC DOT] Lara Birnback is executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, representing a neighborhood of roughly 20,000 people. Her organization, which worked directly with Wouters in the past, is circumspect about his latest concept. “It’s certainly more interesting and responsive to the kinds of things that the community has been asking for when thinking about the BQE. It’s more of those things than we’ve seen from any of the designs that New York City DOT has presented to us through their engagement process,” she says. “But at the end of the day, it’s still a way of preserving more or less the status quo of the BQE as a major interstate highway running through the borough.” She argues it makes more sense to patch up the triple cantilever and use the extra years of service that buys to do a more radical rethinking of the BQE’s future. (For example, one 2020 proposal by the Brooklyn-based architecture studio Light and Air proposed a simple intervention of installing buttresses on the open-air side of the triple cantilever, propping it up with a relatively small addition of material.) “We really strongly encourage the city to move forward immediately with a more short-term stabilization plan for the cantilever, with repairs that would last, for example, 20 to 25 years rather than spending billions and billions of dollars rebuilding it for the next 100 years,” Birnback says. Birnback says a major rebuilding plan like the one Wouters is proposing—for all its community benefits—could end up doing more harm to the city. “I think going forward now with a plan that both embeds the status quo and most likely forecloses on the possibility of real transformation across the corridor is a mistake,” she says. NYC DOT expects to begin its formal environmental review process this year, laying the necessary groundwork for deciding on a plan for what to do with the triple cantilever, either for the short term or the long term. The environmental process will evaluate all concepts equally, according to DOT spokesperson Vincent Barone, who notes that the department is required to review and respond to all feedback that comes in through that process. There is technically nothing holding back Wouters’s proposal from being one of the alternatives considered. And he may have some important political support to help make that happen. Earlier this month, Brooklyn’s Community District 2 board formally supported the plan. They are calling for the city’s transportation department to include it in the BQE’s formal environmental review process when it starts later this year. [Photo: Sinisa Kukic/Getty Images] Wouters argues that his proposal solves the pressing structural problems of the triple cantilever while also opening resources to deal with the highway’s big picture challenges. “The several hundred million dollars of savings is now funding that could go to other parts of the BQE. And there are other parts that are really struggling,” he says. “I’m always thinking about the whole length and about all these other communities, not just this one.” With a new presidential administration and a mayoral primary election in June, what happens with the triple cantilever is very much up in the air. But if the environmental review process begins as planned this year, it only makes sense for every option to fall under consideration. What gets built—or torn down, or reconstructed, or reinterpreted—could reshape part of New York City for generations.

Ivanka Trump has made it clear that she's done with politics. That hasn't stopped her and husband Jared Kushner from remaining an influential political couple.They have not formally reprised their roles as White House advisors in President Donald Trump's second administration, but they've remained present in Donald Trump's political orbit.While Ivanka Trump opted out of the 2024 campaign trail, she and Kushner still appeared at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump's victory party on election night, and the inauguration. Kushner also reportedly served as an informal advisor ahead of Donald Trump's trip to the Middle East in May, CNN reported.Ivanka Trump, who is Donald Trump's eldest daughter, converted to Judaism before marrying Kushner in 2009. They have three children: Arabella, Joseph, and Theodore.Here's a timeline of Ivanka Trump and Kushner's relationship. 2007: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner met at a networking lunch arranged by one of her longtime business partners. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in 2007. PAUL LAURIE/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Ivanka Trump and Kushner were both 25 at the time."They very innocently set us up thinking that our only interest in one another would be transactional," Ivanka Trump told Vogue in 2015. "Whenever we see them we're like, 'The best deal we ever made!'" 2008: Ivanka Trump and Kushner broke up because of religious differences. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in 2008. Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Kushner was raised in the modern Orthodox Jewish tradition, and it was important to his family for him to marry someone Jewish. Ivanka Trump's family is Presbyterian. 2008: Three months later, the couple rekindled their romance on Rupert Murdoch's yacht. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in 2008. David X Prutting/Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images In his memoir, "Breaking History," Kushner wrote that Murdoch's then-wife, Wendi Murdoch, was a mutual friend who invited them both on the yacht. May 2009: They attended the Met Gala together for the first time. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump at the Met Gala. BILLY FARRELL/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images The theme of the Met Gala that year was "The Model As Muse." Ivanka Trump wore a gown by designer Brian Reyes. July 2009: Ivanka Trump completed her conversion to Judaism, and she and Kushner got engaged. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in 2009. Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Kushner proposed with a 5.22-carat cushion-cut diamond engagement ring.Ivanka Trump told New York Magazine that she and her fiancé were "very mellow.""We go to the park. We go biking together. We go to the 2nd Avenue Deli," she said. "We both live in this fancy world. But on a personal level, I don't think I could be with somebody — I know he couldn't be with somebody — who needed to be 'on' all the time." October 2009: Ivanka Trump and Kushner married at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on their wedding day. Brian Marcus/Fred Marcus Photography via Getty Images The couple invited 500 guests, including celebrities like Barbara Walters, Regis Philbin, and Anna Wintour, as well as politicians such as Rudy Giuliani and Andrew Cuomo. July 2011: The couple welcomed their first child, Arabella. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner with Arabella Kushner. Robin Marchant/Getty Images "This morning @jaredkushner and I welcomed a beautiful and healthy little baby girl into the world," Ivanka announced on X, then Twitter. "We feel incredibly grateful and blessed. Thank you all for your support and well wishes!" October 2013: Ivanka Trump gave birth to their second child, Joseph. Ivanka Trump with Arabella Rose Kushner and Joseph Frederick Kushner in 2017. Alo Ceballos/GC Images He was named for Kushner's paternal grandfather Joseph and given the middle name Frederick after Donald Trump's father. March 2016: Kushner and Ivanka Trump welcomed their third child, Theodore, in the midst of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Ivanka Trump carried her son Theodore as she held hands with Joseph alongside Jared Kushner and daughter Arabella on the White House lawn. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images "I said, 'Ivanka, it would be great if you had your baby in Iowa.' I really want that to happen. I really want that to happen," Donald Trump told supporters in Iowa in January 2016.All three of the couple's children were born in New York City. May 2016: They attended the Met Gala two months after Ivanka Trump gave birth. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump attend the Met Gala. Kevin Mazur/WireImage Ivanka Trump wore a red Ralph Lauren Collection halter jumpsuit.On a 2017 episode of "The Late Late Show with James Corden," Anna Wintour said that she would never invite Donald Trump to another Met Gala. January 2017: Ivanka Trump and Kushner attended Donald Trump's inauguration and danced together at the Liberty Ball. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner on Inauguration Day. Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images The Liberty Ball was the first of three inaugural balls that Donald Trump attended. January 2017: After the inauguration, Ivanka and Kushner relocated to a $5.5 million home in the Kalorama section of Washington, DC. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's house in Washington, DC. PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images Ivanka Trump and Kushner rented the 7,000-square-foot home from billionaire Andrónico Luksic for $15,000 a month, The Wall Street Journal reported. May 2017: They accompanied Donald Trump on his first overseas trip in office. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump with Pope Francis. Vatican Pool - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images Kushner and Ivanka Trump both served as advisors to the president. For the first overseas trip of Donald Trump's presidency, they accompanied him to Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, and summits in Brussels and Sicily. October 2019: The couple celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary with a lavish party at Camp David. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner at a state dinner. MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images All of the Trump and Kushner siblings were in attendance. A White House official told CNN that the couple was covering the cost of the party, but Donald Trump tweeted that the cost would be "totally paid for by me!" August 2020: Ivanka Trump spoke about moving their family to Washington, DC, at the Republican National Convention. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump at the Republican National Convention. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images "When Jared and I moved with our three children to Washington, we didn't exactly know what we were in for," she said in her speech. "But our kids loved it from the start." December 2020: Ivanka Trump and Kushner reportedly bought a $32 million empty lot in Miami's "Billionaire Bunker." Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's plot of land in Indian Creek Village. The Jills Zeder Group; Samir Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Page Six reported that the couple purchased a 1.8-acre waterfront lot owned by singer Julio Iglesias, Enrique Iglesias' father, in Indian Creek Village, Florida.The island where it sits has the nickname "Billionaire Bunker" thanks to its multitude of ultra-wealthy residents over the years, including billionaire investor Carl Icahn, supermodel Adriana Lima, and former Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula. January 2021: They skipped Joe Biden's inauguration, flying with Donald Trump to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, instead. Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and their children prepared for Donald Trump's departure on Inauguration Day. ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump did not attend Biden's inauguration, breaking a long-standing norm in US democracy. While initial reports said that Ivanka Trump was planning to attend the inauguration, a White House official told People magazine that "Ivanka is not expected to attend the inauguration nor was she ever expected to." January 2021: The couple signed a lease for a luxury Miami Beach condo near their Indian Creek Village property. Arte Surfside. Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel Ivanka Trump and Kushner signed a lease for a "large, unfurnished unit" in the amenities-packed Arte Surfside condominium building in Surfside, Florida.Surfside, a beachside town just north of Miami Beach that's home to fewer than 6,000 people, is only a five-minute drive from Indian Creek Island, where they bought their $32 million empty lot. April 2021: Ivanka Trump and Kushner reportedly added a $24 million mansion in Indian Creek Village to their Florida real-estate profile. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner on a walk in Florida. MEGA/GC Images The Real Deal reported that Ivanka and Kushner purchased another Indian Creek property — this time, a 8,510-square-foot mansion situated on a 1.3-acre estate. June 2021: Several outlets reported that the couple began to distance themselves from Donald Trump due to his fixation on conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner behind Donald Trump. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters CNN reported that Trump was prone to complain about the 2020 election and falsely claim it was "stolen" from him to anyone listening and that his "frustrations emerge in fits and starts — more likely when he is discussing his hopeful return to national politics."While Ivanka and Kushner had been living in their Miami Beach condo, not far from Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, they'd visited Trump less and less frequently and were absent from big events at Mar-a-Lago, CNN said.The New York Times also reported that Kushner wanted "to focus on writing his book and establishing a simpler relationship" with the former president. October 2021: Ivanka Trump and Kushner visited Israel's parliament for the inaugural event of the Abraham Accords Caucus. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in Israel. AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images The Abraham Accords, which Kushner helped broker in August 2020, normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.During their visit, Ivanka Trump and Kushner met with then-former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attended an event at the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. August 2022: Kushner released his memoir, "Breaking History," in which he wrote about their courtship. Jared Kushner. John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Summit "In addition to being arrestingly beautiful, which I knew before we met, she was warm, funny, and brilliant," he wrote of getting to know Ivanka Trump. "She has a big heart and a tremendous zest for exploring new things."He also wrote that when he told Donald Trump that he was planning a surprise engagement, Trump "picked up the intercom and alerted Ivanka that she should expect an imminent proposal." November 2022: Kushner attended Donald Trump's 2024 campaign announcement without Ivanka Trump. Kimberly Guilfoyle, Jared Kushner, Eric Trump, and Lara Trump at Donald Trump's presidential campaign announcement. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Ivanka Trump released a statement explaining her absence from the event."I love my father very much," her statement read. "This time around, I am choosing to prioritize my children and the private life we are creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics. While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena." July 2024: Ivanka Trump and Kushner made a rare political appearance at the Republican National Convention. Donald Trump and Melania Trump onstage with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Ivanka Trump did not campaign for her father or give a speech as she had at past Republican National Conventions, but she and Jared Kushner joined Trump family members onstage after Donald Trump's remarks. November 2024: They joined members of the Trump family in Palm Beach, Florida, to celebrate Donald Trump's election victory.

