On Tuesday, shortly after the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump is demanding $230 million from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to reimburse him for legal costs related to earlier federal investigations against him, the president claimed he would donate any such funds to charity. “I’m not looking for money,” he told reporters. “I’d give it to charity or something. I would give it to charity, any money.” Trump, almost as if unable to resist, then framed the demand as satisfying a personal grudge. “But look what they did,” he said, referring to the federal investigations against him. “They rigged the election.” Does Trump grasp the impropriety at play? His bid to appear magnanimous suggests that he knows it doesn’t look good for a president to shake down the Justice Department for taxpayer money, particularly amid a shutdown, and especially as his administration slashes Medicaid and food stamps. His effort to put a generous spin on this blatant grift—there is no compelling evidence that the DOJ’s investigations were launched improperly—belies Trump’s long, sordid history of stiffing contractors, and, even more notoriously, the court-ordered dissolution of his namesake charitable arm over a “shocking pattern of illegality.” Let’s revisit some of that history, starting with the Trump Foundation, his tax-exempt nonprofit. In 2019, a New York judge ordered the foundation to pay $2 million to an array of charities—and then shut itself down—after determining that Trump, along his children Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, misused the foundation to further their political and business interests. That ruling came after various indications that Trump was misusing the organization. In January 2016, while running for president, he claimed during a fundraiser for veterans’ causes that he had personally donated $1 million via the foundation. After reporters revealed that no record of such a donation existed, Trump belatedly ponied up that amount to a foundation supporting fallen Marines and police officers. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post found that Trump had pledged more than $8.5 million to various charities over the previous 15 years, but had only delivered on a third of it. In 2022, Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, another nonprofit controlled by the president, along with his business, the Trump Organization, agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the DC attorney general charging that the committee illegally misused funds to enrich the Trump family by “grossly overpaying” his companies “for use of event space at the Trump Hotel for certain inaugural events.” Trump’s latest nonprofit, a foundation supposedly set up to oversee his planned presidential library, is already flashing warning signs. Trump and his aides have claimed that various donations he has received while president—including funds left over from the record $250 million his 2025 inaugural committee raised from corporations; proceeds from $1 million-a-plate fundraising dinners and $5 million one-on-one meetings with the president; and the large settlements that Meta, Disney, and Paramount have paid to settle seemingly extortionary Trump lawsuits—will go to the library. Trump even claimed the $400 million plane that Qatar gifted him, and which the Air Force is spending heavily to upgrade, will go to the library when he leaves office. But it isn’t clear as yet which, if any, funds or other valuables have been transferred to the library foundation. The organization was incorporated in May with the president’s son Eric; Michael Boulos, the husband of Trump’s daughter Tiffany; and a lawyer who works for the president in New York serving as trustees. This suggest the foundation will be controlled by Trump’s family, not independent outsiders. Already, the State of Florida has attempted to transfer valuable property in Miami to the foundation for a library site that also could host a hotel, condos, or other commercial ventures that could benefit the president and his family financially. (A judge temporarily halted the transfer last week in response to a lawsuit challenging its legality. ) Any assets that do make it into the foundation’s coffers can be used, legally in most cases, to pay salaries to Trump family members, provide them with free office space, and fund certain travel, experts told Mother Jones. Trump’s abysmal track record extends to his commercial activities as well. In 2016, hundreds of contractors—from carpenters, painters, and plumbers to corporate law firms—accused the then-presidential candidate of failing to pay bills he owed. Even his former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has publicly complained that the president barely paid him for his legal work. If Trump does manage to coerce a settlement out of his loyal DOJ appointees—a prospect made more likely by the fact that one of them, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, uset to be his personal lawyer—there’s nothing to indicate it’ll be used to pay anyone but himself.

