Source: Silicon Bay Partners’ Staff with Assistance from ChatGPT
Photo: ChatGPT

Donald Trump once promised Americans he was so rich he would finance his own political rise. Back in 2015 and 2016, he repeatedly bragged that he was “self-funding” his campaign and therefore couldn’t be bought. It was a central part of his sales pitch: a billionaire outsider who didn’t need donors, lobbyists, or corporate cash.

That promise aged about as well as Trump Steaks.

In reality, donors, corporations, billionaires, PACs, and special interests eventually poured hundreds of millions — and later billions — into Trump’s political machine. Even during the early stages of his first campaign, outside donations quickly became a major source of funding. Fact-checkers later noted that the campaign absolutely did have donors despite claims to the contrary.

Fast-forward to today, and the self-proclaimed billionaire who once bragged about not needing anyone’s money has built one of the most aggressive fundraising operations in modern political history.

From “Self-Funding” to Super PAC Empire

Trump’s orbit now includes super PACs that have reportedly raised hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy donors and corporations eager to stay in his good graces. His 2025 inaugural committee alone reportedly raised a staggering $239 million — more than double his own previous inauguration record and far beyond what recent presidents collected.

Corporate America lined up with oversized checks. Technology companies, oil interests, Wall Street firms, pharmaceutical giants, gambling companies, and crypto firms all contributed heavily. Executives who later received government appointments or favorable access also appeared on donor rolls.

Apparently, draining the swamp now requires valet parking for billionaires.

Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 also shattered records, hauling in over $106 million from wealthy donors and corporations. Americans never really got a full transparent accounting of how all that money was spent, but they did get a parade of gold décor, luxury events, and enough patriotic merchandise to stock a casino gift shop.

The Endless Search for “Fraud”

Perhaps no vanity project has cost more — financially and institutionally — than Trump’s obsession with proving widespread election fraud.

After losing the 2020 election, Trump and allies filed dozens upon dozens of lawsuits challenging the results. Courts repeatedly rejected the claims for lack of evidence. Yet the fundraising never stopped.

Supporters were bombarded with urgent emails demanding money for an “Official Election Defense Fund.” Investigations later revealed that much of the money did not actually go toward election litigation at all. Reports indicated hundreds of millions were redirected into political PACs and other operations tied to Trump’s political future.

Even more controversially, some reports alleged donors were automatically enrolled into recurring payment systems that repeatedly drained bank accounts unless users manually unchecked fine-print boxes. Refund requests reportedly exploded afterward.

The fraud hunt itself became one of the biggest fundraising tools in modern politics — a perpetual motion machine powered by grievance, outrage, and donation buttons.

Taxpayer-Funded Grievances

Now the spending appears to be escalating into even stranger territory.

Recent reports describe a controversial $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” connected to settlements involving Trump-related lawsuits against the government. Critics argue the fund could reward political allies and individuals tied to January 6 while operating with limited oversight.

At the same time, Trump continues floating grandiose vanity projects that critics say resemble the wish list of a king rather than a president: massive gold-trimmed ballrooms, oversized arches, elaborate patriotic monuments, and lavish redesigns that seem less focused on governing than on branding.

Because apparently every national crisis can be solved with more marble columns.

The Most Expensive Ego in Politics

Trump built his political identity around the image of a master businessman who would spend his own fortune to “save” America. Instead, his political career has become a magnet for donor cash, corporate influence, legal defense fundraising, luxury events, PAC money, merchandising, and endless monetization opportunities.

What began as “I alone can fix it” gradually evolved into: “Please click here to contribute $47 immediately.”

And while supporters were told they were financing patriotism, critics argue much of the money ultimately financed spectacle, lawsuits, rallies, branding exercises, political revenge campaigns, and a lifestyle of perpetual political theater.

For a politician who promised to self-fund, Trump may go down as one of the most heavily financed personal brands in American political history.

