REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, May 6, 2026 06:55
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VIEWED: 143656
PAGE 91 of 92

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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Tuesday, April 14, 2026 7:38 AM

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Wednesday, April 22, 2026 6:50 PM

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Saturday, April 25, 2026 10:41 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Dreams for a Battleship Led to His Navy Secretary’s Ouster

The Navy secretary, John Phelan, was supposed to deliver the first of the president’s ships by 2028. The timeline was nearly impossible.

By Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper | April 23, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/trump-navy-secretary.ht
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President Trump wanted one thing, more than anything else, from his secretary of the Navy, John Phelan: a new class of battleships.

“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest and by far — 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Mr. Trump boasted at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate and resort in Florida a few days before Christmas. Mr. Phelan, a billionaire investor who has a home near the club, stood next to the president as he made the announcement.

Mr. Phelan’s job was to deliver the first of Mr. Trump’s battleships by 2028.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump fired Mr. Phelan, who had struggled to come up with a plan to deliver the ships on the nearly impossible timeline that Mr. Trump has demanded, senior defense and administration officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Mr. Phelan is the first service secretary to be forced from the Defense Department during this administration, though he is far from the only senior Pentagon official to be dismissed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals and admirals over the past year, including the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, earlier this month. Mr. Hegseth has also butted heads with the secretary of the Army, Daniel P. Driscoll, over promotions and a host of other issues.

The churn of senior Pentagon officials at a time when the U.S. military is engaged in war with Iran has alarmed top Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

The Pentagon did not respond to questions regarding the circumstances surrounding Mr. Phelan’s dismissal. Mr. Phelan could not immediately be reached for comment.

The breaking point for Mr. Phelan, who often said that he and Mr. Trump texted and talked on the phone regularly, came in the last two weeks as the president’s frustration over Mr. Phelan’s management of his prized battleship program grew and Mr. Phelan’s enemies in the Pentagon, including Mr. Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen A. Feinberg, mounted a campaign to force him out.

Earlier this month, Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Feinberg told Mr. Trump that the Navy secretary was not a team player and needed to go, military officials said. Mr. Trump called Mr. Phelan to talk about his poor relationship with other leaders in the Pentagon.

Mr. Feinberg and Mr. Hegseth had recently seized some decision-making authority from Mr. Phelan, tapping a three-star admiral to oversee the Navy’s submarine portfolio and having him report directly to Mr. Feinberg.

That left Mr. Phelan with oversight of a major investment in new ships that Mr. Trump has called a “golden fleet,” built around the president’s beloved battleship program.

Presidents rarely pay close attention to military procurement, but Mr. Trump has spoken repeatedly about his plans for a new “Trump-class” battleship. In a February speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., Mr. Trump insisted that he had helped design the new class of ships that bear his name.

“I put a little more spirit in the hull,” Mr. Trump told the troops. “I want that ship to look gorgeous, you know.”

For Mr. Trump, the ships recalled “Victory at Sea,” a documentary television series that ran in the 1950s and touted the role that battleships and other Navy vessels played in World War II.

“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he mused to reporters in January when talking about the new battleships. “What a great thing that is to watch!”

Mr. Phelan played a prominent role in selling Mr. Trump on the new ships and his ambitious plans for revitalizing the U.S. Navy’s fleet and the U.S. shipbuilding industry.

In his confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Phelan said that the president often texted him late at night to ask him about “rusty ships or ships in a yard” and what Mr. Phelan was going to do about them. Before the Navy settled on its plans for the Trump-class battleship, Mr. Phelan wooed the president to the idea by showing oil paintings of some of the service’s great battleships from earlier eras, defense officials said.

In its $1.5 trillion defense budget, released earlier this week, the Trump administration is asking for $65.8 billion for shipbuilding, the second-largest shipbuilding budget proposal since 1955, according to Congressional Budget Office data.

The Navy is also projecting that it will be asking for $17 billion in fiscal year 2028 to start construction on the first of the Trump class, Navy officials said.

But senior defense officials said the program, along with Mr. Trump’s ambitious plans for his golden fleet, was marred by problems. The U.S. shipbuilding industry has nowhere near the capacity to build a technologically advanced battleship of the sort Mr. Trump is envisioning in the next few years, senior military officials said.

The Trump administration has failed over the last 16 months to nominate anyone to serve as assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition — who is supposed to oversee the Navy’s weapons programs. And the Navy’s civilian work force, which plays a critical role in developing and testing new warships, has been devastated by cuts and early retirements, military officials said.

In the days after Mr. Trump announced his plans for the new battleships, defense experts raised questions about whether they would ever be built.

“The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion,” wrote Mark F. Cancian, an expert on military budgeting with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail.”

The ship would take “years to design,” Mr. Cancian noted. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

In Mr. Trump’s imagination the new warship would be massive, weighing as much as 40,000 tons, and would be packed with new high-tech weapons, like lasers, hypersonic missiles and electric rail guns, most of which are still in development and years from being deployed.

In recent weeks, it had become clear to Mr. Phelan that the Navy and the U.S. shipbuilding industry did not have the ability to deliver on Mr. Trump’s vision. Mr. Phelan recently suggested to Mr. Trump that the Navy might have to rely on European shipyards to deliver the battleships on the ambitious timeline Mr. Trump was demanding, senior military and administration officials said.

Mr. Trump rejected the suggestion.

In his December news conference, announcing his plans for the battleships, Mr. Trump had vowed that the vessels — “the largest battleship in the history of the world ever built” — would be made in the United States with U.S. steel.

“We’re going to restore America as a major shipbuilding power,” he said.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth agreed that the Navy needed new leadership, officials said, and the president asked Mr. Hegseth to handle the resignation.

On Wednesday, Mr. Phelan heard he was being fired and went to the White House to see Mr. Trump, the officials said. He never saw him, but the president later phoned him to confirm the news, the officials added.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump wrote a message on social media that seemed designed to salve his fellow billionaire’s feelings.

“John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”

Maggie Haberman and Adam Entous contributed to this report.

Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Times.

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.

A version of this article appears in print on April 25, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Demand for Trump Warship Doomed Navy Chief.

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

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Monday, April 27, 2026 6:55 AM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump’s Pardon Economy

For some wealthy offenders, clemency is just a golf game—or a million-dollar plate at Mar-a-Lago—away.

By Ruth Marcus | April 27, 2026

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-pardon-eco
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“I have great respect for you,” Donald Trump told Rod Blagojevich. “I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don’t give up. But, Rod, you’re fired.” It was April, 2010, week four of the third season of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” and Blagojevich, the pugnacious former governor of Illinois, had bungled the assignment: to design a promotional campaign for a new Harry Potter exhibit at Universal Studios. In truth, Blagojevich had bigger things to worry about. He was broke—hence the “Celebrity Apprentice” gig. More worrisome, he was about to stand trial on corruption charges, for, among other things, trying to profit from naming Barack Obama’s replacement in the Senate. Blagojevich was ultimately convicted and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He served eight of them, until Trump, in his first term as President, commuted his sentence. Blagojevich, a Democrat, had launched a lobbying blitz and received support from Jesse Jackson, Rudy Giuliani, and the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz. A full pardon came later, at the start of Trump’s second term. The weekend after the Inauguration, the President “called me on a Saturday night to say he’s gonna pardon me,” Blagojevich said. Speaking with me recently, he recalled his “Celebrity Apprentice” appearance with glee. “That’s the great miracle of the whole thing—if I don’t do that television show, then President Trump doesn’t become the only President in American history to have fired and freed the same guy,” he said.

Now, in an only-in-Trump’s-America turn, Blagojevich has become a pardon lobbyist. His client is Anne Pramaggiore, who was once one of the most prominent women in Chicago: the C.E.O. of Commonwealth Edison, the state’s largest utility; the chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; and a benefactor of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the Chicago Urban League. In January, Pramaggiore reported to a federal prison in Marianna, Florida, to serve a two-year sentence for her role in a scheme to provide no-show jobs to associates of Michael Madigan, the long-serving speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives and, before his own conviction on corruption charges, perhaps the most influential politician in the state. At the time, Pramaggiore was appealing her conviction, and she stood a reasonable chance of winning. (A Supreme Court ruling had wiped out the basis for part of the conviction, and the foundation for the remaining charges was shaky.) But, in Trump 2.0, the courts are just one route to freedom, and not necessarily the swiftest. So Pramaggiore had also turned to lobbyists in the hope of a Presidential intervention, eventually paying them a total of nearly five hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred and thirty thousand went to Blagojevich, according to federal lobbying reports.

In several months of reporting on pardons during the second Trump Administration, I reached out to dozens of lawyers, lobbyists, pardon recipients, and Administration officials, most of whom declined to be named, if they responded at all. Not Blagojevich, who returned my phone call with alacrity. “Put me on the record, because Anne Pramaggiore is one thousand per cent innocent,” Blagojevich insisted when we first spoke, in late February. “She’s a victim of a terrible injustice, inflicted on her by a system in Illinois that’s dirty, rotten, and corrupt.” (Pramaggiore was indicted in November, 2020, during Trump’s first Administration, and his second Administration has defended the conviction on appeal.)

In pursuit of clemency for Pramaggiore, Blagojevich said, he met with multiple players in the world of pardons under Trump: Ed Martin, the Stop the Steal activist who was installed in the position of pardon attorney after his nomination to be the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia tanked; Alice Johnson, who was named to the newly created role of White House pardon czar a half-dozen years after Trump, during his first term, commuted her life sentence, for cocaine trafficking, at the behest of Kim Kardashian; and Sean Hayes, a former Republican congressional staffer, who oversees pardons as deputy White House counsel. The ultimate decider, of course, is Trump himself. “We’re trying to build a coalition of support to bring this to President Trump’s attention,” Blagojevich told me. “It’s not so easy. He’s the busiest person in the world.” To make the case for Pramaggiore, Blagojevich brought in Dershowitz, a Trump confidant. “The two of us, maybe, potentially, can at one point go see President Trump and talk to him about this, when the timing’s right,” Blagojevich said.

Before Blagojevich could get in to see Trump, Pramaggiore’s case took an extraordinary turn. On April 14th, it was argued before the federal appeals court in Chicago; that day the panel of judges granted Pramaggiore a new trial and ordered her released right away. For Blagojevich, though, the pardon effort isn’t over. He is hopeful that Trump will still intercede. “I would ask that he does for her what he did for me,” Blagojevich said on a phone call after Pramaggiore’s release.

Unlike his predecessors, who tended to delay dispensing pardons until their final months in the White House, Trump plunged into the process in the first hours of his second term. “Most Presidents sit there and allow injustices to linger while innocent people are stuck in prison, or people who may have done wrong, who’ve been over-sentenced, are treated mercilessly and have to sit and wait,” Blagojevich said. “President Trump is very different. He sees something wrong, and he works to get it done and undo the wrong.”

Under previous Presidents, pardon seekers were expected to wait at least five years after serving their sentences and to demonstrate remorse for their actions. With Trump, no wait—and no remorse—is required. Nor is conducting a previously standard F.B.I. background investigation. On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, Trump made good on a campaign pledge to pardon the January 6th defendants. Calling them “our great hostages,” Trump pardoned around fifteen hundred of them, effectively erasing the largest investigation in the history of the Justice Department. One of those pardoned was serving a twenty-year sentence for blasting bear spray into the mask of a police officer and using a crutch to bash another officer in the head. Another pardoned rioter, sentenced to twelve and a half years, stole a Taser and shocked an officer with it twice, giving him a heart attack. The next day, Trump fulfilled another campaign promise: to pardon Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online black market Silk Road, who was convicted of distributing narcotics and conspiring to launder money, and was given two life sentences and forty years. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

Trump’s first-term pardons were focussed, in part, on undoing the work of the special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation into the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia plagued his Presidency. Trump pardoned his former national-security adviser Michael Flynn after Flynn pleaded guilty—twice—to lying to the F.B.I. about a conversation with the Russian Ambassador during Trump’s first Presidential transition. He pardoned his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort after Manafort’s conviction for, among other things, hiding millions of dollars in offshore accounts and failing to register as a foreign agent for Ukraine. Trump pardoned his longtime ally Roger Stone, who was convicted of witness tampering and lying to Congress, and he pardoned the former White House strategist Steve Bannon before Bannon stood trial for siphoning funds from a campaign to build a border wall.

As with much else involving Trump’s two Presidencies, his first-term performance appears restrained in retrospect. During the first year of his first term, Trump granted a single pardon and commuted a single sentence. Similarly, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton issued no pardons or commutations during their first year in office. Trump, in his first full year back in power, dispensed eighty-eight pardons and twenty-three commutations—not including the January 6th rioters or seventy-seven individuals preëmptively pardoned for any crimes they may have committed during the 2020 election. The theme of the second-term pardons has been rectifying the purported weaponization of the Justice Department under Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland. Trump “was very clear when he came into office that he was most interested in looking at pardoning individuals who were abused and used by the Biden Department of Justice and were over-prosecuted by a weaponized D.O.J.,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has explained.

Two princesses talking.

“You can kiss a frog and turn him into a prince, but you can’t stop that prince from turning into a dud who wastes two years of your twenties.”

Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai

Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University who specializes in Presidential clemency, told me, of Trump’s use of the pardon power, “It’s part of his carrot-and-stick approach—you’re his enemy, he’s going to prosecute you. You’re Jim Comey, you’re Tish James, he’s going to investigate your mortgage application. He’s going to do everything he can to bring you down. Whereas, if you’re a January 6th person, you support his family’s crypto business, you do anything to support him, he will give you a pardon. We’ve never seen anything like this before in history.”

The pardon power was intended, the Supreme Court has said, to promote “the benign prerogative of mercy.” Some of Trump’s pardon recipients appear worthy—the White House pointed me to, among others, a sex-trafficking victim who’d been convicted in an extortion scheme run by her abusers—but, in one instance after another, this President has directed clemency toward political allies, celebrities, and fraudsters. Trump commuted the sentence of the former congressman George Santos (“Good luck George, have a great life!” the President wrote on Truth Social) and pardoned the reality-TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who’d been convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion. Matt Gaetz, the disgraced former congressman and a failed nominee for Attorney General, used his show on One America News Network to press Trump to pardon the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking in what Trump labelled a “Biden setup.” The Trump confidante Laura Loomer weighed in on behalf of Rabbi Joseph Schwartz, a New Jersey nursing-home owner convicted of defrauding the government of thirty-eight million dollars by failing to pay employment taxes. Trump pardoned both men last year. (In one astonishing twist, a lobbyist named Joshua Nass, who received a hundred thousand dollars as part of the effort to secure the Schwartz pardon, was arrested in March and charged with having “plotted the violent extortion of one of his own clients,” apparently Schwartz, who Nass claimed had failed to pay him an additional five hundred thousand dollars.)

Trump has pardoned people charged by his own Justice Department. One such instance, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, followed a golf outing with the former congressman Trey Gowdy, who asked Trump to help him move up a meeting with Justice Department prosecutors and ended up with a full pardon for his client. In a first for any President, Trump has granted clemency to corporations, pardoning one company and commuting the sentence of another. He has even purported to have pardoned an individual convicted of a state crime: Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in 2020. Martin, the pardon attorney, had promised in a post on X, “Tina, we are coming for you, M’am.”

Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was reportedly blindsided by the pardon of Hernández and attempted to put a pause on pardons late last year. She was said to be concerned about the haphazard nature of the process and the huge sums being paid to lobbyists and attorneys. “Susie does not like this,” one person familiar with the pardon process told me. “Pardons are rarely a good news story.” The flow has slowed recently: this year, there have been eight commutations and twenty pardons but none, as of late April, since February.

For pardon supplicants, the surest way to the President’s signature is to tap into his sense of victimhood. As one lawyer who works on pardon cases explained to me, “Is this a prosecutor that the President hates? Is this a judge the President hates? Everything about him seems to be personal, and so you need to take that approach and view this as personal grievances. He doesn’t really care about your case, but he’s happy to exercise his personal grievances through your case.”

Trump’s pardon spree may have happened in any event, but it was facilitated, as a political matter, by Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter. During Biden’s truncated reëlection campaign, he repeatedly promised that he would not pardon Hunter, who, in June, 2024, was convicted of illegally possessing a gun and went on to plead guilty to failing to pay income taxes. Not long after Trump was elected, Biden abandoned his pledge, asserting that his son had been “selectively and unfairly prosecuted” by Biden’s own Justice Department. The pardon was remarkably broad: it covered any offenses that Hunter “may have committed” during an eleven-year period. Biden followed up with preëmptive pardons for his siblings and their spouses, who were not under investigation. He also took the unusual step of issuing preëmptive pardons to current and former officials who were potential targets of the incoming Administration, including the former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, and members and staff of the House January 6th committee, including the former representative Liz Cheney. Liz Oyer, who served as pardon attorney under Biden, told me that, in her view, Biden’s actions “laid the groundwork for this narrative that Trump has tried to spin—that this is just what all Presidents do.” (According to the Journal, Trump recently promised pardons to “everyone who has come within two hundred feet of the Oval.” Leavitt suggested this was a joke.)

The role of the pardon attorney is to review requests for pardons and commutations and transmit recommendations to the President. During the Biden years, Oyer told me, the work had been “very frustrating.” Thousands of people were serving lengthy prison sentences under mandatory-minimum laws that Biden had championed during his Senate days, but Oyer found his Administration reluctant to intervene. “There was a lack of political courage in the White House,” she said.

The frustrations of working with the Trump Administration were of a different magnitude. Oyer says that she was never told, despite repeated requests, whom she should deal with in the White House counsel’s office. She recalled that she learned about the January 6th pardons from a news alert. “I started getting frantic calls from people in the Bureau of Prisons saying, ‘We’re being told we need to release four hundred people tonight, and facilities are reporting that families are coming in their cars and knocking on doors.’ ”

The Trump Justice Department assigned Oyer a task outside the office’s normal scope. It wanted her to look into restoring gun rights to individuals whose previous convictions made them ineligible to possess firearms. Oyer duly assembled a roster, which was eventually whittled down to nine people who had already been vetted and had committed nonviolent crimes. Then she was asked to add a tenth: Mel Gibson. The actor had pleaded no contest, in 2011, to a domestic-violence misdemeanor for assaulting his ex-girlfriend; she said she’d been left with two broken teeth and a black eye. According to Oyer, an aide to Todd Blanche—then the Deputy Attorney General, now the acting Attorney General—told her, “We have to grant relief to Mel.” In fact, Oyer’s assent wasn’t needed; the Attorney General has the authority to take this action. “I believe that my recommendation was sought because it would give a veneer of legitimacy to what was really a political favor for a friend of the President,” Oyer told me. In early March, she submitted a memo that included Gibson as a possible candidate but declined to recommend restoring his gun rights. That very day, she was pulled out of a meeting by her deputy and told that security officers were waiting in her office to present her with termination papers. The following month, the Justice Department announced that Gibson’s gun rights would be reinstated. (A senior Justice Department official denied that Oyer was pressured to recommend Gibson or that she was fired because of the incident.)

“Trump has totally upended the clemency system as we know it,” Oyer said. “There is no path forward for regular people who have merit-based claims to clemency. And, at the same time, there’s a booming pardon economy where—if you’ve got inside access or if you have the money to spend to get the right lawyer or lobbyist in place—you can essentially buy a pardon. If you can pay to attend one of these million-dollar-a-plate dinners at Mar-a-Lago, or if you can make a gigantic donation to Trump’s political interests, or if you can fund his crypto business, then you can get a pardon.”

Oyer notes that Trump’s pardons take a financial toll, in addition to a moral one. On her Substack, “Lawyer Oyer,” she maintains a running total of the pardons’ cost to the federal government, in fines and forfeitures, and to victims, in restitution. Trump’s pardons, Oyer estimates, have erased at least one and a half billion dollars owed by those convicted of crimes.

The White House insists that money plays no role in Trump’s pardons. The evidence suggests otherwise. “If you’re a wildly rich guy who’s looking for a pardon, giving a contribution is probably the single best way to elevate your brand,” one Republican lobbyist told me. In 2023, Trevor Milton, the founder of an electric-and-hydrogen-vehicle startup called Nikola, was sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding investors; his supposedly “fully functioning” prototype had been towed to the top of a hill and filmed rolling down the slope. Trump’s “pardon of innocence,” as Milton called it, not only excused him from serving time (he had been free on bail while appealing the conviction) but relieved him of having to pay restitution to those he defrauded, a sum that federal prosecutors claimed amounted to more than six hundred and sixty million dollars. “There was real loss to real people who listened to Mr. Milton and invested in Nikola because of what they heard from him,” the U.S. district judge overseeing Milton’s case said.

Before the 2024 election, Milton had contributed relatively small sums to political candidates. He gave fifteen hundred dollars to Trump during the 2016 campaign cycle, a thousand in the 2020 cycle, and ten thousand in 2022. In the fall of 2024, while Milton was appealing the conviction, he and his wife, Chelsey, contributed more than $3.6 million to Trump and other Republican candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission records. The Miltons also gave nearly a million dollars to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., after he endorsed Trump. Milton—who had been represented for years by Brad Bondi, the brother of the former Attorney General Pam Bondi—received a pardon from Trump in March, 2025. (A spokesman for Milton said that Brad Bondi was “not involved in any form or fashion in the pardon process.”) “They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for President,” Trump said then. When the President called Milton to inform him of the pardon, Milton recalled, Trump told him, “You’re clean, you’re cleaner than a baby’s bottom, and you’re cleaner than I am, Trevor.”

Today, Milton is the C.E.O. of SyberJet Aircraft, an Arizona-based company, which claims that a new nine-seat jet will be the fastest of its kind. (“SyberJet is pushing the limits of light jet aviation in ways no other manufacturer is,” the company’s website says.) I wrote to Milton to ask about his pardon and his ramped-up political giving. “I was never offered a pardon until I received it,” he wrote in response. “Never bought a pardon. I never offered to donate for a pardon. I was never asked to donate.” Shortly afterward, the Journal reported on a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign that SyberJet was conducting, which included sponsoring the lavish SyberJet Lounge at the Kennedy Center. “I walk into meetings now, and I’ll get high fives from the most wealthy people in the world,” Milton said. “They’re, like, ‘Welcome to the club. You can withstand the fire. We can trust you now.’ ”

Another recent Trump pardon beneficiary is Paul Walczak, from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, whose family owned nursing homes. On November 15, 2024, ten days after Trump’s reëlection, Walczak pleaded guilty to failing to pay withholding taxes for his employees. Prosecutors argued that he should face a sentence of between five and six years. According to their sentencing memorandum to the judge, Walczak “used the funds to enrich himself,” purchasing a two-million-dollar yacht and spending corporate funds at Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier, and Saks. In addition, the memorandum continued, “when the IRS persisted—refusing to allow him to simply walk away with the millions of dollars he took from his employees under the guise of complying with the tax code—the Defendant tried to hide his personal wealth by starting a new business under the name of his then twenty-year-old daughter.”

After pleading guilty, Walczak agreed to pay the taxes and asked for leniency. But, prosecutors said, “awarding a lesser sentence to a defendant simply because he is wealthy enough to pay back millions of dollars after being caught is not justice.” Rather, they wrote, “to maintain confidence in the justice system, it must be the case that nobody can pay his or her way out of jail.”

Two people walking past shop windows.

“I prefer to walk down whichever side of the street has the most shopwindows I can admire my own reflection in.”

Cartoon by William Haefeli

Unbeknownst to prosecutors, Walczak was maneuvering to do just that. Even before Trump returned to office, Walczak’s lawyers had prepared a clemency petition that cited, among other things, the millions of dollars that Walczak’s mother, a conservative activist named Elizabeth Fago, had raised for Trump and for Republican causes. During the 2020 campaign, the petition noted, she’d hosted a Trump fund-raiser, attended by Donald Trump, Jr., where a diary stolen from Biden’s daughter Ashley was circulated. The petition highlighted support for Walczak from Trump, Jr., and his then girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle. It made the argument, sure to appeal to Trump but unsupported by the evidence in the case, that prosecutors had singled out Walczak because of his mother’s Republican ties. And, to bolster Fago’s claim that her son was being punished for her political activity, it noted Biden’s assertion that he’d been compelled to pardon Hunter because of selective prosecution by his Justice Department.

As Walczak’s sentencing date approached, Fago received an invitation to a million-dollar-per-person fund-raiser for MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC. The “candlelight dinner,” to be held on April 4, 2025, at Mar-a-Lago, would feature President Trump. Fago’s largest previous single donation had been a hundred thousand dollars to the Republican National Committee, in 2002, and her political giving for the 2024 election cycle totalled a little more than six hundred dollars. MAGA Inc. reported receiving a million-dollar check from Fago on April 3rd. The next evening, she seized the moment to make her case to Trump, according to a person familiar with the event. Afterward, the President spoke to Wiles and his top fund-raiser, Meredith O’Rourke, issuing instructions: “Get it done.” The following week, Walczak was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and ordered to pay more than four million dollars in restitution. But before he had to report to prison the White House announced the pardon. The White House did not respond to a detailed request for comment about the pardoning of Walczak and others. Fago, through an attorney, declined to comment, and Walczak didn’t respond to an e-mail. An Instagram post by Walczak’s half brother showed Walczak celebrating with family members. In one photo, Fago has wrapped her arms around her beaming son. He is wearing a red baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Make Paul Great Again.”

To avoid concentrating too much power in any single branch of government, the architects of the Constitution crafted an intricate system of checks and balances. Pardons, derived from the British monarch’s ancient “prerogative of mercy,” represent a deliberate exception. Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 provides that the President “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” As the Supreme Court described it in an 1866 case, the pardon power “extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency or after conviction and judgment.”

For a power so sweeping, the President’s pardon authority received little attention during the debates over the Constitution. The first two draft proposals did not include a pardon power; that came later, as part of a plan proposed by Alexander Hamilton. “Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed,” Hamilton argued in Federalist No. 74. “The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” He and others posited that a single individual, the President, would wield the pardon power more responsibly than if authority—and therefore blame for bad decisions—were spread more widely.

The delegates at the Constitutional Convention, well aware of abuses of pardons under the English monarchy, worried about the potential for corruption. One of them, Roger Sherman, suggested that the Senate be required to concur in grants of clemency; he received support from only his home state of Connecticut. Toward the end of debate, Edmund Randolph, Virginia’s governor, moved unsuccessfully to bar pardons in cases of treason, expressing concern that the President “may himself be guilty” and that the “Traytors may be his own instruments.” (A counter-argument was that impeachment would protect against such abuses.) In hindsight, the critics of untrammelled pardon authority had a point. The President “ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself,” George Mason argued at the Virginia ratifying convention, in 1788. “It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?”

On May 29, 1865, Andrew Johnson granted pardons to most former Confederates, an act that helped restore them to political power and frustrated the goals of Reconstruction. But thousands, including high-ranking officers, were at first excluded from the mass amnesty, so Johnson’s tenure also featured the emergence of “pardon brokers,” who promised to help desperate Confederates seeking to recover property seized by Union forces. The typical fee was a hundred and fifty dollars. The Johnson White House insisted that such services had no effect. “The President declares that any intimation that money can assist a petition is a gross insult of his whole office,” Johnson’s pardon clerk wrote.

More recent Presidents have issued their own share of questionable pardons. On Christmas Eve, 1992, the departing President, George H. W. Bush, pardoned the former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and five other former officials connected to the Iran-Contra scandal. The pardons led the independent counsel Lawrence Walsh to suggest that the President, who was mentioned in Weinberger’s notes, was trying to shield himself from being drawn into any court proceedings. “In light of President Bush’s own misconduct, we are gravely concerned about his decision to pardon others who lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations,” Walsh said.

Bill Clinton’s pardons—he issued a hundred and forty on his final day in office—were even more squalid. A House investigation found that Clinton’s half brother, Roger, “engaged in a systematic effort to trade on his brother’s name,” receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from individuals seeking pardons. Hillary Clinton’s brother Hugh Rodham, a Florida lawyer, also received nearly four hundred thousand dollars from two clients for whom he obtained last-minute pardons. Most infamously, Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a financier who’d fled the country rather than stand trial on charges of tax evasion. Rich’s ex-wife Denise, who’d lobbied Clinton to grant the pardon, had contributed a million dollars to Democrats and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Clinton’s Presidential library. “It’s clear that none of these grants of clemency would have been issued on the merits,” the House committee conducting the investigation concluded. “Only by capitalizing on relationships between President Clinton and individuals close to him were these petitioners able to obtain grants of clemency.”

Frank Bowman, an emeritus law professor at the University of Missouri, has recently completed a book on the history of pardons. He faults Johnson for undermining Reconstruction, Clinton for his questionable eleventh-hour actions, and Biden for shielding family members. But for all the distasteful pardons of past Presidents, Bowman told me, Trump is in a sordid class by himself. “On the Trump side, you can keep going for literally dozens, maybe hundreds, of what-abouts. And, on the other side, you’re going to keep coming back and saying, ‘What about Marc Rich?’ ‘What about Hunter Biden?’ ” Bowman said. “The first answer to whataboutism is one of scale. Nothing on Trump’s scale has ever happened at any point in American history, period.”

Trump’s brazen use of the pardon power has generated a Washington growth industry—pardon lobbyists and lawyers, who tout their connections with Trump Administration officials. Some of the biggest reported payments have occurred in cases where the clemency bid has not succeeded. Keith Schiller, Trump’s former bodyguard and later his director of Oval Office operations, disclosed that his lobbying firm, Javelin Advisors, was paid a million dollars to secure a pardon for Fred Daibes, a New Jersey businessman convicted in a bribery scheme in which he gave gold bars to the former senator Bob Menendez. No pardon has been granted. Robert Travers, a lawyer for Daibes, issued a statement last fall that indicated some frustration with the outcome: “Fred Daibes has not worked with Keith Schiller or Javelin since June of this year and he is no longer engaged with them.” (In response to a lengthy list of questions about Trump’s pardons, Leavitt, the press secretary, sent the following statement: “President Trump exercises his constitutional authority to issue pardons and commutations at his discretion. Anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money.”)

