Trump launched “Trump TV: The Essentials Station” on September 21, after he banned several news organizations from the White House press pool. Trump’s assumption seems to be that Americans would rather watch a stream of disorganized bloviation instead of crisply packaged news with context and explanatory material. A Washington Post reporter watched Trump TV for 24 hours and provided this review: “It not only lacks the polish of news professionals, it is also missing the pageantry of an authoritarian state-run news network.”

I checked it out around 2 pm on a weekday and there were 530 people watching a rerun of Trump participating in a signing ceremony on January 14, 2026. A signing ceremony for what? It didn’t say. But there was a jug of milk on the desk, so maybe it had something to do with dairy farmers. You can catch Trump TV here if you have already cleaned every closet in your house, you have no friends and nothing to do, an electromagnetic pulse has knocked out every other channel, and there’s not a thing in the house to read.

[Check out The Weekly Matterboard, Drone-Launching Triumphal Arch edition]

Socialism rising. Capitalism has a huge branding problem. Though it is far superior to socialism, a lot of people don’t know that and are rooting for the wrong team. A Gallup survey just found that 43% of Americans have a positive view of socialism, the highest level in polling that dates to 2010. Capitalism does better, with 55% approval, but this should be a rout, not a tight race.

We think there’s confusion over the word “socialism,” which connotes authoritarianism to older people but is more like capitalism-lite to younger Americans. After all, anybody who remembers the gloomy, despotic USSR knows it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But younger folks see capitalism as a rigged system where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg control everything and ordinary people just do what they say. They’re not completely wrong, given the recent rise of the American oligarchy.

But there’s a lot of confusion, even in the survey itself. Americans strongly approve of “small business” and “free enterprise,” for instance—but you can’t have either without capitalism. So which is it, people? We’ll have more reporting on this topic soon, because what people really seem to want is what you might call social capitalism, or capitalism that makes all of society better. We’ll be offering some ideas on what that might look like.

[The Weekly WTF: Gas is a bargain, and other Trump knee-slappers]

Politician held accountable! New Jersey’s Lt. Gov., Dale Caldwell, resigned on September 25 after an investigation found evidence of sexual harassment and other problems. Caldwell denied the allegations, but finally stepped down after the state’s governor and other top officials said he should go. It’s quite astounding. We’ve grown accustomed to corrupt officials staying in office forever and even getting reelected. Something strange is happening in New Jersey.

Love him! Your taxpayer dollars are paying for a 30-second Trump political ad that’s been airing on Fox News and Newsmax. The ad features Trump railing against communism and Marxism, with lists of Trump’s imagined accomplishments flashing on the screen (“reigniting American manufacturing”). “Love Me” by JMSN plays in the background. This would all be fine, except at the end, the ad’s mandatory disclosure statement says, “paid for by the US government.”

That’s probably illegal. Federal law bars the use of government resources for political campaigns. A Trump spokesmodel said it can’t be a political ad because Trump isn’t running in 2026. That’s hokum, given that Trump has a direct stake in the outcome of the midterm elections, which will in large measure be a referendum on Trump himself. Oh, and JMSN said he didn’t authorize the use of his song in the ad, and wouldn’t have if asked. He might sue. Some ad.

Cocaine finds a way. Blowing up boats might be Pete Hegseth’s idea of a good time, but it hasn’t done much to stem the cocaine trade, according to reporting by the Washington Post. Operation Southern Spear, as it’s known, began last year and has so far involved the aerial bombardment of at least 79 boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing at least 234. This was supposed to scare drug traffickers away.

It didn’t. Government studies found that those attacks haven’t reduced the supply of cocaine entering the United States, according to the Post. Prices have remained steady, another sign of robust supply. Drug traffickers have changed tactics, moving away from the fast boats US forces have been blowing up on open water, and shipping more drugs via commercial ships and routes closer to the coastline.

[5 things to expect if Democrats win in November]

You could argue, well, if the US boat attacks are forcing cartels to change tactics, then maybe they’re worthwhile. Except that human rights activists say they could be war crimes because they target noncombatants. Plus, those attacks have probably killed innocents with no connection to drug cartels who were targeted by mistake. The four-star admiral who was in charge of the region when the Spear campaign began resigned last December, reportedly because he had concerns about the legality of the whole campaign.

A principled strategy would be, when in doubt, don’t kill people. The Pentagon seems to have the opposite ethos.

Forsaking Dolly. Just one month after music legend Dolly Parton died, there’s an ugly dispute over—what else?—her money. Parton had no kids and her husband died last year. Her estate is worth around $450 million. Her nephew Bryan Seaver, long her head of security, has reportedly made some aggressive moves to corner a chunk of that money. Parton’s manager, Danny Nozell, fired Seaver shortly after Parton died, claiming some sort of shakedown effort. There’s a lawsuit and there may be a trial.

