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The White House is trying to break a fireworks record on Saturday—but doing so will likely cost taxpayers a pretty penny.The Trump administration has not communicated how much the July 4 celebration will cost, or who is expected to foot the bill for the pyrotechnics display. There has been no public record of the company behind the show, Pyrotecnico, receiving a standard government contract for the job, as has been the case with Washington’s previous July 4 celebrations.In lieu of concrete digits, NOTUS’s Anna Kramer reached out to several fireworks companies for a rough estimate on the show’s price tag. They projected the cost in the millions.“You’re talking a many multimillion-dollar production, without a doubt,” James Woods, the director of sales at Pyro Shows in Tennessee, told NOTUS. Pyro Shows assisted in one of the previous world record-setting fireworks displays in Dubai in 2014.Woods told NOTUS that some of the individual shells used in the upcoming celebration could cost anywhere between $50 to $1,000. NOTUS estimated that if even “3 percent of the devices used in this show cost $50, that would total $1.3 million for those devices alone.”This year, the Freedom 250 celebration has promised a record-shattering 40-minute display beginning at 10:30 p.m. that will use more than 860,000 explosives. They’ll be set off along the Reflecting Pool, as well as in West Potomac Park and off of eight barges on the Potomac River.The current record is held by the Iglesia Ni Cristo, a church in the Philippines that earned the Guinness World Record title in 2016 for lighting 809,000 fireworks during a New Year’s Eve event.Another fireworks professional, Kellner’s Fireworks owner Bob Kellner, hypothesized that even if the entire record-setting show were composed of “filler” shells (the cheapest explosives possible, sold for around $2 a pop), the display would still cost a minimum of $1.7 million. But only hitting that bare minimum is highly unlikely, as more sophisticated fireworks cost significantly more.There is just one federal record offering details about the upcoming semiquincentennial. A document from the Interior Department, dated December 2025, dedicated $1.5 million to Garden State Fireworks to run the display. But that was months before Donald Trump promised to launch “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY” on Independence Day 2026.NOTUS reported that Garden State Fireworks has been responsible for the capital’s July Fourth show for the last decade, and typically receives a contract between $250,000 and $300,000 for the display.

President Trump bought hundreds of stocks the day before he paused tariffs and caused the stock market to rally. Trump filed his latest financial disclosure on Monday, and it shows that he made 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million on April 8, 2025, from companies including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), according to an analysis from investigative outlet Sludge. The next day, Trump announced that he was pausing his sweeping tariffs for 90 days, and the S&P 500 went up by nearly 10 percent, one of its largest one-day increases ever.The timing of these trades suggests he planned to cash in, realizing that markets would rally after his announcement. Those weren’t the only suspicious stock trades he made last year, either. On August 18, Trump’s accounts bought between $250,000 and $500,000 of stock in chipmaker Intel, four days before the president announced that the federal government would take a nearly $9 billion equity stake in the company. Intel’s stock price went up 6 percent after that announcement.Trump also bought stock in defense contractor Palantir Technologies throughout the year, publicly praising the company while increasing its federal contracts, particularly those with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of his top advisers, White House deputy chief of staff and anti-immigration hawk Stephen Miller, also owns between $100,001 and $250,000 of Palantir stock. This year, Trump singled out Palantir on Truth Social in April and sent its stock price soaring.By law, Trump and other executive branch officials are supposed to publicly disclose securities transfers, including stock purchases, over $1,000 within 45 days. Not only did Trump wait more than a year to disclose the April stock purchases, he didn’t disclose any other of the thousands of stock trades he made in 2025.In all, Trump reported $2.2 billion in income in 2025, from crypto, stock trades, foreign real estate, suing news organizations, and other grifts. His administration is openly engaging in market manipulation and insider trading without any fear of consequences.

A grand jury apparently agreed that it's now a crime to touch the Reflecting Pool in D.C., despite a century of people wading in it.

The White House’s Freedom 250 spectacle grotesquely exposed the settler-colonial legacy of 1776.

Most of this article was conceived and written back in the early 1970s. It is excerpted from a book published in 1974. The book was and is titled What Is To Be Undone, a word play on Lenin’s famous title. The article may feel a bit academic, something some philosophy class might conceivably address. And since [...]

President Donald Trump is once again hawking a company in which he owns stock. Trump announced Thursday that stock in Micron Technology Inc., a semiconductor company, had leapt nine points on the stock market following the company’s commitment to donate $250 million to the president’s Trump Accounts, the individual savings vehicle for eligible American citizens under age 18.“Thank you Micron!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Trump’s thanks aren’t just on behalf of America’s children—it seems that the president personally benefited from the stock’s sudden rise. Trump’s recently released financial disclosures from 2025 revealed that the president already owned between $1.67 million and $6.65 million worth of stock in Micron. In March, as the administration was making preparations to launch the Trump Accounts, Trump purchased between $215,000 and $550,000 in Micron stock, according to MeidasTouch. In a press release Tuesday, Micron said the donation was the “largest corporate commitment of its kind.” At the same time, the company is facing a federal class action lawsuit over allegations of collusion and price-fixing with other chip manufacturers.In 2025, the president raked in loads of cash in the stock market by buying or selling a whopping 21,000 times with companies he talks about publicly, such as Nvidia and Intel. And Trump has a history of manipulating the stock market by boosting certain companies on social media. This also isn’t the first time the president has attempted to boost a company tied to Trump Accounts. In December, Dell pledged a $6.2 billion commitment to the accounts. A few months later, Trump purchased at least $1 million in Dell stock, and then went on a rant about buying Dell computers.

Donald Trump has made enormous changes to the White House during his time in office: He’s paved over the Rose Garden, stripped the palms from the Palm Room, and most unforgivably, razed the executive estate’s East Wing.But one strange detail about Trump’s bathroom renovation, revealed by New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman in their new book, Regime Change, might be the grossest yet.“New carpet was laid in the bathroom on Inauguration Day, as before,” the authors wrote. “Trump’s preference for a fully carpeted bathroom had posed a challenge for the Residence staff during his first term. The portion nearest the shower would often be soaked through; the staff was never quite sure why, but they worried about mold growing underneath.”Carpeted bathrooms became trendy in the 1970s and ’80s, several decades after synthetic fibers—namely nylon—were first introduced as carpet materials, making wall-to-wall carpeting a possibility for American homeowners. The novel idea was initially marketed as a luxury option, extending the lush comfort of the bedroom into the washroom. But the fad quickly fell out of style for obvious reasons. By the late 1980s, carpeted bathrooms had largely been replaced with vinyl or tile to reduce the possibility of trapped moisture and mold growth.Trump, however, seems to have held onto the fantasy that it could be done well.“It was important to him to have a fully carpeted bathroom, and residence staff’s solution to the damp problem, or the potential mold problem, was to get essentially a small piece of carpet and overlay it as if it was a bath mat on top of the carpet in front of the shower, and then substitute and rotate that carpeting,” Swan told MS NOW. “So, we do have some details from inside the residence, including some disputes and tensions between the president and the first lady over the interior decorating and renovating.”The Times duo’s reporting revealed further interior decorating disputes between Trump and his wife, with the president often removing items that Melania had intentionally placed around the residence and stowing them away in his office.