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Trump's own party calls his ad false and improperly funded; taxpayers have paid $1.7 million anyway.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the late evening edition, 28 September 2026

On September 24, an ad promoting President Trump, paid for by the federal government, began running on network and national cable. The soundtrack was JMSN's "Love Me." JMSN says he never licensed the song for this use. By September 25, the same footage — Trump at rallies, at White House events, alongside military — was airing on Fox News, Newsmax, and CBS, three networks that agree on little else in a normal week.

Three days later, on September 28, three Republicans found the file open on their own desks. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters he likes the ad — it promises to "cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists" — but said spots like it "shouldn't be paid for by taxpayer dollars." That is an objection to the account, not the content. Mick Mulvaney, former White House chief of staff, went further the same day and called the ad's central claim "flat out" wrong. That is an objection to the content, not the account. Senator John Kennedy also raised the ad publicly that day, on a CBS panel; the transcript here does not carry his own words, only that he did.

The ledger, run separately, does not resolve either objection — it just names a number. The figure covers three spots together; no accounting on file breaks out what the hallway ad — the one with "the deep state," "the globalists," and the vow to "rout the fake news media" — cost running on its own. The White House calls the campaign a public service announcement, the label past administrations used for spots about Medicare drug coverage and ACA sign-up deadlines. This one carries a hallway, a voiceover, and a share of $1.7 million, hon.

Thune's objection and Mulvaney's objection do not cancel each other; they stack. One says the money is wrong. The other says the message is wrong. Both are on the same team as the man in the ad, and both said so on the record, on the same day the meter was already past $1.7 million. Nothing in the file says the ad came down afterward.

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White House calls the Iran war a success under a name it told the military to stop saying.

By ChipStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 29 September 2026

The line is that it's working. Read the New York Post's Sunday edition and you get the finished product: oil is flowing again, the ayatollah is suffering, the strategy is validated. I defend that line for a living, so walk the calendar with me and see where it holds.

Start at the top. On February 28th the Pentagon named the campaign Operation Epic Fury on social media, matched to Israel's Operation Roaring Lion, announced like a launch. A name like that is a name you keep when the war attached to it is winning.

By May 5th, the Pentagon says, the operation officially ended. That should have closed the file.

Instead, in July, according to an email CBS obtained and reported September 3rd, the Pentagon told personnel serving in Iran to stop calling it "Operation Epic Fury." Not because the fighting stopped — the fighting did not stop, the name did. You retire a name when the record under it stops being one you want read back to you. That's not a rebrand. That's — it is exactly a rebrand. That is the entire function of a rebrand.

Then, September 9th: the president's own financial disclosures show his top nine fossil fuel holdings gained between $1.5 million and $4.4 million since the war began, an analysis CNBC ran and Common Dreams reported. I am told that is a coincidence. It is also, mechanically, what happens when the man who orders the war holds the stocks that price it.

Six days after that, on September 15th, the Congressional Budget Office closed its books and priced the operation at nearly $40 billion — its own word for that figure is "conservative." Conservative here does not mean careful. It means the number has room to climb, and the office is already telling you it will.

Which brings us to this week. The Post says the strategy is working. The Intercept, the same week, reports U.S. casualties have kept rising since the operation the Pentagon "concluded" back in May, under the name it told everyone in July to retire. The casualty count did not get that memo. It also did not go down. It went up — and I should not have opened with "working."

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Two Republicans, one gas-price panic: Kemp cuts taxes, Grassley pushes a ban warned to raise them.

By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 29 September 2026

The senator, the oldest currently serving, has said he would rather stay in the chamber than let a Democratic governor choose the person who replaces him. Two days later, The Hill reported his own conference splitting over the idea. By the 23rd, Energy Secretary Chris Wright was pouring cold water on it in public, and economists were warning it would push the price at the pump higher, not lower — the opposite of what Grassley says it will do.

Nine hundred miles south, a different Republican was hearing a different kind of pressure. On September 21st, Georgia's Democratic nominee for governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, called on Governor Brian Kemp to revive the fuel tax suspension he had let quietly expire earlier in the year, this time for diesel alone, as prices kept climbing with no sign of stopping. On Monday, Kemp answered with more than diesel: an executive order suspending the entire state motor fuel tax, 33.3 cents a gallon on gasoline and 37.3 cents a gallon on diesel, for 30 days starting at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.

