Politics

For up to $100,000 a month, investment banks, hedge funds and algorithmic trading firms can now buy access to President Trump's Truth Social posts milliseconds before they are made public. The premise is that Trump’s posts move markets so much that getting access to these posts mere milliseconds earlier is enough to gain an edge in the market – the elusive alpha that hedge funds are so obsessed with.  Critics are labeling it a blatant violation of insider information laws. Without going into the legality of the offering, I want to challenge Trump's claim about the actual value of early access to his posts. We found no evidence of any systematic trading strategy that could deliver a profit Given Trump’s continuous impact on markets, I decided to run an experiment.

Somewhere in a Republican advertising agency, a young man is enjoying a cigar, ordering pizza and assembling the following TV ad. It begins with a Democratic congressman from a competitive district looking reasonable in a manly lumberjack shirt. “The Democratic party is a Big Tent,” he says. The screen goes dark. The announcer says, “A Big Tent? Big enough for what?

Dr. Fauci won’t see you now. The man who served as America’s top medical adviser during Covid had to be subpoenaed to appear before the Senate this week. Wanted to hear his expert opinion? Too bad. Almost every question received the same response. "On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution." Anthony Fauci’s silence is the perfect coda to the madness of the Covid era. We were told, again and again, to "trust the science." But the science establishment didn’t trust us. Information was withheld, facts were twisted and opinions suppressed. Fauci was given a sweeping presidential pardon by Joe Biden. Yet even now, years later and immune from consequences, Dr. Fauci doesn’t want to talk.

When asked on The Root whether he'd support cash reparations for black New Yorkers, Mayor Mamdani said he wouldn't rule it out: "Here in New York City, we were very complicit." The mayor promised an answer once the city's Commission on Racial Equity reports back in 2027. Slightly inflammatory and highly performative, his answer hit his sweet spot perfectly. He is teasing his supporters with a radical, racialized policy that has no price tag and no implementation plan, just outrage. Zohran Mamdani is a better content creator than mayor. He knows exactly which topics will generate clicks, articles and outrage. That's a valuable skill for an influencer or a campaigner – earned media is the best priced media, but less so for a mayor who actually has to govern a major American city.

Portland’s downtown area, though not without a certain residual hippy charm, increasingly resembles the Dunkirk of May 1940. Standing on top of the city’s Moda Tower at night is to survey the aftermath of a battle, with legions of homeless residents hunched together around braziers or lying on cots displayed in rows on the sidewalk. It appears as if the police in Portland can’t be bothered to enforce the few remaining laws involving public drug use or fouling the streets. But the truth is there simply aren't enough cops to enforce the laws after the city council became one of the first Democratic strongholds to defund the police in the wake of the George Floyd riots in 2020. Now the results of that ideological experiment are in.

In his final hours in office, President Joe Biden issued a preemptive, blanket legal pardon for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible US health official during the Covid pandemic, for any and all actions he took from 2014 on, the same kind of pardon he granted his son Hunter Biden. Fauci, like Hunter Biden, thus literally rose above the law. That’s what made today’s decision by Fauci to take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee so shocking.   After Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth, chairman Rand Paul told Fauci he would face “repercussions” for refusing to answer questions based on a valid congressional subpoena.