Roaming Charges: Call the Shrink

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

I remember when Woodward and Bernstein’s description in Final Days of Nixon wandering the halls of the West Wing late at night having drunken conversations with the portraits of FDR, Jefferson and Lincoln, seemed such an inconceivable account of a president who’d lost his marbles that many people assumed they’d made it up, though their source was Tricia’s husband Edward Cox.  [Nixon got looped on expensive French wines, Chateau Margaux and Lafitte Rothschild, which, in true Dick Nixon style, he often mixed with a splash of…7 Up!]  But Donald Trump posts his insane rants online for all to see, nearly every night, and without the aid of alcohol to set him off, just his own disintegrating mind and no one bats an eye anymore. Last week, he compared himself to Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Alexander the Great (does he know the Macedonian psychopath was bisexual?), claiming he was more powerful than all of them, and was “by far the most powerful person that has ever walked this planet,” because of his “global reach.” (Does he know Global Reach was the title of a book on transnational corporations written by the left-wing political economist Richard Barnett?)

During daylight hours, Trump sensibly defending cutting a deal with Iran that ended the war, allowing Iran to keep its enriched uraniumn stockpiles, maintain and restock its ballistic missile arsenal, have control over the Strait of Hormuz, remove sanctions on Iranian oil, unfreeze $28 billion in Iranian financial assets and commit to help raise at $300 billion reconstruction fund to reconstruct the damage to Iran’s infrastructure from the US/Israeli airstrikes. Trump even defended Iran’s right to defend itself and admitted that the US couldn’t dislodge Iran from controlling the Strait of Hormuz without sending in US ground troops and sustaining heavy losses. Of course, he’s said 100 different things about the Strait of Hormuz, including that it didn’t matter because the US has so much oil it doesn’t know where to park all of the barrels. [Fact check: 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows through the Strait; the price of gas here in Oregon City is still $4.97 a gallon cash; and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drained down to a puddle. Tell us another one, Don!] And, most consequentially perhaps, he publicly criticized Netanyahu for continuing to bomb Lebanon and attempting to undermine his deal. 

But that was by day. By night, another Trump emerges. A belligerent, bombastic, even sociopathic Trump, who threatened to “bomb the shit” out of Iran if he didn’t get his way and to kill the Iranian diplomats “before they even made it back to Tehran.” He vowed to seize the Strait of Hormuz and take all of the oil. He boasted about provisions that weren’t in the MOU he signed and decided the existence of provisions that were.

Trump’s public support is now down to 30%, the lowest of any recent president, even Biden in his dotage and George W. at his nadir. But he’s still more popular than his war on Iran, which is supported by only one in four Americans. Few believe the war was worth the costs. Even fewer know what the war was all about in the first place. Trump has never been a great communicator; aside from his code-words and dogwhistles to bigots, it’s increasingly difficult to deconstruct what he’s actually saying and what he’s saying actually means. But he promoted himself as a great salesman, mainly of Trump. But he couldn’t sell the Iran war and now he can’t sell a plan to end it, especially to his principal political sponsor, the person most responsible for resurrecting his political career when it was on life support after J6, Miriam Adelson. 

Adelson infused Trump’s Preserve America PAC with $100 million and raised, pledged and contributed another $150 million to other Trump-affiliated coffers, dwarfing the $75 million contributed by Elon Musk. What did Adelson expect for her money? Palestinians wiped out of Gaza, stripped of their land in the West Bank, Southern Lebanon seized into Israeli control and Iran blown off the map. So give Trump credit for double-crossing his investors, if he understood the consequences of his actions. 

Trump is impulsive. He Tweets on impulse. He acts on impulse. Consequentialism is not in his vocabulary, even in a mispronounced or badly misspelled way. There are deals to be made and deals to be blown up. Often the same deal.  Often on the same day. This may work in real estate. It doesn’t work in war or diplomacy.

The internal conflicts are beginning to leak out of Trump’s consciousness, the weight of Adelson’s millions battling with the weight of Trump’s ego. Trump’s been burning a lot of bridges lately, including every bridge into New York City. But can he afford to burn this one? Not just the link to Miriam Adelson, but the entire symbiotic relationship of the Trump presidency, indeed the entire US government, with the state of Israel and its stateside lobby. What if, for example, the Ellisons, who, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, have injected $45 million into Trump-related accounts and gotten rewarded with a lightning-fast approval of the takeover of Warner Brothers by Paramount, turn on him and use their control of CBS and CNN with the ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss at the helm to rake him over the coals, as Adelson owned media outlets are already doing in Israel?

The knives are also coming out from inside the house, as they invariably do when the aging ruler, physically infirm and mentally unstable, shows signs of vulnerability. This explains the curious case of the normally status-seeking Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, in name at least, who seems to play no role in the Trump administration’s diplomatic initiatives, to the extent there have been any stabs at diplomacy, instead of lectures, threats and posturing. With his eyes on the White House, Rubio certainly has no desire to alienate AIPAC, Adelson or the Ellisons. He’s hanging back, lurking in the shadows, waiting on the deal either to fall apart under its own weight or be sabotaged by the Israelis, as US intelligence agencies warned Trump was Netanyahu’s intent last week. 

At some point, Trump handed the mess he’d made in Iran over to JD Vance to clean up. Vance had quietly opposed the war from the beginning, for his own political reasons. He wants to inherit what’s left of the MAGA contingent in 2028 and has begun talking more and more like Tucker Carlson on quaaludes. His presence within the Administration has waxed and waned with Trump’s mood. Rubio was clearly in favor after the kidnapping of Maduro, but after the Iran war began to crash on the Strait of Hormuz, Trump turned to JD Vance to mop up the mess.  Vance has less diplomatic experience than Rubio. He was clearly just glad to hear his name called from his seat on the far end of the bench. It was clearly a setup. If Vance emerges with a deal, Trump will seize the credit. If the deal falls apart, he’ll get the blame. Rubio will stick the blade into the VP and let Trump call in someone else, Stephen Miller, probably, to wipe away the blood.

