REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, August 14, 2026 05:33
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PAGE 96 of 96

Tuesday, August 4, 2026 4:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.

Your party is dead.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2026 4:32 PM

SECOND

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


Where Are Trump's Lawyers Now?

• Roy Cohen Disbarred; dead

• Michael Cohen Disbarred; pleaded guilty to tax, campaign and false-statement crimes

• Rudy Giuliani Disbarred in NY and DC; $148 million in defamation damages

• Alina Habba Sanctioned $1 million for frivolous litigation

• Boris Epshteyn Pending Arizona criminal charges in fake-elector case

• John Eastman Disbarred in California and suspended in DC; Arizona criminal case pending

• Kenneth Chesebro Disbarred in New York; pleaded guilty in Georgia; Wisconsin case pending

• Sidney Powell Pleaded guilty in Georgia

• Jenna Ellis Pleaded guilty in Georgia; suspended in Colorado; Arizona criminal case pending

• Jeffrey Clark Facing criminal charges in Arizona over fake-elector scheme

• Christina Bobb Facing Arizona criminal charges over fake-elector scheme

• Lin Wood Disbarred in Colorado; Retired and surrendered his law license rather than face disbarment in his home state of Georgia

• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among all of Ronald Reagan's, George H. W. Bush's, Bill Clinton's, George W. Bush's, Barack Obama's, and Joe Biden's lawyers: ZERO

• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among Donald Trump's lawyers: Ten and counting

https://imgur.com/gallery/where-are-they-now-0cJdfqJ

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

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Tuesday, August 4, 2026 5:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.

Your party is dead.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 10:37 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Irrationality Is Dangerous

The president’s recent rant is a sign of serious dysfunction in the Oval Office.

By Tom Nichols | August 4, 2026, 6:03 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-reflecting-pool-irrati
onality/688180/

Many Americans—and much of the rest of the world—have become inured to Donald Trump’s strange rants. When he shouts about sharks, when he drones on about his brilliant uncle, when he casually ponders violating the Constitution, his supporters try to dress his statements up as some kind of strategy: He’s not lost touch with reality, you see. He’s doing the weave, or he’s owning the libs. He’s fighting the fake news and flooding the zone. He knows what he’s doing.

These excuses have never really held much water. But his rant yesterday about the Reflecting Pool (speaking of things that don’t hold water) was a warning that the president has encased himself in the hard amber of irrationality that inevitably surrounds authoritarian leaders. He has become detached from reality—and that detachment is extremely dangerous.

The Reflecting Pool mess is different from other Trump obsessions because it reveals just how immune to evidence and logic his beliefs have become, even when a trusted lieutenant wheels an entire box of supporting evidence into the Oval Office. In Trump’s world, nothing is ever innocent. If something went wrong, the fault must lie with Americans conspiring against him, not with a contractor who did shabby work. And so the boss put out the order: Find the criminals who destroyed my lovely pool.

The task of prosecuting this inane case fell to Jeanine Pirro, who has known Trump for more than three decades. She has long been one of his most loyal defenders on Fox News, and she was his personal choice for the job of U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia after the failed nomination of Ed Martin. She dutifully charged multiple people with vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, including the Olympic athlete David Hearn. But last week, she moved to drop the case after admitting that the pool’s condition was “the result of a botched installation” and not of criminal activity. Trump immediately turned on her. In a Truth Social post after Pirro’s filing, Trump said he disagreed “100%” with his old friend. “I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM.”

This outburst, however, was merely a warm-up for a nearly 10-minute performance yesterday afternoon in the Oval Office that went well beyond Trump’s usual whining. Pirro, he said, “choked” under pressure from the court. She “made a mistake. It was vandalism.” He continued:
Quote:
One of the things was, the Reflecting Pool hasn’t worked since 1922, because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1922. You know, it’s the largest, longest pool ever, all that. The concept is beautiful, but it always leaked because of the size, because of maintenance, whatever. But it was built in 1922, and from the day it was built, it was—it leaked. Biden spent $58 million. Barack Hussein Obama spent much more than that. He said, “I have an idea. Let’s take the river from, let’s take the water from the Potomac.” So they took the water from the Potomac, and it was putrid. It was putrid. It was a disaster. Biden was a disaster.
But how did Trump know that Pirro was wrong and he was right? “We have photographs or tapes,” he said, “like moving cameras, right? We have them where people are on the side, cutting it with a box knife.” Trump then admitted that he wasn’t “thrilled” with the work the contractor did, but “in addition, there was vandalism.” He complained about some damage to the grass nearby, but then came back to the pool, where “they took knives or cutters, and they cut the material—it’s material. And they put their hands and they pulled it.”

Pirro undermined all of this in a lengthy filing to the court that accompanied her request to withdraw the case. Perhaps in an earlier time, when Trump appeared more amenable to listening to the advice of friends and trusted advisers, he might have been satisfied with the harassment of his opponents. As the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote in their recent book on Trump, he admitted that he wanted charges filed just to harass perceived enemies such as New York Attorney General Letitia James, even if the charges were unlikely to stick. “I want to make her life miserable,” they quote him as saying to an adviser.

But Trump has now passed from being a stubborn narcissist to a cocooned authoritarian. Political scientists since World War II have studied the problem of “irrational” leaders, people in positions of power who seem unable to accept any version of reality that conflicts with their assumptions. Irrational, in this sense, does not mean “stupid,” or “incompetent,” or “psychotic.” It refers more specifically to leaders who have become so trapped by their own self-regard, so isolated from the outside world, so imprisoned within their own sense of infallibility that they refuse to consider any arguments or information that conflicts with their beliefs.

Trump reportedly relishes being compared to some of the great dictators of the past, but he apparently does not comprehend how their stories are also warnings. Joseph Stalin was so certain he had outfoxed the Nazis that he fell into catatonic denial for several days after the Germans attacked in 1941. Saddam Hussein refused to believe that American troops were crossing into Iraq, even as tanks rumbled toward Baghdad. Nicolae Ceauescu of Romania was one of many leaders throughout history who refused to believe that he was about to be deposed, despite troops advancing on their palace. (He and his wife died shouting orders at their firing squad.)

Trump’s detachment from reality is sometimes amusing and often alarming, but the price of his irrationality until now has been mostly economic and reputational (or, in the case of the Reflecting Pool, aesthetic, now that the cases against innocent Americans have been dropped). His belief in tariffs, for example, is a flatly irrational attachment to a tool that has been proven, over and over, to harm Americans. Likewise, his fixation on NATO has undermined decades of careful diplomacy and weakened the strongest alliance in history.

The war in Iran, however, has shown that Trump’s inability to perceive reality has become truly dangerous. He led the United States into a disastrous conflict because he thought his “gut” was smarter than the advisers who warned him that deposing Iran’s regime was unlikely. He continues to mislead the American people, and perhaps himself, about America’s strategic defeat at the hands of one of its worst enemies. The world economy and the balance of power have been changed, perhaps for many decades to come, because Trump cannot draw links between cause and effect; he does not understand that his actions and the failures that follow are somehow related to each other.

Iran is a disaster, but Trump’s irrationality could create other, even more perilous situations. When the water systems in seven states were recently subjected to cyberattacks, Trump blamed his fellow Americans, despite evidence of foreign involvement. What if America suffers another mass-terror attack, and Trump decides that it, too, is the work of disloyal Americans instead of foreigners? Will his underlings round people up based on such a delusion? Or perhaps Trump, if his party is beaten soundly in the midterms, will make up his mind that such a loss is impossible and call for invalidating the election’s results. He might even inspire his supporters to violence—as he did on January 6, 2021.

More worrisome is the possibility of a military crisis that unfolds quickly and threatens U.S. allies or the United States itself. If Russian President Vladimir Putin decides to test NATO and attacks a member of the alliance, or if China begins to move in the Pacific, could anyone in Trump’s inner circle contradict the president’s presumptions and biases? If, say, Russia or China or other powers go to a heightened state of nuclear alert, Trump would have to make decisions of potentially cataclysmic importance. Would he listen, even to basic information, if it conflicted with his omniscient gut?

Trump has always been notoriously un-briefable, but in his first term, he had people who would try to speak the truth to him. More important, he was capable, at least to some limited degree, of occasionally listening to those assistants. All of that is gone. Trump slamming his old friend Pirro shows that when even the most trusted allies offer him the truth, he won’t accept it.

Trump is not going to have some sudden epiphany about the need for an open and honest policy process. Like other authoritarians before him, the president has retreated, irrevocably, behind the walls of his own Forbidden City of the mind—a place where he is the emperor, his judgment is always right, and his commands must always be obeyed.

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

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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 2:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.

Your party is dead.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 9:07 PM

SECOND

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


World Leaders Are Getting Sick and Tired Of Donald Trump’s Antics

By Daniel R. DePetris | Aug 05, 2026 at 10:21 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-deal-tactics-12286430

Before Donald Trump was President of the United States, he was a real-estate magnate in Manhattan who courted celebrity about as much as he courted the big deal. His negotiating style wasn’t prefaced on traditional give-and-take but rather on pummeling the other side into submission. "The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have," Trump wrote in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal. "Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs."

