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As Elon Musk defends nude deepfakes, the FTC is moving to censor AI models trained to recognize historical injustices. By Mike Ludwig This article was originally published by Truthout As Elon Musk defends nude deepfakes, the FTC is moving to censor AI models trained to recognize historical injustices. To understand the stakes of the debate […]

Will reports of foreign influence campaigns be used to discredit valid criticisms of artificial intelligence? Andy Lee Roth Project Censored Opposition to local AI data centers is bipartisan, according to a March 2026 Gallup poll, which found that majorities of Democrats (75 percent) and Republicans (63 percent) would oppose construction of an AI data center where […]

The post James Talarico Accused Ken Paxton of Voter Fraud. His Own Voter Registration Is Raising Questions. appeared first on ProPublica.

On Saturday morning, Donald Trump posted more than 40 times on his own social media platform, Truth Social, which is his primary megaphone. Nearly all of these posts could charitably be described as AI slop, and none of them is worth dwelling on at any length. OK, fine: In one image, he wore a garish, bedazzled white jumpsuit reminiscent of Vegas-era Elvis; in another, he was depicted as a screaming George Washington, leading soldiers in the Revolutionary War. He posted a doctored photo of Bruce Springsteen looking haggard, and bragged about his own physique at 80, claiming he was “aging in reverse.”How much would you pay to access such posts slightly faster than nearly every other human? Truth Social reportedly is charging as much as $100,000 per month to high-frequency trading firms to gain access to the website’s API, allowing traders to see these stupid posts a few milliseconds before everyone else. The service was announced a few weeks ago, resulting in accusations of self-dealing and a Democratic bill (that will go nowhere) to ban selling speedy access to the president’s posts. Meanwhile, thanks to congressional Republicans, Trump has held onto his immunity from IRS audits, his (probably spyware-filled) plane from Qatar, and the billions of dollars he’s already raked in by selling the presidency. This is the story of so much of Trump’s presidency: an unending series of scandals that amount to the biggest act of public corruption in American history. The scandals just keep coming, and yet, aside from complaints from the usual corners—the minority party, The New Republic, etc.—they’re largely greeted by a collective shrug. Of course Trump is corrupt. Of course he’s profiting from the presidency. What will it take to snap Americans out of this complacency?The Truth Social API scheme is debased, even by Trump’s standards. As with many of his scams, it comes with a fig leaf: Truth Social is not just selling access to Trump’s posts but to those of the top-performing accounts on the platform, which likely include those belonging to other administration officials like JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kash Patel, as well as the official White House account. But there is only one account that matters on Truth Social—and it certainly matters a lot, especially to high-frequency traders. Trump’s posts have gotten dumber and more deranged, but they still have the power to move markets. You’re at least as likely to hear updates about the Iran war or tariffs there as you would from “official” White House sources. More importantly, Trump’s updates are more chaotic and unpredictable than others, making them all the more appealing to traders. Selling access to them is a flagrant and naked act of corruption, allowing the most vampiric buyers and sellers on Wall Street an edge to make vast amounts of money that will never “trickle down” to ordinary Americans. Most of the time, these traders will get AI-generated images of Trump’s various obsessions, like his planned “triumphal” arch or his belief that he’s up there with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or “ReTruths” of Fox News and Breitbart stories. But sometimes they will get real news that they can act on, to the tune of millions or more. They may also get news that has been ginned up especially for them. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this scheme is the fact that it incentivizes Trump to use his Truth Social feed to make news that moves markets—and therefore increases demand for these $100,000 subscriptions. Given the volatile war in Iran, this could quite literally be a matter of life and death: The bigger the news Trump creates, the more subscribers he will likely rake in. And that money ends up in his pockets.At the same time, Trump has used one flagrantly offensive and unconstitutional move—a proposed $1.8 billion slush fund that would go to people who claimed they were victims of malicious prosecution by the Department of Justice (like January 6 rioters)—as cover for another: permanent immunity for himself, a long-suspected tax cheater, from IRS investigations. Senate Republicans successfully held up Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until he provided (nonbinding) guarantees that the slush fund would not move forward; the IRS immunity deal is very much still in place, and has, predictably, received much less coverage than the comparably more odious slush fund. Some of the apathy surrounding these stories stems from the fact that the president has long benefited from the common belief that American politicians are corrupt, which has ironically helped cloak Trump as he swiftly became the most corrupt politician in American history. As with much of his political persona, there is the sense that he is doing things openly that other politicians do secretly—even when that’s not really true, as in the case of his literal selling of the presidency. Similarly, because the Democrats are out of power and the GOP is completely under Trump’s control, there’s nothing that really can be done officially—at least not yet. This, too, has oddly