Do Donald Trump and his family “actually give a fuck” about appearing to profit from his presidency? Evidence is mounting that they don’t. Mother Jones reported yesterday on various ways that corporations, foreign governments, and random rich people with agendas are giving money and other benefits to the first family—and noted that the president and his kin have largely dispensed with even their first-term pretense of adherence to ethical norms. This view was seemingly bolstered by Arthur Schwartz, an adviser to Donald Trump Jr., who, while explaining his unwillingness to address my questions about conflicts resulting from Trump Jr.’s business ventures, texted: “Write your ridiculous story. Literally no one cares…We don’t actually give a fuck.” The president indeed did not appear overly troubled by extensive bipartisan criticism when he accepted, on Wednesday, a plane from Qatar (a country where his business just cut a deal to develop a golf resort) to use as Air Force One. And he ignored critics accusing him of corruption again on Thursday, when he hosted a dinner at his Virginia golf course rewarding 220 of the largest purchasers of his $TRUMP meme cryptocurrency, including dinner guests who said they hoped to use the access to influence him. > “Write your ridiculous story. Literally no one cares…We don’t actually give a > fuck.” “They really don’t seem to be making much of an effort to show they care about appearance of conflicts of interest or corruption,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a recent interview. As brazen as Trump’s recent actions may appear, he nevertheless has continued to argue they are not corrupt. Trump this week threatened to sue ABC News again for reporting, he said, “that Qatar is giving ME a FREE Boeing 747 Airplane”—Trump insists the plane is going to the Department of Defense, rather than to him personally, despite having repeatedly said he plans to eventually transfer it to his presidential library. White House spokespersons, too, continue to profess indignation about media reports suggesting that there is anything untoward about the president taking gifts or money from people attempting to influence him. “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday. “This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.” The White House has claimed Trump’s businesses don’t create conflicts of interest because “the president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.” But these arguments are belied by Trump’s failure to limit the appearance or reality that he is using his power to reward people who help enrich him. Trump continues to benefit from the family companies now run by his sons, and ethics experts note that because Trump has not set up a blind trust, the president can keep track of who is paying or investing in those firms in hopes of influencing him. The Trump Organization and White House have declined to renew modest ethics restrictions they imposed during Trump’s first term. In 2017, the Trump Organization, run by Eric and Donald Trump Jr., said it would not ink foreign deals during the Trump presidency. This time, the company is reaching foreign deals. And while they claim to be avoiding agreements with foreign governments, the Trumps are making development deals that rely on approval by foreign governments. The Trump family also appears to be benefiting from a plan by a state-backed United Arab Emirates firm to use a Trump-affiliated digital coin in a multibillion-dollar deal. Donald Trump Jr., speaking Wednesday in at an economic conference in, of all places, Qatar, elaborated on this decision. “In the first term, we actually said we’re not going to do any foreign deals,” he said. “The reality is, it didn’t stop the media from constantly saying you’re profiteering anyway. We’re like, we stopped entirely, even the deals that were totally legit, it didn’t stop the insanity. So this time around, we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to play by the rules,’ but we’re not going to go so far as to stymie our business forever, lock ourselves in a proverbial padded room, because it almost doesn’t matter—they’re going to hit you no matter what.” This comment raises questions about what Trump Jr. thinks padded rooms are used for, and what not “totally legit” deals he may have in mind. But it also suggests that he understands the purpose of ethical norms to be avoidance of criticism. Critics of the first family’s mix of business and politics, by contrast, are concerned about actual corruption occurring. The president and his family hear those concerns. But they don’t seem to give a fuck.