Source: The New York Times, Abbie VanSickle and Emily Cochrane
Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

A majority of the justices sided with Alabama in a move that could speed up efforts to put in place a congressional district map that would eliminate a majority-Black district.

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared a path for Alabama to use a new voting map for the midterm elections, a victory for Republicans and another sign of the significance of the court’s recent decision narrowing the Voting Rights Act.

The justices appeared to splinter along ideological lines in the decision, with the court’s three liberals joined in dissent.

The one-paragraph order involved a pending petition before the court by Alabama lawmakers who challenged the state’s current congressional map, which includes two majority-Black districts that both elected Democrats to Congress in 2024.

The Supreme Court’s decision will send the case back to a lower court judge to reconsider the legality of the Alabama map in light of the court’s recent decision dealing a blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights-era law. It raised the bar for bringing legal challenges to voting maps, like one that previously resulted in the current Alabama map.

Alabama officials are likely to point to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling to ask the lower court judge to allow the state to use a congressional map first approved in 2023, but never used in light of subsequent court rulings. That new map would include only one majority-Black district, instead of the two in the current map.

“For too long, unelected federal judges have had more say over Alabama’s elections than Alabama’s voters,” said Attorney General Steve Marshall of Alabama. “That ended today.”

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s majority had “unceremoniously” discarded a lower-court ruling “without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue.” She asserted that the lower court was free to decide whether the recent Voting Rights Act decision had “any bearing” on its analysis or “if its prior reasoning is unaffected by that decision.” She was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In late April, in a 6-to-3 decision, the justices threw out Louisiana’s current congressional district map, finding that state officials there had improperly used race to draw up a congressional district map that likewise had two majority Black districts.

The court’s conservative supermajority announced that “vast social change” and improved race relations now called for a higher bar — a strong inference of evidence that lawmakers had intended to racially discriminate, not merely gain a political advantage in drawing up voting districts — to bring challenges under the Voting Rights Act.

With states already engaged in a tit-for-tat redistricting battle across the country, the ruling opened up a new front for lawmakers to re-examine their maps and impose new lines before the 2026 midterm elections. Republicans across the South are moving to carve up Democratic-held districts with a majority of Black voters that had been drawn to comply with a previous interpretation of the Voting Rights Acts and aiming to shore up a political advantage in their bid to hold onto their razor-thin majority in the House.

The day after the Supreme Court ruled in the Louisiana case, Alabama lawmakers asked the justices to step in and clear the lower-court rulings that had resulted in the state’s current map. They separately filed an emergency application on Friday on what the court’s critics call “the shadow docket,” asking the justices to clear the way for lawmakers to jettison the current map.

Lawyers for Alabama officials urged the justices to allow them to reject the current map as a “race-based congressional map” that “segregated more than a million Alabamians into different districts because of their race.”

Monday’s order from the Supreme Court came just over a week before voters are set to go to the polls on May 19 in Alabama for primary elections ahead of the midterms. But Alabama Republicans, aiming to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana, had quickly moved to be prepared in case the courts ruled in their favor and lifted a ban on mid-decade redistricting that was in place until after the 2030 election.

That map was first approved in 2023, as the legislature faced a court order to draw district lines that allowed for a second majority-Black district or margins “close to it.” The legislature instead passed a map that increased the share of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts to about 40 percent from about 30 percent.

Later that year, the federal court rejected that map, instead tapping an independent special master to draw a new one. The special master’s map remained in place for the 2024 election, preserving the state’s existing majority-Black district and creating a new majority-Black district that includes the capital city of Montgomery, several counties of the rural Black Belt and part of the city of Mobile along the Gulf Coast.

That new district was flipped by Representative Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat who joined Representative Terri A. Sewell, another Black Democrat, in the House. It was the first time Alabama had sent two Black lawmakers to Congress.

