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This blog explores politics from a liberal/left perspective but also deals heavily with conspiracy theories and various unusual topics. Although I started this blog to research 9/11, my most pressing issue of concern now is anthropogenic climate change.

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"The US-Canada Trainwreck and the Limits of American Power"

Josh Marshall makes a lot of important points:

As Donald Trump not so much dismantles the U.S.-backed global order as dynamites it, that destruction coupled with the rise of a more vocal and electorally prominent U.S. left has renewed the discussion of just what that U.S.-backed global order was. 

This passage and this whole U.S.-Canada breakdown illustrates a lot of it. 

The U.S. has been a great power by various definitions for more than a century. It was one of two for most of the latter half of the 20th century and the sole one starting in the final decade of the 20th century. To understand this now-receding era, we must recognize that U.S. power functioned differently with the relatively wealthy states primarily in the global north and those poorer states mainly in the south. Its power was based largely on two key alliance structures: One based in Europe (NATO) which is really the western fringe of Eurasia and another based on the littoral and island fringe of East Asia — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, et al. It was a book I read by Zbigniew Brzezinski about 20 years ago that really shaped my understanding of how these two alliance structures fit together with global geography. 

The U.S. completely dominates North America by its economic, military and even geographical heft and faces no real strategic competitors in South America. So we’re free of any real foes in our whole hemisphere. 

Meanwhile, these two alliance structures create counterweights to Eurasia’s two great land powers, Russia and China. One of the reasons this has been a sustainable arrangement is that it worked for both sides. The U.S. gets things it wants. For Western Europe and littoral East Asia, it provides a counterweight to the local potential dominator/bully. 

But, critically, that counterweight comes from a partner which isn’t too close at hand. The U.S. is big and powerful. But they are and will always be across the sea, over the horizon. This schema of course leaves out a huge amount of the globe. But it was a stable and mutually beneficial system, and at least until quite recently covered most of the globe’s wealth, as well as real and potential military power. (It’s also no accident that most of the U.S.’s problems, wars and blunders over the last two generations have been in another place that doesn’t fit into this schema geographically, culturally or really any other way: the Greater Middle East.) And the key to its stability is that in those two alliance structures, the U.S. didn’t ask that much. 

No, the U.S. isn’t a global philanthropist bringing peace and prosperity to all. But its terms are fairly generous. In these two theaters, the U.S. has acted not as a dominator but more like a first among equals. Critics of U.S. power have always stumbled on this basic fact. For all the purported similarities between the U.S. and Russian great power models, why are countries in Europe trying to stay in or enter into our imperium rather break free of it? 

Ukraine illustrates all of this. It’s why Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and its security counterpart, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, have been basically a bust while the EU and NATO have grown. Yes, yes, yes, the CIA and Victoria Nuland are the secret hands and all the rest. The reality is that the proof of the pudding has been in the eating. 

The basic answer on all these fronts is that the U.S. imperium, for those who wish to call it that, is, in these two theaters, a good deal. It doesn’t ask that much. The U.S. has operated as a first among equals, not a mob boss. 

The centerpiece of Trumpism is that it wants to be a dominator, especially in the regions where that’s plausible, the Americas. (It’s no accident that the [Toronto] Star says the Trump wants to make Canada into an American Belarus, a nominally sovereign client state.) 

And in the short term the U.S. has a lot of power to do that, or at least extract big costs from countries which don’t comply. 

But the U.S. was never powerful enough and certainly isn’t powerful enough now to be the dominator of Europe and littoral East Asia, and certainly not the entire globe — not without infinitely larger spending on military power. 

We’re already seeing the de facto limits of U.S. military might with an adversary as comparatively feeble as Iran. 

The simple fact is that for all the other evils of Trumpism, they simply don’t understand the basis of American power, military or economic. That’s the basis of the absurdity of the last decade, in which the U.S. is somehow the defiant rebel against the system it created for its own prosperity and security and which has ensured both for going on a century. 

Listen to their thinking and you see it clearly: We’re the big power. We’re in charge. But we don’t act like we’re in charge. We let ourselves get pushed around. Now we’re going to be in charge. 

They simply don’t understand that to the extent we are “in charge,” the underlying basis of the agreement puts us in charge. It’s the comparatively easy terms of American global power. 

They really do imagine that U.S. allies are something like colonies or Finlandized client states that we’ve just let get over their skis. 