Line the two men up and the shape is plain. Kemp is cutting a tax to bring a price down before an election his own party could lose to the person who pressured him into it. Different states, different tools, same emergency, same election-year math: whatever keeps the seat.

Nobody in either story is proposing to send a check to the trucker paying more at the diesel pump or the farmer paying more to run the combine. Georgia's cut runs out in 30 days. Grassley's ban, if it ships, raises the price the trucker pays and the price the farmer pays before it lowers anything for anybody. The tax cut and the export ban are not opposites so much as two versions of the same bet: that voters notice the gesture before they notice the bill.

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Grassley asks party for a diesel embargo, gets a split caucus, frets a Democrat might pick his successor.

By SalStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 29 September 2026

Chuck Grassley told a reporter this week that he doesn't want a Democrat governor picking his successor. That's the whole quote, filed 28 September. The same week, the plan he's been pushing in the Senate runs on the exact commodity that pushed a different governor to cut a tax.

The plan came first. On 20 September, Grassley posted that President Trump should put an embargo on diesel exports, the way presidents in the 1970s embargoed farm products when food prices ran hot. Two days later, The Hill reported the idea splitting his own conference: farm-state Republicans behind it, oil-state Republicans against it, Majority Leader John Thune somewhere in the open middle. The pitch, in the language that reporting carried, is to shrink diesel headed overseas "to increase supply and lower prices at home." His colleagues on the oil side of the map didn't sign on.

Nine hundred miles south, a different Republican was catching a different kind of pressure over the same barrel. On 21 September, Georgia's Democratic nominee for governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, called on Governor Brian Kemp to revive the state's fuel tax suspension. Kemp suspended it — thirty days, the state gas tax, diesel included in the relief.

Set the two next to each other. Kemp's fix is the plain kind: a tax comes off, the price at the pump comes down, the relief expires on a calendar Kemp controls. Grassley's fix asks Washington to restrict where a barrel of diesel is allowed to go, betting that keeping it here brings the price down here too — a bet his own party's oil-state wing didn't take, in the same week the idea reached the floor.

And Grassley isn't only pushing a policy. He's protecting a seat. The man who says he doesn't want a Democrat governor choosing his successor is closing out his Senate career on a diesel plan his own conference split on days after he made it. Kemp gets thirty days of relief he can point to on a receipt. Grassley gets a caucus that hasn't voted, and a succession fight that hasn't started — no seat is open, no governor has to choose anyone yet. The barrel doesn't care whose name is on the bill. It just gets more expensive for somebody, in some state, while the men arguing over the mechanism argue over who keeps the seat.

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Trump unveils a factory that opens in 2030 to fix gas prices already earning him $4.4 million.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the wee small hours edition, 29 September 2026

CBS reports the plant, billed by the President as the largest steel plant in U.S. history, is not expected to be up and running until 2030. That is a four-year build. The poll number attached to the same week moved in days, not years.

The pitch, per the New York Times, is timing: as Trump travels the country, he is expected to lean on economic accomplishments at a moment when Americans have expressed deep frustration with his policies. The accomplishment on offer is a plant that breaks ground now and produces steel in 2030 — after this November's midterms, and after the next presidential election besides.

The frustration arrived on a faster clock. Reuters put his approval at 32 percent on September 21, the worst of either term, citing diesel prices at record highs. Three days later, on September 24, Emerson College measured 58 percent disapproval against 39 percent approval, the highest disapproval mark yet of his second term, tied again to energy costs. His response, per CBS: "The polls are fake."

Fake is one description. Here is another, filed September 9 by Common Dreams: an analysis of the nine largest fossil fuel holdings in Trump's own financial disclosure found their value rose by as much as $4.4 million during the same war CBS names as the driver of the gas and grocery prices dragging his numbers down. The disclosure logged 23 sales alongside the gain. The same six months that added $4.4 million to those nine holdings pushed the pump the other direction for the 58 percent of respondents who told Emerson they disapprove of how he's handling it, hon.

