Trump Pardons One of the Car Industry’s Biggest Scammers—Just in Time

President Trump on Thursday pardoned Trevor Milton, the founder of the bankrupt electric truck company Nikola who was sentenced to four years in prison for securities and wire fraud charges in 2023—right before he had to pay millions in restitution.

Milton famously exaggerated the green tech of his hydrogen trucking start-up, defrauding investors.

“Oh my gosh, oh, you won’t believe just what happened,” Milton said in a video he posted on Instagram. “I just got a call from the president of the United States, on my phone, and he signed my full and unconditional pardon of innocence. I am free,” he said. “The prosecutors can no longer hurt me,” he said. “They can’t destroy my family, they can’t rip everything away from me, they can’t ruin my life.”

When Milton was first indicted in 2021, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office noted that his investors “suffered tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses, including, in certain cases, the loss of their retirement savings or funds that they had borrowed to invest in Nikola.”

This pardon conveniently nullifies the $680 million Milton owed to Nikola shareholders and the $15.2 million to Peter Hicks, one of his wire fraud victims.

Milton emphasized what he saw as “striking similarities” between his case and the four criminal cases against President Donald Trump, who also maintains his victimhood. Milton has been an ardent supporter of Trump and donated $920,000 to the Trump 47 Committee and $750,000 in September to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA Alliance political action committee after his sentencing.

The country isn’t so confident that Donald Trump’s economic policies are making America great again.

A chart shared Friday by The Washington Post’s economics columnist Heather Long hinted at bad news for the economy, with U.S. households growing increasingly concerned that they’ll be financially worse off a year into the future than they are now. The chart was released by the University of Michigan as part of its consumer sentiment surveys.

“This is one of the scariest charts I’ve seen in awhile,” Long said in an X post. “In the ‘vibe-cession’ under Biden, people gave the economy poor grades. But they were generally optimistic about their personal finances (esp the rich).

“Under Trump 2025, people at all income levels are worried they will be worse off in a year. This is the type of situation that causes people to really pull back on spending. This is what is different than 2023 or 2024.”

That sentiment could convince people to hold onto their dollars as fears of a recession intensify.

A report by the University of Michigan’s survey of consumers in February forecast similarly bad news for the American economy. Last month, inflation expectations jumped an entire percentage point, from 3.3 percent in January to 4.3 percent in February, marking the second consecutive month of “unusually large increases,” according to the university report.

Polled consumers “expressed unease” about several economic factors, including unemployment as well as Trump’s aggressive economic policies.

More than half of the surveyed respondents expected unemployment to rise over the next 12 months—the most people to believe so since 2020—while 40 percent of consumers “spontaneously mentioned” Trump’s tariffs “generally unfavorably,” according to the report.

“While consumers appear relatively secure about their own incomes, with most expecting gains in the year ahead, only 16% expect their income gains to outpace inflation,” the report reads. “This is yet another sign that consumers are worried about the trajectory of prices.”

“Overall, inflation expectations are trending in an unfavorable direction,” the report noted, adding that “expectations matter because consumers have shown that they will act upon them.”

Donald Trump pulled a 180-degree turn Friday when speaking about Canada, after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that the country’s relationship with the U.S. was “over.”

In a post on Truth Social Friday morning, Trump dropped his stupid schtick of calling Canada’s leader its “governor,” as part of his ongoing campaign to have it become the “fifty-first state.” Instead, he issued a surprisingly deferential statement about our northern neighbors.

“I just finished speaking with Prime Minister Mark Carney, of Canada. It was an extremely productive call, we agree on many things, and will be meeting immediately after Canada’s upcoming Election to work on elements of Politics, Business, and all other factors that will end up being great for both the United States of America and Canada,” Trump wrote.

On Wednesday, Trump levied a new round of “permanent” 25 percent tariffs on all imported vehicles and autoparts—a move sure to have a large impact in Canada, where many U.S. cars are assembled. Trump had threatened the European Union, warning it against working “with Canada in order to do economic harm” to the U.S. unless it too wanted to be hit with steep tariffs, a blatant attempt to back Canada into a corner.

Carney called the new tariffs on vehicles a “direct attack” on Canadian autoworkers and said that his country would make preparations to “dramatically reduce” its reliance on the U.S. The next day, the two leaders had their first conversation since Carney became prime minister earlier this month after Justin Trudeau stepped down. After being appointed, Carney triggered a parliamentary election to be held on April 28.