It’s no surprise that many big, left-leaning social media accounts have recently joined Bluesky — but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center attempts to quantify that shift. This comes as an update to Pew’s news influencer report released in November 2024, which did not include Bluesky in its numbers. The report focused on a relatively small group of 500 influencers, all of whom have more than 100,000 followers on at least one major platform and post regularly about current events. For this Bluesky-centric update, Pew looked at those same influencers (as opposed to accounts that may have found a big audience on Bluesky exclusively) and saw that in February/March, 43% of them had an account on Bluesky. Just over half (51%) of those accounts were created after the 2024 presidential election. There’s a big divide between influencers on the right and the left, with 69% of the left-leaning accounts (the ones that explicitly identified as liberals or Democrats and expressed support for Kamala Harris or Joe Biden before the presidential election) making the jump to Bluesky, while only 15% of the conservative ones did the same. This movement wasn’t necessarily at the expense of X (formerly Twitter). While X owner Elon Musk’s alliance with now-President Donald Trump seemed to drive new users to Bluesky, 82% of the influencers tracked by Pew still had an account on X, down only slightly from 85% in summer 2025. In other words, even if left-leaning influencers are dipping their toes into Bluesky, most of them (87%) haven’t abandoned X. Pew also says most influencers continue to post more regularly on X than on Bluesky. However, Bluesky activity does appear to be picking up — the number of influencers on Bluesky who are actually posting grew from 54% in the first week of January to 66% in the last full week of March. Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW

Floyd Mayweather and Donald Trump, HBO Boxing Icon says, "No Mayweather, No Trump"Credit: Getty North America - Mayweather (Allen Berezovsky / Contributor) Trump - (Kevin Dietsch / Staff) “No Mayweather, no Trump.” That’s the heavy-duty take HBO Boxing icon Jim Lampley dropped on me during our conversation on Friday afternoon. It’s one of the most polarizing, but plausible things anyone has said to me in a while. In case you’re a relatively young sports fan or someone who didn’t pay much attention to HBO Boxing during the 1990s and early 2000s, you may not know Lampley. Without listing every accolade and distinction, I’ll say this: there are people in every industry who have a combination of experience and wherewithal that enables them to captivate a room with the stories and takes they’ve accumulated during their journey through levels of their craft and the years of their life. Lampley is one of those people.CANASTOTA, NY - JUNE 14: Boxing commentator Jim Lampley poses with his new ring and photo on the ... More wall after the induction ceremony at the International Boxing Hall of Fame induction Weekend of Champions events on June 14, 2015 in Canastota, New York. (Photo by Alex Menendez/Getty Images)Getty Images During our interview, we discussed his book, It Happened, his autobiography that tells the story of his 50-year career in sports broadcasting and tons of boxing stories and concepts. I asked him about the infamous post-fight moment with his longtime broadcast partner Larry Merchant—you know the one, where Mayweather snapped, “you don’t know s### about boxing,” and Merchant fired back, “if I was 50 years younger, I’d kick your a##.” It’s classic. I wanted to know from Lampley, who was there, what the deal was with Mayweather and Merchant, but I got so much more. Lampley explained, “Well, obviously it was something that built up over a long period of time. I think that Larry gave him proper credit for being a great fighter. In particular, he didn't like that Larry would sometimes say something to the effect of, well, he's great and you can't beat him, but he isn't gonna sell a single ticket with this style, that kind of thing.” Clearly, Merchant was wrong about Mayweather’s ability to sell tickets. No fighter has made more in pay-per-view revenue, and Mayweather can still command a crowd and a payday by participating in boxing exhibitions. Also, if you watch the history of post-fight interviews between Mayweather and Merchant, the latter is particularly abrupt and a little antagonistic toward the fighter. Even during the aforementioned interview, the conversation starts off with Mayweather having his arm around Merchant. However, Merchant’s tone and verbiage was off-putting to Mayweather as it came just moments after the controversial ending to his fight with Victor Ortiz, but I digress. That aspect of Lampley’s answer was mostly what I expected to hear. The broadcast journalism legend delivered a punchier concept as he delved deeper into Mayweather’s dynamic and his overall influence on American culture.NEW YORK, NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 26: Floyd Mayweather Jr. visits "Making Money With Charles Payne" at ... More Fox Business Network Studios on February 26, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images)Getty Images “One of the things I say, have said over and over and will continue to say until proven otherwise, no Mayweather, no Trump,” Lampley said. Trump is a boxing fan, Trump watched what Floyd did. Trump realized from what Floyd did that you could build and develop a social media audience and you could do it with negativity. You didn’t have to be happy talk. You didn't have to be a great guy. There were some people who would rather that someone was channeling their angst and their frustration and venting it on the web. And I believe to this day, no Mayweather, no Trump.” The concept is wild, but not completely unfathomable. I used to say this about Mayweather, ‘it takes a special kind of person to be at peace with being the most hated person in a room.’ In that sense, it’s easy to see tons of people in every industry who have adopted that approach–whether they got it from Mayweather or someone else.DETROIT, MICHIGAN - OCTOBER 18: Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, ... More brings boxing legend Thomas Hearns to the stage during a campaign rally on October 18, 2024, in Detroit, Michigan. There are 17 days remaining until the U.S. presidential election, which will take place on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)Getty Images Donald Trump’s involvement with boxing dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Trump Plaza in Atlantic City became a key venue for major fights. At its peak, the hotel and casino played host to several heavyweight title bouts, including, Mike Tyson vs. Michael Spinks in 1988 and Evander Holyfield vs. George Foreman in 1991. Trump didn’t just rent out space for the fights—he appeared to actively positioned himself as a central figure in these events, often appearing ringside, hosting press conferences, and getting photographed with the fighters.ATLANTIC CITY, NJ - JANUARY 22: Businessman Donald Trump in ring with boxer Mike Tyson after ... More knocking out opponent Larry Holmes at Tyson vs Holmes Convention Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey January 22 1988. (Photo by Jeffrey Asher/ Getty Images)Getty Images Some may argue Trump used these moments to build prestige, associate himself with dominance and success, and to thrust himself into the spotlight. Needless to say, it seems to have worked.ATLANTIC CITY, NJ - JANUARY 22: Businessman Donald Trump and Champion Boxer Evander Holyfield at ... More Tyson vs Holmes Convention Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey January 22 1988. (Photo by Jeffrey Asher/ Getty Images)Getty Images Putting a bow on the Mayweather-Merchant beef: “So Floyd was the original social media genius and the essence of the genius was to prove that you could be negative rather than positive and you would build an audience that way,” Lampley continued. “And so Floyd didn’t like the honest straightforward evaluations that Larry offered on the air and most particularly about his style of fighting that he was a hide-and-seek fighter, that he was not trying to do damage in there, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought that was palpably visible. Floyd just didn’t want anybody to say it. So they didn't like each other and it was really more Floyd disliking Larry than vice versa." Mayweather’s rise to global prominence began in the mid-2000s. Specifically, his bet-on-myself fight against Oscar De La Hoya in 2007. The fight marked Mayweather’s triumphant separation from Top Rank Boxing and it also was the cornerstone moment of his shift from “Pretty Boy” to “Money.” Mayweather and Trump’s paths would more publicly cross years later. In Mayweather may have used social media to push negative concepts in the past. However, to his credit, I interviewed him earlier this year, and he formally apologized for every time he used social media to be toxic. That admission actually adds some credence to Lampley’s concept. I’ve never had an opportunity to speak to President Trump, but I can promise you, if I do, I will ask him if he learned anything from his encounters with Mayweather. Whether Trump truly studied Mayweather’s moves or simply mirrored them instinctively, the similarities are clear—and Lampley might be one of the only people to call it out this directly.

