Federal prison officials visited Alcatraz last week after Donald Trump’s announcement earlier this month of plans to rebuild and reopen the infamous island prison, which has been closed for over 60 years.
David Smith, the superintendent of the Golden Gate national recreation area (GGNRA), told the San Francisco Chronicle that officials with the Federal Bureau of Prisons are planning to return for further structural assessments.
“They have been out here. They’ll be coming out again to do assessments of the structure,” Smith told the news outlet.
The island facility has been closed since 1963, when then attorney general Robert F Kennedy ordered its shutdown amid high operating costs, limited space and multiple escape attempts.
BOP director William Marshall told Fox News that engineering teams are already surveying the site. “We’ve got engineering teams out there now that are doing some assessments, and so I’m just really excited about the opportunity and possibilities,” he said.
In recent months, the US government has moved to reopen at least five previously closed detention centers and prisons.
Although California lawmakers have dismissed the Alcatraz proposal as a “distraction” and not a serious plan, the Trump administration is actively working – with the help of private prison companies – to reopen other facilities, some of which are already back in operation.
Smith said he was skeptical about reopening Alcatraz, pointing to the large financial investment and legal challenges it would require.
He said it’s “just not well-situated” for the Bureau of Prisons.
But Marshall called the proposal “exciting” and feasible. He suggested that modern, lightweight materials could solve some of the island’s logistical challenges.
“When you think of Alcatraz, you think of Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Lambeau Field, those types of facilities … you just get that kind of feeling about Alcatraz when you think of those historical venues,” Marshall told Fox News’s My View with Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law.
“And so, yeah, we absolutely think we can get it done.”
Meanwhile, the GGNRA is undertaking seismic retrofitting projects on the island, including reinforcing the pier and stabilizing the aging cellhouse to prevent further deterioration.
Donald Trump will address graduates of West Point on Saturday, as his administration moves to implement a rightwing agenda at military service academies that has prompted the disbandment of student clubs, the removal of certain books and at least one faculty resignation.
It will be the second time Trump has spoken to graduates of the United States Military Academy in upstate New York where the next generation of army leaders is educated, and offers the president an opportunity to stump for his defense policy.
This week, Trump announced plans to spend $540bn over 20 years on the “Golden Dome”, a missile defense system intended to protect the United States from ground- and space-based weapon strikes. The project received an initial dose of funding from the “big beautiful bill”, a comprehensive piece of tax-and-spending legislation Republicans in the House of Representatives passed on Thursday after weeks of negotiations.
The army is also gearing up for a parade through the streets of Washington DC, something Trump tried unsuccessfully to hold during his first term that is now billed as commemorating the force’s 250th birthday. Its 14 June date also happens to be the day Trump turns 79.
The military and its elite service academies have been affected by the wave of executive orders Trump has signed since taking office, as well as by the policies of Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host he appointed to lead the defense department.
Trump’s sprawling order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government led West Point to disband some student clubs, including the Society of Women Engineers, the Latin Cultural Club and a third group serving the LGBTQ+ community. The defense department has told West Point and other schools to comb their library stacks and remove any books or materials that may fall afoul of the DEI-related policy.
Earlier this month, Graham Parsons, a philosophy professor at West Point, resigned after 13 years on the faculty, saying: “I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.”
The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York, reports that several protests are planned outside the campus for the president’s appearance, including one to take place on boats in the adjacent Hudson River.
Trump last addressed West Point graduates during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when they wore masks and were spaced out in an effort to prevent transmission of the virus.
Earlier this month, he delivered the commencement speech at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he alternated between offering the life advice typical of such speeches and harping on preferred talking points such as his baseless insistence that the 2020 election was rigged and his opposition to transgender athletes.
Although Elon Musk said Doge didn’t cut Aids programs, global health officials describe widespread and disastrous effects resulting from the White House’s throttling of foreign aid. The disruptions have caused new HIV infections to surge in recent months and threaten to derail plans to eradicate the virus as a public health threat by 2030.
In one stark case, the cuts have cast uncertainty over the rollout of a newly developed injectable that scientists have hailed as “the closest thing to a vaccine that we have ever had in HIV response”.
Musk says his cuts did no defunding
Musk was projected 10ft tall above the stage at the Qatar Economic Forum this week as he gave a sweeping and combative video interview. The creator of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, who once boasted he had fed “USAID into the wood chipper”, found himself defending his cuts to humanitarian aid. Just days before, Bill Gates had accused the world’s richest person of “killing the world’s poorest children”.
In one especially fraught exchange with Bloomberg interviewer Mishal Husain, Musk rebuked a question about whether his cuts to USAID had imperiled HIV/Aids programs and claimed he would “fix it right now” if any services had, in fact, been defunded.
“First of all, the program, the Aids medication program, is continuing. So, your fundamental premise is wrong. It is continuing,” Musk said. “It is false. It’s false. It’s false.”
Rather than Musk’s cuts leaving HIV/Aids programs intact, however, global health officials said that Doge’s efforts have in reality hampered their work worldwide and thrown the protection of large swaths of people from disease into disarray.
Doge’s dismantling of USAID plunges Aids services into chaos
Prior to Doge’s cuts and the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid, the US was involved in a wide range of HIV/Aids treatment and prevention programs across dozens of countries. The government implemented the majority of its operations through Pepfar, a USAID-funded program that has contributed more than $110bn to preventing and treating the virus since the initiative began in 2003.
