REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, April 23, 2026 20:49
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 136872
PAGE 91 of 91

Saturday, April 11, 2026 12:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, April 12, 2026 2:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
So, you want Democrats to elect a rapist much like Trump so that authentic Trumptards who elected a rapist President don't look foolish, comparatively? Why do Trumptards defend rapists, tax cheats, bribe-takers, and the generally incompetent?

Donald Trump’s Incompetence Is Costing Him the Country

An unpopular war, skyrocketing gas prices, unsteady financial markets, a cabinet filled with sycophants — the president’s colossal missteps have led to calamity at home and abroad

By Matt Bai | April 12, 2026

Illustration by VICTOR JUHASZ (Look closely at the illustration. Can you see Trump's error?)

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/donald-trum
p-incompetence-chaos-maga-1235544798/

It was the first week of September in 2005, about a week after Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans, when George W. Bush uttered the line that would come to define his second term, if not his entire presidency: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” It was a throwaway comment, a plainspoken president telling his aide, FEMA Director Michael Brown, that he appreciated the effort. But the effort wasn’t nearly adequate, the federal response pitiful, and Bush’s ad-lib became the slogan for an out-of-touch administration that either couldn’t run the government or, worse, didn’t care. For the rest of Bush’s dismal time in office, every new failing would be met with the same sardonic response from his critics. Heckuva job, Brownie.

Donald Trump’s “great job” to Marco Rubio, tossed out during his State of the Union speech in February, didn’t have quite the same staying power. (“I think he’ll go down as the best ever,” Trump told his secretary of state, causing Henry Kissinger to bolt upright in his grave and laugh out loud.) But however much he may try to distract us with outrageous posts and circus-like spectacle, it’s becoming clear that second-term Trump is sinking faster and deeper than Bush ever did, and the dead weight on his back is pretty much the same.

It’s really not ideology that’s tanking Trump right now. I mean, yes, his administration is the meanest, most xenophobic, and most imperialist in at least the past century. And I’d like to think that would be a deal-breaker for the vast majority of middle-ground American voters, but if we’re being real, it probably isn’t. Independent and moderate voters have been with Trump on immigration, broadly speaking, since he first started doing his nativist routine a decade ago. And even a lot of populist leftists can get behind an “America First” foreign policy and protectionism for American manufacturers. Maybe Trump should be flailing politically because he’s brazenly profiting off the presidency and renaming half of Washington after himself, but near as I can tell, that part doesn’t especially trouble people, either.

No, what’s killing Trump right now isn’t the extremist agenda — it’s the mind-blowing incompetence. Deporting immigrants is one thing; masked agents executing American citizens on Midwestern boulevards is another. Ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions might get majority support on paper, but launching a war without any clear rationale, without having thought through even the most basic consequences, is how you lose the electorate in a hurry. (About six in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s wartime performance, according to Pew Research, and that number isn’t going down anytime soon.) Gas prices are spiking, mortgage rates are soaring, financial markets are lurching back and forth. Airport terminals look like Disneyland in July.

Competence — and by that I mean the most fundamental, entry-level, don’t-blow-up-the-world kind of competence — was more of a thing in the first Trump term, when the president cycled through a series of senior aides, old-line party and military types, who saw themselves as buffers between Trump and the various agencies. Four years in exile liberated Trump from all of that. His second-term team comprises mainly fringe players and pugnacious pundits, people more comfortable with pancake makeup than managing complex bureaucracies, for which they have nothing but contempt anyway. It’s a bold experiment, but one that seemed ill-fated from the start.

I could waste the rest of this column dredging up examples, I guess — the Homeland Security secretary spending $220 million on ads that showed her on horseback at Mount Rushmore; the FBI director shuttling his girlfriend around with a security detail and chugging beers with hockey players while there are actual crimes to solve; the defense secretary who thinks it’s fine for Apache helicopters to buzz the backyards of washed-up rock stars; the attorney general installing U.S. attorneys who really ought to be doing wills and closings (if that). Better if we just stipulate to staggering daily malfeasance and enter it into the record.

Put it this way: When Trump finally replaced Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a former plumber and MMA fighter who keeps intimating that he’s been some kind of secret military agent but can’t talk about it, every sane person in Washington applauded as if this were the second coming of James Baker in his prime. That tells you all you need to know.

I’ve long advanced a theory, probably stemming from my childhood in the Carter years, that voters can abide almost anything from a president — as long as it isn’t a descent into chaos. (Nothing says chaos like getting attacked by a rabbit.) Fairly or not, we like the illusion of a president who is at least mostly in control of events, because otherwise it’s just too hard to sleep. I will admit that Trump has given me doubts about this theory; there were moments, especially in his first term, where it seemed like destructive chaos re­ally worked for Trump, perhaps because it was the most predictable thing about him. It’s not working now.

Trump’s economy — and, more to the point, the impression that he always seems focused on something that isn’t the economy, like this obsession with election fraud that no one outside his Truth Social feed actually believes or cares about — has driven away a legion of independents who voted for him, while his Napoleonic foreign policy has opened a bitter and widening rift in his own base. You could walk from the Jefferson Memorial to K Street (farther than it looks, believe me) and not run into a human being who thinks Republicans are going to keep the House after November. And count me among those who think Democrats now have a reasonable shot at taking back the Senate, too, by putting in play Republican seats in Texas, North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska. MAGA may yet have some currency as a movement, but as a governing entity, it is now presiding over a failed state.

IT’S OFTEN SAID that people just become more who they are as they reach the final stage of life, and you can already see how Trump will probably spend the last two years of his paralyzed presidency — as a builder, obsessed with his ballroom and his arts center and his silly Arc d’Trump, railing at architects and racing to leave behind a legacy in gold leaf. What happens to his movement is a more complicated question. What does Trumpism become once the voters have rejected Trump?

Already, the contours of factions are taking shape. One is what you might call the “True MAGA” wing — Trump followers who will argue that Trump abandoned his own “America First” ideology, because he was corrupted by insiders, or maybe because he lost his mental grip. The way forward, then, isn’t to abandon MAGA, but rather to return to its nativist, anti-globalist roots. (Maybe even ease up on the white nationalism, indulge a little antisemitism instead.)

Marjorie Taylor Greene has very shrew­dly set herself up as the heir to authentic Trumpism. So has Tucker Carlson, who should not be dismissed. Even J.D. Vance could stake a claim to this faction, having cleverly made it known that he opposed the Iran war while simultaneously demonstrating, again, his slavish loyalty.

Then there’s what I’d call the “Trump But” crowd, as in: “I’m just like Trump, but maybe better.” After a late and zealous conversion to MAGA, Marco Rubio seems to be setting himself up as the softer-edged, more experienced, more broadly appealing version of Trump. Senators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz might position themselves as more cerebral Trumpian successors — ideologically aligned in all the right ways, but also more focused on economic fairness. Robert Kennedy Jr. wouldn’t be crazy for thinking he could merge what’s left of MAGA with his own anti-corporate following. (He’d be crazy for other reasons, but not that one.)

The posturing among these factions might be fun to watch — and perhaps even substantive in a weird way. But if I were a Republican politician looking to salvage the remains of MAGA right now, I’d give some thought to the governing part, too, and how I might convey a grasp on it. Competence by itself has never been a compelling theme in presidential politics; just ask President Dukakis or President Romney. But stupefying incompetence isn’t much of a calling card, either.

We know now that George W. Bush’s decline into chaos wasn’t merely a temporary nadir for the right. It marked the end of a 40-year run for neoconservatism and ultimately led to Trump’s hostile takeover of the party. Similarly, whether MAGA outlives Trump as a viable political force won’t only depend on whether it can still appeal to some slim margin of white voters. It will also depend on whether Republicans can shake the image of a party that seethes with contempt for government but is fundamentally unserious about running it.

Heckuva job there, Trump. Heckuva job.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, April 12, 2026 5:06 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
So, you want Democrats to elect a rapist much like Trump so that authentic Trumptards who elected a rapist President don't look foolish, comparatively? Why do Trumptards defend rapists, tax cheats, bribe-takers, and the generally incompetent?


Nope.

I want Democrats to stop attempting to ruin men by any means necessary for the sin of being in their way.

You're nothing but a bunch of liars, and you manipulate women's minds more than any Muslim leader ever did.

Quote:
Donald Trump’s Incompetence Is Costing Him the Country


All polling data still shows that this is just another lie.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, April 12, 2026 5:36 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Peter Magyar: former govt insider promising system change

https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/peter-magyar-former-govt-insider-
promising-system-change/article

Good for Hungary.

Now there will be ZERO Muslims in the country.

Lefties wanted this guy, and I just can't figure out why...

He's for no immigration. He's going to end any work programs they had under Orban and there won't be anybody in Hungary that doesn't belong there.

Maybe he can teach Trump how to finally get that done here, because we're going on 2 years now and the poison of the Democrats has still blocked us from doing what needs to be done.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 13, 2026 6:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
So, you want Democrats to elect a rapist much like Trump so that authentic Trumptards who elected a rapist President don't look foolish, comparatively? Why do Trumptards defend rapists, tax cheats, bribe-takers, and the generally incompetent?


Nope.

I want Democrats to stop attempting to ruin men by any means necessary for the sin of being in their way.

You're nothing but a bunch of liars, and you manipulate women's minds more than any Muslim leader ever did.

Quote:
Donald Trump’s Incompetence Is Costing Him the Country


All polling data still shows that this is just another lie.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Why are Trumptards so angrily opposed to Trump paying $88.3 million for raping E. Jean Carroll?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump

Why are Trumptards so indifferent to Trump taking $billions in bribes in exchange for government contracts, pardons, and tax relief directed toward billionaires?

Trump net worth increased by $4 billion in one year
https://www.bing.com/search?q=trump+net+worth+increased+by+%244+billio
n+in+one+year

I know why, and it's the same reason why Trumptards struggle in America, but I love hearing Trumptards explain their own version of why they act as badly as they do.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 13, 2026 6:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Donald Trump, the worst US president ever?

Under his administration, governance became performance; truth became negotiable; and power became personal.

By Kua Kia Soong, former MP and a former director of Suaram

March 31, 2026

https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2026/03/30/donald-t
rump-the-worst-us-president-ever

Have you often wondered how history will remember Donald Trump?

If history were a meritocracy, Trump would be remembered as a footnote – an eccentric real estate showman who mistook television ratings for governance.

Unfortunately, history is not so tidy. It occasionally hands immense power to a man who believes instinct outranks knowledge, volume outranks reason, and spectacle outranks substance – and then watches as the consequences unfold in real time.

To call Trump “the worst president in American history” is not merely an insult. It is an attempt to describe a presidency that did not just fail – it redefined failure itself.

His tenure can be understood through four defining breakdowns: the collapse of intellectual seriousness, the corrosion of truth and law, the reckless mismanagement of economic power, and the normalisation of cruelty without borders.

The cult of ignorance in power

Previous US presidents at least paid homage to expertise. Trump treated it as an obstacle.

His handling of Covid-19 stands as the clearest indictment. Faced with a once-in-a-century public health crisis, he downplayed the threat, saying “it will disappear”, contradicted his own scientists, and publicly mused about injecting disinfectants, turning White House briefings into global spectacles of confusion. While other governments mobilised coherent responses, the US lurched between denial and improvisation.

This was not merely poor communication; it was a governing philosophy.

Expertise was sidelined, agencies were undermined, and scientific consensus became politically negotiable. The result: one of the world’s highest death tolls, paired with a president more interested in television optics than epidemiology.

The war on truth, law and democracy

Trump did not merely bend the truth – he attempted to bury it under an avalanche of falsehoods. Fact-checkers stopped counting after tens of thousands of misleading or false claims. But the deeper damage lay not in any single lie, but in the normalisation of unreality as a political environment.

This culminated in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Having lost, Trump refused to concede, promoting baseless claims of fraud and pressuring officials to overturn certified results.

His call to Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes was not satire – it was an unvarnished attempt to bend democratic machinery to personal will. The inevitable climax came with the Jan 6 Capitol attack, when a mob, animated by his rhetoric, stormed the seat of American democracy. It was a moment that would have been unthinkable in a system that still commanded universal allegiance to the rule of law.

Human rights norms, already fragile, were further weakened as they became transactional. The message was unmistakable: principles were negotiable, truth was optional, and power was personal.