For a while, Trump’s strong-arm tactics worked after he ascended to the White House. After all, foreign leaders can’t just stick their heads in the sand when the most powerful person on the planet makes threats. More often than not, those on the receiving end of those threats offered Trump concessions in the hope he would take the worst-case scenario off the table.

Trump’s coercion paid him dividends in the first year of his second term. Mexico was hit with tariffs, forcing President Claudia Sheinbaum to deploy 10,000 troops along the U.S.-Mexico border to put a dent in the northerly flow of migrants and fentanyl.

Deathly afraid that Trump would withdraw the United States from NATO, the alliance’s members flattered the American president before signing up to a massive hike in defense spending.

And after Trump used his inauguration address to threaten a takeover of the Panama Canal due to what he argued was excessive Chinese influence there, the Panamanian government sought to mollify his anger by withdrawing from Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative and declaring Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison’s operations in the strategic waterway unconstitutional.

Yet as Trump’s second term grinds on, small and middle powers who may have thought submission was their best course of action are now fighting back. Trump is as loud and brash as ever, but the results aren’t nearly as impressive for him today as they were in the past. States as varied as Brazil, Canada and Spain are dismissing Trump’s noise and using it as an opportunity for a strategic reassessment.

Brazil is the poster-child of this trend. In July 2025, the Trump administration declared Brazil a national security threat to the United States, accused the Brazilian government of undermining the rule of law and denounced its judicial system for "persecuting" former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Based on this justification, the White House slapped Brazil with an additional tariff of 40 percent in a bid to pressure President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva into dropping Bolsonaro’s case and changing Brazil's trade practices.

The outcome, however, was far from what Trump expected. Instead of capitulating, Lula da Silva argued that Washington was in essence trying to extort a proud, independent Brazil for political purposes. He played the nationalism card and projected himself as the defender of Brazilian sovereignty.

The strategy worked—Lula saw his approval ratings go up; searched for alternative trading partners to lessen dependency on the United States as an export market; and dropped opposition to negotiating a regional trade pact with Beijing. Trump’s decision to leverage America’s economic firepower merely induced Brazil to double down on its economic relationship with China, the very power the Trump administration views as its biggest non-hemispheric competitor in Latin America. Brazilian exports to China have risen by 22 percent year-on-year.

Canada is increasingly resistant to getting pushed around too. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney isn’t jettisoning the strategic alliance with the United States—indeed it would be foolish to do so given Canada’s status as a neighbor and the deep military-to-military ties it shares with Washington as part of the North American Aerospace Command.

But what Ottawa regards as U.S. bellicosity and pettiness—hints about turning Canada into America's 51st state; Washington’s 50 percent levies on a large list of Canadian goods; and Trump holding up the formal opening of a new cross-border bridge over tolls—is forcing the Canadian government to entertain non-U.S. options in everything from defense to economics. One poll from earlier this year found that only 9 percent of Canadians believed the United States was a trustworthy ally.

The Carney administration is therefore diversifying. Canada, which historically relies on its southern neighbor for the bulk of its military equipment, is now reaching out to Europe for certain combat systems and seeking to invest in its own defense industry.

Canadian officials aim to award 70 percent of defense contracts to Canadian defense firms over the next decade, both to create more Canadian jobs and ensure that Canada’s military isn’t overly reliant on a single supplier. This, combined with Canada’s goal of exporting 55 percent of its natural gas to non-U.S. customers over a similar time-frame, demonstrates the degree to which Ottawa is trying to limit its exposure to Trump’s impulses.

Europe is tired of the antics as well. When Trump implied that U.S. military force was on the table to acquire Greenland, the EU banded together and essentially drew a line in the sand. When Trump insisted he would cut off all trade to Spain in retaliation for its decision to block the U.S. military from using its bases for the war in Iran, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez shrugged.

The United Kingdom was more sensitive to Trump’s anger but has nevertheless repeated its position that direct U.K. military participation in the war won’t happen.

Trump’s old playbook is wearing out for two reasons.

First, countries doubt Trump can be placated or that any agreements they make with him will actually be implemented. He signs deals, only to ignore them when they become inconvenient or renegotiate them to squeeze out more concessions. Trump is never satisfied, pockets whatever wins he extracts and demands more.

Second, the Trump phenomenon is reminding middle powers why hedging is their best weapon. In a world where great powers are unapologetically brazen, countries like Canada and Brazil need to be willing to adapt when the situation requires it.

As Europe is discovering in real time, relying on a single superpower for your military, diplomatic or economic needs is not a sustainable strategy because it creates extreme dependency and limits your geopolitical options. When the person leading that superpower is as irascible and unpredictable as Donald Trump, that dependency can turn into vulnerability.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the?Chicago Tribune.

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

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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 10:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Say whatever you say, Shit Golem.

Your party is dead.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 5:15 AM

SECOND

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


When a President Promises a Massacre

Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.

By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/08/05/trump-colonial-extermination-asymm
etric-warfare/

“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”

Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that failed him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from ancient times until today. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition,” a horror later retold as fiction in Joseph Conrad’s classic “Heart of Darkness.”

Trump may not advocate for such conspicuous atrocities, but his brand of warfare shares some of the key hallmarks of such unrestrained colonial extermination campaigns. To understand the magnitude of this horror which has mostly gone unacknowledged, take a trip with me into Trump’s own heart of darkness; an exploration of his world of wars that might best be described as a war of the worlds.

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

Channeling His Inner-Martian

As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.

Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude. And this follows similarly lopsided casualty tolls in Trump’s conflicts in Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and on the high seas. This low-risk butchery masquerading as warfare harkens back to 19th-century extermination campaigns in which so-called inferior races were massacred in spectacles of slaughter — colonial violence that wiped out ethnic groups and set the stage for 20th-century genocide.

“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!” Trump recently announced on Truth Social. “This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.”

This unhinged command for disproportionate retaliation — which may amount to a violation of international humanitarian law — was featured, mostly without further remark, in news reports with bland headlines, like “Trump pays respects to 4 US service members killed in the Middle East.” It was also, for example, tucked deep inside and presented without further comment in a New York Times article about impending testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee by Hegseth and Caine.

Trump’s order, and the matter-of-fact coverage from the Times, reminded me of a report by a different Times, almost exactly 199 years earlier: an article from Van Diemen’s Land, the Ireland-sized island to the southeast of Australia that we now know as Tasmania.

White settlers poured onto the island in the early 1800s, wiping out the kangaroos and replacing them with sheep. They treated the Indigenous people no differently. “Thousands were hunted down like wild beasts,” according to the local press. When one of the white people were killed by locals, the Colonial Times reported that other settlers exacted revenge on the Indigenous people that left “sixty of them killed and wounded.” The next year, when members of settler police and military forces were pelted with stones, they responded with gunfire and a bayonet charge that “killed seventy of them, dragging the women and children from the crevices of the rocks, and dashing out their brains.”

The slaughter in Tasmania was the inspiration for author H.G. Wells’s late 19th-century sci-fi classic “War of the Worlds,” in which Martians with superior technology, advanced firepower, and no compunction about annihilating humanity invade England, laying waste to London and driving out its population. “And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought,” the narrator says in the book’s open. “The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

When lawyer Raphael Lemkin formulated the idea of “genocide” after World War II, almost 50 years after Wells wrote “War of the Worlds,” he considered Tasmania a historical case study of his concept. It’s unclear if Trump ever read “War of the Worlds,” though he attended the New York City premiere of the 2005 Steven Spielberg film adaptation; I doubt he understood Wells’s allegory, presuming he knows what an allegory is.

The Tasmanian carnage was part of an age of slaughter and genocide carried out across the globe by European powers and the United States. Trump has long been in the thrall of the precepts of this era of colonial conquest: Might makes right; territorial acquisition through armed intervention; and colonial relationships with, and resource extraction from, conquered foes and weaker nations.

Trump often invokes and praises Andrew Jackson, his 19th-century predecessor in the White House, who owned slaves and implemented a policy of “Indian removal” that culminated in the Trail of Tears, the military’s forced displacement of Native Americans, during which thousands died. Trump advocated “furthering President Jackson’s legacy, expanding his vision, [and] honoring his memory” earlier this year, pronouncing that Old Hickory embodied the “best of the American Spirit.” Trump has even employed America’s contribution to the eradication of indigenous peoples as a punch line. He has made light, on social media, not only of the Trail of Tears but also the Army’s massacre of hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

Even the Army’s official history portrays Wounded Knee as a Tasmanian-scale slaughter in which an effort to disarm a group of Lakota religious revivalists resulted in an errant shot, possibly an accidental discharge, that “led immediately to heavy and indiscriminate firing from soldiers,” including the use of artillery, “despite the presence of numerous noncombatants.” In the end, up to 300 Lakota, including women and children, lay dead while “Army casualties totaled 25 killed and 39 wounded, some of whom likely were hit by friendly fire.”

