The crackdown is partly intended to give Chinese authorities greater visibility into overseas stock trading by Chinese nationals so they can tax profits.
New Jersey GOP Representative Tom Kean—who has been missing from Congress and his own neighborhood for nearly three months—is still finding time to make money trading stocks.NOTUS reported on Tuesday that Kean submitted an electronic signature on Friday disclosing that he’d traded stocks personally in April—a move that would raise questions about insider trading even if anyone knew where he was. This is the second time Kean disclosed his trades even as he’s missed a whopping 90 House votes.“Call me old-fashioned, but I think it should be a bigger story that a sitting Republican member of Congress is missing, nobody knows where he is, yet he’s somehow still insider trading,” political commentator Mike Nellis wrote on Tuesday.Nearly five weeks ago, Kean told the public he was absent due to a “personal health matter,” and would return shortly. He did not elaborate on the health matter.“You couldn’t make up a better avatar of the 119th Congress than a Congressman who misses all floor votes but still trades stocks,” political scientist Alex Garlick said.Aside from the stock trading, Kean has also continued to send out newsletters, signed off on travel expenses to Las Vegas for staff, and himself used Amtrak and rideshare apps in San Francisco—far away from his home district, and well into his mysterious absence. Kean’s condition may very well be serious. But if he’s going to be sending newsletters, catching Ubers, and trading stocks, he’ll need a more detailed explanation for his sabbatical.
The Iran war continues to divide Donald Trump’s social media cultists.After reports that the Trump administration was finally getting around to ending its incredibly expensive and pointless military campaign, Republican Senator Ted Cruz criticized the peacemaking on X.“I am deeply concerned about what we are hearing about an Iran ‘deal,’” Cruz wrote Saturday. “If the result of all that is to be an Iranian regime—still run by Islamists who chant ‘death to America’—now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium & develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, then that outcome would be a disastrous mistake.”MAGA influencer Alex Bruesewitz jumped on Cruz for daring to question Dear Leader: “Cool, Ted. No one asked you, bro. Stop trying to undermine the President and his administration.”“Hush, child,” Cruz replied. “The adults are talking. I’m not your ‘bro.’ And young political grifters pushing Iran appeasement are not remotely helping the President.”Bruesewitz, a 29-year-old Trump adviser who helps the administration post memes on social media, was ready with a fittingly immature reply.“Sorry you’re still salty that I prevented you from getting a picture with Nicki Minaj after you came running after her like a school girl,” he wrote. “You’re going to get wiped out in 2028, clown.”Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo received similar treatment on Saturday after he mused that “the deal being floated with Iran seems straight out of the Wendy Sherman–Robert Malley–Ben Rhodes playbook: Pay the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] to build a [weapons of mass destruction] program and terrorize the world. Not remotely America First.”This time, it was White House spokesman Steven Cheung who “clapped back,” or whatever.“Mike Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about,” Cheung said. “He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals. He’s not read into anything that’s happening, so how would he know.”The fact that this is how the White House communications director speaks to people is both shocking and kind of funny. While Cruz’s and Pompeo’s neoconservative bloodlust is despicable, it’s hard to see Bruesewitz’s and Cheung’s ridiculous fealty to Trump as any better. Their insistence that Trump knows what he’s doing in Iran is also provably false. One supposes the silver lining here is that the MAGA coalition is sadder and more dysfunctional than ever.