Economic nationalism as strategic self-harm

Trump promised to restore American economic greatness through toughness, chiefly in the form of tariffs and trade wars. The results were instructive.

His trade confrontation with China triggered retaliatory tariffs that hit American farmers particularly hard, forcing the government to spend tens of billions in bailouts – an ironic outcome for a policy meant to strengthen domestic industry. Supply chains were disrupted, uncertainty surged, and businesses faced rising costs.

Even allies were not spared. Tariffs were imposed on steel and aluminium imports from partners like Canada and the European Union under the dubious justification of “national security”, straining ties that had underpinned decades of economic stability.

Markets oscillated wildly, not because investors admired bold strategy, but because they struggled to predict the next policy lurch. Economic governance became indistinguishable from brinkmanship.

The broader consequence was a weakening of the global trading system itself. Institutions and norms that had structured international commerce since World War II were treated as constraints to be broken rather than frameworks to be improved.

Trump’s great irony as a self-proclaimed dealmaker is this: he managed to make nearly every party worse off – including his own.

Cruelty without borders: power without sovereignty

If Trump’s domestic record revealed ignorance and impunity, his conduct abroad exposed something even more disturbing: a capacity for cruelty unconstrained by respect for human life or national sovereignty.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his unwavering political and military support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, widely condemned across much of the world as genocidal in scale and intent.

Civilian suffering – children buried under rubble, entire neighbourhoods erased – was not a deterrent but background noise to geopolitical calculation.

This same disregard for international norms was evident in the normalisation of targeted assassinations. The killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad was not merely an act of escalation – it was a declaration that sovereignty itself was conditional, subject to unilateral American force.

Similar patterns emerged in the treatment of leaders linked to groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, where assassination and extrajudicial murder displaced diplomacy entirely.

Even more brazen was the posture toward Nicolas Maduro. Open discussions of capture, removal, or forced regime change signalled a return to an earlier era of imperial intervention – one in which smaller nations exist at the mercy of great power whims.

The principle that states are sovereign equals under international law was not merely weakened; it was openly mocked. Taken together, these actions reflect a presidency that did not simply neglect international law – it treated it as irrelevant.

Violence became a tool of convenience, sovereignty an obstacle to be bypassed, and human life a variable in a larger spectacle of power.

A presidency without precedent

It is tempting to rank Trump alongside past presidential failures. But such comparisons risk understatement. They failed within a system they at least recognised.

Trump’s distinction lies in his apparent indifference to the system itself. He did not merely lower expectations – he dismantled them. Governance became performance; truth became negotiable; power became personal.

In the end, Trump’s presidency may be remembered not just as a failure of governance, but as a failure of humanity, where ignorance enabled recklessness, impunity enabled lawlessness, and cruelty was exercised without restraint, at home and across the globe.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 13, 2026 6:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump, the worst US president ever?



I'm sure you have no shortage of idiots who will tell you that.

So why are you picking the guy nobody heard of, from the country that nobody could point out on a map, working for an organization nobody ever heard of?

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 13, 2026 8:00 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump, the worst US president ever?



I'm sure you have no shortage of idiots who will tell you that.

So why are you picking the guy nobody heard of, from the country that nobody could point out on a map, working for an organization nobody ever heard of?

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ixStringJoker, read Trump's words. If you conclude he is NOT the worst President in history, you demonstrated why your own life is a goddamn mess that you ought to be ashamed of:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. He talks about “fear” of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside, and being ten and even twenty feet apart. I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History. Leo should be thankful because, as everyone knows, he was a shocking surprise. He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican. Unfortunately, Leo’s Weak on Crime, Weak on Nuclear Weapons, does not sit well with me, nor does the fact that he meets with Obama Sympathizers like David Axelrod, a LOSER from the Left, who is one of those who wanted churchgoers and clerics to be arrested. Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Apr 12, 2026, 8:03 PM

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116394704213456431

Roll Call tracks Trump's written nonsense:
https://rollcall.com/factbase/topic/twitter

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 13, 2026 9:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


IRS Cuts Open Door For Cheats. More Taxpayers Bet ‘The IRS Isn’t Going to Catch Me’

The Internal Revenue Service shed thousands of enforcement employees — and some taxpayers appear eager to cheat

By Richard Rubin | April 12, 2026 9:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/irs-staffing-tax-enforcement-1a18e
33f

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is scaling back tax enforcement, leaving fewer federal employees to audit returns, collect unpaid tax debts and deter Americans from skirting the law.

The Internal Revenue Service has shed thousands of enforcement workers since President Trump returned to office, and his fiscal 2027 budget proposal seeks further cuts amid the administration’s broader pullback of white-collar law enforcement. The IRS enforcement workforce would fall below 30,000, fewer than at the end of Trump’s first term and about a third less than the Biden-era peak.

The retrenchment is spurring a vibe shift across the tax landscape ahead of the April 15 deadline, and lawyers say they see more taxpayers and tax-shelter promoters eager to cut corners or cheat.

“There’s seemingly this mentality building which is, ‘The IRS isn’t going to catch me,”’ said Carolyn Schenck, a former IRS national fraud counsel, now at law firm Caplin and Drysdale in Washington.

Audits of people with at least $10 million in income dropped 9% last year, and they are on track to decline another 39% this year. Partnership audits declined, reversing an attempt to scrutinize private-equity firms and other complex entities that have long bedeviled the government. In 2025, the IRS collected less direct revenue from audits and appeals than in any year since at least 2012, though the money can arrive years after audits start.

Even without the proposed cut for next year, inflation-adjusted spending on tax enforcement is already the lowest in at least 20 years, according to the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“They have defunded the police,” said Matthew Rappaport, a tax lawyer at Falcon, Rappaport and Berkman in New York. “There’s no more succinct way to describe what’s happened.”

The cutbacks will be costly for the government's bottom line and expand budget deficits. The administration’s own IRS budget document acknowledges that chasing scofflaws generates more money than it costs. “Reductions in enforcement spending create missed opportunities and lost revenue for the United States,” the document said.

The IRS workforce reductions so far would cut an estimated $46 billion in federal spending over the next decade and reduce revenue collections by $643 billion, according to The Budget Lab at Yale.

While in office, Charles Rettig, who was Trump’s first-term IRS commissioner, described the agency as outgunned by wealthy, well-advised taxpayers. He estimated that the tax gap — the difference between taxes owed and paid — was approaching $1 trillion a year.

More at https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/irs-staffing-tax-enforcement-1a18e
33f

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 13, 2026 5:18 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Parable of the President

Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo XIV reveals that to him, religion is primarily about power, not morality.

By David A. Graham | April 13, 2026, 2:15 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/04/trump-vs-pope-contradi
ctory-message/686784/

Many people get the Sunday scaries, but most of them are not a sitting president facing self-inflicted global chaos and the growing possibility of a bruising midterm election in a few months. What feels like a weekly social-media crashout from the president of the United States usually starts some time on Sunday and continues into the early hours of the next morning. Given the failure of negotiations with Iran on Saturday, the likelihood of elevated gas prices for months, and the resounding defeat of Trump’s ally and role model Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Donald Trump had plenty of fuel for a freakout last night.

But the most notable subject in this week’s edition was Pope Leo XIV, who has been critical of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and war in Iran. The posts illustrate that Trump views religion much the way he views everything else: as something that can serve him but does not create any obligations on him.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, kicking off a lengthy jeremiad. “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump claimed that Leo XIV was elected only because the cardinals believed he’d be good at dealing with the current administration. Trump is also upset that Leo met with David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and commentator. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” Trump said.

Forty-six minutes later, Trump posted an illustration of himself as a Jesus-like figure, reaching out to heal a man in bed while a nurse, a soldier, and others look on, and with a background of patriotic bric-a-brac (flag, eagles, fighter jets). The image has been circulating for at least a couple of months, during which time an angel near the top of the image has somehow transformed into a creepy monstrosity, presumably through the wonders of generative AI. The illustration drew claims of blasphemy and even demonic possession from some usual Trump allies on the right; the president has since deleted it, telling reporters he believed that the picture depicted him as a doctor.

Too many contradictions appear here to list them all. For example, Trump insists that Leo renounce politics yet also complains about the pope’s policy stance on crime. What he’s referring to here is a mystery. (The Catholic Church could be said to have a decarceral agenda: Jesus, quoting the Prophet Isaiah, said that he had been sent to preach freedom to prisoners, and the first pope, Peter, was imprisoned at least once and likely executed for professing Jesus. Then again, the Vatican City has, by some accounts, the highest per-capita crime rate in the world, due mainly to pickpocketing.)

Another contradiction is that Trump doesn’t actually seem to have any problem with the intermingling of religion and politics—as the Christlike image shows, and as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s aggressive rhetoric about the war demonstrates. The president’s reflexive response to criticism (or perceived criticism) from any public figure is to unleash a social-media barrage against them, without much thought about who the person is or what their role in society might be. This black-and-white view of the world owes more to Mani, another religious leader whose death was depicted as a crucifixion, than to Jesus of Nazareth.

The tirade at Leo is the latest escalation of anti-Catholic sentiment among some figures on the MAGA right. Trump has a number of devout Catholics in his administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J. D. Vance, although some, like Vance, have sometimes disagreed with the Holy See under Leo and his predecessor, Francis. The Free Press reported last week that the Pentagon had summoned a Vatican official, the first known time such a meeting had been held. It didn’t go well, with administration officials reportedly invoking the Avignon papacy, the 14th century domination of the role by the French crown. Both sides downplayed the report, but Trump’s post makes it hard to dismiss the friction between them.

Speaking with reporters as he flew to Algeria today, Leo said, “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message in the Gospel.” And though more restrained than Trump, he showed that he can dish it out as well as take it, quipping about Truth Social, “It’s ironic—the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

But although Leo separated himself from involvement in electoral politics in the way that Trump meant it, he defended his claim to speak on social issues, citing Jesus’s statement that “blessed are the peacemakers.” Matters of peace, poverty, and privilege are central to Christianity, and navigating how and how much to take on these issues is a challenge to any secular leader—indeed, any individual—who professes the religion.

Trump’s theological vision shares much with, and may have come from, Norman Vincent Peale, a popular Protestant minister of the mid-20th century. Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, attracted congregants including the Trump family with a version of Christianity that emphasized happiness and material wealth but perhaps asked less of its followers, even though Jesus repeatedly says in the Gospels that following him is not a casual endeavor.

As an adult, Trump showed few signs of religiosity or familiarity with scripture even as he courted Christians in the 2016 election. Since surviving an assassination attempt in 2024, Trump has sounded more overtly religious, and has publicly mused about his chances to get into heaven. But his rhetoric has not been matched by any clear change in behavior, quest for absolution for past sins, or increased attendance at church. Matters of peace, poverty, and privilege do not seem front of mind: After briefly portraying himself as a peacemaker in pursuit of the Nobel Prize, Trump has now embraced military adventure; he has shrugged at economic tumult; and he has brushed aside faith leaders’ concerns about his immigration enforcement. Trump well understands the iconographic and organizational power of Christianity, but he seems to reject the idea that it should create any constraints on him.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, April 14, 2026 7:38 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


State Department Tells Human Rights Watchdog to Ignore Trump’s Extrajudicial Killings

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “lacks the competence” to review Trump’s campaign of deadly boat strikes, a State Department spokesperson said.

By Nick Turse | April 13 2026, 1:37 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/04/13/trump-boat-strikes-iachr/

The United States is waging a pressure campaign against the leading inter-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into illegal U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the monthslong campaign of extrajudicial killings by the U.S. military.

Though the president of the IACHR disputes that the U.S. is pressuring his organization, the State Department responded to questions about the meeting with a statement urging the commission to move onto other matters. A past IACHR president said the organization may fear the “wrath” of the United States, which is the largest financial contributor to the commission’s parent organization, if it launches an investigation.

U.S. lawmakers and experts say an investigation by the IACHR could be an important mechanism to hold the Trump administration accountable for the lethal strikes. Scores of civilians have been killed in the campaign, which has seen families of victims petition the IACHR and sue the U.S. government, accusing it of wrongful death and extrajudicial killings.

Last month, the IACHR — an arm of the Organization of American States, or OAS, charged with the promotion of human rights in the Western hemisphere — held a first-of-its-kind hearing on the legality of the boat strikes. The IACHR considers petitions dealing with violations of rights by member states, including the U.S. At the March 13 hearing, the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, International Crisis Group, and the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights made the case that the U.S. boat strikes violate both U.S. domestic and international law.

Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, noted that the attacks were conducted without the authorization of Congress and were “in violation of international law on the use of force.” Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur and a professor of international law at the University of Sydney, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.” He said these “serial extrajudicial killings gravely violate the right to life” and were not permissible as law enforcement actions or in the name of national self-defense or allowed under the law of the sea, under international humanitarian law, under international counter-terrorism law, or treaties targeting narcotics.

The hearing drew sharp criticism from the United States, which sent representatives to the meeting. State Department legal adviser Carl Anderson rebuked the commission for holding the hearing and said it wasn’t fit to review legal claims. State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the commission “strayed far outside its mandate” and was being manipulated by the ACLU.

“The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue,” Pigott said. “Convening hearings under these circumstances risks undermining — not strengthening — the credibility of the inter-American human rights system.” Pigott also instructed the commission to work through decades-old petitions instead of focusing on the boat strikes.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 48 attacks since September 2025, destroying 50 vessels and killing almost 170 civilians. The latest strikes, on April 11 in the Eastern Pacific, killed five people and, according to the Coast Guard, left one “person in distress.” The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

In December, the IACHR expressed “deep concern regarding reports of lethal operations against non-state vessels” that it said “allegedly resulted in the deaths of a high number of persons.” It called on the U.S. to “refrain from employing lethal military force in the context of public security operations” but emphasized a “willingness to maintain continued dialogue and technical cooperation with the United States to support the protection of human rights in all security and defense policies.”

“If it is a law enforcement issue, then you cannot just kill them. You have to try to arrest them.”

“What it is is murder,” Juan Méndez, a former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said of the attacks, stressing that he was speaking as an expert on international law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law and not on behalf of the commission. “You’re deliberately shooting at people who may be engaged in illegal action. But if it is a law enforcement issue, then you cannot just kill them. You have to try to arrest them. You have to try to bring them to justice.”

A source close to the IACHR said the United States was clearly pressuring the organization to ignore attacks under fear of losing funding, pointing to Pigott’s decree.

The State Department responded to questions by pointing The Intercept to a statement by Pigott in which he told the IACHR to ignore U.S. “counter-narcoterrorism” operations. “The Commission needs to redirect its focus toward the individual petitions languishing on its docket, sometimes for decades,” he decreed. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment or clarification about which petitions it wants the IACHR to prioritize.

Mendez outlined the potential pressures the IACHR was under. “The Commission may well feel that this is a very delicate situation, and if they take the initiative, they’re going to incur the wrath of the United States,” he explained. “They are stretched for funding. And if the United States cuts the funding, they probably would have to shut down — at least for a while.”

During President Donald Trump’s first term, the U.S. reduced its contributions to IACHR from $2.7 million in 2017 to zero in 2018, leaving other member states and permanent observers from the European Union to make up the shortfall. In 2019, the U.S. withdrew funds from the IACHR due to its promotion of abortion legalization. By last May, the Trump administration had terminated funding for at least 22 OAS programs. The administration did not request specific funds for the OAS in 2026, although the House appropriations report for 2026 provides $46.5 million, similar to 2024 levels.

The State Department did not provide the total number of OAS programs that saw their funding cut or terminated, nor say how often the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw funding from the IACHR.

Stuardo Ralón, the current president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, pushed back on the claims of bullying by the U.S. “There is no pressure from the United States on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,” he told The Intercept.

When The Intercept asked if the commission intends to carry out an investigation into the United States’ lethal strikes, Ralón said, “The IACHR does not conduct investigations. Doing so falls outside its institutional nature and mandate.”

The commission is actually well known for high-profile investigations, including of U.S. immigration detention centers during the Obama administration, and an attack on 43 students from a Mexican teacher training school who were kidnapped and presumably killed in 2014. In fact, the OAS website is filled with references to the “Commission’s investigation[s].”

When The Intercept pointed out that the first line of the Commission’s 10-point mandate states that the IACHR “receives, analyzes and investigates individual petitions in which violations of human rights are alleged to have been committed,” an IACHR spokesperson offered a clarification. “In the context of public hearings, the IACHR does not carry out investigative functions in the strict sense,” wrote Corina Leguizamón. The Intercept did not inquire about the use of public hearings as a means of inquiry.

“We have asked the Commission to fulfill its responsibilities as the premier regional human rights body to conduct a fact-finding investigation of these heinous killings and to ensure that no country can act in this fashion because that will have severe implications on human rights in the region and beyond,” Dakwar, of the ACLU, told The Intercept. “The U.S. government has not put forward any justifications for its premeditated murders. The commission is within its competency and its bounds to fully investigate the egregious violations of international law happening in its own backyard.”

U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif,, also sent a letter to the commission urging them to “scrutinize this administration’s policy and help advance accountability in the international arena.” They added, “The challenges we have faced in securing transparency and achieving accountability underscore the importance of your respected Commission’s contribution.”

Ralón said the IACHR had not taken any steps toward the ACLU’s requests to launch an investigation into the strikes; convene a special meeting with OAS Member States affected by them; or request an advisory opinion from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the legality of the policy. “The IACHR will continue to monitor the situation in accordance with its mandate,” he told The Intercept, stating it “does not have the competence to initiate ex officio actions under the terms proposed, nor to assess the proportionality of the use of force in scenarios that may involve operations in international waters or situations between States.” Ralón added: “The Commission neither anticipates nor rules out future actions; it acts based on the information available, at the appropriate time, and with strict adherence to its mandate.”

Mendez, the former president, said that the IACHR was in a challenging situation. “The Commission could, if they wanted to take the initiative, take the case forward. If they get a formal complaint, they do investigate. They inquire. They ask for information. But under the present situation, they’re unlikely to take any action on their own initiative,” he told The Intercept.

In December, the family of Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza, who was killed in a September 15 attack in the Caribbean, filed a complaint with the IACHR. The petition names Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the perpetrator, stating that he “was responsible for ordering the bombing of boats like those of Alejandro Carranza Medina and the murder of all those on such boats.” It also notes that Hegseth’s conduct was “ratified” by Trump.

The next month, family members of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadian men killed in a U.S. boat strike on October 14, 2025, sued the U.S. government for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. Lawyers from the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and Seton Hall Law School professor Jonathan Hafetz called the entire campaign of attacks in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful” in their complaint.

The suit was brought in U.S. federal admiralty court under the Death on the High Seas Act, a congressional statute that covers wrongful maritime deaths. The plaintiffs also brought claims for extrajudicial killing under the Alien Tort Statute, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over violations of the law of nations, including extrajudicial killing. Another federal statute, the Suits in Admiralty Act, waives U.S. sovereign immunity — which ordinarily protects the federal government from being sued — over both claims.

The State Department referred to the cases in its rebuke of the March 13 hearing, accusing the IACHR of allowing “the ACLU to exploit the hearing to try to force the United States to prematurely disclose arguments and evidence in two cases pending before U.S. federal courts.”

Last month, Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, told members of the House Armed Services Committee that attacks on Latin American drug cartels are “just the beginning” as he unveiled a terrestrial effort dubbed “Operation Total Extermination.”

Humire announced that the Pentagon supported “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” and referred to the attacks as “joint land strikes,” saying that America was providing Ecuador with “capabilities that they otherwise would not have.” In a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in that country, the White House also informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

Gen. Francis Donovan, the chief of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers last month that “boat strikes are not the answer,” but teased an even broader campaign. “What we’re moving for right now might be an extension of Southern Spear, but really a counter-cartel campaign process that puts total systemic friction across this network,” he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe these kinetic [boat] strikes are just one small part of that.”

Mendez — also formerly a U.N. special rapporteur on torture and a recently retired professor of international law at American University’s Washington College of Law — said he did not believe that U.S. pressure would affect any future investigation if the IACHR moves forward with an inquiry into the boat strikes. “It doesn’t affect their impartiality and independence, but it does affect what they might do on their own initiative,” he said. “I’m not saying that they will duck and forget about it. This is a very important issue. But they probably want to wait to see who brings what kind of case to them.”

Ralón also said the commission would not be cowed. “The IACHR exercises its functions with full independence and autonomy, in accordance with its conventional and regulatory mandate, and its decisions are not subject to external interference by any State,” he said.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, April 16, 2026 6:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


It’s Not Just Iran. Trump Is Flailing on Multiple Fronts.

By Jonathan Lemire | April 15, 2026, 2:24 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/trump-iran-hungary-melani
a-epstein/686816/

You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.

Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.

Donald Trump has long ruled by fear. He demands complete fealty from fellow Republicans; he pushes around world leaders. He’s a political escape artist. But this time, he has boxed himself in without an obvious way out. The war in Iran was a conflict of his choosing, but it has not gone at all how he expected. Trump believed that it would resemble the military blitz that effortlessly snatched Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, that it would be a surgical strike lasting days or maybe just a couple of weeks. Instead, the conflict is approaching the 50-day mark. Iran is battered but emboldened, and now has greater control of the vital strait—through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes—than it did before the war, wielding it like an economic vise to squeeze the rest of the globe. Trump has demanded it be reopened, even threatening to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization if the regime did not comply. But Tehran didn’t quake in terror. Trump’s usual intimidation tactics aren’t working.

The Venezuela raid in the year’s first days altered the course of Trump’s presidency. By the closing months of 2025, the momentum of his first six months in office had dissipated and his party had suffered a series of electoral losses. He looked to some like an early lame duck. But the Caracas military operation, White House aides felt, righted the ship. Trump, though never restrained, was transformed into pure id, acting on impulse and goaded on by advisers who saw an opportunity to further expand executive power. And he fell further in love with the might of the U.S. military, telling advisers that it was an unstoppable force. Greenland. Iran. Cuba. His legacy, he believed, would be redrawing the world’s maps.

Read: Trump is learning that his bullying has consequences

The U.S. military has smashed much of Iran’s defenses and damaged its missile arsenal. The joint operation with Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader and many of his top lieutenants. But Iran didn’t surrender. Trump had overestimated the capacity of the Iranian people to rise up, and he had not understood the extraordinary pain that the hard-line theocratic regime was willing to accept to maintain its grip on power. Thirteen American troops have been killed. Tehran maintained the ability to strike at its Gulf neighbors and damage their energy facilities. And even though much of its navy was destroyed, it was able to seize control of the strait by wielding the threat of mines, fast-attack boats, and armed drones. Giant oil tankers avoided the danger, and prices around the world began to rise.

This is when Trump ran into the limits of his power. He was outraged that such a makeshift force would intimidate the shipping companies, demanding that they “show some guts” and force the passage. But companies balked. He urged European nations to step in, noting that they benefit more from the oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz than the United States does. But Europe refused, having not been consulted before the war began and declining to bend to Trump’s wishes just weeks after he strained transatlantic ties by demanding that the U.S. be given Greenland. They were finally standing up to the president who boasted to my colleagues that “I run the country and the world.”

Back home, some Republicans were also finally saying no. A few loud, isolationist voices—Tucker Carlson, Steven Bannon, Megyn Kelly—declared that a new war in the Middle East broke Trump’s “America First” promises. And while most Republicans begrudgingly went along with the bombing campaign in Iran, many made clear that they would draw the line on a ground invasion. The Pentagon has readied potential assaults; military leaders are still awaiting Trump’s orders. Polls showed that Americans, who never approved of the war, were deeply opposed to a ground attack. Instead, Trump went on social media the morning of Easter Sunday and unleashed an unhinged threat, demanding that Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” before adding “Praise be to Allah.” Muslim leaders denounced the post as blasphemous. Two days later, he went further, threatening that “a whole civilization will die.”

Read: Trump made a deal that gives him nothing he wanted

Even some of Trump’s advisers were deeply dismayed, a few of them told me. Members of Trump’s inner circle had counseled him to avoid issuing deadlines; he had now set several, and looked weaker each time one passed. His post was threatening actions that would amount to war crimes—and a genocide. The president was flailing, several people close to him told me. His usual maneuvers had not worked, so he believed that his only play was to escalate. But it wasn’t strategically employing unpredictable behavior to get his way; it was desperation. He looked erratic. Republican allies and world leaders lobbied him to back off his threat, and as the deadline approached, his team seized on a cease-fire offer dangled by Pakistani negotiators. But the talks this past weekend in Islamabad did not yield a deal, prompting Trump to order the blockade. The plan was to apply pressure on Iran to open the strait and on Europe to aid the U.S. So far, neither result has been achieved.