Elon Musk's Tesla registrations suffered a drop in Québec. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images 2025-05-30T11:35:36Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Tesla sales in Québec plunged 85% in the first quarter, mirroring sharp declines seen in Europe. Canada has frozen $43 million in Tesla EV rebates due to Trump's tariffs and fraud concerns. Musk's DOGE work sparked backlash, boycotts, and dealership vandalism across the US and Europe. Tesla's sales woes have reached Canada.Data from the vehicle registration authority in the province of Québec shows a dramatic decline in Tesla registrations in the first quarter of 2025.Only 524 new Tesla vehicles were registered in Québec between January and March 2025, down over 85% from the 5,097 units logged in the final months of 2024.The company's top-selling Model Y saw the steepest drop in terms of pure numbers, falling from 3,274 units in the final quarter of 2024 to 360 in the first quarter of 2025. The Model 3, Tesla's cheapest car, plunged from 1,786 to just 96 units over the same period, a fall of 94%.While the drop is precipitous, it should be noted that auto sales are generally lower in the first quarter of the year than later in the year.Though confined to one region of Canada, the collapse mirrors similar issues in Europe, where Tesla sales fell by nearly 50% in April despite overall EV demand continuing to grow.In Québec, as in Europe, demand for electric vehicles remains strong, suggesting that Tesla's slump is less about market conditions and more about the brand itself.Rebate freeze and trade tensionsSeveral factors appear to be converging.Tesla has been excluded from Canada's federal EV rebate program, with $43 million in rebates frozen and each individual claim now under review.Transport Minister Chrystia Freeland ordered the freeze in March following a last-minute surge in Tesla rebate applications — from 300 a day to nearly 5,800 — which triggered a probe into possible abuse.Freeland also said that Tesla would remain ineligible for future incentives as long as President Donald Trump's 25% tariffs on Canadian goods are in place.In parallel, provinces, including British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, and Manitoba, have removed Tesla from their rebate programs.Political backlashTesla's registration drop in Québec also comes amid a broader global backlash, especially in Europe, against CEO Elon Musk, who has endorsed a number of European political parties, including Germany's far-right AfD party and Britain's populist Reform UK party. In North America, Musk's role leading the Department of Government Efficiency has led to protests, boycotts, and vandalism of Tesla dealerships across at least a dozen states.Musk said this week he was stepping away from DOGE after months of involvement as a "special government employee." Federal law stipulates that those with this title cannot serve for more than 130 days in a 365-day period.Tesla's shares, which had come under pressure during Musk's DOGE stint, began rebounding in April after he announced he would step back from government work and "spend 24/7 at work" on his companies.In a Q&A published by Ars Technica on Tuesday, he said he'd been too involved in politics since wading into the 2024 presidential race last year — a campaign he heavily financed to the tune of nearly $300 million.In a sit-down with Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum last week, he said he's no longer going to be spending big on politics, like he did in the 2024 election.Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Last month, Donald Trump pushed the boundaries of government and financial ethics by announcing a contest: whoever bought and held the highest amount of the $TRUMP meme coin for an entire month would win an invite to a private dinner with the President. That dinner took place on Thursday at the Trump National Golf Course in Virginia, with attendees reportedly dropping nearly $394 million on $TRUMP in order to win the privilege. According to an analysis by The Guardian of the winners’ wallets, over half of them lost money participating in this contest. But that’s only if you’re analyzing the wallets visible on the contest site’s leaderboard. The real money was being made elsewhere.“Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this”I interviewed an enthusiastic crypto trader who figured out how to win the contest without losing any money: buy enough $TRUMP to get onto the leaderboard — and then in a separate wallet on a separate exchange, buy $TRUMP perpetual futures that would be profitable if (or as he saw it, when) the value of $TRUMP dropped. Yes, he did The Big Short, except with Donald Trump’s meme coin. “Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this,” he told me before the contest ended. “Everyone knows $TRUMP price will fall inevitably as more supply comes online in the future and gets dumped on retail.” When I spoke to him again after the dinner, he told me that “the majority of people I spoke with, particularly the crypto traders and folks who are very close to the crypto ecosystem, are like, ‘Yeah, I dumped this. I already sold the coin.’” “A lot of people put on the same hedge trade as I did, because they didn’t wanna take risk on the coin,” he added.I can’t reveal his name, his position on the leaderboard, how much he spent, or the dates of specific trades he made. I can say that he did this for shits and giggles. But as he told me, when there’s such a clear and obvious set of financial incentives behind the $TRUMP dinner contest, it’s worth making the gamble.Did it pay off? “Um, I basically was flat,” he said. “I originally wanted to make some money, but I think the shorting I did — it was okay?” He did, however, get a free dinner out of it. The following interview has been edited for clarity.Let’s just start from the beginning. What made you want to enter this? I think meme coins have a lot of staying power because humans just want things to gamble on. What was fascinating when the Trump token launched in January right before the inauguration, was that it effectively was like a black hole that sucked money away from all these other tokens in the ecosystem. That’s why the Trump token ran up to some preposterous number immediately after it was dropped. When I saw this competition launch, it was clear that there was going to be a tremendous amount of grift in this space, and the presidential family was only interested in self-enrichment and all that. 
It was clear that there was going to be a tremendous amount of grift in this spaceBut putting that aside, I’ve just been interested in the Trump token and I think I’ve just been structurally bearish, because the Trump token has a bunch of supply that’s currently controlled by, effectively, the Trump family and the associates. It’s only a matter of time before the supply unlocks. When that supply unlocks, in the crypto community, people call this dumping: they’ll just dump it onto retail and that’s how they get their exit liquidity. So that’s one way the Trump family can make money. The other way is obviously whenever there’s trades that happen, the trading fees also accrue to the family. I know that the Trump token is going to go down. If you put a gun into my head and ask, what will the price be two years from now? It’s going to be much lower than where it is today. When this contest launched, I was like, okay, this is clearly a way for the affiliates and the Trump family to find a way to drive up the price temporarily. And having been in this space for a while, it’s clear that these events only drive the price up for a period of time and then people lose interest. Unless you feed them something else, it’s going to drop. Everyone expects the token to dumpThey launched the contest right around when the first tranche of Trump tokens were going to unlock, which was supposed to be 90 days after the launch of the token back in January. And so this whole contest was kind of timed at an apt moment where it’s like, okay, supply’s going to unlock. Everyone expects the token to dump. But then, on Twitter, they agreed to delay the unlock for another 90 days. But once the unlock happens and they start dumping, that’s when the price is going to drop a lot. 
