What happened
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent yesterday said his department has been working to create a $250 bill bearing President Donald Trump’s portrait, and he showed off a mockup ordered by U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach. “At present, no living person can be on U.S. currency,” under a 1866 law, Bessent said. “We will stick to the law” but “have prepared in advance” in case Congress passes “proposed legislation” authorizing the Trump banknote.

Who said what
The Treasury Department is “moving proactively” and doing “due diligence” in response to legislation introduced by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), a spokesperson said. That “Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act” has “since stalled out, with no actions” since February 2025, CBS News said. Trump has “also pushed for the creation of a $1 coin bearing his image,” The New York Times said, “and is having his signature added to U.S. currency this year,” as he endeavors to “honor himself while commemorating the nation’s 250th birthday.” 

What next?
New banknotes can take “more than a decade to design and produce,” The Washington Post said, and “typically” require “extensive coordination” with the Federal Reserve and Secret Service to add “dozens of embedded security features” to prevent counterfeiting.

What happened
A $9.7 billion Pentagon contract with Dell Technologies this week sent the company’s stock soaring, likely boosting President Donald Trump’s more than $1 million investment in the company, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported yesterday. “Government ethics watchdogs are sounding the alarm” not only because Trump “potentially stands to gain financially” from the Dell deal, the Post said, but also because he “has repeatedly praised the company at public events” since acquiring the shares earlier this year. 

Who said what
The Dell investments were among more than 3,600 trades executed in Trump’s investment portfolio from January through March, according to a mandatory filing this month. The Trump family “has argued that the president does not personally control the trading,” but the president’s financial accounts “are not in a traditional ‘blind trust,’” the Times said. And his Dell purchase “draws new attention to the inherent problems” with the family’s “widespread investments” in military drones, cryptocurrency, mining and prediction markets while Trump “oversees policy and government purchase decisions for those same sectors.” 

What next?
Presidents are exempt from an ethics law that prohibits official self-enrichment. Congress should “revisit the arrangement whereby we rely on the president’s own sense of integrity rather than law to avoid conflicts of interest,” Greg Williams at the Project on Government Oversight told the Post.

What started as online satire has spiralled into a mass movement for India’s disaffected younger generation. The parody Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) launched this month and quickly amassed more than 22 million followers on Instagram — more than twice that of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the world’s largest political party. 

Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old public relations student at Boston University, created the Cockroach Janta Party, inspired by comments from India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant that compared unemployed young people to cockroaches. While Kant later clarified that he was only referring to some people acquiring fraudulent degrees, his remarks drew “considerable ire,” said Al Jazeera, “mainly from Gen Z internet users, as they battle large-scale unemployment, inflation and bitter religious divides” following 12 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. 

With a cockroach as its symbol, the CJP has exploded across social media, fueled by “memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction” that turned “absurdist humour into protest,” said The Associated Press. One million people have signed up to join the movement in the past week, with its “tongue-in-cheek membership criteria” including “being unemployed, lazy, chronically online and capable of ranting professionally.” 

“I don’t expect CJP to become a functioning political party,” said 29-year-old digital marketer Oindrila Mohinta to The Telegraph India. But its “rapid growth sends a message to the ruling party that many, especially the youth, are unhappy with corruption and the economy.”