A readers’ survey conducted by The National Pulse has shown that the mostly MAGA-leaning readership rated President Trump’s first year in office at an average of 8.3/10. The results were finalized before the commencement of the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran’s Islamic Republic regime, with a new poll posted live yesterday to gauge any change in sentiment.

You can take the follow-up readers’ survey here.

The survey captured the opinions of 712 participant readers of The National Pulse, most of whom identify as part of President Trump’s MAGA base.

Asked to elaborate on their ratings, responses ranged from: “Promises made promises kept,” to “Not enough accountability for past agency heads. And still driving away independents with style issues. I like the style, but they don’t.”

Though the average rating was high, many expressed that they have not yet seen real changes in their lives.

“I wanted to vote for Pres Trump and I did. But things have not changed in anyway at all for me and my family. Gas is still the same price. My grocery bill is still climbing. The tariffs absolutely are getting passed on to us,” wrote one respondent, with another stating: “Not enough make America Great Again, too much make Israel great. Need to prosecute convict and jail the past political criminals.”

Nevertheless, overall optimism within the MAGA base remains high, perhaps even disturbingly so, with a full 61 percent of respondents saying Republicans should keep the House of Representatives at the midterm elections – an increasingly unlikely scenario.

Asked about the Senate, which is more likely to remain Republican-controlled, though trending in the wrong direction, a full 61 percent also supported the idea that Republicans would retain control, with 20 percent choosing Democrats, and one in five respondents expecting a tie.

Asked about their political priorities, answers ranged from mass deportations to stopping radical Islam to fixing corrupted election processes.

“Deport illegals, secure the vote, jail the political criminals,” wrote one respondent, with another adding: “The administration has done a great job of reviving the blue collar middle class by closing the border and getting started on deportations. Now it must do the same for the white collar middle class by driving to near zero the H1B and OPT visas. It’s the only way to prevent more cities from electing communist Mayors.”

Asked about their thoughts for Presidential candidates in 2028, an overwhelming majority of readers picked Vice President J.D. Vance, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a distant second.

Seventy-three percent of respondents chose Vance, with 21 percent picking Rubio. This part of the survey was an exclusively write-in section, and we did not prompt for candidates. The idea was to see if any outliers, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Stephen K. Bannon, or others, would make the list. There was almost no noteworthy deviation from what was expected.

Asked for additional thoughts or “any other business,” the most common response was “Keep up the good work,” a sentiement for which we at The National Pulse are truly grateful. Other responses included: “All of Trumps cabinet picks are great,” as well as, “Get rid of the Epstein class and set laws to stop this madness happening in the future.”

A counter-point added: “The Panicans, blackpillers, and doomposting grifters are living in a terminally online bubble that does not reflect reality nor the mood of many voters. The American people do not care about Epstein or Israel – they care about what makes their lives better. President Trump understands this and is pursuing this agenda in ways that the armchair critics could never comprehend.”

Please take part in the post-Iran version of this survey today, and let us know if your views have changed as a result.

One hundred and ten years ago, on May 9th, 1916, The Gazette Times of Pittsburgh printed a special telegram from Washington, D.C. entitled ‘Nitrate Plant Wins in House With Changes.’

The report made the second page, with the front reserved for a slightly more pressing matter: World War I. One year prior, the Germans had torpedoed the British ocean liner the RMS Lusitania, killing over one hundred Americans in the process. While the Americans had not formally entered the war by May 1916, it was only a matter of time.

As a result, the nation was once again confronted with Alexander Hamilton’s thesis from his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, which concluded: “In countries where there is great private wealth much may be effected by the voluntary contributions of patriotic individuals, but in a community situated like that of the United States, the public purse must supply the deficiency of private resource. In what can it be so useful as in prompting and improving the efforts of industry?”

As a result of the war, America was becoming increasingly concerned about the availability of nitrates, or the German ability to disrupt the trade from Chile. Nitrates were especially important for the production of explosives, the likes of which the U.S. would need when it eventually joined the war a year later.

The National Defense Act (1916) mandated the construction of two new plants, with an adjacent hydroelectric plant. The location? Muscle Shoals, Alabama, right on the Tennessee River – a particularly treacherous terrain that had long stymied trade, commerce, and economic growth.