Since Doge dismantled USAID in January, however, the future of Pepfar is uncertain, and many of its services are in jeopardy. A temporary waiver from the state department has allowed funding for some HIV/Aids programs to continue, but only those aimed at treating people who are already living with HIV, as well as pregnant or breastfeeding women.
As a result, many prevention programs involving pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs, or Prep, ground to a halt without US funding. Even services that were allowed, such as testing and treatment, also stopped due to the disruption and confusion caused by Doge’s shutdown of USAID, according to the United Nations. People who showed up to receive testing or medicine often found that no one was there to give it to them, according to a UN health official.
“There were thousands of healthcare workers and community health workers, laboratorians and data clerks, for example, that immediately stopped work,” said Dr Angeli Achrekar, deputy executive director of the programme branch at the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and a former Pepfar official. “It’s not like you just turn on the light switch and all of a sudden these services start up again.”
The effects of the cuts have been almost immediate, according to Achrekar, and could roll back years of advancements in combating HIV infections. In Botswana, the number of people receiving Prep has decreased by half since last year. The 30,000 people in Mozambique who were receiving Prep at the end of last year recently went down to 19,000, according to a UN tally. In Zimbabwe, the number of people receiving Prep declined from 4,000 to 1,800 in the same time frame. In Nigeria, 850,000 condoms distributed in December went down to 300,000 by February.
“It’s country after country,” Achrekar said.
A miracle drug cast into uncertainty
The cuts to prevention programs have also caused confusion and uncertainty around the rollout of a highly anticipated new drug called Lenacapivir. The drug, which is under review at the US Food and Drug Administration, protects patients against HIV infection through a single shot given every six months. Two separate large trials across different populations have shown that it almost entirely blocks the risk of contracting the virus.
“It’s nearly 100% effective at stopping new infections,” Achrekar said. “It is the closest thing to a vaccine that we have ever had in the HIV response.” Other researchers have called it a “miracle”.
Pepfar announced at the end of last year that it was partnering with The Global Fund, an international organization that finances global health programs, in an effort to roll out Lenacapivir to at least 2 million people within the next three years. Doge’s cuts have thrown a potential wrench in those plans, however, since the drug would fall under the category of preventative services that the tate department’s waiver says should no longer be funded.
At the Qatar Economic Forum this week, Musk insisted that medication programs were continuing, and, when confronted with the example of Lenacapivir, suggested he would restore its funding.
“Which ones aren’t being funded? I’ll fix it right now,” Musk claimed, later adding: “If in fact this is true, which I doubt it is, then we’ll fix it.”
In response to Musk’s comments, UNAIDS released a statement saying it was encouraged that he would review the crisis caused by halts to US funding. Musk has made similar pledges about restoring health programs that Doge cut in the past, however: in February, Musk said that efforts to prevent the spread of Ebola had been accidentally canceled but were then restored – a claim that USAID officials said was false.
While the Global Fund waits to see what the Trump administration decides to do with Pepfar, it is hoping to carry on with its plans for Lenacapivir whether the US is involved or not. Losing Pepfar’s partnership would mean a huge decrease in funding, however, as well as Pepfar’s extensive connections to organizations that could help in administering the drug.
“We’re not backing off the ambition to deliver Lenacapivir to two million people if we can,” said Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund. “The extent to which we can continue to do that in partnership with Pepfar is uncertain.”
Since the waiver was issued on 1 February there has been no clarity or new policy released on what the Trump administration plans to do with Pepfar. US partners working on prevention services have had their agreements terminated, while UNAIDS projects that if Pepfar’s treatment and prevention services are stopped entirely, it would result in an additional 6.6m HIV infections by 2029.
One day after House Republicans approved an expensive package of tax cuts that rattled financial markets, President Trump pivoted back to his other signature policy priority, unveiling a battery of tariff threats that further spooked investors and raised the prospects of higher prices on American consumers.
For a president who has fashioned himself as a shrewd steward of the economy, the decision to escalate his global trade war on Friday appeared curious and costly. It capped off a week that saw Mr. Trump ignore repeated warnings that his agenda could worsen the nation’s debt, harm many of his own voters, hurt the finances of low-income families and contribute far less in growth than the White House contends.
The tepid market response to the president’s economic policy approach did little to sway Mr. Trump, who chose on Friday to revive the uncertainty that has kept businesses and consumers on edge. The president threatened 50 percent tariffs on the European Union, and a 25 percent tariff on Apple. Other tech companies, he said, could face the same rate.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has raced to enact his economic vision, aiming to pair generous tax cuts with sweeping deregulation that he says will expand America’s economy. He has fashioned his steep, worldwide tariffs as a political cudgel that will raise money, encourage more domestic manufacturing and improve U.S. trade relationships.
But for many of his signature policies to succeed, Mr. Trump will have to prove investors wrong, particularly those who lend money to the government by buying its debt.
So far, bond markets are not buying his approach. Where Mr. Trump sees a “golden age” of growth, investors see an agenda that comes with more debt, higher borrowing costs, inflation and an economic slowdown. Investors who once viewed government debt as a relatively risk-free investment are now demanding that the United States pay much more to those who lend America money.