So put yourselves in the Iranians’ shoes. What are they to make of all of this?  If Trump’s behavior seems schizophrenic to you, imagine how the Iranians, sophisticated diplomats, viewed his baffling and wildly contradictory statements from day to day and hour to hour. They were so confounded by Trump’s bipolar mood swings that they told mediators in Pakistan that they had consulted psychologists, not of course to fix Trump’s mind. It’s beyond repair. But to decode his mindset. His mental pathology. How to read whether he means what he says, and which statements he really means when he quickly contradicts himself and how long he’ll hold those views before he changes his mind. 

Does he actually trust the people he sent to negotiate for him? 

Does he have the fortitude to stand up to the Israelis? 

Would he really follow through on his threat to kill them in a drone strike? He didn’t hesitate to wipe out the previous Ayatollah and most of the leadership of his regime and their families on the first day of the war. He even laughed about killing the people he wanted to replace them with. What kind of a man does that? What kind of a man admits to doing that?  to analyze Trump’s statements and try to predict his response to Iran’s proposals in the peace talks. Is any deal they sign with Trump worth the pixels it’s written with, especially when Israel isn’t on board, as it clearly isn’t. 

By the way, there’s no word on whether the Iranians consulted with Freudians or Jungians. There’s a case to be made for each or both, given his unresolved mother issues and his obsession with power for the sake of power.

But psychology can only take you so far. Sooner or later, as Kierkegaard said, you must confront “the darkness of the current moment,” and whatever malign forces lurk within. And this goes far beyond Trump’s serial prevarications into the nature of the American empire in extremis. How do you trust a regime that says the rules of war don’t apply to us and drives the point home by bombing a girls’ school? If the Geneva Conventions aren’t binding, how long will an MOU serve to restrain them? 

As Andrew Cockburn astutely observed in a recent piece, the new Iranian regime isn’t bound by the old rules, even the old fatwas issued by the late Ayatollah, such as the one commanding that Iran not develop weapons of mass destruction. The new regime came to power, seeing their fathers, uncles and brothers slaughtered by the US and Israel in a surprise attack. And they’ve quickly gained a stature and authority that the old, more cautious and conciliatory regime didn’t enjoy. They proved themselves. They survived the worst two nuclear regimes could fling at them. They not only survived, but they struck back, militarily and economically and brought Trump to the table, desperate to end the war before it ends his presidency. The Iranians may not have won the war. But endured it and survived it and are now winning the terms for how it will end.

+++

+ For the first time since the War Powers Act was passed in 1973, both houses of Congress have approved a measure directing the president of the United States to end a war. On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate voted 50-48 to approve a War Powers Resolution directing Donald Trump to end U.S. hostilities against Iran. The measure was originally introduced (and approved) in the House by Rep. Gregory Meek. Four Republican senators—Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy —joined every Democrat except one in support of the resolution–the lone Democratic dissenter: John Fetterman. The measure does not require Trump’s signature and, if the Constitution means what it says, is binding on the president. 

+ The Pentagon responded to the vote by asking for an additional $88 billion for the war, much of it to replenish depleted stockpiles of high-tech weapons.

+ Meanwhile, Trump threw a tantrum at a luncheon meeting of Republican senators, which one aide described as a “total clusterfuck” with Trump weirdly berating Sen. Dave McCormick for missing the War Powers Act vote, even though McCormick was in Pennsylvania with Trump at Trump’s request. Outgoing Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy went after the President in the closed-door session for keeping the Senate (and the US population) in the dark about the Iran deal:

I stood and said, ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on. It’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on…[Trump] did not particularly care for my comments, raised his voice, I lost my temper…it’s the Irish in me.

Reporter: The Department of War is asking for $80 billion more for the Iran war. Do you think Americans support this at a time when so many are financially struggling?

Trump: Who are you with?

Reporter: NewsNation, sir.

Trump: Not a very good group. [NewsNation is well to the right of Fox News.] Not doing very well. [If so, it’s because they defend every irrational thing Trump says or does.] Not only do they support it, they demand it.

+ As Stephen Semler reported earlier in the week, the Iran War is the most unpopular war in American history…

Reporter: Are you willing to risk economic catastrophe and strike Iran again?

Trump: A nuclear weapon supersedes depression. Depression’s real bad. A nuclear weapon will cause depression much more quickly.

+ Moody’s reports that, between increased military funding and higher oil prices, Trump’s Iran war has cost U.S. families more than $100 billion.

+ Did the US, USSR, UK, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, China, or North Korea getting the bomb cause a “depression”?

+ Iran shouldn’t agree to nuclear weapons inspections unless Israel also agrees…

+ Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Lebanon: “Lebanon, all of Lebanon, should become our playground. ALL OF LEBANON should be our TARGET.  And they tell me, ‘Wait a second, there is Lebanon and there is Hezbollah.’  I do not accept this artificial approach…Let a thousand Lebanese mothers weep, and not one Israeli mother weep.”

+ John Fetterman: “If you have contempt for Israel, you are anti-American.”

+ Trump: “I think [Israel] could do better … I’m not saying they shouldn’t protect themselves. I’m saying when two drones are shot into the desert and drop harmlessly, you don’t have to knock down buildings in Beirut. They could behave better…”

+ Since October 11, the first full day of the so-called ceasefire brokered by Trump and overseen by the Board of Peace (with zero budget), Israel has killed at least 1,005 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 3,157.

