Wednesday, May 27, 2026. Chump continues to destroy the economy while his administration continues to lie about it, he wants to impose NDAs on all federal workers, and much more.
That's Ben breaking down the latest on Iran this morning for MEIDASTOUCH NEWS.
For reasons that have never been altogether clear, Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted
that he’s successfully lowered the price of groceries. American
consumers know better, and their perceptions are bolstered by real-world
data. The Hill reported
last week, “Federal inflation data confirms what you may have been
feeling already: Groceries are getting more expensive. Unfortunately,
things may be about to get a whole lot worse, economists are warning.”
A few days later, a national CNN poll found that 61% of Americans said they’ve had to cut back on groceries due to price concerns.
A
simple grocery-store habit is getting fresh attention online: buying
soon-to-expire food at a discount and freezing it before it goes bad.
For
budget-conscious shoppers, the appeal is straightforward. The strategy
can turn markdown meat, deli items, and prepared foods into meals that
cost a fraction of full price.
In a recent post
on Reddit's r/Frugal forum, one shopper said they make "a lap around
the grocery store" to look for foods nearing their sell-by date and
stock up when markdowns are steep.
Memorial
Day is supposed to feel like a victory lap into summer: gas tank full,
cooler packed, suitcase in the trunk. This year, it feels like sticker
shock. A snapshot circulated by Ed Elson, host of the Prof G Markets
podcast, on X on May 25, lined up seven everyday inflation categories against last year's holiday weekend and the numbers landed with a thud.
The
headline movers: gas up 28%, flights up 21%, coffee up 18%, beef up
16%, hot dogs up 11%, hotels up 4%. The surprise sitting atop the pile
is tomatoes. A pound of tomatoes costs 40% more than it did last
Memorial Day, the largest single move in the data set and a number
that's gotten very little airtime so far.
Texas
BBQ joints are getting smoked by skyrocketing beef prices, with some
saying the iconic Texas brisket boom could be headed for a painful bust —
forcing owners to consider raising prices, changing menus or even
shutting down.
“This is as bad as it gets,”
Houston pitmaster Russell Roegels told The Washington Post.
(1)“Everybody’s at risk these days. You’re one bad week from closing.”
Roegels,
owner of Roegels Barbecue Co., says in the past year, the wholesale
price he pays for brisket has shot up by 28% to $5.56 per pound. He
recently raised his menu prices for brisket by 6% to $35 per pound, but
fears that could drive customers away.
And he’s
not the only one who is worried. The meat-price crisis has already
pushed several Texas barbecue spots out of business, including Brett’s
BBQ Shop, Kirby’s BBQ, Sabar BBQ and Wright on Taco & BBQ.
To explain the dilemma of setting menu prices in the current economic climate, Isaac MacDougal points to limes.
“A couple months ago, a case of limes was $50,” said MacDougal, founder of Cocktail Mary
and co-owner of Supper Club Cocktail Lounge. Now, because of drought
and supply chain kinks, it’s over $100. He figures when you factor in
the labor cost to squeeze big batches, “the lime juice in a cocktail is
more expensive, a lot of time, than the spirit that goes into it.”
But
soaring food costs are just one piece of the puzzle for restaurant and
bar owners struggling to keep their menu prices in check. Since the
pandemic, they’ve been at the mercy of upsurges to practically all of
their costs, including labor, rent, utilities, taxes, insurance, swipe
fees and packaging.
Since Trump regained office in January 2025, food inflation has increased 3.16%.
Trump ran on a platform to “defeat inflation,” but, as food prices climbed, he said affordability was a “con job.”
Part of the reason for higher food prices is the war Trump started with Iran, which predictably closed the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global oil shipping route. The war has led to high gas prices across the country, and food prices have followed suit.
Recently, Trump was asked whether “Americans’ financial situations”
affected his decision-making when it came to ending the war in Iran, according to NBC News.
“Not even a little bit,” Trump replied.
Trump said the “only thing that matters” is stopping Iran from having
a nuclear weapon. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,”
he added. “I don’t think about anybody.”
As
Americans grapple with rising prices at gas pumps and grocery stores,
President Donald Trump's top economic adviser has framed elevated
consumer spending as a sign of the country’s resilience.
During
an interview with Fox Business on Tuesday, Director of the National
Economic Council Kevin Hassett doubled down on his upbeat view of the
economy, arguing that the knock-on effects of the Iran war are only a
“temporary circumstance.”
What
a moron. What an idiot. Kevin Hassett is a fool if he thinks the
American people are stupid enough to fall for that. They've been
"spending more money on everything else" because "everything else" is
also soaring.
Ruth Igielnik (NEW YORK TIMES) reported Saturday:
Concern
about rising prices has reached a fever pitch as Americans sit down to
Memorial Day barbecues across the country. A majority of Democrats,
Republicans and independents said that they had changed their purchases
from grocery stores to stay within budget in the last several months,
according to polling from CNN.