That is on top of businesses, including Walmart, that say they may have to raise prices as a result of the president’s global trade war. The onslaught of policy changes has also left the Federal Reserve frozen in place, unsure as to when the economy will call for lower interest rates in the face of persistent uncertainty. As a result, borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans and credit cards remain onerous for Americans.
Still, Mr. Trump continues to proclaim that his policies will bring prosperity. This week, the White House released data showing that its tax cuts could increase U.S. output as much as 5.2 percent in the short term, compared with the gains it would have achieved if the bill is not adopted. The administration has stood largely alone in offering such rosy predictions about the effects of Mr. Trump’s policies on businesses, average workers and the nation’s fiscal future.
In report after report, economists this week predicted that Mr. Trump’s signature tax package could add well over $3 trillion to the national debt. Some found that the measure is unlikely to deliver substantial economic growth, and could enrich the wealthiest Americans while harming the poorest, millions of whom could soon lose access to federal aid for food and health insurance.
The tax cuts are largely an extension of ones that Congress passed in 2017, meaning that few taxpayers will see an increase to their after-tax income. In fact, some might see their financial situation deteriorate: Many of the lowest earners may even see about $1,300 less on average under the Republican bill in 2030, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, which factored in the proposed cuts to federal safety-net programs.
Facing an onslaught of red flags and dour reports, the White House has remained bullish.
“I think folks have cried wolf a lot,” Stephen Miran, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview, stressing that Mr. Trump’s agenda would “grow the economy.”
In the past, investors and businesses might have rejoiced over Mr. Trump’s grand proclamations about lowering taxes, reducing regulations and opening access to foreign markets. But the most common reaction this week was concern over Mr. Trump’s sclerotic approach, which has renewed fears that the economy could enter a prolonged period of pain.
“It’s possible that you’re going to get a big benefit to growth, but the costs are so obvious and so clear that I think it’s hard to put a lot of faith in that at the moment,” said Eric Winograd, an economist at the investment firm AllianceBernstein.
By most metrics, Mr. Trump inherited a solid economy. Layoffs were low when he took office, and have stayed that way, helping to keep the unemployment rate stable. And consumers, even amid elevated prices, continued to spend apace.
Four months into his second term, however, there are signs that the economy is beginning to come under greater strain, in what experts worry is a prelude to a more substantive slowdown. While economists do not expect the economy to tip fully into a recession, they say Mr. Trump’s tariffs in particular have raised the odds of a downturn, as both businesses and consumers begin to cut back.
Many of the president’s allies maintain that Mr. Trump is doing exactly as he promised during the 2024 presidential campaign, acting out of a belief that his vision can spur robust economic growth. In doing so, that can help to create jobs, raise wages and generate the sort of activity that can lessen the nation’s fiscal imbalance, said Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who served as one of Mr. Trump’s advisers during his first term.
“So many of these problems are the result of low growth,” Mr. Moore said of the economy. Mr. Trump is aiming to get growth back up to 3 percent, Mr. Moore added.
But the administration has at times ignored a steady stream of data suggesting its policies may not deliver those gains.
The disparity between vision and reality became apparent Thursday as House Republicans voted to advance a bill that would extend the set of tax cuts enacted in the president’s first term. The measure also included Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay.
An analysis released Thursday by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan advisory arm of Congress, found that the new Republican measure may raise the average rate of growth in U.S. output by only 0.03 percentage points compared with current expectations through 2034. The finding cast doubt on the administration’s long-held assertion that economic activity can help to lower the deficit. The joint committee also said the president’s tax package could add $3.7 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next decade.
Mr. Miran maintained on Friday that congressional analysts and others had underestimated the effects of Mr. Trump’s initial tax cuts, and had done the same this year.
“Better tax policy creates better economic growth, and better economic growth creates better revenue,” he said.
Focusing on the debt, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said on Fox News on Thursday that there was “a lot of spending reduction in this bill,” adding that the Trump administration would seek additional savings as the bill moved through the Senate.
The prospect of a worsening fiscal imbalance prompted Moody’s Ratings just last week to downgrade the U.S. credit rating, citing Republican tax cuts and the proclivity of past G.O.P. administrations to spend. Party lawmakers swiftly rejected the finding, but bond markets took notice, sending yields on longer-term U.S. debt higher. Soft demand at an auction of 20-year Treasuries on Wednesday gave markets another jolt, pushing up bond yields and weighing on U.S. stocks.
Mr. Trump sent markets into another tailspin on Friday as he abruptly shifted his attention to tariffs. He attacked the European Union and threatened to raise tariffs on its exports to a flat rate of 50 percent. He signaled a mixed appetite for negotiations, telling reporters in the Oval Office: “I don’t know. We’re going to see what happens.”
The president also took aim at Apple, signaling he would impose a 25 percent import tax on iPhones, months after his administration relaxed some of its trade policies to aid tech giants. Mr. Trump later suggested his new tariffs might also apply to Samsung.
The S&P 500 fell nearly a percentage point on Friday and pushed the U.S. dollar lower against a basket of its peers. Many from Washington to Wall Street yet again scrambled to decipher Mr. Trump’s intentions — and sort out the extent to which the president is serious, bluffing or set to walk back his policies again.