Humanity never fails to disappoint. Dolly Parton was a creative genius and a national treasure. Most others are neither.

[How to profit from rising interest rates]

So that’s why you didn’t get the job! Your coffee says a lot about you—especially at a job interview. Somebody on TikTok started complaining about young job applicants bringing iced coffee to job interviews. What’s wrong with it? The plastic cup might dribble. The straw might slurp. Your hand might be clammy from holding it. You might seem like you care more about the coffee than the job. It’s informal, like sandals. Disrespectful!

Of course, there’s an alternate view, which is: Get a life, corporate prigs. The debate has now blossomed into a media frenzy in which everybody has an opinion. The Wall Street Journal helpfully explained that this is really a proxy battle pitting corporate fossils against young upstarts who have no respect for their elders or the Proven Ways.

Here’s an idea: Pour your iced coffee into one of the four dozen lidded tumblers everybody seems to have in the cupboard these days. Stick a napkin in your pocket in case of emergency. And if you actually know of an open job, be smart and keep it to yourself.

Enjoy a cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

New standard for useless politician. Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is alive, technically. He’s been seen breathing. But McConnell seems to be impaired in ways that would force just about any other 84-year-old worker into immediate retirement.

McConnell endured some kind of fall and maybe a heart attack in June. He basically disappeared for three months, sparking speculation that he died. Then he resurfaced when the Senate reconvened in September. But something is obviously wrong. Here’s a video of aides wheeling McConnell into a van on Capitol Hill. At one point he gives the camera a thumbs-up, signaling awareness. But once in the van he stares straight ahead like a zombie (or a dementia patient). There’s another video of McConnell casting a committee vote, in which a fellow senator has to tell him how to vote, as if McConnell doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. At other committee votes, McConnell was a no-show.

[Check out The Weekly Matterboard, Trump KissCam Edition]

It’s undignified for aides or party hacks or family members or whoever’s doing it to use an elderly man for what are obviously political purposes. But it’s even more ridiculous that somebody so infirm can be a “public servant.”

At least the memes are good. Here’s McConnell making a cameo appearance in “Weekend at Bernie’s.” Here’s McConnell going off a ski jump in his wheelchair. Here’s McConnell riding a bronco at a rodeo. Here he is doing acrobatics. Remember, when the only choices are to laugh or cry, choose laughter.

Trump says gas is cheap. We remind readers that while The Weekly WTF may be snarky and sarcastic, it is not fictional. Trump actually did say that gasoline, at an average price of $4.47 per gallon, is cheap.

While discussing gas prices during a speech in North Carolina on September 16, Trump said, “it’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done…. Frankly, even if it was a lot more.”

What has Trump’s Iran war done, anyway? When he started the war on February 28, Trump said ordinary Iranians could “take over your government” once the despotic theocracy was gone. The despots are still in charge and ordinary Iranians are more miserable than ever as they cope with a crumbling economy and runaway inflation.

Oil prices have averaged $95 per barrel since Trump started the war, up from an average of $68 in 2025. Higher gas and diesel prices have so far cost the typical household an extra $840. That doesn’t include the government’s $40 billion cost, which is borrowed money added to the $40 trillion national debt.

[An Iran war breakthrough might be coming]

We suspect Trump has never filled a gas tank or paid for gas with his own money. His Iran war has done nothing for anybody except make life more expensive.

Pentagon beauty contest. If you’re a military servicemember and you want to attend incompetent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “state of the force” event on September 30, you must have a waist-to-height ratio below .55 along with “impeccable grooming standards.” You must also be perfectly clean-shaven. No beards allowed. If you have a mustache, it cannot extend below the top lip line or surpass the corners of the mouth. Sideburns must be trimmed in a horizontal line. Somebody leaked those requirements to the Wall Street Journal, probably to remind everybody what an effete punk Hegseth is. The Journal reported the details on September 15.

If you attend this event, you’ll also need an incredibly high tolerance for bullshit, because Hegseth will probably praise the warrior force he thinks he built while overlooking all the damage he has caused. For starters, Hegseth guided Trump into one of the dumbest wars in American history. Demoralized troops are on extended deployments to fight a never-ending Iran war most Americans disapprove of. Munitions are running short and Navy ships are breaking down. Oh, there’s also a new effort to impeach Hegseth in the House of Representatives—led by one of his fellow Republicans. If Hegseth were to be honest, he’d says the state of the force is a farce, starting with the leadership.

Athlete soilings. What’s the right way to say this? There’s been an awkward public discussion recently about elite athletes pooping in the midst of competitions. Not during a bathroom break. You can’t afford to take a bathroom break if you’re competing. You just poop where you are and keep on moving, as if nothing unusual happened.