In private moments, most Republicans have been saying for months that holding the House is likely beyond their reach. The GOP’s margin is slim, and the party out of power tends to do well in midterm elections. But at least, Republicans thought, the Senate was safe. That’s no longer the case. Democrats are looking at the map and see possible pickups in North Carolina, Maine, and even Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska. Republicans’ poll numbers are falling while prices—particularly of gas—are rising. Trump has yet to make a real case for the necessity of the Iran conflict. And even if the war were to end soon, the economic pain is forecast to last for months, well into campaign season. Before the war erupted, the White House had planned for Trump to hammer home an economic message. But now the president is distracted—and he doesn’t have good economic news to share anyway.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, continues to project confidence about both Iran and the midterms, telling me in a statement that “conflicts like this are ultimately judged by the outcome, which will be a good one for the American people, and there’s a lot of game left to play before November.”

Last summer, the West Wing’s plans to tout the economy were interrupted by questions surrounding Trump’s ties to the dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein scandal has been one of the few areas in which Republicans have felt comfortable breaking with Trump, who wants the matter closed. But once again, the financier was thrust back into the headlines—this time by the first lady. Melania Trump caught many senior White House aides off guard last Thursday with her sudden statement denying ties to Epstein, a few of them told me; the president himself admitted he didn’t know what his wife was going to say. It’s led to speculation that the first lady was trying to get ahead of some sort of damaging Epstein-related story; so far, nothing has materialized. But her call for Congress to give Epstein’s victims a public hearing ensures that the story won’t die any time soon.

Hungary has added to the president’s losing streak. On Sunday, just days after Vice President Vance made a campaign appearance in Budapest with Orbán, the ruling party was routed at the polls. Orbán had been a model for many on the right; he had wielded state power to seize influence over Hungary’s media, universities, and other institutions, aligning with Vladimir Putin to undermine the European Union and NATO. Trump had invested much in Orbán’s reelection: Secretary of State Marco Rubio also made a Budapest appearance, while the president repeatedly endorsed Orbán and suggested that more U.S. funding would be on the way to Hungary if the prime minister won. The voters of Hungary had other ideas.

Read: There’s a message for MAGA in Viktor Orbán’s defeat

And then the president picked a fight with the pope. Pope Leo XIV has been judicious in speaking out about political matters but has been unsparing for months with his criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. When the Iran conflict broke out, the pope (as pontiffs tend to do) spoke out against war. Popes and presidents don’t always see eye to eye, but most commanders in chief opt against attacking the vicar of Christ for fear of alienating the tens of millions of Catholics in the United States—or, perhaps, to avoid any potential for divine retribution.

But Trump, of course, is not most presidents. He does not take criticism from anyone, and those close to him believe that he felt threatened by another powerful American voice on the global stage. So there the president was on Sunday, just a week after offending Muslims, slamming the pope as being “Weak on Crime” and “catering to the Radical Left.” To make it worse, Trump posted an AI image depicting himself as Jesus healing a sick man. The uproar was swift, even from some in Trump’s party accustomed to silently suffering his outrages. Trump buckled, taking down the post before improbably claiming that the image depicted him as a doctor, not as the son of God. But then, unbowed, he chided the pope again on social media late last night.

The pope, for his part, has said this week that he has “no fear” of the Trump administration. He is far from alone.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, April 17, 2026 7:55 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


America’s Orange Jesus

Reflections on a week in which Donald Trump decided to feud with the Pope while comparing himself to the Saviour.

By Susan B. Glasser | April 16, 2026

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/americas-
orange-jesus

In her 2023 memoir, “Oath and Honor,” published the year before Donald Trump’s remarkable return from political oblivion, the Republican apostate Liz Cheney describes watching in amazement on January 6, 2021, as her fellow-Republicans in Congress lined up to sign electoral-vote objection sheets. Cheney, who had been No. 3 in the Party leadership throughout Trump’s first term in office, concluded that her colleagues suffered from a “plague of cowardice,” summed up by their willingness to go along with Trump’s false claims about the “rigged” 2020 election despite understanding full well that he had lost fair and square. “The things we do for the Orange Jesus,” Cheney heard one of them, Mark Green, of Tennessee, mutter as he put his name down. (Later, Green denied having made the comment; the following year, Trump praised the congressman for his many “political talents.”)

I immediately thought of Cheney’s Orange Jesus line this week when Trump, amid an escalating public feud with Pope Leo XIV, circulated an A.I.-generated image of himself as the Christian Lord and Saviour, before deleting it and telling reporters the next day, at the White House:

I did post it. And I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with the Red Cross, there’s a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. I had just heard about it, and I said, “How did they come up with that?” It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better. I make people a lot better.

It is not enough to read these words, as silly and mendacious and incoherent as they are. Trump’s remarks, in my view, make for essential viewing, thirty-seven seconds that showcase the precipitousness of our fall as a superpower. Look at how Trump stares straight into the cameras as he lies. A doctor? Seriously? It’s as though he felt no need to come up with a better excuse—or any excuse at all. (To be fair: the fact that, as Trump said this, he was flanked by a fifty-eight-year-old MAGA enthusiast from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who had just delivered to him a bag of takeout McDonald’s in a bright-red “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt suggests that God does have a pretty good sense of humor.) By Wednesday, Trump had reasserted his claim to divine authority, posting another A.I.-generated image of himself standing alongside Jesus, who has his arm wrapped around Trump’s shoulder; both of them are bathed in the soft glow of a heavenly light. Trump’s caption: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”

The point is simply this: in Trump 1.0, Orange Jesus was a snarky shorthand for the hypocrisy of Republicans who knew better but joined up with the cult of Trump anyway. In Trump 2.0, Trump thinks he has actually become Orange Jesus.

How else to explain the President’s many otherwise inexplicable acts since returning to office? The gilding of the White House to resemble a profane copy of the Vatican, the ever more baroque lies, the slapping his name on everything, and, perhaps most of all, the repeated reminders that our leader recognizes no earthly limits on his power as he wages war in the Middle East and speaks of conquering other lands. “There is one thing,” he told the Times, in January. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” America First-ism is not the ideology of this Presidency; Trump First-ism is. The fact that he serves up his megalomania with such an excess of dark farce only reinforces how shameful it is that this is the man for whom so many Republicans have chosen to sacrifice what remained of their integrity.

On Thursday, a federal commission stacked with Trump appointees voted to approve the President’s plans for a triumphal arch on the National Mall, modelled on those built by Napoleon and the Roman emperors to celebrate their military victories. At two hundred and fifty feet tall, it would be the biggest such structure in the world. Asked last fall by CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe what this modern-day arch was meant to commemorate, Trump pointed to himself and replied, “Me.”

One might conclude from the fact that Trump quickly deleted his Jesus post on Monday morning, some thirteen hours after posting it on Orthodox Easter, that he realized he had gone too far, even for many of his most vocal followers. There’s no doubt that the online backlash was swift and laugh-out-loud funny, the worst kind of insult to a man who sees himself as endowed with otherworldly powers. I particularly loved one from Sarah Palin—an image of Jesus seemingly begging Trump to stop making such an ass of himself: “Alright. That’s enough. Give me the phone.” You literally cannot buy publicity this bad for a politician.

At such a moment, it would seem to be an extreme case of political malpractice for the President to pick a public fight about the extent of God’s imprimatur on his decision to go to war on immigrants at home and Iranians abroad with no less of an authority on God than the Pope himself. Even before the whole I-am-Jesus thing, Trump’s popularity was plummeting to historic lows as his war upended the global economy and sent prices for oil, gas, and a zillion other products skyrocketing.

But the cult lives. On Thursday morning, at a Pentagon press briefing, there was Trump’s self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, comparing Trump to the Lord once again, as he likened reporters’ “incredibly unpatriotic” coverage of the President’s conflict in the Middle East to the evil Pharisees tearing down Jesus after he had performed a miracle in front of their very eyes. (That same day, it was revealed that Hegseth, during a Pentagon sermon, had quoted fake Bible verses from the movie “Pulp Fiction”—who knew that Trump 2.0 could turn “Saturday Night Live” into a reality-TV show?)

At almost exactly the same time that Hegseth was going on about the Pharisees, Pope Leo’s latest missive to his flock landed on X. “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, and Patriarch of the West wrote to his tens of millions of followers.

Not long after, Trump was given the opportunity to walk away from his no-win feud. But, no, responding to reporters’ questions on the White House lawn, he suggested that the Pope, in condemning war as the Scriptures demand, was in fact in favor of allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon, whereas he, Trump, would not allow that to happen. “I want him to preach the Gospel, I’m all about the Gospel,” the President added. I am not much of a Bible quoter, but it seems pretty clear which side the Lord would be on in this fight between the Orange Jesus and the real one’s personal emissary on earth.

The folly of the ancient Roman emperors springs to mind here. History has not judged kindly their demand that their subjects not only build great arches in their honor but that they literally worship their rulers as Dominus et Deus, Lord and God. Those imperial cults of personality, and many of their monuments, lasted no longer than the short period of their rule. Trump may scar our beautiful capital with golden memorials to himself, but how long, really, will it last, this tacky reign of a President who styles himself a MAGA god?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, April 17, 2026 9:27 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Russ Vought slammed for omitting $2.2 trillion deficit in Trump budget, didn't want to "confuse the country"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russ-vought-slammed-for-omitti
ng-2-2-trillion-deficit-in-trump-budget-didn-t-want-to-confuse-the-country/ar-AA214bJj

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, delivered an opening statement at a Committee oversight hearing on President Trump's FY2027 Budget request that slammed the President’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russ Vought.

Merkley said: “Immediately upon opening this budget, I was struck by what was missing. No plan to bring down gas prices. No plan to bring down grocery prices. No plan to save Social Security, which will start running out of money in just six years, requiring a 28 percent cut to seniors' benefits according to the most recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.”

Merkley continued: “No funding for aid to farmers hurt by Trump's tariffs. No additional funding to deal with unexpected disasters, like wildfires, floods, or hurricanes. No meaningful revenue proposals. And no credible plan to reduce the debt, which is now over 100 percent of GDP.”

The lack of debt reduction planning in the budget led Merkley, who mentioned his own budget bona fides, to accuse Vought of breaking the law in his report by inadequately assessing the ballooning deficit.

“In addition,” Merkley said, “as a former Congressional Budget Office analyst, I went looking for the deficit projections, but you didn't bother to put them in, yet again ignoring the law – 31 U.S. Code § 1105 – which requires the President's Budget to include at least 5 years of deficit and debt projections – but yours does not. So, you are breaking both the spirit and letter of the law.

“What your budget does include are projections that the President's tariffs will raise an eye-popping $1.6 trillion in revenue more than CBO estimates. And CBO's estimates were made before the Supreme Court ruled Trump's tariffs unconstitutional. So, your revenue projections should have been even lower than CBO's, not higher. Making your estimates here simply fictional.”

When Merkley asked Vought why he didn’t include deficit numbers in the budget, as required by law, Vought said: “It’s a discretionary budget. One of the things that I think is important is not to confuse the country when we’re in the middle of several reconciliation efforts over the next year.”

Merkley responded: “I disagree with the notion that it’s discretionary to follow the law. The law did require deficit numbers.”

Extrapolating from the budget’s revenue numbers — even as he portrayed those numbers as dubious — Merkley reported that he did the math and that the deficit amounts to about $2.2 trillion. Merkley told Vought, “I think perhaps the reason you didn’t want to include deficit numbers is you didn’t want to draw attention [to them].”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 20, 2026 1:03 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Could Be Political Suicide for Republicans

In normal times, this budget would be dead on arrival.

By Fred Kaplan | April 20, 2026 5:45 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/trump-defense-budget-iran-
war-hegseth-republicans.html

I’m old enough to remember when Republicans criticized Democrats for “throwing money at a problem.” Now here comes President Donald Trump, proposing a military budget for next year of $1.5 trillion, and most GOP lawmakers are just nodding.

If passed, this would be, even when adjusted for inflation, the United States’ largest defense budget ever—larger than the amount spent (again, adjusting for inflation) in any year during World War II, when the nation’s entire economy was geared to war.