After a French court found far-right leader and former presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement on Monday—a conviction that will bar her from holding political office for five years—some of President Donald Trump’s closest allies are boosting baseless conspiracy theories alleging that Le Pen’s conviction is part of a global scheme to keep right-wing populists from holding office. Le Pen is reportedly accused of wrongfully diverting $5 million in funds earmarked for the European Parliament to staffers of her nationalist, xenophobic party, the National Rally, over a 12-year period. The verdict makes her ineligible to run in the country’s next presidential election in 2027—and comes after she was polling at 37 percent, more than 10 points ahead of her closest challenger. Le Pen has run for that office three times before, and became more popular as right-wing political parties across Europe rose in prominence in recent years; in the 2022 presidential runoff, Le Pen earned 41.5 percent of votes to President Emmanuel Macron’s 58.6 percent. (Macron is term-limited.) In addition to being ineligible to hold office as a result of the conviction, Le Pen will also have to serve two years’ house arrest and pay a fine of more than $100,000. The politician has denied wrongdoing and said she intends to appeal the charges, which she dismissed on French television Monday night as “a political decision” intended to prevent her election. “The rule of law has been completely violated by this decision,” Le Pen added. (Sound familiar?) A variety of right-wing politicos from around the world condemned the verdict. Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán posted on X, “I am Marine!” Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—who will face a trial on accusations of inciting a 2022 coup attempt seeking to overturn the election he lost, the country’s Supreme Court ruled last week—characterized Le Pen’s conviction to Reuters as “left-wing judicial activism.” And Le Pen’s protégé, National Rally president Jordan Bardella, alleged that “French democracy…is being executed” by the verdict. You might think Trump’s cronies would abstain from commenting and count themselves lucky that their guy managed to evade criminal conviction himself for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. But you’d be wrong. Trump allies couldn’t help but characterize Le Pen’s conviction as evidence that the American president, too, had been unfairly targeted in his many court cases. “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world,” Elon Musk wrote on X in a post Monday morning, which had more than 16 million views by that afternoon. Musk made those comments when he re-shared a post from Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official who previously posted racist conspiracy theories online and interacted with white nationalists under a pseudonym, according to a 2023 NBC News report. The Benz post that Musk re-shared on Monday grouped Le Pen and Trump with a series of others accused, or convicted, of crimes—”[Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Matteo Salvini in Italy…Călin Georgescu in Romania”—and alleged, “The criminal prosecution of every populist challenger is a dagger in the heart of the credibility of democracy.” In response to another post from Benz boosting the conspiracy theory about the Le Pen verdict, Musk wrote: “This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump.” (But Trump has not, in fact, been immune from court rulings: Several court orders have successfully halted or even reversed some of his most outlandish moves since taking office for the second time, such as his attempts to overturn birthright citizenship and fire thousands of probationary federal workers. Trump was also found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels, and found liable by a jury of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.) Responding to a post from X user Alex Lorusso—executive producer of the right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s Benny Show on YouTube —that alleged, “they’re trying the same playbook they did to Trump in France,” Musk wrote: “Same playbook everywhere.” And in response to a two-minute video posted by Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a right-wing Dutch political commentator characterizing the Le Pen verdict as “lawfare against the European right-wing,” Musk replied: “Unreal.” Donald Trump Jr. also got in on the baseless paranoia, writing in his own post: “France is sending le Pen [sic] to jail and barring her from running?! Are they just trying to prove JD Vance was right about everything?” (He was presumably referring to the vice president’s well-documented disdain for Europe.) Trump Jr. made that post while re-posting another from Robby Starbuck—a conservative activist who brags about getting corporations to roll back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—claiming that “the left in France” was behind the “BS charges” Le Pen was convicted of. Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Le Pen’s conviction yet, and spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones about whether the president supports Musk’s and Trump Jr.’s claims. There is no evidence to support the idea that Le Pen’s conviction was politically motivated; instead, it’s a reminder that despite Trump’s successful evasion of punishment himself, nobody—not even an aspiring president—is above the law in a truly healthy and just democracy. It’s no wonder this concept triggers the Trump crowd.