Another 59 percent of Americans said they had cut back on extras and entertainment.
More
than three quarters of Americans, including 55 percent of Republicans,
said President Trump’s policies had increased the cost of living in
their community.
Survey after survey has found
that Americans are feeling growing financial uncertainty. Nearly half of
all voters gave the economy the lowest rating, “poor,” in the latest New York Times/Siena poll, up 11 percentage points since January.
And economic confidence has hit a four-year low, according to Gallup.
Kevin Hassett better accept the reality that the American people are not buying the lies that he is selling.
A growing number of CEOs suspect a market crash is imminent but have been “scared”
to say so publicly out of fear of retaliation from President Donald
Trump, and on Tuesday, one security expert warned that such a crash may
not only be imminent, but “permanent.”
“If
nothing is done about the current situation, Trump’s looming recession
could blow a deep hole in the economy,” warned former Homeland Security
senior official Miles Taylor in an analysis published Tuesday on his
Substack. “So deep that – if it happens before we’re ready – many folks
may never be able to crawl back out. That’s because two explosions could
hit the U.S. economy at the same time.”
Chump doesn't care about the average American. He cares about building his ballroom and he cares about creating his slush fund.
He cares about his slush fund, he just doesn't care about the average American. He's too busy figuring out ways to enrich his own pocket to actually focus on the needs of the American people.
“The
GOP is in a silent state of panic.” That’s what a former 2016 and 2020
top Trump presidential campaign official told me this morning. And you
don’t need a Princeton PhD in political science to understand why. The
president's political position as of late May 2026 is the worst of his
career, and the people inside his own party who track these numbers
professionally have stopped pretending otherwise.
These are not soft margins driven by sampling noise.
The
Reuters/Ipsos, Marist, AP-NORC, and YouGov surveys are independently
arriving at the same picture from different methodological positions,
which is the polling pattern that tends to precede a genuine political
crisis rather than the kind of temporary slump that recovers within a
news cycle or two.
The American people get it Chump is corrupt and focused on enriching himself. Everything he does is about bringing in funds to himself.
Michael Luciano (MEDIAITE) notes:
“Trump
brought the NVIDIA CEO on his trip to China to lobby Xi Jinping to buy
advanced AI chips, even though it would create a U.S. national security
threat,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted on Friday, referring to
the president’s trip to China, where he was accompanied by Jensen Huang
and other U.S. business executives, as well as Eric Trump, who has
business ties to the Chinese Communist Party. “It turns out Trump also
bought millions in NVIDIA’s stock.”
Eric Trump
responded to the post by saying all family assets are in a blind trust
and are “in broad market indexes,” as opposed to individual stocks:
All
of our assets are invested in a blind trust by the largest financial
institutions in broad market indexes. To suggest that individual stocks
are being bought or sold, at the discretion of any member of the Trump
family, would be a lie and blatantly false. Using a silly example, if
you buy the “Schwab 1000,” you will get some exposure to Nvidia – as
well as a 1,000 other U.S. companies large- and mid-cap stocks. It’s
completely disingenuous to represent anything to the contrary. Please be
better than this…
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) responded by linking to the disclosure signed by Donald Trump himself.
“Outright
lies,” Beyer said. “Trump’s assets aren’t in a blind trust, and he
bought and sold individual Nvidia stock in 15 separate transactions
totaling millions of dollars. That’s what Trump’s financial disclosure –
which has his signature – says. See for yourself.”
The
disclosure, which is 113 pages long, shows 2,345 purchases, mostly of
individual stocks, and 1,296 sales, mostly of individual stocks.
According to Fortune,
Donald Trump is the first president since at least Lyndon Johnson to
trade individual securities. Since Johnson, every president has placed
their assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees. Trump
claimed during his first term that his assets were kept in such an
arrangement, but Fortune noted that Walter Shaub, the head of the Office
of Government Ethics, resigned in July 2017 and concluded that the
blind trust was “not even halfway blind.”
Chump
is a con man and a liar. And both count on silence to get away with
their actions. It's for that reason that Chump is now attempting to gag
the federal workforce.
Alex Woodward (INDEPENDENT) reports:
Donald Trump’s administration is proposing a government-wide mandate to require all federal workers to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent the spread of “confidential government information” to journalists.
Tuesday’s
draft notice of the proposal would require new and existing workers to
sign an agreement to “safeguard” a broad range of government information
from reaching the public after a series of high-profile “leaks” to news
organizations.
The document
broadly defines “confidential government information” to include a vast
amount of information, documents and communications beyond typical
classified and unclassified labels.
No.
No, you piece of garbage, Chump. You're not going to do that to our
federal workforce. You're not going to hide from sunshine laws. You
are human garbage and you will remain in the sewer but you're not going
to drag our government down with you.
Brianna Tucker (HUFFINGTON POST) adds that the big exposures came from Chump's own people like Pete Hegseth::
The
controversial form is a stark contrast to the way confidential
information has been handled within the Trump administration, from
contractors to cabinet officials.