Earlier this month, Trump imposed a separate 25 percent tariff on all imports from Canada, with a lower 10 percent tariff on energy and some exemptions for goods covered by the 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. Increasingly, it seems that Trump’s trade war with Canada could potentially devastate states along America’s northern border.

The Trump administration’s abrupt street arrests of legal immigrants, who subsequently disappear into government detention, should be a huge scandal met with swift action by Democrats in Congress.

But for some reason, just 34 Democrats in the Senate and the House have signed on to a letter demanding answers about the arrest of Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk in Massachusetts and other international students who have had their legal immigration status swiftly revoked without due process and now face deportation.

The letter calls for “answers about this case and about ICE’s policy that has led to the identification and arrest of university students with valid legal status,” and was sent Thursday to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

On Thursday, Rubio boasted that he had revoked the visas of “more than 300 at this point” while failing to mention a specific reason why Ozturk’s visa was revoked. No justification has been provided for University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi’s arrest and detention, either, and his whereabouts are unknown.

The 34 Democrats who signed the letter to Trump administration officials are below:

• Representative Yassamin Ansari—Arizona
• Senator Adam Schiff—California
• Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton—District of Columbia (nonvoting delegate)
• Representative Hank Johnson—Georgia
• Representative Delia Ramirez—Illinois
• ​​Representative André Carson—Indiana
• Senator Brian Schatz—Hawaii
• Representative Jill Tokuda—Hawaii
• Senator Chris Van Hollen—Maryland
• Senator Elizabeth Warren—Massachusetts
• Senator Edward Markey—Massachusetts
• Representative Ayanna Pressley—Massachusetts
• Representative Lori Trahan—Massachusetts
• Representative Katherine Clark—Massachusetts
• Representative Stephen Lynch—Massachusetts
• Representative Seth Moulton—Massachusetts
• Representative James McGovern—Massachusetts
• Representative Jake Auchincloss—Massachusetts
• Representative Rashida Tlaib—Michigan
• Representative Ilhan Omar—Minnesota
• Senator Tina Smith—Minnesota
• Senator Andy Kim—New Jersey
• Representative LaMonica McIver—New Jersey
• Representative Bonne Watson Coleman—New Jersey
• Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—New York
• Senator Jeff Merkley—Oregon
• Representative Summer Lee—Pennsylvania
• Representative Greg Casar—Texas
• Representative Lloyd Doggett—Texas
• Senator Bernie Sanders—Vermont (independent who caucuses with Democrats)
• Senator Peter Welch—Vermont
• Senator Tim Kaine—Virginia
• Representative Donald S. Beyer Jr.—Virginia
• Representative Mark Pocan—Wisconsin

Add one more to the number of Trump officials who don’t understand how digital security works.

In an interview with Fox News Thursday evening, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that the encrypted retail messenger app Signal is a “very safe way to communicate.”

“I don’t think foreign adversaries are able to hack Signal, as far as I know,” Bondi said.

But that’s all wrong, as pointed out by Representative Jimmy Gomez, who took a moment to publicly school the Justice Department chief on the matter.

“Hackers don’t need to hack Signal, they can hack your phone. Then they can see your screen and even access your camera and microphone,” the California Democrat posted Thursday night. “So Pam, if you can read your messages on signal, then China and Russia can read your messages on signal.”

The Trump administration has come under intense scrutiny after The Atlantic reported that several of its key officials discussed imminent plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen over Signal. The conversation was witnessed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was seemingly accidentally invited to the group chat by national security adviser Mike Waltz.

Former intelligence officials have warned that America’s adversaries “undoubtedly” already have the chat records, largely thanks to the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff’s physical presence in Russia when he was added to the chat.

In an interview with MeidasTouch Tuesday, former national security adviser Susan Rice said that Witkoff’s use of Signal while in Russia basically hand-delivered news of the attack to the Kremlin hours before it took place.

“Russians have whatever Witkoff was doing or saying on his personal cell phone,” Rice told the podcast.

Bondi indicated Thursday that the Justice Department would not launch a criminal investigation into administration officials’ use of Signal to communicate the attack plans.

She also declared that the details shared in the chat—which included down-to-the-minute scheduling for the launch of U.S. F-18 attack planes toward Yemen, “trigger based” strikes, and the launch of sea-based subsonic cruise missiles—were “not classified.”

Meanwhile, Representative Chrissy Houlahan cornered National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, committing the intelligence chief to “follow the law” and investigate the leak as required by bipartisan legislation.