Some companies, including Walmart, have said they may have to raise prices as a result of the president’s global trade war. (Karsten Moran for The New York Times)
Some businesses have forecast price increases as a result of Mr. Trump’s tariff threats. A report this week from Allianz found that many businesses are trying to push the added tariff costs onto suppliers or consumers, with roughly half of its survey respondents saying they may increase prices.
The potential for rising prices while growth is slowing poses a unique challenge for the Fed and its voting members, forcing them to reconcile with conflicting missions — a goal to pursue low, stable inflation, and a desire to sustain a healthy labor market.
“The bar for me is a little higher for action in any direction while we’re waiting to get some clarity,” Austan Goolsbee, the president of the Chicago Fed and a voting member on this year’s rate-setting committee, told CNBC on Friday.
Mr. Goolsbee recalled a recent exchange with the chief executive of a construction business, who said: “We’re now in a put-your-pencils-down moment.” Businesses, Mr. Goolsbee said, now “have to wait if every week or every month or every day there’s going to be a new major announcement.”
“They just can’t take action until some of those things are resolved,” he added.
— H.E. Justin Sun 👨🚀 🌞 (@justinsuntron) May 23, 2025
The event was a private dinner with the president at Trump National Golf Club, where “investors spent an estimated $148 million on the $TRUMP meme coin to secure their seats … with the top-25 holders spending more than $111 million,” Reuters reported, citing crypto intelligence firm Inca Digital. Reuters also cited an analysis that found the Trumps have made $320.19 million in fees from their meme coins.
And the person in the photo is Justin Sun, a MAGA-aligned crypto bro who said he was “awarded” what he identified as a “Trump Gold Tourbillon” (a Trump-branded watch that retails for $100,000). The White House didn’t immediately respond to MSNBC’s question as to whether the president actually gifted this watch to Sun.
His investments in Trump have been considerable — but, for him, arguably worthwhile. Sun has been in the news in the last few months because, after he plowed $75 million into Trump family crypto, per NBC News, the SEC put a 60-day pause on the charges of market manipulation and offering unregistered securities it had been pursuing against him since 2023. (Sun did not reply to NBC News’ request for comment, but denied any wrongdoing to The Wall Street Journal in April.)
NBC News published a dispatch on the president’s event, for a more thorough picture of the various attendees and the MAGA movement’s blatant disregard for ethics.
But to really catch the flavor of what’s happening, it’s these images of brazen wealth and intolerably open corruption that one would expect from a president dead-set on dragging the United States back to the Gilded Age, an era marked by immense wealth inequality and widespread corruption.
As Chris Hayes noted on “All In” on Thursday, the contrasting images of Trump that day — whipping votes for a House budget with deep cuts to social programs, such as food aid and health care, in the morning, and in the evening reportedly helicoptering into a ritzy and self-enriching dinner for a few minutes — is too glaring to ignore.
Watch Hayes’ commentary on what he called the “Met Gala of pay-for-play” here:
Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was briefly inaccessible for thousands of US users early Saturday, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks internet disruptions.
The site appears to have resolved the outage, as DownDetector reports are down to 690 as of 11:30 a.m. ET.
Users in the United States began reporting issues on DownDetector at about 8 a.m. ET on Saturday. By 8:26 a.m. ET, more than 25,000 US users reported issues with the X platform on the mobile app and website. Users also reported issues with the server connection.
More than 11,000 users in the United Kingdom and hundreds in other countries have also reported issues.
DownDetector tracks user-reported issues, so the numbers may not reflect the full scale of X’s outage.
Problems accessing X on Friday stemmed from a data center outage, according to a post by X’s engineering team on Friday at 8:03 p.m. ET. Tech magazine Wired reported there was a fire at a data center leased by X in Hillsboro, Oregon, on Thursday morning.
According to Downdetector, users began experiencing issues on Thursday at about 2:00 p.m. ET. According to the X developer platform, there was a site-wide outage from Thursday to Friday that has been “resolved.” But logins with X began experiencing “degraded performance” on Friday and the “incident is ongoing.”
“Our team is working 24/7 to resolve this. Thanks for your patience — updates soon,” X wrote in the post.
“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms. I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out,” Elon Musk, who acquired the platform in 2022, wrote in response to a post on X Saturday morning which said the outages may stem from the data center fire. “As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made. The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
In late March, X experienced a widespread outage that was due to a “massive cyberattack,” according to Musk.
X said in 2024 that the site averages about 250 million daily active users. Musk announced on March 28 that he sold X to xAI, his artificial intelligence start-up.
A federal judge on Friday granted Harvard University’s emergency motion to block the Trump administration from revoking its ability to enroll international students, as litigation on the matter continues.
In her order, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said Harvard showed “it will sustain immediate and irreparable injury” if the Trump administration is allowed to implement its revocation notice before “there is an opportunity to hear from all parties.”
The order allows Harvard to maintain its “status quo” in enrolling international students for now. Burroughs has scheduled another hearing for May 27.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem notified Harvard a day earlier that the government would be terminating its student visa program, marking a major escalation in the administration’s pressure campaign against the Ivy League university.
This development is extraordinary, but it does not appear out of the blue: In mid-April, while canceling nearly $3 million in DHS grants to Harvard, Noem simultaneously demanded that the university turn over records on foreign students alleged to have engaged in “illegal and violent activities.” Failure to cooperate would jeopardize Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification — which allows schools to admit international students. Evidently, Noem has now followed through on that threat.
