2026-04-13 04:20:56
Hungary’s much-watched national election—a competition between Trump and Putin-aligned authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and centrist opposition leader Peter Magyar—has ended with a devastating rebuke to the right-wing leader. Orbán conceded his party’s defeat before midnight today.
Already sixteen years in power, Orbán was looking for another four-year term and a renewed majority for his hard-right party, Fidesz. Instead, Magyar appears to have clinched a clear win for himself and a two-thirds parliamentary majority for the opposition party Tisza.
My colleague Marianne Szegedy-Maszak covered the race, its outsized implications, and the quest of “one of the most successful populist strongmen of the 21st century” to save his career in a comprehensive piece this week—just updated to reflect Magyar’s win.
For Hungarians, this election is existential, and exhausting. A pervasive sense of anxiety permeates conversations in social media and within families, and even casual interactions are charged. Hungarians have faced the complete Fidesz takeover of traditional media channels, and turned to Facebook and alternative media channels, which are abuzz with conversation, debate, and sharing of insights—or the latest Fidesz outrage. A friend in Budapest hinted darkly at a national curfew after the election, and one of my Hungarian cousins said her hairstylist was so spent that he planned to take Monday off to recover—as did her husband.
For many Americans, of course, Orbán’s Hungary is a miniature version of Trump’s US—indeed, in some ways, it may have served as a role model for MAGA in its crusade to dismantle democratic institutions and crucial elements of civil society. When Trump first ran for election in 2016, Orbán had already “built the wall”—in his case, an electrified razor wire fence constructed by prisoners—on Hungary’s southern border, attempting to staunch the flow of Syrian refugees who, to be sure, were more likely to use Hungary as a transit point than a final destination. This also allowed Orbán to declare a “state of emergency,” which has not been lifted since. Sound familiar?
Among its many implications internationally, the defeat is a public rebuke to Vice President JD Vance, who campaigned for Orbán during several days before Sunday’s election. And in at least one respect, Orbán—an erstwhile democracy activist—might be less autocratic than Trump: He’s already publicly conceded his loss.
2026-04-13 03:37:19
This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the federal agency that oversees Wall Street—announced that it has brought almost 30 percent fewer new enforcement actions against companies in the first year of the Trump administration.
In practice, this means that the SEC is bringing fewer cases against bad actors in the financial markets for crimes like insider trading or fraud. That contradicts statements that the SEC’s head, Paul Atkins, made to Congress in February, disputing reports that suggested his agency was prosecuting fewer crimes, and assuring lawmakers that SEC enforcement work had not seen a steep decline.
In its release of case numbers this week, the agency framed its enforcement drop as an effort to focus more on cases where investors saw direct harm and to better use agency resources.
“Regrettably, such resources have been misapplied in prior years to pursue media headlines and run up numbers, and in turn, led to misguided expectations on what constitutes effective enforcement,” the SEC wrote in its statement.
The agency’s report of its enforcement numbers got minimal attention this week, likely because it was issued just hours after President Trump issued a threat to annihilate the people of Iran that raised mass alarm of war crimes or potential nuclear warfare. (The president later walked back his threats.)
The SEC’s data release comes after months of signs that have pointed to unprecedented lenience by the agency toward financial crimes. In the last year, the SEC suddenly shut down many of the cases against cryptocurrency firms initiated under Biden-era leadership: It dismissed a case against Coinbase one month after Trump’s second inauguration, then halted a prosecution against a Chinese crypto entrepreneur who bought millions in tokens from a Trump family crypto venture, and a few months later threw out a case against crypto giant Binance. (The White House also pardoned both the firm itself and ex-CEO Changpeng Zhao.)
A private sector analysis from an economic consulting firm that partnered with NYU to scour court records for SEC actions raised the possibility of a 30 percent drop in prosecutions in November. It also noted that financial fines obtained by the SEC had dropped to their lowest level in more than a decade.
