AI Experiment

Karoline Leavitt's response to the reporter's question as to how the White House decided Jared Kushner's involvement in all the Middle East negotiations was appropriate kind of triggered me:

It may be frankly, but it's not despicable. It's what we call *normal*. The reporter isn't suggesting it's inappropriate, he's presupposing that any normal person would regard it as inappropriate prima facie.

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) July 22, 2026 at 8:40 PM

But am I right on that? Is it really prima facie inappropriate? It seems obvious to me and my Bluesky pals, but then of course I and they don't like Trump or Kushner. We think they're horrible and criminal malefactors. So we could be biased.

So I thought I could put it to an LLM test: If I put it to Google's Gemini as a pure hypothetical case, the way they do in in law school, at least in the movies I've seen, without any names, what would it say?

suppose the president of a country invites his son-in-law to join a diplomatic negotiating team dealing with parties some of whom have given the son-in-law's investment firm billions of dollars, while the other parties haven't given him anything. Is that appropriate?

The LLM responded, and I'll give you the whole thing, in the purest LLM style (note the em-dashed parenthetical and the bullet list):

It's Gangland

 

From Kash Patel, The Plot Against the King.

So nothing is illegal any more:

Inauguration funds are the bribe-iest funds. No reporting requirements on expenditures from inaugural funds. Trump can pocket them outright.

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— David Waldman (@kagrox.bsky.social) December 12, 2024 at 6:45 PM

Bezos following on Zuckerberg, who chose the same nice round number for his inauguration donation, but it doesn't occur to Washington Post to call that one a bribe either:

The donation, which was confirmed by Meta spokesman Andy Stone, is the latest effort by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to mend fences with the political right, which has persistently criticized him following the company’s 2021 decision to ban Trump from Meta’s social platforms. The donation arrives nearly two weeks after Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November.

And today it's reported that Sam Altman of Open AI has also joined the million-dollar inauguration club, is that cool or what? And Apple's Tim Cook, Tim Apple as Trump has called him, has a dinner date coming up with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, so I suppose he'll be ponying up his million soon.

Hardly anyone is using the word "bribe", despite the fact that we basically know Trump pocketed donations from his first inauguration, in 2017, another million dollars, as it happens, in the form of grossly inflated charges paid by the Inauguration Committee to the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania for the inauguration events held there; I'd forgotten, but DC Attorney General Karl Racine brought a lawsuit against the committee and the Trump Organization over it and won a $750,000 settlement out of them. Or course there's also a fig leaf of denial: the defendants say they are settling only to avoid the cost and trouble of litigating, and do not admit any "wrongdoing, unlawful conduct, or liability".

Ask Etty Kett

Dear Etty,

I know a bunch of people who would like to be ambassador to Uruguay, and as President of the United States I'm definitely entitled to give one of them the job. But I can't give it to all of them. So I had this brilliant idea that I could auction it off to the highest bidder, like give me a billion dollars and I'll name you ambassador to Uruguay?

Only my lawyers think I might get into trouble for that, and to be honest I've had some bad experiences with stuff like this recently. Like I had this charitable foundation where I used to get people to make me payments so I wouldn't have to pay income taxes on them, because I'm smart that way, and this stupid state attorney general, a colored lady by the way, this is what affirmative action gets you, said I was violating the law on charities and closed the whole foundation down and made me pay a big fine. And then this actress I banged years ago wrote a whole story about having sex with me and could have published it in the middle of my presidential campaign and I had my other lawyer pay her a hundred thirty large to keep it to herself and then when I was paying him back I kind of structured the payments to make them look like normal legal fees and now I'm stuck with a 34-count criminal conviction from yet another colored prosecutor for falsification of business records for which I can't even pardon myself since it's not in a federal court.

So I thought it would be best if I just took the money straight, like a billion-dollar check, and deposit it, not in the superPAC or whatever, but right in my own account. Will that work?

