The Weekly WTF: Trump robs small businesses

Plus, the new Worst Trump Cabinet Official, Bill Gates’s harem, and don’t cry for Scott Pelley

THIS STUFF ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Director of national incompetence. There’s a new Worst Trump Cabinet Official: Bill Pulte, who Trump has picked as the next director of national intelligence, or DNI. The DNI, in theory, is an important job. This official oversees 18 intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the NSA. Prior DNIs include a senator, two retired admirals, a retired general, and an ambassador. Like, serious people with lots of worldly experience.

The current DNI is Tulsi Gabbard, the former House member who Trump’s inner circle shunned. The inside joke was that with Gabbard in the job, DNI stood for Do Not Invite. She’s leaving this month. Nobody will miss her.

Trump wants to replace Gabbard with Pulte, who’s 38 and currently in charge of the agency that manages the housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte has never worked in intelligence, or diplomacy, or the military, or been elected to office. But he donated money to Trump, plus he’s punkish and abrasive. Trump’s kind of guy.

[Trump has a Joe Biden problem on jobs]

Pulte is one of 25 grandchildren of the man who founded Pulte Homes. But he never did much at the company except parachute in as a board member for four years. The well-regarded Pulte Family Charitable Foundation the grandfather established has publicly dissociated itself from brash young Bill.

Last year, at a private event, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Pulte, “I’m going to kick your ass.” That altercation came after Bessent felt Pulte was talking trash about him to Trump. He probably was. That may be one reason Trump likes him.

Pulte is best known as the Trump crony who combed federal mortgage records looking for dirt on Trump enemies. Wait: There’s his intelligence-gathering background! Pulte’s snooping led to accusations that Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook and New York State attorney general Letitia James committed mortgage fraud. Cook and James both say that’s crap.

Democrats in Congress say Pulte’s appointment as DNI is a joke, and some Republicans agree. That means the Senate may never confirm Pulte, leaving him in lame-duck “acting” status indefinitely. But that won’t stop him from plowing through the reams of intelligence data you and I pay for to find even better dirt on people Trump wants to punish. Maybe he’ll get even with Bessent. Trump also reportedly wants Pulte to clean house within the intelligence services, like DOGEing the spooks.

The Pinpoint Press has had good instincts on the Worst Trump Cabinet Officials. Our first two picks—Kristi Noem at Homeland Security and Lori Chavez-DeRemer at Labor—are both gone. They were so bad even Trump couldn’t abide them.

We think Trump should fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. We’ve also noted that FBI Director Kash Patel (sorry, Ka$h) is vindictive, self-serving and drunk too often for comfort. Pulte has tough competition as WTCO. But Hegseth, at least, served in the military. Patel is a lawyer. Pulte is uniquely unqualified. That, alas, may endear him to Trump even more. 🙄

The case for Hegseth. If you’re rooting for Hegseth as WTCO, you’ve got some fresh ammo. Hegseth’s Defense Dept. hired a rioter who marauded through the US Capitol with a metal pipe on January 6, 2021, to work in a counterterrorism job that requires a top-secret security clearance. Elias Irizarry, who was 19 at the time, ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor and apologizing for his actions. He’s one of hundreds of J6 rioters Trump pardoned in 2025.

[AI is saving the Trump economy]

Nothing against second chances. But there are probably thousands of former USAID workers who are more qualified for any job at the Pentagon than this guy.

Latest tariff sham. There is actually some non-Trump WTF this week 👇, but organizational logic suggests we stick with Trump until we run out of material. So you might want to know that the great human-rights activist Donald Trump is taking on slave labor. He now plans to impose new tariffs on imports from Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and nearly 60 other trading partners because his trade advisors have mustered evidence that forced labor contributes to the production of some goods in these countries’ supply chains.

If they investigated the United States using the same criteria, they’d probably find that America, too, relies on slave labor. Then they could really clean up this dreadful practice, starting right here at home.

[The Weekly WTF: America the immoral]

You didn’t know Trump is a crusader for worker rights? Neither did anybody else. What’s obviously going on is Trump told his trade people to find some new pretext for imposing tariffs, now that courts have struck down his main rationale for tariffs and may soon strike down the backup tariff plan he rolled out earlier this year. Assume the latest effort will face legal challenges as well, given that it is absurd.

More abuse of American businesses. When the Supreme Court overturned Trump’s emergency tariffs in February, it set in motion a refund process for some 330,000 import businesses that had paid nearly $170 billion in bogus taxes to the US government. The Trump administration is now trying to wriggle out of something like $40 billion of those refunds. Trump’s trade shysters basically say certain importers need to file a lawsuit to get their money back, which will impose the heaviest burdens on small businesses that don’t have trade lawyers on staff, and may not be able to afford hiring them.

Here’s the short version: Trump imposed an illegal tax on thousands of businesses, and now that the courts have said no, give it back, he’s erecting legal and logistical barriers to refunding money those businesses never should have sent to the government in the first place. It’s theft. Trumpism is worse than socialism.

[Are you cashing in on the epic stock boom? Most Americans aren’t]

Microhard. What’s your attitude toward Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates? For a long time, he seemed like a better billionaire, devoted to lofty causes such as improved sanitation in Africa. He helped start The Giving Pledge, a promise by some of the world’s richest people to give the majority of their money to charity.

But Gates has a dark side. The Epstein files released earlier this year suggested Gates had a couple of extramarital affairs while married to Melinda French Gates. Now the Wall Street Journal suggests Gates had at least 20 affairs.

That would be a lot of affairs for a normal person to have during a 27-year marriage. But debauched billionaires have a lot of staff to manage these types of things and cover them up. Ordinarily, we don’t find out. But Gates’s connection with the sleazebag Epstein opened a peephole that is becoming a picture window. Epstein emails suggested that Gates acquired STDs and got antibiotics from Epstein to treat them. Now it looks like there’s a lot more dirt on Gates than even Epstein had. Two affairs have now become 20. Is this going to become a geometric progression?

Breaking CBS News. Longtime 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley has a lot of media friends, and it was probably a dumb move by new CBS News boss Bari Weiss to fire him. Weiss took over CBS News last year after David Ellison’s company Skydance bought CBS parent Paramount. Ellison and his father Larry are Trump pals. CBS News is on the Trump Enemies List, and it seems like the Ellisons hired Weiss to hollow out the news network as a sop to Trump.

There’s more going on. The audience for traditional news networks has been declining for years, for obvious reasons (the internet, streaming, podcasts, social media, Substack). All the news networks are trying to adapt. CBS is now doing it worst. But it wasn’t exactly thriving before Weiss arrived.

Pelley, 68, is an elite media bigshot who will end up fine. CBS supposedly fired him “for cause,” the cause being, he criticized management. Ha. CBS will probably have to make him a big payout. If there’s no confidentiality agreement, Pelley will probably write a juicy book dumping all over Weiss and the Ellisons. Sources will line up to dish on these corporate jerks. Pelley will get his revenge. If he retired tomorrow, he’d have a distinguished career to be proud of and more money than most journalists can dream of.

What gets far less attention is the demolition happening throughout journalism, where no TV stars are involved. I’ve been a journalist for 35 years, and for about two-thirds of that time, digital technology has been wrecking journalistic business models and making it damn hard to earn money in the news business. Many good journalists simply leave because they can’t make a decent living. I’m not complaining! Everybody has to adapt. The creative destruction has also brought great innovation. I’ve benefited personally from many of those changes.

The political and corporate hostility toward CBS News is repugnant. But no more so than the countless firings and sad outcomes at many other news ventures. Please support good journalism, people. And not just when it’s an infuriating national story.