Good afternoon, and welcome to U.S. Democratic Socialists.
Trump made over 1,000 stock trades in a single month while sitting in the Oval Office, and refuses to reveal who’s managing his portfolio. Voters who previously abandoned the Democratic Party have been brought back in after Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win. A group of businesses backed by conservative think tanks is suing to block Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores. And a new investigation reveals how a Palantir co-founder turned criminalizing homelessness into a business opportunity.
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Trump Made Over 1,000 Stock Trades in June
While the rest of the country was watching grocery prices climb in June, Trump was making more than 1,000 stock trades from the Oval Office, according to a financial disclosure published Saturday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.
The transactions were worth somewhere between $78.1 million and $263.1 million. Trump bought heavily into Berkshire Hathaway, Visa, Mastercard, and Cintas, and he bought and sold Palantir stock multiple times throughout the month. His single largest move was dumping up to $25 million in a Vanguard fund on June 22.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said the trades are managed by independent third-party financial institutions through “computer-based model portfolios,” and that Trump has no ability to direct or influence any investment decisions. But there is no indication Trump has a true blind trust, as his wealth is held in a revocable trust under his own name, with his eldest son Donald Trump Jr. serving as the sole trustee.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Robert Garcia have pressed Trump to identify who manages his portfolio and explain why certain trades coincide with government decisions. The lawmakers pointed to 15 trades that raise potential conflicts of interest and noted that Trump signed the disclosure himself, certifying his awareness of thousands of individual transactions.
The total number of stock trades during Trump’s time in office now exceeds 14,000, worth up to $1.06 billion. Meanwhile, Congress has yet to pass a ban on stock trading by sitting presidents.
Voters Who Left Democratic Party Return After Progressive Wave
The Democratic Party lost a lot of Michigan voters over Gaza in 2024. More than 100,000 people voted uncommitted in the presidential primary to protest Biden’s support for Israel, and thousands of them went on to vote for Jill Stein or (oddly enough) Donald Trump in the general election.
Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate primary win this month is bringing them back in.
More than 2.5 million people voted in Michigan’s primary this cycle, up significantly from the 2 million who turned out in 2024. Progressives have secured the Democratic nomination at every level of government in the state, including attorney general hopeful Eli Savit, U.S. House nominees Will Lawrence and Donavan McKinney, and Ann Arbor mayoral candidate Yousef Rabhi.
Samraa Luqman, a Yemeni American political activist in Dearborn who voted for Trump in 2024, said she is returning to the Democrats in November to back El-Sayed because he is “worried about Americans at home.” Waqas Sarwar, also in Dearborn, voted for Stein in 2024 but was excited to cast his primary ballot for El-Sayed and Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Polling shows a majority of Democrats now oppose military aid to Israel, support Medicare for All, and support abolishing ICE. El-Sayed holds all three positions, which is a big part of the reason the establishment spent $65 million trying to stop him in the primary.
Business Coalition Sues to Block Mamdani’s Municipal Grocery Stores
The Multicultural Business Coalition filed a lawsuit on Monday to stop New York City from opening five municipal grocery stores that would sell everyday staples at prices 30% below what private retailers charge.
The coalition represents 50 chambers of commerce spanning nearly every immigrant business community in the city. Its central argument is that the stores would be built on municipal property and pay no rent, giving the city a cost advantage that no private grocer or bodega can match.
Mamdani launched the grocery store program because food prices have been rising for years, and the private market has done nothing about it. The city-run stores will not carry hot food, alcohol, cigarettes, or lottery tickets, and Mamdani has said repeatedly that the stores are not designed to compete with bodegas.
Several conservative think tanks and politicians have offered funding and legal assistance to the coalition, which is trying to raise $1 million to fight the initiative. The Greater New York Chamber of Commerce is providing its legal counsel. The people suing are not the ones skipping meals.