Joe Biden was the first president who, just two years ago, nudged a military budget up against the $1 trillion mark. The world is a turbulent place, to the point where almost nobody in politics proposes cutting defense spending. But is the world so turbulent, and is our position in it so precarious, that we need to increase the budget by almost 50 percent in a single year? Nobody in the Trump administration has made the case, and it’s particularly puzzling, given that Trump’s “National Security Strategy” proposed reducing America’s security commitments abroad.

Let’s say we do need to buy a lot more weapons. Are the weapons he proposes to buy in larger quantities the sorts of weapons we need? And to clarify matters, most of this $1.5 trillion will be spent on weapons. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth touts that the budget includes a 7 percent pay hike for members of the armed forces (about twice the national inflation rate), but the total proposed cost for military personnel is just $205 billion (about 13 percent of the defense budget), which exceeds this year’s amount by only $8 billion.

By contrast, Trump and Hegseth propose boosting the budget for weapons procurement from $223 billion to $413 billion—a staggering 85 percent increase. Research and development for new weapons rise almost as steeply, from $210 billion to $344 billion—a 64 percent increase.

There is almost no precedent for such a surge.

The Pentagon has not yet released all the line items in the budget, so it’s hard to break down these figures in much detail. Some of the growth seems somewhat related to advanced satellites (a $24 billion increase for Space Force) and A.I. (a $42 billion increase for “autonomous” systems). But steeper increases (and larger stacks of money) go for traditional Cold War–era systems, such as piloted combat planes (money for Navy aircraft alone doubles from $17 billion to $34 billion), and warships (up from $45 billion this year to $66 billion next year).

The warships are especially expensive ($13 billion for a new USS Gerald Ford–class aircraft carrier, $2.7 billion for a DDG-51 destroyer) and take many years to build. It could be argued we need more ships, but do we need the kinds of ships we’re buying? They are far more capable than ships of older times, but they’re also more vulnerable, given the swarms of anti-ship missiles and drones, which, for instance, China has prepared to fire in case of a war near the Taiwan Strait.

A few years ago, some analysts noted that big ships were good for crisis management—all those attack planes and missiles could intimidate an adversary—but they should probably be moved out of harm’s way if bullets started to fly. (Submarine crews have a related joke: “There are two kinds of warships—submarines and targets.”) This spring’s war with Iran shows they’re of limited use for crisis management: Two aircraft carriers and their escort ships didn’t scare the Iranians into backing down. (However, against a country of limited military power, such as Iran, the carriers can still launch a lot of firepower.)

There’s another, more mundane problem with this budget, especially with the scads it devotes to shipbuilding—the largest sum (adjusting for inflation) since 1962. Even if Congress passes it, the Navy won’t be able to spend it.

A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the Navy’s program for 2025 placed greater strains on the nation’s shipyards than they had faced in recent decades, adding that the yards “suffer from an insufficient quantity of skilled labor … and supply chain challenges.” And the proposed shipbuilding program for 2027 is more than 50 percent larger than that for 2025. Nothing has been done in the meantime to enlarge our shipbuilding capacity, or entice a larger or more skilled workforce. In fact, according to the CBO report, employment in the shipyards hasn’t grown since 1990.

Similarly, a new study by the conservative American Enterprise Institute concludes that “we lack the manufacturing ability and supply chain to produce weapons” at a scale that Trump and Hegseth envision not only for shipbuilding but for projects throughout their $1.5 trillion budget.

In other words, in so many ways, this budget is a fantasy. Under ordinary conditions, congressional leaders would declare it “dead on arrival.” But, of course, these are far from ordinary conditions. GOP lawmakers, who control Congress, bow down to their party leader’s commands, even at the price of abrogating their own constitutional powers. The question, this time around, is whether they’re willing to do so to the point of political suicide—which is what they would risk committing if they passed this budget in this midterm year.

First, their majorities in the House and Senate are perilously slender. Second, Trump’s positive ratings recently dipped below 40 percent. Third, his war with Iran is less popular still. The defense budget, though far broader in scope, would be viewed by much of the public through the same prism, especially since the Pentagon will request more money still—Hegseth has suggested $200 billion more (though he hasn’t officially requested so much)—as a supplemental to this year’s budget, to compensate for the costs of the war: for instance, to restock the munitions, spare parts, and other supplies that the airstrikes and other activities chewed up.

This is crucial to decisions of political risk because, in order to pay for his massive increase in defense spending, Trump is proposing to slash $73 billion in domestic spending—including for popular programs in education, agriculture, housing, and health. Trump himself acknowledged the causal connection, saying at a private lunch, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicare, all of these individual things” because “military protection” had to take priority.

Even some Republicans are starting to chafe against the budget, not so much because they care about social programs but because, even with those cuts, the soaring military costs swell the federal government’s already-ballooning deficit.

The real problem with the defense budget is that, given an unavoidably finite amount of money, we’re buying the wrong kinds of things. This was dramatized in the air war on Iran, when U.S. ships and warplanes fired 850 cruise missiles, the newest of them costing $3.6 million each, at targets whose destruction had no effect on the course of the war—or when a $4 million battery of Patriot air-defense missiles was deployed to shoot down a small swarm of drones costing as little as $20,000.

This sort of exchange rate is unsustainable. After five weeks of airstrikes on Iran, the world’s 16th strongest military, the U.S. Air Force and Navy—the world’s mightiest power, we’re told over and over—is on the verge of running out of crucial missiles. Think about the calculations that China’s generals are running through their heads in pondering a war for Taiwan.

The Pentagon is moving into the modern era to some extent; for example, it’s building a lot more drones, but even many of our drones are more expensive than those on the world market. Ukraine, which learned how to build drones from Silicon Valley engineers, is now building models that cost a fraction of ours—and are more effective.

At a Senate Budget Committee hearing this week, Republican Lindsey Graham gushed over Trump’s military request, calling it “the best military budget I’ve seen since I’ve been in Congress,” adding, “If you’re a guy like me, this is the budget you’ve been dreaming of.”

Dreaming is one way of describing what Graham was doing. Then again, the Democrats on the panel didn’t offer much in the way of alternatives. What the Pentagon, other agencies, and private think tanks need to do is rethink the defense budget—how much is really needed to do what?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 20, 2026 5:21 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Pope James David Vance the First

The vice president has decided he’s a more accomplished theologian than Leo XIV.

By Tom Nichols | April 16, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/pope-jd-vance-iran/686826/

The Trump administration doesn’t seem to have many rules, but one of them is that once the president picks a fight, his posse must show up to support him, no matter how ill-advised the conflict. And few senior officials are more eager to back up the boss in every embarrassing beef than Vice President Vance, who recently seems to have decided that he, and not Pope Leo XIV, is the true arbiter of Catholic doctrine.

President Trump is personally angry with Leo because the pontiff has been deeply critical of America’s war of choice in Iran. Accordingly, Trump lashed out at His Holiness twice over the past few days. Vance might have seen this as a valuable opportunity to say nothing and let the storm pass; Leo, naturally, doesn’t seem to care all that much what Trump thinks. (As my colleague Liz Bruenig wrote, Leo answers to a higher authority.) Had the vice president remained silent, Trump might have moved on, and Vance, a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, would have been able to stay out of a dustup between his president and his spiritual leader.

But no. Vance just had to speak up. He could have taken his cues from John F. Kennedy or Mario Cuomo, Catholic politicians who were careful to note that their faith was personal and important to them, but that in their public life, they must govern as Americans according to the Constitution. Vance decided on a different approach: The pope, he implied, wasn’t a very good, or very smart, Catholic.

Vance’s response to Leo’s statements came during an interview at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia. It was a sour cocktail of equal parts hubris and ignorance with a spritz of Vance’s trademark smarm, and it is worth considering in full:
Quote:
In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.

And I think that one of these issues here is that there has been—if you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful; you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth, and that’s one of the things that I try to do, and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy, whether they’re Catholic or Protestant.
Vance just told the bishop of Rome that theology should be “anchored in the truth”? What does that even mean? Whose truth? Somewhere in the nether gloom, Pontius Pilate is rubbing his aching temples and thinking he’s heard this one before.

Catholics, of course, believe that the pope is infallible when he issues ex cathedra pronouncements on faith and doctrine and, yes, morality, so challenging his pronouncements on war and peace seems a tad presumptuous for a member of the faithful. (My own faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, does not have a figure with power like the pope, but you can bet I’d think twice before telling our top cleric, the patriarch of Constantinople, that he was all hosed up on some important theological stuff.) Vance’s slap at Leo—including the pompous implication that he needs to go back and do some theology homework—illustrates the political and religious risks that Vance is willing to take not only with the Vatican, but with a country whose population is one-fifth Catholic, in order to demonstrate his utter fealty to Trump.

Some years ago, I wrote a book, The Death of Expertise, in which I examined the strange phenomenon whereby every person thinks they’re an expert, to the point where they are willing to lecture actual experts about those experts’ own field of competence. Doctors, lawyers, professors, and people in trades such as carpentry and electrical work can tell stories of some layperson who had ideas about medications, the law, or what kind of circuit breakers to use. It’s human, it’s silly, and it’s sometimes dangerous.

Vance, however, has blown right past all such minor examples and has now seized the top seat in the Death of Expertise Hall of Fame: He has lectured the pope—the pope, the leader of a billion and a half Catholics—about being too sloppy with theology.

It gets better—or worse, depending on how you look at it. Vance took issue with Leo’s declaration about war, in which the pope said: “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” What about World War II? Vance huffed. Wasn’t God on America’s side then? Of course, arguing that God takes sides in human wars seems a rather fraught business, which is why most Christian denominations tend to avoid such pronouncements and instead ask their adherents to pray for peace. During the American Civil War, although slavery was a manifest evil, Abraham Lincoln chose not to extol the North’s righteousness in his second inaugural address, but instead humbly reminded Americans that both sides “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God,” sorrowfully noting that the Almighty gave the conflict to both North and South as the price of exterminating the sin of slavery.

But Vance wasn’t really interested in arguing with his spiritual father; he was instructing him. “When the pope says that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword,” Vance pontificated, “there is more than a thousand-year tradition of just-war theory.”

It’s true that the early Christian world produced what is now known as the just-war tradition, a body of thought that serves as the foundation of much of American and international law about when countries may go to war, and how they should conduct themselves in combat. One of the first and most important of these thinkers was Saint Augustine. Indeed, Leo knows this because he was the leader of the Augustinian order for more than a decade, and so Vance might have paused for just one more nanosecond to realize he was lecturing the first Augustinian pope about the just-war tradition.

Less than a day after the vice president’s remarks, the chairman of the doctrine committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops spelled it out for Vance that a difference of opinion with the pope is not just another internet wrangle with some random troll: “When Pope Leo XIV speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church,” Bishop James Massa wrote, “he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ. The consistent teaching of the Church is insistent that all people of good will must pray and work toward lasting peace while avoiding the evils and injustices that accompany all wars.”

Perhaps Vance will take the hint. Meanwhile, his attempt to enlighten the pontiff revealed not only his arrogance, but his lack of knowledge about the just-war tradition itself. No matter what the vice president thinks, it’s not a set of rules that tells Christians when God is on their side. The just-war tradition attempts to reconcile the reality of a violent world with the undeniable spiritual peril of taking up arms, and it’s a lot more complicated than Christ blessing the good guys. For nearly 20 years, I helped students every summer at Harvard wrestle with just-war concepts, debating what constitutes a “just cause,” considering the meaning of a “right intention,” and evaluating “proportionality,” among other tenets of the just-war tradition.

These concepts are not a checklist to be completed; they are not chits to be collected that then allow national leaders to assume that their wars are approved by Jesus. The entire body of just-war thinking regards war as evil and every human life lost, ally or enemy, as a tragedy. Its precepts are not excuses; they are meant to be questions that leaders should ask themselves before risking their mortal souls by going to war.

Vance’s attempt to take on Leo by going after the pope’s, shall we say, area of expertise only showcases what Pope Gregory the Great called “the queen of all vices,” the deadly sin of pride. The Catholic Church, in Latin, calls this the transgression of superbia. But describing the willingness of someone like Vance to do such a thing requires a word from Yiddish rather than Latin: chutzpah.

