The News You Need on Monday, April 13th, 2026.
The news you need today from Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser. What was up with that Melania presser last week, the Pentagon is scrambling for private profit, and the US is destroying itself.
Trump Corruption Watch
In Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, the Scramble for Private Profit Is Intense
The Guardian
Scott: When Trump refashioned the Department of Defense at the outset of his second term, placing a cashiered Army major and Fox News weekend anchor in charge and renaming it the “Department of War,” profit motive was a prime factor. Being a venture capitalist was a prime factor in appointments, proximity to the tech bros was a must, and the lack of any history of uniformed service was really no obstacle. Indeed, four senior executives who worked for tech bros were suddenly given unprecedented commissions as lieutenant colonels to facilitate their involvement in artificial intelligence contracting. Uday and Qusay also have their sights on huge Pentagon procurement contracts, investing in drone-producing start-up firms that appear poised to secure significant deals. Now The Guardian’s Aram Roston has taken the lid off more insider dealing.
A high-profile US defense department official who oversees the agency’s artificial intelligence efforts made a profit of up to $24m selling a private investment he held in Elon Musk’s AI company earlier this year, according to government ethics records released this month. The value of his stake totaled a maximum of a million dollars when he joined the department.
Emil Michael, who is the Pentagon’s under secretary for research and engineering under the Trump administration, oversees negotiations with AI companies and has been pushing the defense department to rapidly increase the widespread use of AI.
Michael declared in March 2025 that he had a position in xAI valued between $500,000 and $1m.
He sold those holdings on 9 January for between $5m and $25m, according to disclosures filed with the office of government ethics (OGE). He reported that he owned the xAI shares through a company called KQ Partners. (Government financial disclosure reports are designed to show ranges of holdings, rather than precise amounts.) The increase in value amounts to a gain of between 400% and 4,800%.
xAI, which is the company behind Musk’s Grok chatbot, is not publicly traded, so it is unclear how Michael obtained his position, how it was priced or to whom he sold it.
Orbán Out in a Landslide Election in Hungary
Süddeutsche Zeitung
Scott: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin pulled out all the stops to secure the reelection of their friend Viktor Orbán, who in the final days of the campaign was revealed to be the keystone in Putin’s plans to defeat Ukraine and disable and undermine NATO and the European Union. The opposition Tisza Party led by Péter Magyar appears to have narrowly secured a two-thirds majority, which will be essential to undo all the firewalls Orbán installed to keep himself in power indefinitely.
Hungary faces a change of government, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—after 16 years in power—faces the prospect of being voted out of office. In Sunday’s parliamentary election, with just under half of the votes counted, the pro-European Tisza party—led by Péter Magyar—stands at 135 seats in the 199-seat parliament, according to the National Election Commission. This would effectively secure them a narrow two-thirds majority—a threshold that, according to observers, is necessary to bring about genuine political change.
Leading up to the closing of the polls, a very high voter turnout was evident. Two hours before polling stations closed, the central election authority reported that 74.23% of eligible voters had already cast their ballots. This figure represents a significantly higher turnout than at the same point during the last parliamentary election in 2022, when it stood at 62.92%.
In many places, long lines formed outside polling stations. In the southern Hungarian city of Szeged, many voters—unwilling to wait any longer—unceremoniously cast their votes outside the voting booths. There was also a massive turnout at Hungarian diplomatic missions abroad; long lines formed in cities including Barcelona, Stockholm, Málaga, Munich, Manchester, and Oslo. According to press reports, even the current Nobel Prize laureate in literature, László Krasznahorkai, waited nearly two hours outside the Hungarian consulate in Milan to cast his vote.
Several Hungarian media outlets described the voter turnout as record-breaking. According to experts, however, it remains unclear—for the time being—which side stands to benefit from this high turnout. After casting his ballot, Péter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party, characterized the election as a pivotal choice “between East and West.” The only remaining question, he suggested, was whether his party would win with a simple majority or a two-thirds majority.
In his final campaign appearance, Magyar pledged that his first act as prime minister would be to commission a special inquiry into Orbán’s murky dealings with the Kremlin which led, among other things, to his foreign minister giving periodic briefings to Putin’s foreign minister and taking instructions from him as to how to obstruct support for Ukraine in the EU and NATO. In exchange, it appears that Orbán sought Putin’s agreement to give Hungary a chunk of Ukrainian territory after the country had been conquered. Hungarian legal analysts suggest this conduct might be viewed as treason under Hungarian law and might lead to criminal prosecutions.