Such disproportionate mass killings and exterminations were a hallmark of the 19th century. This “destruction of the ‘inferior races’ of four continents prepared the ground for the destruction of six million Jews in Europe,” as the author Sven Lindqvist observed, in his classic text “Exterminate All the Brutes.” We look back on these Holocaust-precipitating slaughters as beyond abhorrent. Or at least we did.

The death toll disparity at Wounded Knee doesn’t compare to the carnage of Trump’s war on Iran. The estimated 3,375 to 6,000 Iranian deaths dwarf the 19 U.S. deaths by 180 to 320 times, or more than two orders of magnitude. (The official U.S. Iran war death toll stands at 18, with the Pentagon omitting one widely reported loss.) The 60-to-1 Tasmanian toll of dead and wounded is a similar ratio as the estimated 39,806 total Iranian casualties compared to the official U.S. count of more than 700 troops who have been killed or wounded.

Trump has also repeatedly touted the lopsided nature of his punitive expedition in Venezuela, a short war in which the U.S. deposed and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro, creating a de facto U.S. colony run by a quisling. “To have a few injuries, but no death on our side, is really amazing,” Trump bragged after the invasion, later comparing the lack of U.S. fatalities to the substantial death tolls of the (much longer) Korean and Vietnam wars. The 100 or more Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel and civilians killed compared with a handful of U.S. injuries shares a lineage of battlefield massacres like the 1863 U.S. slaughter of 250 to 500 Shoshone — including at least 90 women, children and infants — at Bear River at a cost of 24 U.S. troops, and the up to 6,000 Zulus armed with shields and spears cut down by Gatling guns and artillery compared with 10 British troops killed at Ulundi in southern Africa in 1879.

Trump’s 2025 war against the Houthi government in Yemen — Operation Rough Rider — was similarly lopsided. The airstrike monitoring group Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids combined. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured. The U.S. also killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders, according to CENTCOM spokesperson Dave Eastburn, who referred to “credible open sources” citing 650 Houthi casualties. The U.S. did not suffer a single reported fatality during the campaign. And Trump’s relentless strikes in nearby Somalia have amounted to up to 420 deaths at a cost of zero American lives.

The Trump administration’s boat strike campaign in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which has killed at least 221 people without the loss of even one U.S. life, is a still more egregious slaughter. In this case, only unarmed civilians are targeted, victims akin to the fleeing Tasmanian women and children who had their skulls bashed in.

There are, of course, myriad differences between Trump’s ongoing war on the world and 19th-century colonial extermination campaigns in Africa, America, Australia, and elsewhere. Trump doesn’t, for example, explicitly assert racial superiority as a reason for his military interventions even if he often lapses into racist rants and is making war in Somalia while deriding Somalis as “garbage.”

But Trump’s more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and outright wars have heightened the increasing trend toward “riskless warfare,” a term coined more than a quarter century ago by Paul Kahn, the director of Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights. “It is an image of warfare without the possibility of chivalry,” the prescient Kahn later observed. “At the heart is a violation of the fundamental principle that establishes the internal morality of warfare: self-defense within conditions of reciprocal imposition of risk. Without the imposition of mutual risk, warfare is not war at all.”

Earlier this decade, in a study of drone warfare, Neil Renic, a scholar of military ethics, refined the concept as “radical asymmetry,” in which “one side has, in a practical sense, overcome the type and degree of physical vulnerability that has long been regarded as an expected and unavoidable feature of war.” Renic sees the drift toward unilateral violence leading to the increasing “perception of the weaker party … from an opponent to be fought and overcome, to one that must be hunted and done away with,” contributing to “dehumanization” of the enemy which, “in some cases … has led to a more severe decline in the targeting practices of the United States, from the morally questionable to the morally indefensible.” This feature of modern warfare harkens back to the age of extermination, when Tasmanians and others were also hunted and done away with.

As Trump has reveled in asymmetrical body counts and called for more disproportionate deaths, he has increasingly fancied himself an alien destroyer like Wells’s Martians; even if he himself doesn’t quite realize it. In one bizarre AI-slop image he posted on Truth Social as the Iran war went south, Trump appears to be striding from a spaceship — on some platform high above Earth — as legions of weapons-toting alien warriors flank him. In another, a gigantic Trump is seated at a command console in a space station floating high above the world. On screens above him, we see huge explosions apparently going off simultaneously back on Earth. On still another, an indistinct country is seemingly being ravaged by lasers.

“Then in a moment the Heat Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins,” wrote Wells in “War of the Worlds,” describing the Martians’ weapon of mass destruction. “The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar.” Wells referenced the “massacre of mankind” and “the rout of civilization.” As Trump has made disproportionate slaughter his signature accomplishment from Latin America to the Middle East to Africa, he has channeled his inner Martian. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote of Iran on Truth Social, promising the “entire country could be taken out” and warning he might bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.”

Trump’s unhinged rhetoric is further driven home by the remaining imagery in the command-console post: a mushroom cloud from a monstrous nuclear blast with text on a screen announcing “target destroyed,” while a glowering Trump is poised to push a glowing red button that suggests he is about to incinerate the planet. Trump’s annihilationist fantasies are especially disturbing since he controls a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world many times over. (“We have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world 150 times,” was how Trump put it.)

Iranians, Latin Americans, Somalis, and Yemenis have all been in the crosshairs of America’s lopsided killing campaigns during his second term, but in this new age of slaughter, all of us are potentially targets in Trump’s war on the world.

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 1:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
When a President Promises a Massacre

Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.

By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.


Iranians, Latin Americans, Somalis, and Yemenis have all been in the crosshairs of America’s lopsided killing campaigns during his second term, but in this new age of slaughter, all of us are potentially targets in Trump’s war on the world.

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


If Nick actually believed any of this, he wouldn't have the fucking balls to write any of it.

Because he's a lying bigmouth pussy, just like you and everyone who voted for Kamala Harris.

You're fucking gutter trash, and I'd love for you to finally figure out where I live so you can come and visit and I'll put you into the fucking ground where you belong.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, August 7, 2026 7:12 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:

If Nick actually believed any of this, he wouldn't have the fucking balls to write any of it.

Because he's a lying bigmouth pussy, just like you and everyone who voted for Kamala Harris.

You're fucking gutter trash, and I'd love for you to finally figure out where I live so you can come and visit and I'll put you into the fucking ground where you belong.
Have you seen too many superhero movies, 6ix? If it makes you feel powerful to believe you will triumph in an impromptu duel to the death, keep fantasizing. That's why people like you go to movies. But you might need to practice to make it a reality. Otherwise, you're just a duck or deer during hunting season dreaming of killing the hunter.

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 7:13 AM

SECOND

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


The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed

As Donald Trump faces one humiliation after another, he is attacking those he blames.

By Jonathan Lemire | August 5, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-humiliated-iran-ref
lecting-pool/688184/

One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.

But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.

His recent targets include an Olympic canoeist accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a rushed and botched renovation project, and journalists who reported about the security deficiencies of Trump’s new Air Force One. In the first matter, he pushed for a prosecution after an arrest was made; in the other, he ordered a criminal investigation. (The case against the canoeist and other alleged vandals fell apart, and the subpoenas of the journalists have been dropped, at least for the moment.)

For months now, Trump has been on the receiving end of another humiliation: He has been repeatedly mocked and ignored by the hard-line leaders in Iran. Once more this week, the president reacted with rage when Iran again contradicted his claims about negotiations to bring the war to a close. How will he lash out this time?

Trump really, really does not want to be forgotten, and he cares deeply about leaving his physical mark on Washington. He is a developer at heart who spent decades obsessing over the details of his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach while also overseeing the design of luxury golf courses around the world. He mostly kept that impulse in check during his first term, but now, facing his political mortality, he has decisively shifted his focus to his legacy, whether that be trying to claim territory for the United States or reshaping the nation’s capital. You know the list: the East Wing, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the municipal golf courses, a helipad on the White House South Lawn, and so on. Trump has long prized symbols—particularly when the symbols can project his power—and seized upon America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to further beautify Washington, his backdrop as he presided over the grandiose celebrations. His attention was particularly drawn to the Reflecting Pool.

Trump was not wrong in thinking it could use a little love. The Reflecting Pool, which stretches east from the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall, toward the Washington Monument, has long leaked and showed its age, bedeviling administrations for decades. In April, Trump announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner that would be, in his words, American-flag blue. To complete the project before the July 4 festivities, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. Instead, the algae flourished, the pool turned green, fences went up, and mitigation efforts failed. The Reflecting Pool undeniably looked worse. More than $16 million was wasted, and the national symbol was closed on the nation’s birthday.

Trump was furious. One of his signature projects had fallen apart—and he needed a scapegoat. He settled on an unexpected one: an Olympic canoer. David Hearn, 67, says he had just finished up a bike ride when he swung by the Reflecting Pool to see the failing sealant and reached down to touch the green water. He was arrested and detained for hours. The case, on its surface, seemed ridiculous. But it gained traction when Trump, reeling from the renovation’s failures, began going on Truth Social to blame so-called vandals for destroying the pool and accuse them of cutting an (improbable) 250-foot gash down the middle. Media outlets promptly debunked the claim with a series of fact-checks, but Trump was undeterred, relentlessly claiming that the pool had been vandalized.