This March, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) sent a letter to the SEC expressing his own concerns about the agency’s falling enforcement efforts. He noted that staffing at the corporate watchdog has dropped by 17 percent, with many of those cuts specifically in the enforcement division. Financial fines collected by the SEC, he wrote, had dropped by 45 percent, while “disgorgement,” a process where the SEC requires companies to return profits that were obtained through ill-gotten means, had fallen by a staggering 98 percent. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent the agency two letters last month expressing similar concerns.
That same month, the SEC’s enforcement chief—the top lawyer in charge of bringing cases against companies—abruptly resigned after just six months on the job because she clashed with some of the agency’s Republican political appointees in trying to more aggressively pursue financial fraud charges, “including in cases that touched the president’s circle,” according to Reuters.
The day after it released its decreased enforcement numbers, the SEC finally announced Ryan’s replacement. The new enforcement chief will be David Woodcock, an attorney who previously led the SEC’s regional office in Fort Worth, Texas. Following that job, he went into private practice at Gibson Dunn, helping to defend companies facing SEC enforcement actions.
2026-04-13 03:34:05
Unable to quickly remove Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz—the world’s most important oil transit corridor—with its current equipment, the US is switching tack: President Trump announced Sunday in two Truth Social posts that the Navy will launch its own blockade of “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave” the passage, and intercept those that have paid Iran’s tolls to cross.
The announcement will almost certainly mean a further spike in oil prices when markets open on Monday, and it’s a move that does little to help Trump’s sagging domestic approval, leaving much of Iran’s hold on the global oil supply intact Gasoline costs will keep rising. Military commitments and expenses, will keep growing. The MAGA coalition will continue to crack.
Meanwhile, Trump’s two main promises on Hormuz this weekend, to clear Iranian sea mines from the strait—efforts he said were “starting” in another Truth Social post Saturday—and to detain “every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran,” are dubious.
That’s first and foremost because the US doesn’t have the resources to get rid of the sea mines. State-of-the-art demining vessels, if left alone by Iran, could clear the strait in a matter of weeks or months. But the Navy has no “significant mine clearing capability,” the Wall Street Journal reported in March, and its unmanned anti-mine vessels are unreliable even in clear waters that pose far less of a challenge than Hormuz.
Detaining the ships that pay Iran’s tolls also seems pretty unlikely. To pull it off, Trump seems poised to try to open his own safe channel across the strait, competing with the route Iran has set up to guide ships through the mine-filled waters: Two US destroyers apparently crossed Hormuz on Saturday “to demonstrate to commercial tankers that the waterway could be transited safely.”
A safe alternate path under American management would force oil buyers to pick a side: Iran or the US.
Among the problems with that plan: First, China buys most of Iran’s oil. Will the US actually detain those tankers if they pay Iran’s tolls, and risk escalating a series of showdowns with China that have so far not gone well for Trump? Second, many ships on the Iranian route do not pay tolls. How will Washington check which ones did pay in order to detain them? And what will it do with the ships: fine them, effectively charging a second toll?
Given those realities, it seems that all Trump did on Sunday was announce changes that make an already volatile situation more difficult. Trump’s blockade makes safe transit across the waterway even more confusing and uncertain—raising questions of whether deadly mines will still linger in the strait, of how to safely move oil, and virtually ensuring that crude prices will remain damagingly high for months to come.
2026-04-12 01:56:41
Sam Altman suggested that an investigative story describing him as someone “unconstrained by truth” with a “sociopathic lack of concern” for consequences caused an early Friday attack on his San Francisco home.
The OpenAI CEO’s unsubstantiated implication came in a post on his personal blog published on Friday, hours after the attack. “There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago,” he wrote. Although he initially “brushed it aside,” he said he was “pissed” and now “thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.”
A 20-year-old man was arrested early Friday after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home. No one was hurt in the incident. The same man is suspected of also threatening to burn down a building at OpenAI’s headquarters later that morning. The Monday New Yorker investigation Altman referred to included interviews with over 100 people who had firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducted business. While a few people defended Altman, most said he was power-hungry and manipulative.
