FIFA is “proposing that the opening match of their inaugural under-15s football festival should be Israel against Palestine,” according to reporting by The Athletic, which cited sources with knowledge of the plans. When I read the news, I literally shook my head in disbelief. This eye-wateringly corrupt and politically opportunistic soccer organization might just be on the brink of outdoing itself, once again, with this exploitative spectacle.

The backstory to the proposed match is FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s awkward failure to orchestrate a photo op between the vice president of the Israel Football Association and the president of the Palestinian Football Association at the FIFA Congress in April. After being called on to a stage together, the PFA president, Jibril Rajoub, refused to shake hands with his Israeli counterpart despite pleas from Infantino. Instead, Rajoub faced the audience and shouted, “We are suffering!”

Infantino wouldn’t be giving “hope to the children”— he would be using them as pawns.

It appeared Infantino was trying to posture as a grand peace broker ahead of announcing that he would be running for another term as president — a cushy gig that pays more than $6 million a year. But instead of being humbled by his amateur diplomatic backfire, he seems to be doubling down in the strangest way: by proposing the two youth teams face off against each other in the opening match of a new tournament.

The whole setup smacks of an empty showman trying to profit off one of the most high-profile geopolitical conflicts in the world — and one in which one party has engaged in an ongoing ethnic cleansing and a genocidal military operation against the other.

International sports tournaments certainly do stir up international political tensions from time to time. But those matchups happen unpredictably, through a combination of random draws and coinciding ranking in a contest. And it’s understood that no matter how high emotions run, the game is ultimately just a game.

What Infantino’s FIFA appears to be pushing for, instead, is a dramatization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the medium of sports. Regardless of the stated intentions, it would make the match itself about their adversarial relationship, and would attract international attention — and potentially a large, lucrative viewership for a new tournament — based on politics and controversy. It’s easy to see how in this context the match could intensify ill feelings between the two teams. That this match would involve children makes it even more distasteful, as they would lack the maturity to see past FIFA’s cheap gimmick. Infantino wouldn’t be giving “hope to the children” — he would be using them as pawns.

It’s still unclear if the match will happen. A spokesperson for the IFA told The Athletic, “We are more than ever willing to use football as an instrument to promote normalization and peace,” and added, “Our hands are always extended for a better future for everyone. We hope to find a brave partner on the other side.” The PFA did not respond to a request for comment.

But the fact that it’s apparently even being floated as a proposal is a window into FIFA’s cynicism. 

We don’t need to be charitable here — how could this possibly be about peace? Infantino is a sycophant who proudly awarded our imperialistic, war-loving president the ludicrous inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” in a bid to curry favor with him and ensure the World Cup rakes in as much cash as possible. Politico reported that Infantino scored more face time with Trump than any world leader in 2025. If he harbored even the slightest bit of concern about contributing to global unity, he would rescind his dystopian reward and resign out of shame. 

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Less than a day after hosting an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight on the White House lawn, President Donald Trump turned his attention to announcing another splashy event: the July 4th event in Washington meant to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, which Trump says will now be “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all” and feature the “largest fireworks show in history.”

As MS NOW reported, this event was, according to the organization managing the event, originally intended to celebrate America’s founding and love of country in a nonpartisan manner. The event description made no mention of Trump and promised a “celebration of the people, principles, and patriotic spirit that make the United States the greatest nation in the world.”

But Trump is politicizing the event, once more co-opting the country’s anniversary into a personal celebration, and selling it with the same energy that one might advertise a monster truck show.

I can’t help but think of that warning that populists pander to the public and divert their attention from misdeeds with “bread and circuses.” But Trump’s political strategy has gone all in on circuses — and the bread has gone moldy.

Trump is barely even attempting to govern anymore, but he is feverishly devoted to crafting the symbolism of power.

It is not uncommon for presidents to sponsor fun cultural events at the White House. But Trump’s UFC fight used entertainment as a reactionary political forum, encouraging his supporters to see violence as a just and honorable signifier of their politics.  