+ According to an UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry report this week on the targeting of children by Israeli forces in Gaza, “Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip.” The UN inquiry found that during the first two years of the Israeli assault, over 20,000 children were killed and more than 44,000 injured.

+ The Times of Israel reported that Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz told a conference in Tel Aviv that the Israeli army will not withdraw from its “security zone” in southern Lebanon, “even if there is an American demand.” Katz vowed that Israel would continue to control the land it has seized and that the “200,000 [Lebanese] residents will not return” to the homes they fled under Israeli bombardment.

+ Naim Qassem, head of Hezbollah: “A ceasefire means Hezbollah does not fire and Israel is free to occupy anywhere! We do not want such a ceasefire.”

+ 4,000+: Number of Lebanese, mostly civilians, killed by Israel since the start of the Iran War.

+ Evil in Action: Israel targeted the beachside home of one of Lebanon’s leading environmentalists, 75-year-old Mona Khalil, who spent much of her life trying to save sea turtles…

+ The Economist on how the US burned through its arsenal of Patriot missiles: “Since the Iran war started, America and its Gulf allies have burned through stocks of Patriots at a dizzying rate, exacerbating an already acute global shortage. New manufacturing lines are not expected to yield significant results for years.”

+ Matthew Petti in Reason on how Iran’s cheap drones effectively countered the US’s high-tech weapons: “Chinese hobby drones hit the civilian market in the early 2010s, making this type of warfare even cheaper. The Islamic State group obtained a small ‘air force’ by strapping grenades to photography drones…”

+ CBS: “The Iranians are saying they’re gonna have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. True or false?”

JD Vance: “That’s the sort of things they could have access to so long as they honor their end of the obligation.”

+ Did JD check that with the Boss?

+ Trump: “We had two big moments—when I terminated the JCPOA, the Obama deal. It was a horrible deal for the United States. It was a deal where billions of dollars were given to Iran. They tried to bribe them to make a deal. That never works.”

+ Lindsey Graham: “I spent 4.5 hours with President Trump on Friday. Here’s what I think will happen next. If this deal fails, President Trump is gonna take the Strait of Hormuz over by force. We’ll charge a fee for all those who go through to pay for the operation … if Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we’ll obliterate them.”

+ Mount Trump erupting on Fox News, threatens not only to obliterate Iran but kill its peace envoys during the negotiations. The first item in the MOU he signed was to make no new threats of violence and he’s done nothing but since Friday. (That’s what spending 4.5 hours with Lindsay Graham will do to a person.)…“You close it, and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.” (Apparently, it’s okay to use “fucking” on TV when you are threatening mass slaughter, but not when describing sexual intercourse.)

+ The Democrats are going to run to the right of Trump on Iran, a war few wanted and everyone but them, John Bolton and Lindsay Graham are tired of and they’re going to lose…

+ Look at Lutnick’s eyes when Trump says, sensibly for once, that Iran should have some enriched uranium because other nations do: “It’s a little hard when other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. You have to use a little common sense.”

+ The best thing Trump has done since taking office is to give Americans a better understanding of what America is really all about…”51% of Americans say they are extremely or very proud of being American, down sharply from 82% in 2013.”

+ How the anti-Trump right responded to Trump’s peace deal with Iran.

+ Reagan got better press when he pulled the US out of Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing…

+ Someone might remind Trump, the self-proclaimed fight fan, that heavily-favored George Foreman had Muhammad Ali on the ropes for most of the night in Kinshasa, but it didn’t end well … for George, the dope who got roped.

+ From Andrew Cockburn’s latest piece on the consequences of Trump killing the Iranian leadership on the first day of the war…

The strike on the first day of the war that killed the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a host of other senior regime figures. The consequences were immediate, and totally predictable. Not only did a new leadership swiftly take control, but the semi-pacific policies directed by Khamenei over the course of many years were abandoned forthwith. In October 2003, Khamenei had issued a Fatwa – a religious injunction carrying the force of law – forbidding the development and production of any weapons of mass destruction. As the U.S. intelligence community concluded in 2007, (and maintained ever since), a nascent Iranian nuclear weapon program was immediately terminated. The uranium enrichment program that continued was apparently inspired by Khamenei’s misguided notion that going through the motions of developing a weapon (by enriching) would adequately substitute for the real thing in terms of deterrence. Fatwas die with their author, so Khamenei’s injunction is defunct. Whether or not Iran’s new rulers wish to follow the North Korean example and develop a weapon we do not know, but we do know they have deployed a weapon of mass economic destruction, one that was eschewed by Khamenei on religious/legal grounds.

+ Axios: What lessons did you learn about the limits to presidential power from the Iran War?

Trump: There are no limits.

+ Here’s how JD Vance owned the comparison of the Trump regime to Nixon’s: “I think Nixon’s historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy.” JD’s right. He and his boss have certainly raised the bar for what amounts to high crimes and misdemeanors while in office…

+ But if the US Congress and the federal courts didn’t impose any limits on his presidential power, Iran certainly did…

+++

+ What do we call the crises after the Polycrisis?

+ Politico on the bipartisan strangulation of SNAP, which began under Clinton but has now reached the point of breaking its political hyoid bone:

SNAP’s era as arguably the nation’s preeminent anti-poverty program may be ending. Already 3.5 million people nationwide have been booted from the program and, as the law’s new eligibility terms take effect this year, more are likely to follow, while others will be abruptly sent back into a workforce for which they are unprepared. Parents of teenage children and adults in their 60s will now be expected to find a job and prove they are working. Roughly 45,000 people in Maine, including veterans and homeless adults — briefly granted a reprieve from work requirements during the Biden administration — will be newly required to work or volunteer. Costs to states will balloon, as they are expected to kick in more funds to administer the program and, for the first time, pay part of the cost of benefits themselves.

