Tax Political Wealth

Trump's Endorsement Record Cracks, Raskin Finds Common Ground With Rogan, and Cuban Warns on California's Wealth Tax

With roughly three months remaining before midterm elections, data from contested primaries shows Trump's endorsed candidates winning at a lower rate than in 2022 and substantially lower than in the 2020 cycle. Analysts attribute part of the decline to natural incumbency dynamics, but also to quiet funding of primary challengers by defense-establishment and Chamber of Commerce factions within the party. Each endorsement that fails carries a structural cost beyond the individual race: donors update their models, and ambitious politicians in later cycles begin calculating whether the president's backing is necessary or whether distance is affordable.

Congressman Jamie Raskin declared he agrees 'one thousand percent' with Joe Rogan on what has been described as the 'Truth API scheme' — concerns about the way Truth Social has reportedly been monetizing or manipulating its application programming interface to generate data flows that benefit specific parties financially. Raskin, whose background is in constitutional law, signaled that the underlying legal and consumer protection issues are legitimate regardless of political packaging, implicitly suggesting there may be a legal theory worth pursuing through regulatory or criminal referral channels.

Mark Cuban issued a forceful warning against California's proposed wealth tax, which would apply a percentage levy to assets beyond a certain threshold, including unrealized gains. Cuban argued the measure would cause startup founders and early-stage investors to relocate before a liquidity event triggers a major tax burden — a concern grounded in behavior patterns he knows from direct experience. A founder holding forty percent of a company valued at two hundred million dollars on paper would face a substantial cash liability on equity that has not yet converted to actual money.

The economic literature on wealth taxes is genuinely mixed. Sweden implemented and then repealed one partly because of capital flight; France had a similar experience with its ISF wealth tax; Norway maintains one without the catastrophic founder exodus critics predicted. California's specific concentration of venture-backed startups, the illiquidity of pre-IPO equity, and the availability of zero-income-tax domiciles in Texas, Florida, and Nevada make it a distinct case. The state's economic modeling on projected revenues has been criticized as optimistic by independent analysts, and the honest empirical question — whether revenue collected from founders who stay exceeds revenue and economic activity lost from those who leave — remains unanswered.

Elon Musk's announcement that X will publicly display government censorship requests — showing users which agencies worldwide have requested content removal and the legal justification cited — drew a more ambivalent reaction. Civil liberties organizations have long argued for exactly this kind of mandatory disclosure. The policy, evaluated on its merits, moves toward greater accountability, even as the irony of its origin in a platform that has faced its own content moderation controversies was not lost on observers.