Even some of his closest allies, two of them told me, privately rolled their eyes at the president’s obsession and scoffed at his refusal to admit a mistake. One Republican lawmaker, speaking to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid Trump’s wrath, deemed it “the dumbest controversy of his term” but added, with a rueful chuckle, that “it’s better than talking about how badly everything else is going.” But the episode had real-world consequences: Hearn told my colleague Matt Viser that it was “unsettling to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.” He had to hire lawyers and attend court dates, and he had his phone seized. The legal process itself functioned as a form of punishment.

The Reflecting Pool was an unlikely cause célèbre this summer, but it seemed likely to end with a whimper at the end of last week. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who once touted her office’s ability to prosecute the case, executed a textbook Friday news dump when her office asked to dismiss the cases against Hearn and the handful of others accused of vandalism because evidence had emerged that suggested the damage was the the result of a botched installation, not vandalism. The farce seemed, mercifully, over.

Nope! Trump went on social media this past weekend to eviscerate Pirro, who has been one of his most loyal allies. Throwing the facts out the window, Trump declared that “to me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM” and that he would “disagree 100%” with the U.S. attorney in D.C. Accustomed to complete fealty, he raged to allies. In the Oval Office on Monday, he declared that the former Fox News host had “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.” Pirro was then summoned to the Oval Office; she was later seen walking out of the West Wing, wheeling a box full of materials from the case that she had brought to show the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency has oversight of the Reflecting Pool (Trump did not appear to be mollified by the meeting and continued to criticize his longtime ally last night). A White House official told me that Pirro still had her job. The official added that may not be the case for long.

Trump has complained about Air Force One for nearly a decade. When he took office after his 2016 election, the president—who had grown accustomed to flying around in his luxury private jet—was dismayed by the antiquated state of the two VC-25 aircraft that usually bear the call sign, which had been in use since the early ’90s. He pushed for a new plane with a more Trumpian color scheme, but a series of setbacks and delays pushed the arrival of the modern replacement jet until 2028. This was not something, most people understood, that could be rushed: Air Force One needed to be outfitted with top-of-the-line (and often classified) communications and security features that allow it to serve as a White House in the sky, especially in case of an emergency.

But Trump grew impatient. So when Qatar’s royal family offered to give him a $400 million “palace in the sky,” Trump immediately demanded that the luxury liner become his interim aircraft until Boeing completed delivery. It would, Trump said, be a gift to the Department of Defense, and it would go to his presidential library once he left office. This, of course, prompted all sorts of pushback. Permitting a foreign government to supply the signature American aircraft struck many people as not just unpatriotic, but also an outrageous security risk. It was also yet another example of Trump displaying a disregard for norms and for traditional legal and political guardrails—and this time at a truly gargantuan scale.

Trump didn’t care. Nor did he seem bothered that it would cost up to $1 billion to retrofit the jet to make it acceptable for an American president to use. He set the same aggressive timeline as with the Reflecting Pool: He wanted the interim plane ready for use on the nation’s birthday. And there it was, soaring above Mount Rushmore on July 3 and then off to a NATO summit in Turkey a week later. But then, suddenly, Trump was back aboard the old baby-blue-and-gold Air Force One when he left Ankara. He claimed that the new jet had gone ahead of him to England to give troops stationed there a chance to tour it and that he was taking the original “for old time’s sake.”

A few days later, The New York Times reported what many had suspected: When hostilities ignited again in nearby Iran, the Secret Service determined that there were security concerns with the new aircraft flying near a danger zone. It was missing some key defense modifications, the paper reported, in a story that ran only after the president had safely returned to the United States. Trump, once more, was furious and embarrassed, and summoned FBI Director Kash Patel to the White House. In an extraordinary escalation of the administration’s pressure on independent news organizations, subpoenas were issued to several Times reporters, some delivered at their homes. The government requested the reporters’ phone records and demanded that they provide grand-jury testimony as part of a leak investigation to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information to the newspaper about a national-security matter.

The Times defended its reporters, while press organizations and Democrats issued statements about overreach and intimidation. Trump, once again, took to social media to blast his hometown paper and its journalists, sometimes in ugly, personal ways. It didn’t matter, it seemed, that the White House later admitted that the new plane would need upgrades, and that the president himself said it would be “maxxed out,” which all but confirmed the newspaper’s reporting. Trump was “incensed,” one adviser told me, and “wanted a head on a pike.” But, again, the legal process intervened, this time in the shape of a federal judge who grilled Department of Justice lawyers late last month over the handling of the subpoenas. DOJ then withdrew them. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement, “The President and the Administration remain committed to holding individuals who recklessly and illegally leak classified information to the media accountable.”

There was a reason Trump reacted so strongly to those two humbling moments, some people close to him told me. And that’s because they came against the backdrop of the near-daily humiliation that the president has been suffering at the hands of Iran. The war is not going well. A conflict that Trump thought might take a few weeks at most has now stretched into its sixth month, and, try as he might, he can’t get out of it. He has declared victory many times and threatened to wipe Iran off the map nearly as often. Neither has happened. At this point, his unfulfilled threats—with Iran calling his bluff—have almost become a dark running gag.

The past few days, in a way, have been a microcosm of the whole conflict: Over the weekend, Trump came close to ordering a new wave of attacks, but walked them back after calls from regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, and fears of how Iran might respond. Instead, Trump said he would give diplomacy another chance, claiming that good progress was being made and that the Strait of Hormuz would soon be open. But Tehran denied that any negotiations were happening. And then another ship was attacked in the strait. Trump reacted in fury, posting that the Iranian regime was “unbelievably duplicitous,” when decades of history would suggest that Tehran was, in fact, very knowably duplicitous.

But how Trump will respond next to this ongoing embarrassment remains unknown. He’s made the war deeply personal. Will he now bail on the stalled war entirely, leaving Iran more empowered in the region? Will he follow through on his threats to dramatically escalate the conflict, perhaps even to strike civilian infrastructure and energy sites? Or will he channel his rage against Americans who point out his mistakes?

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 6:13 PM

SECOND

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


U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s clash with President Trump over the handling of the Reflecting Pool case is raising questions about Trump’s sanity.

There is video of Trump explaining that vandals, not incompetent workers, caused the Reflecting Pool liner to peel. Trump is crazy.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/31/doj-reflecting-pool-damage-bo
tched-installation-not-vandalism-01021291

The video of Trump being senile and talking faster than his brain works.



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

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Sunday, August 9, 2026 9:54 AM

SECOND

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


The Watchdogs Are Barking Themselves Hoarse

The scandals of the president’s first term now seem quaint.

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman | August 9, 2026, 8 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-ethics-corruption-c
rypto-watchdogs/688187/

Last May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading GRIFTER IN CHIEF and DON THE CON.

But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”

Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.

This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.

That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, especially among Republicans, and the examples of accountability are scarce.

Within a few days of the inauguration last year, the administration had terminated 17 inspectors general, dismantling oversight of taxpayer funds, quid-pro-quo business ventures, and ethics-law violations. The president made roughly $2.2 billion last year, according to The New York Times, a windfall that came mostly from cryptocurrency deals, a new source of income that now forms the bulk of his net worth at a time when his administration has made eroding crypto oversight part of its economic agenda. He also booked up to $117 million in legal settlements, mostly with major tech and media companies, and $125 million from foreign golf and real-estate deals—roughly twice the revenue generated from such deals in 2017. The president has also made more than 21,000 securities trades, often in quick bursts tied to market-moving moments he sparked, according to a Bloomberg analysis. His sons’ portfolio of defensive-technology companies, meanwhile, has collectively generated more than $3 billion in direct government business since Eric and Donald Trump Jr. made their investments, The Washington Post found.

“I think the big difference in this term is just how blatant all of it is. In the first term, there was at least a head nod towards Trump as president being separate from Trump the businessman,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for CREW, told me. “Now that’s gone.”

The White House sees things differently. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email that the allegations of corruption are “the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.” She said that the president’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions” and that he has no conflicts of interest.

But it’s hard to deny the shift in scale from Trump’s previous four years in office. One of the many examples of how much has changed: In the fall of 2019, the administration announced that the G7 summit would be held at Trump’s golf club in Doral, Florida, which alarmed not just watchdog groups but also Republican lawmakers who didn’t think the president should award his own company a government contract. Two days later, Trump retreated and blamed “Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility” for his reversal.

This March, the Doral golf club played host to the Shield of the Americas summit, a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean leaders to discuss combatting drug cartels. Trump has announced that the G20 summit later this year will be held at the same hotel because it’s “the best location” for the job. The reaction from GOP members of Congress to the news ranged from silent to “thrilled.”

Many of the major ethics scandals of Trump’s term seem almost quaint: Housing Secretary Ben Carson, or possibly his wife, spent $31,000 on a dining set. Ivanka Trump endorsed Goya beans. EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt spent $43,000 to install a phone booth.