The Lincoln Memorial is a sacred place in the American story, meant to prompt reflection about our republic’s existential questions. Trump held a weigh-in for his UFC fight here, a desecration.

The event itself, held in a gigantic metal structure called “The Claw” on the White House lawn — at which a fighter repulsively croaked, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” — sent a message to the rest of America about who was welcome and who was not at Trump’s party outside the People’s House. It also signaled to members of a right-wing movement built on a caricature of militant masculinity that Trump values their support.

Having started a disastrous, failed war of choice and holding record-low approval numbers, Trump has retreated to party planning and interior decorating. The UFC event was only the latest, but his pageants have also included an over-the-top military parade, decking the White House in gold, draping images of his face everywhere in Washington and providing bizarre updates on renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Trump is barely even attempting to govern anymore, but he is feverishly devoted to crafting the symbolism of power. And he’s going to lean into it through the semiquincentennial celebrations.

Trump might be entertaining some in his base with these circuses, and they serve as a way to telegraph his support of pro-regime paramilitaries. But he has also completely forgotten that other vital prong of vulgar populism — the bread. During Trump’s first term, the economy hummed along decently, the memory of which played a key role in his return to office. But this term, he is presiding over a self-made affordability crisis, and he couldn’t be less concerned. In fact, he’s showing outright scorn for the people. 

Trump boasted, “I love the inflation,” when reporters pressed him about inflation reaching a three-year high, driven in large part by an energy price surge he caused. He proudly declared, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” as he loses a war he promised not to start and has no clear plan to get out of. He has taken no serious steps to relieve working Americans from the extra financial pressure. And he’s starting to hemorrhage support because of these intertwined crises.

One of Trump’s political talents has been using his clownish charisma and culture wars to convince right-leaning, working-class Americans that he’s on their side — just as he signs legislation and regulations that are gifts to tech tycoons and the richest 1%. But if the fundamentals of the economy aren’t working — particularly after a previous round of inflation under a predecessor — it could spell disaster for his party during the midterm elections. At some point, people need that bread. 

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A federal judge indefinitely blocked President Donald Trump’s proposed nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund on Friday and demanded that the administration provide a sworn statement within a week that it will not try to go ahead with creating it in the future. 

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s decision demonstrates a more punitive attitude toward the fund than Senate Republicans, who have made a fuss about the effort but proven unwilling to take binding action to block it.

Brinkema is right to be suspicious and demand a clear disavowal.

Of course, that the fund is even a possibility is astonishing. It would use the pretext of compensating people treated unfairly by the federal government to effectively act as a slush fund for Trump’s political allies and potentially be used to pay out violent Jan. 6 rioters who seek compensation for being penalized by the government.

Senate Republicans recognized it as so obviously politically toxic that in May they revolted en masse through public objections and an acrimonious two-hour meeting with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, described it as “one of the roughest meetings I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate.” 

The Trump administration temporarily retreated, but declined to decisively rule out reviving the fund in the future. Blanche said, “We’re not moving forward with the fund. Period.” But he refused to commit to the promise in writing when asked to do so by Democratic lawmakers. And Trump continued to praise the idea of the payout fund as “beautiful” and “important.”

Senate Republicans had an opportunity to muzzle Trump on the fund and put the issue to rest with amendments to an immigration bill they passed earlier in June — but in a remarkable display of subservience, chose not to do so. Perhaps they hoped they could take Blanche at his word that the fund was fizzling out while avoiding direct confrontation with Trump.

Brinkema is therefore stepping in where a Republican-controlled Congress has failed. The fund is still being challenged in court by a pro-democracy group and, according to The Washington Post, at a hearing in Virginia on Friday, Brinkema “forcefully rejected the government’s arguments that the case was moot, citing Trump’s praising of the idea and acting attorney general Todd Blanche’s unwillingness to say under the penalty of perjury that the administration will not try to stand it up in the future.”