“The government’s action is unlawful,” the university said in a statement on Thursday, adding: “This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission.”
The price of President Donald Trump’s meme coin plunged 16% as of Friday morning, just hours after he hosted a black-tie gala at his Virginia golf club for its biggest buyers — an elite crowd that spent a combined $148 million on the token for the chance to be there.
It was billed as “the most exclusive invitation in the world.”
Among the 220 attendees were crypto influencers, industry executives such as Sandy Carter of Unstoppable Domains, and former NBA star Lamar Odom, who used the occasion to praise Trump as “the greatest president” and promote his own token, $ODOM.
The top 25 wallets were promised a private reception and guided tour. Others, such as 25-year-old Nicholas Pinto — whose dad drove him to the event in his Lamborghini — left underwhelmed and still hungry.
“The food sucked,” Pinto said. “Wasn’t given any drinks other than water or Trump’s wine. I don’t drink, so I had water. My glass was only filled once.”
Trump made only a brief appearance, Pinto said. “He didn’t talk to any of the 220 guests — maybe the top 25,” he said.
All in, the president was there for 23 minutes, Pinto said. Trump delivered a brief address rehashing old crypto talking points then left on a helicopter before taking any questions or pictures with his meme coin contest winners, he said.
Phones weren’t locked in RFID pouches, and security was lax, according to Pinto.
“Once Trump left, they didn’t really worry about anything else,” Pinto added.
Contest winners who spent the most on $TRUMP meme coins added their signatures to a poster-sized printout of the leaderboard at a gala dinner at Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, May 22, 2025. (Nicholas Pinto)
The crowd’s opulence was on full display.
“Richard Mille watches weren’t even rare,” Pinto said. “I saw at least 16 people wearing them. I never see that unless I’m at a high-end restaurant in Miami or Dubai.”
But the vibe was more muted than expected, he said: “Lots of people didn’t even hold the coin anymore. They were checking their phones during dinner to see if the price moved.”
The Budgets has reached out to Trump representatives for comment on the dinner and attendees.
Protests
For lawmakers and regulators, the dinner set off alarm bells.
The #1 token holder was Chinese-born crypto mogul Justin Sun, who is currently facing Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges that were recently paused, with the agency citing “the public interest.”
Sun holds over $22 million in the $TRUMP token and another $75 million in World Liberty Financial’s native token.
“As the top holder of $TRUMP and proud supporter of President Trump, it was an honor to attend the Trump Gala Dinner,” Sun posted on Friday. “Thank you @POTUS for your unwavering support of our industry!”
Outside the gates of Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, about a hundred protesters gathered, according to NBC News. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., joined them, backing a new End Crypto Corruption Act with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Signs read “Crypto Corruption” and “Trump is a traitor.”
Crypto on Capitol Hill
“The Trump family activity in the memecoin space makes my work in Congress more complicated,” Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., told CNBC News on Friday.
Hill, who’s leading negotiations on a bipartisan stablecoin regulation bill known as the GENIUS Act, called the gala “a distraction from the good work we need to do.”
Now, the GENIUS Act is at risk.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., recently added a controversial rider to the bill that would cap credit card late fees — what’s seen as a poison pill that could alienate banking allies and stall final approval.
President Donald Trump speaks at a dinner for meme coin contest winners at Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, May 22, 2025. (Nicholas Pinto)
On Thursday night as the meme coin contest dinner was underway, a bloc of Senate Democrats announced they’d be pushing for a new provision that would ban presidents and senior officials from profiting off crypto ventures while in office — a direct challenge to the Trump-linked stablecoin USD1 that launched in the spring.
In Washington, there’s growing concern that political infighting over Trump’s crypto ventures could derail the stablecoin bill altogether. That poses an even bigger risk.
According to The Wall Street Journal, major banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are in early talks to issue a unified digital dollar to compete with Tether, the foreign-controlled stablecoin that now commands over 60% of global market share.
Those plans hinge on legal clarity.
If the GENIUS Act stalls, the U.S. could lose its window to regain ground in the global race for digital payments.
The White House has tried to draw a line between Trump the president and Trump the private businessman.
“The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters when pressed on attendee transparency.
The administration declined to release a guest list. But blockchain data — and a patchwork of guest photos — tell part of the story.
A Bloomberg News analysis found that all but six of the top 25 wallets used foreign exchanges, ostensibly off-limits to U.S. users. More than half of the top 220 wallets were linked to similar offshore platforms.
One Nasdaq-listed penny stock, Freight Technologies, disclosed in an SEC filing that it spent $2 million on Trump’s token to push U.S.-Mexico trade policy. It didn’t make the cut for the dinner — finishing 250th.
Since its January debut, the $TRUMP coin has generated more than $324 million in trading fees. Roughly 80% of the $TRUMP token supply is controlled by the Trump Organization and affiliates, according to the project’s website.
WLFI, the Trump’s parallel token, has sold $550 million in two token sales.
Still, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks remained bullish on “significant bipartisan support” for stablecoin legislation.
“We already have over $200 billion in stablecoins — it’s just unregulated,” Sacks told CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” on Wednesday. “If we provide the legal clarity and legal framework for this, I think we could create trillions of dollars of demand for our Treasurys practically overnight, very quickly.”