What seemed to generate a drumbeat of headlines then was the cost of Trump’s travel, especially to his own properties. Although Trump had once ridiculed President Obama for taking a 2012 vacation that cost “taxpayers millions of dollars,” he often traveled several times a month to his private properties in Florida and New Jersey. Less than two months into his first term, The Washington Post reported that Trump had spent nearly one of every three days in office at one of his own properties. A Government Accountability Office report found that the president’s four trips to Mar-a-Lago in one month of 2017 cost taxpayers a total of $13.6 million.

A year and a half into his second term, Trump has made 270 visits to his properties, marking a 14 percent jump compared with the same point in his first term, according to the CREW tracker (which updates daily). Trump’s taxpayer tab for golfing trips hit $70 million last fall, HuffPost calculated. If he continues golfing and traveling at the current pace, the analysis showed, this term will run taxpayers $300 million—twice what they paid during his first term. Those costs include protecting the president and his family; the Secret Service spent nearly $100,000 at Trump-owned properties in the first five months of the second term.

A related category of recurring stories from the first term concerned Trump’s Cabinet members and their questionable taxpayer-funded travel. In the fall of 2017, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price became the administration’s first Cabinet member forced to resign following outcry over his use of public funds for work trips in private jets. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s firing followed after, among other things, the public learned of a taxpayer-funded trip to the United Kingdom he’d taken with his wife. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke left the administration in 2018 following several scandals involving misuse of government-funded travel, including to Dallas and the Virgin Islands. And Pruitt, the EPA secretary, faced scrutiny over repeated trips home to Tulsa and abroad on the taxpayers’ dime. In Trump’s second term, the focus of outrage is rarely the trips themselves, but rather what happens on them—for example, FBI Director Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to Hawaii, where he went on a “VIP snorkel” at a Pearl Harbor memorial, and his trip to Milan for the Olympics, during which he was filmed drinking in the locker room with the U.S. men’s hockey team.

One of the many scandals surrounding Kristi Noem when she led the Department of Homeland Security involved a $70 million jet supposedly intended for high-profile deportations, as well as the purchase of two luxury planes for $172 million. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, uses one of the planes to fly home to Oklahoma most weekends, and the department says he picks up the bill, although they won’t provide details on how that’s calculated. Another is reportedly being used by Melania Trump.

Yet another category of ethical issues that has gained relatively little notice is the volume of merchandise being sold by the president and those in his orbit. In February 2017, a weekslong controversy followed Kellyanne Conway, then a top aide to Trump, promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line during a Fox & Friends appearance. Conway faced bipartisan accusations of violating a statute that prohibits federal employees from using “their public office for their own private gain,” including through “the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise.” The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee pushed for a prompt review of Conway’s statements, including possible disciplinary action.

Now brand promotion and trademarked gear have become so ubiquitous in the White House that the Oval Office study—a small room that past presidents have used for tasks such as reviewing speech drafts and making calls—has been transformed into a shrine for baseball caps and collectibles emblazoned with MAGA, Gulf of America, and TRUMP 2028. Officials throughout the administration are known to enjoy self-branded merchandise (maybe Patel most ardently). This past spring, the Trump Organization applied for a trademark for “Trump 250” images to allow the president to profit from clothing or knickknack sales tied to America’s 250th birthday. The Trump Organization’s flagship store launched 168 new products in time for Trump’s second Inauguration Day, according to a count by CREW. Truth Social, Trump’s primary form of communication with the public, is his own company as well—meaning that anyone who wants to hear directly from the president must do so on an app where their clicks and page views generate ad revenue for Trump. (Many of those ads are for his own products.) The company recently launched a service selling to Wall Street early access to the president’s digital communications, which frequently move markets.

But perhaps the most significant category of self-dealing allegations is the one with no first-term analogue. A few days before Trump’s second inauguration, an Emirati royal backed a deal to purchase a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s primary crypto venture, for half a billion dollars. The deal, reportedly signed by Eric Trump, included $187 million up front and at least $31 million set to go toward entities linked to the family of Steve Witkoff, a lead Middle East negotiator for the administration and a co-founder of the crypto firm. A majority of the wealth that Trump has amassed this term, according to financial disclosures, comes from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses. World Liberty Financial applied for a national-trust bank charter in January and is expected to receive permission to operate like a bank in the near future, NOTUS reported this summer, a move that could give executives yet another way to direct money toward the president.

For Trump’s birthday, in June, a bloody spectacle arrived on the White House South Lawn, courtesy of UFC Freedom 250; World Liberty Financial was an “official partner,” and fighters were paid bonuses in “stablecoins,” cryptocurrency issued by the company. The Trump family also used the fight as an opportunity to sell physical silver and gold coins—some priced as high as $12,000—featuring Trump’s face and purportedly “designed by President Trump” through a collaboration between UFC and the Trump Organization. The Public Integrity Project, a legal nonprofit, sued to try to stop the event, calling it “a volcano of corruption,” but failed. Several other groups, including CREW and Public Citizen, raised questions and condemned the festivities. But the fights continued as planned.

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

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Monday, August 10, 2026 8:26 AM

SECOND

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


The Man in Charge of Immigration Data Just Resigned

The Department of Homeland Security has stopped releasing timely, reliable statistics on immigration enforcement.

By Nick Miroff | August 10, 2026, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-dhs-deportation-dat
a-ice/688220/

Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed.

During the past year and a half, as the White House directed DHS to run the largest deportation campaign in history, Trump officials blocked Rosenblum’s team from publishing monthly reports. The office’s website went stale, and its immigration-enforcement tables became frozen in 2024, as if nothing has happened since then. In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum said he was glad to quit an administration whose values he didn’t share but sad to leave his team operating in a “hostile work environment.”

It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.

Arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data categories most crucial to understanding what Trump is doing in his second term. With DHS’s data office muzzled, the only public source for immigration data has been the ICE website, where the agency periodically publishes enforcement statistics—but it has sometimes gone months without posting updates. ICE statistics show that the agency deported about 400,000 people during Trump’s first year in office, a figure well short of the White House’s goal of 1 million annual removals. Trump officials, starting with Kristi Noem during her time as DHS secretary, found a way to gloss over this fact by claiming that a far greater number of immigrants left the United States voluntarily than were removed by ICE. The department has counted these estimates as “self-deportations,” as if they were confirmed departures rather than rough guesses.

I asked DHS why Rosenblum’s team had been blocked from publishing monthly reports. The department’s press office didn’t answer that question, but it sent a statement: “This is the most transparent administration in American history.” The email was unsigned, and sentences appeared in different-size fonts, as if they had been copied and pasted. The statement said that during the president’s first year in office, “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.”

Even the immigration hard-liners in Trump’s MAGA movement aren’t buying it. They say that the administration is backing off the president’s campaign pledge to undertake the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, swayed by pro-business Republicans who are worried about labor shortages and political strategists who warn that aggressive enforcement will hurt the party in the midterm elections. Critics on the right—including Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, the Fox News host Tomi Lahren, and the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer—have most recently blamed Mullin, who took over from Noem in March.

Mullin has pushed back against critics, insisting that ICE enforcement is the most intense it’s ever been, and that officers averaged 4,200 daily arrests nationwide during the first week of August. DHS hasn’t published data backing that claim, though, and the most recent ICE data show that average daily arrests were less than half that amount in July. The discrepancy is typical of the way that immigration data tend to surface in social-media posts or in leaks to right-wing publications or influencers, not in the regular, apples-to-apples systematic way that Rosenblum’s former office was designed to deliver.

The fundamental problem is the same one that U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro faced when she had to tell the president the truth last week about the Reflecting Pool—that the damage to its lining was likely caused by a botched installation, not vandals. The White House’s benchmark for success—1 million deportations a year—has worked better as a rhetorical device than an achievable goal. ICE’s previous record for deportations was 432,238, set in 2013, according to DHS data. The gap between the president’s expectations and the reality of what ICE can pull off endangers the job of any DHS official who acknowledges numbers that fall short. No one wants to tell the president that his deportation claims have no clothes.

Trump’s return path to the White House was paved by embellished immigration data. Illegal border crossings reached an all-time high during the Biden administration, but Trump, Vice President Vance, and other administration officials have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that 20 to 30 million immigrants illegally arrived during Joe Biden’s term. Last year, DHS published on X an idyllic image of a sandy beach with the caption, “America After 100 Million Deportations,” a figure whose basic math amounted to fantasizing about the forced removal of tens of millions of American citizens. Not to be outdone, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, who remains a hero of MAGA hard-liners, said that he wanted to arrest and deport 100 million people, equal to roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population.

The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that the total number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States increased from 10.8 million in 2019 to 15.8 million in 2024. The Pew Research Center, another nonpartisan group, has similar estimates. White House officials including Stephen Miller have depicted Trump’s crackdown as an urgent remedy to the influx that occurred under Biden. But even as the administration ramps up deportations, it has added to the pool of potential deportees by stripping legal status from more than 1.5 million immigrants who were living and working in the United States with Temporary Protected Status or another form of provisional permission. The number of people whose immigration status the administration has rendered illegal over the past 18 months has so far outpaced the number of immigrants ICE has actually deported.