+Hong Kong’s GDP per capita surpassed Britain’s when it was still officially a British colony.

+ AI-linked securities now account for a record 45% of the S&P 500, according to Yahoo Finance.

+ Toronto Dominion Bank (TD) has informed employees it will use software to monitor their work in an effort to “increase productivity.”

+ Axios: “A year’s worth of inflation-adjusted wage gains vanished in just four months, leaving workers little better off than when President Trump returned to office.”

+ The conspicuous consumption is the purpose of their consumption.

+ Adam Smith: “With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.”

+ Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, dead at 100, may have inflicted more human misery than any other American in the post-World War II era…

+ Greenspan often concealed the consequences of his economic villainy behind language so obscure that not even his wife, longtime NBC White House correspondent Andrea Mitchell, could understand it…

+ Mark Ames on Greenspan: “Atlas Croaked”

+ Elon Musk: “The reason they call me a Nazi is to encourage people to murder me.” He just became a trillionaire on paper and he’s still desperate for attention…

+ The Wall Street Journal on the spike in CEO pay:

More U.S. CEOs last year crossed the once-rare pay threshold than in any year since 2021—and nearly a dozen topped $200 million. Their compensation looked like crumbs, of course, compared with Elon Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla, which set a new record and is about 16 times the combined value for all 391 other chiefs in the Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay ranking. (Musk’s deal could ultimately be worth $1 trillion.)  Still, No. 2 Shankh Mitra reached $821 million from Welltower, a real-estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare. That lands him one of the biggest executive-pay packages for a public-company CEO over the past decade.

 

+ According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, consumer debt is at a record high and savings are falling toward a record low: “Total liabilities among US households swelled to a record $19.9 trillion at the end of the first quarter, according to Fed data, a sign that Americans are continuing to borrow and fund their spending. Yet, the personal savings rate is hovering near a record low, shrinking to 2.6% in April.”

+ Apple just shuttered the first of its stores to unionize. Apple blamed “deteriorating conditions” at the mall in Towson, Maryland, outside of Baltimore. To the workers, it’s a clear case of retaliation.

+ In an interview with Politico’s Victoria Guida, Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC under W., is warning that the gutting of financial regulations imposed after the 2008 crash is going to lead to a new round of defaults and bank bailouts: 

Regulators have to stand strong, because the banks, it’s in their financial interest to drive those capital levels as low as possible. And if they don’t stand firm against it, we’re going to have another crisis.

I think there’s still some people on Wall Street, especially among the big banks and their lobbyists, that still think the crisis was all about government wanting poor people to have mortgages. “It’s all the borrowers’ fault, and what was the big deal? We got through it.” I fear they view bailouts as the new paradigm, and certainly, I see how quick the regulators were to bail out those billionaire depositors in Silicon Valley, which was a relatively small regional bank.

+ For the first time in a decade, the newest version of Chinese supercomputers has topped all US machines in processing speeds.

+ The stock trading watchdog Unusual Whales reports that: “Nancy Pelosi literally is buying leveraged products on companies she legislates. She bought Intel, 200 call options with a strike price of $50 and expiring 03/19/2027, on 05/29/2026. She also bought call options. Unusual.”

+ 54 million Americans now report having more than one job or “income stream,” an increase from 41 million two years ago. Nearly 72% of U.S. workers rely on a second income beyond their primary job.

+ Trump pal Larry Ellison’s Oracle just slashed its total workforce by 13% in 2026.

+ Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are suffering the dismal same fate, as job cuts at U.S. factories hit the highest levels since the end of the global financial crisis in 2009 and the Covid-19 pandemic.

+ Rep. Mike Haridopolos (apparently Mar-a-Lago hair is now a thing): “The number one reason why we have these higher housing costs, in my opinion, is you had 10 million people coming here illegally over four years. You had too many people demanding housing.” Private equity is entirely blameless…

+ In fact, the increase in housing costs has nothing to do with immigrants and, as Saagar Enjeti shows, almost everything to do with private equity,  interest, insurance, and repairs…

+ Speaking of housing costs, there are 25 million American adults living with their parents, a new record.

+ We’ve reached the Mean Old Geezer Stage of Capitalism: First, drive the country into recession, then subsidize AI to take people’s jobs, then eliminate unemployment benefits!

+ Over to you, Pope Leo from the Southside:

We tend to think…that the only issue of morality is sexual…. I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that.

+ Musk: “In the future, a trillion times a trillion dollars will be spent on making antimatter to travel to other star systems.” How much ketamine did he quaff this morning?

+ The US strategic petroleum reserve has hit its lowest level since 1983.

+ According to an analysis of Trump’s stock trades by CBS News, the president’s investment accounts made 3,642 transactions between January 6 and March 30, a pace of about 63 per trading day….

The sheer volume of trading is unprecedented for a sitting president. The data shows the president’s accounts bought and sold companies that have extensive business dealings with the federal government, prompting accusations of insider trading and conflicts of interest from Democrats and ethics experts. The Trump Organization says outside financial advisers oversee the accounts, and the president and his family have no role in making the investments.

 + Like every construction project Trump has ever been involved in (including the “renovated” Reflecting Pool), the new White House ballroom is vastly over-budget ($600 million), needing a public bailout and likely starting to fall apart before it’s even completed…

+++

+ Hakeem Jeffries is so isolated from what’s going on in his own city that he makes the Boy in the Bubble look like a habitué of Studio 54…

+ What was going on in his City? A clean sweep by the Democratic Socialists, most of them backed by Mandani, including victories unseating two AIPAC-funded members of Congress: Adriano Espaillat, who was defeated by Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Dan Goldman, who was taken down by former NYC comptroller Brad Lander. In New York’s Seventh District, State Rep. Claire Valdez steamrolled Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the race to replace outgoing Rep. Nydia Velázquez.