There was just one problem. The war ended before the plant – known as the Wilson Dam – had been completed. The government, stuck with a massive boondoggle, almost sold the whole thing to Henry Ford for just three percent of its total value. Sadly for him, the political will to shift this giant operation into private hands for a fraction of the cost simply wasn’t there, and in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the hope of providing cheap energy for locals. It worked.

Today, the Wilson Dam has 21 generating units with a net dependable capacity of 663 megawatts. It is a National Historic Landmark and serves over 10 million people across seven states.

Neither Woodrow Wilson, for whom the dam is named, nor FDR, nor the 18,000 workers who built the dam could have ever realised what an important role the TVA would play over a century later. Though perhaps Hamilton foresaw it all.

American energy demand is currently skyrocketing, with power-hungry AI data centers creating genuine political and logistical insecurity and anxiety, especially on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, legislators long dead are having a greater impact than the current crop, with the TVA recently voting unanimously to reverse plans to shutter its critical Kingston and Cumberland coal plants and build a bridge to high-tech nuclear power.

The decision was predicated on arguments President Trump and his team have been making for over a decade now: that you can’t run a 21st-century superpower on unreliable “renewals” and the wishful thinking that surrounds them.

When the TVA board, bolstered by Trump-appointed members, ran the numbers, the threat became abundantly obvious. Earlier plans had been tied to a 2035 full-coal retirement goal that prioritized green ideology over America’s energy grid needs. Massive shortfalls loomed, with electricity demands on track to double in some areas.

Without this course correction, ratepayers face sky-high bills, and industry faces blackouts. Sticking to the old retirement schedule, which would have forced Kingston offline in 2027 and Cumberland into a phased retirement starting in 2026, would have been outright economic self-sabotage, the likes of which Americans 100 years into the future could not have forgiven.

Now, Kingston and Cumberland will stay online indefinitely, modernized to work alongside new natural gas and battery storage facilities. Their combined 3.8 gigawatts of output will help keep the grid stable and bills low, ensuring energy security while the next generation of clean, reliable power plants comes of age: small, nuclear-powered modular reactors, or SMRs.

But the TVA is not constructing new coal-fired facilities. It doesn’t need to.

It’s preserving American energy infrastructure and local jobs to provide the breathing room needed to scale up new technologies without spiking prices. One source close to the TVA explained it to me as follows: “With data centers and manufacturing booming, we can’t risk reliability on unproven timelines. Coal extensions buy time for nuclear to scale.”

The TVA’s nuclear deployment program may now be the largest in American history.

Already in 2025, it submitted the nation’s first utility-led construction permit application for a small modular reactor (SMR) at a site near Oak Ridge to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). With $400 million in Department of Energy funding already secured in late 2025, the project is moving at a pace rarely seen in nuclear.

Construction of its GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 model reactor is likely to begin in late 2028, with commercial operations targeted for 2032. This, they say, is just the tip of the spear, with the TVA already exploring up to six gigawatts of capacity across its service area through agreements with firms such as ENTRA1 Energy and NuScale.

This is a genuinely future-proof energy strategy.

Like so-called renewables, nuclear produces zero air pollution. Unlike renewables, it also produces reliable, 24/7 baseload power that isn’t held hostage by things like weather, or birds, or mechanical failures.

By maintaining existing coal assets, the TVA is effectively self-funding its own high-tech future, using the energy of today to attract, support, and expand the AI and advanced manufacturing industries that will eventually run on the small modular reactors of tomorrow.

It’s fitting that a firm with such an august history in national security, manufacturing, and energy production appears to be living up to the promise of those who first brought it into existence. It’s a very American story.

For months, the assumption in both political and media circles was that the Netflix-Warner Bros-Paramount throuple’s argument would end in a bidding war. Paramount made an offer for Warner Bros. Netflix retained the contractual right to match. Paramount nudged its bid up by another dollar per share this week. Netflix had every legal right — and more than enough cash — to respond.

But in the end, Netflix backed down, in a victory for antitrust policy that will be studied and cited for years, perhaps decades, to come.

Netflix has held more than $9 billion in cash for three consecutive years, so none of its retreat was about balance sheet capacity. Indeed, it was about a regulatory reality set in place by figures like the recently ousted Gail Slater, who pledged a Goldilocks approach to antitrust.

William Kovacic, former FTC chairman and antitrust guru, recently noted: “One of Gail Slater’s frequently recited mantras is, we are not Biden, we are not Bush. And she points to Bush and says, not active enough. Biden hyperactive.”