As massive protests swept through the capitals of Hungary and Serbia in recent days, the embattled and increasingly autocratic leaders of both countries moved to crack down on critics, who, they insisted, have received quiet assistance from a hostile foreign entity: the United States Agency for International Development. Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic, facing protests over economic conditions and corruption, have attributed their political woes to foreign conspiracies. They’ve blamed the movements threatening their power on EU bureaucrats in Brussels, on the 94-year-old George Soros, and—inspired by the actions by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk—on USAID. In Budapest Saturday, tens of thousands demonstrated against Orban amid anger over inflation. The right-wing populist leader—who has trailed a center-right opponent in polls ahead of an election next year—vowed to purge critics at non-governmental organizations and media outlets that, he claims, were paid by the EU and the United States. “After today’s festive gathering comes the Easter cleaning,” Orban said. “The bugs have overwintered. We will dismantle the financial machine that has used corrupt dollars to buy politicians, judges, journalists, pseudo-NGOs and political activists. We will eliminate the entire shadow army.” Those remarks seemingly referenced Orban’s vow last month to go “line by line” through pro-democracy organizations in Hungary that have received US funding in an bid to “make their existence legally impossible.” In Belgrade on Saturday, a crowd the government said was just over 100,000 people—and which protesters said was at least 300,000—rallied in the city center against President Vucic, another right-leaning populist. The assembly was part of a mounting anti-corruption protest movement set off by the November collapse of a concrete canopy at a train station that killed 15 people. Critics have blamed the disaster on shoddy work by contractors and alleged corruption by government officials. But Vucic has called the movement a “color revolution,” using a term popularized by Vladimir Putin to suggest protesters are part of a western-funded regime-change effort. And recently, he has added USAID to the constellation of groups he says are part of the plot against him. Vucic last month cited Trump’s attack on USAID to justify raids against good-government groups, some of which had received modest funding from the agency. When a Serbian journalist last month asked Vucic about his son’s alleged links to criminals, the president responded: “How much money have you received from USAID?” Such rhetoric has quickly become common among governments in central and eastern Europe. Leaders are using Trump’s and Musk’s hyperbolic and often false attacks on USAID—including Musk’s claim that the agency is a “criminal organization”—as a cudgel to attack domestic critics and civil society. In Georgia, increasingly pro-Russian and autocratic Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has cheered Trump’s suspension of foreign aid and has accused USAID of joining in a “coordinated” attack on Georgian interests, the Guardian has reported. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico—who critics accuse of dismantling anti-corruption efforts to help political allies facing prosecution—has similarly celebrated the attacks on USAID and has asked Musk for information on past US support for non-governmental groups in that country. But the trend of adopting USAID as a bogeyman looks particularly ominous in Serbia and Hungary, as those countries’ leaders edge toward using past US support, real or alleged, as an excuse to shut down democratic opposition. “We are certainly seeing this played out in Hungary and Serbia with Orban and [Vucic] using Musk’s and others’ negative statements about USAID as a justification for cracking down on some groups that received USAID funding,” said Thomas Carothers, a democracy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trump and his allies aren’t simply enabling such efforts—they are encouraging them. In a visit last week to Serbia, Donald Trump Jr. used his podcast to conduct a fawning interview with Vucic, in which the US president’s son eagerly amplified the Serbian leader’s claim that USAID funds were part of an international conspiracy aimed at undermining the Vucic government. Trump Jr. asked if the canopy collapse that set off was anti-corruption protests in Serbia had been “weaponized, perhaps like our January 6.” Vucic said he had already reached that conclusion: “I was saying the same to my people here,” he claimed. Asked by Trump Jr. about the extent to which the protests against him are “manufactured,” the Serbian president indicated the movement is wholly the work NGOs funded by USAID and other foreign organizations. “I am absolutely certain that your father and…Elon Musk and some others guys, they can recognize it easily,” Vucic said.

