On this day in 2025, the Trump administration carried out its first known strike on a boat in the Caribbean, claiming to be target drug runners. Eleven people were killed. A year on, the death toll from such extra-legal actions stands at 223 from 67 strikes.
Good morning! Andrew here as we recap another hellishly busy and mostly hard-to-love news day. But first: Are you up to date on what must be one the most brazen acts of corruption in U.S. history?
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the UAE’s “spy sheikh” and his pals own half of the Trump family’s bank, far-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos thinks ICE should stick to brutalizing other people, and progressive Senator Ed Markey trounces Rep. Seth Moulton in Massachusetts
Today is also another day on which ‘First Draft’ is published without a paywall, so new readers can see what Zeteo brings to the table: all the reporting and opinion you need, on the political subjects that matter. Upgrade to paid now!
Let’s get to it.
The ‘Spy’ Who Funded Me
With the daily onrush of news about Donald Trump’s titanic corruption, fascism, petty grievances, and embarrassing misuse of taxpayer dollars, it can be easy to lose sight of his individual acts of graft – even when they are world-historic.
Last year, the president made at least $1.4 billion off his cryptocurrency ventures. Much of that haul came from sales of his near-worthless memecoin, $TRUMP, which the president launched days before his second inauguration. Even more came from his family’s crypto exchange, World Liberty Financial.
As president, Trump has actively sought to boost the crypto industry, while signing legislation to legalize and promote the sale of crypto “stablecoins,” like those marketed by World Liberty Financial.
As bad as that all sounds, it’s only gotten worse as reporters have uncovered more details about the president’s business dealings with foreign leaders – and as the corruption has grown more staggering.
Days before Trump’s inauguration, his family inked a $500 million deal with an investment firm backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother to the United Arab Emirates’s president.
Tahnoon is not just any rich Gulf Arab. He’s the UAE’s national security adviser, often called the “spy sheikh.” Per Bloomberg, Tahnoon is also known as “the de facto business chief of Abu Dhabi’s wealthy ruling family and the man at the helm of a $1.5 trillion empire.”
The deal with World Liberty Financial gave Tahnoon and co. a 49% stake in the Trump family’s crypto bonanza. The public only learned many of these details in January, thanks to a Wall Street Journal report. Of course, that was well after Trump’s second administration agreed to provide 500,000 advanced AI chips per year to the UAE, with a fifth slated to go to one of Tahnoon’s companies. Total coincidence!
The UAE had sought such AI chips before, but was rebuffed by the Biden administration. Things apparently changed after several meetings with Trump and his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (whose son is World Liberty Financial’s CEO), a visit to the White House last March, and – of course – the investment in World Liberty Financial.
Somehow, the story keeps getting worse.
As part of the Trump administration’s unparalleled corruption, the president’s appointees recently gave World Liberty Financial “preliminary conditional approval” to launch a bank.
That is more than bad enough. But roughly half of the bank will, naturally, belong to the Emiratis.
According to a recent Journal report, “Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan and co-investors are behind an entity that owns the largest stake – 49% – in the holding company that World Liberty Financial created to house its banking venture, according to people familiar with the matter.”
If it feels like more Americans should be mad about all of this – and, thankfully, it appears they are.
A new poll from UMass Amherst finds that Americans oppose Trump’s crypto grifting. Respondents were told that Trump and his family earned $1.4 billion last year from their crypto ventures, and asked if a sitting president should be allowed to profit from business ventures that could be affected by the policies and decisions of his administration.
The response was overwhelming: 77% of Americans said the president should not be allowed to profit this way, while only 23% said it should be allowed.
UMass additionally asked respondents whether they trust Trump to avoid using his position as president to benefit his family’s business interests. Roughly two-thirds of Americans said they do not.
The only question, of course, is why there are any Americans who are OK with Trump’s crypto corruption, or who trust him to avoid using the presidency to boost his family’s business interests. He is doing that, and then some. We’ll surely learn more soon.
🇮🇷 Iran War Updates
A wedding and five funerals: Iranian officials said a U.S. airstrike hit a wedding, killing five, including a 4-year-old child, and wounding 68. The U.S. said it did not target civilians. Iran vowed revenge, and fired missiles and drones at U.S. sites in Jordan and other countries. The U.S. military also said it struck Iranian air defense, radar, and maritime assets, with Axios reporting tankers hit under a “tanker for tanker” policy.
