Meme stock grifters now run the mortgage game

Bill Pulte is honestly the perfect mascot for Trump-era corruption. The guy’s only 37, coasting on family money from Pulte Homes (which, if you know, you know—just read the BBB complaints), and still managed to get himself fired by his own relatives after trying to stage a boardroom coup. Before all this, he spent his days chasing attention online, running sketchy “feel good” cash giveaways on Twitter, and grifting in meme stock and crypto circles with characters like Andrew Tate. He was knee-deep in the whole GameStop and Bed Bath & Beyond hype, even organizing cringey “Pulte PPSHOW” events in airport hangars where his followers handed him trophies that read “Bill Pulte Fucks… Only the Young.” This is not the resume of someone you’d ever trust with a job, let alone the backbone of US housing. But after he and his wife cut Trump a $1 million check, suddenly he’s confirmed by the Senate and put in charge of the entire US mortgage market—literally made himself chairman of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which hold trillions in assets and basically keep the housing industry afloat by buying up mortgages and selling them to investors. For anyone new to this, Fannie and Freddie are supposed to be overseen by the FHFA, but the law explicitly says the FHFA head can’t also chair either board, let alone both. That’s not a gray area—that’s black letter law, but he did it anyway. And it gets even shadier: his confidants leaked confidential Fannie Mae pricing data to competitors, which goes way beyond “unethical” and straight into “are you actually trying to rig the market?” territory. Of course, Pulte didn’t stop at just self-dealing. He’s been accused of weaponizing these agencies to go after Trump’s political enemies—prompting mortgage fraud probes into folks like Letitia James and Adam Schiff—and generally turning what should be low-profile, technocratic jobs into tools for the White House. Meanwhile, the Justice Department acts like Trump’s private muscle, and anyone with a shred of integrity got purged in the first few months. I talk to people in homebuilding—most of them lifelong Republicans—and even they’re embarrassed by this guy, but when corruption is the whole point, it doesn’t matter. Compared to this, Watergate is child’s play. It’s just wild to watch the country slide into open lawlessness, with literal meme stock grifters running critical federal agencies and nobody left who can stop them. Stuff that would get you instantly fired at any normal company is now just daily business. I never thought I’d see the day America got this divided and openly shameless, but here we are, and it’s honestly just exhausting and sad.