She said, according to the Post, “We don’t have the kind of absolute certainty that this fund wouldn’t rear its head” again, and that the “public interest in this case is very, very strong in my view.”

The Post notes that Brinkema’s latest decision came after Justice Department officials had called off the fund in court filings and argued the issue was moot.

Brinkema is right to be suspicious and demand a clear disavowal. The Atlantic, citing eight people familiar with the fund, reported on Thursday that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House “indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped,” and that “officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated.”

Brinkema was right to try to find a way to preempt these efforts. At the same time, it’s not clear what shape any alternative arrangements might take and whether they could circumvent a block on the fund.

There are also other ways that Jan. 6 defendants might be able to get compensation. As Anthony Coley, the former director of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs in the Biden administration, wrote recently for MS NOW, hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants have filed claims against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act. This policy acts as a “back door” to pay out Jan. 6 rioters through a process hidden from public view.  “A DOJ run by the president’s former defense lawyers can still settle such claims one by one, on its own authority, with no public hearing and no vote,” Coley wrote.

Coley also pointed out that Congress has a few options to pass legislation to bar that from happening. But given the GOP’s track record so far on opposing Trump, there’s little reason for optimism.

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President Donald Trump’s latest gaffe Wednesday in which he said he loves inflation is more than an act of political self-harm. It’s the kind of error that should once again raise questions about his soundness of mind. 

A reporter at the White House asked Trump whether he was concerned about Wednesday morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report that inflation hit 4.2% in May, a three-year high.

Trump replied:

No, I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over, you know, I can say it now, something you didn’t know, do you know, we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it, you know. Who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now. We took out the other night 22 ships late at night with no lights because they don’t have any radar, because we blasted the crap out of it.

It was a jaw-dropping response. 

It’s beyond baffling that Trump would announce that he’s fond of an economic phenomenon that hurts working people and has been leading to losses for incumbent parties across the democratized world. People struggling to put food on the table and make rent are suffering in a tangible way from skyrocketing energy costs, and their corrupt billionaire president is cavalierly describing inflation as a positive. Trump is once again writing Democrats’ midterm attack ads for them.

When Trump gets midway through the comment, one might wonder if he’s speaking in an ironic tone and winding up to offer a counterintuitive explanation for why Americans should see inflation as tolerable. But instead, he pivots to a non sequitur about the U.S. allegedly secretly smuggling barrels of oil from somewhere unspecified — Iran? The Strait of Hormuz?

Other officials in his government appear to have no clue what he meant. As MS NOW reported, “Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who was simultaneously testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, told lawmakers that he did not know of any such operation.” 

A White House official tried to clean up Trump’s confusing claim by telling The New York Times that Trump was referring to the U.S.’ efforts to escort commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz. But not only was that operation entirely public, it also failed miserably. Unless more evidence emerges that says otherwise, it appears Trump was making something up or doesn’t understand how his own Iran policy works.

But crucially, nothing he said explains why he said, “I love the inflation.” Even if there has been some secret oil-removal mission in Iran, it doesn’t make inflation good, or tolerable (or more likely to recede). Instead it seems Trump failed to retain focus on the topic at hand, and then blurted out something he meant to sound like an advertisement for American power. 

Wednesday’s gaffe is distinct from Trump’s comment last month that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” as he confronts Iran. That professed indifference amounted to Trump accidentally revealing his true feelings.

“I love the inflation” is closer to President Joe Biden saying “we finally beat Medicare” at the end of an unintelligible ramble during his 2024 debate with Trump. Biden’s answer amplified doubts among Democrats over whether he was capable of completing a second term, and it eventually led to him dropping his candidacy for re-election. 

By contrast, Trump’s incoherent account of inflation and tall tales about his foolish war are yawned at by Republicans. A functioning party would do everything it could to buck a party leader who is a walking, talking liability and appears to have declining reasoning skills. But if those Republicans running in midterm elections don’t strongly condemn Trump’s claim to love inflation, we’ll have reason to question their reasoning skills, too. 

