Money

Trump launches government AI to answer Americans; it answers by contradicting him.

By MitchInvestigations · the matinee edition, 29 September 2026

On September 19, President Trump posted a poll to Truth Social. The subject was what to call artificial intelligence, which he described as "inaccurate, and very ineloquent." The options were "Superior Intelligence," "Extreme Intelligence," and "Supreme Intelligence." Followers voted.

Three days later, at the United Nations General Assembly, the poll graduated to a promise. Trump told the world body that artificial intelligence will be renamed "super intelligence" in all U.S. documents.

On Tuesday, the promise arrived at an event billed to prove it. At the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, Trump unveiled America.gov, an AI-powered federal portal he called "one of the most revolutionary product launches of all time," and thanked Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder now running the National Design Studio, for building it. At that same event, per NBC, Trump said he "will be signing" an executive order renaming AI to Super Intelligence. The order he actually signed that day, per the Washington Examiner, orders every federal agency to integrate its public-facing services with America.gov, immediately. It renames nothing.

All together now: ask the site itself. America.gov runs on the same artificial intelligence the president wants renamed, and ABC found that its sourced answers undercut many of his own statements — the government's AI, sourced to the government, checking the government's president, on the government's own launch day.

The Senate had a chance to check something too. The same Tuesday, Senate Democrats Mark Warner, Brian Schatz, and Andy Kim tried to pass, by unanimous consent, a bill creating an AI safety panel with the power to evaluate and enforce standards on frontier models. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Commerce Committee, blocked it.

Speaker Johnson, asked about guardrails ahead of his own Tuesday meeting with tech executives, said he hopes they will be voluntary. "I hope it's voluntary," he said. "We'll find out what comes out of the meeting today."

Line one of the executive order Trump actually signed says every agency integrates with America.gov. Line one of the executive order Trump says he will sign says AI becomes Super Intelligence. Only one of those lines exists. The bill that would have made either line accountable to anyone besides the president does not.

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Homeland Security spends taxpayer money promoting Trump the week his own candidate scrubs 'Pro-Trump' from a slogan.

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

On September 23rd, Charlie Hatcher, the Tennessee Republican who beat a Trump-endorsed incumbent in the August primary and then accepted Trump's endorsement himself, quietly removed the words 'Pro-Trump' from his own campaign slogan.

By Friday the same commercial had spread to Newsmax and CBS. The outrage had by then acquired its own vocabulary — self-aggrandizing, propaganda — and its own open question: whether spending public money on a spot built to promote one man violates the federal law written to prevent exactly that.

This week the sourcing caught up to the outrage. Sources familiar with the matter told ABC News what the ad's own disclaimer had already implied: the money came from the Department of Homeland Security, not from any campaign account. No dollar figure for the buy has been made public. The thirty-second running time is on the record only because a reporter happened to be watching Fox News on a Wednesday night — it is not an amount anyone at Homeland Security has itemized, and Public Citizen's complaint does not put a number on it either.

That complaint landed Tuesday, filed with the FCC, the FTC, and the broadcasters that carried the spot, naming at least three ads meeting the same description and asking regulators to pull them and investigate. The White House's term for the ads is public service announcement. The Nation's word, in a column the same day, was brazen, with a prediction attached: that the ads 'seem likely to backfire.'

Backfire, in this ledger, arrived early. Hatcher's adjustment came before the outrage over the ad had spread past a single network, before Public Citizen's complaint, before ABC News confirmed whose account paid for any of it. Homeland Security spent to keep the Trump name on the air. A House candidate in the president's own party spent to take it off his own slogan. Same asset, two accounts, opposite entries, in the same week. Reconcile it however you like, hon — the balance still runs against the guy who found out both of these were paid for with his taxes.

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THE INVOICE

Border agency funds a Trump ad Democrats call illegal, for a candidate who'd already dropped his name.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the early bird edition, 29 September 2026

Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, confirmed this week what her own ledger already showed: the money used for President Trump's television ads was earmarked for Customs and Border Protection. That is the whole story in one sentence, and reconciling it takes the rest of this column.

Start with September 23rd. The new slogan came back with the words "Pro-Trump" removed. The filing does not say why.

ABC's sources traced the money to the Department of Homeland Security. Collins traced it one step further, to the appropriation written for Customs and Border Protection.

