Good morning! Yesterday afternoon, a 16-year-old shot his way through the locked doors of Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend. He killed three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a teacher. A 7-year-old and a 54-year-old teacher were taken to St. Charles Medical Center in critical condition. Just before entering the school, he had fired at someone in a vehicle outside.
A parent at the school saw him go in, followed him, and shot and killed him before police entered. Officers arrived at 1:02 p.m., just three minutes after the first 911 call.
Bend-La Pine had done what schools are told to do. It had a secure entry vestibule, electronic check-in, cameras, partnerships with armed school resource officers, and classroom locks funded by a 2022 bond. The teenager got through the locked entrance by shooting through the doors.
Someone stopped the killing. Nobody was able to prevent it.
According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, this was Oregon’s first deadly mass shooting at an elementary school. Nationally, the Washington Post counts it as the 21st mass killing with a gun this year and the third in a week. The 5-year-old was the youngest victim of any K-12 mass killing recorded since 2006.
Eleven years ago this month, a gunman killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg. My oldest son was enrolled there, and by pure luck had no class that morning. He came home. Nine other families suffered unimaginable losses.
Yesterday, families in Bend gathered at a reunification center, waiting to learn whether their children were safe. Some went home holding their children. Others never will.
Thousands gathered for a vigil at Drake Park last night. All Bend-La Pine schools are closed today.
There’s no graceful way to move from a school where children have been murdered to the president’s ballroom. Perhaps there shouldn’t be.
In Bend, voters spent money trying to make their children’s classrooms safer. In Washington, some of America’s wealthiest corporations and individuals have committed hundreds of millions to build what Trump promises will be the finest ballroom in the world.
Now we’re learning exactly who has been paying for it. The Washington Post has obtained the internal spreadsheet behind Trump’s White House ballroom. It records 67 donations over $10,000 through late September, identifying the source, date, and amount. The total comes to $333 million in contributions and commitments, some already paid and others arranged in installments. According to the Post, the vast majority came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government. Companies and executives whose firms have held federal contracts during Trump’s second term account for about half. At least $77 million came from donors who requested anonymity.
Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, as did the Adelson family and Dish Network co-founder Charles Ergen. Amazon, Microsoft, Comcast, Caterpillar and T-Mobile are on the list. So are cryptocurrency companies and investors, now enjoying a friendlier regulatory climate, who promised more than $18 million between them.
Coincident with these donations are the following administrative actions. In May 2025, the FCC opened an investigation threatening licenses essential to Ergen’s company, EchoStar. Ergen met privately with Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in June. The investigation was dropped in September. With a license sale to AT&T still awaiting federal approval, Ergen committed $12.5 million to the ballroom in December and another $12.5 million in February. The FCC and Justice Department approved the sale in May.
International banker Julio Herrera Velutini was indicted on federal bribery charges in 2022. Following Trump’s election victory, his daughter Isabela, a financial consultant in her mid-twenties, donated $3.5 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc. In August 2025, her father’s charges were reduced to a misdemeanor through a plea agreement. The following month, she pledged $2.5 million to the ballroom, paying the first $835,000 installment in October. Trump pardoned her father in January. Her second ballroom payment was due this month.
Salesforce is the third. CEO Marc Benioff personally committed $1 million to the ballroom in October 2025, requesting anonymity. Salesforce made another $1 million commitment on Christmas Eve. The following month, the Army awarded the company a contract worth up to $5.6 billion through 2035. The Pentagon noted that it had solicited bids and received exactly one. Salesforce committed another $1 million on January 29.
The Pentagon says political connections play no role in its contracting decisions. The White House says the prosecution of Herrera Velutini was politically motivated. Ergen and EchoStar declined to comment on the Post’s findings.
The money goes through the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that generally doesn’t have to disclose donors, and ends up in a White House account the president controls. The government’s agreement with the Trust requires it to protect donor anonymity, to the extent permitted by law, unless the White House authorizes disclosure in writing.
Donald Trump’s name is missing from the spreadsheet. As recently as Wednesday, he told an Arizona rally, “I’m going to spend $400 million to build a ballroom.” At September’s Republican convention, he asked whether he would get credit for building it with his own money. He has repeatedly described the project as a gift from himself and other American patriots.