Some lawyers and lobbyists have reached out, unsolicited, to people who have been indicted or convicted, dangling the prospect of making their problems disappear. “Every one of my clients is being approached by these scumbags,” one prominent criminal-defense lawyer told me. “They identify people who are under the gun, who’ve been convicted, who have money, and they say, ‘I can make this happen.’ ” Another prominent criminal-defense lawyer said, “There’s a category of people who just sell the connection. It’s really so bald-faced—they are just so clear that they can get it done. They say who they’re friends with. It’s often White House counsel. And they ask for a million dollars, and another million dollars if it’s successful.”

Ches McDowell, a bearded, baby-faced man with a penchant for bespoke suits, chewing tobacco, and ostrich-skin boots, isn’t one of those cold callers—business at his firm, Checkmate Government Relations (so named “because we win,” he told me), is too good for that. McDowell, a North Carolina lobbyist who set up shop in Washington in May, 2025, reported an astonishing twenty-two million dollars in lobbying revenue last year. His clients have spanned the corporate landscape, from Fortune 500 firms such as Eli Lilly, General Dynamics, and Philip Morris to newer entrants on the Washington scene, such as the GEO Group (which operates detention centers), the Sports Betting Alliance, and Trevor Milton’s SyberJet.

Most Washington lobbying shops are decorated in the style of an upscale airport lounge. McDowell’s features taxidermy—a seven-hundred-pound stuffed bear that he shot himself, a snarling mountain lion—plus a plaque with the Wi-Fi password, which refers, cheekily, to Trump’s claim of having won the Presidency three times. McDowell, the son of two staunchly Democratic pastors, met Trump, Jr., shortly before the 2016 election and now counts him as a close friend. But McDowell said that they do not mix business and friendship. “I’ve never, never once, discussed a lobbying issue that I’m hired to work on with Don,” he told me.

McDowell squeezed me in for an interview while being driven, in his Cadillac Escalade, to his Georgetown tailor for a fitting. “We’re burning K Street to the ground and rebuilding,” he said, referring to the traditional address of Washington lobbying shops. “The model that we brought to D.C. was ‘We’re going to get it done whatever it takes, no matter how much political capital we have to burn.’ ” McDowell’s team includes a nephew of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the son of Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita.

Among McDowell’s achievements is obtaining a pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange. In 2023, during the Biden Administration, Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to implement an effective anti-money-laundering program. The company agreed to pay $4.3 billion, one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history, and to subject its operations to strict monitoring; Zhao was fined fifty million dollars and served a four-month sentence. The technical-sounding nature of these offenses belies the seriousness of the misconduct, which allegedly helped Hamas terrorists, Russian drug traffickers, and other criminals move billions of dollars. “Binance turned a blind eye to its legal obligations in the pursuit of profit,” then Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said when the guilty pleas were reached. Binance began its formal lobbying campaign soon after Trump’s second Inauguration, hiring the law firm Baker & Hostetler. It reported being paid three hundred and thirty thousand dollars last year for lobbying on “financial services policy issues” and “executive relief”—in other words, pardons.

In the meantime, the Trump family had ventured into the cryptocurrency industry, with a company called World Liberty Financial, which launched in September, 2024. An entity owned by the Trump family controls around forty per cent of the business. “It’s one of the more successful things we’ve ever done,” Eric Trump told the Times last year. Binance played a key role in insuring that success. According to the Journal, Binance arranged for an investment firm owned by the United Arab Emirates to buy a two-billion-dollar stake in Binance—with the purchase made using World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin, USD1. This transaction gave World Liberty Financial access to an enormous new pile of cash, one that could generate an annual income of eighty million dollars. (World Liberty Financial has denied that Binance played a role in having the deal financed with USD1.)

Then, last September, Binance brought on McDowell’s Checkmate to lobby the Trump Administration for a pardon and on cyber-policy issues. Checkmate has been paid more than $1.3 million for its services. For McDowell, neither Ed Martin, the pardon attorney, nor Alice Johnson, the pardon czar, was necessary to make his case. Instead, he went to Bo Hines, a fellow North Carolinian, who had recently served as the executive director of Trump’s crypto council. McDowell’s pitch to him was simple: the President’s crypto policy required undoing the excesses of the Biden Administration. “I felt like that was an easy sell,” McDowell said.

A few weeks later, McDowell, en route to a hunting trip with Trump, Jr., joined the President’s son at the White House for a ceremony awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie Kirk. At some point, as the Journal first reported, McDowell, finding himself one on one with the President, took the opportunity to advocate for Zhao. Trump signed Zhao’s pardon seven days later. Leavitt explained that the President “has officially ended the Biden Administration’s war on the cryptocurrency industry, and I think that’s the message he sent with this pardon.” Trump, for his part, said of Zhao, “I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden Administration.”

Father talking to child about making their bed.

“If you think you shouldn’t make your bed because ‘it will just get messy again,’ I have terrible news about literally every aspect of life.”

Cartoon by Asher Perlman

McDowell’s colorful approach is not the only strategy for pardon lobbying. Adam Katz, an unassuming-looking man who grew up on Long Island, has a law practice that consists mostly of run-of-the-mill commercial litigation and white-collar defense work—a pharmaceutical-company employee facing an overseas bribery investigation, a chemical manufacturer accused of racial discrimination. But during Trump’s first term Katz became a pardon attorney, owing to connections that have served him well in the age of Trump. After graduating from Duke, he met a fellow-alumnus, Andrew Giuliani, the son of the former New York City mayor and Trump ally. Katz went on to represent Rudy Giuliani when he was sued for defamation by two Georgia poll workers, whom he’d accused of election fraud. (A jury awarded them a hundred and forty-eight million dollars.) In law school, at Georgetown, Katz befriended Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s personal senior counsel and longtime close adviser. Katz went on to play a small role advising Trump when the President was sued for defamation and sexual assault by the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. (In two separate cases, juries awarded Carroll a total of eighty-eight million dollars.)

Katz was on a business trip to Las Vegas, in 2019, when he happened to meet a man named Andres Camberos, a California marijuana entrepreneur. Camberos shared the story of his sister, Adriana, who was about to serve a two-year prison sentence for selling counterfeit 5-hour Energy drinks, portraying her as the dupe of her husband, who had also been convicted in the scheme. Katz offered to try to help and, in January, 2020, he filed a clemency petition on Adriana’s behalf. A month later, Andres made his first significant political contributions, consisting of a hundred thousand dollars spread among Trump-campaign committees and the Republican Party. (Seven months earlier, he had donated twenty-eight hundred dollars to Biden.) Katz brought in Stefan Passantino, a former deputy White House counsel who retained strong ties to Trump world. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a client of Passantino’s, also expressed support for Adriana. The day before Trump left office in 2021, he commuted Adriana’s sentence; she was about halfway through her prison term.

Then, in November, 2024, both Camberos siblings were convicted in a separate fraud scheme, this one involving reselling grocery items and other household supplies. “With the money they made from the scheme, Adriana and Andres Camberos made extensive luxury purchases and investments,” the Justice Department said in a news release. “They bought or financed a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, a Lamborghini Huracan, and multiple Range Rovers; purchased multiple homes in the San Diego area; purchased a condominium at the beach in Coronado; and put the money in multiple investment accounts.” Adriana said that she hadn’t realized the diversion scheme broke the law; District Judge Cynthia Bashant disagreed. “Ms. Camberos knew exactly what she was doing was illegal,” Bashant said at Adriana’s sentencing. “She developed an elaborate scheme to hide what she was doing. To the extent she testified to the contrary, I find she testified untruthfully.” Adriana was sentenced to a year in prison, Andres to home confinement.

With Trump back in office, Katz and Passantino went to work, this time with an argument tailor-made to appeal to Trump: that vengeful prosecutors had targeted the Camberos siblings for political reasons. The case against them, the pardon petition said, represented “a grave miscarriage of justice against two established business owners who were only prosecuted because President Trump commuted Ms. Camberos’s sentence from a prior conviction in 2021 and Mr. Camberos made a donation to the Trump campaign.” The petition compared the Camberoses’ prosecution to the case brought by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, against the Trump Organization, arguing that in both cases the supposed victims of the fraud did not suffer any financial harm. In mid-January, Trump granted clemency—and this time went beyond mere commutation. Adriana and Andres Camberos each received a full pardon.

George W. Bush wrote in his memoir, “Decision Points,” about his revulsion at the pardon process. “One of the biggest surprises of my presidency was the flood of pardon requests at the end,” Bush recalled. “I could not believe the number of people who pulled me aside to suggest that a friend or former colleague deserved a pardon. At first I was frustrated. Then I was disgusted. I came to see the massive injustice in the system. If you had connections to the president, you could insert your case into the last-minute frenzy. Otherwise, you had to wait for the Justice Department to conduct a review and make a recommendation. In my final weeks in office, I resolved that I would not pardon anyone who went outside the formal channels.”

Vice-President Dick Cheney pressed Bush to grant clemency to Cheney’s former chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who had been convicted of perjury and obstructing an investigation into the leak of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer. “We don’t want to leave anyone on the battlefield,” Cheney argued. Bush commuted Libby’s sentence shortly before Libby was to report to prison, saying that the thirty-month term was “excessive.” But, to Cheney’s great displeasure, Bush balked at granting a full pardon. (That move was left to Trump, in 2018. “I don’t know Mr. Libby,” he said, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly.”) Bush took the extraordinary step of cancelling a pardon, which he’d given the day before to a New York real-estate developer. He said he had not known that the recipient’s father had contributed more than thirty thousand dollars to Republicans. “It raises the appearance of impropriety, so the President prudently decided not to go through with the pardon,” the White House press secretary Dana Perino said at the time.

For all that, recent Presidents can be faulted as much for their stingy exercise of the pardon power as for its deployment. Oyer, the former pardon attorney, described arriving at her office at seven on the morning of Trump’s second Inauguration, prepared to process Biden’s final pardons and commutations, only to find a disappointingly short list of cases. “I had expected to see more names in there, people who were really deserving,” she said. “It was really absolutely gutting to see how many people were left behind.” Although Biden issued a record number of commutations—more than four thousand—his total of eighty pardons was the second lowest on record, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. Only George H. W. Bush granted fewer, seventy-four in all.

Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas, in Minneapolis, oversees a clemency clinic there, supervising a half-dozen law students as they pursue commutations and pardons. Osler developed an interest in clemency after serving as a federal prosecutor in Detroit during the late nineties. His caseload was heavy with crack-cocaine prosecutions that carried long mandatory minimum sentences and fell disproportionately on African American defendants. The punitive approach, he came to believe, conflicted with his Christian faith, in particular the admonition in John 8:7: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” He told me, “I felt the weight of the stone in my hand. I put it down and walked away and did mercy.”

Osler’s clinic is currently seeking a commutation for an eighty-three-year-old Texas man who was sentenced to life in prison without parole, in 1985, for helping run a drug ring. He’s confined to a wheelchair and recently suffered a stroke, but his crimes occurred so long ago that he is not eligible for compassionate release. Another client, this one seeking a pardon, is a Kentucky woman who was sentenced to fifty-seven months, in 1996, for nonviolent drug crimes. She was released in 2001 and has been unable to receive licenses for several professions, including as a physical therapist and a real-estate agent, because of rules that exclude convicted felons.

Osler has watched with increasing frustration as his clients’ petitions go unanswered. He described the pardon attorney as “a zombie office, in the sense that they’re assigning numbers to cases that come in, but it’s not clear that anything’s happening beyond that.” Rather than receiving good or bad news for clients, Osler said, “you simply don’t hear. There’s no up, and there’s no down. And so, when they call from prison or they write, I have to tell them it’s pending. But, really, that means it’s being ignored.”

When I asked Osler which pardons bothered him most, he said, “It’s those that have gone to the people who are fabulously wealthy—these are the people who have been advantaged by so much. With my students, we’ve told the stories of people who are fabulously poor and are being ignored.” Clemency, Osler continued, “has begun to take the form that the worst parts of government have already had, which is to be dominated by lobbying. It’s been O.K., if you are a polluter, to hire people who are connected to the President to inveigh on your behalf and pay them tons of money. That wasn’t how clemency worked. But now that kind of ugly fog has floated over to what’s supposed to be about mercy.”

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

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


The Age of American Caesarism

The legal right spent decades empowering the presidency. Now it must reckon with the system it helped create.

By Gregg Nunziata | April 27, 2026, 9 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/trump-caesar-executive-power
/686846/

Julius Caesar styled himself as a servant of the republic, claiming to speak for the people even as he disregarded laws and norms to govern by caprice. The Roman republic did not survive him.

The second Trump administration has revealed American Caesarism in nearly full bloom. Despite ambitions to fundamentally change the course of the country, this administration has no real legislative agenda. Instead, the president governs by executive orders, emergency decrees, and extortionate transactions, using his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He’s launched foreign military adventures and full-blown wars seemingly based on personal whim, and has made the military a political prop and a tool for domestic law enforcement. With Congress sidelined and the courts reluctant to check Donald Trump’s excesses, America has been left with what some legal scholars have described as an “executive unbound”—and with a president who threatens to supplant the republic in all but name.

Trump’s most fervent supporters justify his approach in terms reminiscent of Caesar’s. The White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has remarked that “the whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.” Many Republicans argue that Trump’s policy preferences deserve support because he has a “mandate,” and they heap scorn on the “unelected” judges who have had the temerity to rule against him.

This is not American democracy. The central premise of the Constitution is that liberty requires divided authority. The accumulation of power in one branch of government is, as James Madison warned, “the very definition of tyranny.” Americans are already feeling the consequences of this imbalance: Because executive orders, emergency declarations, and unilateral action lack the durability of legislation passed by Congress, policies swing wildly from one administration to the next. Families and businesses cannot plan ahead, which undermines investment, growth, and prosperity.

American Caesarism did not emerge overnight with the election of Trump, but over the course of decades. And though conservatives alone did not create this state of affairs, many were key proponents of a vision of politics centered on one commanding figure—a vision that is now destabilizing our country. I have spent my career in the conservative legal movement, which has included advising Senate Republicans on judicial nominations. I have become convinced that if the Madisonian republic is to endure, conservatives must reckon with our role in bringing the nation to its current breaking point, and work to reestablish the checks and balances that we helped erode.

For much of American history, conservatives were the nation’s fiercest skeptics of executive power, warning that a swelling presidency could threaten liberty by displacing the authority of Congress and the courts. By the 1970s, a rise in what conservatives saw as judicial activism had shifted their focus to overreach by the courts. To those on the right, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was emblematic of a Court operating far beyond the bounds of the Constitution to usurp policy making. The courts of the era also reshaped criminal law, ordered busing to desegregate schools, redefined the relationship between church and state, and even waded into tax-and-spending issues. Convinced the judiciary had slipped its constitutional leash, the conservative legal movement dedicated itself to preventing what it called “legislating from the bench,” through scholarship, advocacy, and organizing.

But this focus on reforming the judiciary, combined with the politics of the period, meant that comparatively little attention was paid to the other two branches of government—and, in particular, to the slide toward rule by presidential fiat. Many of the leaders of the modern conservative legal movement had served in Republican administrations and had lived their entire lives against a backdrop of seemingly unbreakable Democratic control of Congress. (The future judicial superstars William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia all held senior legal roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations.) In the 1970s, they saw the presidency humbled by the Watergate scandal and subsequent reforms. To a conservative of this era, the presidency must have seemed the only viable instrument of policy making, and its relative weakness a cause for concern.