The United States is destroying itself
The Guardian
Charles: If you only read one column this week, make sure it’s this one from the Guardian’s brilliant Rebecca Solnit, in which she hits upon the very reason for being of The Horton-Kaiser Report: “The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment.” Against all odds, Solnit manages to mention all of them in a single 1200 word piece:
The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.
Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers…
But the offensiveness may be a distraction from the destructiveness. A whole sector of mainstream media now functions as spirit mediums attempting to interpret Trump’s actions to try to fit them into the context of competent leadership and coherent and consistent agendas. If there was a coherent agenda, it would be a destructive one, a malevolent one. The newly popular slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” is useful here, because what this system does is weaken, damage, corrupt and harm. The idea that there’s a coherent agenda driven by Vladimir Putin works in the sense that most of what Trump has done is good for the ageing Russian dictator while also bad for the US.
Solnit also nails exactly what will be necessary when this nightmare is finally over: the most fundamental reconstruction the United States has undertaken since the end of the Civil war.
We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last forever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.
It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen – the electoral college and voter suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us – and nature and future generations too – rather than is driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.
Detail Emerges on the Relationship Melania Didn’t Have with Jeffrey Epstein
El País
Scott: What caused Melania Trump to suddenly give a nine-minute press statement in front of the cameras? Charles has offered some takes, as have many others. One persistent claim was that Melania has word that Brazilian supermodel Amanda Ungaro was known to have given a couple of press interviews in which she was going to spill some very embarrassing Epstein beans. Indeed, an interview ran Sunday morning in the Madrid-based El País, which took the added step of releasing its entire piece in English. Ungaro was married to model agency entrepreneur Paolo Zampolli, who Melania insists introduced her to Trump. They had a harsh falling out, and Zampolli appears to have availed himself of the power of the Trump White House to get custody of their child and have his trophy wife brutalized by Trump’s secret police—she was locked away for three months and then deported. However, Ungaro’s ire in her interview is focused principally on ICE and their mistreatment not only of her but of a host of others she met in captivity.
Handcuffed at the hands and feet, she was transferred to an immigration detention center in Miami, where she spent three and a half months in complete horror. Her husband, who had a green card (permanent residency permit), was released. “I volunteered to scrub the floors at six in the morning so I wouldn’t go crazy. I spent the whole day crying; I read the Bible from beginning to end,” she says. She helped others, sharing with them her phone credit to make calls. She claims that there were detainees with residency permits, an octogenarian handcuffed in a wheelchair, and a young woman who had just lost a baby and had to wait a long time to receive medical care…
To proceed with the deportation, she was taken to Louisiana. “It was a hall with more than 120 people, the floor was wet, there were no windows, four days without seeing the sun… I came out infested with lice,” she recounts. She landed in Brazil wearing the prison uniform, with nothing, not even a cell phone. “I spent a month depressed in a room.”
Ungaro regrets not having left Zampolli sooner — and not having reported him. “I was living at the mercy of a sick psychopath who abused me psychologically, sexually, and physically. I asked many people for help. No one ever helped me. But I couldn’t leave without my son, and he would not sign [the authorization],” she says.
Ungaro does offer some fresh detail on Epstein and Maxwell, however:
In 2002, when she had not yet turned 17, she flew from Paris to New York on the Lolita Express, the private plane of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “My agent told me, ‘We’re going with a couple of friends, a private plane just for us.’ There were around 30 very young women there, 14, 15, 16 years old. I said, ‘What is this?’ And he replied, ‘Don’t worry.’” That is how she recalls a trip she first revealed to the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.
Ungaro claims that she didn’t interact with anyone on the flight, except to greet the hosts, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his accomplice, who is currently serving a sentence for sex trafficking. “Amanda, let me introduce you to Jeffrey,” her agent said. “He came over and asked, ‘Where are you from? How old are you? Which modeling agency do you work for?’ And he introduced me to Ghislaine.” She claims she never saw Epstein again; he was found dead in his cell in 2019. The same fate befell the modeling agent who put Ungaro on that plane, Jean-Luc Brunel, who was arrested in connection with the Epstein case and died in a Parisian prison in 2022.
It appears that Ungaro has given several other still unpublished interviews.
No Exit
The Guardian
After JD Vance’s completely predictable failure to make any progress with the Iranians, Donald Trump’s latest insanity was to lurch from “a complete blockade” of the Strait of Hormuz, to just blocking ships “entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas.”
Sidney Blumenthal’s latest column recalls all of the president’s other lurches of the last four weeks, and usefully reminded us that the last person to make the same threat as Trump was air force general Curtis LeMay, “who said that the correct strategy for the Vietnam War was to “bomb them back to the Stone Age”. LeMay was the most vocal of the critics within the military’s high command of John F Kennedy, accusing his diplomacy that ended the Cuban missile crisis as ‘almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.’”