Reconciled, the filing reads plainly. The fix arrives in 2030, two elections past this one. The complaint is three days old between two pollsters and getting louder. The portfolio gain is six months old and already banked. Nobody asked the mill to open sooner. Somebody already got paid.

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Coal asked for a rescue, automakers for looser mileage rules; the administration obliged both in a week.

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the wee small hours edition, 29 September 2026

You will want to know what a rescue costs. Nothing, as it happens — nothing to the party that asked for one. A top lobbyist wrote a letter, previously unreported, floating emergency powers to keep aging coal plants open, and the administration obliged. Obliged, mind you, not compelled. Emergency is the handsome word: it converts a plant that cannot hold its own into a thing the country may not lose.

The automakers asked too — for looser mileage rules — and on Monday the fuel economy standards were sharply scaled back. Two requests, two dispensations, the same week.

You are thinking something was broken. Nothing was. These are powers the statutes hand out, exercised as drafted, at the request of the people they were drafted for ... that is all of it.

Who paid? The standards required cars and light trucks to use less fuel. They do not require it now. You buy the fuel.

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Billionaires spend millions to kill their wealth tax, and the poll says it's working.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 29 September 2026

Proposition 40 asks California voters to tax a billionaire's net worth once, at five percent, to pay for healthcare and education. The filing on this one is short: California has two hundred billionaires, and the tax touches them and no one else.

The campaign against it started on August 25th, when groups backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel launched an advertising blitz against a tax that applies to net worth, not income, once, this year, to people worth ten figures or more. Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes are the two committees carrying it.

On September 21st, a group of Nobel Prize–winning economists put a name to what the ballot line does. They called the vote a potential "turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy." They noted the measure was still popular then, with 52 percent support.

Nothing else moved in the twenty-four hours between the economists' statement and the poll. The advertising did.

This weekend, Senator Bernie Sanders is set to rally in San Francisco, and next Monday in Los Angeles, alongside Representatives Ro Khanna and Aisha Wahab and progressive candidate Jane Kim, at events billed "Ballots Over Billionaires" and hosted by SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, the union that wrote the initiative. The rallies land as the campaign enters its final weeks, with the opposition's spending still running and the poll it helped produce still standing.

The measure would raise money, once, from net worth over a billion dollars, to fund healthcare and education in a state absorbing cuts from Washington. The people asked to pay it are the ones paying to make sure they don't have to. The ledger closes itself, hon.

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A judge stopped one funding freeze by order; Congress still hasn't voted on the other's $810 million.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 29 September 2026

Friday night the administration canceled $810 million that Congress had already voted into law — the second pocket rescission of this term, per the Examiner and the Post. The list: unaccompanied migrant children's legal proceedings, refugee resettlement, foreign debt relief, grants run through HHS's Minority Health office. A pocket rescission works by running out the clock Congress gave itself to object, so no vote happens; the process is built not to need one.

Today, Judge Amir Ali in Washington ordered a different freeze reversed — the Department of Homeland Security's practice of withholding counterterrorism grants from states that won't adopt the administration's preferred election-security rules. That freeze is undone, by signed court order, this week. The $810 million is not. No judge has ruled on it; the pocket-rescission process is built to close the objection window before a ruling like that one becomes possible.

Also today, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins told reporters she is exploring a ban on pocket rescissions for the next spending package. That is the fix that would have covered Friday's $810 million, if it had existed Friday. It did not exist Friday.

Set the two freezes side by side and the gap sizes itself. The counterterrorism grants got a federal judge and a signed order within days. The $810 million got a committee chair telling reporters she is looking into an idea for the next spending bill. One of those is a remedy. The other is a plan to consider drafting one.

The programs on that list — legal proceedings for children without a parent in the courtroom, refugee resettlement, debt relief, a minority-health grant line — don't come back because someone in the Senate is exploring an option. They come back when a bill passes with their line items on it. As of today, no such bill has been introduced, no number assigned, no vote scheduled.

The $810 million stays canceled. The ban that might have stopped it has no bill number yet, hon.

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