So this contest was interesting. I was like, okay, well, I feel like I can put on a trade here where I’m not taking on any real risk and I think it’ll be cool to meet random people at this dinner and see who else is interested. It seems like there are a lot of folks from out of the country who are flying in to attend the dinner, and a lot of crypto whales. There’s one that I follow, he’s mentioned in his Telegram that he’s one of the big holders. He’s talked these last few days about how he’s preparing for this dinner. So talk me through how you generated the funds to buy the Trump coin. Did you use your own personal funds?I use my personal funds. All the crypto trading I do is with my personal funds. Some of the trading I do is on Coinbase through a centralized exchange. And the rest of the trading I do is on chain through self-custody wallets. When this opportunity came up, the only way you can actually be in a position to be in the top 220 is if you own $TRUMP tokens in a self-custody wallet. Some of the exchanges, including Coinbase, allow you to buy the $TRUMP token, but that would not count towards this contest. What I did was I moved stablecoins like USDC to my Solana wallet, and then I used a decentralized exchange to buy the $TRUMP token. The way the contest works is you have to register your wallet before you are counted towards the ranking system. And unfortunately, I did that like a couple days late, so I had to size up a little bit more to ensure that I could catch up to the people who had registered a couple days prior. But that’s a nuance. So explain the process of shorting $TRUMP coin on a secondary market. Like how does one do that? I am a dumb person who only understands shorting markets through watching The Big Short. Basically when you short, you’re hoping that the price goes down, right? And the mechanism of shorting here is slightly different than shorting stocks, but we don’t need to go into the specifics here. The way to short [crypto] is, you can do it in two ways. One is through a centralized exchange that offers, effectively, shorting services. And what I mean here by shorting services is, there is a “perpetual future” that is offered at these exchanges. When I talk about exchanges that offer this, it’s mostly going to be like Binance or Bybits and some of the bigger exchanges outside of the US. Coinbase is very far behind when it comes to offering derivative products that goes above and beyond just buying the token. I couldn’t do it through Coinbase, and I can’t short through an exchange like Binance, because there’s a lot of restrictions around who can actually use Binance. I’m in the US and Binance has very strict VPN rules. I can’t just open a Binance account and short. The only real way for me was to short on a decentralized exchangeSo the only real way for me was to short on a decentralized exchange, which has actually become really popular in the last year or so. It’s like the same concept as shorting on Binance, but you can do it on chain. I use a service called Hyper Liquid, which is a very popular decentralized exchange. And on this exchange, they offer derivative products that basically track the movement of different tokens. And so they offer, effectively, $TRUMP perpetual futures, and you can effectively initiate a short position through that. I’m happy to go into the details if you want, but that’s like the high level. Yeah, yes, please please tell me these details. So that is basically how to set up the short position. Conceptually, there’s a few things to keep in mind. First thing is: because I’m shorting in a separate wallet that’s completely detached from $TRUMP, 
I have to put up additional capital in another wallet to do this. It’s not like I can just use my $TRUMP tokens as collateral and use the same pool of money to short. And the way shorting works and the way perpetual futures work in general is you put up a certain margin. So let’s keep it simple: say I put up $100k in margin and I choose to short the $TRUMP token. Now, if $TRUMP goes up in price, then I’m hurting, because I’m betting on the token falling. If the $TRUMP token doubles in price, well, then I will have lost a hundred thousand dollars in which case, my margin gets wiped out and this [futures] contract will have to be closed because I’ve lost all my money. If the token goes down in price, that’s when I profit — as long as I close out the position in the green. So you basically are juggling two wallets. One is the wallet in which you’re holding all this $TRUMP coin. 
The other one is like, how would you describe it? Is that the money that you’re generating in order to pay for participating in the contest? The most important wallet here is the Solana wallet with the $TRUMP tokens, because that’s what’s being used by the contest organizers to determine who makes the top 220. But as I mentioned earlier, I am structurally bearish on the $TRUMP token and I wouldn’t want to go for dinner and like, see my money go down when the $TRUMP token goes down in price. I decided I wanted to basically put on a hedge, where, using the other wallet and the short position, I’m basically agnostic to any sort of price movement. That’s the reason why I set up the other wallet. I could have taken on the price risk, but that’s pretty risky, because typically what happens with these events is that as we get close to the end of the contest date, people start dumping the $TRUMP tokens. The value of the $TRUMP token will have gone down — let’s say it went down to 90,000 — it would be offset by the short wallet, which would be like 110,000. And then they add up to 200,000, which is how much I hypothetically put in from the start. 
Did you make money off of this?Um, I basically was flat. I originally wanted to make some money, but I think the shorting I did — it was okay? I basically just broke even on this entire tradeLet me take a step back.
So initially I shorted the same amount as the token. But then as the time went on, as we got close to the contest end date, I decided to increase the size of the short position, because I thought that based on the thesis I had, people are going to start selling because there’s nothing to look forward to. And so I increased that size. But it just so happened that towards the end of the contest was also when the crypto markets started ripping after May 8th. So net-net, I think I basically just broke even on this entire trade.Define the crypto markets “ripping.”May 8th was basically the Thursday right before that weekend when the US representatives were going to meet the Chinese representatives in Switzerland [for tariff negotiations]. That day was also when the UK deal announcement was made. And so the market basically took that as a bullish sign, and then that got parlayed into the positive euphoria of the US-China negotiations. Everything started going up. Okay. So every market just started getting bullish. 
Yeah, all the tokens ran up a lot. If you look at the token price, $TRUMP coin on May 7th was roughly 11 bucks, and then on May 9th it was like 14 bucks. Over time that token has come down in price. But yeah, it ran up 40 percent in the span of like two days.What was the strategy going into the end game? 
Because it sounds like it was super volatile around the end and that’s why you needed to increase your short position. I thought that towards the end, I could opportunistically make some profits by shorting more than I owned, if that makes sense.[The previous week, the contest organizers announced a new incentive for winners to not sell the coin before the dinner: a rare “TRUMP DIAMOND HANDS” NFT.]What is the point of encouraging people to go diamond hands by offering this NFT? So I think this goes back to the incentives of Trump’s affiliates, right? They have a lot of supply that they own. Last I looked, they own eighty percent of the supply. But all of that, as with many other [crypto] projects, gets locked up and only gets released over time, so that you don’t have all this supply pressure on day one. Because then no one wants to buy the token. The whole point of the NFT and this subsequent rewards program that they’ve talked about, but haven’t given the details for, is to incentivize people to hold the token longer. The longer people hold the token, then the price arguably would not fall as much. 
The only way to keep the price high is if you introduce all these little games to keep retail engagedThe eventual setup, I’m sure, whether that’s in three months or in a year or two, is that the affiliates will then have their supply unlock, and they will want to sell. They obviously want to sell at a higher price. And the only way to keep the price high is if you introduce all these little games to keep retail engaged and interested in holding tokens. How do you get the NFT now? Do you have to rebuy all the coin?Yeah, my understanding based on that tweet they sent is, they basically look at your wallet holdings on the day of the dinner and compare that to your wallet holdings on the last day of the contest. And so if those match or if you own more, then they’ll give you an NFT. I was kind of dumb. What I should have done was, right before the 1:30PM cut off, I should have sold like, 90 percent of my tokens. In this way, on the dinner day, I would only have to buy 10 percent of what I bought previously, and I think I would qualify for this NFT. 
Wow. Have people done that? Well, the NFT hasn’t been dropped yet.