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The date when Social Security’s trust fund is expected to run out of money just got bumped up. The fund is now projected to empty in 2032, according to a new report released by Social Security’s trustees.  

The new depletion date isn’t an earth-shaking change — it’s only a quarter earlier than the estimate in last year’s report. But it illustrates how President Donald Trump’s policies are degrading a program he promised to never jeopardize — and accelerating an approaching crisis in how our government will assist the elderly and disabled.

The report names three factors that contributed to the earlier insolvency date. One is a declining fertility rate, but the other two drivers can be traced back to Trump: a drop in immigration into the country, and the “substantial effect” of the tax policies in the One Big Beautiful Bill he signed last summer.

Trump’s acceleration of the program’s insolvency comes atop his assaults on the program’s administrative capacities.

Reduced immigration during Trump’s second term — especially when coupled with a declining fertility rate — strains Social Security because the program is funded through payroll taxes. Those come out of people’s paychecks, and fewer workers supporting an aging population means the program receives less revenue. Indeed, Social Security already has been tapping its trust fund for the better part of the past two decades because the program’s costs have exceeded its cash income. And as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out last year, last year’s tax cuts were a boon to the rich but a bust for the solvency of the Social Security trust fund.

To be clear, if the fund is depleted, Social Security won’t go belly up. Benefits will continue to be paid out, but there will be a large drop in the amount. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the “average monthly cut would total $500, which is more than what the average retired household spends on groceries each month.” 

That would be a huge blow to the budgets of many older Americans. Social Security is a major source of income for most retirees, and roughly 40% of beneficiaries over the age of 65 rely on it for most of their income. And it would mark the destabilization of the sole source of retirement security for most Americans that is supposed to be insulated from ups and downs — unlike 401K plans. As the CBPP has pointed out, Social Security is “most workers’ only source of guaranteed retirement income that is not subject to investment risk or financial market fluctuations.”

Trump’s acceleration of the program’s insolvency comes atop his assaults on the program’s administrative capacities. His cuts to the Social Security Administration have left offices understaffed, increased wait times, and reduced quality of customer service.   

Ultimately, Trump is exacerbating a colossal social safety net problem that predates him, and the trust fund will hit dire straits after he has left office. Democrats need to have clear plans for shoring up the program and making it robust for the future — which will require not being sheepish about taxes as a tool for renewing the social contract. And when Republicans try to claim that they, too, are champions of Social Security, all Democrats need to do is point to the truth.

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“I’m Hunter Biden. You’ve never actually heard from me,” posted the son of former President Joe Biden to X and Substack on May 19.

It was an unexpected proclamation from a long-controversial figure in Democratic politics, whose personal scandals, nepo baby tendencies and criminal conduct have long been the stuff of political culture wars and tabloid coverage — and even a factor in electoral outcomes. But Hunter Biden’s note marked the opening salvo of a deliberate bid to reinvent himself using the miraculous powers of the social Internet. 

And at the moment, it’s strangely kind of working.

Biden has been posting and replying to other people’s posts frequently, and getting a ton of engagement, thousands of reposts and vaguely positive media coverage for his commentary. He’s published posts on a variety of topics — sobriety (Biden has battled drug and alcohol addiction), his family, gratitude, his paintings, fundraisers for homeless people. Mostly it’s in writing, but sometimes he puts up videos with snippets of life philosophy in the style of Instagram influencers.

My suspicion is that Biden knows tapping into the attention economy could be parlayed into future opportunities.

Part of the reason Biden is breaking through is he’s making blunt, self-deprecating humor a significant part of his online persona. For example, he once complained that a photoshopped image of him smoking a pipe featured what looked more like a meth pipe than a crack pipe, asking to be mocked more accurately. (Biden has openly discussed an addiction to crack cocaine.) He ended that post with the phrase, “Thank you for your attention to this matter” — a nod to Trump’s signature sign-off on many of his own social media posts. The joke seemed to be well-received by people across the political spectrum. 