Mr. Figures said the decision “sets the stage for Alabama to go back to the 1950s and ’60s in terms of Black political representation in the state.” And in a statement on social media, he said, “the fight must and will go on.”

Other Southern states have also moved to change their maps. The state legislature in Louisiana, where Governor Jeff Landry has delayed House primaries, is debating a new congressional map. And lawsuits, including one filed Monday by a coalition of Memphis voters and organizations, have challenged a new congressional map in Tennessee that carved up a Democratic-held district in the majority-Black city of Memphis.

Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.

Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/politics/supreme-court-alabama-map

Source: Independent, Eric Garcia
Photo: President Donald Trump has endorsed a primary challenger against Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) after Cassidy voted to convict Trump in 2021. (Getty)

Trump just steamrolled Indiana Republicans who defied him, Eric Garcia writes, and the president is just getting started

President Donald Trump got the first major political scalps of his second term on Tuesday when five state legislators in Indiana who resisted his push to redraw the state’s congressional map lost their primaries.

It’s the latest example of Trump exacting revenge on Republicans whom he sees as crossing him. He’s already pushed Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) out of Washington and into retirement. Many of the Republicans who voted to impeach or convict him either lost their primaries or preemptively retired to save the embarrassment.

A defining trait of the second Trump administration has been his push for vengeance. The Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey, and when a judge threw out the case, it indicted Comey again. He publicly gloated about the death of Robert Mueller, Comey’s friend and the former special counsel who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

And May represents the perfect opportunity to make three Republicans who criticized Trump in the past pay.

President Donald Trump has endorsed a primary challenger against Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) after Cassidy voted to convict Trump in 2021.

The first comes in Louisiana. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) always faced an uphill battle after he voted to convict Trump for the president’s actions on January 6. But Cassidy had just been re-elected in 2020, meaning he was on borrowed time.

Now the bill comes due. Trump made Cassidy, a gastroentrologist, bend the knee when he nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who had spent years promoting lies about public health, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Cassidy relented and voted to confirm Kennedy, spending much of his time since trying to avoid questions about Kennedy.

That did not work. Instead, Trump endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) in the Louisiana primary. In addition, Cassidy faces former Rep. John Fleming in the primary.

To boot, Louisiana also changed its law. Previously, Louisiana had an open “jungle primary,” wherein the top two vote-getters advanced into a runoff regardless of party affiliation.

On May 16, each party has a primary and then the top two vote earners advance to a June 27 runoff if neither candidate wins a majority.

This puts Cassidy at a structural disadvantage. A former Democrat, he can no longer rely on crossover voters who might admire him for standing up to Trump or his work with Joe Biden on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Even then, he probably lost plenty of goodwill by saddling up to Trump as much as he has.

Cassidy seems to understand Republicans back home don’t like him. Hence why he offered a limp opposition to Kennedy when the secretary testified on the Hill last month.

The second state where Trump seems more than get his pound of flesh comes in Louisiana’s neighbor Texas. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is not as Trump-critical as Cassidy.

But he did vote to certify the 2020 presidential election results, negotiated a bipartisan gun control bill and when Trump ran again in the 2024 cycle, said Trump’s time had “has passed him by.”

Cornyn is running against ultra-MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton–whom despite being impeached and acquitted by fellow Republicans and his wife divorcing him after multiple alleged affairs–earned enough votes to go into a runoff later this month in March.

A University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs poll showed that Paxton narrowly beats Cornyn 48 percent to 45 percent with only seven percent of respondents saying they are unsure. That’s a stunning number for a four-term incumbent senator, former attorney general and former Texas Supreme Court justice like Cornyn. But it’s a sign of where the party has moved in Texas.

Moreover, Trump has withheld his endorsement of Cornyn, despite the fact Trump knows that Paxton opens the door for James Talarico, the telegenic baby-faced Bible-quoting seminarian Democrats chose as their nominee, winning the seat in the Lone Star State. Trump’s brain might know Cornyn is the right choice. But his heart is with Paxton.

