Crooked Media - There will be flood 🌊

Disgraced former president Donald Trump asked oil executives for $1 billion to help his campaign. You’ll never guess what he offered them in exchange (hint: it’s the climate).

• You don’t need a snarky evening newsletter to tell you how incredibly high the stakes are for the 2024 election. For climate policy, they couldn’t be higher. Sea surface temperatures and polar ice-melt rates are soaring. While President Biden has enacted dozens of new rules on cars, power plants, and infrastructure to stave off the “existential threat” of climate change, disgraced former President Donald Trump calls it “a hoax” and amassed a sorry record of undoing climate regulations and making life generally easier (and cheaper!) for polluters. But now there’s evidence of just how neatly Trump’s disdain for climate science meshes with his love of corruption. And it all spells a major election hurdle — and opportunity — for the Biden campaign. 

• Today the Washington Post reported on a meeting last month at Mar-a-Lago where Trump promised a roomful of oil executives he'd undo dozens of environmental rules and regulations if only the executives raised $1 billion for his presidential bid. Trump told the captains of the fossil fuel industry the whole thing would be a “deal” for them considering how much money they’d make in a second Trump administration. It’s hard to imagine a more mustache-twisting example of naked corruption and disregard for the lives of untold millions of people at the mercy of climate change. Many, many fair-minded voters would find the contrast between Biden and Trump just as stark. Except, according to polls, many have little idea it exists. 

• New polling shows that most voters aren’t that well aware of Biden’s four biggest domestic achievements, including the Inflation Reduction Act, which included record climate investments and green incentives for businesses and individuals. Voters know even less about Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan. Even worse: Many voters actually think Trump — who famously flubbed Infrastructure Week for months on end — did as much on this issue as Biden. (He did not.) The upshot is that Biden’s campaign has A LOT of work to do to inform voters about how his policies benefit their communities, while Donald Trump is openly promising to literally sell them out to oil companies for his personal benefit. 

Partisanship is partly to blame for making voters tune out Biden's achievements in this area. But millions of GOP moderates and independents are also waiting for a reason to abandon Trump. Maybe they’d like to know that Trump is promising to kill electric cars in exchange for cold, hard cash.

TikTok announced today it will start automatically labeling AI-generated content, including artificial images made with TikTok’s AI effects and shared elsewhere. That’s a bit of good news as the U.S. heads into its first presidential election in the age of AI. At the same time, it points to a much bigger problem: the dangerous collision between AI and politics. And we’re not just talking about the “Drunk Nancy Pelosi” deepfake. 

It has become shockingly easy to generate deepfake content of politicians, newsmakers, or anyone else. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes proved exactly that point to unnerved election officials at an election safety seminar this week. TikTok’s new policy makes it slightly trickier to blast totally artificial content into global public view, but hardly impossible, especially for determined bad actors. 

Of course, this change does nothing to counter another very real danger: how authentic content is selectively delivered to inflame specific audiences. After all, this will be an election in which one of the two main candidacies is based on false information about the 2020 election and orbited by a constellation of other lies. TikTok, of course, is clearly looking for “responsible actor” press while facing a potential forced sale or ban in the U.S. But, still, hooray for TikTok, thanks for reminding us how full of artificially-enhanced videos of dancing cats you truly are.

Barron Trump was selected as a Florida delegate-at-large (no relation to his massive height) to the Republican National Convention. Barron, who turned 18 in March, is making his first move into politics, joining half-siblings Don Jr., Eric and Tiffany as delegates. This job should be fairly easy since the GOP literally had no party platform the last time Trump ran in 2020. Barron: you’re young! There’s still time to save yourself!

The Biden Administration is expected to soon release a new rule designed to speed up the processing of asylum claims for many migrants crossing the southern border, NBC News reported, citing unnamed sources. The move is designed to make it faster and easier to deny entry to migrants with criminal records or who are deemed a national security risk. 

Medical school graduates are starting to avoid states with abortion bans or new post-Dobbs restrictions when choosing their residencies, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. New residencies are down 4.2% in states with near-total abortion bans, compared to just 0.6% overall. The difference is even deeper for graduates entering OB/GYN residencies. 

An appeals court rejected Hunter Biden’s attempt to throw out federal gun charges, clearing the way for him to go to trial next month. Biden is charged with false statements and with illegally possessing a firearm while using drugs in 2018. He faces separate federal tax charges in California. 

Donald Trump got some moral (well, amoral, at best) support from friends at his Manhattan election interference trial today. MAGA Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Jeanine Pirro (R-FoxNews) both turned up at the courthouse today. So far Eric Trump is only one of Trump’s kids to attend. Melania has been noticeably absent. She’s probably just SUPER busy.

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Fifteen-year-old Khaya Njumbe of Gary, IN, is on track to become the state’s youngest-ever college graduate. Not to be outdone, I’m really close to finishing a Sudoku puzzle. 

Doctors in China appear to have cured Type II diabetes in a patient using stem cell transplants.

The state of Utah set up a tip line to encourage Utahans to snitch on trans people who “violate” the state’s public bathroom law. Trans activists and allies responded to this by flooding the line with thousands of fake reports, rendering the whole thing as useless in reality as it was cruel and wrong-headed in conception. Even the state auditor tasked with following up these calls accused the legislature of taking a “ham-handed approach.” Prank calls for good, we love to see it!