[Why AI might try to eliminate humanity]

This all came up because Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk had a bout of diarrhea while competing at an endurance event known as Hyrox in Beijing on September 12. Diarrhea streamed down her legs, getting on the running track and other equipment. Cameras caught it all. Wietrzyk kept going—and actually won.

What would you have done? Stopped or continued? What if you were officiating the event? Would you stop everything right then and there, or just let athletes be athletes and clean it up later?

Wietrzyk’s first reaction was, what’s the big deal? “A win is a win,” she said on social media. A shitstorm ensued. Critics said she was inconsiderate and blamed the event organizers for allowing other athletes to compete amid “biohazards.” The organizer issued a statement acknowledging it was dealing with “increasingly complex situations” in part because it pushes athletes to the max.

[It’s time to revise the American Dream]

The media pounced on the story, running pixilated images obscuring the diarrhea, somehow making it seem more ghastly than it probably was. Wietrzyk backtracked, apologizing to the whole world for having to see diarrhea, and saying she should have “stepped off the track” instead of plowing through the crap. She gave up the victory. Hyrox said it updated its rulebook and will now disqualify athletes if they’re responsible for body-fluid contamination.

We think the lesson from this incident is a simple one: When in doubt, get to a bathroom.

Just sports … and sex. There’s a new sports-betting app trying to lure young, horny men with boobs and other female body parts. Is anybody surprised?

Okay, nobody’s surprised. But some people are pissed. The app is called Novig and its shtick is that it only does sports—no politics or IPOs, as Kalshi and Polymarket do. One of the owners is pinup actress Sydney Sweeney, famous for nude scenes that dudes go crazy over. Launch ads for Novig feature Sweeney, naked, with a pair of footballs barely covering her breasts, and other cheeky poses with sports equipment. Get it, guys? Hot blonde … sports betting …. hand over your money.

Real female athletes called Sweeney a poseur and bashed her for sexualizing women in sports. Gymnast Gracie Kramer, as one example, dinged Sweeney while posting this homage to women athletes on Instagram. 10/10!

Nobody involved with Novig is apologizing. Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky explained the ads by saying the goal was to “close the gap from a brand-awareness perspective.” Guess what: It worked. Nobody had heard of Novig a month ago. Now just about every sports bro who lusts for Sydney Sweeney knows where to place his bets.

Enjoy a real cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

Iran war gets considerably worse. There’s one reason above all never to start a Middle East war unless you have to: Developments can easily spin well beyond your control. That’s what is happening now in the Iran war President Trump launched in February.

Iran’s allies, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, have now seized terrain allowing them to threaten and essentially block cargo shipments through the narrow strait at the southern end of the Red Sea. That has become an important alternate route for oil exports from Saudi Arabia that can’t get through the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

Iranian proxies in Iraq also attacked Saudi oil infrastructure, knocking out a pipeline that has been a major conduit for Saudi oil since it lost access to Hormuz at the start of the war. Iran seems to be mobilizing regional assets and escalating its attacks on Persian Gulf energy suppliers, to further constrict global supplies.

This gives Iran’s radical Muslim regime more leverage over global oil supplies than it has had since the early weeks of the war. Brent crude prices, which had dipped to nearly $70 in early July, have now soared back to $108. US gasoline prices are back up to $4.30. Diesel is at a record high of $6.05. Diesel is essential to food production and shipping, and the price spike will raise costs throughout the economy. Odds are now high the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in the coming week, to tamp down the inflation Trump’s war is causing.

[Check out The Weekly Matterboard: What matters and what doesn’t]

Iran and the Houthi rebels it funds may be deliberately making life miserable for Trump (and the rest of us) by squeezing oil supplies hard in the weeks before the US midterm elections, to inflict maximum election losses on Trump’s Republican party. So the squeeze could be temporary. But Iran’s leaders and their Houthi cohorts must be astonished at the amount of pain they’re able to inflict, while the leader of the world’s so-called “superpower” doesn’t seem to do anything more than troll them with goofy AI cartoons.

Trump’s election desperation. Trump is so desperate for political support that he’s trying to buy it, with your money and mine. At the Republican “midterm convention,” he floated the idea of a $5,000 payment to every American if Republicans hold control of both houses of Congress. This won’t happen, because it’s an awful idea. If you want the details, here are some good ones. As a sign of Trump’s temperament, however, this sad plea tells us Trump thinks he’s likely to lose big in November, and we should be prepared for all manner of devious scheming.

More Mommy War$. The Trump administration is planning to change a child-care subsidy program so that stay-at-home parents—read Moms—get taxpayer money for taking care of their own kids. But you would only get the money if you stay at home—not if you work. Some working Moms might be thinking, hey, I have a job, AND I ALSO TAKE CARE OF THE KIDS WHEN I’M NOT WORKING. But I wouldn’t qualify? Yes, that’s right.