“We have every expectation now that it’s going to pass,” added Sacks, though he didn’t answer a question about concerns from Democrats that there aren’t sufficient safeguards in place to keep the president and his family from profiting from legislation.
The Trumps are financial backers of World Liberty Financial, which is behind the USD1 stablecoin that is backed by Treasurys and dollar deposits.
Abu Dhabi’s MGX investment fund recently pledged $2 billion in USD1 to Binance, the world’s largest digital assets exchange. It’s the company’s largest-ever investment made in crypto.
President Donald Trump said in a social media post Friday morning that Apple will have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the United States.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.,” Trump said on Truth Social.
Shares of Apple fell about 2% on Friday after the post.
Production of Apple’s flagship phone happens primarily in China, but the company has been shifting manufacturing to India in part because that country has a friendlier trade relationship with the U.S.
Some Wall Street analysts have estimated that moving iPhone production to the U.S. would raise the price of the Apple smartphone by at least 25%. Wedbush’s Dan Ives put the estimated cost of a U.S. iPhone at $3,500. The iPhone 16 Pro currently retails for about $1,000.
This is the latest jab at Apple from Trump, who over the past couple of weeks has ramped up pressure on the company and Cook to increase domestic manufacturing. Trump and Cook met at the White House on Tuesday, according to Politico.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview with Fox News on Friday that he was not part of the meeting at the White House but the Apple situation could be part of the Trump administration’s push to bring “precision manufacturing” back to the U.S.
“A large part of Apple’s components are in semiconductors. So we would like to have Apple help us make the semiconductor supply chain more secure,” Bessent said.
Cook gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and attended the inauguration in January. Apple has announced a $500 billion spend on U.S. development, including AI server production in Houston.
Apple declined to comment for this story.
The company said during its May 1 earnings report that it expects about $900 million in additional costs for tariffs in the current quarter. Cook said on the company’s earnings call that the tariff outlook was “very difficult to predict” past June.
Foxconn, one of Apple’s main iPhone assembly partners, is spending $1.5 billion on expanding its India facilities, the Financial Times reported Thursday.
Trump has made public criticisms of other major U.S. companies, including Walmart, during his trade war push, but the levies on a specific consumer product is a new step. The exact legal mechanism for the tariff is unclear.
Trump followed up his post about Apple with another calling for a 50% tariff on products from the European Union. Taken together, the posts point to trade tensions increasing again after the U.S. had temporarily lowered many of its levies, including in an agreement with China.
Apple also had to navigate tariff threats during Trump’s first term, when a 15% tariff on Chinese imports was being considered in 2019. At that time, Cook had a strong relationship with Trump and the final trade deal excluded core Apple products from the duties.
As Apple is caught in the U.S. president’s crosshairs, the company is also seeing weak demand in China. On Friday the company hiked trade-in incentives for iPhones in China.
A federal judge further blocked the Trump administration from sharply cutting jobs and reorganizing the structure of many major federal agencies as part of its so-called DOGE effort under billionaire Elon Musk.
The order issued late Thursday granted a preliminary injunction that pauses further reductions in force and “reorganization of the executive branch for the duration of the lawsuit.”
The Trump administration on Friday morning appealed the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and is expected to ask that court to block the injunction from taking effect.
“But Congress creates federal agencies, funds them, and gives them duties that — by statute — they must carry out,” Illston wrote.
“Agencies may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a President may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress.”
Illston’s injunction was issued in response to a lawsuit challenging the effects of a Feb. 11 executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which said it “commences a critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy.” The order directed heads of federal agencies to prepare for large-scale reductions in force.
The suit was filed by a group of unions representing federal workers, as well as advocacy groups, and several cities, states and counties.
The Trump administration has already requested that the Supreme Court issue an emergency pause of Illston’s initial temporary restraining order blocking its reorganization efforts.
“That far-reaching order bars almost the entire Executive Branch from formulating and implementing plans to reduce the size of the federal workforce, and requires disclosure of sensitive and deliberative agency documents that are presumptively protected by executive privilege,” wrote U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer in the May 16 application to the high court.
“Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has ever intended to make federal bureaucrats ‘a class with lifetime employment, whether there was work for them to do or not,’” Sauer wrote. “This Court should stay the district court’s order.”
The mass firing of federal employees has been a pillar of Trump’s domestic policy in the early months of his second term.
Pennsylvania’s attorney general recently accused a police officer of taking photos in a women’s locker room, secretly filming people while on duty and possessing a stolen handgun. But he was unable to bring charges related to a cache of photos found on the officer’s work computer featuring lurid images of minors created by artificial intelligence. When the computer was seized, in November, creating digital fakes was not yet considered a crime.
Since then, a statewide ban on such content has taken effect. While it came too late to apply to the police officer’s case, the state’s attorney general, Dave Sunday, has already used the law to charge another man who was accused of having 29 files of A.I.-generated child sexual abuse material in his home.
Over the past two years, American legislators have grown increasingly alarmed by the threat of malicious deepfakes. Sexual images of middle school students have been digitally faked without their permission. Vice President JD Vance disavowed an almost certainly inauthentic clip that mimicked his voice to criticize Elon Musk. An ad featuring an A.I.-generated version of the actress Jamie Lee Curtis was removed from Instagram only after she posted a public complaint.