Lastly, there’s Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Massie has been the biggest thorn in Trump’s side in the lower chamber. He led the charge to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein, voted against the One Big, Beautiful Bill last summer and opposed making Mike Johnson speaker. Trump has endorsed former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein in the race.

But so far, it looks like Massie pull it off. Plenty of voters in the district like the fact he is idiosyncratic like his fellow Kentuckian Sen. Rand Paul.

And cutting loose Republicans could have unintended consequences.

Trump excommunicating Tillis turned out to be an own-goal since former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper leads Trump-endorsed former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley in North Carolina’s open Senate race. And Tillis helped push out Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary and forced the Department of Justice to–at least temporarily–back off of its probe into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

And Cassidy already has shown quiet signs of rebellion, as Trump blamed Cassidy for sinking the nomination of Trump’s pick for surgeon general Casey Means, an ally of Kennedy.

Trump has shown a stunning level of party discipline. And he’s a transformational figure in the Republican Party. But doing so will have consequences that will reverberate long after he leaves.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-republican-primaries-indiana-louisiana

Source: Silicon Bay Partners’ Staff with assistance from New York Times and ChatGPT
Photo: ChatGPT

According to the New York Times, the Supreme Court just curtailed many protections against gerrymandering, making the fight for fair voting maps even more difficult. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court ruled 6-3 that a congressional map creating a second majority-Black district is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The decision makes it easier for state legislatures—particularly in the South—to “crack” or “pack” minority voters, effectively reducing Democratic voting power to solidify Republican majorities.

Gerrymandering isn’t just a wonky political term—it’s one of the most effective ways to quietly rig a democracy without ever touching a ballot. It works by manipulating the boundaries of voting districts so that the outcome of elections is practically decided before a single vote is cast. Instead of voters choosing their representatives, representatives end up choosing their voters.

The mechanics are deceptively simple. Mapmakers—often controlled by whichever party is in power—“pack” opposing voters into a few districts where they win overwhelmingly, or “crack” them across many districts so their influence is diluted everywhere. The result? Elections that look competitive on paper but are structurally tilted. You can win fewer votes overall and still walk away with more seats. That’s not a glitch—it’s the design.

The consequences go far beyond unfair maps. Gerrymandering creates “safe” districts where the real contest isn’t the general election but the primary, often pushing candidates toward more extreme positions to satisfy a narrower base. Compromise becomes politically dangerous. Accountability erodes. Lawmakers don’t fear losing to the other party—they fear being outflanked by their own.

And here’s the quiet danger: it’s perfectly legal in many cases. Courts have struggled to draw clear lines on when partisan gerrymandering goes too far, leaving the practice largely unchecked at the federal level. That means the people drawing the maps often have every incentive to push the limits—and very little reason not to.

The warning signs are already visible. When election results consistently do not reflect the overall will of the voters, when incumbents rarely lose, when political polarization deepens year after year—gerrymandering is usually part of the story. It doesn’t just skew representation; it corrodes trust. People begin to feel their vote doesn’t matter, and when that belief takes hold, participation drops and democracy weakens from within.

Fixing it isn’t impossible, but it requires political will that those receiving help from the system rarely have. Independent redistricting commissions, transparent mapping processes, and clear legal standards can help restore balance—but they only work if the public demands them.

Gerrymandering thrives in the shadows of complexity and apathy. It’s not loud like voter fraud claims or dramatic like election-night disputes. It’s quieter, more technical—and far more enduring. Ignore it and you don’t just risk losing a fair election. You risk losing the idea of fair elections altogether.

Source: Silicon Bay Partners’ Staff with assistance from ChatGPT
Photo: ChatGPT

For the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) has officially replaced the traditional comedic performer with a mentalist, Oz Pearlman.

This decision follows a tumultuous 2025 event where comedian Amber Ruffin was removed from the lineup shortly before the event following criticism from the Trump administration.