The truth is that this precedes Trumpism. We saw this in that pivotal 18 months or so between the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. (I actually wrote about this conversation and the books it spawned in a review essay in The New Yorker at the end of 2003.) It was less impetuous and feral. But the outlines are the same: We’re in charge. But we haven’t been acting like we’re in charge. And it’s that lackadaisical approach to managing the globe that made things like 9/11 possible. So now we’re going to actually be in charge. 

Again, a basic misunderstanding of the basis on which we are “in charge.” In truth, though I’ve been a partisan in these debates for half my life, a lot of this was probably inevitable with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the major counterweight to American power, which shaped the “good” decisions America made to put this whole system in place. 

A different and more fecund line of argument is whether the deal America made with its major allies drove unequal shifts in America’s domestic economy which ended up undermining the American domestic political foundations of these global alliances. That’s a complicated question. But there’s at least a there there. 

I’ve talked a lot here about big think and the nature and limits of American power. I should conclude with what I hope goes without saying but still needs to be said. This breakdown in U.S.-Canada relations isn’t just a misapprehension of the nature of American power. It’s deeply wrong, an unprovoked assault on friendly neighbors and longstanding partners with whom we share so much. As I wrote to a Canadian, discussing this this morning, this whole episode is a source of shame and embarrassment for the United States.

 

The Ongoing Gross Spectacle and Horror Show Debacle of The Orange Lunatic's 2nd term

From Judith Dayal--  

Look at him. An orange, bloated monument to appetite, his face lacquered into a color found nowhere in the natural world, his body packaged in an expensive suit with the general appearance of something money has preserved considerably longer than nature intended. 

A man born into wealth who has spent his entire life looking desperately hungry. Hungry for money, praise, power and somebody, anybody, to walk into the room and tell him he is the biggest, richest, smartest, most important boy who has ever lived. 

Eighty years old and still waiting for the gold star. 

So he covers everything else in gold instead. The ceilings. The furniture. The faucets. The fucking airplane. A man with so much money and so little taste that he somehow made obscene wealth look like a clearance aisle. 

And then there is the face. Painted orange, perpetually scowling, lips pursed around some fresh complaint against a world that has given him almost everything and somehow failed to give him enough. 

Because there is never enough. That is the thing about greed. It does not eat because it is hungry. It eats because something else still has food. 

Donald Trump has the appetite of a fire that mistakes being fed for being satisfied. Everything around him eventually becomes kindling, currency or a mirror. Their money. Their loyalty. Their dignity. Their country. More. He always needs more ~ More applause, more obedience, more people bending the knee, more enemies to punish, more cameras pointed toward him. 

An ego with the gravitational pull of a dying star and roughly the same prognosis for everything nearby. And this week, while everything caught in that gravity keeps bending toward him, he walked reporters across the White House grounds to show them what he has made prettier. Fresh grass. New granite. A new helipad. Plans for his enormous ballroom. He signed a piece of granite too. His name will be laid face-down beneath the presidential seal, where nobody will see it. He needed to put it there anyway. There is something almost painfully perfect about that. 

A man so desperate to leave himself on everything that even a rock buried beneath other people's feet must belong to him. And while showing off what he has built, he said it would last “no matter what happens with the world.” 

The words almost feel too perfectly written for him. The world can happen somewhere else. There is granite to polish here. Grass to admire. A ballroom to imagine. The house can fill with smoke ~ the man holding the matches would still like everyone to come outside and look at the landscaping. Meanwhile, Americans keep opening their refrigerators and discovering another thing they may need to throw away. Another recall. Another outbreak. Another tiny thread in the enormous invisible net of people and systems whose job is to notice when something has gone wrong. 

We rarely think about that net until somebody starts cutting through it. And this is what is happening to our country now. It is being pulled apart thread by thread. A question no longer asked. A scientist no longer there. A protection quietly removed. A relationship severed. A guardrail ripped out while we're still barreling toward the curve. Each thread looks small enough to lose ~ until you look up and realize the whole fucking thing is unraveling. 

And still the dying star pulls. Institutions, laws, alliances, truth itself ~ everything dragged toward the enormous gravity of one man's appetite until nothing is allowed to exist outside of him. A dying star does not need to hate the planets around it. It destroys them simply by being what it is. 