House Democratic appropriators call this a misuse of CBP funding, coming, in the Hill's own words, weeks out from the November midterms. Public Citizen calls it something with sharper edges: two complaints filed Tuesday, asking the FCC, the FTC, and the broadcasters themselves to pull the spots, on the theory that a taxpayer-funded ad promoting one sitting official is the exact conduct the disclaimer law was written to catch. The accusation and the complaint are not filed by the same people and do not allege the same violation — one names a misused appropriation, the other a specific statute — but they describe the same commercial.

Here is the reconciliation, hon: an appropriation written for Customs and Border Protection produced a media campaign built around one name, in the same six days that the one Republican running on that name took it off his own sign. The money did not vanish. It changed columns — from the border agency's ledger to a broadcast slot — and it is sitting, right now, in an ad Charlie Hatcher never asked for and isn't using.

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States launch emergency measures after a 30-minute operation's 65 billion barrels failed to lower record diesel prices.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the early bird edition, 29 September 2026

A ledger has two columns, and you do not need an opinion to read the gap, only the filings and a straight edge. Here are the filings for five weeks: one column for what the government said it won, the other for what the driver paid.

The government's column opens with the operation itself: a 30-minute military action credited with booking 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, 35 percent of it assigned to the Pentagon before any buyer signed a contract.

On August 28, Congress was asked to stop what commentary called a takeover of Venezuela's oil fields. The record shows a request, not a vote.

Two days later, the President described the same barrels as a refill for U.S. reserves — language a reviewer called fit for an organized-crime transcript. The seizure was filed as inventory management.

By September 1, the filing had not settled into one fact: a broadcast was asking whether the country had signed a deal or lost its oil at gunpoint. Either reading left the same word in the ledger: majority U.S. control.

The price column did not wait for that argument to resolve. By September 5, diesel reached $5.88 a gallon, and the governing party's pollsters reported that voters were assigning the blame correctly.

The next day, an official denied any Venezuelan oil had been taken — one hour after telling the same audience the country was now "forced to work" with the United States. The boast and the denial share a byline and a clock; they share no answer.

The Washington Examiner clocked diesel crossing $6 a gallon for the first time, at $6.05, citing Middle East supply constraints. The same morning, reading the same AAA feed, a second outlet posted $6.06 — a penny apart, a war apart: a 14 percent rise over the month, 64 percent over the year, credited not to the Venezuela deal but to the President's war with Iran. Two wars, on the record, billed to the same pump the same morning.

That is the column the driver reads this week. Texas and Georgia announced emergency measures Monday against diesel prices, aimed at the transportation and agriculture sectors it hits hardest, because the federal remedy has not arrived on either clock it was given: the barrels were booked in thirty minutes; the relief at the pump was promised in a year or two. The states did not wait for the second clock to run out. They filed their own emergency instead, and the gap between what was booked in Venezuela and what is billed in Texas is the one line in this ledger that has not moved.

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Johnson's House votes 417-3 to shield voters from data-center bills, he calls their alarm a Chinese psyop.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the early bird edition, 29 September 2026

On September 16, a Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 417 to 3 to pass the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill requiring data centers to cover the cost of the grid and energy upgrades their operations demand, so households do not eat the difference on their power bills. A vote that lopsided, three no votes out of 435 members, is not a margin a divided Congress produces by accident. It takes near-unanimous agreement that the problem is real.

The next day, September 17, the Cook Political Report released a poll of 37 swing districts. Voters there view AI companies unfavorably by a two-to-one margin; 64 percent say they are more concerned than excited about the technology, against 31 percent who say the opposite. The industry the House had just voted to make pay its own freight was already underwater with the voters who decide swing seats.

Five days after that, on September 22, a separate poll found that only 7 percent of voters list data centers among their top three political issues, and 12 percent list artificial intelligence generally. Low on the priority list is not the same as popular; a household can rank its power bill below the economy and still resent the bill.

The county that hosts the president's own neighbors decided it did not want the thing he has said every American should want.

Then, on Monday, September 28, twelve days after his own chamber's 417-3 vote, Speaker Mike Johnson sat for a Fox News interview. Asked by anchor Cheryl Casone about claims from unnamed tech executives and lawmakers that the nationwide pushback against data centers is directed from China, Johnson agreed: a Chinese psyop, he said, and accused Democrats of fearmongering.

The executives who supplied him that line are the ones whose product a Cook poll finds underwater two-to-one and whose facilities local governments, including the president's own county, are voting to keep out. Seventy-five percent of Americans oppose data centers in their own communities. The Speaker's own caucus already conceded, 417 to 3, that the bills are a problem worth legislating. What his chamber called a ratepayer complaint, he called a foreign operation, twelve days apart, hon.