Key details about the decision to have no comedian:

The 2026 Shift: WHCA President Weijia Jiang said that featuring a mentalist offers a “fresh” and “interactive” evening to focus on celebrating the First Amendment, rather than political satire.

Administration Pressure: The shift away from comedians in 2025 and 2026 coincided with heightened tensions between the media and the returning Trump administration, which had labeled potential performers “hate-filled” and “pathetic”.

Historical Precedent: While the dinner has traditionally featured comedians since the mid-20th century, the association has previously removed them, such as in 2019 following the controversy over comedian Michelle Wolf’s 2018 performance.

Alternative Entertainment: Instead of a comedy roast, mentalist Oz Pearlman was chosen to “peek into the minds” of Washington newsmakers.

So, I asked ChatGPT to write a few jokes to roast Donald Trump and his administration. Here they are:

“He keeps saying everything is ‘the best ever.’ At this point, even his Wi-Fi password is probably ‘BestPasswordEver123.’”

“Trump loves making deals. The only deal he won’t make? A deal with a fact-checker.”

“He said he’d drain the swamp, but somehow it turned into a resort with membership fees.”

“Trump doesn’t age like a normal president—he ages like a headline: loud, confusing, and somehow still trending.”

“He always talks about winning. At this point, even his autocorrect changes ‘winning’ to ‘tweeting.’”

“They say history repeats itself. With Trump, it just gets reposted—with more caps lock.”

“Trump’s idea of a briefing is just reading his own tweets out loud and nodding along.”

“He promised to run the country like a business. To be fair, there have been a lot of reorganizations.”

“Trump says he’s very busy lately—mostly reposting things he insists he’s never seen before.”

“He keeps calling everything ‘fake news,’ which is impressive, because at this point even his own past statements are like, ‘yeah… that tracks.’”

Who knew ChatGPT could be so funny!

Source: Independent
Photo: Donald Trump deleted this image depicting him as Jesus after posting it on his Truth Social account. (AFP/Getty)

The president has been shamed into deleting two offensive Truth Social posts in as many months this year — it’s a sign that his political shock jock act is growing stale, writes Andrew Feinberg

When President Donald Trump has trouble sleeping, he picks up his smartphone and doom scrolls through social media, posting and reposting things in search of the dopamine hit that comes from seeing a post go viral and whip up millions of his followers on Truth Social.

It’s a pattern that dates back to his earliest days in politics, when he would set the political world alight in 140 (later 280) character bursts on the site formerly known as Twitter.

According to sources who served in both administrations and across his three presidential campaigns, Trump frequently uses his posting sprees as a gambit to force television networks to interrupt their pre-planned coverage to report on whatever utterance emanated from his thumbs on any given day — often marveling at the speed with which his words would move from his phone screen to a cable network chyron at the bottom of his TV screen.

Over the last 10 years — Trump’s entire political career — his posts elicit a predictable outraged reaction from Democrats and left-leaning pundits on the various television networks, and usually polite demurrals from the Republican members of Congress who’ve learned how to deftly blow off reporter questions about whatever outrage-du-jour the president has served up over his mobile phone.

But that pattern appears to be breaking more and more as the second year of Trump’s second term unfolds.

Two months ago, the president’s posting habit got him into serious trouble when a video appeared on his Truth Social account showing Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.

The reaction both online and off was swift condemnation and claims of blatant racism — including from several Republican lawmakers — despite early attempts by the White House to dismiss the outrage as liberal overreaction and oversensitivity to what Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed as “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King.”

But over the 12 hours between when it was posted and deleted, something happened. Republicans began to speak out.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, a close ally of Trump’s and the only Black member of the upper chamber, wrote that he was “praying it was fake” and called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

President Donald Trump posted a video depicting the Obamas as apes, triggering widespread criticism. GOP Sen. Tim Scott described it as ‘the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House’ (@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social)

Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose district voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, also slammed the president’s post as “wrong and incredibly offensive — whether intentional or a mistake” and said it “should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”

It was the rare instance in which Trump had been forced to respond to criticism by retracting something he’d said on social media — even though he later maintained that he hadn’t seen the offending portion of the video.

