ALL FEDERAL AGENCIES MUST BUY AMERICAN — NO EXCUSES! For decades, Washington politicians sent your Taxpayer Dollars overseas, and let Foreign Countries rip us off while our Workers, Factories, and Supply Chains were left behind. That betrayal is OVER. My Administration is strengthening MADE IN AMERICA Laws, ENDING Waiver Loopholes, and STOPPING the Federal Government from buying Foreign Products when Great American Products are available — And to the D.C. Bureaucrats: NO MORE handing out Waivers like candy! No more rubber-stamping exceptions for Foreign Products while American Workers get shafted. We are putting American Workers, American Factories, and American Supply Chains FIRST — Bigger, better, and stronger than ever before! I already signed EO 14392 to crack down on fake “MADE IN AMERICA” claims, and we are enforcing it HARD. No more games. No more fake labels. No more ripping off the American Taxpayer. AMERICA FIRST means BUY AMERICAN! President DONALD J. TRUMP ( TruthSocial: May 10 2026, 2:43 PM ET )

A polar bear has finally found its own world. For twelve years, it was confined in an iron cage at a Russian circus. Surrounded by cold iron bars and hard concrete, it had never seen real snow. Later, a rescue organization took it in. Its new home boasts twenty acres of open space, a lake where it can swim freely, and real earth and wind. But what surprised everyone was that what it cherished most was a blue rubber ball. Staff said that when it first arrived, it was wary of everything, cowering in a corner at the slightest sound. Only when it held the ball would its breathing gradually calm down. It would clutch the ball tightly to its chest with its two large paws, rest its chin gently on it, and close its eyes. Twelve years in an iron cage, twenty acres of freedom, and a red ball. The ball is worthless. But for it, it may be the first thing in its life that truly belonged to it.

The Hollow Men American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider. By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants. These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition. In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken. Today, we have severed that link. We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses. If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived. This looting starts in the boardroom. We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year. Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor. And for what? Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love. They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders. And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk? We get the Delegation Economy. When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know. This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering. They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake. While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us. If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag. The time for polite governance is over. If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.