Over time, sympathy for executive authority hardened into theory, and the legal movement once known for “strict construction” of the Constitution found a great deal of elasticity in it. Some began to advance the view that Article II, which vests “executive power” in the president, gave him any authority not expressly limited by the Constitution. The duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” came to be seen not as a restriction on the president’s policy making but as a grant of leeway to reinterpret the law. Most important, many conservatives came to believe that the president’s role as “commander in chief” gave him sweeping, unilateral authority in matters of national security—a view that has significant implications in a nation perennially on a war footing, including against non-state actors.

During the Reagan administration, conservative legal thinkers also embraced the “unitary executive theory,” which asserts the president’s sole control over the executive branch. In the past few years, this theory, reasonable at its core, has gained traction in the courts. The Supreme Court seems poised to allow Trump’s removal of a member of the Federal Trade Commission, which could set the stage for broader, more dubious rulings. The most extreme interpretations of this theory could allow the president to fire any federal employee at will, ignore civil-service protections, and eliminate the independence of the Federal Reserve.

While legal conservatives were developing theories of enhanced executive power, their political compatriots gained a congressional majority for the first time in decades. The new Republican majority, distrustful of Congress after decades of liberal control, undertook “reforms” that undermined the power of the institution. They slashed congressional staff (particularly nonpartisan and expert staff), weakened committees, and imposed term limits on committee chairmen, eroding important points of leverage over the executive branch.

By the 1990s, the courts were changing too. The new generation of conservative judges, intent on reining in the judiciary, empowered the executive. They embraced doctrines that instructed courts to defer to the administrative agencies’ interpretation of their own authority, and others that tended to insulate the executive from meaningful judicial review. (The “presumption of regularity,” for instance, assumes that the president and his agents act in good faith.) Courts also tended to uncritically accept presidential determinations in matters of foreign affairs and national security.

The conservative bench’s focus on preventing a weak presidency arguably reached its zenith in 2024 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, which concerned Trump’s potential criminal liability for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The majority, rather than being rattled by a president who had attempted a coup, labored to protect the country from the hypothetical danger of a presidency rendered impotent by specious criminal prosecutions. Never mind that if such a future materialized, Congress or the Court could resolve it. Instead, breaking with foundational conservative legal principles, the majority created sweeping presidential immunity out of whole cloth.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has shown signs of being open to another path, ruling against the administrative state in several major cases. However, the judiciary remains less willing to confront executive overreach outside of the regulatory context, especially in matters of purported national security. Conservative judges, in particular, continue to indulge presidential power at the expense of Congress.

Last year, an appellate court overturned the president’s invocation of wartime authorities to expedite the deportation of Venezuelans on the sensible grounds that Venezuela was not, in fact, invading the United States. A conservative judge dissented, writing that “the President’s declaration of an invasion, insurrection, or incursion is conclusive. Final. And completely beyond the second-guessing powers of unelected federal judges.” This type of deference to the executive, which relies on presidential good faith, now amounts to judicial abdication.

Similarly, the recent decision striking down Trump’s tariffs relied solely on the determination that the emergency authority at issue does not authorize tariffs. The justices did not wrestle with the president’s invocation of a national emergency to impose his policy agenda, nor did they say that Congress could not hand such legislative powers over to the president in the first place. Even still, with this modest holding, three conservative justices dissented. Justice Clarence Thomas, a favorite of conservatives, wrote separately to argue that Congress could give any of its powers to the president, so long as they were not “core legislative powers.”

If America is to preserve its liberty, conservative legal scholars and judges will need to adjust to a new reality and revisit doctrines that no longer serve to protect the constitutional structure. Some conservatives have already begun moving in this direction. In its recent rulings ending deference to the administrative state, the Court explicitly abandoned the stance of an earlier generation of conservatives. The lawsuit challenging Trump’s tariffs was brought by veterans of the conservative and right-of-center legal movements, who argued that the president had exceeded his authority. These are promising developments—but we need to go further.

Courts should refuse to read broadly any executive power not firmly tethered to the language of the Constitution, and reject clearly pretextual claims of national emergencies. They might, as the conservative legal scholar Yuval Levin has suggested, adopt a doctrine that resolves ambiguous legal questions in favor of republican government, which would mean pushing policy disputes to the legislature rather than the executive.

The Supreme Court should also look with more scrutiny at the White House’s use of the “emergency docket” (or “shadow docket”), whereby the Court issues interim rulings on urgent cases. The Trump administration has filed dozens of emergency requests to freeze adverse lower-court rulings while litigation continues. The Court’s tendency to side with the White House in such cases, if only temporarily, has allowed serious constitutional harm to continue, and has, in some cases, done irreparable damage. This seeming deference to executive interests is particularly difficult to justify in an administration willing to flout court orders.

Courts cannot restrain the executive alone; they have too narrow a function and work too slowly. Congress must rediscover its role—and conservatives who wish to preserve our original constitutional structure can help make this a reality by supporting expanded funding for the legislative branch and championing rules reforms to make Congress more effective. Another step would be to establish a congressional version of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The OLC issues opinions that, though not law, guide executive-branch behavior and influence both the judiciary and the public’s understanding of contested legal questions. A well-funded congressional office of legal counsel could weigh in on such questions as well, so that executive-branch lawyers would not be the only ones assessing the bounds of executive power on behalf of the government.

Legislation to rein in our “unbound” executive should be a priority. Obvious first steps would include strengthening the enforceability of congressional subpoenas, protecting against politicized law enforcement, and limiting the president’s emergency powers and ability to profit from his service. America could also recover its capacity to amend the Constitution and use that power to pare back the presidency. A prime target would be the presidential pardon, a vestige of monarchy that has become a source of scandal and corruption.

The conservative legal movement once transformed the national conversation about the courts. It can do the same with executive power—but only if it is willing to redirect its intellectual and advocacy efforts in that direction. If conservatives truly believe in ordered liberty, constitutional limits, and the rule of law, then the task ahead is clear: We must help check Caesar. Not for the sake of any party, but for the sake of the republic.

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

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Wednesday, April 29, 2026 6:35 AM

SECOND

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


The Evolution of Trump’s Corruption

The president is no longer intimidated by backlash.

By David A. Graham | April 28, 2026, 6:17 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/04/evolution-of-trump-cor
ruption-g7-summit/686983/

Seven years ago, during a marginally more innocent time, the Trump administration announced plans to hold the 2020 G7 summit at Donald Trump’s resort in Doral, Florida. The backlash was fierce, and somehow the then–Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s dismissive attitude—“Get over it”—failed to quell concerns, including among Republicans. Two days later, Trump gave up and moved the event to Camp David. (In the end, it was canceled because of COVID.)

Things are different in Trump’s second term. Later this year, the United States will host the G20 summit—an offshoot of the G7 that includes approximately 20 leaders of the world’s largest economies—and the president has selected Trump National Doral as the location. A few days ago, The Washington Post reported that Trump even intends to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin, a global pariah, to the meeting. But the Doral G20 has gotten nowhere near the same amount of attention, and much less backlash.

The way the two summits have been received feels like a case study in the differences between the first and second Trump presidencies. In 2019, neither the press nor the public was yet so fatigued by news and numb to outrage, as New York magazine observed this week, nor were they yet accustomed to a president using his position to openly enrich himself. (The Atlantic’s headline about the G7 announcement was “Trump’s Most Shameless Act of Profiteering.” How young we were!) The Republican Party also had more leaders who were willing to criticize the president, either publicly or privately. Finally, although Trump has never seemed especially vulnerable to shame, the president and his aides could still be swayed by sufficient embarrassment back then. The phrase shameless corruption gets used a lot, but Trump’s second term embodies it.

Although the first Trump administration created a fire hose of news, the country has been going at this pace now for 10 years, and the public is getting tired. Trump’s announcement of the location for the G20 back in early September, was overshadowed by larger stories, particularly the Epstein files; days later, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, briefly blotting out all other coverage. The G20 summit may also seem less relevant than other global events, especially given that Trump is currently shaking or breaking the world order through different means. (He has also already dis-invited South Africa from the summit for largely imagined offenses against Afrikaners.)

Perhaps most important, the idea of Trump grubbing a few dollars out of hosting a meeting at one of his properties seems positively quaint today. During the first Trump term, I covered a succession of egregious choices: Trump refusing to financially disentangle himself from his companies; diverting Mike Pence to his Irish resort for a stopover; charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates to stay at Mar-a-Lago while protecting him; and making his hotel in Washington, D.C., a physical affront to the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

To say that these actions now look like nickel-and-diming is not to forgive them but to acknowledge the much larger scale on which Trump and his family are working now. The president’s government is signing off on big payouts to former aides, including Michael Flynn ($1.25 million for a case in which Flynn pleaded guilty) and Carter Page (another $1.25 million, even though courts twice dismissed his lawsuit). The government has not yet made deals with people convicted for their involvement in the January 6, 2021, riot, but their lawyers are hopeful. Trump has handed out clemency to a slew of people who have donated money to his campaign or his other efforts, which looks a great deal like selling pardons.

Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, has signed lucrative deals in cities around the world where his administration is also conducting foreign policy. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, too, is making business deals in some of the same countries with which he is negotiating on behalf of the president, even though he has no government role. Trump’s media company has jumped into cryptocurrency and prediction markets, a clear conflict of interest given the federal government’s role in setting crypto policy. The New York Times recently reported on how a Syrian billionaire had sought to get sanctions removed on his country with a charm offensive that included an offer to open a Trump-branded golf course. He was egged on by a Republican member of Congress. (The sanctions have been removed, but the Trump Organization says that no deal to build a golf course is in the offing.)

Last summer, David Kirkpatrick of The New Yorker attempted to quantify how much Trump and his immediate family had made off the presidency and came up with a rough figure of $3.4 billion. By late January, Kirkpatrick estimated that the total was up to $4 billion. And it will continue to grow. Trump is even suing his own government, hoping to get the Justice Department—led for now by his former personal attorney—to pay him $230 million for investigating him, and the IRS to pay him $10 billion for mishandling his tax information.

I worry that summarizing so many examples so briefly only contributes to the same fatigue that has enabled them. If one death is a tragedy and 1 million deaths are a statistic, perhaps it is also true that charging the Secret Service thousands of dollars on hotel rooms is corruption, but raking in billions is simply a new paradigm. Yet these examples pop up regularly. The Trump administration has realized that its profiteering no longer produces the same public fury it once did, that nearly all Republican officeholders will stay quiet, and that it can grit out or ignore any residual shame. The result is on a dollar basis, and perhaps on any basis, the most corrupt administration in American history.

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

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Wednesday, April 29, 2026 6:52 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Thanks for keeping up a daily journal of all the reasons why the world you thought you were living in 2 years ago died and is never coming back.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, April 30, 2026 6:50 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:
Thanks for keeping up a daily journal of all the reasons why the world you thought you were living in 2 years ago died and is never coming back.



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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
You and Trump agree that the old World must die to make way for his New World:

The YOLO Presidency

Trump is focused on becoming one of history’s “great men.”

By Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer | April 29, 2026, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/donald-trump-legacy-histo
ry/686817/

Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?

Impossible. And yet. Hegel’s theory of “world-historical individuals,” men who redirected the course of humanity, focused on three figures: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel described them as unlikely “heroes of an Epoch” for upending established orders that had previously seemed fixed. They were “practical, political men” who were each condemned in their age for smashing norms and for other conduct “obnoxious to moral reprehension”—as Trump has been accused of, centuries later.

And though Trump has long compared himself to America’s two greatest presidents, we were recently told by two people who are in a position to know such things—a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant—that the president had, in private conversations, begun thinking about himself less as a peer of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and more as an addition to Hegel’s immortal trifecta.

“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the confidant told us. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”

The tendency to self-aggrandize is as fundamental a feature of Trump as his sculpted hair and overlong red ties. But it has become even more important in setting his priorities and steering his actions as he hurtles through his final term in office. He no longer has to worry about the judgment of voters and can instead focus on what he’s decided really matters: ascending to become one of history’s so-called great men and leaving an enduring—and, in many cases, physical—imprint. The result, at least so far, has cost many lives and billions of dollars, damaged the world economy, strained already fragile alliances, and cratered the president’s standing with the public. But those around him cast his new focus as a liberation. “He is unburdened by political concerns and is able to do what is truly right rather than what is in his best political interests,” the administration official told us. “Hence the decision to strike Iran.”

What the American people think—and what near-term consequences they may face—has mattered less to Trump than his own designs to remake the world by bombing seven countries, toppling two world leaders in as many months, threatening to seize Greenland, and undermining the NATO alliance. Earlier this month, Trump described the conflagration with Iran in existential terms, writing on social media, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Even when he later agreed to a two-week cease-fire—which has since been extended—Trump portrayed his Middle East adventurism as “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” At home, he has focused his time and attention on unending tributes to his reign—building projects that recall ancient Rome, decorative gilding that evokes imperial France, banners with his visage draped across government buildings, and a gold coin set to be minted with his image for the nation’s 250th birthday. “He is conscious, proud, and hopeful that some of the things that he does are resetting long-standing orders of things,” a second senior official told us. “Not in a Socrates sort of way, just: The stuff I’m doing is very different, and it will reset things to some level, and that includes not just this country but the world.”

Read: ‘I run the country and the world.’

When we asked several White House officials whether Trump had discovered and embraced Hegel’s writings, they dismissed the hypothesis almost laughingly. The president does not have a reputation as a reader. He did recently learn about the powerful triumvirate in a brief passage that someone handed him, the senior official told us, although that person couldn’t recall if it was a poem, an essay, or something else. The second senior official suggested that Trump might be recalling a speech he heard at a golf club event last year, where a speaker placed Trump in the frame of historical figures such as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. White House officials and allies have debated other reasons for the president’s turn toward history, and some have dismissed it as typical Trumpian braggadocio—the greatest, the biggest, the best. They all spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to candidly detail their private conversations with the president.

Then, on Saturday night, following an assassination attempt at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Trump turned briefly introspective, offering yet another glimpse of how he views his place in the scope of history. Speaking to reporters shortly after the alleged gunman had been apprehended, Trump said that he had “studied assassinations,” mentioned Lincoln, and argued that “the people that make the biggest impact—they’re the ones that they go after.” “They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much,” he continued, before musing that only “big names” face these threats to their life, and concluding: “I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.”

Trump’s heightened tendency to view himself as a world-historical figure—capable of brash, misunderstood greatness—has transformed his second term, and not necessarily in a good way. Republicans are in a panic about the political costs of the attack on Iran, which has increased prices and interest rates ahead of an election that will hinge on affordability. Democrats, meanwhile, delight in Trump’s focus on building a ballroom and a memorial arch, which swing-voter focus groups regularly identify as a misplaced priority. And inside the administration, the excitement of his first year has given way to a more defensive mentality, as some of the president’s most committed supporters splinter away and the political operation struggles to maintain the 2024 coalition.

But for Trump, the costs have been outweighed by what he views as the opportunity before him, a chance to transform the world in a manner that few historical figures have ever even approached. A second Trump confidant summarized bluntly: “He’s clearly in his ‘I don’t give a fuck’ mood.”