Blessed in Bedminster

Tales of the Resistance

There's this telling moment in the Ross Douthat interview of Senator J.D. Vance ("What J.D. Vance Believes"), where Vance is asked when he decided he "liked" Donald Trump, and he cites his first personal meeting with Trump, in 2021, and Trump telling him the story of how the generals tried to fool him into thinking they were obeying his orders to draw down US troops in northern Syria, in 2018-19, by shuffling them around instead:

The media has this view of Trump as motivated entirely by personal grievance, and the thing he talked the most about — this was not long after Jan. 6 — was “I’m the president, and I told the generals to do something, and they didn’t do it.” And I was like, OK, this guy’s deeper than I’d given him credit for. And also I was deeply offended by this. Talk about a threat to democracy — the generals not listening to the president of the United States about matters like troop redeployment.

Actually, it was probably not a general but a civilian, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in the first place and then Mark Esper. It was a matter of maybe 200 troops out of a total of 2500 US troops in the region, with an extremely specific function: protecting our Kurdish allies (guarding the detained remnants of the Islamic State so it couldn't reestablish itself in the region) from our Turkish allies, who didn't care about the Islamic State, but were eager to get all the Kurds, who President Recep Tayyib Erdoğan regarded as anti-Turkish terrorists, away from the Turkish border; he'd been calling Trump all year, demanding the removal of the US troops so he could conquer all the Kurd-held territory without crossing any Americans, and Trump obediently tried to make it happen, but then the troops didn't actually go away.

Why was Trump so determined to obey Erdoğan's orders and throw the Kurds under the Turkish bus, against the urgent advice of every single member of the national security and foreign policy staff? Perhaps because he so valued his "very good relationships" with authoritarians like Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS, and Erdoğan too? He'd rather have the secretary of defense get mad at him than the president of Turkey. He could fire the secretary of defense (and eventually did, of course, over Esper's refusal to contemplate putting down American protestors with American troops).

But then there's another aspect to Trump-Turkish relations, the "conflict of interest" he mentioned to Stephen Bannon in a 2015 interview:

Literary Corner: Perfect

 

The Worthless Clause

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I have a clause in there
that says, don't believe the statement,
go out and do your own work:
this statement is worthless.
It means nothing. Well,
they call it a "disclaimer"--
they call it "worthless clause" too,
because it makes the statement worthless.

I hate to be boring and tell you this.
When you have the worthless clause
on a piece of paper and the first--
literally the first page
you're reading about how
this is a worthless statement
from the standpoint of your using it
as a bank or whatever--
whoever may be using it, you tend
not to get overly excited about it.
I think it had very little impact,
if any impact on the banks.

Arranged from the text of Trump's sworn deposition in the case of People of New York State vs. Donald Trump et al., as quoted in Judge Arthur F. Engoron's response to motions on both sides for summary judgment, released, I guess, on Tuesday (granting it in part, as you probably know by now, to the people, and denying it to the Trump, who is now in the first phase of losing the right to do business in New York State, which will mean he and his children and his 500 LLCs and the Trump Organization also have to give up a lot of properties run from New York, including Mar-a-Lago, the Aberdeenshire golf club, and golf courses in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and I don't know how many more, unless he manages to absorb them into a reconstituted Trump Organization in Delaware, which Attorney General James has been trying to stop him from doing), on Trump's poetic theory of the "worthless clause", actually a whole bunch of clauses, of boilerplate that the organization prefixes to its annual Statement of Financial Conditions, which is used by financial organizations to figure out how risky it is to work with them:

There Oughta Be a Law. And Maybe One Day There Will Be.

Speaking of emoluments, I had no idea of this, but apparently Democrats, I guess in the House Oversight Committee, are in fact working on the investigation of the greedy and plainly unconstitutional hoovering of foreign government money into his businesses of Donald Trump during his presidential term, as reported in the New York Daily News in mid-August:

Amid GOP howls over the Hunter Biden case, lawmakers are scrutinizing former President Donald Trump’s business dealings during his time in office, Rep. Jamie Raskin said Sunday.

The Maryland Democrat promised a new report on cash that foreign governments gave to Trump businesses, though he did not go into detail.

“We’re going to release a report about all of the foreign government emoluments — millions of dollars — we can document that Donald Trump pocketed at the hotels, at the golf courses [and] business deals when he was president and that his family got,” Raskin told ABC’s “This Week.”

