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The phrase “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” coined in the 1960s by legendary California politician Jesse Unruh, referred, at that more innocent time, to wealthy people funding campaigns. Nowadays it comes with an additional meaning, as some of our leaders deploy their political power to enrich themselves and their families. 

The Trumps are especially adept at this. And if you want to see how this works, you should be reading Zach Everson, a Forbes staff writer who has been deftly covering the Trumps’ Venn diagram overlap of political and financial power for years. 

Not only is he authoritative, he’s prolific. In just the past few weeks, Everson has written about how Don Jr. was paid $813,000 as a Trump Media and Technology Group director despite attending only two meetings; how insiders at a firm called Dominari Holdings loaded up on company shares just as Don Jr. and Eric Trump were announced as advisory-board members, leading to a stock surge; how Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes earned $47 million last year, even as the company lost $401 million; and how the older Trump sons made a big bet on AI data centers a few weeks after their dad pushed for billions of dollars to be invested in the industry. 

This isn’t a new beat for Everson. You might remember him from his Substack, 1100 Pennsylvania, which meticulously chronicled the comings, goings, and $15 bowls of cereal at the hotel that Donald Trump used to own, just a few blocks from the White House. The hotel is now a Waldorf Astoria, but the Trumps are apparently looking to reclaim it, so maybe that old beat of Everson’s can come back to life.

Quick quiz: What was the property tax bill last year for a 112-acre, $13.1 million parcel on Florida’s Gulf Coast?

Maybe $75,000… or $100,000? 

How about $531?

Pulte Home Co. paid such a small bill thanks to Florida’s generous “rent a cow” provisions that allow builders to state that their land is agricultural, and pay much lower taxes, until construction is about to get underway.

Josh Salman and Kara Newhouse at the nonprofit site Suncoast Searchlight scoured the records of more than a thousand companies to show their readers how builders can simply plunk some cattle onto their undeveloped land to take advantage of tax breaks meant for farmers and ranchers. The tax reductions eventually disappear as the homes go up, but in the meantime, local officials must scramble for revenues they’ll need to provide services for the new residents. 

The tax shortfall from the scheme in just two counties came to at least $6.6 million last year alone. And it’s legal: “We know they are playing the system,” said a local property appraiser. “But they are acting within the bounds of the law.”

A guy builds a cool treehouse for his daughters. Everyone seems to love it; nothing goes awry for sixteen years. Then a neighbor complains because so many people gather around it on Halloween. The city investigates and decides, among other things, that the owner needs to submit soil reports, structural designs, and even a plan for making the treehouse ADA-compliant.

That process has gone on for eight years, and the owner has paid $50,000 in legal fees and permits—and even faces a misdemeanor criminal charge. And he is about to give up.

If you’ve ever dealt with a faceless, seemingly nonsensical bureaucracy, you’ll find this LA Times/Clara Harter piece to be worth your time.

When a company pays $16 million to settle a pointless lawsuit, it might have to trim expenses elsewhere. For Disney’s ABC News, that meant making a series of cutbacks, including taking a chainsaw to FiveThirtyEight, the website that started with (mostly) accurate election predictions and expanded beyond politics into areas like sports and entertainment. 

Look, it’s a tough environment in media, especially for companies like ABC that depend on faltering legacy revenue streams. So cuts are hard to avoid. In this case, though, ABC didn’t just lay off the small staff; it also shuttered the decade-old data and archives behind it, according to G. Elliott Morris, FiveThirtyEight’s former editorial director of data analytics. “Aside from erasing history, this prevents access to publicly released data, including raw polls, averages, model estimates, and story data,” Morris said. “Totally unacceptable for a company (allegedly) doing journalism.”

Morris is right. If you Google FiveThirtyEight today, or a more specific term like FiveThirtyEight’s presidential ratings, the links take you to a generic politics archive on ABC’s website. 

The cost to archive FiveThirtyEight’s old datasets and stories is minimal (especially for a corporation that generated more than $5 billion in operating income last quarter). The cost to journalists, researchers, and anyone interested in political trends is monumental.

As we noted above, the network news business is under tremendous pressure these days. So you might also wonder why companies like CBS or CNN wasted even a nickel on their polls gauging how viewers felt about Trump’s speech to Congress last week.

The CBS poll showed that 76 percent of viewers approved (58 percent ‘“strongly”), and 74 percent found Trump both “presidential” and “entertaining.”

That led to headlines like Newsweek’s “Donald Trump’s Congress Speech Was a Huge Hit with Americans” or a Florida radio station’s lede, “Donald Trump receiving rave reviews on his speech.” CBS’s poll was the first data point the White House noted in its release calling Trump’s speech a “masterclass.”

But if you check CBS’s toplines, you’ll see their viewer sample was 51 percent Republican and only 20 percent Democrat—even though Gallup found the electorate evenly split last year between the two parties. (CNN’s had a 44 percent GOP tilt.) Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to watch a Trump speech, and Republicans like Trump much more than Democrats do, and you put those two things together, and voilà, you have a poll that generates nonsense headlines, and wastes money to boot.

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