And somehow, millions of Americans looked at this profoundly needy man, this spray-tanned shrine to excess and insecurity, and saw strength. They saw the whining and called it toughness. They saw the cruelty and called it honesty. They saw the greed and called it success. They saw a man who cannot tolerate being mocked, contradicted, ignored, corrected or told no and said, “Alpha male.” 

Okay. And perhaps that is why they love him so much. He gave them permission. Permission to stop apologizing for the things they once knew enough to be ashamed of. To stop wondering whether cruelty should embarrass them, whether selfishness should trouble them, whether another person's suffering should ask anything of them at all. He made their worst impulses feel righteous. He told people who had spent years being embarrassed by the ugliest parts of themselves that actually, those were the best parts. Be louder. Be meaner. Care less. Take more. And if somebody weaker than you gets hurt along the way, well, they probably deserved it. That is the gospel now. Not sacrifice. Not compassion. Not loving your neighbor. Just an endless, grasping hunger dressed up in red, white and blue. 

A movement built around people screaming about what they are owed while demanding everyone else learn to live with less. Less healthcare. Less education. Less safety. Less freedom. Less dignity. As long as somebody they hate loses something too. Especially then. And now we watch the country crumble around us. 

We watch the wrecking ball swing through things we thought would hold while the man operating it stops occasionally to point out how nice the lawn looks. And none of us gets to pretend we don't know how we got here ~ 

Millions of people looked at this orange, bloated monument to human rot, lacquered in bronzer and narcissism, saw the greed, the cruelty, the staggering emptiness of the man ~ and thought, yes. Give him the most powerful country on Earth. And now the whole fucking world gets to find out what happens when you do.

Trump and Propaganda Techniques

 This is a great explanation of propaganda techniques. 

There's no doubt that POS POTUS is a master propagandist. It's how he's built his cult.

Here's the thing that always confuses me. He's clearly a massive doofus. He knows almost no history, geography, math, science or even economics. Either he is an amazing dumbass or he is an amazing actor who plays a massive dumbass as POTUS.

So how is he such a master propagandist?

Here are the possibilities I can think of (probably a mixture of these):

1) despite his dumbassity, he was well-trained by people like Roy Cohn and Vladimir Putin, who both were/are masters of propaganda.

2) he has someone regularly telling him what to say for optimal propaganda effect (but who is it? Putin? They don't talk that often. Stephen Miller? Is he really a propaganda expert? Steven Bannon? Do they talk that much? Someone we don't know? Who else would be this sort of Svengali int he White House?)

3) propaganda techniques are ultimately pretty simple-- you don't have to be smart to use them-- you just have to be persistent and have no conscience to use them

4) he's has an intuitive sense of the use of propaganda because of his long history of conning people.

The main things POS POTUS propaganda does is lie all the time about everything, constantly repeat the key lies and viciously attack anyone who tries to correct him or even oppose him. Repetition, flooding the zone and DARVO. Maybe he really is the perfect kind of dumbass to both master these skills and carry them out.

The "Collins Elite" -- a Secret Religious Group Connected to the Pentagon That Is Covering Up the Truth About UFOs

A film premiering next month will shine a light on a secret U.S. group which UFO researchers claim is helping to cover up the discovery of alien spacecraft. 

The film, God versus Aliens, has interviews with two experts about the 'Collins Elite', a supposed secretive group within the U.S. military which has helped to cover up alien abductions and crashed spacecraft since the 1950s. 

Speaking to DailyMail.com, British director of the film Mark Christopher Lee said: 'A lot of people know about Majestic 12, a supposed committee of military leaders and politicians interested in UFOs: it's out there in pop culture, along with Area 51. 

'But two of my interviewees believe that this is a smokescreen, and the real organization is the Collins Elite, based in the Wright Patterson Air Base [in Ohio]. 'These people are said to work in a private organization on behalf of the government, because there are no freedom of information requests (FOIA) to private companies.' 

The Wright Patterson Air Base was home to the Project Blue Book investigation into UFO reports which began in 1947 - and there have been previous rumors of a secret 'UFO room' at the base. 

Lee told DailyMail.com that his interviewees - UFO author Brian Allan and alleged abductee Tony Topping - suggest that the members of the Collins Elite believe that aliens are demonic, or wish to label them as being so. 

Both suggest that the Collins Elite has worked to suppress information about UFOs, claiming UFOs to be demonic or Satanic in origin. 