A lot of Biden’s posting is unobjectionable and sometimes even wholesome — at least by the standards of online attention-seeking behavior. But there’s an aspect of his new identity that I find more troubling: his attempts at cross-partisan political populism. Regardless of what his intentions are, he’s exhibiting a naivete about noxious right-wing ideas.

A couple days after he began his pivot, Biden appeared on the podcast of the right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Candace Owens. The decision to appear at all was shocking — Owens is at the very heart of some of the most backward and outlandish disinformation emanating out of the far-right online, including false claims that the moon landing was faked; that France’s first lady is a pedophile and lying about her gender; and that the FBI, the French Foreign Legion, the Israeli government and Turning Point USA staff could be among those involved in the death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last year. As my MS NOW colleague Anthony Fisher pointed out, during the interview Biden praised Owens “for asking questions” about Kirk’s death in an astonishing endorsement of Owens’ operation.

Last week, seemingly emboldened by attention he’s getting from the right for his new identity online, Biden wrote on X: 

Someone called me the MAGA whisperer and I’ll gladly take the title. Left, right, D or R we all want the same things. We’re being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we’re at each other’s throats, they get fat and rich off of our misery.

This appears to be a shallow riff on a common piece of political rhetoric on the left that people have more in common than they’re led to believe and that shared interests can unite the working class across race, gender and other social divisions. But notably, Biden’s spin on the idea seems to be that there’s no substantive difference between the left and the right. That kind of apolitical populism might sound appealing, but it’s not true.

When someone responded to Biden’s post saying he was part of the elite that he was decrying, Biden deflected by implying his substance abuse struggles render him an outsider to the elite class. This, too, is nonsense. Biden’s mental health struggles are real and deserve sympathy, but that doesn’t negate the reality that he traded inappropriately on his father’s name to make insane amounts of money, or pleaded guilty to tax fraud but was saved from the consequences by a presidential pardon.

The next day, Biden wrote a long post on X cataloguing “things most Americans agree on,” listing policies or ideas that he believed transcended political tribe. Some of it was sensible — there’s a lot of data backing broad bipartisan support for things he mentions like “groceries cost too much,” “legal immigration is good” and “endless wars are stupid.” But some of it was also sloppy. One item on his list read: “AI is like my new best friend that also might be trying to take my job, my ability to think for myself, and my humanity in the process. Yo like I love you, but WTF, but I still love you.” In reality, recent polling shows Americans are far less ambivalent — and more critical — about artificial intelligence and its development than Biden seems to believe. And Biden’s claim that “diversity is actually awesome” is a universal principle in America that requires amnesia about the last decade in politics.

Biden’s glib political posts have been getting enough attention that a Fox News reporter asked President Donald Trump last week what he thought about the idea of Biden running for president in 2028. (Trump made a joke that if scandal-plagued Democrat Graham Platner has a chance of succeeding his race for the Senate in Maine, maybe Biden has one too.) 

It’s difficult to know what to make of all this, and the timing of Biden’s “internet guy” era is also curious. With his father out of the political picture, Biden’s life and ordeals had become of far less interest to the public. If he wants a return to equanimity after feeling unfairly scrutinized by the public, it would seem this is the time to relish a new privacy. Instead, he’s catapulting himself into the public sphere in a way he never has before.  

My suspicion is that Biden knows tapping into the attention economy could be parlayed into future opportunities to make money and form valuable social connections. And he seems to be in need of cash. In court filings filed in 2025, he said he was “several million dollars” in debt. And people mostly stopped buying his amateur art works for exorbitant prices after 2023, according to his court filings. (It shouldn’t be hard to guess why.)

Is Hunter Biden serious about getting into politics, whether as some kind of influencer, pundit or politician? Does he view it as a way to find validation after years of being stigmatized? Is he just using it as a way to exploit the algorithms that rule our lives and turn politics into just one more way to secure eyeballs? I have no idea. I don’t think he does either. 

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