Under the Justice Department’s long-standing Philadelphia National Bank framework, a 30 percent market share marks the point at which serious antitrust concerns begin. A Netflix acquisition of HBO Max (owned by Warner Bros) would have produced a combined streaming entity controlling more than 45 percent of the market, even after accounting for subscriber overlap. Number one buying number three.

That represents a form of structural dominance that puts consumers not just on the back foot, but indeed on their knees.

Conversely, Paramount’s purported acquisition of Warner Bros presents an entirely different configuration. Paramount sits in fifth place in streaming and is seeking to combine with third. Ignoring duplicate subscribers, a merged Paramount–HBO platform would total roughly 220 million subscribers — still about 100 million fewer than Netflix alone. The leader remains Netflix. The market does not tip into one-firm command.

That distinction explains why Paramount was able to certify compliance with the DOJ’s standard request for information. Its path to clearance is far more straightforward than Netflix’s. Reports that the Justice Department was already examining aspects of Netflix’s market conduct only underscored the risk.

The bottom line is that Netflix bowed out because it understood it would not clear antitrust scrutiny.

This is what effective antitrust deterrence looks like in practice. Regulators did not even need to block the transaction. The mere prospect of rejection was enough to keep Netflix’s woke talons off brands like Superman, Harry Potter, Friends, Game of Thrones, and more, as Joel Thayer explained to me during this interview.

What emerges now is not market contraction but market recalibration. A Netflix–Warner combination would have entrenched the dominant streaming platform. A Paramount–Warner combination creates something else: two subordinate competitors combining to form a more viable challenger capable of standing alongside the top tier. The numbers bear this out beyond streaming.

In the theatrical production space, Netflix does not even operate a traditional movie studio. Paramount ranked fifth among major studios in 2024; Warner ranked third. Combined, Paramount and Warner would control roughly 24 percent of the box office market — broadly in line with Disney at 21 percent and Universal at 20 percent. That is competitive parity among established firms, not the creation of an unassailable behemoth.

Now, consumers stand to gain from a streaming market that features genuine rivalry. Netflix has raised subscription prices repeatedly during its period of dominance. A strengthened competitor with comparable content depth introduces discipline. Price increases become strategic decisions rather than assumptions.

Creative professionals can now gain leverage because when multiple buyers compete for compelling content, bargaining dynamics shift. Award-winning director James Cameron publicly argued for a more competitive landscape, fully aware that Netflix might not appreciate the sentiment. Within days, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos responded by calling Cameron “disingenuous” and “completely untrue.” The sensitivity is quite revealing.

Warner has struggled as a standalone entity for years and was unlikely to reverse course organically. A buyer appears inevitable.

The policy question was whether regulators would permit the dominant streaming platform to swallow it whole or allow two mid-tier competitors to combine into a viable rival.

They made the correct calculation by making the first option implausible.

For once, the guardrails held, and the market adjusted accordingly. The ball is now in Paramount’s court.

On the night of Thursday, February 5, President Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video about election fraud that included a two-second splice featuring Barack and Michelle Obama, portrayed as apes in the style of The Lion King.

The outrage machine swung into gear, culminating in the likes of CNN’s Bakari Sellers demanding a “fumigation” of Trump and MAGA from the United States.

But as the aching “anti-racism industry” locomotive groaned back into a pathetic trundle, distracted editors at the Guardian – a 205-year-old progressive publication – were weighing a story that would have staggering implications for President Trump, his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and indeed his entire administration.

It was, in large part, an attempt to lay the foundations for a fresh impeachment of the 47th President of the United States.

“NSA detected phone call between foreign intelligence and a person close to Trump,” the headline roared.

It could have been a stomach-dropping, monster revelation… if it was true.

The story was immediately seized upon by NeverTrump™ figures like Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, Michael Weiss, and even the band Wheatus – of ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ fame – garnering millions of impressions over the next few hours.

At the time of publication of this Substack piece, the Guardian’s author, Cate Brown, still hadn’t removed her original tweet, asserting what would soon be debunked as “fake news.”

If the story had even been a little bit true, it could have triggered months of investigations, jamming up the Trump agenda in a Russia collusion-style hoax.

There was just one problem: when the Guardian’s single source saw what they had written about his testimony, it was his stomach that dropped.

They had the story wildly wrong. Was it their mistake, or his? There was no “person close to Trump” on any call, he hurriedly informed them. Either the Guardian reporter misheard or he misspoke.