This daffy idea is supposedly the brainchild of Vice President JD Vance, who is trying to make some kind of statement about old-fashioned Puritanical values. It could actually happen, without Congressional action. Back to the kitchen, ladies!

9/11, a snoozer. At the Pentagon ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, Trump fell asleep. He does this a few times a month in public, jaw drooping, shoulders sinking, head jerking every few seconds as some damaged neuron tries to snap him out of it. The media doesn’t cover Trump’s public napping very much, but the Internet sure does.

We know Trump is old and he doesn’t get a lot of sleep at night. We’re not letting him off the hook, though. Trump is obsessed with his public image and with the atmospherics of every event he appears at. Does he know how decrepit he looks with his eyes closed and his neck jerking around? We think Trump doesn’t realize he does this, and his aides are afraid to tell him. If Democrats were smart, they’d put Sleepy Trump on every billboard in America.

[See the dramatic story of the Pentagon on 9/11]

Kimmel goes underground. ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel interviewed James Talarico, the Democrat who’s running for the Senate in Texas and has a pretty good chance of winning. But the interview didn’t air on the show itself. While broadcasting on September 9, Kimmel said the Federal Communications Commission under Trump has threatened him, the show, the network, and the network’s affiliate stations, so it didn’t seem safe to broadcast the Talarico interview. Instead, it would air on YouTube the next day.

Clever! The FCC doesn’t have jurisdiction over YouTube, since it doesn’t broadcast over the airwaves. Most people viewing late-night TV do it online, anyway, the next day or when they see clips pop up on social media. So most people watching Kimmel’s Talarico interview saw it the same as they would had it aired on ABC first.

[It’s time to revise the American Dream]

Kimmel, meanwhile, generated tons of bonus media coverage over the “banned” interview, which of course made people want to watch it more. So while dinging Trump and his lackey at the FCC, Brendan Carr, Kimmel ginned up more attention than if the segment had aired with no controversy. Kimmel’s YouTube channel promotes it as “Jimmy Kimmel’s Interview with James Talarico That the FCC Doesn’t Want You To See.” Have a look! 👇

The YouTube interview has racked up 4 million views, 375,000 likes and 25,000 comments. As a TV segment, that’s a win. Polls show Talarico with a narrow lead over Trump-backed Ken Paxton, the former state attorney general involved in a slew of controversies. If Talarico pulls out a win in deep-red Texas, it would be a momentous development for Democrats, edging them closer to control of the Senate. Keep in mind, however, that Kimmel watchers aren’t necessarily swing voters in Texas.

Enjoy a cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

This is possibly the dumbest thing any US president has ever said. But we have to give Trump some breathing room because, who knows, maybe he’ll say something even dumber tomorrow.

There are 97 countries that have a trade surplus with the United States, including China, Mexico, Taiwan and Germany. If Trump blocked trade with even some of them, it would be an economic disaster. Prices would soar way beyond the inflation of the Joe Biden era. Stocks would crash. There would be widespread shortages and almost certainly a recession.

Trump is angry that interest rates are going up. He wants them to go down. He thinks the Fed can solve the problem, but it probably can’t. The Fed controls short-term rates that mostly affect banks. It doesn’t set long-term rates such as those on mortgages and car loans. If the Fed did cut short-term rates, it could actually send long-term rates even higher. That’s because looser monetary policy can make inflation worse, and bond investors would demand higher interest rates to protect against the eroding value of money.

At least one person in the Trump administration, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, knows how interest rates work. Markets must think he’ll talk Trump off the ledge, because stock movements were pretty normal after Trump’s unhinged post. The market doesn’t take it seriously. Let’s hope that instinct is correct.

Illegal Trump coin sells out. The US Mint now sells a $1 coin with Trump’s face on it for a minimum of $1.55 apiece. Trumpflation has even hit coins.

The coin is probably illegal, because US law says there can be no currency featuring the likeness of a living person. The Mint says the coin is not “in circulation,” so it doesn’t count as currency. Yet you can still buy stuff with it. Typical Trump duplicity.

Here, you have everything that’s wrong with America today in one tidy package: A narcissistic leader breaks the law to flatter himself and gullible fools lap it up. Eww.

ICE Melt. Trump’s immigration gestapo, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, threw quality and procedural standards out the window as it rapidly staffed up last year to send swarms of agents out hunting for migrants, according to at least one agency whistleblower. A 17-year veteran of ICE told the New York Times that ICE gave unqualified applicants badges and weapons, sometimes without proper training or background checks to assure they weren’t putting psychopaths on the job.