The patriots made the list. Trump didn’t.
So far, there is no record of the personal contribution he keeps claiming to make. Meanwhile, the projected cost of the broader East Wing project has climbed to $600 million, according to the Post, and taxpayers have already paid for part of the construction.
On MS NOW, former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann wondered where the corporate lawyers were. The project’s legality has been the subject of federal litigation, and in August, four Supreme Court justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, concluded that construction was likely unlawful because Congress had never expressly authorized it. The other five allowed construction to continue because they found the preservation group challenging it likely lacked standing. They explicitly declined to rule on whether the construction itself was legal. The corporate commitments described above preceded the August ruling.
The White House response didn’t dispute the reported amounts. A spokesman praised the donors’ generosity, dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest, and promised to pursue whoever leaked the records.
Elsewhere, Trump has been explaining that the war in Iran will end whenever he decides it should.
“As soon as I want it to end, it’ll end,” he told reporters Wednesday, promising that oil prices would then “drop like a rock.”
On Thursday, CNN reported that the Pentagon has developed options for another round of attacks, including using the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, better known as the mother of all bombs. The 21,600-pound weapon produces an enormous surface explosion, although military experts question its effectiveness against Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities.
One source described a potential strike-and-withdrawal scenario as a “fireworks show,” a spectacular attack that could give Trump an opportunity to declare victory and leave. Iran still gets a say in whether it stops fighting, and a presidential declaration of victory won’t necessarily reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
That brings us to the diesel deal we’ve been following. With fuel prices climbing in the wake of his Iran war, Trump turned to Vladimir Putin. Last Friday, he announced a temporary easing of sanctions on Russian diesel without consulting Ukraine, even as Ukrainian negotiators were meeting with his envoys in Miami. Zelenskyy called it a birthday gift to Putin. The next day, Trump declared, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”
On Sunday, Trump announced an energy ceasefire that neither side appeared to have agreed to. Russian attacks continued.
The intelligence threat followed. The Washington Post reports that on October 12, US officials warned Ukraine that intelligence sharing would stop if Kyiv struck Russian energy facilities again. That evening, five Russian ballistic missiles struck Kyiv without the usual advance warning from Ukraine’s partners. Whether the missing warning was connected to the threat remains unresolved. The next day, Trump insisted the US was still sharing intelligence.
French MEP Bernard Guetta, speaking to France 24, called Trump a liar for blaming Ukraine for fuel prices driven largely by his own war. He went further, saying America, at least under this president, was no longer Europe’s ally, while acknowledging that many of his European Parliament colleagues wouldn’t go that far.
In Brussels, Zelenskyy explained that Ukraine had offered an energy ceasefire. When that failed, he asked Washington for enough antiballistic missiles to protect Ukraine’s power grid for the duration of the Russian diesel arrangement. He says he received none.
Asked about mending fences with Trump, Zelenskyy said the very idea seemed strange. Ukraine was still fighting, still negotiating, and still entitled to defend itself. Ukrainians, he said, would continue living, fighting and, most importantly, living with dignity.
He also rejected the notion that Putin would settle for the Donbas. If Putin only wanted eastern Ukraine, why had the invasion begun with an attempt to capture Kyiv?
Then Sky News asked the question hanging over the confrontation. With Trump facing difficult midterms, crushing poll numbers, high diesel prices, and an Iran war that wasn’t going his way, was Ukraine being made the scapegoat for his problems?
Zelenskyy, a former comedian, stared down at the podium and let the question hang for about fifteen seconds. Then, looking up to the press, he just smiled.
The room laughed.
“This is my answer.”
Damn, that's a good article. Tears all the way through.
The school shooting in Bend is horrific. The father who killed the shooter did the right thing, but the burden of having to do that is almost too heavy to even contemplate.
I hope it was nowhere near your place.
...
Zelenskyy is a F*CKING HERO.
Trump is a sad, pathetic excuse for a worn out, incontinent, blissfully ignorant NEPO baby grown old.
He wishes he could be Zelenskyy. Hell, he wishes he could be PUTIN. But he is not. He is not even himself anymore ... or maybe the self he is displaying is the one that was always there ... it just has no filter and no boundaries now.