Between that February day and this past weekend, Trump’s unhinged posting habits would continue without any hint of him feeling chastised by the criticism from his own side.

Amid the ongoing war with Iran he started on Feb. 28, Trump threatened to attack Iranian power plants and water desalination plants — civilian infrastructure protected under international law — on multiple occasions.

A week ago, he appeared to threaten what many experts would consider to meet the definition of genocide when he took to Truth Social to warn that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if the Iranian government did not capitulate to his demand to agree to a ceasefire deal and open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 pm last Tuesday.

That series of posts also triggered widespread outrage and condemnation — including from a Chicago-born Catholic priest named Robert Prevost, who, like Trump, found himself in a new, powerful job last year after winning an election.

Prevost, who is better known nowadays as Pope Leo XIV, is the 267th Bishop of Rome, the head of the Catholic Church, and perhaps the only living American whose fame rivals Trump’s in the current moment.

And because the Pope, as the saying goes, is Catholic, he’s been prone to make statements advocating for peace. He even criticized Trump’s call for Iranian civilization to “die” if Tehran didn’t heed his demands as “truly unacceptable.”

Trump took it personally, it seems, because he lashed out at the pontiff late Sunday in a bizarre Truth Social missive blasting Leo as “WEAK” on crime and “terrible” on foreign policy, posted as part of a late-night spree that also saw him upload an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus.

Some of his Republican allies, such as Vice President JD Vance, appeared to do the usual waffling and explaining away when pressed on Trump’s attack on the Pope, with Vance, the administration’s most prominent Catholic, opining on Fox News that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality” and “let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

But the Trump-as-Christ meme appeared to be a bridge too far. It depicted the president in a white robe and red sash with a glowing outstretched hand placed on the forehead of a man in a hospital bed. Trump is seen surrounded by patriotic symbols including a waving U.S. flag, the Statue of Liberty and an eagle flying above fireworks and fighter jets.

“I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross,” Trump told reporters outside the White House in a hastily arranged press conference on Monday. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”

He then blamed “fake news” for comparing the image to Jesus and refused to apologize to the pope, who he claimed had “said things that are wrong.”

Yet the president appeared to understand that he’d once again crossed a line after his post was met with a flurry of criticism from right-wing personalities and religious figures.

Isabel Brown, a Catholic podcaster for right-wing outlet The Daily Wire, called the president’s post “disgusting and unacceptable, but also a profound misreading of the American people experiencing a true and beautiful revival of faith in Christ in the midst of our broken culture.”

Michael Knowles, another right-wing Catholic figure at The Daily Wire, said it “behooves the President both spiritually and politically to delete the picture, no matter the intent.”

Within hours, the post was gone from his Truth Social feed.

While he still offered the “doctor” excuse later on, it was yet again a rare instance of deleting a post amid criticism — the exact behavior that he’s resisted for most of his political career.

Twice in two months is not a coincidence. Trump is more and more testing the bounds of decency as his base continues to demand transgressive and outrageous rhetoric. But it’s very possible that Americans — including those who voted for him in 2024 — are growing tired of this game.

And with the 2026 midterms fast approaching, the strategy that served him so well in 2016 and 2024 may have finally run out of juice.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-posts-ai-truth-social-rants

Source: Stacker, Pete Reinwald
Photo: John Cardamone on Unsplash

According to many accounts, the term “first lady” didn’t surface until 1849, when Zachary Taylor, the 12th president, is said to have used it to eulogize Dolley Madison, wife of President James Madison. Today, the term is as American as the White House. “First lady” has come to symbolize strength, stature and service.