I don’t know the specifics. There are definitely people who sold before the end of the deadline, and that’s clear from even looking at that leaderboard page, right? There’s one column with current holdings and a bunch were zeroed out, but they are still in the top 220 because it’s a time-weighted calculation.Why did they do time-weighted calculations rather than like, just a cumulative amount of money you held at the end? I think this goes back to solving not only how much do you hold, but how long do you hold it for, and rewarding people differently. So if you held $60 over the entire stretch of the contest, you should be rewarded more than someone who held like $200 for one day on the last day. I think the time-weighted calculation effectively is trying to normalize for that. They also gave me a call the same day, which I thought was spam for a secondHow have the organizers been in their interactions with you for the contest and for the dinner and everything?They emailed me the day of, as soon as the
contest ended, saying that I had made it into the top 220. And they also gave me a call the same day, which I thought was spam for a second. But when the voicemail thing came up, I’m like, oh, this is actually a real thing. So I picked up the phone and then they just confirmed that I got the email and that I would have to do a KYC [Know Your Customer check, part of anti-money laundering regulatory compliance for banks, crypto exchanges, and other entities] in order to qualify for the dinner. Please give us your data, references, whatever. 
Yeah, nothing that sophisticated. They outsourced it to another party and I just provided my name, my nationality, where I live. No social security number or anything like that. Plus my birthday. and I think they just ran like an external check to make sure that I wasn’t a criminal or anything like that. I feel like it was pretty light vettingHow thoroughly do you think they’re been vetting you, how professional has the process been? I feel like it was pretty light vetting. I talked to someone about, let’s say, getting into the White House and it’s a lot more strict in terms of, you have to show your passport and all that. And here, you don’t really have to do that. You just have to show your ID at the door. At least that’s what they said. And as long as your ID matches the information you gave, you’re fine. So I don’t think the security is that strict, per se, but it’s good enough, I guess. Have you participated in any contests like this or heard of anything similar? No, I have not.That’s wild. This is rather innovative if one thinks about it in a “divorced from most governmental ethics” manner. Did you read about how it’s possible that Trump just doesn’t show up to this?I did see something that basically said, yeah, based on the terms and conditions, the president does not have to be there, I think. Honestly, I think a lot of people aren’t really there to see Trump. I could be totally wrong, but I get the sense from, let’s say, like looking at the crypto whales’ Telegram, that [they’re] more interested in just meeting other crypto folks so that [they] can network. If Justin Sun is there, that’s pretty good, right? Like being able to talk to him and maybe, you know, get his contact information and all that. RelatedThe many escapes of Justin SunI think for me and probably other people, we’re more interested in seeing if there’s any other interesting news that comes out of this dinner. I will have my wallet ready, and if some great news gets dropped at the dinner, that could potentially positively influence the $TRUMP token price or any other token price, I will buy it on the spot and try to profit. This is something that other attendees are thinking about doing too?I can’t say with certainty, but based on that one Telegram guy, it seemed like it was implied. Like, if they announced a rewards program for a Trump thing – say, the NFT will be used for this, and then the rewards will give you some really impressive thing in three months, that could probably move the price. Then I would take on a short-term trade literally at the dinner table. That’s why after the $TRUMP token dropped right before inauguration, I finally decided to download Truth SocialThat’s a first mover advantage right there.In crypto, half of it is just being a first mover advantage. That’s why after the $TRUMP token dropped right before inauguration, I finally decided to download Truth Social. I only follow Trump. He’s the only guy I follow and I have notifications on, which actually served me well. Was it April 9th when he sent out that tweet saying that tariffs are now delayed for 90 days? That was first out on Truth Social and I saw that immediately, and I’m like, oh, time to trade my equities, because I will be first to the news. So he’s dropped some nuggets for sure on his account. So the dinner itself is a good money making opportunity?Possibly. It’s hard to say, but in the event that it does, there is some information that gets dropped, that could be actionable.Is there anything you’re particularly proud of about the process of executing this short?I don’t know if there’s anything I’d really brag about or be like, super proud of.
I think this hedge trade, for someone who’s pretty involved in crypto, would be fairly obvious. Net-net, I think I broke even because I did basically go a bit big around my short towards the end of the contest. So that made up for some of the fees I had to pay and whatnot. I’m pretty happy.
I feel like I didn’t take on any risk and I’m able to go to this dinner. That’s probably a win in my books. One thing is, if I had real capital, I would have tried to make the top 25. That requires a lot of money, which I don’t have. I don’t really care about seeing Trump at all. I care more about seeing who else is there, of the top 25I think it’s like a couple million.I think you’d have to have 200,000 tokens, so yeah, roughly like two, three million USD. 
And if you want to not take on the risk of the token price moving, you’d want to take a short position of roughly the same size. It would be like a four or five million dollar capital outlay to make it happen. But the benefit of being in the top 25 is you get to meet Trump, and also get to be in a more intimate networking session, which I would actually enjoy being at. I don’t really care about seeing Trump at all. I care more about seeing who else is there, of the top 25. What was the minimum size of the wallet that made 220, do you know? It’s hard to say because what someone could have done is they could have bought a lot initially, and then halfway through they sold most of them, because they were pretty confident that they would make the top 220, because it’s time weighted. [Calculating out loud omitted.] I guess only fifty thousand [if you held the total amount from day one through the end].Honestly, that’s not a lot. It’s not. 