It shows. Trump’s immigration goons have killed at least six people during his second term, and fired at many more. Many of the targets were in cars, threatening nobody. Everybody saw the unjustified and cowardly killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. The ICE agent who killed a Colombian national in Maine in July had a history of mental health problems and violent behavior toward women when ICE hired him. A local police department wouldn’t hire him because of “too many red flags.” The word must be out: If you’re angry and you want to shoot people, get a job with ICE.

Graftville, USA. The portion of Americans who think the federal government is corrupt jumped from 73% in 2024 to 79% in 2025 to a record-high 89% this year, according to Gallup. Can anybody think of a reason why that might have happened?

House sneakers. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives, says he may allow members to wear sneakers in official chambers if his party takes control of the House and he becomes Speaker next year. Hey, why not? The business attire members of Congress wear is kind of a sham, anyway, falsely signaling that these are serious people doing serious work. In reality, Congress has let a gargantuan national debt fester, passed tax cuts for the wealthy that the wealthy don’t need, cut benefits for poorer Americans, and allowed the government to shut down repeatedly. They may as well dress the part.

Jeffries typically sports dark-colored dress sneakers, and he triggered some huffing back in 2023 when he wore a pair—along with striped socks—to an Oval Office meeting with President Joe Biden. Pearl-clutchers trembled at the breach of decorum. Trump, by contrast, is a Florsheim man, occasionally gifting a pair of the starchy oxfords to associates. Honestly, if these people could just do their jobs competently, it wouldn’t matter if they wore Birkenstocks or combat boots.

Bartirometer? Trump mouthpiece Maria Bartiromo, who spent 12 years playing an anchor on the fictional news network Fox, has left her job, according to the network. Real journalists report that she got caught passing Fox News’s coverage plans to Trump. Why would that be a surprise? She’s a quack who’s been a Trump cultist for years. Bartiromo was one of the leading Fox spokesmodels parroting Trump’s claims of fraud after the 2020 election, which got Fox sued by two companies that manufacture voting machines. Fox settled one of those lawsuits for $787 million. The other is ongoing. At any real news organization, you’d get fired immediately for bringing such ignominy upon the institution.

Fox’s parting with Bartiromo may contain an interesting tell, however. CNN reports that Fox has decided not to repeat any Trump claims of election fraud following this year’s midterm elections. That’s the info Bartiromo passed to Trump. If so, that’s a sharp reversal of Fox’s usual stance, which is basically to repeat and amplify any outrageous Trump claim.

Maybe Fox is sick of getting sued and coughing up money. But it might also feel Trump is in permanent decline and not worth backing any more. Bartiromo might be so beholden to her master that she can’t get with the program and sign on with the next Republican charlatan lucky enough to receive the Fox blessing. Don’t worry, she’ll land on her feet as a celebrity endorser of Trump merch or some other MAGA functionary.

Enjoy a real cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

Naming wrongs. President Trump has a tell: When he’s completely out of ideas, he makes absurd territorial claims. The latest is Lake of America, Trump’s new name for Lake Ontario. That’s his punishment for Canada standing up to his latest round of tariffs by imposing their own retaliatory tariffs on US imports.

Trump has also declared the Strait of Hormuz—which is 6,800 miles from the mainland United States—to be US territory. And one of his first moves as president in 2025 was renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Every rational person in politics should sign a joint statement saying that when Trump is gone, we’ll simply undo all of his inane renamings and other pointless acts. But people are afraid. Google Maps actually shows the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America.” So it may feel it has to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Since Trump signed executive orders on both of those, there’s a sense of officialness. But other nations don’t need to abide by Trump’s orders, and they use the traditional names. Obviously a future president can sign orders undoing Trump’s, and put the whole naming absurdity to rest. Let’s hope that is what happens, if we ever have a normal president again.

Trump’s trade war with Canada, alas, could do more damage than scribbling a new name on a map. So far, Trump and Canada have each announced new import taxes on $20 billion worth of imports. There are rumblings that Trump may pledge to withdraw from the entire free trade deal with Canada and Mexico that he himself orchestrated in 2020. Analysts have been expecting Trump to go full-tariff, again, once the midterm elections are past, but he’s getting a jump on that. Tariff Man is off the mat and we’ll all end up worse for it.

[Trump’s tiresome Canada tariffs]

Economic D-Day on hold. The Trump administration hyped a big speech by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on August 24, at which he announced an “economic D-Day” against Iran. But D-Day has only been announced. The threatened package of sanctions and other measures—which the administration calls “Operation Economic Outcast”—hasn’t gone into effect yet, and it’s not clear when or if it will.

If this gives you a sense of deja vu, it’s because Trump launched “Operation Economic Fury” against Iran in April. In May, it announced it was ramping up Operation Economic Fury. Economic Fury has now morphed into Economic Outcast.