Familiar threats: Hailing what he called a “very justified attack,” Donald Trump reached for the sort of threat he has made repeatedly before backing off, saying Iran should not fight back or it would be “hit again at a much harder and higher level, but it will not be the biggest attack of them all, that is waiting in the wings.”
Art of no deal: Asked about the chances of another ceasefire, Trump told Fox: “I think an agreement with them isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. We gave them a lot of chances.”
Sanctions talk: At the G20 finance ministers meeting, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he found significant support for efforts to “economically asphyxiate this regime.” He also said trade routes would adjust and “in two years, the Strait of Hormuz will be a worthless piece of water.”
Oil up: Global oil prices rose above $4 a barrel on Tuesday, settling at a five-week high. Iranian Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said: “If the enemy wants us not to export oil from the Persian Gulf, no one will be able to export oil.”
Lebanon latest: More than 10 European nations are willing to send troops to Lebanon to replace UN forces due to depart, freeing up local troops to disarm Iran-backed Hezbollah, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said. Israeli operations continue in the south of the country.
Milo Learns His Lesson (Almost)
It’s time to reach again for that tweet about leopards eating people’s faces, although in the case of far-right Brit Milo Yiannopoulos and his comments about his removal from U.S. soil, it’s more a case of “I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs man who voted for Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, adding: ‘But I still think leopards should eat those brown people’s faces instead.’”
Yiannopoulos was deported last week, accused of having overstayed his visa and, more importantly, fallen out with Laura Loomer, an extremist way better connected in Trumpworld. On Tuesday, back in London, Yiannopoulos spoke to fellow Brit Piers Morgan.
“I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America,” Yiannopoulos said. “They put you in manacles, your hands, your feet, chained together. I mean, everyone arrested is like an MS-13 gang member, and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television.”
Authorities moved him every few hours, he said, “to keep ahead of my lawyer.” He added: “No one would tell me anything… it was humiliating, and it was disorienting and all the rest of it. It was physically degrading… I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before.”
“This is not how immigration systems are supposed to work,” he said.
Reminded of his vile remarks about ICE deportations, Yiannopoulos squirmed.
Morgan said: “There you are aggressively promoting ICE… demanding that millions of people be deported. People say, ‘Milo, you’ve been hoisted by your own petard.’”
“And I don’t have a word to say,” Yiannopoulos said. “You got me.”
But he did have words to say, trying to wriggle away from his vile rhetoric about Somalians, claiming to have been “generalizing about groups that have rampant criminality.” Shamelessly, he said, “It is true that… the majority of Somalis in Minnesota are in some way connected with the fraud there,” and “It is true that there are some demographic tendencies in the statistics about violent crime and sexual crime stuff in America.”
On the whole, Yiannopoulos added, ICE should be “deporting more people.”
Morgan said: “The problem you have, I think, in these tweets and public statements, is that you weren’t singling out Somali criminals, for example, or just criminals. You wanted Somalis as a group, all deported. You said that.”
He did. And now he’ll have to say it from elsewhere.
🗞️ What You Need to Know
House of cards: Conservative Democrats Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez voted to rescue a GOP agenda, including a resolution condemning socialism. A senior party aide told Puck the move was “fucking atrocious.” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he would pursue disciplinary action. Golden and Perez were among eight Dems who voted for the anti-socialist resolution. Two voted present. GOP Rep. Chuck Edwards was censured for alleged sexual harassment.
Post haste: A U.S. Postal Service whistleblower said the service could “derail” the midterms if it continues rushing out “untested” technology as part of Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict voting by mail. Revealing the claims, Senator Richard Blumenthal told Postmaster General David Steiner to abandon all such actions.
Elections news: Analyst Charlie Cook said Republicans could expect the midterms to be “bad, really bad, or truly horrible.” DHS posted a webpage for a national voter registry, an attempt to interfere with state-run elections. Republicans in the third-most populous Texas county slashed polling stations by a third.
Ad nausea: In North Carolina, the father of a murdered college football player said the GOP Senate Leadership Fund tricked him into recording an ad he thought was against gun violence but which is actually a smear against Democrat Roy Cooper. In Maine, Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson was targeted by a volley of negative ads while GOP incumbent Susan Collins was attacked for caving to Trump.