Download for free The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (2nd Edition) by Tom Nichols from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=The+Death+of+Expertise

Also for free Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy by Tom Nichols from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Our+Own+Worst+Enemy+Nichols

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, April 20, 2026 10:29 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Aides Keeping the President in the Dark

Donald Trump’s advisers are treating him like he can’t handle the reality of the war in Iran. They might be right—but that fact is a danger to the constitutional order.

By David A. Graham | April 20, 2026, 5:48 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/04/donald-trump-aides-ira
n-war/686875/

Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.

The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down. Commanders were scrambling to create and execute an operation to rescue both. The second was the president’s temperament. As plans developed and went into effect, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, “aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.”

It’s a stunning bit of news: During a national-security crisis, top advisers decided the commander in chief’s presence was a liability. This incident is only the latest example of how Trump’s aides have been trying to keep him in the dark and build a protective bubble around him.

A president whom aides do not view as reliable and steady is a danger in any situation, but the war in Iran has brought many of these issues to the fore. In the lead-up to the war, which Trump launched without consulting Congress, making a case to the American people, or assembling allies, many of his aides believed that Trump was not taking seriously the risks and trade-offs involved, according to Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. (The fact that these aides have voiced none of these concerns publicly but said enough privately that the comments leaked later does not speak well for the Cabinet’s judgment or courage.)

Once the war began, Trump received updates that were screened and bowdlerized for him. He has long been inattentive to briefings—early in his first term, aides realized that he liked maps and graphics and would glaze over if given much information in text—but he has reportedly been starting his day off with a sizzle reel of stunning explosions rather than with hard info. These clips, which show the real prowess of the American military, did not convey the ways that the U.S. was losing the war on a strategic level. According to Time, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles became “concerned aides were giving the President a rose-colored view of how the war was being perceived domestically.” Trump was reportedly shocked at how easily Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, even though the military had warned of the possibility.

Although Trump’s erratic and horrifying social-media posts have absorbed much of the media’s attention of late, his live appearances haven’t done a lot to assure the public of his steadiness either. He unconvincingly told reporters that he had believed that a picture that depicted him as Christlike actually showed him as a doctor. Trump has never excelled at reading from a teleprompter, often coming off as stiff and bored, but his delivery has been especially rough in recent weeks. He seemed tired and unfocused delivering lines in his April 1 White House speech, has waffled on whether the action in Iran is or isn’t a “war,” and declared the war complete even as hostilities continued. Trump also said he wasn’t made aware of a curious press statement by First Lady Melania Trump, where she denied any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, before it was made.

Every president eventually feels trapped in a bubble. In 2014, an evidently claustrophobic Barack Obama reveled in the act of just walking to Chipotle from the White House. Other predecessors have complained about receiving heavily filtered information and feeling removed from the real world. The Biden administration raised new questions of whether the president was being hidden from the public and the press—and even from some aides—to obscure physical or mental decline.

Whatever the reasons for aides cloistering a president, the ramifications for democratic accountability are serious. If the president is not up to the task of governing, the public might understandably wonder if the person they elected is really in charge, or if unelected aides are in effect running the country. In 1974, worried about Richard Nixon’s drinking and paranoia, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger instructed the military not to deploy nuclear weapons without asking him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger first. This was on the one hand a reasonable precaution—the president was unstable—and, on the other hand, a scandalous one, because Americans had elected Nixon and not Schlesinger. The Biden and Trump administrations raise the same specter.

Trump, for better and worse, can’t be shut in as effectively as Biden could. For one thing, Biden’s cellphone number wasn’t in circulation among many reporters. Aides apparently didn’t consult Trump on how to handle the bizarre story of a FEMA official who claims to have teleported to Waffle House, but an understandably perplexed president learned of it anyway when CNN called him directly to ask about it.

While having some sources of information beyond one’s staff is generally good, the risk is that Trump’s sources aren’t good ones. As my colleague Jonathan Lemire reported last year, Trump has mostly stopped holding the rallies that he had used as a barometer of his base. Many people who are not reporters have access to the president’s phone number. And Trump has always been susceptible to misinformation, gravitating to sources that are conspiratorial or tell him what he wants to hear rather than what is true.

But if the president can’t handle reality, the problem is ultimately with him—not with the information he’s receiving. Aides’ desire to keep Trump in the dark is understandable, but it is also an affront to the constitutional system.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, April 21, 2026 11:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


People should be free to build gratifying fantasies free from unpleasant facts.

When I first wrote about Trump in the 2017 edition of The Death of Expertise, I was willing to believe that Trump’s political base did not hold him accountable for his ignorance and errors because they lacked the ability to see his errors as actual mistakes. At the time, I quoted psychologist David Dunning—who along with his colleague Justin Kruger discovered the Dunning-Kruger Effect—when he noted that “some voters, especially those facing significant distress in their life, might like some of what they hear from Trump, but they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes.”

Today, we have to reconsider that view. Many Americans who support Trump have doubled down on their loyalty, at levels that now suggest a cult-like following rather than political support.

In Trump (and other celebrities, such as Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), the American public has found public figures who indulge their paranoia about shadowy forces ruining their lives. Citizens feel they know these celebrities and can trust them. Social scientists call such attachments “parasocial relationships,” in which people feel a deep personal connection to famous people who, in the main, have no idea who they are. -- Tom Nichols, THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Second Edition [2024]

parasocial-relationships
https://www.findapsychologist.org/parasocial-relationships-the-nature-
of-celebrity-fascinations

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, April 21, 2026 11:50 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


‘The Right Amount of Crazy’

In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality.

By Fintan O’Toole

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-right-amount-of-crazy-
fintan-otoole/

In January, when The New York Times asked Donald Trump whether there were any limits on his global powers, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.” Since whatever morality he ever possessed has long since departed, the remaining question is whether he has also lost his mind. Given that, in the course of his war on Iran, he has chosen to present himself to the world as a genocidal maniac—posting on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”—the answer may seem all too obvious.

Yet to arrive at it we have to tease out the relationships that are always at the heart of his persona: the complex connections between performance and reality, method and madness, bombast and bombs. With Trump, these oppositions are never absolute. The borders between them are always porous. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that in Trump’s chaotic mind there lurks the Madman Theory, a belief that acting crazy is a rational strategy. Richard Nixon coined the phrase for his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, during the Vietnam War:

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

The belief that Trump has been following Nixon’s playbook in relation to Iran has been a staple of recent media analysis. It is certainly valid. Yet it raises a further question: Is it possible for someone to act the lunatic while actually being one? We are faced with a vastly more consequential version of a Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s novel, claiming to be crazy is taken as evidence of sanity. Likewise the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.

To get our bearings in this maze we might begin with Irving. He appears, shorn of a surname, in the book Tony Schwartz ghostwrote for Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987). While still at college, Trump has done his first deal, buying with his father and refurbishing an apartment complex in Cincinnati. He hires Irving to manage the project. Trump suspects that he is a thief and calls him “a short, fat, bald-headed guy with thick glasses and hands like Jell-O, who’d never lifted anything in his life beside a pen, and who had no physical ability whatsoever.”

But his saving grace is “an incredible mouth.” According to Trump, Irving would collect rents from the most recalcitrant tenants by putting on a show of frenzy:

He’d ring the doorbell, and when someone came to the door, he’d go crazy. He’d get red in the face, use every filthy word he could think of, and make every threat in the book. It was an act, but it was very effective: usually they paid up right then and there.

One day, while Irving was on his rounds, he knocked on a door, and a little ten-year-old girl answered. Irving said, “You go tell your father to pay his f—ing rent or I’m going to knock his ass off.”

Irving, says Trump, “left a very vivid impression on me.” Trump learned early on that screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls and making every threat in the book was a good way to get what he wanted. There would seem to be a clear path from Irving to the flamboyantly demented Trump of his Easter Sunday morning post: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

For Trump’s apologists, he is thus not a mad King Lear, an (almost) eighty-year-old monarch raving on the heath. He is a Hamlet who has chosen “to put an antic disposition on,” the better to achieve his purposes. There’s every reason to believe that this is the way Trump sees himself. William Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general in the latter part of his first term, recalls in his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another (2022), an occasion when Trump wished to make a public claim of vindication:

Then, studying me, with a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I am going to go and tweet about this.”

I glanced up with a look of discomfort. He smiled playfully. “Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?” he asked, looking at each of us one by one. We all looked blank. “Just the right amount of crazy,” he said.

Likewise, Nikki Haley recalled that when she was serving as his ambassador to the United Nations, Trump told her how to deal with the North Koreans: “Tell them you just talked to the president…. Make them think I’m crazy.” In 2017 Axios reported an exchange between Trump and his trade representative Robert Lighthizer, who was negotiating with South Korea: “I’ll tell the Koreans they’ve got 30 days,” Lighthizer said. Trump rebuked him: “No, no, no. That’s not how you negotiate. You don’t tell them they’ve got 30 days. You tell them, ‘This guy’s so crazy he could pull out any minute.’” In 2024 Trump told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he would not have to use military force to prevent a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, because President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—crazy.”

The conviction that putting on an antic disposition is a winning geopolitical strategy has a long history. Henry Kissinger articulated it in a lecture in Peshawar in 1962. In the cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union, he said,

the only way one can communicate one’s determination, I think, is by conducting a policy in which one indicates a high capacity for irrationality. What one has to do is prove that in certain situations one is likely to go out of control, and that regardless of what sober calculation would show one is simply so nervous that the gun is going to go off. A madman who is holding a hand grenade in his hand has a very great bargaining advantage.

In this theater of bluff, the president of the United States is Irving writ large. If he goes red in the face, uses every filthy word he can think of, and makes vile threats, he is in fact being coldly calculating and lucidly shrewd. According to this line of thinking, there is not just a gap between appearance and reality—the two are complete opposites. The rationale is that the higher the seeming capacity for irrationality, the more rational the president is because the more probable it is that the enemy will be terrified and make large concessions. By this logic, Trump’s genocidal ravings at Iran are proof that he really is, as he insists, a very stable genius.

The Chinese, of course, have a dismissive phrase of their own for the Madman Theory: paper tiger. Like all performances, the crazy act must be able to command at least a suspension of disbelief. In Trump’s case, his infinite hype produces diminishing returns of credibility. His warning in 2017 that “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” whose threats would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” was followed the next year by his declaration that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love” after exchanging letters. The paper tiger went into the shredder.

The odd thing, though, is that these two realities—that Trump is playing out his own version of the Madman Theory and that his act has long worn thin—seem to point toward the same apparent conclusion. The first appeals to his fans, the second to his detractors. But both suggest that there is only the show. Some think it’s a great show, some think it’s terrible. Yet the truth is that Trump is always acting in both senses. There is no border between pretense and practice, shadow and substance.

Shakespeare gives us more than Lear or Hamlet, real or feigned mental derangement. There is a third possibility. Titus Andronicus begins by pretending to be mad and then becomes so in reality. To translate this into the history of the American presidency, we need only return to Nixon. Just because you’ve invented and acted on the Madman Theory doesn’t mean you can’t go mad: Nixon’s paranoia, enemies lists, conspiracy theories, and seemingly drunken order to nuke North Korea do not speak of robust mental health. The Madman Theory, it seems, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Trump’s genocidal threats are a much madder version of the theory than anyone previously had in mind. They go against two of its basic requirements. When Kissinger set it out in 1962, he added that unfortunately, “given the public opinion of Western democracy, this is not a policy that can be conducted.” The Madman Theory, even when put into practice by Nixon, is a strictly limited form of coterie theater. The performance is only for hostile governments. It must be kept from one’s own citizens because public opinion matters; the leader of a democracy does not want his voters to think he has truly lost his marbles.

Second, Kissinger suggested that since there were such limits on democratically elected leaders’ use of the strategy, the alternative for the US was to transform its alliances “from what were in effect unilateral American guarantees” into “efforts of real cooperation to prevent threats to countries from being overrun.” The US can’t have its allies thinking that its president has gone crazy either. So it must instead offer them real cooperation in joint efforts to deter invaders.

Trump’s homicidal hysteria breaks both of these rules. It is not a private performance for the benefit of a highly select audience (in this case the members of the Iranian regime). It is a stadium spectacular, simulcast live to the whole world. It displays psychosis to American voters and to America’s allies. It sunders any common interest with friendly European and Anglophone nations. It is thus unmoored from the constraints either of democracy or of alliance.