Ever since moving back into the Oval Office, Trump has been adding accents to the room, cluttering the space with golden urns, military flags, rows of presidential portraits, and a 19th-century copy of the Declaration of Independence. The crowns of the doors have been gilded, as have the seal and stars on the ceiling. Like clip art in blank spots on the wall, he has affixed ornamental molding, coated in gold leaf. When we entered the Oval Office for an interview last April, one of the first questions he asked us was of decor: “Do I do a chandelier?” he inquired. “Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line.” (Ultimately, he opted against it because the logistics were not ideal; one option included hanging it directly through the bald eagle’s beak on the presidential seal.)

The doors, however, remained glaringly unadorned until Trump had an idea: He took his personally designed presidential challenge coin—such tokens are generally a palm-size souvenir that’s popular in military and law-enforcement circles—and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. “Everyone was impressed by how good it looked,” a White House official told us. In the weeks that followed, Trump made his way through the West Wing, seeking out new places to affix his coins (golden and featuring the presidential seal). One by one, the president decorated the office doors of each of his deputies. His aides are convinced that he will eventually cover all of the doors.

Trump, a developer by trade, has always loved these sorts of details—to a point of distraction. Building and branding are “in his DNA; it’s who he is,” David Urban, a Trump ally, told us. And now, as president, Trump feels that he’s deploying those skills for the common good. “He believes in his mind that he’s making all of these things better, and you know what? At the end of the day, he is making all of these things better.” The president’s friends and advisers have told us story upon story of his obsession with the smallest minutiae, of his dedication to his monuments of self—the time he got down on all fours to help explain exactly how he wanted new tiling at Mar-a-Lago arranged; the time he glanced out of a window at one of his golf courses and then stopped a meeting, just cold stopped it, so he could amble out to instruct the gardeners.

His passion for his personal projects has begun bleeding into daily work as president. One month into the Iran war, for instance—as gas prices averaged near $4, mortgage rates were climbing, and inflation fears were eroding stock values—Trump came to the press cabin in the back of Air Force One to argue that the bombing campaign was working. Or, at least, that’s what the reporters covering his trip home from Mar-a-Lago thought he was there to do. Then he suddenly switched from talking about the war to boasting about his plans for “hand-carved” Corinthian columns as part of his $400 million White House ballroom. The president presented six mounted, photo-realistic renderings of the project that he explained at length, like this was a miles-high slide show. He went on about the drone-resistant roof, the bulletproof windows, the multiple porches, and the basement military facility, before pausing near the end to explain his priorities.

“I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this—I’m fighting wars and other things,” Trump told the assembled press. “But this is very important because this is gonna be with us for a long time.”

A foreign leader visiting Washington today would find a city under reconstruction, with tower cranes over the White House, a spectacle that recalls Roman Emperor Augustus’s claim that “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marbles.” There’s the planned remodeling (and recent renaming) of the Kennedy Center, the affixing of his name to the United States Institute of Peace, the attempted seizure of D.C.-municipal golf courses that Trump plans to renovate, the paving over of Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden into a Mar-a-Lago-style patio, and the tearing down of the East Wing to make way for the massive ballroom. (That destruction prompted the largest outcry, perhaps because the symbolism was visual, physical, visceral—a wrecking ball laying waste to a cherished pillar of democracy.) The proposed “Arc de Trump,” a 250-foot structure modeled after Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, would be taller than any similar structure in world history, and more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial, across the river from where it would stand. “The GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World,” Trump declared three days after announcing the cease-fire with Iran.

Even the yearlong celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial has become as much about feting Trump as observing the nation’s 250th birthday. Trump will mark his 80th birthday in June with a demonstration by modern-day gladiators—a UFC Freedom 250 fight on the White House South Lawn. The fighters will weigh in at the Lincoln Memorial. Later, they will emerge from the Oval Office to battle before a waiting Trump, the event complete with fireworks and a light show—a grandiose and very Trumpian tribute to himself.

Trump doesn’t like to use the term legacy, advisers and allies told us, and some have wondered whether he really cares about his legacy at all. “The only legacy President Trump is concerned with is making America greater than ever before,” the White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told us. As Trump searched for a running mate in 2024, the second Trump confidant recounted that they had tried to implore him to pick someone who could help continue his political movement. Trump retorted: “What the hell do I care? I’ll be dead.”

“I don’t think he’s sitting around musing about what people will think 100 or 200 years from now,” one of the senior officials told us.

But there is no dispute that something has changed in his second term—a freeing of his ambition, and a newfound sense of power. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump told The New York Times after a successful operation in Venezuela to capture its leader, Nicolás Maduro. His top advisers now talk about him as the person with “the highest tolerance for risk in the world, and the best instinct for self-preservation,” according to one of them. That has left everyone around him attempting to proceed as if this is a normal presidency—or, at least, a normal Trump presidency—but the president is different now, firmly in his second term with personal electoral victory no longer a driving force. The guardrails from the first term are gone, and Trump has all but abandoned the pretense of caring much about the Republican Party that he holds in an emperor-like grip.

Read: It’s not just Iran. Trump is flailing on multiple fronts.

Top White House officials, political advisers, and Cabinet members gathered in mid-February at the Capitol Hill Club to lay out a midterm-election strategy that would focus on delivering a consistent message that’s focused on the economy and cost of living, regardless of what Trump says or does. The group met again a month later, at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria, which was previously the Trump International Hotel. The February plan had run headlong into the expensive war, so the message became blunter: There was no longer room for error.

Sarah Longwell, a former Republican and an anti-MAGA political strategist who regularly conducts focus groups with Biden-Trump swing voters, told us that Trump keeps acting in politically irrational ways. “So every time he’s focused on the ballroom, every time he’s focused on the Kennedy Center, voters are like, ‘But you’re not focused on Americans. You’re not focused on me. You’re not focused on the economy,’” she told us. “Most people are like, ‘I don't care about the ballroom. Just be focused on the economy. That was the whole point of you.’”

One Trump ally told us that the president is not particularly worried about whether he loses the House, and that he cares only slightly about holding the Senate. The reason: A Democratic Senate means “a six-month impeachment trial versus three hours,” this person explained. But Trump has survived two impeachments, and he arguably returned more powerful. His focus now is on doing something more enduring with his influence. Trump worries about being perceived as a lame-duck president, several people told us, including this ally. He has—at least on one occasion—acknowledged his own mortality. Jimmy Carter died in late 2024, during the presidential transition, and when he lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, Trump watched the proceedings for hours from Mar-a-Lago, transfixed by the coverage, a person close to the White House told us. One day, Trump mused, he would be inside a flag-draped coffin like that. (In a story about Trump’s health, New York magazine also reported a version of these comments.)

The same ally told us that Trump now cares more about his successor, believing that a Republican president loyal to him will help ensure that his actions are not immediately reversed. After losing in 2020, he had four years out of power to watch President Biden try to return the nation to a pre-Trump status quo ante, and he now understands what lasting change requires. But even that is complicated. “There is a little bit of tension there, because I think there’s a part of him who might also want to say, ‘I’m the only one who can hold this coalition together,’” the first Trump confidant told us. (Trump has publicly mused about running again in 2028—a clear joke to troll his opponents, advisers insist—though other people in Trump’s orbit, such as the MAGA influencer and former adviser Steve Bannon, are more seriously pushing the idea.)

Read: Doomsday-prepping for Trump’s third term

In short, the president’s incentive structure has changed. “The hallmark of his entire life has been: Solve the problem that’s in front of my face, and I bet I’ll be able to solve the next problem when I get to it, but I’m not going to worry about it right now. And it leads to this inherently short-term thinking,” this confidant said. Now that Trump is no longer running for president, this person explained, “he’s not thinking about What do my polling numbers say right now? or What are they for in the midterms I’m not running in, or for 2028 when I don’t care?”

Still, Trump’s team remains cautiously optimistic that it can refocus him on the coming midterms, which could act, perhaps, as the last guardrail to curb his influences in a term that, so far, has mainly been dictated by such whims. “He knows he is essentially on the ballot in the midterms,” one of the senior White House officials told us, as if by saying it aloud they could will it into reality. But after those elections, this person mused, “God knows what the next two years will look like.”

Hegel—whether or not Trump has actually read a word of his dense tracts—may offer some hints. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon Bonaparte, Hegel argued, operated with “an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe.” They were not exactly intellectuals, he wrote, and they did not live particularly happy lives. Napoleon was exiled in his 40s to St. Helena; Alexander died at 32; and Caesar, after declaring himself dictator of Rome, was assassinated at 55 by nobles. As Hegel concluded: “So mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.” The German philosopher could just as well have been writing about Trump, some 200 years before the American president dubbed himself a great man of history and began trampling so many modern-day flowers.

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

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Thursday, April 30, 2026 7:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Thanks for keeping up a daily journal of all the reasons why the world you thought you were living in 2 years ago died and is never coming back.



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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
You and Trump agree that the old World must die to make way for his New World:


I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and I'm certainly not going to be reading any part of that wall of text from one of your intellectual idiots.

I've been telling you for a year and a half that your world is dead and it's never coming back.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, May 1, 2026 7:58 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:

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and I'm certainly not going to be reading any part of that wall of text from one of your intellectual idiots.

I've been telling you for a year and a half that your world is dead and it's never coming back.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Mysterious Obsession With Obama’s Fake Son

Would he look like Trayvon Martin?

By Jonathan Chait | May 1, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/obama-son-trayvon-martin/687
018/

“If Obama had a son, he’d attack the White House Correspondents Dinner like Cole Allen,” Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and prominent libertarian activist, wrote on X earlier this week.

The claim that a former president’s hypothetical son would have attempted to assassinate President Trump is insane. Barnett’s hypothesizing about the motives of a nonexistent male child of Barack Obama is part of a conservative fixation that’s detached from historical reality. Yet it feeds a collective sense of victimization that Trump shares and has deftly exploited.

The reference, for those who don’t closely follow conservative news sources, was to a line Obama uttered in 2012. After Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, Black leaders criticized the president for failing to speak out. Obama, appearing in the Rose Garden, said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Ever since, the political right has turned the phrase into a notorious synecdoche for the Obama presidency. Conservatives continue to repeat the line, years later, which is why Barnett was able to reference it as shorthand. For some on the right, Obama’s remark is the most emblematic moment of his presidency, hauled out again and again by Fox News, Breitbart, and other right-leaning news outlets to remind them of his responsibility for racial strife.

As Ben Shapiro put it last year on Ezra Klein’s podcast, “The implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America—which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying. That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream. And when, instead, things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was: Well, you know, it turns out that Black people in America, they’re inherently victimized by a white-supremacist system that puts Black people underfoot. And: My son could have been Trayvon.”

Shapiro explained, “The reaction of the right was: This is an interest group–based politics that does not particularly like the founding, and we are going to react to that with Trumpism.”

It is hardly unusual for a president to acknowledge his ethnic heritage. Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden liked to play up their Irish American background. Just this week, Trump touted his mother’s Scottish background.

It may feel to conservatives as though Obama was talking about his race all the time; perhaps that is because they keep reminding one another of the rare prominent instance he did so. Obama delivered a memorably nuanced address about race as a candidate, then mostly avoided mention of it throughout his presidency. If Obama had spoken about his race more frequently, conservatives would not rely so heavily on the singular example. His remark about Martin being Black like him has been endlessly repeated by conservatives because it was the exception rather than the rule.

It is true that the American political discourse around race changed during and after Obama’s presidency. Progressive Americans became more conscious of racism, and many white Americans grew more resentful. In progressive spaces, it became common for mob-style panics to hyperbolize trauma and shut down criticism.

Yet Obama was an early and forceful critic of that tendency. He attacked the left over and over and over again for intolerance and dogmatism on the subject of race. The right’s insistence on ignoring those repeated entreaties, and instead fixating on a single moment when he expressed empathy with the parents of a murdered Black teen, reveals far more about conservatives than it does about Obama.

And this is especially true because Obama’s commentary about Trayvon Martin was, in reality, quite mild. Whereas conservatives invoke the line as if Obama had performed some version of Garrett Morris’s famous SNL sketch (“I’m gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see!”), his comments were measured and empathetic: “Obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through.” He added, “All of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.”

Obama took pains to avoid prejudging the case, and urged the country to use it for unity rather than division. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this. And that everybody pulls together.” He didn’t say anything about white supremacy. He merely pointed out that his children have a similar skin color as Trayvon Martin’s, which is factually correct. Shapiro likes to say, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” but the key word here seems to be your—Shapiro’s feelings are another matter altogether.

A decade and a half later, Obama’s remarks about Trayvon Martin present a sobering contrast with the current president. Trump’s supporters have constructed an elaborate double standard to ignore his fire hose of lies and incendiary rhetoric, which they dismiss as “mean tweets” or otherwise inconsequential. They have justified doing so in large part by turning Obama into a chimerical monster who supposedly launched the racial war that Trump must now win.

Yet the strongest evidence they can marshal for Obama’s alleged provocation is rhetoric that is more thoughtful, dignified, and presidential than anything Trump has said in his entire time in the White House.

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

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Friday, May 1, 2026 1:19 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Obama.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, May 2, 2026 8:56 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:
Fuck Obama.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
My working theory is that Trumptards are wrong in all ways knowable. That theory is backed by data collected on the excruciating personal failures of Trumptards I know. Their failures make Trump attractive since only he can fix what is wrong with them. But who will fix Trump?

How Trump Screwed Himself
Talking with Greg Sargent
Paul Krugman
May 02, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-trump-screwed-himself

I’m sort of on vacation, and didn’t do an interview this week. However, I talked with Greg Sargent of The New Republic from my hotel.

Transcript

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

This week, Donald Trump rejected a proposal from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This offer would have set aside questions about Iran’s nuclear program for now. That may be why Trump rejected it. But there’s another possible reason—accepting that deal wouldn’t make him look as if he’s winning. Yet this comes as gas and oil prices continue to rise, which isn’t making Trump look like a winner either. And partly because of that, Republicans are privately warning that their prospects in the midterms look increasingly dire. So what now for Trump?

Paul Krugman has a great new piece on his Substack, arguing that Trump simply does not have the cards in the Iran situation, even though he may not know it. So we’re talking with Krugman about where all this is going. Paul, always nice to have you on.

Paul Krugman: Good to be on again.

Sargent: So Trump rejected that proposal from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps in part because it would not address Trump’s demand for total termination of Iran’s nuclear program. But the New York Times had an extraordinary detail about the Iranian offer: “A U.S. official also said that accepting it could appear to deny Mr. Trump a victory.” Paul, apparently that’s the single most important factor in all of this, right?

Krugman: That’s what’s been holding everything up. For most of us, by about a week into the war, it was obvious that basically America lost. But Trump cannot bring himself to acknowledge that.

He’s been trying—he’s threatening to bomb them back into the Stone Ages, and he’s been threatening war crimes, and he’s been imposing counter-blockades against the blockade—all of which seems to be because he cannot seem to accept that actually he screwed up badly. There is no good outcome for the United States here. All we can do is accept something that actually leaves Iran stronger than it was, but he won’t do it.

Sargent: Well, we just learned that gas prices rose on Tuesday to the highest level in four years. It’s well over $4 a gallon on average. Brent crude is over $100 a barrel again. Paul, can you just walk us through the basics of how those developments are tied to the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed?

Krugman: Yeah. Before this war, about 15 percent of the world’s oil flowed through that strait. And it’s other stuff too—natural gas, helium, fertilizer—but right now let’s focus on the oil.