It seems to me this must be entirely Raskin's own baby—the preeminent constitutional scholar of the House, you could say of the entire Congress; he's been the lonely voice of protest against Trump's avid seizing of domestic emoluments as well, proposing a bill on the subject in March 2018:

Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) has introduced legislation to help stop President Donald Trump’s ongoing violations of the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause. Raskin’s bill, the Heightened Oversight of Travel, Eating, and Lodging (HOTEL) Act (H.R. 5304) would prohibit government agencies from using taxpayer dollars to stay or dine at hotels, restaurants, and other properties owned by the President, the President’s family, or the head of any other executive agency....

“If the President does not have enough respect for the Constitution to refuse extra government payments beyond his official salary,” said Congressman Raskin, “then we must cut the unlawful payments off at the source.”

Recent reports demonstrate the need for such a ban: This week, Americans learned that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) had spent a staggering $138,093 in travel expenses at 12 different Trump properties in the first eight months of the Trump administration. Trump’s expensive Mar-a-Lago resort charged the U.S. Secret Service at least $63,700 between February and April of 2017 alone. It also billed the U.S. Coast Guard $1,092 for a two-night stay by an employee traveling on official government business. The Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which secured a 60-year lease from the government in 2013, presents significant conflicts of interest and has also received taxpayer funds. Last month, CNN reported that the General Services Administration (GSA), the government entity tasked with overseeing the lease and protecting taxpayers’ interests in the agreement, was billed $1,650 by the Trump International Hotel and its onsite restaurant. This payment merits extra scrutiny, as it occurred shortly before the GSA suddenly reversed its previous determination that Trump’s ownership of the hotel would violate a provision of the agreement barring elected officials from deriving any benefit from the lease.

It's just immensely heartening to me that this is going on, not just because I've been obsessed with the issue (most recently last week) and really anxious for Trump's corrupt conduct to be exposed once and for all, but even more because it's happening in Congress, where these problems can and should be corrected by legislation: it's long past time that there should be ways of enforcing the constitutional ban on bribery, especially bribery of the president, and extortion. We need to make sure that no president ever again enters office in the hope of picking thr public's pocket on the one hand and selling the nation's foreign policy for his own personal gain.

And it could happen if we give Joe Biden a congressional majority in his second term.

Narratology: A Real Whistleblower

 

Part I

Part II

Extraordinary new story that I thought needed a little narratological juice

Brooksy New Year

Happy New Year!

Updated 1 January.

Death of Mimì. English National Opera, don't know the date or cast.

David F. Brooks, winding up the year in his traditional way with the annual presentation of the "Sidney Awards", not a red carpet ceremony by a list of magazine article recommendations, oddly dominated this year by human interest stories, tales of personal obsession productive and unproductive (a man loses his son on 9/11 and becomes a 9/11 truther; a man who was sexually exploited as a young teenager now studies "rooms occupied by Ghislaine Maxwell"; a novelist receives a fan letter from a convicted murderer and, convinced he's innocent, puts her own life on pause in a crazed crusade to get him out of prison), but among the more typically Brooksian choices is a piece by a former research assistant of his at The Times, April Lawson, in a magazine, Comment ("Public Theology for the Common Good"), edited by another former research assistant of his at The Times, Anne Snyder. 

Snyder, of course, is also Mrs. Brooks, as well as

Director of The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a Fellow at the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism [now known as the Urban Reform Institute, with our and Brooks's old friend Joel Kotkin serving as executive director, wouldn't you just know it], and a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum. She holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Georgetown University and a B.A. in philosophy and international relations from Wheaton College (IL).

while Lawson was a co-founder and Associate Director of Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which Brooks founded for the Aspen Institute in early 2019 only to be forced to abscond from it when BuzzFeed revealed that Aspen was paying him six figures for it even as he puffed it up in his Times column, as well as puffing up Facebook's participation in it in remarks for which Facebook seemed to have paid him as well (see my report on this from last March, apparently at the same time as Snyder's book, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver's Guide to Supporting Social and Moral Renewal was issued by The Philanthropy Roundtable, $14.95 in paperback, sorry I didn't get to this when we were all planning our end-of-year donations, as I'm sure the suggestions from this incestuous web of do-gooding are completely sensible and not at all self-serving).