In the film, Brian Allan, who also serves as an editor for Phenomena Magazine, says: 'The Americans established an agency, the Collins Elite. I've spoken to one of the guys who they approached, Anglican Pastor Ray Boeche. 

'The Defense Intelligence Agency were looking at this demonic element, and they labelled these sorts of aliens as 'non human entities'. They believed that there was a demonic component to the UFO phenomenon: they are not invading us, it's Biblical.' 

Tony Topping believes that the group's conclusions come from some of its members' origins in right-wing Christian evangelism, and suggests that the group may have access to crashed alien spacecraft. Topping believes that the work of the group may mean that aliens are portrayed as demonic or evil if the U.S. government ever reveals more information about UFOs to the world. 

Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual says that the ideas that supposedly motivated the Collins Elite may have continued within the Pentagon. Watson, who was not involved in the film, told DailyMail.com that Luis Elizondo, the former Director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Pentagon, claims an unnamed senior official told him that he should stop investigating UFOs because they are Satanic. 

Watson said: 'The Collins Elite seems to have been an unofficial and informal group inside the Pentagon, who regarded aliens as demonic. 'There is no hard evidence for such ideas, and it is worrying that small secretive groups within US Government agencies with such beliefs could have an undue influence on policies and actions based on mere rumour and speculation. Topping believes that the work of the group may mean that aliens are portrayed as demonic or evil if the U.S. government ever reveals more information about UFOs to the world. 

The film includes an interview with Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project. Shostak says that advancing technologies - including AI-powered sky scans - will mean that aliens will be found by 2036 (he has previously placed a famous bet that this will happen). 

The film also examines the likely impact of alien 'first contact' on world religions, with Shostak suggesting that aliens might bring new gods with them - and that if they are more technologically advanced, people on Earth might worship the new alien gods. 

Lee, a musician with band The Pocket Gods who also produces the TV show Nub TV, says the film is a passion project, as he is a Christian fascinated by the paranormal. He believes the project is very timely. 

Lee says, 'What's happening in America at the moment with disclosure in US Congress and whistleblowers coming forward, some very credible people that work for the US government that are willing to testify under oath that there is something unusual, unexplained.' 

'God versus Aliens' is released on August 10 via Sky Television in Britain and worldwide via Nub TV on Ayozat.com.

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

 

See also this podcast: 

 Do Secret Religious Groups Use Faith To Stop UFO Disclosure? | Jason Samosa 

The ‘Collins Elite’ is one of the most polarizing terms in the UFO community, often used as a blanket explanation for why high-ranking officials want to keep the truth in the dark. 

But what if the reality is much more tactical than we’ve been led to believe? 

At the world’s biggest UFO conference (Contact in the Desert), Dan sat down with researcher Jason Samosa, who shares his journey from studying for the ministry to uncovering the geopolitical and religious intersections of the UFO phenomenon. They explore their personal struggles with faith, and how powerful networks of religious and political elites use it, and our foundational institutions, against us to control the UAP narrative and influence the world at large. 

 They dive deep into: 

• The Genesis of Secrecy: How a 1950s Pentagon program evolved into a sophisticated control system designed to weaponize religious ideology (the ‘UFOs = demons’ hypothesis) and suppress the UFO reality. 

 • The Great Schism: The clash between our desire for scientific truth and the inflexible nature of ancient religious institutions that refuse to grow. 

 • The ‘Family’ Connection: Why some of the most influential figures in government networks intentionally lean into apocalyptic narratives to prevent the public from questioning the status quo. 

 • The Cost of Disclosure: Why a complete shift in our understanding of the universe might be seen as a direct threat to the financial and political systems that rely on our current worldviews. 

 • Seeing Through Power Systems: Jason discusses how his own path, from evangelical study to navigating Washington D.C., has highlighted why the ultimate truth may never come from the government, but from our own ability to see through traditional power systems. 

It turns out that in the battle for disclosure, the biggest threat to the truth is the weaponization of our own faith. 

Links: Watch Jason Samosa’s Outstanding YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@jason_samosa 

Find Jason Samosa on X: https://x.com/jason_samosa

 ‘Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife by Nick Redfern’: https://www.amazon.com/EVENTS-Secret-Government-Demonic-Afterlife/dp/1933665483 

 ‘Forbidden Science 6: Scattered Castles, The Journals of Jacques Vallee, 2010-2019’ by Jacques Vallee - https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Science-Scattered-Journals-2010-2019/dp/1949501361 

 ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Pi-Yann-Martel/dp/0156027321

Buckled Columns in Steel Frame Building Don't Lead to Progressive Collapse

 So weird!