+ Asked by CNN for his assessment of the results, Sen. John Fetterman snapped: “The dirtbag left is surging.” We call them “low-baggers” out here, John.

+ Trump on the New York primaries: “They want a lot of Communists to come in. I’m saying it a little differently. But the people that they are pushing are Communists. And this country is not going to have Communists.” Wasn’t Trump swooning all over Mamdani just a few months ago? Is he too addled to realize that Brad Lander et al are the most likely to provide cover for his get the hell out of Iran as fast as possible policy, while the Schumer Democrats, the Neo-cons and AIPAC roast him over hot coals…?

+ Stephen Miller, who apparently doesn’t get out much (a good thing for all concerned), on the NY Primaries: “Over time, the Democrat party has abandoned all of that, and they have instead adopted this radical, revolutionary, and in many cases, violent ideology that wants to tear America down and destroy everything that we know and love, from top to bottom. Right? Living in a state of total anarchy, without police, without law enforcement, where criminals can rape and maim and murder with impunity, where your kids are taught from the age of two to hate America, to hate their God, to hate their parents, to hate their family, to even hate their own gender, that’s their agenda…that’s just a death knell for America.”

+ Last week, the country was about to fall under the unforgiving yoke of Sharia Law (which is actually a lot more forgiving than the punitive laws being pushed by the Christian Nationalists). This week, it’s Communism! Tommy Tuberville: “If we don’t do something with the filibuster and we don’t get things passed, it’ll be the last time we’ll have a Republican president, a Republican Senate or a House. That’s how fast this country is going down to communism.” What about poor Antifa? They must feel left out. No wonder they trashed the Reflecting Pool…

+ In 1996, Susan Collins pledged to only serve two terms in the Senate. She’s now running for her sixth…And prominent Democrats are backing her against their own candidate, Graham Platner. Here’s former Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield on Platner: “I think it’s demoralizing that his transgressions are being overlooked … I think it’s an indictment of our party that we’re willing to look the other way on this.”

+ They were willing to look the other way on a genocide in Gaza. Still are…

+ Tucker Carlson excoriated the Republican Party on his way out the door: “There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party. I won’t support the Democrats either. I don’t know what I’m going to do. How could any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States, that puts the interest of another country (Israel) above its own citizens?”

+ As one MAGA leader after another defects from Trump, the paranoia inside the White House is beginning to strike deep…

The White House has compiled a secret “blacklist” of prominent MAGA influencers who have been accused of taking money to post social media content aimed at shifting the discourse on important political issues or offering access to President Donald Trump…The White House is now monitoring signs that influencers may have been paid off by domestic or foreign lobbies to target the president and his supporters.

+ Trump to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the Epstein Island-hopper: ‘I remember when you were thirty-five, you were a killer. And now, you’ve got your beautiful wife, and your big house, and you’re just soft. And you’re a pussy. You know what you are? You’re a pussy.’ So says President TACO…

+ Tom Dans, the man Trump appointed to head the US Arctic Research Commission, told the New Yorker that one reason the US is considering seizing Greenland is to secure access to seafood that could potentially bring back unlimited shrimp at Red Lobster.

+ What do we get if Canada becomes the 51st state? A year’s supply of Moosehead ale, a slab of bacon and the return of the Expos to Montreal? Sounds good to me. But how do the Canadians benefit?

+ If the Democrats somehow manage to win control of the House in November (which is looking increasingly doubtful), they pledge that on “day one” they’ll hold hearings on  … Jeffrey Epstein. You didn’t think they were going to make health care, climate, inflation, defanging ICE or income inequality a priority, did you?

+++

+ France during the first week of “summer”: Every light pink number is 40C+ (104F+). Many stations at 44C+ (111F+).

+ More than 40 people have drowned in France’s lakes and rivers this week, trying to seek relief from the record heatwave.

+ Trump was in Pennsylvania this week, bragging about bringing coal back from the dead:

China uses coal. The other very successful countries use it. The unsuccessful countries use wind. Those beautiful windmills that blow round and round and don’t do anything except cost you money every time it goes around, you lose $10. Every country that uses wind is a disaster. Every country that uses our beautiful substances from underground are doing very nicely, thank you. [See: Strait of Hormuz.]

+ With more than 600 Gigawatts of active operational capacity, China accounts for nearly half of the world’s total wind power. At least 16% of China’s total electric generation comes from wind. Farmers in the US who lease their land to wind energy companies earn on average between $17,300 and $20,100 a year. 

+ Banks based in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan account for 83% of global fossil fuel financing. The largest fossil fuel bank of all is JPMorgan Chase, with annual financing of $53.5 billion.

+ An electrical worker named Dante talked to Wired about working on the construction of data centers:

Nobody judges me on data center work. We’re almost always working for the worst possible people in the end. But we all need a paycheck because of the unlivable world that those same rich people have created for us. Either I’m wiring up a lumber mill or a Dollar General warehouse or whatever else…essentially the same kind of work–all for already extremely rich pieces of shit to use for the exploitation of the working class so they can get more rich.

+ $450 million: the amount of tax breaks given to data centers in Oregon last year, with little to no public input (because most Oregonians would have been enraged). 

+ American Reservoirs, excuse me, Rivers is one of those faux-conservation organizations that exists mainly as a place for rich people and corporations to drop a load of money and pretend they’re doing good while knowing that nothing much will ever be done with it, certainly nothing that would disrupt the circulation of commodities or the ongoing industrialization of the West. America Rivers’ primary goal, other than filling its coffers with corporate loot, is to pass laws or engage in regulatory compromises that set the bar so they often end up damaging the very rivers they claim they want to protect. Case in point: American Rivers is now advocating for logging operations inside the boundaries of the nation’s Wild and Scenic River Corridors, the riparian strips of land adjacent to undamned and pristine rivers that are currently treated as the near equivalent of wilderness areas, where no mark of industrial man should intrude. 