Realistically that number is probably higher. The thing is, this is not like a $50,000 disbursement where you’re never seeing that money again. After the dinner, you could choose to sell your token. Now, maybe the price will have moved from when you first bought it to when you sold it, but the actual loss, or potentially profit, is not obvious.Oh, that makes this some really interesting campaign finance implications. I guess the one thing I’ll say is, the Trump team probably won’t sell for a couple months at very least. And so whatever happens between now and then theoretically doesn’t really impact the team, right? Because if they had not launched this dinner contest and they did nothing, and then right before the unlock happens, they launch another campaign or they do something weird like this, then that will immediately pump up the price because crypto is so reflexive. And they can then sell into the strength of the price movement, theoretically. But here, I think what they want to do is actually show that this $TRUMP token has utility, and that it’s actually useful rather than just being a meme coin. And this is one way of making the $TRUMP token worth holding, because it’s not just a meme. If you buy it, you can go to dinner, you can earn points. You can get an NFT. It’s basically the playbook that a lot of folks will potentially run if they’re launching a meme coin with utility value. Oh, utility value is definitely a good way of saying it. Yeah, utility value in the sense that yeah, you can go to dinner, you can get an NFT, you can earn points that will get you something in the future. But yeah, this is a little bit different from memes like Pepe or Doge or Shiba Inu. Those have zero utility values. They’re literally just a meme. You can’t go to a dinner if you own a lot of it. It’s just a meme. The morning after the dinner:How are you? How was your crazy night out?It was good. And yeah, there was a sponsor who wanted to do an afterparty afterwards. They basically rented out the rooftop bar on top of the Marriott. I stayed out until 1 AM. But it was good. The actual event was quite interesting. The protests outside the dinner obviously were just kind of off-putting. I was like, damn, should I really walk into this thing?Activists staged an “America Is Not For Sale” protest while President Trump hosted the winners of his meme coin contest at the Trump National golf club. Getty ImagesI’ve actually never been to the Trump National. How is it as a venue? It’s on the Potomac River. When you are in the club you can see the really nice golf course and then the river is right there. The room was long and the podium was right up in the front and the tables were almost set up in a way where there were many rows of tables, but not that many columns, if it makes sense.I didn’t recognize this until maybe like, after an hour in, but people started taking seats because they wanted to be closer to the podium. And eventually, I’m like, damn, I gotta get a seat. But all that didn’t end up mattering because when Trump walked in, basically like a celebrity, everyone rushed up to the front and pulled out their phones and started recording. Who did you meet that was interesting or fun?Justin Sun was there, it was just that everyone wanted to talk to him. I guess the only thing I could do was just say hi to him. There were a bunch of international folks. A few folks were from Poland, who came all the way here from Portugal, where they now live. There was a lot of Asian people there. I met some folks from South Korea. Some guys from France, Italy. There was this hedge fund manager from Croatia who came just to check this out. Some guy from Sweden.There were also some market-making firms, like really big in crypto, like Wintermute. And then another guy who works at Kronos Research. The organizers also brought some folks, like the founder of the Moonshot app. I guess Moonshot had partnered with folks with the $TRUMP launch back in January. He said he didn’t buy any tokens because none of the employees are allowed to trade [the meme coins on their own platform, because it would be a conflict of interest], and so he was just invited by the organizers.[According to Crunchbase, Moonshot, an app that enables users to purchase meme coins, was acquired by Jupiter, a Solana trading platform. No named individuals appear to be publicly associated with either enterprise, although Jupiter’s founder is apparently someone going by the name “Meow.” The guest interviewed by The Verge did not recognize Meow from photos. – Ed.]There were a bunch of folks in the crypto ecosystem, now that I think about it, who actually had effectively insider knowledge that Trump was gonna launch a coin. They didn’t know exactly what that was gonna be, but they knew it was coming and it was gonna be a real coin.
For the first hour or two [after the announcement], people were wondering if Trump’s account got hacked. I just thought that was interesting, that it was effectively prewired to a lot of folks. Ah, so like: if those people knew, then they had that first mover advantage for that full hour – that it was a legitimate coin?Yeah, the public didn’t know whether it was an intentional drop or if some hackers hacked the Twitter account. I ended up meeting one of the top winners, and he was telling me how he hedged his tradeDid you find any really diehard MAGA people there?I’m sure that there were a couple of folks.
I just never got a chance to speak with someone who’s like, super pro-Trump. I’d say the majority of people I spoke with, particularly the crypto traders and folks who are very close to the crypto ecosystem are like, yeah, I dumped this. I already sold the coin. A lot of people put on the same hedge trade as I did, because they didn’t wanna take risk on the coin. I ended up meeting one of the top winners, and he was telling me how he hedged his trade. So effectively, he was taking on no price risk. Now the only thing is when you short these tokens, there’s a funding cost, but because he had such a big position the funding was actually pretty significant. 
So he said he paid, I don’t know, like $50,000 in funding costs, but to him it was still worth it, especially since he got a watch that’s supposedly worth $100,000 if you’re in the top four. Wait, they gave out watches?
Yeah. When Justin went up and gave the speech, after that, he got the watch.Honestly $50,000 to meet the president and get a watch that’s twice that amount, is a pretty good deal. Yeah. I had no idea yet that there’s a TrumpWatches.com. I think the host referenced this — like, if you want a watch, just go on the website. I was like, this is real? And then I actually went on the website and it turned out it is. Swiss-made chrono movement – oh my God, there are so many watches. Do you see that one on the very front page? They gave out two of those as prizes for raffle winners. Oh, that’s only $500, man.Yeah, I know, right?Lame. I guess you can’t yet buy the $100,000 watch on this website. They were specially designed and they only were able to have two ready for the event, and the other two will get shipped to the winners. 
[The website currently lists the “Crypto President Tourbillon Watch” for pre-order, claiming that “only 10” have been made. – Ed.]A commemorative hat.Did people post photos or selfies, or was there a sense of discretion?There were obviously crypto traders who didn’t wanna give their real names, and some folks who were trying to be camera shy and avoid the limelight, but I feel like for the most part, people were taking selfies and they were just having a good time. And there were photographers walking around taking photos of everyone. And then at the end, this was after Trump and after all the gifts were given out, the host was like, everyone put on your hat that you got — it’s in my bag,
it’s a Trump meme dinner hat — let’s all put it on and take a photo and then hashtag “trumpmemedinner” or whatever.[The White House is refusing to release the guest list with names of attendees. The New York Times has since said that it has acquired a copy of that list.Although photos of the gifted hats have circulated on social media, no related hashtag seems to have taken off. – Ed.] Oh, okay, so they actually encouraged you to put it on the Internet. 
I guess the host took the photo and it was like a selfie or something. The other funny moment was during the Trump speech. For the most part, it was just him talking about his campaign, and about how he beat Biden, and blah, blah, blah, how we were in a terrible place with crypto before he got elected and now we’re in a great place. That sounds exactly like a thing Trump would say. That was pretty accurate. At one point, the microphone made a cracking sound and then he was like, whoops, my ear. and he made a joke referencing the assassination attempt. A poster promoting the afterparty.How did you figure out about the afterparty? Was it the official afterparty? 
A lot of folks were saying there was gonna be some afterparty exclusive to VIPs, like the top 25 holders. There were a few folks who were trying to get into this party, but then it turns out it was actually not that exclusive. This MemeCore group, the number two holder, they rented out space at the rooftop of this Marriott and effectively invited everyone. So when you were leaving the venue, they had a couple buses that would come every 10 minutes and they were like, yeah, feel free to take this bus and we’ll take you to the after-party. A lot of people ended up going. 
[On TikTok, an attendee wearing a giant mask of what appears to be the MemeCore mascot, was accused of covering his face “to hide their identities” at “Trump’s crypto bribery event.” – Ed.] How was the afterparty? Was it well funded? They had an open bar, free drinks. It was fine, nothing like that noteworthy.
