Every corruption scandal is a Mike Johnson corruption scandal

There have been approximately one million new Trump administration scandals this week, which is impressive when you remember that Monday was a federal holiday so the scandals needed to be packed into four business days instead of five.

Probably the grossest one would be the revelation that the Trump White House specifically intervened last year to ensure a Donald Trump Jr.-linked company got a massive $620 million loan from the Pentagon. And by Trump White House, we mean pro-sedition and pro-crimes dirtbag Peter Navarro, one of Donald's top advisers. And by "intervened," we mean the Defense Department jumped through hoops to make sure it happened.

But interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it. The staff worked late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks, the source said.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

At first glance you're probably thinking this refers to the tiny company that landed a drone-related Pentagon contract after bringing on Junior as an adviser, but you first heard about that one over half a year ago. No, this is a different company. Trump Jr. took a financial stake in this one, a rare earths magnet manufacturer, through his personal venture capital fund, and three months later Junior's White House pal Navarro called up the Pentagon to tell them to give the company a sweetheart taxpayer loan. And both of these are separate from the Trump family's billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency dealings, those greased by a series of Donald Trump pardons to crypto-boosting criminals who have worked to cement the industry as a hub of international drug sales and money laundering.

It's all gloriously crooked, of course. It wasn't long ago that House Republicans had driven themselves to apoplexy over the thought that presidential son Hunter Biden might have made a fraction of one percent of that much selling paintings or acting as a corporate adviser but now, whaddaya know, it turns out it's fine if White House staff personally direct government money into the presidential family's pockets, and the more of it the better.

The loan was a massive financial commitment from the Pentagon in its effort to fund companies that could help the U.S. reduce dependence on China’s critical mineral supply chains. The deal was a dramatic win for Vulcan, a North Carolina rare-earth magnet company launched just two years earlier. Estimates of its valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced. It was also a win for Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, which took a stake of undisclosed size in Vulcan about three months before the Pentagon announced the deal.

And there may be more good news on the way for the president’s eldest son. Among other companies under review for a Pentagon loan was a drone parts manufacturer that Trump Jr. advises and owns a stake in, according to one of the defense officials who spoke to ProPublica.

Navarro, who served as trade adviser in Trump’s first term, and Trump Jr. have formed a close bond in recent years. The president’s son visited Navarro in prison while he served time for defying a subpoena from lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump Jr. was one of the small group of people Navarro dedicated his latest book to for having “my back when it was against the wall.” And a week before the Vulcan deal was announced, Trump Jr. hosted Navarro — now the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing — on his streaming show, encouraging his nearly 2 million subscribers to buy Navarro’s book. That interview was not long after word came down from Navarro to Pentagon staff to make the massive loan to Vulcan, one of the defense officials involved in the deal said.

Funny how all these small companies with no particular track record keep getting big government commitments right after establishing business relationships with Trump's own family.

This is where we have to at least count our blessings, because if Trump and his family didn't intentionally surround themselves with the stupidest and most obviously crooked people in the country they probably would have at least tried to hide such an obvious act of corruption. Navarro and Junior are, however, extremely stupid, and the two seditionists don't appear to have made any particular attempts to hide the theft.

One of Trump Jr.'s other new investments is, and I kid you not, "GrabAGun," an online gun seller. And yes, it turns out that the White House is going to great lengths to boost the fortunes of that company too.

Most notably, USPS rule changes would allow handgun shipping nationwide — recreating the mail-order system that made [Lee Harvey Oswald’s] purchase possible. Together, these changes would enable remote gun ordering with home delivery, according to regulatory critics tracking the proposals.

GrabAGun, the Texas-based online retailer that markets itself as the “Amazon of guns,” stands to benefit enormously from this deregulation. The company’s March 2025 announcement revealed Donald Trump Jr. as both a board member and significant shareholder through a SPAC deal backed by 1789 Capital.

You might be quietly marveling over the Trump administration rushing to erase a mail-order gun sales ban imposed after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, given Trump's own brushes with would-be assassins. But this is the Trump family; the family patriarch nearly getting his head blown off doesn't factor into any of it, if there's a few pennies of profit to be gained.

It's all part of the sitting president's own moves to pump-and-dump individual stocks, steer no-bid government contracts to personal allies, tear up regulations that stand in the way of family profits, and divert government funds to Whatever The Hell He Feels like. Team Trump isn't even trying to pretend they're not crooked. They don't care anymore, and they seem quite confident in their presumption that nobody else will give a damn either.

President Donald Trump purchased stock in the company that will receive a fortune in publicity thanks to his decision to promote an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House South Lawn next month.

Trump purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 of stock of TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of UFC, on March 25, according to a HuffPost review of his May 12 financial disclosure filing.

There were already about a dozen different ways Trump's "cage fight on the White House lawn" stunt was crooked even before Trump decided to spice things up with a bit of pocket-change day trading. The whole thing appears mostly to have been invented as a taxpayer-hosted publicity stunt for Trump buddy and UFC CEO Dana White; it's also a boon to cryptocurrency-based online gambling sites—the same ones flooding every nook and cranny of American life with advertisements and that have been partnering with media companies to make compulsive gambling the next big American thing.