Some of us remember how well that worked when Richard Nixon extended the bombing of Vietnam to Cambodia.
Donald Trump: “The Iranians have no cards.”
Colin Jost: “They are LITERALLY holding a Straight.”
The Horton-Kaiser Report Podcast
Iran’s LEGO Videos Take War Propaganda to a New Level
WIRED
Scott: War propaganda in some form is ancient, but it is a routine aspect of most military confrontations from the twentieth century forward. With Trump’s war on Iran, it has entered into a new phase in which pop culture and AI play increasingly powerful roles. American propaganda has been mundane, unimaginative, and often illiterate, much of it focused on Pete Hegseth strutting across a stage. It provides a perfect target for ridicule, and pro-Iranian videomakers have seized upon it.
Minutes after President Donald Trump announced that he would not wipe out “a whole civilization” on Tuesday evening, a team of self-described young Iranian activists jumped into action.
Members of the group known as Explosive Media were putting the finishing touches on their latest AI-generated, Lego-inspired Trump video. The video features a Trump mini-figure colluding with leaders from Gulf states, Iranian officials pressing a big red button labeled “back to the stone age,” and Trump throwing a chair at US generals.
This was the latest of more than a dozen videos the pro-Iran group has released since the beginning of the war in February, many of which have racked up millions of views on mainstream platforms. While Iranian government accounts have posted Lego-style videos in the past, Explosive Media’s content is more sophisticated and scripted. And it’s produced by a team of young pro-Iranian creators who appear deeply knowledgeable about the internet and American culture. Already some critics have alleged the group has ties to the Iranian government…
“People are disengaging from some of the real conflict content and looking for something that can distill what’s happening quickly and in a language and tone that they understand and that’s what those Lego videos are doing,” Moustafa Ayad, a researcher with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue who has closely tracked the online content being shared by Iranian groups during the war, tells WIRED. “They’re making it easily accessible to understand the conflict from Iran’s point of view, and it’s hitting on points of disaffection in the United States at the same time. It’s working on two fronts.”
You can view the most recent of the LEGO videos here.
Why Do Populists Have Such a Russia Fetish?
Byline Times
Scott: One thing that’s a constant about the so-called “populist” parties in Europe. They make a great show about being nationalists and disdaining newly arrived immigrants. But they all also have a very peculiar relationship with one other country in particular: Russia. Süddeutsche Zeitung today reports from a gathering of the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, at which the party’s platform is being discussed. Under schools and education, they want to be done with “woke” subjects like art appreciation, and in its place install something really practical and necessary: compulsory study of Russian.
Here, Byline Times takes a look at Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s party, whose leaders all seem to have carefully disguised financial relationships with the Kremlin. What could be more patriotic?
There is something deeply strange about the British far-right’s version of patriotism.
Its adherents drape themselves in the Union flag and talk endlessly about sacrifice, sovereignty, and standing firm against foreign threats. Their social media profiles are decorated with poppies, Spitfires, and Churchill quotes.
Taking their rhetoric at face value, you would think they were ready to put their lives on the line for their country at a moment’s notice, like some modern incarnation of Dad’s Army.
But when actual threats to the country emerge – not imagined assaults by migrants or cultural Marxists, but real, tangible attacks by a hostile foreign power – these would-be patriots melt into thin air.
They grumble about Nato aggression. They complain about fuel prices. Or they side, directly or indirectly, with the foreign aggressor…
The far-right defines Britishness not by values or principles, but by internal enemies: remainers, immigrants, academics, the BBC, and the ‘woke’. Its vision of patriotism is less about belonging and more about exclusion. It is a narrow, brittle nationalism in which only a select few are allowed to truly partake.
This isn’t new, of course.
Our far-right has long been clinging to a sepia-tinged fantasy of wartime Britain: a Britain that can only exist in the distant past.
This same model applies to the AfD in Germany, the neo-Pétainist Rassemblement National in France, FIDESZ in Hungary, and a dozen other beacons of new right populism around the globe. And it derives straight from the Kremlin playbook that calls for using whatever levers are available to create strife, mayhem and civil war in democratic societies to weaken them or bring them down.
Exploring the Antennae
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. Stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm that lasts for hundreds of millions of years. But the galaxies’ large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning over 50 thousand light-years, this stunning telescopic frame also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. The remarkably sharp ground-based image follows the faint tidal tails and distant background galaxies in the field of view. The suggestive overall visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair, also known as Arp 244, its popular name -The Antennae.
Your Online Moment of Zen
Fine Young Cannibals 1989
Edited by Imogen Sayers.