Over Saturday afternoon, evening, and late into the night, the Guardian agonized about what to do with this damaging revelation. They even considered eschewing a correction and instead publishing a whole new story, with more accurate details.

Eventually, they succumbed to basic journalistic standards. Eventually.

It was only on Sunday morning that they decided to change the headline to: “NSA detected foreign intelligence phone call about a person close to Trump.” [Emphasis added]

In other words, there was never a “person close to Trump” picked up on a foreign intelligence intercept. Instead, a “person close to Trump” was being discussed by two other, unidentified people.

Furthermore, the paper admits: “The person close to Trump is not understood to be an administration official or a special government employee.”

Well, if that ain’t just the non-story of the year.

Editors reluctantly added a humiliating addendum, right at the bottom, with a sort of jaw-dropping nonchalance about it all:

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to clarify that the phone call was between two people associated with foreign intelligence who discussed someone close to Donald Trump, not between someone and a person close to Trump. The earlier version was based on multiple phone calls with a source who later said he mispoke and clarified the actual details of the call.

This also then changed, with the Guardian forced into naming the source himself:

This story was amended on 7 February 2026 to clarify that the phone call was between two people associated with foreign intelligence who discussed someone close to Donald Trump, not between someone and a person close to Trump. The earlier version was based on multiple phone calls with the whistleblower’s attorney, Andrew Bakaj, who later said he misspoke and clarified the actual details of the call.

The Guardian’s report isn’t the first time a claim was made that a “whistleblower” had filed an inspector general (IG) complaint. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal popped a story on February 2, which alleged in an uncharacteristically alarming tone:

A cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel is swirling around the complaint, which is said to be locked in a safe. Disclosure of its contents could cause “grave damage to national security,” one official said. It also implicates another federal agency beyond Gabbard’s, and raises potential claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House, officials said.

In journalistic parlance, this means it is being heavily “shopped around.”

The complaint itself appears to date back to May 2025, just two and a half months into Tulsi Gabbard having her feet under the DNI desk. And despite a spokesman for the IG telling the Wall Street Journal that allegations against Gabbard weren’t credible, the Guardian pursued the story.

It was only on Friday, February 6, that Guardian reporter Catherine (“Cate”) Anne Brown would speak with the alleged whistleblower’s lawyer, Andrew Bakaj (say: ‘Buh-kai’), at length.

Brown herself began a formal career in investigative reporting around four years ago, starting with the Washington Post in late 2022, before her final piece was published in January 2026. Before that, she worked as a freelancer for outlets like Business Insider and completed what she calls “OSINT research training” with Bellingcat, an “intelligence agency” closely linked to pro-establishment U.S. and UK operatives. Bellingcat has received funding from the “CIA sidekick,” the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as well as from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

Brown and Bakaj would speak about the whistleblower’s claims, with Bakaj taking the final rap for the factual flub on the front page of one of the world’s oldest newspapers. And while it is unclear whether the two knew each other very well before their call, almost everyone in Washington, D.C., knows to treat Bakaj’s claims with a ladleful of salt, given his role in the first failed Trump impeachment effort.

Bakaj, of Ukrainian descent, is a former CIA officer who also worked for Hillary Clinton and the Bush State Department in Kiev. After bouncing around government, he landed with Democrat lawyer and ‘Disney adult’ Mark Zaid at the Compass Rose Legal Group.

The pair cooked up the first Trump impeachment, with Bakaj serving as legal counsel for whistleblower Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman. His twin brother, Alexander Vindman, now running for Senate as a Democrat, served as one of the most hyped witnesses in this process before anyone knew his own brother was the progenitor of the claim against President Trump. Vindman was even offered the job as Ukrainian defense secretary, a bizarre turn of events for a U.S. Army officer inside America’s national security apparatus.

So Bakaj’s claims, at least to a serious investigative reporter, should be viewed as extremely partisan – especially when it comes to whistleblowers and national security. His previous clients failed in their attempt to oust a sitting president, and repeatedly disgraced themselves in apparent fealty to a foreign nation of which they all share recent ancestral lineage.

For Brown, however, these characters would become the backbone of a story rushed out amid the media’s monkey meltdown, provided on a “single source” basis and without appropriate consultation with ODNI and its communications team.