So 15 percent of the world’s oil goes through that narrow passageway, which is extremely easy for Iran to block. That 15 percent—there’s really not much of an exit. There’s no real way around the Iranian blockade. A little bit of stuff can go by pipeline, but not much. And that’s a lot of oil being denied to the world market. And of course, the price of oil has gone way up.

But if this continues, he ain’t seen nothing yet. Because the really interesting thing—I cited some numbers from Goldman Sachs in the Substack—although the price of oil is way up, consumption of oil is only down a little bit. And mostly what’s happening is that they’re drawing down inventories of oil, that people who have oil in storage tanks, with oil that was already on tankers, is being used up, which is all happening out of the belief that the strait will reopen soon and prices will come down.

As people start to realize that that’s not about to happen—which has been happening just over the past couple of days—then the prices have to go much, much higher.

Basically, the price of oil has to go high enough to inflict enough economic damage—we have to somehow or other stop, reduce the consumption of oil by another 11 million barrels a day. Convenient thing is that right now, world oil consumption is about 100 million a day. So that’s also about 11 percent. And it takes a huge price increase to do that.

It’s not easy to wean yourself off oil, in the matter of weeks, which is what we’re kind of expecting has to happen. So this can get much—it’s ugly already. It’s ugly politically, obviously, for Trump and the Republicans to have gas hitting its highest level in four years. But it’s going to get a lot uglier very soon unless Trump swallows his pride and accepts that he actually lost this war.

Sargent: Well, just to clarify what you’re saying here—in other words, in order to get the world to demand less oil in keeping with the fact that there’s less supply, the prices really have to go up a lot.

Krugman: I mean, think of it. There’s a certain amount of oil available, which is less than it was. You can’t burn a barrel of oil that isn’t there. So one way or another, people have to be induced to burn less oil. And the way we do that—it’s a world market—the way we do that—in effect nobody decides on it, but what happens is just that the price of oil, there’s bidding for barrels of oil, and the bidding drives the price up until the demand for oil has fallen back in line with the supply.

And the thing—a crucial point again—is oil is, to use the jargon, it’s inelastic. It’s very hard for people to switch away from oil. Give me five years and we can all be driving electric cars, but next month, we can’t. So the prices have to go really, really high to make that big of a dent in oil demand.

Sargent: Right. And so this is where your argument comes in. It’s sort of a structural argument about the situation. You wrote that Trump doesn’t have the cards in the standoff with Iran precisely because the longer we wait, the harder it gets for the world. So I guess the only way out—the only way this can be resolved—is in a way that leaves America weaker and leaves Iran stronger. Can you explain that?

Krugman: Yeah, I mean, basically Iran clearly still has the ability to block that strait. They have drones, they have missiles. The United States bombed a lot of their sites, but not enough. And these things are really easy to hide. They have speedboats.

And, if you want to think of the maximally vulnerable target—a fully loaded oil tanker. You want to hit something with bombs that will go off with a big bang and a lot of flames, it’s an oil tanker.

So Iran has the ability to block the strait. And they have every incentive to do that until they feel that they’re not facing an existential threat—the Iranian regime. So really, the strait does not get open until Trump accepts a deal that is sufficiently favorable to the Iranians for them to start letting tankers through again.

By definition—the strait was open before Trump started his war—Iran is clearly going to want to charge tolls on it. Iran is not going to cancel its nuclear program because...they’re hurting too. The United States has a blockade. Iran can’t export oil—it’s among the countries now that can’t sell oil. And they also can’t import food, which is probably more important. But they are prepared to pay that price. So in this waiting game, basically they have by far the upper hand.

Another—well, another president would not have started this idiot war in the first place. But in any case, given the situation, would say, okay, we need to face reality. I need to face reality. I messed up and I’m not going to get something that looks like victory out of this. But Trump so far won’t.

Sargent: Well, you mentioned that there’s pressure on Iran as well. And I want to ask you—is there a scenario where the pressure on Iran actually does matter and forces them to the table on terms that are more favorable to Trump?

Trump had this missive on Truth Social where he said, “Iran has just informed us that they are in a state of collapse. They want us to open the Hormuz Strait as soon as possible.”

Is this just complete bullshit? I mean, is there a scenario where the pressure on Iran does sort of force them to the table on terms that would make Trump feel a little more like a winner, or whatever the only thing that matters is?

Krugman: Yeah, it’s one of those things where—is this unadulterated bullshit? No, it’s adulterated bullshit. I mean, Iran is hurting. Their economy normally depends overwhelmingly on selling oil. And again, they actually import food. So there’s going to be a lot of unemployed, hungry Iranians, a lot of economic disruption—maybe even, if this goes on long enough, maybe even runaway inflation in Iran.

But this is a fanatical, theocratic regime which is completely willing to kill its own people to stay in power. That is not going to force them to cave. And on the other hand, the whole world economy outside the Persian Gulf is looking at very nasty consequences, including the United States and the political consequences of—I guess, $4.18-a-gallon oil today and much more than that for diesel, by the way. So there are other things that are hurting even more.

It’s very unlikely that the United States is prepared to deal with multiple months of this stuff. So, yeah, it’s not the case that [it’s all] Iran is hurting us and we aren’t hurting Iran. But if you ask who is going to have to cry uncle sooner, it’s almost certainly us.

Sargent: Well, beyond this one missive on Truth Social, Trump keeps making the opposite argument in a bigger sense. He keeps saying Iran has been totally defeated. And as you mentioned, it’s true that Iran’s military has been badly degraded. But Trump also says time is on his side. He doesn’t feel rushed to make a deal at all. He’s perfectly happy to wait until Iran submits and gives him his way—that’s almost exactly verbatim what he’s saying.

Paul, I think the temptation is strong to read that as sort of typical Trumpian bluster, but it seems plausible to me that he doesn’t understand the situation at the most fundamental level, in the sense that he doesn’t understand that Iran has some leverage here precisely because he can’t accept that thought [that] he’d be the submissive one and they’d be the dominant one. And that doesn’t compute in Trump’s brain. Do you think that’s plausible, that he just doesn’t know that he is kind of on the losing end of the situation in some ways?

Krugman: I think he’s in a kind of superimposed state where at some level he does know, but he can’t bring himself to admit it, even to himself. We got into this mess, he pulled us into this mess, in part because he has a completely wrongheaded notion of what war is about. He thinks if we have more bombs and we can kill more people, then of course we have the upper hand. That has never been what war is about. It’s always about ends and means and ability to inflict pain.

And he reverts to that over and over again. I’m not a young kid and I remember Vietnam and body counts. And a lot of what Trump says is reminiscent of the body counts. We have destroyed—actually, it turns out that we were much less successful in destroying their missiles and drones than a lot of the claims. In any case, that is not what it’s about.

But Trump just has this, I have the ability to carry out violence, so surely I can’t be losing this war if I can do violence and they can’t do equivalent amounts of violence in return. Except the problem is that it’s not what they can do to America’s military. It’s what they can do to oil tankers that try to exit the Persian Gulf.

Sargent: Right. In his head, he’s always the winner. So he can’t be losing. Isn’t that the basic size of it?

Krugman: Yeah, all of it ties together. I mean, the inability to accept that they lost the 2020 election is part of the same syndrome, you know. A guy who can’t admit that he lost a presidential election to Joe Biden is not going to be able to admit that he lost a war to the mullahs of Iran.

Sargent: That seems like a plausible reading. So The Times has this other report laying out how Republicans are anxious about the midterms, and the factors they cite are the war, gas prices, and affordability more generally. They’re describing this with words like “bleak.”

But it seems like Trump—who keeps saying time is on his side, as we mentioned—isn’t letting that intrude on his calculations either. And yet Republicans can’t push him to change course because they’re not allowed to say he’s not in the midst of a glorious triumph. Paul, what do you make of that dynamic?

Krugman: The moral, intellectual, emotional collapse of the Republican Party is in a way a bigger story than Trump. I mean, yeah, he’s a world-class, bizarre, dangerous person, but what makes him able to do this is the submissiveness of his party.

The celebration of a guy who is an absolute disaster at presidenting—he has led, more or less single-handedly, on his own decisions, his own faith, his own judgment, he has led America into one of our worst strategic defeats in our history. He took on this relatively small military power in Iran, figuring that he could destroy the regime and install his people in a few days, and he lost the war.

But his party will never admit that. They’re busy—just an item that crossed earlier, a couple of hours before we recorded this—the State Department is getting ready to put Trump’s picture on U.S. passports. This cult of personality around a guy who is objectively maybe the biggest loser in the history of U.S. presidents. It’s just amazing.

Sargent: Yeah, I just want to clarify that that was a report in The Bulwark about the passports and Trump’s face. Can I ask you about the global economy? You mentioned that it’s in pretty rough shape right now. What do you predict is going to happen with the global economy over, I don’t know, the next six months to a year?

Krugman: Well, tell me what’s going to happen with the Strait of Hormuz, and that makes all the difference in the world. I don’t think the global economy was in dire straits. There were some wobbles, but it wasn’t that bad before the war. And if the price of oil stayed where it is right now, then we’re talking about a significant but not catastrophic hit to global growth.

The trouble is that the world has not adapted to 15 percent less oil yet. If the strait stays closed, it will have to. And I tried—I did this in a Substack post a few days ago—if your forecast about world oil prices does not lead to a severe economic blow to the world economy, your forecast is too low. Because there’s no scenario in which we get by with 15 percent less oil that doesn’t involve a global recession.

So if the strait stays closed, one way or another we will have a global recession. I don’t know what oil price that will mean—$150 a barrel, $200 a barrel. I can do some economic algebra there and try to give you an estimate, but it’s really all over the place. High enough that we have a global recession, because that’s the only way to reduce oil consumption that much that fast.

Sargent: Right. And that’s built into the structural situation that we described earlier, right? In the sense that Iran knows that if the strait remains closed, the global economy could very well go into recession. So that incentivizes them to not give in, right?

Krugman: Time is very definitely on their side. We’re burning through whatever oil was in storage very fast. And as that happens, the situation gets grimmer. They’re suffering too, but time is on their side. It gives them every incentive to hang tough for something that looks like a victory to them.

And this is another thing where I don’t think Trump understands. For him, everything is about appearance and illusion, and he’s going to goose the markets and try to produce confidence. He’s done that now four times—he’s goosed the markets by saying peace is around the corner.

And the problem for him is that this ends up being about brute physical facts. The oil is there or it’s not. And you can play confidence games for a while, but at a certain point, the reality of are those barrels actually on their way to markets or not is the story. And the Iranians are in control of how that story plays out.

Sargent: Well, maybe you can explain something to all of us. Why do the markets keep going up when he gooses them? Can you explain that dynamic? It’s still something that puzzles me. It seems very obvious that Trump is goosing the markets and yet the markets get goosed. Why?

Krugman: Anybody who tries to explain what the stock market in particular does—God knows. It’s not a good predictor of the future. My old teacher, Paul Samuelson, famously said that the market had predicted nine of the last five recessions.

So the market has got its own psychology. I think we went through a long period when anybody who went optimist, people who bought the dips, did very well. And it takes a while to end that psychology. Now, I think the stock market—God knows.

The oil futures market is more tied to concrete events. I think the problem with that market is they keep on thinking that Trump is going to be rational. Every time he says something that sounds like he might be willing to acknowledge reality, the oil futures drop because people think, so he’s finally ready to recognize reality. And they’ve done that four times now. And I’m not sure it’s going to happen again.

The Lucy and the football analogies seem a little too flippant for this situation. But I think that’s really where it is. At a certain point, the markets stop doing that. So far, I think people, to the extent that there’s a story, is that people in the market keep on betting that, yeah, he can’t be that crazy. And that is not a good bet.

Sargent: It seems like a terrible bet. Just to close this out—Trump may not be winning in Iran, but he’s demanding his ballroom. You made the case that he’s obsessing over the ballroom because it’s an easy area for him to assert dominance over Republicans and over donors who have to pay tribute to him.

I just want to add something to your argument. The ballroom obsessing is clearly a problem for Republicans in the midterms. It’s sort of a symbol of how out of touch he is with voters’ concerns and problems. But here again, even the most vulnerable Republicans are required to go out and cultishly declare that the ballroom has to happen and that it would be the greatest accomplishment by any leader in world history.

Now that’s a dynamic that’s just deeply baffling, but almost sort of weirdly satisfying because their continued hagiography about Trump could screw them almost more than anyone else.

Krugman: Yeah, I mean, Marie Antoinette had nothing on Trump. Here we are, people are complaining about gas prices, there’s a war, and he’s always obsessed with his gilded ballroom. And yeah, I think that for him, it’s an escape. He fantasizes about giant ballrooms.

And for his party, the Republican Party functions as if it was a totalitarian police state, even though, we don’t actually live in a totalitarian police state—not yet. But I think if you’re a Republican politician, first, if you take on Trump, you think he still has the power to destroy you politically. And also, you’re probably a little afraid. Defy Trump and legal action will be taken against you. Who knows, maybe even a MAGA mob will show up. And I think that there’s a real element of intimidation, both political and to some extent even physical, going on here.

Anyone who had the character to stand up to that has left the Republican Party. What’s left—what we’re left with is the people who are willing to debase themselves for the sake of Trump. And it’s become a habit with them. They just do it regardless.

Sargent: So is there a scenario where Trump accepts something in between what he wants and what Iran wants—is there a scenario where Iran makes an offer like that and Trump accepts it and then just declares victory and goes home? Do you see that as a possibility?

Krugman: At a certain point, the sheer damage that’s being done by this closed strait will—I think even Trump will have to at some point acknowledge it and face up to it. I actually think is that the substance of what’s going to emerge is going to be pretty much what the Iranians are demanding. I don’t see—why they would give any significant substance here?

But they might be willing to use evasive, clever language to provide something that Trump and his propaganda machine will, with great effort, spin as a victory. I’m not sure how they’ll do that, but I think the most likely scenario is that effectively Iran remains—it’s collecting tolls and does not give up its nuclear program. Basically it’s the Iranian plan, but that somehow the language of it makes it sufficiently obscure that Trump can go out and say, see we won a great victory.

Sargent: Well, and thinking about Trump’s psychology a little more—he could just say, well, I won because I’m a winner, so I only can win.

Krugman: Yeah. He has never acknowledged defeat on anything. He never acknowledges having been wrong on anything. So he will do that. And the question is only whether they offer him enough cover to do that. Iran is in this for a lot of reasons, and many of them are horrible and crazy, but it’s not for ego. So they are probably willing to assuage Trump’s ego as long as they get the substance of a deal that is overwhelmingly in their favor.

Sargent: Very plausible outcome. Paul Krugman, thanks so much for coming on, folks. Make sure to check out Paul’s Substack—it’s just great. It’s so informative day in and day out. Paul, thank you so much.

Krugman: Thank you.

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

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Saturday, May 2, 2026 1:55 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Obama.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
My working theory is that Trumptards are wrong in all ways knowable. That theory is backed by data collected on the excruciating personal failures of Trumptards I know. Their failures make Trump attractive since only he can fix what is wrong with them. But who will fix Trump?


Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.

We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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

Sunday, May 3, 2026 7:09 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:

Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.