I spoke to opponents of the administration as well as to Republican supporters frustrated by the lack of transparency and the “self-deportation” estimates DHS has used in lieu of hard data. “I don’t care what the data says. Just give it to me,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge at the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. think tank that backs Trump’s deportation agenda, told me. He said that the only way to get beyond “the partisan chatter” and allow the public to fairly assess the deportation campaign is for the administration to release reliable counts of the number of people ICE has arrested, detained, and deported.

The ICE website periodically publishes enforcement statistics, but the site went dark from April until July, a period during which ICE arrests and deportations lagged behind the levels reached under Noem. The administration blamed Democrats and the congressional shutdown for the data lapse, but officials I spoke with at DHS told me that staff members working through the shutdown could have continued updating the ICE site. When the agency resumed publishing its statistics last month, arrests and deportations were once more on an upswing.

Mike Howell, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who worked in the DHS legal office during Trump’s first term, sued the administration last month to force the release of more ICE data. Howell runs a campaign, the Oversight Project, to press the administration to deliver on Trump’s promises, and he helped launch the Mass Deportation Coalition to rally like-minded groups who see themselves as competing for the president’s sympathies with pro-business interests. “The Trump administration’s deportation numbers should be released with the same transparency, regularity, meaningful metrics, and fanfare as other government numbers, like the jobs report,” Howell wrote in a press release after filing the lawsuit. “Americans should be able to track and cheer progress the same way they watch the stock market.”

Howell told me he wants to see the administration target employers and sweep through farms and factories rather than make individual stops in U.S. cities. “It’s the mass-deportation coalition’s view that people aren’t going to leave unless the deportation numbers are much, much larger,” Howell said. His suspicion, he said, is that the administration exaggerates its enforcement data to merely look tough, as a way to prepare the political terrain for a deal with Democrats after the midterms that would provide legal status to some portion of the unauthorized-immigrant population—the scenario that Howell and his allies abhor as “amnesty.”

During Trump’s first term, when record numbers of Central American families crossed the southern border illegally, DHS officials delayed many releases of monthly data until they could package the numbers in a press release with a favorable spin. The Biden administration initially did this, too, but as it faced intense criticism over record numbers of illegal crossings and images of chaos at the southern border, DHS officials came under pressure from lawmakers from both parties to share more data. The department’s most recent appropriations bill includes new oversight provisions requiring DHS officials to publish more data, but compliance remains spotty.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics was set up outside the typical political review process for a reason, Blas Nuñez-Neto, the top border-policy official at DHS under Biden, who helped start the office and was Rosenblum’s supervisor, told me. “With all of these independent statistical units—whether it’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics or some of the other statistical agencies—what makes them special is that they’re supposedly not reporting to political appointees; they’re just producing raw data,” Nuñez-Neto said.

Nuñez-Neto acknowledged that immigration statistics aren’t the same as economic indicators, because immigration data are a measure of a given administration’s own performance on border enforcement—the pace of deportations, for example. “What OHSS was doing was to report on data that is internal to the department’s functioning,” he said, “so there was always a bit of tension.”

During the final year of Biden’s term, as a bipartisan group of senators attempted to negotiate a new border-security deal (which Trump eventually killed), lawmakers funded Rosenblum’s office at levels beyond its requested amount. His team began producing the kinds of user-friendly data tables that allowed the broader public to compare key statistics over time. Their last data set was published January 16, 2025, four days before Trump returned to office.

Rosenblum, who declined to be interviewed, said in his LinkedIn post that it’d been “an honor to serve the public by improving DHS data quality and supporting evidence-based policymaking,” and added a parting shot at the administration. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” he said.

DHS officials have not said when, or if, Rosenblum’s office will resume publishing monthly reports. In the meantime, others are happy to fill the void. Last weekend, the Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvert wrote on X that he was told by “a source at DHS” that the department had compiled a report that states there have been 1,461,529 “total alien forced departures” over the past 12 months.

In the comments below the post, which had more than 700,000 views, Kolvert said he wasn’t sure how “total alien forced departures” were calculated. The category is not one used by the DHS statistics office, and although Kolvert claimed that the report had already “dropped,” it has not been published anywhere.

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

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Tuesday, August 11, 2026 2:30 PM

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


Replenishing Stocks Will Just Recreate A Failed Military

The US Military Must Be Remade--Not Reconstructed As It Was

Phillips P. OBrien | Aug 11, 2026

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/replenishing-stocks-will-just-r
ecreate

Lately there has been a great deal of discussion of how the USA has run down its stocks of certain classes of advanced military equipment. I know, as I have been a part of that debate starting here, and also in the Atlantic. This expenditure of ammunition is indeed shocking, and even before the latest Trump escalation in July had led to dangerously low stockpiles in certain areas; stockpiles so low that, I for one, do not believe that the US military will be capable of fighting a major war for years.

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

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Thursday, August 13, 2026 7:41 PM

SECOND

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


Donors to Trump’s ballroom include 14 companies that have received new or increased government contracts over the last 6 months worth over $50 billion. 16 corporate donors are either facing federal enforcement actions or had actions suspended by the Trump administration, including antitrust actions, merger reviews, and SEC investigations. https://www.citizen.org/article/ballroom-billions/



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

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Friday, August 14, 2026 5:24 AM

SECOND

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


There is a new book on Trump.

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan | Jun 23, 2026
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00

Download for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Maggie+Haberman+Jonathan+Swan&ch
eck=1
or from https://z-lib.gl/s/Maggie%20Haberman%20Jonathan%20Swan

From the Introduction

History is full of ironies. For Democrats, there could be no irony more painful than the realization it was their own success in removing Donald Trump from the White House in the 2020 election—and their subsequent determination to ensure he would never return—that has made him the most consequential and feared President of our lifetimes.

Had Trump eked out a victory over Joe Biden in that election, he would have begun his second term in a sorry state. The pandemic was still raging in early 2021, still killing Americans by the thousands, warping the economy, and disrupting global trade. Inflation would soon arrive, as it did across major economies worldwide, dragging down the approval ratings of incumbent leaders in nearly every liberal democracy and fueling the rise of right-wing populists. There is no reason to think Trump would have been the exception. He has insisted that inflation would never have happened on his watch, but that claim, while impossible to disprove, was equally impossible to take seriously. That spring, Trump was set to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. He had wanted to move much faster than that, and it had required a concerted effort by his military leaders and national security advisor to stop him from initiating a wildly precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East and Africa before he left office on January 20, 2021. Who knows whether Trump’s withdrawal from Afghanistan would have been smoother, more competent, than Biden’s disastrous exit, but the withdrawal was never going to be easy and would have added yet another burden to a consecutive term.

Where Trump envisaged success in a second term, it is not hard to instead imagine him hobbling through those four years, reacting to the pressures that would soon pile up, throwing him off balance and preventing him from ever taking full command of the presidency. Trump had felt stymied for much of his first term, starting with the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, then impeachment, and then Covid. By the end of Trump’s first term he was deeply unpopular, with his approval rating in the thirties. And given the trajectory he was on, it was certainly feasible that he might have finished a consecutive term with an even lower approval—which would have made him an historically unpopular President. Had that happened, Trump’s MAGA movement would have been greatly weakened. And the old-line Republican establishment would have had a fighting chance to yank the party away from the populism that Trump had channeled and fueled so masterfully.

All those what-ifs.

Instead, Joe Biden won the 2020 election—a fact Trump would never concede. When, in early 2021, Trump’s aides sent out a press release from the office of the “former” President, he made sure it never happened again. For months, he inhabited a fantasy world where, encouraged by oddballs and diehards, he would insist that what he portrayed as the greatest crime in American history—the supposed theft of the 2020 election—would soon decisively be proved and he would return to office as early as August of 2021. To admit he had lost—not to mention that he had lost to an aging politician who struggled on the stairs—would have been psychologically impossible for this New York developer and reality TV star who had spent his life trying to avoid humiliation, trying to brand himself as the world’s greatest “winner.”

Another irony: Some Trump aides eventually would concede, though only privately, that it was precisely because of Trump’s unique pathologies—especially a delusional capacity that they thought at the time was entirely self-destructive—that he pulled off the improbable feat of returning to the White House just four years after the infamy of January 6.

The elites of both parties and the national media—and indeed most of Trump’s own advisors—considered him dead and buried in early 2021. Trump himself saw something different, and it wasn’t just his typical bluster. He had a feeling that his core supporters were bonded to him every bit as tightly, maybe even more tightly, than they were before hundreds of them had stormed the Capitol to try to prevent the transfer of power.

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

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Friday, August 14, 2026 5:33 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s inside account of the Trump administration portrays a president with a vast appetite for power but who repeatedly backs down when the costs of his actions become too high.

By Mark Danner | August 20, 2026 issue

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/08/20/trumps-constitutional-dict
atorship-regime-change-haberman-swan/

Reviewed:

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00

Download from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Maggie+Haberman+Jonathan+Swan&ch
eck=1
or from https://z-lib.gl/s/Maggie%20Haberman%20Jonathan%20Swan

Amid the tumult and the bluster and the noise, what exactly makes our singular president tick? After revisiting in minute detail the innumerable outrages and atrocities of Donald Trump’s second term we come upon, in the epilogue to Regime Change, the purported answer. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, having mostly completed their epic chronicle, arrive at the now-gilded Oval Office for their “fact-checking” interview. The president, in an expansive mood, greets them and guides them to their seats in front of the Resolute Desk. “No other president,” he had recently declared with his customary eloquence, “could do some of the shit I’m doing.”