For a story as explosive as the Guardian’s, one would expect a reputable news outlet to:

1. Have more than a single, hyper-partisan source;
2. Wait to hear back from the government department they’re reporting on;
3. Consult with its other employees and reporters in town;
4. Work overtime to verify the claims made by the partisan lawyers.

The Guardian’s editors did none of these things, with sources indicating they were transfixed on the Trump Truth Social monkey mania, distracting them from what should have been basic journalistic rigor.

If this had been a Breitbart News report about Hillary Clinton gone wrong, it would currently be leading the nightly news and even have pseudo-comedic mentions on late-night.

Instead, it is being hurriedly brushed under the carpet. There has been no accountability inside the Guardian, thus far. No one has been suspended. No one has been taken off their beat. And no form of apology has been offered, neither to the subjects of the piece nor to the Guardian’s readership.

Andrew Bakaj won’t be disinvited from any television shows. The American Bar Association will do nothing to him. His firm will not place any sanctions on him. The swamp, as they say, is alive and well.

The story here is of critical importance because this is precisely the playbook that was run during the first impeachment, and almost certainly represents a botched trial run for new impeachments come November 2026, if the Republicans lose the House.

With TrumpRx launching this week, immediately bringing down the costs of America’s new favorite medication, GLP-1, the knock-off merchants are surely panicking. Hims and Hers will spend millions of dollars during America’s other favorite medication, the Super Bowl, to hawk a new concierge service rooted in left-wing populism.

Predictably, the ad only uses white actors for the scenes depicting the out-of-touch, moneyed elite, while every scene about ordinary people has an ethnic minority portraying America. But in Hims’ case, that’s beside the point.

The firm that was referred to the Department of Justice today, and its commercial has rightly raised eyebrows for its use of Galleri cancer detection, which “missed more cases of cancer than it found,” according to Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

Based on a review of the applicable facts, earlier today @HHSOGC referred Hims & Hers Health, Inc. (“Hims”) to the Department of Justice for investigation for potential violations by Hims of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and applicable Title 18 provisions.

— HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart (@HHSGCMikeStuart) February 6, 2026

Voiced by ‘conscious rapper’ Common, who himself is worth a very uncommon $20 million, the ad implies Hims and Hers will be the Robin Hood of the healthcare industry, giving ordinary people access to things only rich people (like Common) have.

Rich people get concierge IV drips, customized peptides, preventative care, and specialists on call. And you’ll basically get the exact same thing if you download their app! Except you won’t. You’ll get what companies like Hims are really good at providing: cheap knockoffs and left-wing politics.

“It’s all about democratizing access to the things that are available to the super rich, and we’re bringing them to people,” said Hims’ chief design officer, Dan Kenger.

It is no surprise the ad copy sounds like it was written by a Bernie Sanders staffer. It probably was.

Hims’ CEO Andrew Dudum is a repeat donor to members of the far-left “squad” or “Justice Democrats” such as illegal immigrant Ilhan Omar, Islamist loudmouth Rashida Tlaib, as well as Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Cori Bush. His list of political donations makes for very interesting reading, and of course concludes with the same Bernie Sanders he’s seeking to channel in Hims’ Super Bowl ad.

Last year, Dudum offered to hire “Gaza Solidarity” protesters after writing about the “Nakba” – an Arabic term for the “catastrophe” of the founding of the State of Israel, on his Medium page. The company famously lost almost $210 million in stock value after his woke tweet.

“As a father whose children are both the descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled the Nakba in 1948, and the descendants of Holocaust survivors from Poland, I have a deep consideration for nuance in my life,” Dudum wrote in 2023.

If only he had deep consideration for the nuances in the world of medicine.

The centerpiece of the ad campaign is a new $49 oral semaglutide pill. It is positioned as an alternative to Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill, which launched just weeks ago after years of development, testing, and regulatory review. Novo’s product relies on a patented system designed to protect the active ingredient during digestion and ensure absorption.

Hims does not have that patent, nor do they disclose how their pill survives the digestive process.

They are effectively launching a product using an unproven technology, with no publicly available evidence that the active ingredient is even bioavailable.

Novo’s CEO, Mike Doustdar, was blunt in his reaction. “You’re wasting $49, in my opinion,” he said, explaining that Novo’s patents exist precisely because protecting semaglutide through digestion is the hard part.

Some biotech investors have labeled Hims’ product a “scam.” Hims is effectively conducting a mass experiment without transparency, regulatory approval, or proof of effectiveness, and laundering their untested pharmaceutical behavior through the Super Bowl and a ‘conscious’ (read: woke) Grammy-winning rapper.