The vast majority of Americans believe that something should be done about the reckless intelligence breach. A YouGov survey published on Tuesday found that 53 percent of nearly 6,000 polled Americans felt that the Trump administration’s Signal leak was “very serious,” while another 21 percent described it as “somewhat serious.”

Donald Trump got whacked by two lawsuits Friday from major law firms challenging his executive orders targeting them for defending clients and causes he dislikes or employing lawyers he’s deemed as enemies.

WilmerHale and Jenner & Block both filed suits against the Trump administration over a pair of retaliatory executive orders allegedly “addressing risks” from the two firms, after Trump previously targeted three other firms. 

The orders targeting WilmerHale and Jenner & Block claimed that the firms had engaged in “obvious partisan representations” and so-called discrimination “against its employees based on race and other categories prohibited by civil rights laws, including through the use of race-based ‘targets,’” meaning they used DEI hiring practices. 

The president threatened to suspend security clearances held by firm members, stop all federal contracts, and bar federal employees from engaging with firm members. 

Trump claimed that the firms had committed wrongdoing by simply taking up cases that went against his policy agenda. He alleged that WilmerHale wrongfully defended clients in cases involving race and elections, and that Jenner & Block had supported “attacks against women and children based on a refusal to accept the biological reality of sex.” He alleged that both firms had backed “the obstruction of efforts to prevent illegal aliens from committing horrific crimes and trafficking deadly drugs within our borders,” likely meaning they simply defended clients in immigration cases. Of course, none of this is actually legally wrong, it just presents obstacles to Trump’s agenda.  

Trump also attacked WilmerHale for “welcoming” former special counsel Robert Mueller to the firm, and Jenner & Block for re-hiring his associate Andrew Weissmann.

In response, WilmerHale filed a lawsuit against the entire Trump administration, including every department and Cabinet member, alleging that Trump’s executive orders constituted an “unprecedented attack” on the Sixth Amendment right to counsel and were an an “undisguised form of retaliation for representing clients and causes he disfavors or employing lawyers he dislikes.”

“These ‘personal vendetta[s]’ are so facially improper that the first court to address the merits of one of these orders concluded that it likely violates multiple foundational safeguards enshrined in the Bill of Rights,” lawyers for WilmerHale stated in a 63-page filing. 

In a statement Thursday, WilmerHale hit back at the ridiculous order, stating that they represented a range of clients “including in matters against administrations from both parties.”

Jenner & Block also filed suit challenging the order. “The Order threatens not only Jenner, but also its clients and the legal system itself,” the firm wrote. “Our Constitution, top to bottom, forbids attempts by the government to punish citizens and lawyers based on the clients they represent, the positions they advocate, the opinions they voice, and the people with whom they associate.”

The law firm Perkins Coie, which was targeted for representing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, challenged a similar order earlier this month and was granted a temporary injunction against the Trump administration’s threat to revoke clearances and access. Another firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, caved to the administration and offered $40 million in free legal services, revoked their own DEI practices, and sold one of their own lawyers down the river, simply because he’d once investigated Trump for alleged financial crimes. 

Trump’s latest orders are a bold-faced attempt to make it impossible for individuals to challenge his actions, and policy agenda, by attempting to chill the work of those who would mount their representation. 

MAHA conspiracy theorists rejoice: Utah has become the first state to ban fluoride from public drinking water.

Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill late Thursday that will prevent local cities from choosing to add the mineral to their water.

The order—which will go into effect on May 7—is a culmination of a baseless premise that originated in the 1960s that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has pushed even further. Fluoride removal bills are also on the table in North Dakota, Montana, and Tennessee.

This anti-fluoride movement is rooted in the conspiracy that early childhood exposure to fluoride could cause mental disability and low IQ. These studies have been thoroughly debunked. Utah’s legislation made no mention of these worries in the text.

“The benefits of community water fluoridation are most pronounced in low income communities—communities that often have the least access to dental care and to other sources of fluoride,” Dr. Scott Toma, a dentist, told The New York Times.

Multiple studies suggest that fluoridation actually is good for dental and oral health. It’s connected with a 27 percent decline in adult cavities and a 30 percent decline in child cavities.

Greenland’s political parties have united under a new political goal: opposing U.S. aggression.

Four political parties in the self-governing territory formed a coalition government Friday to project unity against Donald Trump’s efforts to take control of the island. Greenland has 56,000 residents and is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. The new coalition will hold 21 out of 31 parliamentary seats.

The new majority government will be fronted by the island’s pro-business, pro-independence, center-right Demokraatit Party, making its leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the new prime minister. Nielsen led the island’s effort to set aside party differences in order to coalesce under “heavy pressure” from America, reported Reuters.