And Lawson is now Director of Debates at Braver Angels, a Weavy nonprofit (not connected to the Aspen Institute as far as I know; but praised in print by David Brooks as early as Feburary 2018), devoted to bridging the distance between Red and Blue, and her essay, "Building Trust Across the Political Divide", retails what she's learned in a couple of years conducting debates on Braver Angels principles: everybody must be sincere, everybody gets to speak, and everybody always addresses the chair, as a way of avoiding the pitfalls that generally afflict such efforts, largely, as Lawson says, because they are generally run by liberals:

Neoconservative Denial

Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM).

I want to stop, but maybe just one more column, this one from Robert Kagan of the Kagan dynasty, co-founder with Dr. William Kristol of the Project for a New American Century, and prophet of neoconservatism, as he defined it in 2008, as a kind of political faith going back to 1776 and Alexander Hamilton, whose tenets are

a potent moralism and idealism in world affairs, a belief in America’s exceptional role as a promoter of the principles of liberty and democracy, a belief in the preservation of American primacy and in the exercise of power, including military power, as a tool for defending and advancing moralistic and idealistic causes, as well as a suspicion of international institutions and a tendency toward unilateralism. 

(Though the quotation he uses to bring Hamilton to his side is pretty distorted, when he claims that "Hamilton, even in the 1790s, looked forward to the day when America would be powerful enough to assist peoples in the 'gloomy regions of despotism' to rise up against the 'tyrants that oppressed them"; in fact what Hamilton said, not in the 1790s but 1784, had no reference to "assisting" anybody in the future—merely to the young US already then setting an inspiring example, by its underdog victory in the Revolution: "The influence of our example has penetrated the gloomy regions of despotism, and has pointed the way to inquiries, which may shake it to its deepest foundations.")

But is, anyhow, very anxious at the moment from his (officially ex-neoconservative—he now identifies as "'liberal' and 'progressive' in a distinctly American tradition") position as Washington Post opinionist to assure us (contra WaPo's national security columnist, Greg Jaffe, who writes about the "hubris" of the American project) that the effort in Afghanistan was no effort in "advancing moralistic and idealistic causes" ("It wasn’t hubris that drove America into Afghanistan. It was fear."):

West of Eden: Post-Bibi

Demonstration outside the Prime Minister's Jerusalem residence in May. Photo by Ohad Zwigenberg/Haaretz.

One of the least edifying spectacles in the recent international politics news has been that produced in Jerusalem by Binyamin Netanyahu going Trump one better and really refusing to leave the prime minister's official residence on Balfour Street for weeks, though he hasn't been prime minister since 6 April. 

Not that he's sitting in the living quarters frowning, with his hands tucked into his armpits, daring them to carry him out, as Trump might be doing. Indeed, he's been receiving official visitors, including former ambassador Nikki Haley and abominable pro-Armageddon pastor John Hagee (recovered from his bout with Covid-19 last November). I guess Netanyahu is still the negotiating partner of the not-at-all-anti-Semitic Christian Zionists looking to Israel to hasten the Day of Judgment when all the unconverted Jews will be thrown into the Lake of Fire.

He's occupying his seat in the Knesset as official opposition leader, and he has managed to vacate the prime minister's office, though not apparently without some possibly illegal serious shredding:

Florida man: "How quickly can I blow it all on pussy?"

The Third Man. If you know what I mean.

Headline from the former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, not his former friend Matt Gaetz, who probably might not express himself so coarsely

I have this idea Gaetz will get away with it—been looking at the plea agreement for Joel Greenberg and seeing plenty of opportunities for Gaetz to call himself Greenberg's victim instead of a partner in crime, and don't doubt he's dishonest and disloyal enough to take full advantage of them.

His name isn't mentioned anywhere in the document, but it's clear he's involved in just two of the six crimes to which Greenberg has pleaded guilty (out of I think 33 total charges in the original indictments: the sex trafficking involving a minor, in which he bonked some of the young women Greenberg was in the habit of sourcing through the Sugar Babies app in return for money he paid Greenberg with Venmo and Greenberg in turn paid them, sometimes asking them to take MDMA with him (and paying them extra when they did); and the use of fake IDs Greenberg manufactured in his tax collector's office, which in Gaetz's case seems to have been sort of legitimate, in that he wanted ID for his real self rather than the stolen identities Greenberg created out of abandoned driver's licenses for his own use and that of the girls:

The Gaetz of Hell shall not prevail

 

So, per this Daily Beast story. sometime in late 2020 and early 2021 the former tax collector of Seminole County, Florida, Mr. Joel Greenberg, in a series of text messages exchanged on the Signal app with presidential ratfucker Roger Stone detailing some of the crimes he'd committed, including crimes committed in concert with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), for he would like to purchase a presidential pardon, for $250,000, if Mr. Stone was agreeable, in unmarked bills (well, in Bitcoin):

Tangled Web

"Marquee columnist"

"Marquee columnist" was a phrase used by Matt Yglesias in reference to the ongoing Brooks brouhaha, which you may not have heard about: Somebody finally figured out the the New York Times "marquee columnist" David Brooks is getting paid for the Aspen gig, chairing "Weave: The Social Fabric Project", probably in six figures, and BuzzFeed has been exploring the thought that he might have a bit of a conflict of interest there, since he's composed a substantial number of columns praising himself for his involvement in the thing without warning us that he has a financial interest in it.

Which I thought initially looked like a bit of a stretch, because what kind of idiot imagined he wasn't getting paid? But wait, there's more!

Got Paranoia? General Services Administration

My screenshot from video via the Independent, 4 February 2017.

Can we please jail Emily Murphy, the GOP political hack running the General Services Administration, who has apparently decided to single-handedly kneecap the Biden transition?

The administrator of the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency in charge of federal buildings, has a little-known role when a new president is elected: to sign paperwork officially turning over millions of dollars, as well as give access to government officials, office space in agencies and equipment authorized for the taxpayer-funded transition teams of the winner.

It amounts to a formal declaration by the federal government, outside of the media, of the winner of the presidential race.

But by Sunday evening, almost 36 hours after media outlets projected Biden as the winner, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy had written no such letter. And the Trump administration, in keeping with the president’s failure to concede the election, has no immediate plans to sign one. This could lead to the first transition delay in modern history, except in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided a recount dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush in December.

Which ended after the Supreme Court intervened on the Bush campaign's instance to stop the recount of Florida ballots, and Vice President Gore conceded on 12 December:

Turkey Trot

 

Illustration via Quartz, April 2017.

I'll get to Trump in a minute, but first: imagine you're Vice President Joe Biden, August 2016, on an official visit to Turkey five or so weeks after the coup attempt in Turkey that July, and President Erdoğan gets you under a tree at some point and starts complaining about this state-owned bank, Halkbank, that the New York Southern District is investigating for evading US law by smuggling billions of dollars' worth of gold and other commodities into the sanctioned Islamic Republican of Iran—they've already indicted a guy, Reza Zarrab, and Erdoğan claims the whole thing is a hoax invented by his enemy the cult leader in Pennsylvania, and can Biden please get Obama to make it go away by firing the US attorney in the case, Preet Bharara, and the judge, and extradite the cult leader because he's the one who did the coup as well?

(It's also widely believed in a variety of places that the cleric in question, Fethullah Gulén, had in fact nothing to do with the coup, which Erdoğan has been using in the four years since as a kind of personal Reichstag Fire enabling him to move against all sorts of perceived enemies, depriving them of their livelihoods and public voices and jailing tens of thousands, and Erdoğan's regime has been credibly accused of a practice not at all distant from Vladimir Putin's or Donald Trump's of "post-truth politics".)

We know how Joe responded to the last bit, thanks to this big Times report by Eric Lipton and Benjamin Weiser, and also because the answer is publicly available: with a courteous, but firm no: Sorry man, but no can do:

For the Record: Bad Boyfriend

Hahaha Kevin https://t.co/hfeEQVyOOE

— 🔻Cookin With Yas🔻 (@Yastreblyansky) July 25, 2020

It's so pathetic. House Republican Congressional Committee is begging Trump campaign for a few dollars, out of the $295 million the campaign and the Republican National Committee are sitting on, and Kushner, who apparently "oversees such decisions and has a greater say than RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel", just says no.

According to one anonymus,

For the Record: Waltz of the Inspectors General

Carsington Water, Ashbourne, Derbyshire, with troll, via TripAdvisor.