Last year,
cabinet officials accidentally texted the top editor of The Atlantic
about active military strike plans on an app the Pentagon had just
warned was being targeted by Russia.
Federal
investigations and court filings earlier this year also revealed that
DOGE operatives improperly accessed, shared, and stored sensitive
personal data while working inside federal agencies.
It's
a tactic Trump has deployed for years. During his first term, he became
the first president to require private sector-style NDAs from White
House staff — senior aides and interns alike. Legal scholars at Cornell
Law School called those agreements likely unconstitutional.
His
most famous NDA battle came with former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman,
who refused to sign a post-departure NDA tied to a $15,000-a-month
campaign job offer — an agreement that would have barred her from
disclosing details of her White House tenure. She wrote a tell-all book
instead. An arbitrator later ruled the NDA "invalid" and its terms
"vague and unenforceable."
Legal experts have
long warned that the government cannot impose NDAs on federal employees
for unclassified information, no matter how sensitive or embarrassing.
Critics warn that the sweeping language in the new proposal could be
weaponized to suppress whistleblowers and shield government misconduct
from public scrutiny.
The public has 30 days to comment on the proposed rule before it can be finalized.
Social
media critics whaled on the proposal, with the Freedom of the Press
Foundation calling it “not just absurd, it’s unnecessary and dangerously
secretive.”
“This policy would kneecap
whistleblower protections, undermine the First Amendment, and wrongly
inhibit the public’s right to know,” the association added on Bluesky.
Washington D.C. attorney Bradley Moss also blasted the proposal on Bluesky:
“Federal employees operate under an array of statutory, regulatory and
policy restrictions on the unauthorized disclosure of unclassified
information. The only reason to add this NDA would be to undercut lawful
… disclosures to the media that SCOTUS approved.” Former
U.S. diplomat William Gill pointed out on X that “This obviously begs
the question, what are they trying to hide now? Federal employees are
barred from unauthorized disclosures of classified information but
they’re also covered by whistleblower protections regarding waste, fraud
and abuse. That’s the likely area being targeted.”
Chump is an anchor around the necks of the GOP going into the midterms and he's not their only problem. Their own mouths are getting them into trouble as well. For example,
Troy Matthews (MEIDASTOUCH NEWS) reports:
Republican
Senator Jon Husted voted for Trump's One Big Beautiful Budget bill
which threw half-a-million people off of Medicaid in his state of Ohio,
then he said those who lost their healthcare access didn't deserve to be
on the program in the first place. He later reiterated his support for
kicking people off their healthcare by saying on a radio interview, "I
love doing that kind of stuff."
[. . .]
“Jon
Husted is once again saying the quiet part out loud, claiming the half a
million Ohioans he’s kicking off their health care are not people who
deserve health care coverage," Ohio Democratic Party spokesperson Tony
Wen said in a statement. "Jon Husted could not be more out of touch with
the people of Ohio, and they will vote him out in November.”
Husted
was appointed by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to fill the Senate seat
vacated in 2025 by JD Vance. He is running to be elected U.S. Senator
from Ohio in his right in November.
Washington, D.C. — U.S.
Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., voted against advancing the 2027 Intelligence
Authorization Act out of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he
announced today.
“The bill is a dramatic retreat for congressional oversight,
at precisely the moment when scrutiny of Intelligence Community
activities is needed most,” Wyden said. “This bill
would deny the U.S. Senate any opportunity to scrutinize and vet key
Intelligence Community leaders. It also omits critical, bipartisan
whistleblower protections that have been included in the
Committee-reported bill for years. The Committee’s retreat from its
long-standing bipartisan approach to whistleblower protection
legislation is especially troubling during an administration that
commits so many abuses.”
Wyden highlighted multiple troubling provisions in the bill:
-
Eliminates Senate confirmation for the general counsels of the CIA
and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. At a time of
rampant lawbreaking by the Trump Administration, it is especially
troubling that the only Intelligence Community general counsels
currently subject to Senate confirmation - the people responsible for
offering legal advice on secret, potentially controversial intelligence
activities - would be appointed without any congressional or public
input or scrutiny.
-
Eliminates Senate confirmation for the Director of the National
Counterterrorism Center at a time in which the Center is expanding its
activities into the realm of domestic law enforcement, particularly
through the NCTC Intelligence Fusion Center, in a manner that poses a
real danger to Americans’ rights.
-
Eliminates Senate confirmation for the Director of the National
Counterintelligence and Security Center, even as the bill puts the
Director in charge of a new Intelligence Community Counterintelligence
Office in the Department of Commerce, a wrongheaded and unnecessary
expansion of the Intelligence Community.
-
The bill also excludes a critically important provision that was
included in last year’s bill that stated that, if a company wants to be
an Intelligence Community contractor, it can’t also be a data broker
selling the location data of intelligence officers.
###