Legislators are responding. Already this year, 26 laws governing various kinds of deepfakes have been enacted, following 80 in 2024 and 15 in 2023, according to the political database Ballotpedia. This month in Tennessee, sharing deepfake sexual images without permission became a felony that carries up to 15 years of prison time and as much as $10,000 in fines. Iowa enacted two bills related to sexually explicit deepfakes last year, one of which established sexual images of children generated by A.I. as a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,245 fine for the first offense. In New Jersey, a recently approved ban on malicious deepfakes could result in a fine of up to $30,000 and prison time.
California has been especially aggressive in reacting to deepfakes, passing eight related bills in September alone, including five on a single day.
Academy Award-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis poses with her Oscar trophy, the morning after her win at the 95th Oscars ceremony, at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2023. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
“We’re in a very dangerous time, and we’re playing defense on everything that we do,” said Josh Lowenthal, a Democrat in the California Assembly, while introducing a session last week in Sacramento on the dangers of deepfakes.
Mr. Lowenthal, who co-sponsored a recently introduced bill targeting sexually explicit deepfake material, later watched a demonstration of the technology spit out a realistic image of him in a prison cell and produce a fake news story about comments he never made.
“I would’ve thought that was me,” he said after hearing deepfake audio of his voice, generated on the spot.
Reining in deepfakes has also become a federal priority, and a markedly bipartisan one. Congress overwhelmingly passed the Take It Down Act, which criminalizes the nonconsensual sharing of sexually explicit photos and videos, including A.I. content, and requires tech platforms to quickly remove the content once they are notified. President Trump signed the bill in the White House Rose Garden on Monday, accompanied by his wife, Melania, who backed the legislation.
But lawmakers’ enthusiasm for deepfake legislation has also set off a surge of pushback. Critics complain that many of the laws stifle free speech, constrain American competitiveness and are so complicated to enforce that they are, in effect, toothless.
Because of those concerns, some Republicans in Congress are trying to curb the state actions. They are now considering a 10-year moratorium that would stop states from enforcing and passing legislation related to artificial intelligence, giving the federal government sole regulatory authority and lessening the pressure on A.I. companies. Soon after re-entering office, Mr. Trump revoked an executive order from his predecessor that sought to ensure the technology’s safety and transparency, issuing his own executive order that decried “barriers to American A.I. innovation” and pushed the United States “to retain global leadership” in the field.
Regulating artificial intelligence requires balance, said Representative Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat from New Jersey who has helped write multiple deepfake bills. For all its potential dangers, he said, the technology could also become a powerful engine for job creation and creative expression.
“It’s an ever-evolving space,” said Mr. Gottheimer, a candidate for governor who last month posted a video that featured, with a disclosure, a digitally generated version of himself boxing with Mr. Trump. “The key is making sure that people are protected as we harness the opportunities here.”
Some state laws have also been challenged in court. In California, a conservative YouTube creator who posted an edited campaign video spoofing former Vice President Kamala Harris’s voice sued the attorney general last fall over two laws focused on election-related deepfakes. His argument: The regulations force social media companies to censor protected political speech, including parodies, and allow anybody to sue over content that he or she dislikes.
The lawsuit now includes plaintiffs such as The Babylon Bee, a right-wing satirical site; Rumble, the right-wing streaming platform; and X, the social media company owned by Mr. Musk (which last month also sued Minnesota over a similar law). A federal judge ordered that enforcement of one of the California laws be temporarily paused, saying it “acts as a hammer instead of a scalpel.”
In Dubuque County, Iowa, Sheriff Joseph L. Kennedy is assisting a local police department with a case involving male high schoolers who shared images of female students’ faces attached to artificially generated nude bodies. (Facebook)
Litigation isn’t the only challenge to regulating deepfakes. In Dubuque County, Iowa, Sheriff Joseph L. Kennedy is assisting a local police department with a case involving male high schoolers who shared images of female students’ faces attached to artificially generated nude bodies.
Such cases are time-consuming to work through, requiring careful documentation, data preservation efforts, subpoenas and search warrants for devices, Sheriff Kennedy said. Occasionally, the companies behind the websites or apps that people use to make A.I. images are uncooperative, especially if they are based in a country where an Iowa law has no power, he said.
“That’s where you can hit snags and are short on options for what you can do,” he said. “Sometimes, it just seems like we’re chasing our tails.”
First lady Melania Trump has used AI to record her audiobook. (AP)
While most deepfake bans are focused on sexual, political or artistic content, the technology also has banks and other businesses on high alert. Michael S. Barr, a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, said in a speech last month that the technology “has the potential to supercharge identity fraud.”
One deepfake scam bilked Arup, a British design and engineering company that worked on the Sydney Opera House and Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium, out of $25 million last year. Fraudsters also tried to target Ferrari last summer, using WhatsApp messages that mimicked the southern Italian accent of the automaker’s chief executive.
“If this technology becomes cheaper and more broadly available to criminals — and fraud detection technology does not keep pace — we are all vulnerable to a deepfake attack,” Mr. Barr said.
Iran and the United States made modest progress during talks in Rome over the future of Iran’s nuclear program, an intermediary said on Friday after the fifth round of discussions.