Florida woman: Te Mayonna Brown, the GOP candidate in Florida’s 24th House district, lost under a different name in a primary this year in Illinois, where she appears to be under felony indictment for wire fraud, the Bulwark reported. Brown denied the indictment. Her campaign manager claimed it had been dropped.
Trial time: Tyler Robinson, charged in the killing of far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk, will face the death penalty at trial in Utah, a judge ruled. Robinson has pleaded not guilty.
On the Mark: More than 180 Jewish figures signed a letter in support of Mark Ruffalo, saying the actor was the target of a “smear campaign” and “spurious charges of antisemitism.” Ruffalo has accused the Ellison family, Trump allies behind the Paramount-Warner Bros merger, of complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
‘Double Woohoo!’ for Markey
Senator Ed Markey may be 80 years old, but his Tuesday night Democratic primary victory over 47-year-old Rep. Seth Moulton was never truly in doubt. After all, the last time Markey was up for re-election, in 2020, he took down a Kennedy. You don’t do that in Massachusetts unless voters like you.
Voters, particularly young ones, like Markey because he has made himself a champion of progressive values, focusing on environmental issues and often appearing with luminaries like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. AOC is still just 36 years old. Markey will be half a century older than that at the end of his next term, presuming he beats Republican John Deaton next. Markey has said he will then retire.
Markey’s fellow Massachusetts progressive, Senator Elizabeth Warren, celebrated his win. “Double woohoo!” she posted. “Ed’s a champion for working people, and he’s the best partner in the Senate that money can’t buy.”
🧠 Pop Quiz!
Senator Ed Markey, 80, is one of two members of Congress who were on Capitol Hill under President Gerald Ford, who left office in 1977, and are still there now. Who’s the other one?
Keep your eyes out for the answer below!
🌏 Anywhere But America
🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: At least four Palestinians, including two children, were killed by strikes protecting Israeli troops who captured a Hamas official, authorities said. Gaza officials said the official’s wife was killed. Witnesses said planes fired at least 12 missiles near the Katiba area in the west of Gaza City, an area crowded with displaced families. Zeteo spoke to nursery school principals who were forced to evacuate 200 children amid the nearby gunfire and explosions:
🇺🇦🇷🇺 Drone alerts: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned “every airline that uses Russian airspace,” as well as insurers and anyone using “Russia’s key airports,” that “there will be drones in Russia’s skies on a scale that simply has to be taken into account.” Ukraine will not target civilian planes, he said. Germany said Russia was behind a drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport last month.
🇨🇦🇺🇸 Grown-up speaking: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said talks to resolve Donald Trump’s trade war would begin when U.S. officials “stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having those discussions.” Trump has posted AI slop and repetitive threats.
🇨🇳🇳🇵 Flood fallout: Mass burials were carried out, and rescue efforts continued as the death toll from huge flash floods in China and Nepal passed 1,100, with more than 3,900 people missing, including about 590 foreign nationals.
🇻🇪 Oil move: A U.S. official said Chevron would expand operations in Venezuela, days after Trump bragged about taking oil wealth out of the country whose former leader, Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. kidnapped in January. Energy Secretary Chris Wright was due to visit the country with Chevron executives Wednesday.
🇨🇩 Ebola update: Schools reopened in Ituri province, the area of DR Congo at the center of the fastest-growing outbreak in history, despite teachers’ and parents’ concerns. The death toll stood near 3,000, from more than 6,000 cases.
🙄 WTF?!
Vice President JD Vance is focused on bringing about the end of the world. Which is… not your usual message two months out from the midterms. (Also: imagine if a Muslim politician said this!!!)
🧠 Trivia answer: Iowa GOP Senator Chuck Grassley, 92. He and Markey sat in the House under Ford.
ICYMI From Zeteo
Zeteo’s Martin Pengelly contributed to this newsletter.
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nice way to hear some news first thing on the morning. Thank you
Thank you for the nice article. As for the spy agency who has sent a plane to Moscow. It seems like Trump usually makes excuses for what this is about. Russia and China are working together in this war against Iran and are on their side. When will Trump learn not worship the ground they walk on. This puts the US in dangerous situations and territories. It seems Trump is being played like a Russian asset. Trump wants Putin to look over our military. I don’t think that is smart at all. It’s very dangerous for our country and military. Has he made a deal to destroy Ukraine.? One only knows what is happening.