The American people have spoken. Donald Trump is the 47th president of the United States. At noon Monday, Trump himself spoke, swearing—not especially credibly—that he would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” A lot of other Americans spoke to get us here, too. More than four years ago, at the very same Capitol where Trump was just sworn in, his supporters spoke. “Hang Mike Pence,” they said. Just three weeks later, Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, spoke, journeying to Mar-a-Lago to talk directly to the disgraced former president and to pose obsequiously for the cameras. Sen. Mitch McConnell spoke after Trump’s second impeachment trial, declaring that Trump’s actions had been a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” But the Senate minority leader kept speaking. He insisted that the Senate no longer had any power to convict Trump or to bar him from once again seeking office. Forty-two of McConnell’s Republican colleagues spoke in agreement, voting to acquit Trump and to allow his political career to continue. Trump, of course, never stopped speaking, and he soon announced another run for president. Then, in quick succession, the prosecutors all spoke. Merrick Garland announced he was appointing Jack Smith, who produced two speaking indictments against the former president. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg spoke, charging Trump with 34 felonies that may, or may not, have actually been felonies. “This office upholds our solemn responsibility to ensure everyone stands equal before the law,” Bragg declared. In Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis spoke, charging Trump and his cronies in a 98-page RICO indictment. The Colorado Supreme Court spoke, declaring Trump ineligible to run for president. The US Supreme Court spoke, and—unanimously—said the Colorado court was wrong. So then Republican primary voters spoke, choosing Trump as their nominee. New York judges and juries spoke—declaring Trump liable of sexual abuse, defamation, and fraud, and convicting him in Bragg’s criminal hush-money case—but voters seemed not to be listening. In Georgia, a judge spoke, blasting that state’s prosecutors’ “tremendous lapse in judgment” and “odor of mendacity” in a ruling that would ultimately derail Trump’s trial there. SCOTUS spoke once again, awarding Trump broad immunity and sending Smith back to the drawing board. In Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon spoke, announcing that Smith’s appointment was, somehow, invalid from the very beginning. In the meantime, another special counsel, Rob Hur, had spoken, explaining that he wasn’t going to charge Joe Biden with crimes because, in part, Biden seemed to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden’s supporters very much did not want to listen to that—at least until Biden himself spoke at a debate and removed all doubt. Kamala Harris spoke, and briefly restored joy. But she’d spoken before, telling voters that “Bidenomics is working.” Voters disagreed, and they disagreed even more when Harris said there was “not a thing that comes to mind” that she would have done differently than Biden. Even as Biden seemed to slowly disappear, he, too, kept speaking—at times in ways that were nearly impossible to comprehend. “We gotta lock him up,” Biden said about Trump. “Politically lock him up. Lock him out.” Days later, Biden called some number of Trump’s supporters “garbage.” Then Biden’s staff spoke about apostrophes, while Trump rode around in a garbage truck. On Election Day, the voters finally spoke, and a plurality said that Trump should return to the White House. Most notably, the people of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona all spoke, supporting the former president whom they’d rejected four years earlier. Smith spoke again, conceding that his cases against Trump were officially over. In New York, Bragg—along with Judge Juan Merchan—pushed on, but there was little left for them to say. With SCOTUS’s blessing, Trump’s hush-money sentencing went forward. Sort of. Merchan granted the incoming president an “unconditional discharge,” allowing him to return to the White House with no criminal punishment whatsoever. Which brings us back to Inauguration Day. “The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” Trump said to applause, shortly after taking the oath. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.” We’ll soon discover whether he was speaking truthfully.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that President-elect Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump, Jr. has accepted a job with an investment firm called 1789 Capital. The Times described the firm as focused on “products and companies aimed at conservative audiences.” Indeed, the firm funds right-wing TV host Tucker Carlson’s media company. And its website is larded with right-wing dog whistles: It champions “anti-ESG” and “deglobalization” and firmly opposes “excessive bureaucracy.” Those values are pretty standard conservative fare, but 1789 Capital also has deep connections to a more extreme faction of conservatism: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, hard-line conservatives, many of whom identify as Christian nationalists. The founder of 1789 Capital is Chris Buskirk, who, as the Bucks County Beacon’s Jennifer Cohn reported, once served as the editor and publisher of American Reformer, the unofficial publication of the TheoBros. In the digital pages of American Reformer, TheoBro contributors have fanboyed over the authoritarian Spanish leader Francisco Franco, called Uganda’s criminalization of homosexuality “legitimate civil policy,” and declared that the United States to be “not a nation of immigrants.” Don Jr., who is as online as the TheoBros, though without the fire and brimstone, currently serves as a trustee and executive vice president of the Trump Organization. He isn’t the first person in Trump’s orbit to be connected to Buskirk. JD Vance crossed paths with Buskirk in the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. The name of the firm presumably refers to the year 1789, when the US Constitution was drafted, and, as TheoBro patriarch Doug Wilson explains in a blog post about Christian Nationalism, “The Declaration acknowledged our rights are inalienable precisely because they were bestowed on us by our Creator.” Other 1789 Capital execs include Rebekah Mercer, a powerful conservative donor whose father founded the voter-research firm Cambridge Analytica, and Trump fundraiser Omeed Malik. As NewsTRACS’ Wendy Siegelman reported, in 2023, Malik’s investment company acquired Public Square, a business hub that says it “empowers like-minded, patriots to discover and support companies from a wide variety of industries that share their values.” In addition to his new gig, the Times reports, Don Jr. will likely “still play some role in his father’s political operation.”