Their operational nomenclature could use some work. Going from “fury” to “outcast” sounds like de-escalation, not tightening the screws. It also sounds like Operation Ho-Hum. Iran has been an economic outcast for decades, hamstrung by various western sanctions since the 1979 revolution.

[What the bond market wants you to know]

What next? Operation Stern Lecture? Trump has lost the plot on the Iran war, and maybe the war itself.

Youngsters sour on oldster. About one-fifth of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 are sorry they did. And the youngest Trump voters are the sorriest. A new Navigator poll finds that 31% of Gen Zers who voted for Trump wish they hadn’t. The portion of Trump voters who regret their vote declines with age.

I can’t keep track of who’s in what generation, so here’s the age breakdown, as of 2026:

Gen Z: 14-28 (but only those aged 20 to 28 were eligible to vote in 2024)

Millennial: 29-45

Gen X: 46-61

Baby Boomer: 62-80

Trump only got 43% of the under-30 vote in 2024, but that was the best showing among young voters for a Republican presidential candidate in 20 years. The shift of young voters away from Democrats, toward Trump, may even have put him over the top in crucial swing states, clinching the win.

Young voters may now be moving back toward Democrats. Here’s a breakdown of the Navigator poll results:

The Pinpoint view is that analysts make too much of this or that demographic group aligning with either Democrats or Republicans. Many voters these days are simply disgusted with the status quo, which means they turn against whoever is in power. If Democrats do well in this year’s midterm elections, it won’t be because Americans suddenly love their party. It will be because they’re sick of Trumpism. They could just as quickly get sick of whatever the Democrats have to offer.

[What’s changing at the Federal Reserve, and why it matters]

Stupid golf people. The golf company Callaway ended a brand partnership with media venture Good Good Golf over one of the most idiotic ads in memory. The ad shows a female golfer reaching for a golf bro’s driver, which sets him off. He races over and pushes her to the ground, warning, “do not touch my new driver,” as she lies looking up at him. Have a look:

The lesson of this ad is that there are stupid people everywhere. Bosses at both Good Good Golf and Callaway approved the ad, which ran on social media. Maybe they figured woke is out, so obnoxious behavior toward women is cool again.

The ad was supposed to spoof the horror flick Obsession, but it wasn’t remotely funny and wouldn’t have been funny even without the smackdown of the lady golfer. Everybody apologized … this doesn’t reflect their values … blah blah blah. Funny how values are often absent until you have to prove you have some.

Enjoy a cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

The national debt hit $40 trillion. And it will eventually hit $50 trillion … and $60 trillion … and ….

It’s not news that the national debt is out of control. What would be news is if somebody did something about it. There are murmurs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent supposedly has a plan to turbocharge economic growth and pay down the debt. If so, what is he waiting for?

Other administration officials say President Trump plans to keep rolling out tariffs, and those import taxes will help lower the annual deficit. Okay, great, except tariffs stunt economic growth because they raise costs on everybody. Did anybody tell Bessent?

Up on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, lawmakers are “sounding the alarm” about the national debt, according to The Hill. That’s kinda funny, because those lawmakers are the same ones who have been cutting taxes, boosting spending, and generating all that debt in the first place. It makes one suspect they are not being completely sincere.

[Check out The Weekly Matterboard, Natalie Harp edition]

Does anybody remember the Simpson-Bowles Commission? Back in 2010, when the national debt was a mere $14 trillion, President Obama appointed a panel to make suggestions for stabilizing the national debt. The group’s roadmap called for eliminating most federal tax breaks for businesses and individuals, cutting spending, getting health care costs under control, raising the income threshold for the Social Security tax, and making a bunch of other changes.

Right, it never happened. But when there’s finally no choice but to deal with the debt, we’ll end up doing more or less what that Simpson-Bowles group recommended. Except everything will be 2x or 3x, since the national debt has tripled since then. Here’s the full report.

The debt crisis is finally arriving. Not because $40 trillion is some kind of tripwire, but because markets are struggling to absorb all the debt governments and corporations are flooding onto the market. The excess of debt is pushing interest rates higher and getting the attention of everybody who’s been worrying about this problem for years. The debt crisis won’t be an overnight cataclysm, but a slow-motion train wreck. Unfortunately, that means the politicians who caused the problem in the first place will probably be able to dither for a few more years.

More Trump fury. Trump said on social media that he’s targeting Iran with “the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country.” The terrified Iranians read that post and immediately capitulated to every single Trump demand.

Ha. Of course they didn’t. Trump has become a paper tiger and everybody knows that if he can’t subdue Iran militarily, he certainly won’t be able to do it economically. The Islamic regime has faced western sanctions for decades and somehow managed to survive.

If you think Trump has a new strategy, recall that in May, he launched what the Treasury Dept. called “Operation Economic Fury.” So is the new scheme Economic Fury Pt. 2? Or are we at Pt. 5 or Pt. 6? Trump’s Iran war rebrands might eventually overtake The Fast and the Furious franchise in terms of silly sequels.