What are taxpayers getting, in exchange for ripping up the White House's South Lawn to build this enormous dystopian Thunderdome? Not a damn thing. You won't even be able to watch the White House fights without purchasing an $8.99 monthly subscription to the David Ellison-helmed Paramount+, the Trump-allied media company that holds the exclusive broadcasting rights to them.

But you can't say it's not fitting, right? The alleged 250th anniversary of the United States will be celebrated with a mixed martial arts beatdown hidden behind a billionaire asshole's paywall, and your only involvement in the stunt will be paying for the resulting damage. Hooray.

And none of this even gets into the multiple huge Department of Justice scandals of the week, whether it's former attorney general Pam Bondi refusing to answer questions about Trump and the Epstein files or her replacement opening a criminal investigation into the woman Trump raped in a department store.

Here is the thing we all need to remember. These are not separate scandals. These are not even Trump family scandals. I have said it before and will say it as many times as I have opportunity to: These are congressional scandals. Every one of these exposed acts of corruption is one that would have resulted in congressional fury at any other point in our nation's history. Hearings would have been scheduled, investigations launched, subpoenas would have shot through government buildings at breakneck speeds. We have seen how even this Congress acts when they believe a Hunter Biden has done a naughty thing many orders of magnitude smaller; we've seen how representatives like James Comer and Jim Jordan erupt into orchestrated outrage over even the thinnest allegations of conspiracy.

Here, though, we see the Department of Justice quite openly being weaponized to harass Trump enemies and falsely absolve his friends—and this Congress says not a peep about it. Here we have an administration unilaterally announcing that they will be handing out $1.8 billion in cash rewards to violent seditionists, convicted criminals, disbarred conspiracy-touting lawyers, and any other of Trump's closest allies who got into legal trouble for crimes on his behalf—and the Senate, led by John Thune, can muster no response to this $1.8 billion act of record-breaking corruption except to meekly suggest that perhaps felons who intentionally tried to murder cops shouldn't get shares of that money.

A presidential aide making an explicit demand that the U.S. military hand half a billion dollars over to a company owned in part by the president's son—there is nothing subtle about that one. That, on its own, would be an act that would bring down any past White House.

And nothing is happening. The Republican-held House and Senate have done nothing. No investigations. No inquiries. No subpoenas. No consequences. To hear the Speaker of the House tell it, he has not even heard of most of the scandals that would have brought down previous presidencies. It's not his "lane." Putting a stop to an orgy of White House corruptions and criminality is, suddenly, not something his precious lawmakers ought to be worrying their heads over.

So none of these scandals are actually Trump family scandals, not really, because if House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, or anyone else in Republican leadership wanted to put a stop to any of the corrupt acts they could have done it yesterday. It wouldn't be hard. The investigations would not be difficult; the consequences that needed to be doled out, for each act, would be consequences levied on corrupt figures for two centuries.

The Trump administration is steering literal billions of dollars to Trump's own family and allies because Representative Mike Johnson continues to take steps to ensure it does. It is his Congress that has now become synonymous with corruption. Mike Johnson and John Thune are the leaders now presiding over the most corrupt House and Senate in United States history, a House and Senate that see daily acts of corruption on the nightly news and appear on camera the next day to lie, flat out, about all of it.

That's not partisanship. It's not being lackadaisical. It's not "prioritizing other things."

It's called "being an accomplice." And that is where the buck needs to stop; if Republicans of the House and Senate are engaging in a conspiracy to enable corruption, then it is nothing other than a conspiracy to enable corruption. There's nothing "partisan" about the debate over whether or not presidents can purchase stocks, then use the Oval Office to boost the stocks they've purchased. There's nothing "partisan" in determinations of whether the White House can repeatedly, over and over, steer government money into the hands of presidential family members.

There's nothing "partisan" about taking $1.8 billion of our taxes to form a payoff fund rewarding felons who committed their crimes for Donald Trump's benefit. What is wrong with you freaks.

None of it is "partisan," it's just being corrupt. Mike Johnson and John Thune are Trump's accomplices in all of these thefts—it required breaking their oaths of office to make it happen, so they broke their oaths and made it happen.

You can have any one of these scandals happen, and history would call it a presidential scandal. After the third, the fourth, or the tenth, it ceases to be a presidential scandal and becomes a congressional one.

And that is quite squarely where we're at, and where we've been at for at least a year. Mike Johnson and John Thune are not partisans, because that is not what partisanship means. They're crooks. Whatever illegal acts the White House has gotten away with have happened only because these two corrupt lawmakers and their equally corrupt underlings refused to impose consequences for the illegal acts that preceded them.

Honestly, I don't see how anyone can suggest that the Republican Party is anything but an organized crime ring hiding behind a flag. Look at the Republican boosting of Ken Paxton; that alone should prove it.