Exactly what shit might he have had in mind? Sending masked ICE agents to seize and deport hundreds of thousands of largely law-abiding people and imprison 60,000 more? Overturning the eighty-year-old world trade system by imposing arbitrary tariffs? Launching a war of choice against Iran with nary a word to Congress or the American people? Firing hundreds of thousands of government workers and gutting USAID, PBS, and the Kennedy Center? Attacking law firms and universities and television networks?

One could go on, but the president wishes to make a broader point. A loyal-unto-death aide, Natalie Harp—known to her colleagues as “the human printer”—is dispatched to fetch a document, and the president begins to read from it,

reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as US President. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror—“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around.” Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. Tamerlane. “Napoleon,” he said with relish. “Hitler. Mao. Stalin.”

These leaders “maintained power through fear,” he said. “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?”

Trump lingered on the document’s central argument: that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But his was not.

“I never thought of it in terms of that,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting, the power.” Then he added: “But when I read it, I said, ‘He’s right.’”

And the “he” in question? The “historian” whose name had slipped the president’s mind, Harp later texts them, was actually the golfer Gary Player’s longtime caddy. No matter. “What was revealing,” they write,

was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis but the way he inhabited it: the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture, and detention, and Napoleon—and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear. He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed.

The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of NATO, the destruction of USAID, and the calamity of the Iran war, Trump’s name is more likely to appear on lists of leaders who have diminished their country’s power than lists of those who have increased it. But that he has become one of the most powerful American presidents—that he has since his second inauguration “put on a demonstration of raw executive power the country had not seen since the presidency of FDR”—is well-nigh indisputable. One could go further and say that not only has Trump, like Roosevelt and Lincoln, successfully imposed on the world’s first modern democracy a “constitutional dictatorship,”1 he is the only president to have done so in the absence of a true emergency.

How did he do it? Aggressively, brutally, relentlessly—weren’t we all watching him? The more specific answer is that he did it by exploiting the chief executive’s myriad emergency powers or, as Haberman and Swan rather politely phrase it, by “redefin[ing] the very concept of an ‘emergency.’” Another way to put it is that Trump did what Trump does as easily as he breathes: he lied. Is the trade deficit, in uninterrupted existence for half a century, an emergency? Can a country leading the world in energy production be said to be undergoing an “energy emergency”? Can we consider that the southern border, where crossings dropped 77 percent after Joe Biden’s executive order limiting entry, remains in the grip of a “border emergency”? The answer is no. But it doesn’t matter. In issuing more than 140 executive orders in his first hundred days in office—Roosevelt issued ninety-nine—Trump declared that the country was beset by no fewer than ten separate emergencies.2 And in the face of this supposedly unprecedented onslaught the president must have unprecedented powers to confront them.

This is what would-be autocrats do: declare an emergency and rule by decree. (“Sovereign is he who decides the exception,” in the celebrated words of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.) For a president thirsting for more power, this is the obvious path. But surely the Framers in their wisdom anticipated this danger? Of course they did, which is why Trump’s true innovation as an American authoritarian is not the profligate abuse of emergency powers but the full-on castration of a Congress that allowed him to do it. As we all learned in school, Congress, cantankerous and jealous of its powers, particularly the power of the purse, was meant to be the immediate bulwark against an unbound executive. But during his decade of dominance, Trump has wielded his charisma and his fury and his unquenchable taste for vengeance to systematically destroy any Republicans who would dare raise a voice against him. Though these days a few so-called YOLO—“You only live once”—Republicans, who are retiring or have lost primaries thanks to Trump, are nervously raising their heads from under a rock, since his reelection senators and congressmen have been only too happy to remain silent as he relentlessly increases his power by suborning theirs.

For anyone who has spent Trump’s second term ranting about spineless Republicans and their lack of fealty to the country’s founding principles, Haberman and Swan offer a useful course in the iron laws of Republican self-preservation. The president wields sticks, yes—we have all seen how the insufficiently “loyal” are wiped out by Trump-backed primary challengers—but even more he offers carrots, aggressively seducing those who show the least reluctance to comply. Power in Congress, having increasingly in recent years flowed upward to the leadership, now “flowed out of the Speaker’s office directly into the Oval Office.” And it was not just that Speaker Mike Johnson owed his job to Trump:

Johnson understood the fear Trump inspired…. But it was not just about the threats. He knew also, as did his colleagues, that Trump had a more powerful connection with Republican voters than any of them. And he knew that his own members were seduced by Trump.

Trump exploited those emotions. He understood that many Republican lawmakers related to him like starry-eyed fans rather than as elected representatives of a coequal branch of government. He offered more access than any modern president. Since 2017, he had handed out his cell phone number freely—even to the most junior members of Congress, who would never have dreamed of texting or calling the President. He invited them to play golf with him at his clubs, for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and for flights on his private jet.

With these lavish perquisites on offer, unusual was the young congressman or senator who needed to be shown the stick. Trump had long since rooted out of Congress most of the Republicans who had voted to impeach him, but his memory is long and his vindictiveness unflagging. (Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict him in 2021, was finally crushed in a primary in May.) So why risk it? Take the presidential phone calls and the plane rides—and the money.

And the money in the post–Citizens United age is staggering. By the day after the 2024 election, Haberman and Swan report, “Trump was already receiving phone calls from Fortune 500 CEOs, many of whom had criticized him in the past.” They wanted to get back into the president-elect’s good graces, but the cost

would be high…. Trump would dictate the number—the exact dollar figure—he wanted [his fundraiser] to extract from each CEO. Within days, millions of dollars, and then tens and hundreds of millions, were pouring into Trump’s various fundraising accounts.

The sums are truly fantastical: $1.9 billion raised from corporate donors. Trump’s political apparatus, much more organized and efficient than it had been during his first term, made full “use [of these] outside groups as weapons to enforce compliance” with his agenda. Next to corporate resources, mere politicians are cheap: a couple billion buys a lot of compliance. And should the campaign cash and the phone calls fall short, there was always the social media army, a bevy of MAGA influencers “who had massive audiences and threatened any Republican who would consider voting against Trump’s nominees.” Senator Joni Ernst, a combat veteran who expressed doubts about Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense (for his part Hegseth, one of the dimmer of the dim bulbs among Trump’s appointees, had doubts about whether women should even be in combat), found herself beset with a full-on social media campaign that included nasty details of her divorce. She voted for Hegseth.

And so even before his second term had commenced, Trump and his minions, who make up in loyalty and obedience what they lack in competence, were able very quickly to reduce the United States’ three branches of government to two. Except for isolated cases like the Epstein files—Haberman and Swan offer an entertaining account of the full-on panic caused by that political scandal, including the president’s alleged “nipple fetish,” treated with great seriousness in the Situation Room—the conflict has been between the executive and the courts, which apart from the ideological deformations of the Supreme Court have generally performed ably, though they have not always been obeyed. But is anyone thinking of Tamerlane yet? Or Hitler? Stalin perhaps?

The comparisons seem absurd because although Trump as a politician certainly has elements of genius—his aggression and energy, his uncanny instinct for finding weakness in adversaries, his mastery in dominating the news cycle, his endlessly creative shaping and projecting of his own grievances, his sheer shameless willfulness in making his reality our own—he also remains an ignorant blowhard. He lies so much that he often forgets what the truth is. He doesn’t read. He knows little or no history. And he is so captivated by the sound of his own voice that he almost entirely lacks the ability to listen. Finally, he is wholly in the grip of a decades-old set of beliefs—imposing tariffs will make the United States rich with other countries’ money, American cities are so ravaged by criminal immigrants that only the military can restore order, alliances are simply the means by which freeloader countries “take advantage” of the United States, climate change is nothing more than a fallacious “green new scam”—that are demonstrably false.

What remains astonishing is that Trump, through his indefatigable showmanship, was able to ride his reality show fame to such power in the world’s strongest country that he has been able to impose these aberrant views on nearly 350 million people, with consequences for billions more. As Haberman and Swan show, Trump in his second term has built a government that, but for a few important exceptions (Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought), is made up of incompetent toadies who are wholly responsive to his wishes—a government that, forced to choose between his fantasies and reality, will choose the fantasies every time. The result is that our politics have seemed to turn the world on its head. Thousands are dying in unprecedented heat waves and the American government is firing rafts of climate scientists, paying multinational corporations not to put up windmills that have already been paid for, and scrubbing the words “climate change” from government websites. Trump’s patrimonialist administration has become a stark embodiment of his own ignorance and irrationality.

One result is that parts of Haberman and Swan’s meticulously reported chronicle read like science fiction. Their account of the meetings about the president’s vaunted Liberation Day, on the other hand, a week before the United States unilaterally dismantled the international trade system, sounds like something out of the Marx Brothers:

“Nobody has fucking given me any numbers,” Trump fumed. “Hard facts of how much China tariffs us, how much India tariffs us. You give me bullshit numbers.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick pulled out a folder, saying, “Here are the numbers….”