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The astounding drop in violent crime that began in the 1990s and extended through the mid-2010s is one of the most important — and most underappreciated — good news stories of recent memory. That made its reversal during the pandemic so worrying.In the first full year of the pandemic, the FBI tallied 22,134 murders nationwide, up from 16,669 in 2019 — an increase of roughly 34 percent, the sharpest one-year rise in modern crime record-keeping. In 2021, Philadelphia alone recorded a record 562 homicides, while Baltimore experienced a near-record 337 murders. Between 2019 and 2020, the average number of weekly emergency department visits for gunshots increased by 37 percent, and largely stayed high through the following year. By the 2024 election, for the first time in awhile, violent crime was a major political issue in the US. A Pew survey that year found that 58 percent of Americans believed crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress, up from 47 percent in 2021. And yet even as the presidential campaign was unfolding, the violent crime spike of the pandemic had already subsided — and crime rates have kept dropping. The FBI’s 2023 crime report found that murder was down nearly 12 percent year over year, and in 2024 it kept falling to roughly 16,700 murders, on par with pre-pandemic levels. The early numbers for 2025 are so promising that Jeff Asher, one of the best independent analysts on crime, recently asked in a piece whether this year could have the lowest murder rate in US history.All of which raises two questions: What’s driving a decrease in crime every bit as sharp as the pandemic-era increase? And why do so many of us find it so hard to believe?The crime wave crashesWe shouldn’t jump to conclusions about this year’s crime rates based on the early data, especially since we’re just now beginning the summer, when violent crime almost always rises. Crime data in the US is also patchy and slow — I can tell you how many soybeans the US raised in March, but I can’t tell you how many people have been murdered in the US this year. But what we can tell looks very good. The Real-Time Crime Index, an academic project that collects crime data from more than 380 police agencies covering nearly 100 million people, estimates there were 1,488 murders in the US this year through March, compared to an estimated 1,899 over the same months last year. That’s a decrease of nearly 22 percent. Violent crime overall is down by about 11 percent. Motor vehicle theft, which became an epidemic during the pandemic, is down by over 26 percent. Peer down to the local level, and the picture just keeps getting better. In Baltimore, which The Wire made synonymous with violent, drug-related crime, homicides fell to 199 last year, its best showing in over a decade. As of early May, the city had 45 murders, down another third from the same period last year. City emergency rooms that were once full of gunshot victims have gone quiet.How much lower could it go nationally? The record low homicide rate, at least since national records started being kept in 1960, is 4.45 per 100,000 in 2014. So far this year, according to Asher, murder is down in 25 of the 30 cities that reported the most murders in 2023. Asher argues that if the numbers hold, “a 10 percent or more decline in murder nationally in 2025 would roughly tie 2014 for the lowest murder rate ever recorded.”What’s behind the drop?In short: The pandemic led to a huge increase in violent crime, and as the pandemic waned, so did the wave.The closure of schools during the pandemic, especially in already higher-crime cities in the Northeast, meant far more young men — who are statistically more likely to be either perpetrators of violent crime or victims of it — on the streets. The closure of social services left fewer resources for them to draw on; and the sheer stress of a once-in-a-lifetime health catastrophe set everyone on edge. The murder of George Floyd in spring 2020 led to a collapse in community trust in policing, which in turn seemed to lead to less aggressive policing altogether. As the pandemic eased, though, those buffers came back, providing a natural brake on violent crime.But the government, from the national level down to cities, also took direct actions to stem the flood of violence. The White House under President Joe Biden poured hundreds of millions of dollars into community violence interruption programs, which aim to break the cycle of retribution that can lead to homicide. Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy has brought together community groups and law enforcement to deter the people considered most likely to get involved in gun violence. And the erosion in police forces nationwide that occurred during the pandemic has largely stopped. The situation is far from perfect. Even though Floyd’s murder triggered a nationwide reckoning around police violence, recent data shows that police killings kept increasing, in part because fear of crime often stopped momentum around reforms. Here in New York, even as overall crime on the subways has fallen to historical lows, felony assaults on the trains have kept rising, fueling fears of lawlessness. Why can’t we believe it?As Memorial Day weekend marks the start of summer, the next few months will tell whether the pandemic was truly just a blip in the long-term reduction in violent crime. But what we can say is most people don’t seem to notice the positive trends. An October 2024 poll by Gallup found that 64 percent of Americans believed there was more crime nationwide than the year before, even though by that time in 2024, the post-pandemic crime drop was well under way. But such results aren’t surprising. One of the most reliable results in polling is that if you ask Americans whether crime is rising, they’ll say yes. Astonishingly, in 23 of 27 national surveys done by Gallup since 1993, Americans reported that they thought crime nationwide was rising — even though most of those surveys were done during the long crime decline. Crime is one of the best examples we have of bad news bias. By definition, a murder is an outlier event that grabs our attention, inevitably leading the nightly local news. Sometimes, as during the pandemic, that bias can match reality. But if we fail to adjust to what is actually happening around us — not just what we think is happening — it won’t just make us think our cities are more dangerous than they really are. It’ll sap energy for the reforms that can really make a difference. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. 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Starbucks in South Korea has barred customers from using the names of South Korea’s six presidential candidates in their orders ahead of next month’s presidential election. A Starbucks Korea spokesperson told NBC News the policy was introduced “in order to prevent inappropriate and abusive use of the names.” The decision comes as South Koreans have increasingly used their Starbucks’ orders to make a political statement—ordering via app under presidential candidates’ names, and using phrases in support of or to oppose them, forcing baristas to call them out for pickup, per NBC. Some examples of those orders include: “Arrest Yoon Suk Yeol” and “[opposition leader] Lee Jae-myung is a spy,” per the BBC. According to Starbucks, the company needs to “maintain political neutrality during election season” and will lift the ban on June 3 after the election, the BBC reported. Like many South Korean businesses, Starbucks is seeking neutrality amid the charged political atmosphere around the election, stemming from former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s brief martial law declaration and subsequent impeachment trial, which has deeply divided the East Asian democracy. Similarly, Naver, South Korea’s biggest search engine, has disabled the autocomplete feature on searches for the candidates, a common practice for the tech giant during an election cycle, according to the BBC. The six presidential candidates’ names that Starbucks has banned are: Lee Jae-myung, from the country’s liberal Democratic Party (DP); Kim Moon-soo, from former president Yoon Suk Yeol’ conservative People Power Party (PPP); and Lee Jun-seok, Kwon Young-kook, Hwang Kyo-ahn, and Song Jin-ho. As Fast Company previously reported, Starbucks recently posted “disappointing” earnings results for the second quarter of fiscal 2025 that ended on March 30. Unlike in the previous quarter, Starbucks did not beat analyst revenue expectations of $8.83 billion and an adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of 49 cents, according to Yahoo Finance. Instead, the company posted a revenue of $8.76 billion and an adjusted EPS of 41 cents. One key metric, U.S. comparable store sales, declined 2% in Q2. Shares in Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX) were trading up about 1% on Friday.