Senator Grassley has built his reputation on protecting the integrity of the Inspector general process. He runs a committee that could do something about it. But he is strangely silent about these purges. I hope when I get to 86 I'm not afraid of anyone or anything like Trump

— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) May 16, 2020

https://t.co/Sm0ikVDWwS

— Obliged Friend (@ObligedFriend) May 16, 2020

worth recalling that Walpin firing followed a unanimous and bipartisan request from the board ( Corporation for National and Community Service) he was IG of? https://t.co/s8cBvniwM6

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 16, 2020

L'état profond, c'est moi

Drawing by Signe Wilkinson, November 2019.

Well, it's Saturday, so we're asking for the third time in the past six weeks which inspector general Trump fired last night. Today it's the state department, whose inspector general, Steve Linick, "no longer" enjoys Trump's "fullest confidence" and will be replaced, Politico said, with an "ally of Vice President Pence", because that's what we naturally want in an inspector general, somebody who's already beholden to a White House patron.

Or putting it another way,

A State Department spokesperson said that Amb. Stephen Akard, a former career Foreign Service officer, "will now lead the Office of the Inspector General at the State Department" in an acting capacity.

He won't actually be the inspector general, he'll just play one in the news, and "lead the office" while the inspector general doesn't exist. This would make such a great plot for a Gogol story if Gogol hadn't used the title for a different idea.

But why?

Out Like Flynn Revisited

OK now it's really getting crazy, as the Justice Department seems to think it's found a way to pardon Mike Flynn without giving Trump the trouble of doing it himself. I'm recapitulating some of the things I was thinking about at the time of Flynn's second guilty plea, in December 2018, in the light of what we've learned since then from the Mueller investigation, as a response to the Flynn news.

New York Post editorial page:

Flynn’s supposed crime was lying to FBI agents in a January 2017 interview at the White House. Yet the concealed evidence included 1) a top FBI official’s notes suggesting the entire purpose of the interview was to catch Flynn in a lie, or get him to admit to a technical violation of the Logan Act — all in order to force him from office. And 2) an internal Justice Department memo, from the day before that interview, calling on the FBI to close the Flynn investigation because agents had dug up absolutely no wrongdoing.

In fact, they already had the transcript of Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador that was the supposed reason for the interview — and knew he’d said nothing improper, just things an incoming national-security adviser should discuss.

Actually no. The calls Flynn exchanged with Ambassador Kislyak from where he was supposed to be on vacation in the Dominican Republic between 29 and 31 December 2016 were a response to what the Presidential Transition Team regarded as an emergency, after President Obama imposed new sanctions on the Russian state in return for Russia's well-established interference in the 2016 presidential election and Foreign Minister Lavrov announced that Russia would be retaliating with measures of its own. After getting briefed by the PTT, Flynn called Kislyak (whom he'd met for the first time with Jared Kushner on 30 November, at Trump Tower, for a conversation in which Kushner had talked about Trump's desire to "start afresh" with Russia and Flynn lamented the lack of a secure line for them to communicate—secure, that is, from observation by the US government) and urged him to stop President Putin from said retaliation because if he showed some restraint that would make it easier for the incoming Trump administration to end all the sanctions, including those related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Ukrainian territory, and its murder of the whistleblowing attorney Sergey Magnitsky; two days later Putin agreed.

The PTT was, as we now know, intensely involved with these calls, consulting with Flynn by email and phone before and after each one, through his deputy K.T. McFarland, who was at the Mar-a-Lago club with the president-elect's party:

President on Drugs: Update

Note: I keep updating this.

"Night singer of shares" from the South Sea Bubble, Amsterdam 1720, via Wikipedia. 

Of course it's possible that Trump knew exactly what he was doing, just as he did with the oil futures a while back or the hydroxychloroquine market more recently, in a classic little pump-'n'-dump scheme.

Scientists at Cedars-Sinai are developing an ultraviolet light that is inserted into the lungs of coronavirus patients to kill the virus living there.

Trump was right again about "inserting UV light."

It's called the #Healight

Watch: pic.twitter.com/naGETF2Mfo

— Mark Dice (@MarkDice) April 24, 2020

But as far as Trump goes looks like he mainly goosed the stock price of Aytu Bioscience 18% in one day and somebody made a pot of money. pic.twitter.com/upqWhCMlK6

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 25, 2020