But Trump was convinced that the real numbers for India and China were much higher than Lutnick’s printouts. “No, these are bullshit numbers,” he said, giving Lutnick a hard look. “These are fucking bullshit.”

Harp, despite her best efforts, was not finding the numbers that didn’t exist.

“No, these are the real numbers!” Lutnick insisted…. Turning to the President’s trade representative, Jamieson Greer, Lutnick pleaded, “Right, Jamieson? Jamieson, say these numbers are real. Jamieson, speak up.”

Greer, a trade lawyer who was not inclined to get into a spat with the President, just looked at Lutnick and said nothing.

The President’s global tariff program, set to launch on “Liberation Day,” was just a week away, but the rates were still undecided. Trump wanted to set the rates using a formula he had been devising in his mind. No one was sure precisely how it was being calculated, and it would vary by the day, sometimes by the hour. But how could he make his calculations with these bullshit numbers from Lutnick?

A handful of very wealthy people who are way out of their depth are playing with the world’s trade system, which was developed under the leadership of the United States in delicate negotiations by hundreds of experts over many decades, and they are about to shatter it with a single announcement, all because the president fervently and irrationally believes that the country has “been treated very unfairly” by its trading partners and that tariffs will make the country rich with their money.

In the event, Trump’s announcement crashed the markets, with the S&P 500 losing $2 trillion in one day, and soon the bond market began to plunge as well. Finally, faced with financial Armageddon, Trump backed down, “pausing the tariffs” for ninety days:

That afternoon, the markets surged nearly 10 percent on the news, and Trump surrogates rushed to the cameras to clean up the mess, claiming that pausing the tariffs was the plan all along. This was, they said, a genius negotiating strategy from the dealmaker of dealmakers…. The world had just witnessed a master class in economic brinkmanship, they would all say.

But in fact, Trump had blinked. The collapsing bond markets left him no choice. Investors were losing faith that the United States would be able to make good on its debt.

One lived through these events, of course, but in reliving them through this inside account one feels a kind of terrible awe at the blithe incompetence and sheer irresponsibility on display. In service to his obsessions, the president is willing to take the country right up to the edge of catastrophe, and no one is willing to incur his ire by trying to stop him. Only the reality of the consequences of what he had done—the collapsing bond markets—persuaded him to reverse course. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that as this divergence between Trump’s fantasyland and reality grows, reality increasingly will triumph. The trouble with this lunge for optimism is not only that thus far—with tariffs and the Iran war, for example—we have needed a catastrophe to mark the dividing line but that it fails to account for the damage already done, which is unquestionably very great indeed.

The catastrophe of Iran may mark this country’s decline no less than the Suez Crisis marked Great Britain’s. There is the same stunned realization abroad of having seen the limits of the late imperial mind. Haberman and Swan’s account of the decision to attack Iran—a decision presidents have resisted for very good reasons since 1979—is a bravura piece of reporting and, for those who retain any faith in American power in the world, deeply saddening to read. As he has with previous presidents, the Israeli prime minister comes to the White House Situation Room with a war to sell, and he promises that regime change will follow and the nuclear threat will be removed forever. Trump will be a hero, doing what presidents before him have lacked the audacity to attempt. And although US intelligence analysts call the Israeli scenarios “farcical”—“In other words, it’s bullshit,” helpfully translates Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio—Trump decides to buy in anyway. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs mentions something about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz—one of the principal reasons presidents have resisted similar Israeli importunings for decades—but Trump in his vast ignorance says not to worry, it’ll all be over in a few days. And anyway what do we have to lose?

The account put me in mind of a phrase from an essay published early in this administration: “The Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History.”3 Today, because of Trump’s blithe decision, nearly four thousand Iranians are dead, more than four thousand Lebanese are dead, and eighteen Americans are dead. The Strait of Hormuz, a critical economic choke point, is firmly in the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the aircraft carriers of the mighty US Fifth Fleet have been unable to keep it open in the face of Iran’s speedboats, mines, and drones. “It’s very interesting,” as Trump mused to these reporters, “the power.” It would be reassuring if those anodyne words bespoke some knowledge or wisdom instead of its simulacrum. In truth, military power—the power to blow things up—is less important than military authority: the ability to dictate terms without blowing things up. And Trump, for all his musings on Tamerlane and Stalin, has managed to reduce the United States’ authority immeasurably, thanks to his own shallowness, vanity, and inability to listen.

The mummers’ play of negotiations that led to the memorandum of understanding and the restart of the war that followed fall outside the ambit of Haberman and Swan’s account. Had they not, the authors might have said that when it came to the absurd memorandum—in which the Americans agreed to pay the Iranians billions of dollars to restore the status quo ante—the rising inflation caused by the closing of the strait along with the rapidly approaching midterm elections “left him no choice” but to kowtow to the Iranians. But this is the weakness and danger of Trump’s transactionalism: he has no enduring scale, beyond his own vanity, to judge what’s important or what’s right. And if some in his tiny circle of decision makers do, they lack the courage to tell him. In fact he himself set up an eventual war when he rashly tore up Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018. Now, like some woeful tragic hero, he finds himself doomed by his own unknowing decisions and struggling to negotiate an agreement that can never be as good as his predecessor’s. As drama, there is something right and satisfying about this. But we are all along for the ride as the Iran war and its aftermath turn into a terrible, decadent sham.

Trump, quickly bored, has moved on. He is presiding over other scandals—the algae-filled Reflecting Pool, among others—and other projects, like his splendid ballroom, larger than the White House itself, and his “Arc de Trump,” which is to be nearly one hundred feet taller than its Napoleon-conceived model in Paris. Even as he muses on his power, his approval numbers have stabilized in the mid-thirties: two Americans in three disapprove of the job he is doing. He has long since lost the support of many of the independents, Latinos, and younger voters who brought him back to office. As the midterms approach he struggles to manipulate them through redistricting, rantings about voter fraud, and proposals to suppress voting. But in California and other states the Democrats have matched Republican gerrymandering, and the president’s much-hyped SAVE America Act, which would impose burdensome identification requirements on voters, will not pass the Senate.

The signs are everywhere that the failed assault on Iran marked the high tide of his power. The Supreme Court ruled that he lacked the authority to impose his tariffs or to end birthright citizenship. Lower courts in dozens of decisions have blocked his more presumptuous emergency actions. His high-profile campaign of deportations in “blue cities” crashed on the shoals of Minneapolis’s civic resistance, including that of the two protesters ICE agents shot and killed there. Confronted with a wave of bad press and plunging poll numbers, the administration backed down, ignoring the urgings of some within it (including Stephen Miller and, as Haberman and Swan reveal, Vice President J.D. Vance) that the president invoke the Insurrection Act and send troops into the city. Here, as with the tariffs and the war, faced with darkening reality he retreated, though his administration, working more quietly now, continues to deport tens of thousands.

What truly matters to Trump beyond his ballrooms and his reflecting pools and his arches? Does he lose sleep over immigrants “invading” the country? No doubt he has thrown into high relief the weaknesses of our governing system on its 250th birthday, beginning with his own coming to power after winning nearly three million fewer votes than his opponent. But he will bequeath no doctrine or philosophy. The norms he has shattered with his systematic corruption remain to be made into laws that will be stronger and more lasting. The nihilism he has exposed among voters disgusted by their powerlessness amid ever-rising inequality remains to be addressed by future leaders, but none seems likely to replace him as a ubiquitous social media troll. For two years more and counting, the incessant cacophony—the twenty-four-hour dominance of the news cycle with tweets and insults and scandals—will go on. He is a huckster, an Internet-age buffoon with endless resources to entertain and outrage us. However much we long to banish him from our consciousness, he will not be banished.

He will leave us having succeeded in putting an end to the country’s imperial dominance and in closing borders that were once more welcoming to outsiders. He will have helped ensure that the rich grow ever richer and that millions with less will not have insurance when they get sick. He will have made the government weaker and less responsive and the society around it starkly more corrupt. He will have politicized many parts of the country’s public life that were not politicized before.

But his pretended reflection on what he longed to acquire—“It’s very interesting, the power”—is inert. He has a vast appetite for power only insofar as it satisfies his greed and directs the spotlight upon himself. But it is power merely as self-aggrandizement, and it ends with the sterile farce of his name plastered on arches and monuments. As I write, the courts have ordered that name removed from the Kennedy Center, and that humiliating operation, shaded from the eyes of the public behind a nondescript tarp, also marks a turning point. Would Tamerlane or Stalin have stood for such a disgrace? He has on occasion sent in the troops, but when the courts have pushed back he has loudly complained and quietly complied. For all his bluster about emergencies, he has not invoked the Insurrection Act, fearing that the political damage would far outweigh the gain. Unless he succeeds in blatantly subverting the coming elections—by sending troops into polling places, say, to seize ballots and thereby “protect” the vote, a fateful step that plainly tempts him—his power, however proudly he flaunts it, will continue inexorably to ebb.

—July 22, 2026

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

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