Trump-appointed FDA Commissioner Marty Makary issued a pointed warning on Thursday, writing on X: “FDA will take swift action against companies mass-marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved products.”

Hims doesn’t disclose where it sources its active pharmaceutical ingredients. The company says they come from “FDA registered” facilities, but registration is not approval. When a drug itself lacks FDA approval, sourcing becomes even more important.

As we have previously noted, much of the knockoff drug supply chain runs through China, where quality control and oversight are persistent concerns. American consumers have no way of knowing what they are taking or whether it will have any effect.

In practice, Hims is selling leftist populism using America’s collective waistline as its hook. They’re quite explicit about it, in fact, with Kenger telling Variety: “There’s probably going to be a lot of weight loss commercials this year, and they’re probably going to try to be funny and they’re probably going to be relatable and they’re probably going to have a celebrity, right? And that’s great,” he says. “I think we’re past that conversation. You know, we did that. We talked about it. The prices are down. Now let’s talk about something else.”

That “something else” appears to be peddling a pill with no track record of success. Thankfully, the TrumpRx launch this week means fewer Americans will risk whatever it is Hims is putting in its knockoff Wegovy.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the stupid part out loud, recently opining on how the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) state-sponsored digital yuan will soon be paying out “interest.”

Now the central bank digital currency (CBDC) argument has to be had all over again.

Armstrong heaped praise on the CCP’s approach: “China has decided to pay interest on its own stablecoin, because it benefits ordinary people, and they recognize it as a competitive advantage.”

Alarm bells toll. The guy with all our crypto accounts at his fingertips has developed a taste for putting the blockchain in government hands. It would be bad enough if it were a U.S. central digital bank. It’s all the worse for being China.

The CCP is not running some stablecoin marketing gimmick. It is building a state-administered financial control grid. The digital yuan is a central bank digital currency in its purest form: programmable, surveilled, and designed to bring money flows closer to government oversight. Interest payments are not altruism – they are bait.

Critics online saw it immediately. One replied: “China’s version is a CBDC at best. Not a stablecoin.”

Interest-bearing digital currency changes virtually everything, by the way. The moment a token starts paying yield, it stops acting like neutral digital cash and becomes a deposit account. And deposit accounts always come with a supervisor, a regulator, a central bank, and eventually the long arm of the Federal Reserve.

Central banks have long wanted the ability to reach directly into consumer monetary behavior, to reward saving, punish spending, impose negative rates, or distribute stimulus with conditions attached. A CBDC makes that possible. The Cato Institute has warned that CBDCs could give governments sweeping power over individual financial activity, including surveillance and control that would make cash obsolete. That was never the point of the blockchain.

Bitcoin was born in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis as a rejection of centralized monetary authority. Satoshi did not design a system in which governments could pay you interest in exchange for total visibility into your transactions. Crypto was meant to remove middlemen, not replace them with something worse.

China’s model makes the intention clear. Commercial banks are subsidizing digital yuan interest payments because adoption has lagged. The state wants citizens using the official wallet, inside the official rails, under official monitoring. And once people accept yield as the hook, they accept the architecture behind it.

In the United States, stablecoin policy is already becoming a battleground. The GENIUS Act passed in July 2025 opened the door for platforms like Coinbase to share rewards with users, and banking lobby groups are now fighting to shut it down, warning it will pull deposits out of the traditional system.

But the deeper issue is ideological. Once stablecoins become savings instruments, the distinction between private digital money and government digital money collapses. Regulators will argue that anything paying interest must be treated as a bank product. Central banks will argue that only state-issued money should carry the weight of monetary policy. The path leads in one direction.

That is why President Trump, early in his second term, issued an executive order to protect Americans from the risks posed by central bank digital currencies. He was right to do it. A CBDC is not financial progress. It is financial consolidation.

Armstrong may think praising Beijing is pragmatic. It is not. China is the clearest example of what digital currency becomes when the state holds the keys: a tool of centralized power dressed up as modern convenience. The crypto industry should remember what it was built to resist.

Interest-bearing stablecoins are not the future of freedom. They are the opening act for state-run digital money.

And once that door is opened, it does not close again.

Housing affordability is one of the defining issues in American life. President Trump waxed lyrical about it from the stage at Davos this week, decrying major corporations for gobbling up U.S. housing stock.