This does not merely indicate “a high capacity for irrationality.” It is actually and wildly irrational. It makes a kind of sense only if one’s own voters and one’s supposed international allies are also legitimate targets of the mad threats, if they too are to be terrorized by the specter of the deranged emperor. Trump’s mad act has a logic only if the performer this time really sees both voters and allies as enemies to be overawed.

Trump told Barr that a good tweet has “the right amount of crazy.” His capacity for that kind of calibration has never been impressive: if the original benchmark is screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls, fine gradations are probably not in his skillset. But however skilled he may once have been, it is now obvious that he can no longer control the dosage. Threatening genocide is the wrong amount of crazy—wrong in itself but also wrong because it tells those at whom the threat is aimed that they have nothing left to lose. They may as well bring as many of their enemies down with them as they can.

It would be impertinent to offer a clinical diagnosis of Trump, though that is not a courtesy he has afforded others. He reportedly called his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “mentally retarded”; repeatedly cast doubt on whether Joe Biden was “mentally fit to be president”; said his chief of staff John Kelly “wasn’t mentally fit for the job”; claimed that “Kamala Harris doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL Debate against me”; and called his former national security adviser John Bolton a “total & unhinged WARMONGER, the red faced ‘boiler ready to explode’ was one of those very stupid voices that got us into the Middle East quicksand.”

But whatever its clinical definition, the political diagnosis of Trump’s form of madness was made a long time ago by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan:

The Passion, whose violence, or continuance maketh Madnesse, is either great Vaine-Glory; which is commonly called Pride, and Selfe-Conceipt…. Pride, subjecteth a man to Anger, the excesse whereof, is the Madnesse called RAGE, and FURY.

Or, in this case, Operation Epic Fury.

Fury, Hobbes wrote, arises when a belief that one is uniquely inspired clashes with the refusal of others to bend to this exceptional insight: “If there were nothing else that bewrayed their madnesse; yet that very arrogating such inspiration to themselves, is argument enough.” While sane people “would be unwilling the vanity and Extravagance of their thoughts…should be publiquely seen,” those in the grip of this delusion are all too happy to put them on display. Hobbes pointed out that if someone were to tell you that he “were God the Father,” you would require no further proof of madness. When Pope Leo XIV recently denounced “the delusion of omnipotence,” Trump replied by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus healing a sick man in a bed while a soldier and a nurse look on in awe. Trump is the Savior whom Leo is pledged to serve—the ultimate in one-upmanship.

Rage and fury are the words Shakespeare most often associates with madness. We know that as soon as Trump was elected in 2016, those Republicans who saw him up close began to dread the eruption of his unbridled temper. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in Peril (2021), the then speaker of the house Paul Ryan felt it necessary to read up on narcissistic personality disorder: “Ryan’s main takeaway: Do not humiliate Trump in public. Humiliating a narcissist risked real danger, a frantic lashing out if he felt threatened or criticized.”

This frantic lashing out has been described over and over by those who worked with Trump in the White House during his first administration. “I thought about Trump’s anger. I heard his voice screaming in my head,” recalled the loyal White House aide Cliff Sims. “Trump was railing about everyone at that time. He called Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell ‘a dirty bastard, that motherfucker,’” recalls the former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham in I’ll Take Your Questions Now (2021). The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley “was certain Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the [2020] election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.”

The relevant point about these maniacal outbursts is that they are not performative. They are not strategic enactments of the Madman Theory. They are merely the way he is. Grisham believed that Trump’s public rages were performative until she experienced them in private:

I was not prepared for the way he spoke to or yelled at people, which I know sounds crazy when you consider his Twitter account or even his interviews with the press. But when I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras, I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.

This fury—constantly compared by those who worked with him to the tantrums of a toddler—is, as Ryan realized, dangerous, and all the more so when allied to another aspect of his character: his loss of a connection to objective reality. Rage has to be controlled when it comes up against outside limitations, but there is a sense in which, for Trump, there is no outside. According to The Divider (2022), Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s history of Trump’s first term, John Kelly and “other top officials who served during the Trump administration came to believe that Trump was mentally ill, unable or unwilling to process basic information necessary to do his job, and dangerously uninformed.” Kelly himself “considered Trump a pathological liar, not just someone disconnected from reality but someone who did not even seem to understand that there was a reality other than what he decided it was.”

These, bear in mind, are testimonies from Trump’s first term, when he was a younger man and showed fewer signs of cognitive decline. The fury of thwarted narcissism and the lack of any sense of an external reality can only be more dangerous in a second term, when Trump is even more disinhibited, hearing only voices that, in all their sycophantic echoing of his own desires, might as well be inside his head.

The case for invoking the Constitution’s Twenty-Fifth Amendment and removing Trump from power is strong, and Trump himself joked about it during a cabinet meeting in late March. “I can’t say what we’re going to do, because if I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here for long. They’d probably—what is it called? The Twenty-Fifth Amendment?” Democrats in Congress have become much more willing to call openly for Trump’s ejection on the grounds of his mental incapacity to govern. But the same Republican obsequiousness that has made Trump’s madness ever more dangerous makes his removal a practical impossibility.

The madness, after all, is not just personal. It is structural. When the balance of power is lost and democratic accountability is replaced by a cult of the divinely inspired leader, the conditions that exacerbate derangement become the principles of governance. Writing of the Nixon White House, Arthur Schlesinger remarked:

In such conditions wish tended to rule fact and, in George McGovern’s phrase, government fell prey “to its own delusions and fantasies.” At the far end of this road lay the madness of totalitarian government, where leaders tried to remold reality by force of personality and terror.

Nixon fell, but the American republic itself fell prey to the delusion that the far end of that road could never be reached. The remolding of America and the world through the force of personality and terror is what Trump offered the American electorate in 2024, after the Madman Theory had been put into practice in the violent theater of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. When a majority of voters decided to accept that this was just the right amount of crazy, they would have been mad not to expect an ever deeper derangement.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, April 22, 2026 6:50 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump fought to keep the ballroom fundraising contract secret. Here’s what’s in it.

The agreement governing hundreds of millions in private donations was kept secret until a watchdog group sued and a judge ordered it disclosed.

By Jonathan Edwards, Dan Diamond

April 21, 2026 at 6:03 p.m. EDT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/21/trump-ballroom-dono
r-deal/

The Trump administration’s contract governing hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to build President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom shields donors’ identities, excludes the White House from conflict of interest protections and was disclosed only after a lawsuit and a judge’s order, records obtained by The Washington Post show.

The agreement establishing the legal and financial framework for the planned $400 million undertaking — the most significant change to the White House in decades — was signed in early October, less than two weeks before demolition crews started destroying the East Wing. Public Citizen, a government watchdog organization, sued to obtain the contract between the White House, the National Park Service and the Trust for the National Mall, the nonprofit managing donations for the project, and shared the document with The Post.

“The Trump administration’s failure to disclose this contract was flatly unlawful,” said Wendy Liu, a Public Citizen attorney and lead counsel on the lawsuit, filed after the Park Service and the Interior Department failed to fulfill a public records request for the document. “The American people are entitled to transparency over this multi-million-dollar project.”

The secrecy surrounding the contract mirrors the administration’s broader approach to the project. White House officials have declined to disclose the total amount raised, the identities of all donors or, until recently, basic details about the building’s design. Court documents show Trump knew he was going to tear down the East Wing at least two months before doing so, but he never told the public.

The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public.

“President Trump is working 24/7 to Make America Great Again, including his historic beautification of the White House, at no taxpayer expense,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement defending the administration’s process.

White House officials said not publicly posting the agreement was standard practice for contracts involving the executive residence, citing security concerns. They also said offering anonymity for donors was standard for significant projects and framed the use of private funds as a boon for taxpayers. The administration did not respond to questions about failing to respond to the public records request for the contract or fighting the release of the document in court. Trump has said that the administration has raised about $300 million for the project.

The contract resembles templates used by the Park Service for more routine fundraising partnerships — with several notable differences: Provisions peppered throughout the agreement prevent the signatories from revealing the identities of anonymous donors, and a review process for detecting conflicts of interest with the Park Service and Interior Department makes no mention of doing the same for the president, other White House officials or the 14 other executive departments he oversees.

White House ballroom fundraising agreement

Dozens of the project’s known donors — which include Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Google — collectively have billions of dollars in federal contracts before the administration. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) Critics have argued that allowing anonymous gifts to a sitting president’s signature project creates precisely the kind of conflict the contract itself states it seeks to prevent.

“This document reveals that anonymous donations are the heart of this agreement,” said Jon Golinger, a lawyer and public policy advocate with Public Citizen. “Who are these anonymous donors, and what are they hiding?”

Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of Baltimore who spent three years on a congressionally authorized commission scrutinizing wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the anonymity provisions potentially set up the Trump administration to block congressional inquiries into the project’s funding.

“If Congress knocks on the door, the White House is going to slam it shut and say, ‘You’re not allowed to know these donors,’” Tiefer said.

The National Park Service did not immediately respond to questions about the agreement. The Trust for the National Mall said the Park Service asked it to accept and manage private donations for the project and that it is “not involved in the fundraising, planning, design, contracting, or execution” of the ballroom, spokeswoman Julie Moore said in an email. Donations are subject to the same vetting process the Trust uses for other Park Service projects, and donor names are disclosed in its annual report, website and tax filings, she added.

Except those who don’t want to be.

“Some donors may wish to remain anonymous and we respect donor wishes, while in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations,” Moore said.

The Trust has performed a similar role on previous White House projects, including first lady Melania Trump’s Rose Garden restoration and tennis pavilion during her husband’s first term.

The contract excludes the White House from its conflict of interest review, which explicitly obligates the Trust and the Park Service to ensure that fundraising does not give rise to “an appearance of a loss of integrity or impartiality.” But the Executive Residence at the White House, the party responsible for identifying and referring donors to the Trust — and which the Trump administration has said in court filings is helping manage the overall ballroom project — is not required to face that scrutiny.

Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, called the agreement’s review process “nothing more than a sham,” because it mandates the Trust conduct a narrowly scoped conflict of interest examination while ignoring the vast majority of the federal government. Meanwhile, companies and individuals could be anonymously donating tens of millions of dollars as they stand to gain billion-dollar government contracts, want to avoid a Justice Department criminal investigation, or rid their companies of onerous labor or environmental regulations, she said.

The contract was signed as work on the ballroom project was already underway. Crews had begun clearing trees and foliage from the White House grounds in September. Twelve days after it was signed, demolition crews started tearing down the East Wing. The existence of the contract was not disclosed at the time. Trump, who says the ballroom is needed to host VIPs at larger functions, is pushing to finish it before the end of his second term in 2029.

Congressional Democrats have pressed the Trust for months to share more information about the project. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and colleagues sent a letter in January demanding to know how much money had been raised, whether donors had been promised special access or other perks, and whether the organization had internal controls to prevent preferential treatment. The Trust declined to disclose the amount raised but said it was adhering to all Park Service guidelines.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, demanded answers from dozens of ballroom donors and contractors about their involvement and questioned the “rapidly changing and secretive terms” of Trump’s planned ballroom. He also sent letters to several people who attended a White House dinner in October, which Trump held to honor ballroom donors. Blumenthal asked whether they had contributed and under what terms, noting that the administration had acknowledged it had not publicly identified all donors.

“At every turn, President Trump has sought to conceal the facts about his monstrous multimillion-dollar ballroom,” Blumenthal said in an statement to The Post. “His Administration has kept the contract under wraps, the identities of big dollar donors secret, and the American people in the dark about what big corporations have to gain by funding this boondoggle.”

Blumenthal, Warren and other Democrats have introduced legislation to ban anonymous donations for the ballroom and other projects on the White House grounds.

“There’s only one good explanation for why Trump’s ultra-wealthy ballroom donors want to stay anonymous: They have something to hide,” Warren told The Post.

A federal judge last month also criticized the Trump administration’s approach to soliciting private donors through its contract with the Park Service, calling it a “Rube Goldberg contraption” that allowed the president to avoid congressional oversight while building the ballroom. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ruled last month that construction must be halted on the ballroom until Congress authorizes the project. The Trump administration has appealed that ruling, and a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has allowed construction to continue while the case proceeds.