The two sides met for a little less than three hours and had “some but not conclusive progress,” Oman’s foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, said in a cautiously optimistic message on social media. His country has mediated the talks.
“We hope to clarify the remaining issues in the coming days,” he added.
The main issue in the latest round of talks was Washington’s demand that Iran halt all uranium enrichment and dismantle all of its centrifuges. Iran has insisted it will not give up the right to enrich uranium at lower levels, as guaranteed by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is trying to find a formula that works, and the fact that the talks did not break up in acrimony was viewed as positive. It also suggests that Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister and Mr. Witkoff’s counterpart in the discussions, will need to consult with his country’s leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, over how to proceed.
Still, it was clear that the core disagreement over enrichment had not been resolved. The negotiators are trying to break this deadlock so they can draw up the outlines of an agreement that technical teams can then fill out with details.
If a deal can be struck on the principles, a full agreement will have to cover complicated issues like the phasing of sanctions relief in return for specific steps by Iran to dilute or export its highly enriched uranium, or even to dismantle its extensive enrichment infrastructure.
That would take time, so there is also talk of a possible interim arrangement. If the principles can be agreed on, and while the details are negotiated, Iran might stop enriching uranium in return for some immediate sanctions relief.
A statement by a senior American official said, “We made further progress, but there is still work to be done.”
What happened in previous talks?
Mr. Trump aims to prevent Iran from ever obtaining nuclear weapons. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
Both Iran and the United States have said they want to resolve the decades-old dispute, with Tehran limiting its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of U.S. and international economic sanctions.
In Oman on May 11, Iran proposed the creation of a joint nuclear-enrichment venture involving Arab countries and American investment as an alternative to Washington’s demand that it dismantle its nuclear program, according to four Iranian officials familiar with the plan.
Mr. Araghchi proposed the idea, originally floated in 2007, to Mr. Witkoff, according to the Iranian officials. They asked not to be named because they were discussing sensitive issues.
A spokesman for Mr. Witkoff denied that the proposal had come up. But since then, Mr. Witkoff has outlined a harder administration position.
“An enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again, that’s our red line,” Mr. Witkoff said in an interview this month with Breitbart News. “No enrichment. That means dismantlement, it means no weaponization, and it means that Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan — those are their three enrichment facilities — have to be dismantled.”
Even if the United States prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons, other concerns include Iran’s advanced missile program, its support of proxy militias around the Middle East and its hostility to Israel.
Iran has said its defense and missile capabilities have not been and will not be raised in these negotiations.
What’s at stake?
The talks have the potential to reshape regional and global security by reducing the chance of a U.S.-backed Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and preventing Iran from producing a nuclear weapon.
A deal could also transform Iran’s economic and political landscape by easing American sanctions and opening the country to foreign investors.
Iran has been enriching uranium to around 60 percent purity, just short of the level needed to produce a weapon. It has amassed enough to build up to seven bombs if it chooses to weaponize, according to the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The I.A.E.A. says it has not found signs of weaponization.
If its nuclear facilities were attacked, Iran has said it would retaliate and consider leaving the U.N. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Iran’s economy and the future of its 90 million people are also on the line.
Years of sanctions have led to chronic inflation, exacerbated by economic mismanagement and corruption. Many Iranians say they feel trapped in a downward spiral and hope a nuclear deal would help.
What are the sticking points?
A big one is the question of whether to allow Iran to continue enriching uranium.
Mr. Witkoff had earlier described a possible agreement that would allow Iran to enrich uranium at the low levels needed to produce fuel for energy, along with monitoring. But he now says that total dismantlement of the enrichment program is the American bottom line.
That would appear to negate Iran’s proposal of the three-country nuclear consortium, in which Iran would enrich uranium to a low grade, beneath that needed for nuclear weapons, and then ship it to certain Arab countries for civilian use, according to Iranian officials and news reports.
Iranian officials have said they are willing to reduce enrichment levels to those specified in the 2015 nuclear agreement with the Obama administration — 3.67 percent purity — around the level needed to produce fuel for nuclear power plants.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested that Iran could have a civilian nuclear program without enriching uranium domestically by importing it, as other countries do.
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, left, with Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, in February in Washington. (Eric Lee/The New York Times)
How did we get here?
The previous deal between Iran, the United States and other world powers, signed during the Obama administration, put measures in place to prevent Iran from weaponizing its nuclear program by capping enrichment of uranium, transferring stockpiles of enriched uranium to Russia and allowing monitoring cameras and inspections by the I.A.E.A.
Mr. Trump unilaterally exited the deal in 2018. European companies then pulled out of Iran, and banks stopped working with Iran, fearing U.S. sanctions. About a year after Mr. Trump left the agreement, Iran, not seeing any financial benefits, moved away from its obligations and increased its levels of uranium enrichment, gradually reaching 60 percent.
The Iranians may be attempting a replay. The deal with the Obama administration was preceded by an agreement in principle that served as an outline for the final accord two years later.
Trump administration officials initially rejected this approach, saying it would take too long. But as the administration has come to see the complexities of what it hopes to achieve, such a preliminary accord might help forestall Israel’s threats of military action.
What comes next?
Both sides have agreed to meet again in the near future.
But a deal is not necessarily around the corner. The sides have to break the impasse over enrichment. And talks could still break down at the technical level, which was the most challenging part of previous negotiations.
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