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out. 

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns. 

Recently added structure East 42nd St. Area detailed in photograph below Second Ave. Existing part of the building Photograph taken from here RECENTLY added structure Sagging floors above Missing facade panel 

Buckled columns visible inside existing structure Existing structure The New York Times City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.”

 

“The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.”

 

Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.” Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed. 

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually. “Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes. 

Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said. Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

Trump's Military Dictatorship Budget

Historian Timothy Snyder: 

(Regarding) Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely. This is where all the evidence points. 

If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a notion of US interests. 

There is abundant evidence that he understands politics as a matter of people being paid off. And that is the framework in which to understand his proposed military budget. He is paying people off. 

No other explanation fits the data. Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. 

It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. 

Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide. 

The military budget proposal only makes political sense. But it does not make democratic political sense. It is not designed to be popular among the population at large. It makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) 

It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget. 

Very often, when people say that Trump is “transactional,” they mean something like “just transactional”; he only cares about money, so in the end he cannot be that bad. But that is not where transactionalism leads: it leads to the basic reality that Trump has no notion of interests beyond his own, and will find it natural to take your money and spend it for his power. 

Transactionalism, the conventional wisdom about Trump, leads to the conclusion that the military budget is a bribe for power. But if we need more evidence of the intention, it is all around us. Hegseth is purging the upper ranks of the armed services on the basis of politics. 

Both Hegseth and Trump speak about a future mission of the military against the “enemy within” in the “homeland.” It’s a military dictatorship budget.

The Coming Apocalypse Due to the Strait of Hormuz Situation

From "The Other 98%"--

If the Strait of Hormuz never reopens, the life you know starts coming apart by this fall. 

An actual apocalypse. Not as a metaphor. As a supply chain. And nobody in the media will walk you through what that actually looks like. 

So let’s walk you through it. For three months, a fifth of the world's oil has been cut off. You haven't felt the full weight of it yet, and there's a reason for that. 

The world had a cushion. Enormous reserves of oil sitting in storage, built up over years. We've been burning through that cushion to keep the gas flowing and the prices from exploding. Quietly. Fast. At a pace never seen outside a global pandemic. 

Here's the part the optimists keep skipping: a cushion is not a faucet. It runs out. And when you are near the bottom, you don't get a gentle warning. 

You lose the pressure that keeps fuel moving to every station, every truck, every farm, all at once. The experts who war-game this for a living have a name for that moment. The operational floor. And the worst-case estimates put it around this fall. 

Now picture it. The strait stays shut. The reserves hit empty. And the thing that's been hiding this crisis simply vanishes. Diesel goes first, and diesel is what moves the world. The trucks that restock your grocery store. The trains. The cargo ships. The combines that bring in the harvest. 

Translation, the supply chains we depend on to get our food and medicines disappear. Food doesn't disappear because we stopped growing it. It disappears because nothing can afford to move it, and because fertilizer is made from natural gas, so the next harvest costs a fortune before it's even planted. 

Translation. Grocery stores are closed. People will starve. Factories across Europe and Asia go dark. Entire countries that import every drop they burn get crushed first. And oil itself blows past every record in human history, into numbers with no modern precedent, because the whole planet is fighting over a fraction of what it needs. That is not a gas-price story. That is the machinery of modern civilization losing pressure everywhere, simultaneously. 

And this isn't a fringe nightmare. The Atlantic Council says strategic reserves are "no match for massive, sustained production outages," and calls this disruption "without precedent." And the oil shock is only the first domino. 

Modern economies run on cheap, predictable energy the way a body runs on oxygen, and when you choke it off everywhere at once, everything downstream seizes. 

Translation. Worldwide economic collapse. The Great Depression on steroids (and we will beg for the days of the 2008 recession). 

The scariest part isn't that this scenario exists. It's that the people who could stop it keep insisting everything is fine. The Treasury Secretary swears gas will be cheaper by the midterms. The reserves keep falling anyway. 

This is the bill a war of choice put on the table. And the men who put it there are governing like it can't come due. The cushion is almost gone, and the silence is the scariest part.