helped Trump because it has provided the perception of invulnerability. Because Trump is getting away with it, which he is, it must be OK. And for those who don’t think it’s OK, the assumption is that Democrats aren’t stopping him because they’re feckless, when in fact it’s because voters denied them a scintilla of power under Trump’s second term.This has also led to a prevailing narrative that Trump is a Teflon politician, someone uncommonly immune to scandal. It is certainly true that no president has ever faced so many serious scandals and nonetheless survived. Still, I’m not sure this narrative is quite right. Though Trump is still president, he has clearly been damaged by his laundry list of misdeeds. He is historically unpopular, with an approval rating hovering in the low 30s. He has held onto power in large part because he has held onto a sizable support among Republicans, allowing him to wield unprecedented influence over his party, and because he is the most shameless figure in American political history. By never apologizing or admitting wrong, he can always fight on—even if each fight diminishes him.Still, these two stories from the past week—Trump selling access to his social media posts and Republicans preserving his IRS immunity—tell us something important about his presidency. These scandals have largely been treated separately by opposing politicians and the media, which is understandable: They are separate stories. But they are also part of a larger story—perhaps the largest story—of Trump’s presidency, which is his brazen and ever-expanding corruption. He is lazy and stupid, but he has been very dogged in using his perch as the country’s leader to pilfer from taxpayers and enrich himself and his billionaire cronies.Trump hops from scandal to scandal because each one is treated as a separate. By the time public interest focuses on one scandal, another has emerged. It is exhausting, but—from Trump’s perspective—effective. He takes damage but always lives to see another day (and make another dollar). That’s made possible in part by his destruction of presidential norms and ethics, but also by the fact that his party controls the House and Senate. The Republicans will run cover for him as long as he remains popular with the base, which, I suspect, he always will be.But the Democrats will almost certainly retake one chamber of Congress, if not both, in the fall. When they do, their biggest task will be to restrain this administration—and a huge part of that will involve investigating this corruption. But to do that effectively, they must weave these scandals into a larger narrative, not just pick one or two that seem particularly odious or emblematic. This should be easy. The Democrats will spend the fall campaigning primarily on what has been the biggest issue of the post-pandemic era: the affordability crisis. Prices are rising, real wages are going down, and Americans are anxious and pissed off. While many voters are struggling to get by, one man is doing better than ever. He made more than $2 billion last year alone. And he did it by selling the highest, most sacred office in the land.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s inexplicable advancement of Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general—who is now, according to Politico’s Chris Marquette, only one vote shy of Senate confirmation—has me thinking about the anchoring effect, a topic explored by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their 1974 paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” The piece is a foundational work in the field of behavioral economics; it led to Kahneman winning the Nobel prize for economics in 2002 (even though Kahneman wasn’t an economist).“Heuristics” in this context means “mental shortcuts,” and Tversky and Kahneman spent their careers demonstrating that these tend to follow seriously bad logic. They were especially fond of showing how bad heuristics can be when it comes to math. If you haven’t read Michael Lewis’s delightful joint biography of Tversky and Kahneman and their ideas, The Undoing Project, published in 2016, I recommend it highly. Kahneman also popularized his research with Tversky in his 2011 bestseller, Thinking Fast and Slow. “In many situations,” Tversky and Kahneman wrote in their 1974 paper, “people make estimates by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer.” That’s “anchoring.” These initial estimates, Tversky and Kahneman argue, are pretty arbitrary and extremely susceptible to suggestion. In one experiment, they spun a wheel of fortune and then asked participants whether the percentage of United Nations delegations that represented African countries was higher or lower than that anchor number. They then invited participants to guess what the real number was. When the anchor number was higher, the guesses were higher, and when the anchor number was lower, the guesses were lower, even though the anchor numbers were arrived at through transparently arbitrary means and had zero bearing on the real answer (which, incidentally, is 28 percent).Christopher Voss, a negotiation expert and author of 2016’s Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, writes of extreme anchoring, citing Tversky and Kahneman and taking it one step further. If you’re negotiating over something and you let the other guy bid—that is, you let him anchor—then “you’ve got to be careful”:If the other guy’s a pro, a shark, he’s going to go for an extreme anchor to bend your reality. Then, when they come back with a merely absurd offer it will seem reasonable, just like an expensive $400 iPhone seems reasonable after they mark it down from a crazy $600. Voss, who used to do hostage negotiation for the FBI, advises strongly against extreme anchoring because “your reputation precedes you” and if you get a reputation for making preposterous demands, nobody will want to deal with you. What goes around comes around. Point taken. On the other hand, you might end up in the Oval Office.President