In July, former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a 20-year-old man wielding an AR-15-style rifle. That near miss hasn’t stopped the Rod of Iron Ministries from holding a raffle this coming weekend for a special Trump-branded AR-15 at its fifth annual “Freedom Festival.” Billed as the “largest open carry rally in America,” the festival draws attendees to celebrate the Second Amendment and hear from headliners that will include former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, radio host Sebastian Gorka, former US Rep. Allen West, former Trump ICE Director Tom Homan, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Anyone who registers early for the free tickets can enter the raffle to win the Trump gun. The Rod of Iron Ministries was founded by Hyung Jin ”Sean” Moon as a militant breakaway from the Unification Church founded by his father, the late Sun Myung Moon. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Pastor Sean Moon’s sermons and social media videos espouse a particular End Times theology that predicts a future overthrow of the American government. He believes the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s divine justice—the “rod of iron” invoked in Revelation 2:27. Moon often wears a crown of bullets, carries a gold-plated assault weapon, and rides a Harley in a helmet with a creepy skeleton facemask. (Moon also seems to have musical aspirations: He raps under the name King Bullethead and will also perform at this weekend’s Freedom Fest.) With the help of a $5 million loan from their father, Moon’s brother Justin founded the Kahr Firearms Group in 1995. It started off manufacturing mostly small arms designed to tap into the growing market for American-made concealed weapons as states began to relax their gun laws. It has since expanded, and now Kahr is a sponsor of “Freedom Fest,” which will be held at its TommyGun warehouse in Greeley, Pennsylvania. Both Moons have cultivated significant MAGA ties, including with the Trump brothers, Eric and Don Jr. Kahr Firearms now offers several Trump-themed weapons, and the company’s products are frequently promoted in Don Jr.’s weapons-themed outdoor magazine, Field Ethos. When the firearms company opened its TommyGun warehouse in 2016, Eric Trump gave a speech. Given Sean Moon’s obsession with the downfall of the current American government, it’s no surprise that he was involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He was at the US Capitol on January 6, and while he didn’t go in, he was close enough to get tear-gassed. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by Hyungjin Moon (KINGBULLETHEAD) > (@kingbulletheadrodofironkingdom) The Rod of Iron pastor has never seemed especially concerned with appearances or suggestions that his ministry is a cult. “We’re used to that type of persecution,” Moon told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson in 2022, noting that followers of his father’s church are known colloquially as “Moonies.” Under Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church gained some renown for conducting mass weddings for its believers. (One at Madison Square Garden in 1982 joined 2,075 couples.) In 2018, the Rod of Iron updated this tradition by holding a mass wedding and vow-renewal ceremony in which couples carried (unloaded) assault weapons similar to the one used just days before to mow down dozens of staff and high school students in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting. This year won’t be the first time the Freedom Festival has given away a Trump gun. But considering the Rod of Iron’s reverence for Trump, I wondered whether the Freedom Festival organizers might have had second thoughts about raffling off a weapon favored by the former president’s would-be assassin. “That wouldn’t affect the decision to do this, not at all. I don’t think we’d see the connection,” Tim Elder, the church’s director of world missions, told me. “It’s not the AR’s fault. It’s the guy that was pulling the trigger. It’s his fault. We’re not going to blame the AR for that incident.” But if the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s justice, what does it mean if it’s used to try to assassinate Trump? “We see that God’s hand is on this man,” Elder said simply. The festival starts Friday, with an appearance by Flynn and a screening of his eponymous new movie.