In a move that appears as an attempt to soften his appeal, Altman accompanied his post with a photo of his husband and son. While he acknowledged the present moment as “a time of great anxiety about AI,” he noted, “while we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally.”
Altman’s suggestion of “tactics” indicates that he believes reports like the New Yorker investigation are intentionally dishonest and lead to violence.
The attack comes as CEOs are spending more money on personal security. According to a report by the Conference Board, a nonprofit research group, and ESGauge, an analytics platform, the top 10 percent of spenders pay an average of $1.2 million per year for full-time protection teams, armored vehicles, and threat intelligence.
As of April 11, OpenAI is hiring for four positions in corporate security, including a risk analyst, who will bring experience in “physical security, counterintelligence, and risk management,” and security leaders in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and at data centers.
But security goes far beyond safety when considering the technology OpenAI produces. The attack could be used to develop a surveillance dragnet. The company secured a Pentagon contract in February and announced the deal in a company release titled “Our agreement with the Department of War.”
That same day, the Trump administration dropped and blacklisted Anthropic, a rival AI company, from federal contracts due to the company’s refusal to remove safety restrictions on its AI model that prevent the government from using it for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. So while OpenAI claimed in its February announcement that it would ensure that its tools “will not be used for domestic surveillance,” how could it have successfully secured the contract?
If Altman truly wants to “de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics,” he has to reconcile with boosting a company that requires massive energy resources to harm not only those abroad in the name of national security but our communities at home.
2026-04-11 23:34:18
President Trump, who has long married “protecting American steel” with his “Make America Great Again” slogan, reportedly accepted tens of millions of dollars in donated steel from a foreign firm for his ballroom just days before he slashed tariffs in half that could help one of its plants.
According to a report by the New York Times from earlier this week, two people familiar with the White House ballroom plans said the steel was made in Europe by ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based steel manufacturer.
Last October, the president said he received a “generous” offer of steel worth $37 million—but did not mention where the steel was coming from. According to the same Times report, shortly after the donation, the White House agreed to revise its tariffs in a manner “that could benefit ArcelorMittal, by cutting in half the tariffs applied to exports of automotive steel from its Canadian plant.”
The White House has publicly disclosed only some donors to the $400-million project. The names we know include: tech giants Meta and Amazon, defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Palantir, the crypto platform Coinbase, and the family of Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary who had years-long business ties with Jeffrey Epstein. And of the known donors, few have disclosed the amount of money given—something many companies should have done through lobbying disclosure filings, according to the government ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, responded to the Times’ request for comment by saying Trump was remodeling the White House “at no cost to the taxpayer.”
That may be accurate but doesn’t answer the question: Was this a quid pro quo deal? It’s apparent that Trump has little interest in “protecting American steel.” It’s all about boosting his own.
2026-04-11 21:00:00
Alessandro Chesser is a 40-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He’s married with two kids and was the first in his family to attend college. His grandfather immigrated from Sicily and worked as a school janitor so his family could have a better life.
Skip forward a few generations, and Chesser is noticing the way wealthy investors hide their money to avoid paying taxes. He’s outraged and wants to upend the tax system, which he thinks is unfair to the everyday American worker. In Chesser’s mind, the realistic solution isn’t to reform the tax code, but to make it easier for average Americans to access one of the best-kept secrets of the superrich: trusts.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.Trusts have become big business in the US. They are now an industry worth trillions of dollars. But no one knows the exact number, because the trust industry is extraordinarily private. Trusts can last forever (literally), but there is no public registry for them. In fact, they are one of the main reasons why watchdog groups consider America to be the most secretive financial jurisdiction in the world.
This week on Reveal, journalists Sally Herships and Leah McGrath Goodman investigate America’s shadowland of trusts. As the nation’s wealth gap keeps growing—and Americans brace for Tax Day—we uncover what’s at stake as US states race to become the most trust-friendly jurisdictions in the world.