We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Pope says that you and Trump are risking your immortal souls. There is still time to repent or else burn in Hell forever:

Trump picked a fight with the Pope: The one person he can't fire, can't outbid, and can't outlast

The Pope and the President of the United States are both American. That seems to be a problem.

By Catherina Gioino | May 2, 2026

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-picked-a-fight-with-the-p
ope-the-one-person-he-can-t-fire-can-t-outbid-and-can-t-outlast/ar-AA22dGhA

Trump’s version of the American Dream says the winners are being stolen from: by immigrants and globalists, and by institutions that no longer serve the people who built them. His opponents mostly argue within the same framework, insisting the system should be fairer but still organized around the same ideals. Pope Leo XIV is the first American pope, and is also the only person in the world with the moral authority, the biography, and the institutional platform to critique the MAGA vision of America on its own terms, using its own words.

Trump chose to pick a fight with the Pope in a way that his own base argue is against the very things he preaches. His approval rating has fallen to 34% in Pew’s latest survey, the lowest of his second term. The Iran war he launched has closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted 20% of global oil supplies, pushed gas prices past $4 a gallon, and driven inflation back to 3.3%, the highest since May 2024, with economists warning it could reach 4.2% by year’s end.

The IMF has flagged global recession risk. A majority of voters, 53%, now call the Iran military action a failure, and Democrats hold a 10-point lead on the generic congressional ballot heading into the midterms. An AP poll puts Trump’s approval on the economy at 30%. And into this steps an American pope with a 42% favorable rating and an 8% unfavorable rating, a net favorability 34 points better than the president’s, making the moral case against the very war that is producing the economic pain. The reason why he remains so untouchable despite Trump’s attacks is that he embodies the same thing Trump is: an American.

Iran challenged Trump’s hold over MAGA like no other conflict, and so Leo has like no other figure. Every other critic Trump has faced, from Democrats to foreign leaders, could be dismissed as partisan, but Leo is from Chicago and leads the faith Trump’s own vice president converted to. Now he runs the oldest institution on earth from a sovereign city-state smaller than most golf courses.

When President Donald Trump built the MAGA political movement, he used a very specific version of the American Dream: nationalist, zero-sum, culturally defensive, built on accumulation and dominance. Leo tends to counter that: same country and same institutions but a completely different approach to what the United States should do.

“He’s a believer in the United States, and what he’s saying is also, indirectly, trying to correct where the United States is going,” Massimo Faggioli, professor of historical and contemporary ecclesiology at Villanova University, told Fortune. “He’s credible when he talks about America in ways that an Italian, a German, or a Pole couldn’t be.”

Two American dreams in conflict

Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV previously served as a missionary in Peru before becoming the first North American pope. For years, the American Catholic right dismissed Vatican criticism of U.S. politics as the meddling of out-of-touch European clerics or a Latin American pope with an anti-American chip on his shoulder. Now, that argument is no longer available.

Christopher White, associate director at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center and author of Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy, sees Leo as genuinely uninterested in partisan politics, and genuinely committed to using his office as a moral platform. “He’s standing on the shoulders of many popes before him who have seen one of the chief responsibilities of their office as being a peacemaker. He didn’t go looking for a fight with the president. The president is certainly the one who escalated this.”

“He looked at the camera a few weeks ago and said to Catholics in the U.S., ‘Call your lawmakers. Tell them to reject war, reject violence.’ He does want there to be a political outcome,” White told Fortune, “but he doesn’t want to be perceived as partisan.”

The last pope, Francis, could be filed away by American conservatives as an anti-American Latin American leftist, but Leo can’t. “Francis always had a very skeptical, cynical view of the United States, as an Argentinian,” said Faggioli. “Pope Leo doesn’t have that. He comes from Chicago, which for U.S. Catholic history has a very special place. He has purified his vision of the United States while being in Latin America for so long. He’s really a man of many worlds, especially of the Americas.”

“With an American Pope, you cannot say the Vatican is run by corrupt Europeans. There’s one of us. Pope Leo has limited their options.”

Contradictions in MAGA Catholicism

When Donald Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV on social media this spring, calling him “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” he handed his critics an obvious line: the President of the United States just picked a fight with the pope. But the more interesting story, according to the scholars who study both Catholicism and American politics, is why this particular pope is so much harder for Trump’s movement to deal with than any predecessor.

It’s thanks to a very specific contradiction at the heart of MAGA Catholicism, where talking points used in the past—like geography and biography—are no longer applicable to the American-born Pope Leo XIV.

No one in the Trump sphere has a bigger problem with this than JD Vance.

Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 and has made his faith central to his political identity. He is associated with Catholic integralism, a view that Catholic social doctrine should shape public life, that the church’s moral authority matters in the political sphere.

When Trump’s feud with Leo went public, Vance said the Vatican should stick to “morality,” and let the president dictate policy. Faggioli identifies exactly what that costs him. “When you have the Pope saying something and the President saying something else, and you, as a Catholic who’s an integralist, say the Pope should shut up? Well, you have sold out your argument. Because integralism doesn’t include the idea that the Pope should shut up on certain issues. That demonstrated the limits.”

“Vance is on the record previously saying that he was grateful that past popes, particularly John Paul II, used his moral authority to try to prevent the U.S. from going to war with Iraq in the early 2000s,” recounted White. “But now, when you have a pope opposing a war started by his administration, he wants to sing a different tune. I think that puts his hypocrisy on full display.”

The broader MAGA religious coalition, or what Faggioli calls “a magma or galaxy of different things” combining the old religious right, Catholic integralists, and Christian nationalists, held together as long as the pope was quiet. “Catholics in that coalition felt they needed to say something when their president attacks the Pope,” Faggioli says. “Some, like Marco Rubio, stayed away, because he’s smart. Others who have the zeal of the convert, like JD Vance, found it was a good idea to tell the Pope he should stick to morality.”

A pressure campaign

The church really started speaking up more after the U.S. capture of Maduro in Venezuela. “That sends a message to the Vatican that the United States is acting more and more recklessly on the global scene.” Leo’s January 9 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See focused on global chaos the Vatican saw as American-made. Ten days later, three top U.S. Cardinals jointly condemned U.S. foreign policy. “I think that’s when someone in the White House said, ‘Okay, we should do something about this,'” Faggioli says.

Then came a January Pentagon meeting in which DOD policy chief Elbridge Colby allegedly told Cardinal Christophe Pierre that the U.S. military could do “whatever it wants” and the pope “better take its side.” Both the Vatican and the Defense Department have denied the characterization. Faggioli notes what isn’t denied: “No one has denied that meeting took place. They summoned the papal nuncio to the Pentagon, which is highly unnatural. They chose that venue to send a message.”

“There’s been an effort on the part of this administration to silence and intimidate the pope and his team in their efforts to push for an end to the Iran war,” said White.

Both scholars compare the moment to John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraq War, and both say it’s worse now. “The Bush White House received John Paul II’s emissary,” White says. “They ultimately ignored him, but it was a very different sort of treatment. Now you’ve seen the President himself, the Vice President, question the Pope’s right to speak into these issues at all.” Faggioli: “The real difference is that the U.S. has abandoned the idea that there is something called international law. This is much more than Trump being a little impolite. It’s something steeper than that.”

The religious framing of the war is what alarms Rome most. Hegseth asked Americans to pray for military victory “in the name of Jesus Christ” and compared a downed pilot’s Easter rescue to the Resurrection. That rhetoric “is one of the most dangerous things in the eyes of the Vatican, because they don’t want Christianity to be labeled, again, as essentially a bunch of crusaders who want to take over the Middle East,” Faggioli says.

Social media has of course played a huge role in how Trump, and those in his administration, have interacted with the Vatican. Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself in white robes, one hand on a sick man’s forehead, surrounded by flags, fighter jets, bald eagles, and the Lincoln Memorial. He later said it was supposed to show him as a doctor. Faggioli pointed to a similar incident last year before Pope Leo XIV was chosen. “There’s a history of Donald Trump posting pictures in moments when he was interacting with the Vatican. Just before the Conclave last year, he posted himself sitting in the papal chair. That was not a joke. He was saying: I am the pope of American Catholics. Donald Trump is very smart. This is not accidental.”

Growing anti-Trump sentiment among American bishops

U.S. bishops are rallying around Leo in ways they never did around Francis. “Many bishops, even conservatives who were indifferent toward Trumpism, have realized how dangerous Trump is for the church,” Faggioli says. “Many of them have seen their parishes where immigrant Catholics go empty or half-empty. They’ve realized that this administration is bad for the church.”

White says this is particularly troubling for a nation that long expressed the importance of the right to religion. “This country and even this administration has long touted that the first freedom is religious freedom. I think you could characterize the President’s attempts to undermine the Pope’s ability to speak and preach freely as a real threat to religious freedom.”

More people like the Pope than the President

A March NBC poll found 42% of U.S. voters viewed Pope Leo favorably, with only 8% viewing him negatively. Trump: 41% positive, 53% negative. A YouGov poll found 48% of Americans sided with Leo on Iran, versus 28% with Trump and Vance. Among independents: 50% Leo, 15% Trump.

“The President’s actions toward the Pope are certainly unprecedented,” White ended. “Yet even though it’s unprecedented, it is not entirely unsurprising, given the President’s volatile and often erratic style of operating.”

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

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 10:12 AM

SECOND

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


The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over

For Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, the essence of democracy was thoughtful back-and-forth argument.

By Adam Kirsch

May 3, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/jurgen-habermas-debate-trump
/687016/

Americans have a long history of being hurried into war on false pretexts. The “yellow press” encouraged a war fever in 1898 by blaming the sinking of the USS Maine on the Spanish, even though the Navy’s own expert said it was caused by an accidental explosion. The George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9/11 attacks and was building weapons of mass destruction, neither of which turned out to be true.

But with the Iran war, as in so many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, because he simply didn’t care what the public thought. The American people weren’t consulted about attacking Iran—neither formally, through their elected representatives in Congress, nor informally, by allowing pundits, activists, and civil-society groups to have their say. As Trump told The New York Times in January, his power as commander in chief was constrained by nothing but “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a prolific commentator on world events, didn’t live to comment on the Iran war. He died on March 14, at the age of 96, two weeks after American and Israeli air strikes began. But it bore out his worst fears about the fate of liberal democracy, which he spent a long lifetime analyzing and defending. For Habermas, the essence of democracy was discourse, back-and-forth argument about ideas and values. In his landmark works of political and social theory, he wrote about the “public sphere” where citizens come together to hammer out judgments, and about “communicative action,” which turns language into a force for cooperation. “All political power derives from the communicative power of citizens,” he wrote, and in an ideal democracy “all relevant questions, issues, and contributions are brought up and processed in discourses and negotiations.”

The end of a life as long and productive as Habermas’s can’t be called a tragedy. But there was a special pathos about the tributes published around the world after his death, which seemed to symbolize the tragic condition of democracy itself. In one of his last public appearances, in Munich in November, he gave a speech mourning “the now–barely reversible dismantling of the oldest liberal-democratic regime,” the United States, thanks to Trump’s “arbitrary-autocratic expansion” of executive power.

America’s autocratic turn darkened the end of what Habermas described in the speech as a “politically rather favored life.” Perhaps it was favored in the sense that it began at such a low point, there was nowhere to go but up. Habermas was born in Germany in 1929 and grew up under Nazism; he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and his father served as an officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II. He lived long enough to see democracy take root in West Germany, and then to see a reunified Germany become the bulwark of free Europe.

This happy ending was by no means guaranteed, and Habermas’s work as a theorist and polemicist made an important contribution to it. He began his career in West Germany in the 1950s, when ex-Nazis still dominated the academic establishment. Turning against the influence of Martin Heidegger, then the idol of German philosophy despite his collaboration with the Nazi regime, the young Habermas found a mentor in Theodor Adorno, a radical social critic who spent the Nazi period in exile. Adorno was one of the founders of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and Habermas took up his mantle as the leader of the school’s second generation, spending most of his career at the University of Frankfurt.

But whereas Adorno effectively lost hope for modern civilization after the Holocaust, Habermas devoted his career to finding resources for freedom in the Western intellectual tradition. That quest began with his first book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in 1962. It is still his most popular work, largely because it is more concrete and historical than his later, densely theoretical writing. Habermas traced the birth of the modern concept of “public opinion” to the coffeehouses, salons, and newspapers of 18th-century Europe, which gave ordinary people the opportunity to debate current events and pass judgment on the decisions of monarchs.

This milieu, which laid the groundwork for the French Revolution, served as Habermas’s political inspiration. The public sphere, he wrote, meant “the dissolution of domination,” so that ideas and policies “prevailed on no other ground than the compelling insight of a public opinion.” But Habermas recognized that this liberal-democratic ideal was never fully realized—not in the 18th century, when the public sphere was open only to men of property, and not in the 20th, when public opinion had become passive and inert, an object to be manipulated by propaganda. “The world fashioned by the mass media,” he lamented, “is a public sphere in appearance only.”

Habermas wasn’t alone in making such observations. But whereas leftist thinkers starting with Marx saw the liberal ideal as totally discredited, a mere camouflage for capitalist power, Habermas kept faith with the utopian potential of liberalism. It might be true that a genuine deliberative democracy had never existed, but he insisted that any good society must be based on its principles. “The legitimacy of law,” he wrote in his 1992 book, Between Facts and Norms, “ultimately depends on a communicative arrangement”: Citizens must be “participants in rational discourses,” able to speak their minds freely and to find mutually agreeable solutions to difficult problems.

His study of the dynamics of discourse took Habermas beyond the realm of political philosophy. His scholarship draws on sociology, linguistics, psychology, and cultural studies, engaging with a wide range of other thinkers, past and present. Indeed, Habermas sometimes gives the impression of having read everything about everything. His prose is equally forbidding—dense and abstract, in the long tradition of German philosophy. Yet his work can also be seen as an example of what he called “discourse ethics” in action—an earnest, back-and-forth engagement with other minds.

Ultimately, Habermas believed, language itself commits human beings to democratic argument. In The Theory of Communicative Action, his 1981 magnum opus, he rejected the scientific tendency to think about language in terms of propositions—statements about the world that can be either true or false. The most important thing, Habermas maintained, isn’t what a statement is about, but who it is addressed to. Any time we say something, we say it to another human being in an implicit attempt to win their assent. Different kinds of statements ask for different kinds of acceptance: A factual claim, like “Earth is the third planet from the sun,” wants to be accepted as true, while a moral claim, like “Murder is evil,” wants to be accepted as right.

But in every case, Habermas wrote, “the speech act of one person succeeds only if the other accepts the offer contained in it.” And the decision to accept or reject a speech act is always “based on potential grounds or reasons.” Whenever we say something, we are making a tacit promise that we have good reasons for saying it, and could produce them if called on to do so. Habermas concluded that persuasion isn’t just one way of using language among many others; it is the foundation of every use of language. “The inherent telos of human speech,” the purpose for which it is intended, is “reaching understanding” between human beings.

In real life, of course, we don’t use language only for rational persuasion. We also use it to give orders and make threats, demanding obedience instead of agreement. But when we agree with someone because of the potential “losses” or “rewards,” Habermas argued, we aren’t truly agreeing, just giving in. By the same principle, public discourse is authentic only when no participant is excluded, no opinion is forbidden, and no one is subjected to coercion. These conditions are seldom found in real politics, but we can always get closer to the ideal or further from it.