Donald Trump is a dedicated practitioner of extreme anchoring, having learned it (according to Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s excellent new biography, American Scoundrel) from the reptilian McCarthyite and mob lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn’s terrible reputation preceded him, which led, among other things, to multiple indictments (though no convictions). Cohn learned early on that people weren’t going to like him and he made his peace with that. Trump’s terrible reputation precedes him, too, and it’s cost him over the years in certain business sectors like banking. Even Trump’s fellow Republicans don’t like him much. You’d think that would be a liability in elective politics, but in Trump’s case it hasn’t been.Trump has made extreme anchoring work for himself on a scale Cohn could only fantasize about. His $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, filed while he was president, and concerning events that occurred during his first presidential term, is perhaps the most extreme anchor in the history of negotiating. And the likely Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche shows that it kind of worked.I won’t rehash Step One, which is the lawsuit itself, because I’ve written about that already. I also won’t dwell on Step Two, which is the settlement Blanche approved (part one, part two) as deputy attorney general—a $1.8 billion slush fund plus indemnification from IRS investigations—because I’ve written about that, too. Instead, let’s look at Step Three, which is the negotiation over supporting Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee.The holdouts were Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Both are lame ducks who have, in their latter days in office, offered some token resistance to the president. Their defiance probably isn’t based entirely on principle because they’ve both gotten screwed by Trump. Cornyn lost a primary earlier this year after Trump endorsed his opponent. Tillis decided to retire after Trump threatened to support a primary challenge against him. The salient point is that neither has any obvious reason to appease Trump. The two senators both opposed Blanche’s nomination in committee and said they wouldn’t back down unless it could be demonstrated that a.) Trump’s slush fund, which Blanche said previously was cancelled, really was cancelled, and b.) Trump’s IRS immunity, in Cornyn’s words, “does not extend to people beyond the parties to the lawsuit.” Trump and Blanche met these two conditions, or purported to, and so Cornyn and Tillis changed their votes to “ay.” Blanche put in writing that “there is no fund” and he posted his Senate testimony stating that the IRS indemnity applies only to the Trump family plaintiffs (Donald, Eric, and Don Jr.) and to the Trump Organization. There are persuasive reasons to doubt whether Cornyn’s and Tillis’s conditions truly have been met. These are described here, for instance, and here. But don’t let’s lose sight of the lameness of Cornyn’s and Tillis’s conditions even if they are legitimately met. The outrageousness of Trump’s lawsuit should have yielded no concessions at all from the Justice Department (and the courts may yet throw them out). Why didn’t Cornyn and Tillis get that? Why didn’t they condition a “nay” vote for Blanche on demonstrated proof that both the slush fund and the IRS immunity deal were kaput? (I set aside here the many other arguments to oppose Blanche to keep the focus on Trump’s extreme anchoring.)Trump filed a kleptocratic lawsuit against the federal government that itself could be grounds for impeachment. Any settlement in such circumstances is intolerable because Trump’s legal claim possessed no merit and the mechanism for settling it possessed no legitimacy. Cornyn and Tillis surely understand this. They owe Trump nothing. They are 74 and 65, respectively, so any future opportunities in Republican politics would seem, even in this gerontocratic moment, quite limited. Yet they accepted the warped reality Trump created that he ought to get something out of his $10 billion lawsuit. Why did they do that?Maybe they just didn’t read their Voss. In Never Split the Difference, Voss writes that “no deal is better than a bad deal. If you feel you can’t say ‘no’ then you’ve taken yourself hostage…. Never be needy for a deal.” Cornyn and Tillis’s willingness from the start to allow Trump some of his IRS indemnity showed they were, for no apparent reason, needy for a deal. Maybe it’s a Senate thing. It is, after all, a place that prides itself on being the world’s greatest deliberative body. Deliberation isn’t always such a great idea. Trump was not needy for a deal. At one point he threatened to withdraw Blanche’s nomination over this dispute temporarily until January, when Cornyn and Tillis would have left. Cornyn and Tillis should have replied: “Be our guest.” Instead, they “worked collaboratively” with Blanche, according to “a source familiar with the meeting.” Why weren’t they working uncooperatively? Trump was.This was a make-believe conflict from the beginning. Cornyn and Tillis had some power to deny Blanche Senate confirmation, but they had no power to keep Blanche from remaining as attorney general in an acting capacity. Blanche was likely going to be attorney general either way, just as President Joe Biden’s nominee for Department of Labor secretary, Julie Su, remained acting Labor secretary after the Senate wouldn’t confirm her. In both instances, their previous Senate confirmations as deputies allowed them to be acting secretaries indefinitely. For this reason, I was surprised Cornyn and Tillis picked a fight over Blanche in the first place. But if they were going to have this fight, they should have really had it. When a person makes an outrageous demand, the appropriate response isn’t “Let’s negotiate.” The appropriate response is “Hell no.” There’s no honor in compromising  under such circumstances. The United States Senate is the last place to understand that.