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THE LEDGER

Same campaign-finance law calls Hochul's $33 million a record and Trump's $400 million a violation, same week.

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

New York's governor announced $33 million in campaign cash on hand as of September 29th, $8.5 million of it raised over the summer between her campaign and the state Democratic party's account. Her campaign called it a record. The filing landed in the same week as three others, and the arithmetic across all four does not sort itself the way the adjectives do.

Four days earlier, on September 25th, the Campaign Legal Center accused Donald Trump's $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC of a "clear-cut violation of campaign finance law," arguing, on decades of precedent, that a sitting officeholder cannot direct spending for a super PAC built to raise money outside the caps Hochul's filing sat inside. One filing got a press release. The other got a watchdog's accusation.

Four days before that accusation, on September 21st, both parties filed something else: acknowledgment. The Supreme Court's summer ruling now lets party committees coordinate and spend without the old caps, and Senate Republicans' campaign arm had already reported over $45 million in coordinated expenditures under it. That filing drew zero complaints in the same nine days that produced one.

Pull the drawer open to September 3rd and there's a fourth filing: Elon Musk's America PAC, $800,475.74 spent across 44 separate expenditures on congressional campaigns. None of these four filings contradict each other on the numbers. The numbers agree with one another completely. What disagrees is which column each number lands in — cash-on-hand gets called a record, a super PAC gets called a violation, coordinated spending gets called the new rule, and $800,000 gets called routine.

The instrument is the same instrument in every filing: money moved toward an election under a campaign finance law both parties told pollsters this month they respect. What changes, filing to filing, is whether the number sits inside the limit the law drew or outside it, and whether anyone with standing to complain does. Hon, the ledger doesn't care whose name is on the account. It cares whether the account was ever supposed to exist.

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Pricing your Big Mac by what you personally will pay is illegal in exactly one American city

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the supper edition, 29 September 2026

A posted price used to mean the same thing to everyone who walked in. Not any more. McDonald's pushes AI tools that suggest what a Big Mac costs based on "customer willingness to pay" — willingness, mind you, not cost — and franchisees say the gap between identical items in one neighbourhood has widened. Same bun. Different you. You will be thinking somebody has stopped this. The Federal Trade Commission has proposed an enforcement policy on personalized pricing, warning companies that hide how personal data shapes the prices shoppers see. Proposed. A warning against concealment is not a prohibition; disclose it, and charge it still. And who has banned surveillance pricing? One city. Seattle, on 23 September, seven votes to two — race, gender, employment status, internet history, chatbot conversations, all barred from setting your price ... in one city, of one country. Your price is what they think you will pay.

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Watchdog calls administration's $810 million rescission unlawful, then calls it unlawful again four days later.

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

The Government Accountability Office checked its arithmetic again this week and got the same answer twice. A North Carolina farmer said that week he was in survival mode. A senator who voted to confirm the defense secretary called for his firing twice, and a Republican congressman filed impeachment paperwork against him. None of that money was ever put to a vote of Congress. This week the same government produced the mirror problem: money Congress did vote for, that the executive isn't allowed to keep from being spent.

On September 25, the administration filed a "pocket rescission" canceling $810 million in appropriated funds: money for immigration and refugee programs, foreign debt relief, business grants, and the Health and Human Services Minority Health office, plus funding tied to court proceedings for unaccompanied children. It was the second pocket rescission filed in nearly fifty years.

By Saturday, lawmakers in both parties were calling the move illegal. A pocket rescission works by timing the request so close to the fiscal year's end that the money legally expires before Congress can act on it either way — the appropriation lapses, and the vote it was owed never happens.

On Tuesday, the GAO's lead attorney, Edda Emmanuelli Perez, reasserted the finding under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974: the September 25 rescission is unlawful. This was not a new inquiry. It was the same law, checked against the same $810 million, four days after the filing it was checking, and the number came back exactly as it went in.

Reconcile the two ledgers side by side, hon. On one page, $38 billion moved for a war Congress never authorized, and no filing exists to make it stop. On the other, $810 million Congress did authorize, and a filing exists that the government's own watchdog says can't legally hold. The businesses waiting on the grants don't get a third vote, and neither do the Minority Health office or the children whose court dates don't move because two lawyers disagree about a letter.

Same letter, same law, same number: the finding didn't discover anything Tuesday. It repeated itself. The GAO has no enforcement mechanism of its own — only the letter, filed the same way twice — and the rescission stands unless a court or Congress moves against it. By Tuesday, neither had.

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