[Trump is missing his own economic targets]

What Trump ought to be paying attention to is American Fury. His Iran war has cost the average US household nearly $700 in higher costs for energy, food and other things. Trump’s approval rating is in free fall. “We’ve opened Pandora’s box,” Afshon Ostovar of the Naval Postgraduate School said on a recent podcast. “This is going to be a problem, I think, for months and maybe years.”

Trump 💖 Kim (still). Trump wants to meet again with his dictator-bro Kim Jong Un, the tyrant of North Korea. Nobody knows why, except that Trump seems like he is trying to punish South Korea for refusing to help with his Iran misadventure.

Trump has asked South Korea (and other countries) to send ships to help US forces negate Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. None has agreed. Trump may have asked South Korea for other types of assistance, which he also didn’t get. Trump cites these grievances when explaining why he ordered the Pentagon to cut short joint US-Korean military exercises that have been an annual event for years.

[Trump’s biggest grift yet]

Meeting with Kim would be a further insult to South Korea. North and South Korea are still technically in a state of war, even though there hasn’t been full-blown combat since the 1953 ceasefire went into effect. North Korea has thousands of artillery launchers aimed at Seoul, and could wreak havoc if hostilities ever resumed. Some 23,000 US troops are permanently stationed in South Korea as a deterrent against northern aggression.

South Korea and Japan are America’s most important allies in Asia. North Korea is a Russian ally with nuclear weapons that can reach California. There can be good reasons to engage with an adversary. Dissing your friends isn’t one of them. Kim hasn’t responded, so maybe he’ll play hard to get with his American suitor.

Bessent battles the bond market. The Treasury Dept. surprised markets on August 19 when it said it would double the amount of long-term bonds it purchases as part of normal financing operations. It didn’t say why, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is clearly hoping to lower long-term interest rates such as those consumers and businesses pay on mortgages and most other types of loans.

Rates have been rising since the beginning of the Iran war in February, and as we discussed above, the fiscal debt crisis finally seems to be materializing. It’s not just gads of government debt. Big companies are also issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in bonds to help finance the artificial intelligence buildout. An oversupply of bonds on the market means rates have to rise to coax enough investors to put their money into bonds instead of stocks or other assets.

[The myth of the prosperous worker]

Rates dropped back after the Treasury move. But economists doubt the gambit will have a lasting effect. “Treasury’s bond buybacks won’t work for long,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, wrote on August 20. “We expect traders to continue to push the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield higher.” He and others point out that Bessent is addressing the symptom—rising rates—rather than the cause, which is an annual federal deficit that now exceeds $2 trillion per year.

Can we live with higher rates? Sure. Rates right now are high compared with the modern era, which started during the Great Recession in 2008, when the Federal Reserve began deliberately lowering long-term rates. But if you go back further, rates are near historical averages.

The catch is that Americans have gotten used to cheap money and the benefits it brings. Higher rates, combined with a mountain of federal debt, would probably mean slower growth, fewer jobs, and lower living standards for millions. That’s what happens when you run up bills and finally have to pay them.

Enjoy a cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

Breaking the military, Pt. 1. Something seems wrong in the US Navy, where ships are deploying for longer than usual and sailors are demonstrating acute signs of stress. Several sailors aboard the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier have reportedly tried to commit suicide by jumping overboard, according to Navy Times. Dozens of family members have met with Navy officials to vent concerns about poor working conditions, lack of downtime, and low morale aboard the ship. There were reports of similar problems aboard the carrier Gerald R. Ford earlier this year, including a laundry fire that crewmembers may have set deliberately.

A normal Navy ship deployment is six to eight months. The Ford returned to port in Virginia in May after 11 months, the longest carrier deployment since the Vietnam War. The Lincoln has been at sea for nearly nine months, much of that in the Middle East in support of the Iran war President Trump started in February. Amid the latest uproar, another carrier is now rushing to replace it.

Troops know they can face long deployments during wars and upheavals. But it’s also the job of the Pentagon and the military services to manage their workforces competently and humanely. And Trump’s national-security team is a group of loyalist hacks who earn zero trust.

Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth is the worst Defense Secretary in history, as responsible as anybody for the Iran war debacle. The acting secretary of the Navy is Hung Cao, famous for a 2024 debate in which he criticized the Pentagon’s recruiting tactics and said, “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds."

[Why Hegseth must go]

Trump and his lackeys are bringing down the once-vaunted US military. Democratic members of Congress are raising a stink, but they can’t force Trump to install competent people to run the world’s most complex bureaucracy. Expect this to get worse.