Donald Trump has faced two assassination attempts in the past three months—horrifying events that he has used to spread unfounded conspiracy theories and smear Democratic leaders with false blame. He has been aided in this effort by vice presidential candidate JD Vance, his sons Eric Trump and Don Jr., multiple Republican members of Congress, and backers of Project 2025. This coordinated messaging—that Democrats supposedly “tried to kill” Trump—has been featured at the Republican National Convention, at Trump’s campaign rallies, and in numerous media appearances, from Fox News to Dr. Phil’s show. Trump and his surrogates took the effort to the next level when the former president held a large rally on Saturday at the same site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he was wounded by a would-be assassin during a July 13 appearance. The Trump campaign billed the heavily produced event—which included a live opera singer and an awkward performance by Elon Musk—as a return to “the very same ground where he took a bullet for democracy.” > “They tried to kill him,” Eric Trump said, “and it’s because the Democratic > Party, they can’t do anything right.” Speaking ahead of the former president, Eric Trump highlighted the familiar theme: “They’ve tried to get my father every single second since he went down that golden escalator,” he declared from the podium, standing alongside his wife Lara Trump, currently co-chair of the Republican National Committee. “They tried to smear us, they tried to bankrupt us, they came after us, they impeached him twice, they went after his Supreme Court justices, they weaponized the entire legal system…and it has not worked.” As the audience cheered, Eric Trump emphasized: “And then guys, they tried to kill him. They tried to kill him, and it’s because the Democratic Party, they can’t do anything right.” Eric Trump has sought to directly blame Democrats ever since the attack in Butler, including in multiple appearances on Fox News. Trump himself repeated the theme from the podium on Saturday: “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and who knows: maybe even tried to kill me.” This was a planned element of the former president’s speech; he read the lines from a teleprompter. Amid multiple investigations by the FBI, Secret Service, and Congress, no evidence has emerged that either of Trump’s would-be assassins had any connections to Democratic leaders. Neither perpetrator appears to have been driven fundamentally by partisan politics—a common, if somewhat counterintuitive phenomenon among political assassins, as I documented in previous reporting and in my book, Trigger Points. The motive of the man charged with targeting Trump in Florida remains unclear; his background indicates that he voted for Trump in 2016 but later turned against him and grew sharply critical of his foreign policy. The FBI has said that the motive of the deceased 20-year-old who shot Trump and others in Butler, who was a registered Republican voter, remains unknown. Notably, Vance used a slightly modified approach at the Butler rally, four days after conspicuously working to soften his political rhetoric and image during the vice presidential debate with Democratic Gov. Tim Walz. “Just look at everything they’ve done to President Trump,” Vance said on Saturday. “First, they tried to silence him. When that didn’t work, they tried to bankrupt him. When that didn’t work, they tried to jail him. And with all the hatred they have spewed at President Trump, it was only a matter of time before somebody tried to kill him.” Vance then reiterated that the assassination attempts had resulted from Democrats calling Trump “a threat to democracy.” No evidence supporting that claim has emerged in either investigation. Vance has led the way with this blame, starting in the immediate hours after the Butler shooting, and in subsequent campaign speeches, as I highlighted in my previous reporting. This time, he subtly shifted that blame to “somebody” while keeping the the litany of accusations essentially the same. Other top GOP leaders continue to play along with this false messaging, which threat assessment and national security experts have told me is fueling potential retaliatory violence. On Sunday, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos confronted House Speaker Mike Johnson in an interview about the rhetoric from the Butler rally, after Johnson called out Democratic campaign messaging as overheated. “Eric Trump actually did specifically reference Democrats,” Stephanopoulos said. “He said, ‘They tried to kill him. And it’s because the Democratic Party, they can’t do anything right.’ Do you support those comments or not?” “I don’t know what Eric was saying because I only heard just a snippet there,” Johnson replied. “I don’t know the context.”