President Donald Trump is an unimpressive person. He possessed no real intellect even before his cognitive faculties began to decline. His real estate business career was mediocre at best; he inherited most of it from his father before going bankrupt multiple times. He lacks any real sense of ethics or integrity and often appears incapable of moral reasoning.As an electoral candidate, Trump’s only real skill was disposing of ossified, entitled competitors: the Clintons, the Bushes, the unremarkable and uninspiring band of GOP primary challengers, and so on. Trump won in 2016 thanks to a fluke in the Electoral College and the luck of having an opponent falsely tarred by the FBI director on the eve of the election. He won in 2024 amid public backlash to inflation that he helped cause and after President Joe Biden stepped aside mid-campaign after the incumbent turned in a disastrous debate performance.Having attained the White House twice through sheer luck, Trump has largely squandered the legacy of past generations. Trump’s mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic led to his defeat in 2020. He lacks the focus or interest to build sustainable policy achievements beyond harming his perceived foes. He lacks the basic capacity to transmute a GOP majority in Congress into permanent legislative accomplishments. Among our nation’s presidents, he will surely rank as the worst.The only thing truly impressive about Donald Trump is his skill at corruption. This is not, strictly speaking, a good thing to be good at. Yet one cannot help but be awed at the talent that he possesses for abusing power and enriching himself. The last 10 years have seen more innovations in corruption by Trump than the 240 years of American history that preceded them.Take, for example, his latest scheme to enrich himself and others at the expense of everyone else. Trump owns a social media company named TruthSocial on which he writes his infamous stream-of-consciousness posts. (He previously posted them on Twitter before its then owners banned him for trying to overthrow the 2020 election in 2021.) These posts can provide an unusual level of insight into Trump’s thinking, and interpreting them has been a recurring feature of his political career.Last week, TruthSocial announced an extraordinary new “product”: Truth API, a version of his social media feed that gives subscribers “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.” (Truths is the hyper-Orwellian name that TruthSocial gives to posts.) In practical terms, it would allow Wall Street firms and other financial institutions access to Trump’s market-moving posts a handful of seconds before they reach the general public.Why would anyone bother to pay for a few seconds’ advantage to read a Trump post? Because TMTG, the company that operates TruthSocial, can make money off it. Imagine, for instance, that Trump announces higher or lower tariffs against U.S. trading partners, a new bombing campaign against Iran, or his decision to support or oppose a publicly traded American company. A few seconds of lead time could allow firms with complex trading algorithms to cash in on market movements by Trump’s posts—all by handing him a small monthly slice of the profits.Insider trading is not an unintended by-product; it is the point. “Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, the interim chief executive officer of TruthSocial owner TMTG, reportedly said in a press release. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.”This is a long-winded way of saying that the president is cashing in on his own public comments. According to some reports, subscribers would be charged $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts. Trump personally holds a 41 percent ownership stake in TMTG himself, making him a direct financial beneficiary of his own actions as president. The scheme is functionally no different than if he asked for giant burlap sacks of cash from Wall Street executives in exchange for reading his executive orders the day before they are issued.Trump has largely given up on anything resembling policymaking or governance during his second term. His legislative agenda is practically nonexistent, save for a constitutionally dubious bill to reshape American elections that is dead on arrival in the Senate. He has outsourced his foreign policy, which largely consists of being humiliated by the Iranian government over closures of the Strait of Hormuz, to Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic policy guru, is largely running the mass-deportation portfolio without real supervision.That gives Trump plenty of free time to devote himself to his two great loves. When it comes to remaking Washington, D.C., in his own image, Trump has had a mixed record of success. The Kennedy Center no longer bears his name, thanks to a court ruling, while the ruins of the East Wing are slowly being built over into a gaudy ballroom. The administration also plans on erecting a giant marble arch outside Arlington National Cemetery to honor Trump himself; the next Democratic president will likely demolish it as soon as they can.When it comes to corrupt self-enrichment, however, there are no obstacles or guard rails. He has stuffed the Justice Department with his former (and, in a way, current) personal lawyers to end its post-Watergate tradition of independence. The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that Trump enjoys “absolute immunity” for any crimes committed in connection with his “core constitutional powers.” This anti-constitutional decision amounted to a blank check to collect bribes, kickbacks, and other forms of graft. To that end, Trump has taken millions from various donors in exchange for pardoning a wide range of white-collar criminals. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the rumored going price for clemency is at least $1 million. In one instance, Trump pardoned a Democratic member of Congress whose family had petitioned him for help and then lashed out at him on social media for not switching parties, implicitly suggesting a quid pro quo of sorts. (Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, the lawmaker in question, has denied any wrongdoing over his original bribery charges or the pardon he obtained from Trump.)This is fairly unimaginative by Trumpian standards, of course. A more characteristic scheme is assigning a personal aide—Meredith O’Rourke, a fundraiser whom he reportedly calls his “princess of darkness”—to collect tens of billions of dollars in contributions from major corporations for various pet projects. The Journal reported last month that O’Rourke has taken to referring to Trump as “the boss” and telling the companies, many of whom have regulatory concerns in Washington, that “the boss wants this money.” Those companies have in turn donated hefty sums for the new White House ballroom, Trump’s planned presidential library, and more.Then there is Trump’s tax immunity deal with the Justice Department. Earlier this year, Trump’s personal lawyers struck a bargain to create an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate alleged victims of “lawfare” by the Biden administration. In real-world terms, it was a slush fund to reward his loyalists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and faced criminal charges for it. (Trump pardoned all of them on his first week in office last year.) Trump himself also purported to obtain retroactive immunity for any tax-related crimes he or his family had committed before this year, under the guise of pushing back against the “weaponization” of his tax returns. One of Trumpism’s basic dogmas is that Trump can commit no crimes and it is a crime to investigate him for them. Translating that dogma into legal language proved to be harder than expected. Rare bipartisan pushback from Capitol Hill led Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to seemingly back down from the fund itself, but not from the purported immunity agreement. Trump insisted that Blanche be confirmed as attorney general nonetheless, and Republican senators appear ready to fold on the matter, as well. Corruption, like any disease, is spread by close contact.It is impossible for an honest person to not be repulsed by Trump’s grotesque adventures in self-enrichment, by his near-total sense of amorality and lack of any belief in honest government. At the same time, there is something remarkable about the depths and lengths to which Trump will go to stuff a few more dollar bills in his shirt. It is like watching Barry Bonds hit home runs in the early 2000s—yes, obviously, it is all corrupt and tainted, but isn’t it incredible to see the outer bounds of the human experience? Isn’t it stunning to see what the most corrupt person in America can do when placed in the most powerful job in the nation?That said, it’s worth noting that Trump’s genius for depravity still can’t hold a candle to the true GOAT of American political corruption. Richard Nixon and his cronies were breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters and kidnapping the attorney general’s wife in an era when Congress was powerful, most government officials saw themselves as public servants, and the Supreme Court regularly upheld our constitutional order. Imagine what a man of Nixon’s genuine brilliance could have accomplished if he played under today’s rules. It would be like watching Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points every night, but for bribery.

An array of super PACs is trying to muscle through Melissa Hernandez in a low-turnout special election for a Bay Area House seat. The post The AIPAC Universe Comes Together for Sequel in California appeared first on The American Prospect.

Donald Trump has been raging at Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., because she dropped those high-profile prosecutions for alleged vandalism of his Reflecting Pool renovation. That pressure is corrupt on its own. But new leaks are making it look even worse. CBS News reports that Pirro actually carried a box of evidence to the White House showing that the facts simply didn’t support those prosecutions. The meeting got “heated,” per CBS, seemingly meaning Trump wanted prosecutions in spite of what the facts and the law dictated. Meanwhile, we just learned this fiasco triggered private “tirades” from Trump, further underscoring his quest for lawless prosecutions. We talked to former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, author of The Fix: Saving America From the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. She walks us through just how deeply irregular this presidential conduct truly is, discusses what has been lost at the Justice Department, and reflects on how a Democratic House and/or Senate can rein in all this madness next year. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

‘Hondurasgate’ exposed a plan to boost far-right American puppets across the Western Hemisphere. The post In Latin America, Trump Is Bringing Back That Old-Time Imperialism appeared first on The American Prospect.