+ Stop them? How about joining them?

+ $2.5 billion: the total amount of taxpayer money the Trump administration has paid out (so far) to cancel offshore wind projects.

+ Gallup’s latest West Health-Gallup Affordability Index shows just 49% of U.S. adults feel they can afford healthcare—the first time this number has fallen below 50% since tracking began in 2021 and down from a 61% peak in 2022. Younger adults aged 18-29 have seen the sharpest drop, from 46% to 32% over the period, with prescription costs and medical bills topping concerns across income levels. 

+++

+ CBS: We were in here in April when you first showed us plans…

Trump: I did what? [Haberman and Swan report in Regime Change that Trump is going deaf and also pretends to be deaf when he doesn’t like the question.]

CBS: When you showed us pictures of what you were going to do on the Mall. You said you had a guy who was going to do it in a week for about a million dollars. It’s been two months and $14.5 million…

Trump: Okay. Okay. Are you ready? Barack Hussein Obama. Have you ever heard of him?

CBS: Yes.

Trump: He spent two years and over $100 million on trying to fix it. [Obama spent $37 million.] And you know what happened to it? It never even opened. [Yes, it opened.] He took the water from the river. You know about that, right? It turned out to be putrid. And it destroyed the whole thing. [No, it didn’t.] He spent over $100 million. [No, he didn’t.] Him and Biden together spent $147 million. [No, they didn’t.] You know what happened. It never opened. [Yes, it did. And it was open under Trump in the intervening years.] You don’t mention that, right? We spent about ten. [They spent $16 million.] They were going to spend $300 to $400 million, you know that, right? [No, they weren’t.] And it was going to take four years. I spent, I spent six or seven weeks. Probably $10 million. [$16 million.] They say $16 million, but a lot of that is workers that work around there. So they were going to spend $400 million. [No.] I spent $10. [No.] They were going to spend four years. [No.]  I spent two months, maybe, less. And I have a better product. Now I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up.

Karoline Leavitt: “The vandalism is very real. Despite what Tim Walz wants to say. There have actually been six arrests at the Reflecting Pool, where, again, these deranged individuals—many of them longtime donors to the Democratic Party, to Barack Obama, to ActBlue—have been vandalizing and desecrating our federal monument, one of the most beautiful monuments in the world: The Reflecting Pool.  And that’s why President Trump is not going to stop with this effort. They’re not only holding those people accountable, but they’re going to fix the pool and continue to make it beautiful after this despicable vandalism, just in time to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday next week.”

+ Trump on the reflecting pool saboteurs: “They took razor blades, 350 feet. They took razor blades and knives and they cut patches like that, 350 feet long. There’s pictures of a guy bending over. I don’t know if anybody saw that.” I don’t see that  and I doubt anyone else saw it. But if there was “a guy bending over,” it was probably a cabinet member. They spend more time in that position than anyone else in DC…

+ Maybe they should electrify the water and just fry anyone who touches it.

+ Actually, the best idea yet about what to do with the leaky, algaefied Reflecting Pool has come from the most unlikely source, the ultra-right (and often completely bonkers) Congressman from Tennessee, Tim Burchette: “Honestly, I think it’d be cool if they just let it go and create an ecosystem, have fish in there and everything. … I think that’d be a really … cool way to go.” I’m sure Amphifa agrees!

+ Don’t drain the swamp. Flood it and let it grow!

+ One of my favorite professors at AU, the historian Terry Murphy, was photographed naked in the Reflecting Pool during an anti-war protest in the early 70s and somehow still got tenure. He had the  Washington Post’s photo of him floating in the pool hanging on the wall of his office. Those were different days. Murphy was a brilliant lecturer with a wide-ranging and original mind, whose classes on the histories of western attitudes on death, sexuality and madness were much more radical in their ideas than his bare-assed leap into the nation’s sacred pool. My independent studies with Murphy introduced me to the writings of Michel Foucault, Keith Thomas, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. But he was treated shabbily by the University he devoted the greater part of his life to. After recovering from a stroke in 1983, Murphy’s administration, which had become increasingly under the grip of reactionaries who wanted to turn the university into a farm system for the State Department and CIA, refused to allow him to return to teaching. He sued them under the ADA and won a major victory not only for disabled faculty members but for students as well. 

+ If you want to talk about desecrating the National Mall…Here’s how Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (who moonlights as a reality TV star) kicked off the Great American State Fair: “Our young people have been lied to. They have been told that they would be fulfilled with hookup culture or some get-rich-quick scheme or they could find fame on social media and that would fulfill them. But I’ll tell you, they found that’s a false promise. That’s a lie. And they have sought truth. They have gone to church.”

+ We can be absolutely certain that the principal author of the Declaration, his editors (John Adams, Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingstone), and the people he lifted key phrases and concepts from (Tom Paine, George Mason and John Locke) would have been mortified at the sight of a “Christian” zealot and official of the ruling government, speaking on government property celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the nation’s founding document by expressing these exclusionary sentiments in front of a cast of characters who looked like they walked right off the sets of Big Love, Picnic and the Music Man…We can be equally certain that Duffy, not the brightest in Trump’s package of low-watt cabinet bulbs, would be horrified to learn that most of the founding fathers (and mothers) of the Republic weren’t “Christians,” or even religious, in any form he would recognize, but a collection of agnostics, atheists and deists, who wanted the government they were forming to be sealed off from religious zealotry of all kinds–foreign, domestic and extraterrestrial…As Jefferson asserted, “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”

+++

+ Sen. Roger Marshall: “53 Republican senators, you’re gonna find 53 opinions. We’re very strong-willed, typically top of our class type of folks. So we’ve got opinions. And the hope is, the debate within us, we take 2+2 and turn it into 8.” Turning 2+2 into 8 is how the Pentagon ended up with a $1.2 trillion-dollar budget and still couldn’t defeat Iran (total defense budget $20 billion)…

+ At least, 64% of Americans now say U.S. democracy is at risk of failing, rising from 57% a year ago. With “top of the class type folks” like Marshall running the government, is it any wonder? 