“We don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders, and we want our own independence in the future,” Nielsen, 33, told Sky News the night his party won a decisive majority in Parliament. “And we want to build our own country by ourselves.”

The announcement came just hours before Vice President JD Vance, second lady Usha Vance, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were scheduled to visit a U.S. space base on the island.

The vice president’s trip to Greenland was radically pared down this week after locals dissented to the Vance family’s prospective tourism parade of Greenland’s cities.

American representatives were seen walking around Greenland’s capital Nuuk earlier this week, canvassing residents to see if people would be interested in a visit from the vice president’s wife, Usha Vance.

“They’ve gotten no, no, no, no, no, every single time,” reported TV 2 correspondent Jesper Steinmetz.

Greenland’s government said in a statement posted on Facebook Monday that it had “not extended any invitations for any visits, neither private nor official.”

The territory has not taken kindly to what its officials have described as Trump’s repeated “aggression” against Greenland’s sovereignty. Over the last several months, the U.S. president has made odd jokes and eyebrow-raising militaristic threats about buying and annexing Greenland and shipped his son and MAGA allies to the island for a slapdash photo op with the island’s homeless.

In a statement posted to Facebook, Greenland’s outgoing Prime Minister Múte Egede urged islanders to “toughen our rejection of Trump” and the U.S. leader’s repeated attacks on Greenland’s political independence.

“Enough is enough,” he wrote. “People cannot continue to disrespect us.”

When asked earlier this month, during a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, whether he believed that the U.S. would annex Greenland, Trump said: “I think it’ll happen.”

Trump first became obsessed with the idea of owning Greenland in 2019, when he canceled a state visit to Denmark after it refused to sell the island to him.

Donald Trump is bringing Confederate statues back.

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity in America” that instructs Vice President JD Vance to terminate any activity he sees as “anti-American ideology” from the nation’s cultural institutions like the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo. The order will “prohibit funding for exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or promote ideologies inconsistent with Federal law; and celebrate women’s achievements in the American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women.” 

But hidden in the order—and missing from most headlines—is one other big change: The Secretary of Interior is to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”

In other words, statues of treasonous Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Albert Pike will soon be returning. Their statues were removed nationwide after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. 

The order goes on to target the African American history museum in particular for allegedly promoting the idea that “American and Western values are harmful.”

“The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture,’” the order reads, referring to an NMAAHC online graphic that was posted four years ago and quickly removed, not a literal exhibit in the museum. 

But the truth doesn’t matter here. Trump is appealing to the most hardcore white nationalist wing of his base by turning lauded cultural centers that raise questions and critiques of our society into spaces that blindly “celebrate American greatness.”  

“Attacking the idea that telling the whole story of the United States is an ideological plot to cast the United States in a negative light testifies to a stunningly brittle insecurity about our nation and its past,” Georgetown University history professor Chandra Manning told The Washington Post. “It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that.”

Donald Trump plans to ramp up his purge of the federal workforce and end union rights for many government employees at the same time.

The Washington Post on Thursday obtained an internal White House document outlining plans for 22 federal agencies to cut between 8 and 50 percent of their employees. According to the Post’s sources, the plan is a draft and doesn’t contain final numbers. But it is a worrying sign that heavy cuts are on the horizon that will severely impact government services.

For example, according to the document, the Department of Housing and Urban Development may cut half of its 8,300-person-odd staff, while the IRS could cut a third of its workforce, and the Interior Department could cut a quarter. This could affect the availability of affordable housing, tax refunds, and audits, and even National Park staffing.

Also on Thursday, Trump signed an executive order concerning government agencies, aimed at ending collective bargaining rights and placing limits on which federal employees can unionize.

The memo cites a fact sheet from the White House arguing that the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which allowed government workers to unionize, “enables hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management.”

“President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people,” the document states. The memo states that 18 government departments and numerous agencies are covered in the executive order, and orders the agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreements.

The American Federation of Government Employees has already responded, accusing the Trump administration of “illegally strip[ping] collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers,” in an email to its members.

“Let’s be clear. National security is not the reason for this action. This is retaliation because our union is standing up for AFGE members—and a warning to every union: fall in line, or else,” the email states. “AFGE is not going anywhere. We are fighting back. We are preparing legal action.”

Trump is already attempting to eliminate federal agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Education. By firing federal workers across the government and removing many of their unions, he is not only rendering the government less effective but tightening his control of it.