Once again-- MAGA IS A SICK HOAX AND ULTIMATELY A DEATH CULT 

Most Corrupt Administration In US History By Far

"U.S. creates $1.8B ‘lawfare’ fund in exchange for Trump dropping $10B IRS suit" 

 

Paul Krugman--

So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” 

Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. 

The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies. 

Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people. 

Now, massive corruption on the part of Trump and his minions isn’t new. But the shamelessness of this latest episode of looting takes it to a new level. Until now, we’ve seen a combination of crony capitalism and insider trading. Plutocrats and corporations have been enriching Trump through back channels, especially crypto, in return for government contracts and policy favors, while Trump himself and people close to Trump have been making hugely profitable market bets thanks to advance knowledge of government policies. But now Trump has eliminated the middlemen, effectively telling his officials to pay money directly to him or anyone else he favors. 

Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in U.S. history. 

But now Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today’s world. After all, Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly. Even Third World dictators normally try to mask their corruption. 

Don’t say that this taxpayer-financed slush fund won’t have political consequences. On the contrary, the polling and focus-group analyses I’ve seen say that voters are very angry about corruption. Trump’s theft of taxpayer money, while people are losing healthcare coverage and food aid while suffering from Trump-induced higher prices, is perfect fodder for the Democrats in the upcoming elections. 

So we should ask ourselves why the Trumpists have abandoned all restraint. There have been many corrupt politicians in U.S. history – although they were pikers in comparison to Trump. Yet they at least attempted to hide their corruption, or at least keep it discreet and deniable, in order to avoid a voter backlash. 

I would argue that the blatant nature of the new looting is a signpost of where America under Trumpism is heading in the months and years ahead. It’s true that Trump has a base that will support him no matter what, in many cases literally believing that he has been chosen by God. 

This puts a floor under this support. But his disastrous recent polling, as Nate Cohn writes in the Times, suggest that this floor may be lower than many thought. Now, we already know that Trump and his allies have no intention of facing free and fair elections. With the unstinting help of the Roberts Supreme Court, they have already rigged the midterms through redistricting. Trump minions are actively trying to depress Democratic-leaning voter turnout, by demanding from states the right to challenge their voting rolls. And it would be naïve to think that redistricting will be the end of the MAGA effort to undermine democracy. 

Still, Trump is aware that, even with Republican gerrymandering, November may deliver a blue wave big enough to hand Democrats the House and, quite possibly the Senate. G. Elliott Morris estimates that Democrats will need a 4-point popular vote advantage to win the House, but the latest Times poll gives them an 11 point lead. Why, then, isn’t he trying to be at least slightly discreet in his corruption? 

One answer is that even if MAGA loses big in November, Democrats can’t count on wave elections every cycle, and the field is now strongly tilted against them. As Morris writes. While the situation for Democrats is not necessarily dire for 2026, the situation for democracy in 2028 and beyond certainly is. 

So you can think of the $1.8 billion slush fund as a promise to MAGA-world that there is a payoff to be had if they just stick with him for the next two and a half years. Beyond that, we are, in effect, watching what happens when a quasi-authoritarian regime’s corruption and criminality pass the point of no return. 

At this point Trump and his MAGA minions have stolen so much, committed so many crimes — not just theft but taking America to war illegally, abusing ICE detainees, and much more — that if and when they lose power many of them will face personal ruin at best, years of jail time at worst. This would happen even if they stopped committing more crimes. So there’s no incentive for them to end their criminality, or to end the attempts to bribe others to go along. 

Either they succeed in destroying America as we know it, or they won’t. And until that’s resolved, they may as well engage in even more corruption and criminal acts. Think of it this way: The gravity of what the Trumpists have already done has created a sort of black hole at the center of American political life — and the Trumpists have already crossed the event horizon, the boundary beyond which there is no escape. 

So they will do ever more terrible things, because they have nothing more to lose.

April 25, 2026 WHCD Assassination Attempt Was Almost Certainly LIHOP

I've never been a fan of the LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) theory for the 9/11 attacks, for reasons I've gone over at length here, many times (see side links).

However, the recent assassination attempt on the POTUS at the White House Correspondent's Dinner (WHCD) was fairly clearly LIHOP given the lax security and most notably the bizarre and unexplained scene of a guard dog checking out the shooter for several seconds before he was allowed into the secure area. See also this story.

 

This is a horrible evil and failing administration that needs endless distractions to distract from their multiple failures and scams and this high profile assassination attempt fits right in with their modus operandi.