+ Trump showed up late to the first meeting of the G7 at Versailles, then told the other heads of state that: “I’m the boss.” The boss of what?

Guy Berliner: “The boss of the moss.”

+ Another clip for the “Trump is a Closet Case” file with a fetish for butchers…Trump on Egyptian President el-Sisi: “He was in a hotel and I met him. We fell in love, deeply in love … We didn’t know each other before that. We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed to.”

+ Sisi seems to have donned a pair of Florsheims for his photo-op with Trump…

+ A couple of hours later, Trump, while not looking so beautiful himself, swooned over Modi at the G7: “You look at this man. I’m going to give you a lesson. He’s the most beautiful-looking man. He looks so nice, he’s like an angel. But actually, he’s a killer. He’s as tough as they come. But he looks so good. So he gets you by surprise.” We’re beginning to see why Trump is so eager to get that ballroom built. He’s already got a full dance card: Jaxon Dart, Joe Thomas, Al-Sisi, Modi.

+ Maybe there was more to the Roy Cohn/Trump relationship than we’ve been led to believe…

+ This guy Gill’s entire public persona is built on trying to convince chair-bound, Depends-wearing Fox News viewers that Muslims–who compose less than two percent of the state–are about to impose Sharia Law on Texas….

+ John Hazard: “Whether his daughter ends up wearing a burka is not for me to speculate about, but I doubt that she’ll be going to a public school.”

+ Asked how the Department of Justice defines Antifa, the US Attorney for Minnesota replied: “What Antifa is goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is.” Not knowing what Antifa is didn’t stop a judge in Texas from sentencing Texas ICE protesters, who were dubbed “Antifa” by federal prosecutors, to 30- to 100-year sentences. to 30 to 100 years in prison. One of the defendants, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who wasn’t even present at the protest, was convicted of being part of a conspiracy by concealing antifascist magazines at the request of his wife and sentenced to 30 years. 

+ Acting AG Todd Blanche: Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice.” These sentences were longer than any handed down in the J6 insurrection cases.

+++

+ Sen. Josh Hawley had a little breakdown about Pride hats in baseball, after “Christian” homophobes on the Dodgers and Giants refused to wear them: “Let’s get back to God and country and playing some baseball and stop all this woke garbage.” He’ll be going after Jackie Robinson Day next, which MLB has already drained of any political meaning and transformed into a mere merchfest. Pride Day is basically the same. It exists to allow Fantatics and Nike to sell new caps and t-shirts. Let’s get rid of them, I say, especially if it means cancelling Armed Forces Day, camo uniforms and F-35 flyovers. 

+ What Hawley should be upset about is the latest intrusion of the gambling industry (one of the last growth industries in the US) into baseball, as Polymarket is sponsoring the Power Rankings on the MLB’s own website. Polymarket is the “prediction” betting house that saturated social media with deceptive videos by paid creators who falsely claim to have won hundreds of thousands of dollars with bets on the site. You’d think Pete Rose was commissioner. But Rose, creep that he was, may have been better than what baseball’s got now in Rob Manfred…

+ Speaking of baseball and money, The Athletic asked players to name the worst franchise in the league or as one American League pitcher put it more succinctly: “Which are the ones that are cheap as fuck?” Here then are the 10 Most Cheap as Fuck teams in order of the cheapest, as rated by the players…

Chicago White Sox
Los Angeles Angels
Miami Marlins
Tampa Bay Rays
Cincinnati Reds
Kansas City Royals
Milwaukee Brewers
St. Louis Cardinals
Washington Nationals
New York Yankees

+ New York Times reporter and Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman expounded to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show about the current spineless state of the White House press corps:

They have structured — this White House — the press corps so that it is primarily people, or half people, who they consider to be friendly to them. They control the media pool that is in there now. They control seats. Routinely, the only person really challenging him aggressively — and not rudely or unprofessionally — is Kaitlan Collins. And she takes an enormous amount of shit, and she keeps a total straight face. But she doesn’t have backup…In the old days, when we would be in the pool — even in term one — and they made it harder, but it was still doable, you’d ask a question, somebody else in the pool would follow up on your question. Now it is, you ask a question about Ukraine, Iran, I can go on and on, and he turns to the Reflecting Pool. And it’s 20 minutes of him just talking. And so it is much more challenging…A lot of people have his [phone] number and for reporters, it’s, ‘Wow! I have the president’s number and I can speak to him directly.’ And he controls the terms, right? There have been some pieces of news that have come out. But generally speaking, it’s him setting the agenda. He says one thing here, he says something totally different 15 minutes later, and it’s just him flooding the zone. And that’s what he did in New York when he was a tabloid guy.

+ John Le Carré, on the man who blew his cover as an MI6 agent, Kim Philby: “Just a naturally bent man. I wouldn’t have trusted him with my cat for the weekend.”

+ JD Vance: “I have joked that I have two very, very important people in my life–an Indian and a Pakistani. The Indian is my wife and the Pakistani is Field Marshal Munir. I’ve probably talked to Field Marshal Munir more than I’ve talked to anybody else over the last three months.” Including Usha, who was born in San Diego….

