Three stories broke today. Each one, on its own, would have ended a normal presidency. Together, they tell you everything you need to know about where we are.

A federal lawsuit was filed today in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The allegation: Donald Trump has been selling advance access to his own Truth Social posts.

Not policy briefings. Not legislative previews. His posts — the ones he makes on the social media platform he personally owns, the ones that move stock prices the moment they go live.

Pay the right price, and you see them first. Every retail investor, every pension fund, every ordinary American with a 401(k) sees them a beat later — after the people who paid Trump have already made their trades.

The Intercept is one of the plaintiffs. Bloomberg covered it. Forbes broke it hours earlier. This is not a fringe allegation. It is a federal lawsuit, on the record, filed today.

My answer is yes. They have to.

What a senator from Delaware could do: Introduce legislation closing the gap that allowed this scheme. There is currently no law explicitly prohibiting a sitting president from selling advance access to his own market-moving speech. That gap needs to close.

Last month, after the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, Donald Trump was secretly moved off Air Force One via a catering truck.

A credible Iranian assassination threat had been detected. U.S. intelligence believed the president or his aircraft was being targeted. So the Secret Service and military moved Trump to a smaller C-32A transport plane — and let Air Force One fly ahead as a decoy.

Over 100 people were on that decoy plane. White House aides. Security personnel. Journalists. None of them knew the president was no longer on board. None of them knew they were the bait.

Trump's response when asked about it: "I get a lot of threats."

The President of the United States, confronted with the fact that he allowed more than a hundred people to fly into potential danger without their knowledge or consent, shrugged.

This is not toughness. This is the opposite of leadership. A leader does not use the people in his care as cover. A leader does not put staff and press on a plane he believes may be targeted and then slip out the back through a catering truck.

And here is what connects this story to the next one: the threat was Iranian. The same Iran we are now at war with. The same war that was launched without a congressional vote, without a declaration, on executive authority alone.

What a senator from Delaware could do: Call for a full Senate inquiry. Who authorized putting 100 people on a plane they believed might be targeted? What is the protocol? Who is accountable? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the job.

We are now three months into the Iran conflict. We have expended a significant portion of our precision munitions inventory. The Pentagon has not given Congress a full accounting of what we've spent, what we've committed, or what our readiness posture looks like if a second crisis emerges — in Taiwan, in Korea, anywhere.

The assassination threat in Ankara did not come out of nowhere. It came out of a foreign policy that has spent years choosing military escalation over diplomacy, arms sales over accountability, and the projection of force over the patient work of de-escalation.

We are reaping what was sown. And the people paying the price are not the ones who made the decisions.

The United States has been complicit in the deaths of civilians in this region for years. The Iran strikes did not happen in a vacuum. A senator from Delaware who is serious about national security does not just ask "are we winning?" — they ask "what did we break to get here, and who is going to pay to fix it?"

What a senator from Delaware could do: Demand a full accounting of munitions expenditures and readiness gaps. Co-sponsor legislation requiring congressional authorization before the next strike. Vote no on the next blank check.

A president who profits from information asymmetry. A president who treats the people around him as expendable cover. A president who launched a war without asking Congress and has no plan for what comes next.

These are not isolated failures. They are the same failure, expressed three different ways: the belief that the rules do not apply, that accountability is optional, and that the people in his care exist to serve his interests rather than the other way around.

Delaware deserves a senator who will stand up in that chamber and say this is wrong — not in a press release, not in a carefully worded statement, but on the floor, on the record, on the vote.

Travis Jack Stevens is a declared write-in candidate for U.S. Senate in Delaware. He is a registered nurse and former contract critical care nurse for the Department of Defense. He accepts no Super PAC money.

✍️ Write in TRAVIS JACK STEVENS — November 4, 2026

Chip in to the campaign →