“Homes are built for people, not for corporations, and America will not become a nation of renters,” the President told the World Economic Forum (WEF). “That’s why I have signed an executive order banning large institutional investors from buying single-family homes. It’s just not fair to the public. They’re not able to buy a house.”

The numbers are pretty grim. The frustration is palpable and widespread. The sense that the system is now rigged beyond salvation grows stronger year by year.

America’s median homebuyer is now 59 years old. That is not a functioning housing market. That is a country where adults are being shut out of homeownership.

Trump’s comments, as well as his actions, are a direct negation of the WEF’s 2016 slogan: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

But one executive order and one speech do not a summer make.

If the Trump Administration wants to ratchet up its pursuit of affordability for Americans, it should take a long, hard look at another powerful actor shaping the housing market in ways most do not comprehend. It may be sitting right on your phone as you read this.

It’s Zillow.

For many, Zillow is just a harmless app where you can scroll through listings and daydream. In practice, the company has become something much bigger. Zillow is no longer just a platform that shows you what is available. It has grown into a vertically integrated housing company with its own internal ecosystem. That ecosystem now includes its own mortgage operation, called Zillow Home Loans.

Now, Zillow is not just a participant in the housing market. It has become one of the market’s gatekeepers. It can influence what buyers see, who they contact, and how quickly all these pieces can move. When a company has that kind of sway, it can shape consumer behavior without ever having to announce it.

According to a new lawsuit, that power may be getting used in a way that hurts buyers at the worst possible time, when every dollar counts.

Reuters recently reported: “Online real estate platform Zillow is facing a new consumer lawsuit in federal court in Seattle that accuses the company of pressuring homebuyers into using its mortgage lending division. The proposed class action filed on Friday, claims Zillow operates programs in which its affiliated real estate agents receive high-value sales leads only if they meet internal quotas for securing pre-approved mortgages from Zillow Home Loans.”

Now factor this into the equation: Zillow Home Loans’ mortgages cost $4,600 more than its competitors, on average.

If the allegations in the lawsuit prove accurate, they point to a system designed to steer buyers toward Zillow’s more expensive mortgage products through behind-the-scenes incentives. Agents who want access to valuable leads are pressured to meet internal targets. Buyers who think they are simply shopping for a home may be nudged toward a specific lender without realizing how the machinery is working around them.

What may seem like a minor detail is, in practice, a form of gouging American homebuyers at a critical juncture.

Georgetown professor Steven Salop dug into this late last year, analysing nearly 11,000 Zillow Home Loans from 2022 through 2024, and comparing them against other mortgages in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) database.

He concluded: “This study provides empirical evidence that Zillow Home Loans charged higher prices than other mortgage lenders for conventional 30-year fixed-rate purchase mortgages during the three-year 2022-2024 period, after controlling for a set of borrower, loan, geographic, and temporal characteristics available in the public HMDA data.”

Zillow’s overcharge was $4,579 on an average loan size of $337,000.

That is real money for a working family. It is money that could go toward repairs, moving costs, childcare, savings, or simply staying afloat in an economy that has already punished them with higher prices across the board. It also makes it harder for buyers to compete in the first place, because every extra cost pushes the monthly payment higher and narrows the range of homes they can afford.

The study also found that veterans were hit especially hard.

For VA loans in 2024, the Zillow overcharge was $7,279 on an average loan size of $407,860. At a time when the country talks endlessly about supporting veterans, Zillow is heinously treating them as a premium revenue stream.

This is why Zillow presents such a clear opportunity for the Trump Administration.

With the President returning to his populist economic instincts this year, not only with his proposal on single-family housing but also with ideas like capping punishing credit card interest rates, the public mood is scarcely pro-corporate monopoly. Voters want someone to take on the greedy institutions that have made ordinary life more expensive and more unsettled.

The FTC and the DOJ have the authority to investigate and enforce the rules, and they should do it without hesitation.

Housing is not just another consumer product. It is the foundation of stability for families and communities. When homeownership gets pushed further out of reach, the country becomes less rooted, less secure, and less confident about the future. Americans feel that decline in their own lives, and they are done being lectured by the same people who helped create the mess.

If the goal is to restore the American Dream, then we have to Make America Affordable Again. That starts with breaking the grip of players who treat families as data points and neighborhoods as cash cows. Zillow is towards the very top of that list.