When Habermas wrote Structural Transformation, in the mid-20th century, he believed the main obstacles to public discourse were technological. Radio, television, and large-circulation newspapers made it possible to reach audiences that a coffeehouse pundit couldn’t dream of. But this communication is one-way: The mass media speak to the public but “deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to disagree.” And since the media agenda is set by the rich and powerful, it’s nearly impossible for dissenting voices to get a hearing.

By the end of Habermas’s life, ironically, the advance of technology had created exactly the opposite problem. Thanks to the internet and social media, the barrier to entering the marketplace of ideas has never been lower. A lone streamer can become an authority to millions, while once-mighty TV networks and newspapers struggle to stay afloat. This ought to be a boon for communication, and in the early days of the internet, many idealists thought it would be. So why has a glut of discourse turned out to be worse for democracy than scarcity was?

In one of his last books—A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, published in 2023—Habermas briefly surveyed this development. “Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalization is turning everyone into a potential author,” he observed. The problem is that when it comes to discourse, quantity is often the enemy of quality. Rational public debate can take place only if participants accept certain conditions—above all, the obligation to be truthful and to listen to other points of view.

The internet, to put it mildly, is not known for encouraging these qualities. The problem isn’t just that people deliberately lie, spreading disinformation for personal or political gain. It’s that the public sphere has shattered into competing publics, each able to ignore the others. If you’re a vaccine denier, your social-media feed is full of other vaccine deniers, so your beliefs are always affirmed, never challenged. This makes democratic deliberation impossible. “The point of deliberative politics is, after all, that it enables us to improve our beliefs in political disputes and get closer to correct solutions to problems,” Habermas wrote, and that can’t happen if we are never challenged by counterarguments or kept honest by demands for explanation. (Or as he put it, using the technical language of his theory of communication, “communicative contents could no longer be exchanged in the currency of criticizable validity claims.”)

Habermas was in his 90s when he wrote about social media, and if anything, he underestimated the challenge it poses—not just to liberal democracy, but to his own thought and worldview. The most sinister effect of the internet on today’s politics isn’t just that it foments division. It’s that the weightlessness of online existence breeds a kind of gleeful nihilism. Instead of discourse, social media encourages trolling—the principle that it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as people pay attention to you.

Habermas was right to call Trump autocratic, but what makes him a strongman for the social-media age is his maddening frivolity—the way he doesn’t seem to know or care what he’s doing or what he will do next. Because he doesn’t take anything seriously, he makes it almost impossible to take him seriously, even as he inflicts entirely serious damage on people and institutions. This quality makes Trump an enigma to political theorists, but a star on social media—a medium where “all that is solid melts into air,” to borrow a famous phrase from Karl Marx. When cruelty and carelessness can be such a politically effective combination, it’s clear that the era of rational discourse—the era of Jürgen Habermas—is well and truly over.

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

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 12:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.

We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Pope says that you and Trump are risking your immortal souls.


Fuck the Pope. Fuck Catholicism. Fuck Christianity. Fuck Religion. And fuck you.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 1:38 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:

Fuck the Pope. Fuck Catholicism. Fuck Christianity. Fuck Religion. And fuck you.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you and Trump are personifications of the seven deadly sins — pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth — a classification of vices in Catholic tradition that originated in the 4th century and was refined by Pope Gregory I and Thomas Aquinas. Often called "capital sins," these seven vices are considered the root causes of other immoral behaviors and spiritual decay.

The Seven Deadly Sins and Their Meanings:

• Pride (Superbia): Often considered the root of all other sins, it is an excessive, selfish belief in one’s own superiority and abilities.

• Greed (Avarice): An obsessive, insatiable desire for material wealth, possessions, or power over others.

• Lust (Luxuria): An intense, disordered craving for sexual pleasure, focusing purely on self-gratification rather than love.

• Envy (Invidia): Resentment or sadness directed at another person’s talents, possessions, or happiness, often wishing to take them away.

• Gluttony (Gula): Overindulgence and overconsumption of anything to the point of waste, particularly food and drink.

• Wrath (Ira): Uncontrolled, intense anger, hatred, or rage that drives a desire for vengeance.

• Sloth (Acedia): Laziness, apathy, or a failure to utilize one's talents and pursue Spiritual growth.

These vices are famously detailed as the structures of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Counter-Virtues (Remedies):
To combat these, traditional teachings offer corresponding virtues:
• Pride -» Humility
• Greed -» Generosity
• Lust -» Chastity
• Envy -» Gratitude
• Gluttony -» Temperance
• Wrath -» Patience
• Sloth -» Diligence

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

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 2:16 PM

SECOND

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


Sorry Kiddos, We’re Not In Wonderland Anymore. We’re Not Even In Kansas

Much worse. Evidently, we’re in a country that’s gone mad. Bonkers. Off its rocker.

Sunday, May 3, 2026 by Bonnie McCune

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/sorry-kiddos-were-not-in
-wonderland-anymore-were-not-even-in-kansas.html

It wasn’t until the current leader of this country achieved power again that I realized we’re inhabiting a completely irrational world. Perhaps it’s always been that way, and I simply was too naive or slow to realize it. Evidently, we live in a country where its leader can openly mock other religions, leaders, and countries with impunity. He feels no hesitation in making fun of people with handicaps or who don’t agree with him. He delivers mind-blowing threats with nary a blink.

Is there anything more unreal than a nation in which the leader has been found guilty of lying under oath, stealing/theft, and numerous other charges without a twitch from many authorities? Donald Trump has been adjudged liable, or indicted in numerous criminal and civil cases covering a wide range of legal violations, including falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, sexual abuse, defamation, and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

All with complete impunity. Why is he able to ignore and walk around all the customary forms of crime that so many others are currently imprisoned for? Why are we tolerating this? This man? Anyone else would either be charged with harassment or sued for defamation of character or indicted for crimes.

A friend of mine blames the laissez-faire attitude of society on the laxity with which society treats contemporary media nowadays. We see murders, thefts, beatings, and crimes in a constant flood of words and images in books, videos, and news. I’m not convinced. After all, these despicable behaviors have been part of human conduct from time ad infinitum. They are the stuff of which folk tales and religions are made.

I have taken small comfort in the questionable belief that he’s lost his mind. We’re encouraged to extend tolerance and sympathy to those mentally and emotionally handicapped. My question, however, is why no one has tried to disarm him? Supposedly, there are penalties for failing to halt this destruction. At least there are ethical and moral constraints, even if no one appears willing to stop him.

Do these sound like rational actions by an adult male in our society?

• He authorizes expenditures (for which he has no legal claims) for huge, unnecessary construction projects that have no legitimate purpose but which proclaim his name.

• He single-handedly closes federal agencies and programs, some in existence for years, with little blowback.

• He identifies with god figures so much that he creates (or instructs others to create) images of himself as what obviously is a Messiah figure and Superman.

• He loudly and openly criticizes the actions and purported purposes of other leaders, both civil and international, evidently just to denigrate them.

The publication of Alice in Wonderland is often touted as a view of reality as insanity. Welcome 2026, where Trump’s assessment of reality is bizarre to say the least, and inexplicable is another accurate description. His latest proposal is to build a giant arch in Washington, DC, that would dwarf other monumental arches in the world. The administration has not released cost estimates, but the proposal is massive. The excuse? The country’s 250th anniversary.

In other recent news, Trump downplayed the impact of high fuel prices, suggesting the economic fallout from the ongoing war with Iran is less severe than anticipated. He referred to the current inflation as “fake,” attributing it to fluctuating energy prices. Despite gas prices exceeding $5 a gallon at local stations, Trump has chosen not to address the rising costs of fuel or airline tickets during his remarks at a recent appearance.

Other activities too complicated to detail here include responsibility for the deaths of people and complete disruption of individuals’ lives, like immigrants detained in ICE raids, cessation of valuable government programs with no attempt to evaluate their effectiveness in health care, federal lands, education, and many others

Several weeks ago, he promised that the war with Iran was ending soon. He picked a fight with the pope on social media. He threatened to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve. He posted an illustration of himself receiving an encouraging hug from Jesus Christ. When Trump or his handlers are aiming for better press coverage, he typically shifts attention elsewhere, with little or no support from rational explanations.

Perhaps this time will differ from previous measures. Perhaps he won’t be able to message or thunder his way out of the war he started without congressional approval or voter concurrence. But so far, just as previously, no one is trying to stop him. Not Congress, not the military, not the media, not political parties.

The only possible reason for our situation must be the inherent instability and irrationality of the human race itself. There’s nothing new about individuals or countries trying to kill everyone they view as enemies. Nothing unusual about individuals or power groups or countries trying to grab supremacy in any way possible.

In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll has the characters run a Caucus Race to dry off. The participants run in patterns of any shape, starting and leaving off whenever they like, so that everyone wins. A rather pointless task. For those unfamiliar with this political tradition, the book’s caucus satirizes the absurdity of politics, where participants run in circles with no rules, goal, or clear winner, emphasizing the meaninglessness of competitive processes.

Donald Trump has been found guilty, liable, or indicted in numerous criminal and civil cases covering a wide range of legal violations, including falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, sexual abuse, defamation, and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He uses threats and influences in the manner that 6th-grade bully girls use their power. To denigrate, badmouth, and attempt to humiliate everyone else, not just his opponents. Even the pope! Trump’s version of politics is as ridiculous as the Dodo’s, with people struggling for position simply to get ahead, not for the good of the people or country.

Why should I bother to complain? If someone is delusional but it doesn’t affect me or mine? For example, if he thinks he is the emperor of the world and no one forces ME to kiss his feet, I can live with that. His fantasies don’t affect me. Much different if his visions impacted my life. Say he forced me to pay a $100 fine every time I spotted his image on TV. Then he’d definitely have an impact on me. I think the bill just hasn’t come due yet.

On the other hand, I might be willing to overlook actions if he simply leaves me the hell alone. There isn’t much to respect in our system nowadays, no matter what the topic. Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.

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

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 2:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.


That's what we're doing now.

We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.

You lose. Forever.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 2:38 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.


That's what we're doing now.

We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.

You lose. Forever.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Confederates believed freeing the slaves was evil. It was a duty given by God for the slave-owners to take care of the darkies, turning them into productive members of society, rather than allowing the darkies to devolve into rapists of white women. That's why the Law allowed slave-owners to bullwhip, starve, and torture their slaves, the best-known methods to teach darkies obedience to superior white authorities. Funny how Trump got upset when monuments to slave-owning Confederate generals were removed, unless Trump can't tell the difference between what is evil and good.

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

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 2:42 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.


That's what we're doing now.

We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.

You lose. Forever.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Confederates believed freeing the slaves was evil. It was a duty given by God for the slave-owners to take care of the darkies, turning them into productive members of society, rather than allowing the darkies to devolve into rapists of white women.

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



THE CONFEDERATES ARE YOU, STUPID.



That 2 minute clip is the ONLY time in decades that Clinton came off as genuine when a camera was in front of her.



Seriously... Do you have a document on your desktop to copy and paste your edit to my signature with every post, or are you doing that manually every time you reply to me, faggot?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 2:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Today, Democrats don't show their distain and hatred for black people by burning crosses on their yard, or tying them up to the ball hitch on their truck and dragging them through the streets...

They broke up as many black family units as they could by putting black men in prison for minor weed offenses. They used the Department of Education to ruin their schooling so hardly any of them have a fucking prayer at a decent life once they graduate after 12 years of learning NOTHING. They spent the last 65 years making black people as completely dependent on the government as they possibly could.

They put abortion clinics all over the country, called them an innocuous name (Planned Parenthood), and sat back and watched as 19 Million black children were murdered before they were even born since 1973.

The only time Democrats even pretend to care about black people is right before an election when they go to all the black churches and make all the promises again that they know full well they have zero intention of keeping.

They EXPECT black people to vote for them. Neigh... they DEMAND it. If you're black and you don't vote Democrat, they call you Uncle Tom. They call you a race-traitor. They even call you a nigger.


FUCK DEMOCRATS.

Cancer, the entire fucking lot of you.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 2:56 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 CONFEDERATES ARE YOU, STUPID.

That 2 minute clip is the ONLY time in decades that Clinton came off as genuine when a camera was in front of her.

Seriously... Do you have a document on your desktop to copy and paste your edit to my signature with every post, or are you doing that manually every time you reply to me, faggot?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, Trump's actual life is evil, and he is a dick. But like slave-owners everywhere, the difference between evil and good is completely inverted in the minds of evil people. That got partially solved in the American Civil War by killing massive numbers of slave-owners. It didn't change their opinion of themselves, but it did intimidate those who survived. To preserve their old ways, the slave-owners became less obviously evil. They switched from starving and torturing their slaves to only abusing and underpaying their workforce.

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

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 2:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.


That's what we're doing now.

We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.

You lose. Forever.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Confederates believed freeing the slaves was evil. It was a duty given by God for the slave-owners to take care of the darkies, turning them into productive members of society, rather than allowing the darkies to devolve into rapists of white women.

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



THE CONFEDERATES ARE YOU, STUPID.



That 2 minute clip is the ONLY time in decades that Clinton came off as genuine when a camera was in front of her.



Seriously... Do you have a document on your desktop to copy and paste your edit to my signature with every post, or are you doing that manually every time you reply to me, faggot?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 3:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Today, Democrats don't show their distain and hatred for black people by burning crosses on their yard, or tying them up to the ball hitch on their truck and dragging them through the streets...

They broke up as many black family units as they could by putting black men in prison for minor weed offenses. They used the Department of Education to ruin their schooling so hardly any of them have a fucking prayer at a decent life once they graduate after 12 years of learning NOTHING. They spent the last 65 years making black people as completely dependent on the government as they possibly could.

They put abortion clinics all over the country, called them an innocuous name (Planned Parenthood), and sat back and watched as 19 Million black children were murdered before they were even born since 1973.

The only time Democrats even pretend to care about black people is right before an election when they go to all the black churches and make all the promises again that they know full well they have zero intention of keeping.

They EXPECT black people to vote for them. Neigh... they DEMAND it. If you're black and you don't vote Democrat, they call you Uncle Tom. They call you a race-traitor. They even call you a nigger.


FUCK DEMOCRATS.

Cancer, the entire fucking lot of you.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 3:05 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You are evil, personified, Second.

We have zero interest in hearing anything out of you about who is and isn't evil.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 3:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


1000 black children are aborted every single day in America. 473 black children are murdered for every 1,000 that are born. In states such as Mississippi and in Washington D.C., black women account for up to 79% of all baby murders. The baby murder rate among black women is FIVE TIMES HIGHER than that of white baby murderers.

All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.



And... SPOILER ALERT:

You idiots were freaking out about the made-up covid death statistics for years.

Yet, it is quite curious how none of you have spoken up and said anything about the fact that since the lockdowns have ended, there have been more black baby murders in abortion clinics in the US than the entire amount of OLD, FAT, DYING people who had allegedly died of covid.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 3:53 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:

All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.



And... SPOILER ALERT:

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Who is Senator Byrd?

Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions". Byrd also said in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd#Ku_Klux_Klan

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

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 4:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.



And... SPOILER ALERT:

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Who is Senator Byrd?

Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions". Byrd also said in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd#Ku_Klux_Klan

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



FUCK YOU.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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