+ Trump is an apex misogynist, but he doesn’t publicly demean Melania the way Vance habitually does Usha.

+ Usha explained why she hasn’t submitted to JD’s demands that she convert to his Opus Dei brand of Catholicism in terms that are not very flattering to her husband’s “journey”:

I grew up in a Hindu household that was a very stable household. I have not felt the same need to seek something different that he has. So I think the journey has been more in our relationship, right? Trying to understand where he is, the different ways he’s thinking about things, how that fits into the life that we have together … and less of a religious journey of my own.

+ JD Vance: “I was not a very good boyfriend. I had a terrible temper. I had, in hindsight, what people would have called attachment problems.”

+ Usha’s flinch when JD awkwardly pets her knee during an episode of “Storytime with the Second Lady” suggests that his anger issues may not have been completely resolved…

+ Mary Winzig: “That poor couch!”

+ From After Year Zero, the new collection from Verso of Frederic Jameson’s lectures on the thought of the Frankfurt School: “I remember a seminar in France on Camus’s L’Etranger, a very short book. It lasted two or three years.”

+  The great Junior Parker’s version of “Taxman” is a lot different than George Harrison’s protest of taxes being taken for war and Trident submarines (See David Yearsley’s great analysis of the origins of the song for CounterPunch on April 15th)–it’s not a rock song, it’s a blues of a poor black man facing the tax man coming to get the next to nothing he’s got and if he ain’t got enough, he might take your wife….

+ Parker also recorded a trippy version of Tomorrow Never Knows, shorn of all George Martinisms, paring it down to a single bass line and a few haunting guitar notes with Parker’s voice sounding like it comes from somewhere in the outer Bardo…

+ Bob Dylan on accusations that he was a habitual plagiarist: “All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.” Which may have been his way of restating, though not plagiarizing this time, TS Eliot’s observation that: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”

+ Marcel Proust anticipated the age of Mar-a-Lago Face. In Time Regained, Marcel has returned to Paris after years in a health sanatorium for his asthma (and numerous other afflictions) and mingles his way through a soirée of the beau monde, contemplating how some people have aged beyond recognition, while others seem frozen in time, and in his reverie mistakes his childhood sweetheart, the irascible Gilberte, for her mother, the Jewish aesthete Charles Swann’s wife Odette, the former courtesan (now Mme de Forcheville)…

One saw them as through a colored mist or glass which affected their facial aspect with a sort of fogginess and revealed what they allowed one to observe as if it were life-size, though in reality it was far away, not in the sense of space, but, fundamentally, like being on another shore whence they had as much trouble in recognizing us as we them. Perhaps Mme. de Forcheville, who looked to me as though she had been injected with paraffin, which swells the skin and prevents it from sagging, was unique in presenting the appearance of a courtesan of an earlier period who had been embalmed for eternity.

+ Disclosure Day: Trump welcomes aliens to Washington.

+ Speaking of the Gingriches. Here’s Norman Mailer’s poem “Homage to Faulkner”….

Newt Gingrich looks for angry votes;
Ergo, he hammers welfare folks.
There lie his Presidential hopes:
Apotheosis of the Snopes.

+ And speaking of the Snopes…Martin Ritt’s (pretty awful) film of William Faulkner’s novel The Hamlet, starring Paul Newman, Lee Remick, Joanne Woodward and Orson Welles, was retitled The Long Hot Summer because the studio heads didn’t want people to confuse it with Shakespeare’s play. It turned out that confusing The Hamlet with Hamlet would have been the least confusing thing about the movie, since Ritt and the screenwriters turned Faulkner’s comic novel about the rise to power of a perverse family of white rednecks (the Snopes) into a southern fried melodrama, Peyton Place in the Mississippi Delta.

+ The novelist Colson Whitehead on his slacker tendencies: “I’m a really lazy bitch. But I have a punitive superego. The two go together.” Whitehead is 56, has written nine novels and won the Pulitzer Prize twice. I wanna slack like that…

They’ll Eat Your Heart Out Before You Start Out…They Just Don’t Care

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Nord Stream Conspiracy: the Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World
Bojan Pancevski
(Henry Holt)

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
(Simon & Schuster)

A People’s History of London
Lindsey German and John Reese
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Miles 56: The Prestige Recordings
Miles Davis Quintet
(Craft)

Where Rivers Meet
Your Brother’s Keeper & Gary Bartz
(Brownswood)

Songs of Personal Loss and Protest
Jon Spencer
(Shove)

England is the Master, Ireland is the Slave

“Adorno admires Beckett as much as any composer or writer except perhaps Proust. In Godot, you have two bums and then a moment when two other people come, the master and the slave: Ponzo is pulling Lucky by a string around his neck. This is England and Ireland. There is a moment when the master, England, says to the slave: ‘Think, pig!’ And with that, Lucky comes awake, and all of Western philosophy begins to come out of his mouth in an unintelligible way. The name of every medieval philosopher comes out in this long rigamarole, until finally Pozzo pulls the leash and Lucky stops. Ireland is the inheritor of all of European philosophy and England is a nation of shopkeepers who like to see the demonstration of thought once in a while, but don’t really do it themselves. I would even say, sometimes, Adorno is a little like Lucky, in that he would drive people crazy with his demonstrations. There are many interesting stories about the Mann family, who detested him (though maybe not Thomas Mann himself) and not only because he talked too much. This is the picture one gets of Adorno. On the other hand, he did speak to the students during the student movement. He was, in fact, very sympathetic to their cause. [Although] he did call the police at one point during the demonstrations…” – Frederic Jameson, “Adorno,” After Year Zero: On Postwar German Thought