A Palantir Co-Founder Built a Think Tank to Criminalize Homelessness
If you’ve been wondering why so many states have started arresting people for sleeping outside, look no further than a billionaire named Joe Lonsdale.
Lonsdale co-founded the surveillance technology company Palantir and runs the Cicero Institute, a think tank that has spent years lobbying state legislatures to treat homelessness as a criminal offense instead of a housing crisis. The institute has written model legislation in at least 15 states, and eight have enacted versions of it.
The National Homelessness Law Center released a research brief about the Cicero Institute in June that details the think tank’s conflicts of interest related to its homelessness advocacy. This includes its ties to Social Purpose Corrections, an organization that advocates for a nonprofit prison model, and Lonsdale’s connections to immigration detention and surveillance.
Policies that criminalize homelessness also directly benefit Lonsdale through 8VC, his venture capital firm, which invests in Palantir, crime-tracking app Citizen, and home security company Sauron.
Austin, Texas, which Lonsdale holds up as a success story for his approach, has issued more than 900 citations for sleeping in public since it banned homeless encampments. The number of people without housing in the city continued to rise anyway, because the problem was never about enforcement.
Stand With Us Now
It’s time to start preparing for 2028, and we need to be prepared for the attacks corporate media and establishment politicians will dish out. No other progressive outlet is reaching the number of people we are, and no other outlet is doing it without billionaire money telling us what we can and can’t say. But as Big Tech throttles our accounts every day, the only insurance policy against getting silenced is an audience that funds us directly.
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The line holds. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tomorrow.
Justin, John, Ryan and the U.S. Democratic Socialists Team
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Mamdani Announces $4 Billion Plan to Rebuild the BQE After Decades of Delay. Mamdani and the city’s Department of Transportation announced plans Monday to rehabilitate the city-owned portion of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street. The infrastructure is 20 years beyond its design life and now carries more than 130,000 vehicles per day, more than twice its design capacity. The project includes building a temporary, two-level bypass highway along Furman Street to divert traffic while repairs are made to the existing structure. Construction is expected to begin in 2030 and will take about 10 years to complete at a cost of about $4 billion.
Pentagon Admits It Keeps a Secret Blacklist of Journalists. In a statement to The Intercept, a CENTCOM official threatened to put an Intercept reporter on the list for calling the command too frequently, and confirmed the existence of the secret directory of journalists. The revelation comes amid the ongoing war in Iran, accusations of a cover-up of U.S. casualties and repeated refusals by CENTCOM to answer questions about civilian deaths. The Pentagon has already banned journalists from its press office, expelled reporters who refused to play by restrictions on their work, and fired the editor-in-chief and a Middle East reporter at Stars and Stripes for defending the newspaper’s editorial independence.
Opinion: I Was a Republican Mayor. I’d Vote for a Democratic Socialist. In the latest Opinion Forum on USA Today, readers commented on the emergence of Democratic Socialists as the 2026 midterms approach, and one response stood out from the rest. A former Republican mayor of a small upstate New York city says he’d vote for a Democratic Socialist in a minute if they proposed a real plan on health care or tax reform. DeSantis, a Vietnam combat vet who went on to become a political science and economics grad, says he balanced his city’s budget with disciplined spending, only to see the GOP become his “worst nightmare.”
He’s not only the most corrupt president ever but he is the worst in every possible way!
Trump is pretty sure it's GOOD to be president, be able to buy and sell stocks while supposedly "working", and able to manipulate the value of those stocks by a simple statement to the news!
Mamdani's grocery stores are probably due to be in food deserts, where people try to feed themselves from bodegas instead of super markets. The lawsuit is a product of pure racism!
Palantir IS NOT OUR FRIEND. The greed driving the insane rents all over the country, and the fact we've had the same minimum wage [a ridiculous $7.25] for almost thirty years is the reason so many can't have a roof over their heads, but the wannabe penal state run by Trump and enforced by ICE and Palantir just will not abide anyone not paying rent to one of the fat cats who pay Donny for his signature!