The White House has repeatedly declined to release the government’s contracts with the private companies designing, engineering and building the ballroom.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, April 23, 2026 8:02 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Cultifying the U.S. Military

By Paul Krugman / Apr 23, 2026 at 5:33 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cultifying-the-us-military

In February 1777 George Washington issued an order requiring that American soldiers be inoculated against smallpox:
Quote:
Finding the Small pox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our Army, I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated. This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.
It was a wise decision. Smallpox was a debilitating, often fatal disease. And Washington’s army, which put many farm boys with little previous exposure to infectious disease into crowded encampments, was especially vulnerable. As Washington said, the situation “seems to require the measure.”

It was, nonetheless, a bold, enlightened move. And why not? Washington, like many of the Founding Fathers, was very much a man of the Enlightenment.

By contrast, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who insists on being called the Secretary of War, is a bloodthirsty religious fanatic. He’s more comfortable with fascism than with America’s founding principles. And in another attempt to prove his manhood, he announced on Tuesday that he was ending the sissy requirement that members of the military be vaccinated against the flu.

This was, he said, to “restore freedom” to our armed forces:
Quote:
If you, an American warrior entrusted to defend this nation, believe that the flu vaccine is in your best interest, then you are free to take it. You shouldn’t. But we will not force you because your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable.
Even before we get into the practical damage Hegseth’s move will inflict, note the bizarre framing. Personal freedom is great and should be granted wherever appropriate. But one place where it isn’t and never has been appropriate is in the military. When Americans sign up to serve the nation under arms, they agree to temporarily forego many of the freedoms of civilian life. They must wear uniforms, not street fashion. They must eat Army or Navy food. They must salute officers and obey orders. They must, in other words, adhere to military discipline.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Hegseth is completely hypocritical on this subject. He says that your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable. But he has banned most beards from the U.S. military and cracked down on religious exemptions. After all, bearded men can’t be effective warriors:

Ulysses S. Grant and the American Civil War - Wikipedia

He has also demanded that members of the military lose weight, because he doesn’t like how they look:
Quote:
Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad and it’s not who we are.
But requiring that serving troops receive a vaccine that helps maintain their military effectiveness and also helps protect their comrades from infection? Tyranny!

This isn’t simply about vaccines and facial hair. These directives are part of a larger project, another step in Hegseth’s drive to cultify the US military.

What do I mean by cultifying the military? I mean creating an environment in which professional integrity, military discipline, and historical precedent are destroyed in service to the personality cult of Donald Trump and his enforcer, Pete Hegseth.

Think of these directives as loyalty tests. Hegseth can indulge his faux concerns about liberty while aligning himself with the science-hating right. If you are an officer concerned about the welfare of your troops and voice your concerns, you are out. Mention that the directive against beards is nonsensical and disproportionately harms black male soldiers with a common skin condition, then you are a woke weakling and are sent packing. If you are a general in possession of critical skills and hard-won experience, but served during the Biden administration, you will be unceremoniously fired.

Simply put, the method in Hegseth’s apparent madness is to destroy the integrity of the professional military corps through destructive and despotic behavior that drives out those – like Admiral Holsey – who hold to their principles.

And this should terrify every American. A powerful military always poses a potential threat to democracy. To keep that threat in check, the military must be presided over by an officer corps that understands that its duty is not to any one person, but to the Constitution and the rule of law. The U.S. military has been largely insulated from political influences since the nation’s founding. But Hegseth is trying to subvert that.

Gratuitously exposing service members to disease isn’t a small issue. But it’s much more important as a symptom of the ongoing effort to corrupt the military and make it a servant of extremist politics and politicians.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, April 23, 2026 3:52 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


President Donald Trump seems to have lost his marbles, according to some critics, but one former Trump official said the man was already in decline in his first term.

Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor on Wednesday took to task Nicole Wallace's point about Trump’s behavior getting bizarre, saying that he picked up on hints of breakdown during his "two and a half years inside the administration." "We would go in to talk in the Oval Office about matters of life and death. And there was always a weird non-sequitur, a complete distraction, unfocused, couldn't remember things. The guy was a basket case," said Taylor. "There's no better way to put it. There's no academic way to put it. He was a basket case. Any normal person would have sat there on the couch in the Oval Office and said, 'What's this guy taking? What's he on? He's acting in such a bizarre manner, given the subject. So that was always true.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/former-trump-official-says-pre
sident-was-already-a-basket-case/ar-AA21v6Xr

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, April 23, 2026 8:49 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


A Far-Right Court Allowed the Ten Commandments in Every Texas Classroom—in Direct Defiance of SCOTUS

By Alexis Romero and Mark Joseph Stern | April 23, 2026 4:53 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/supreme-court-fifth-circui
t-ten-commandments-religion-schools.html

On Tuesday, the nation’s most reactionary appeals court allowed Texas to install the King James version of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. By a 9–8 vote, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas did not violate the First Amendment by exposing students to the state’s chosen scripture all day, every day, gutting the constitutional separation of church and state in the process. What’s most remarkable about the decision, though, is not its support for theocracy, but its direct defiance of the Supreme Court. In 1980, justices struck down a law virtually identical to Texas’, forbidding states from placing the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. By flouting this precedent, the 5th Circuit effectively went rogue, daring the Supreme Court to check its brazen disobedience. SCOTUS’ conservative supermajority may be tempted to bless this ruling in light of its own rulings that have steadily allowed religion to encroach on public education. But doing so would come at a steep cost: imperiling its own authority to say what the law is.

Tuesday’s decision in Nathan v. Alamo Heights is the latest chapter in red states’ quest to put Christianity back in their public schools. So far, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas have enacted laws requiring prominent display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, with several more states poised to follow suit. Republican lawmakers crafted these statutes to test whether today’s Supreme Court will continue to shield students from sectarian indoctrination. For decades, the court held that Christianity in the classroom violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which bars the government from promoting or endorsing religion. It enforced this principle with extra vigilance in public schools, where children, as a captive audience, are uniquely susceptible to religious coercion.

In 1980’s Stone v. Graham, the justices squarely addressed a Kentucky law that, like Texas’, required the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom. They found the case so straightforward that they disposed of it summarily, without full briefing or oral argument. Kentucky’s goal, the court held, “is plainly religious in nature,” and the law’s likely effect would be “to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments.” Because it lacked any secular purpose, and would coerce students into religious observation, the statute obviously violated the establishment clause.

So how did the 5th Circuit justify upholding a law that’s basically identical to Kentucky’s? The Supreme Court, after all, has never overruled Stone. But in 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton, the conservative supermajority did say that the court had “long ago abandoned” a different establishment clause decision, Lemon v. Kurtzman. On Tuesday, the 5th Circuit reasoned that Stone cited Lemon, and Lemon had been “abandoned,” so it was free to disregard Stone altogether. As the majority put it: “With Lemon extracted, there is nothing left of Stone.”

There is a major problem with this bold assertion: The Supreme Court has instructed lower courts never to assume that a precedent has been silently overruled by later decisions that seem to conflict with it. Just three years ago, SCOTUS scolded a lower court for doing exactly that. It declared that if a Supreme Court precedent “has direct application in a case,” the lower court must “follow the case which directly controls, leaving to this court the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.” That’s true, SCOTUS explained, even if the precedent is in tension with “some other line of decisions,” or appears to have been “implicitly overruled” by a more recent case. Binding precedent still binds the lower courts, unless and until SCOTUS says otherwise.

The 5th Circuit defied this command on Tuesday, and its excuse for doing so was rice-paper-thin. The majority insisted that Kennedy overruled not just Lemon but every case that relied upon it. Kennedy, though, did not even formally overrule Lemon. It merely stated that, as a descriptive matter, the court no longer applies it. Nor did the Supreme Court in Kennedy purport to overturn every decision that relied on Lemon; to the contrary, it expressly acknowledged and distinguished several such cases as good law. Even if Kennedy did kill off Lemon, though, it does not follow that every decision built on Lemon must fall, too. Many of these rulings—including Stone itself—wove Lemon together with other First Amendment principles, like the prohibition against religious coercion in public education. These decisions may well stand on their own, and lower courts have no license to jump the gun and declare them “implicitly overruled.”

In ignoring precedent, the 5th Circuit has put Texas students and parents in a difficult position. Texas is one of the most diverse states in the country. But now, every public school in Texas’ multicultural society must prominently display the tenets of one religion (Christianity). Imagine a Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim parent who enrolls their child in public school and objects to this display. That parent now must decide to either remove their child to some private school, if they can afford it, or instruct their child to ignore a classroom display that goes against their beliefs.

A parent’s prerogative to control their child’s moral education is a right the Supreme Court has recently claimed to care a lot about. In last term’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court struck down a Maryland public school lesson plan under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. This curriculum involved storybooks featuring queer and gender-nonconforming characters. The conservative supermajority ruled that parents who felt morally opposed to LGBTQ+ people have a First Amendment right to shield their children from queerness by opting out of those lesson plans. Even though this was a public school environment that’s supposed to teach children about a society’s wide range of identities, the mere presence of queer people was deemed to be so insulting that the Supreme Court declared parents must be allowed to remove their children from the classroom.

A few months later, the Supreme Court took their love for parental rights even further in a case about gender transition and pronouns in California schools, Mirabelli v. Bonta. The state had allowed public school students to use their preferred pronouns and prevented educators from outing transgender students to their parents. The Supreme Court found this anti-outing policy unconstitutional, granting parents a religious exemption that forced schools to disclose their children’s gender identity even without the child’s permission. A trans student’s right to feel safe and welcome at school, the court held 6–3, had to yield to a parent’s right to oppose their transgender identity.

If it’s true that parental rights are so important, then the 5th Circuit has to be wrong in upholding the Texas Ten Commandments law. The court tried to downplay this point by saying that it is just a “poster” and therefore lacks any coercive effect. But posters exist in educational settings so that they can educate. This is not a photo of a kitten saying “Believe in yourself!” A reproduction of a major religious text is bound to have an impact on the classroom experience. What happens when the first student asks a question about that large poster on the wall? If the teacher answers in a manner that showcases approval of the Ten Commandments, won’t the student feel pressured to agree? Or what if the teacher tells the student, as the 5th Circuit suggests, to simply ignore the poster? Could the state then punish the teacher for showing “anti-Christian” bias? Ultimately, what the 5th Circuit misleadingly treats as a mere poster becomes an inroad for the government to impose beliefs on both students and teachers. As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton put it himself: “The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.”

The Supreme Court’s penchant for parental rights can’t be reconciled with the 5th Circuit’s blessing of a Christian religious display in schools. As the dissenters pointed out, parents who don’t want their children subjected to perhaps the most important symbol of a particular religion’s teachings must have the same rights as anti-trans parents. Of course, the court could just as easily ignore this contradiction in the same way it’s done in the past, by only turning the screws of judicial scrutiny tight when Christian values are at risk, and looking the other way when people of other faiths are mistreated.

The conservative supermajority may be inclined to do exactly that, especially given its ongoing infusion of Christianity into state education over the last decade. But rewarding the 5th Circuit would be a perilous invitation to further insubordination. If the supermajority blesses the 5th Circuit’s gambit here, it will invite every other lower court to disregard past rulings and dare the justices to call them out. Given how fast and loose the justices have played with their own precedent, it is no surprise that the 5th Circuit thinks it can get away with this challenge to SCOTUS’ supremacy. But a court that tolerates such defiance eventually forfeits the right to demand obedience.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

YOUR OPTIONS

NEW POSTS TODAY

USERPOST DATE

OTHER TOPICS

DISCUSSIONS
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
Thu, April 23, 2026 20:49 - 4523 posts
Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
Thu, April 23, 2026 20:35 - 338 posts
Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Thu, April 23, 2026 19:49 - 10050 posts
In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
Thu, April 23, 2026 19:28 - 7041 posts
Multiculturalism
Thu, April 23, 2026 17:56 - 68 posts
Israel lobby vetoes US gov selection
Thu, April 23, 2026 15:55 - 29 posts
Space, the final frontier
Thu, April 23, 2026 15:41 - 36 posts
Why does nobody in America use public transport
Thu, April 23, 2026 14:41 - 38 posts
Amateur Futurists Check In Here!
Thu, April 23, 2026 14:39 - 38 posts
Countdown Clock Until Vladimir Putins' Rule Ends
Thu, April 23, 2026 14:38 - 183 posts
The Islamic Way Of War
Thu, April 23, 2026 14:36 - 76 posts
Do You Have a Thinking Problem?
Thu, April 23, 2026 14:33 - 166 posts
 VIEW MORE TOPICS 

FFF.NET SOCIAL