Breaking the military, Pt. 2. Trump isn’t just mismanaging the troops. He’s trashing the Pentagon’s hardware, as well.

On August 13, Trump ordered the Navy to revert to an old and outmoded means of launching jets from carriers on several ships under construction. Armchair Admiral Trump prefers steam catapults like those used on carriers after World War II. But the Navy replaced those years ago with electromagnetic catapults that are more efficient and require less upkeep. Going back to the old technology in the middle of production will add cost, delay deliveries, and degrade effectiveness.

Trump likes old, outdated things. He’s also badgering Congress for billions of dollars to build a new fleet of battleships named after himself. Virtually all of the world’s navies retired battleships in the 20th century because missiles and other long-range weapons made them obsolete. Trump wants billions of your taxpayer dollars to sate his own nostalgia. We are at Peak Farce, people.

[Hey Trump: Fire Hegseth]

ICE torture gloves. The Bad Idea Task Force at the Dept. of Homeland Security is working overtime. The department had the brilliant idea to equip immigration agents with electrified gloves that can deliver a non-lethal shock to targets of their cruelty. These gloves are already in use at some police departments and prisons, and the idea is to use them as a way to subdue a rowdy captive without a gun, taser, club, or other weapon that could be fatal. The gloves supposedly deliver an electric pulse to the skin that tweaks out the nerves in a matter of seconds and subdues the target. If you’ve ever used an electrostatic gizmo to treat a damaged muscle, imagine three or four times the maximum dose of juice from that.

This might make sense at a well-trained law enforcement agency that practices full transparency with maximum civilian oversight. The immigration agency isn’t that. ICE is the most retrograde agency in the federal government, responsible, under Trump, for numerous needless deaths, including the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Anybody who saw the videos of those crimes knows that ICE is a kind of Gestapo. They’ll find a way to abuse the shock gloves, as they’ve abused their authority in numerous other ways. These goons should be carrying plastic swords, not weapons.

Is that Melania? Since Trump’s first term, there have been suspicions that somebody resembling Melania Trump stands in for her at various times, when a wifely presence seems appropriate but she’s just not interested. The intrigue deepened recently when a White House aide named Margo Martin exited Air Force One with Trump (not via the catering truck🤣) and photographers mistook her for Melania. See for yourself:

Martin is just 31, while Melania Trump is 56. But Melania has probably de-aged herself, narrowing the gap. Martin’s hair and build also resemble Melania’s. So from a distance, behind sunglasses, yes, Martin could pass for Melania.

I’m not sure why this matters, but the gossip rags think it’s important. Use this knowledge to demonstrate your shrewd grasp of current events at your next cocktail party or barbecue.

[Check out the Weekly Matterboard to find out what news is worth your time]

More air-travel angst. Flight-tracking service FlightAware had a temporary legal showdown with prediction market Kalshi over flight cancellations. The litigation seems to be over, but it has highlighted something regular fliers ought to know about.

Kalshi offers bets on flight cancellations😦. For now, those bets are limited to systemwide stats, such as how many flights will get canceled in a given week or at a certain airport. There are no bets on the odds of any individual flight getting canceled. Kalshi originally listed FlightAware as the source it uses to verify the data and settle the bets.

FlightAware sued Kalshi on August 10, asking for unspecified damages and a ban on Kalshi’s use of its data. It withdrew the suit a day later. So there was some private agreement between the two companies.

Kalshi now says it settles the cancellation bets using data from “primary source agency”—but a link goes to FlightAware’s web site. So Kalshi is still using FlightAware’s data, just without saying so explicitly on its own site.

FlightAware may simply want its name to be stripped from the betting site, for the obvious reason that there’s something weird about people betting on canceled airline flights. There have been plenty of examples of insiders making bets on markets they can influence, and profiting from the outcome.

Could some aviation insider make a big bet on canceled flights, then gum up the air-traffic software or create an security scare that generates a winning bet? Probably, yeah. If or when it happens, FlightAware wants to make sure it’s not the target of traveler rage. Kalshi seems less concerned.

Burrito Wars. How much should a burrito cost? Be careful before you answer. Are you including the DoorDash delivery fee? Or making your own at home?

Political America has been arguing about burrito prices since a pro-Trump activist argued on social media recently that young people shouldn’t have to pay $20 for a burrito. The activist blamed outlandish burrito prices on—all together now—Joe Biden.

[The double-haters’ guide to the midterm elections]

A kerfuffle erupted. Some aghast responders argued that a burrito only costs $20 if you order some bougie version that DoorDash delivers. Kids these days! 🙄

Oldsters started kvetching about bratty Gen Zers who don’t know the value of a buck, recalling the ancient times when hard-working youth slept on couches and subsisted on ramen until they finally made it as arrogant pundits.

The media picked up on the urgent story, trying to divine a deeper meaning. It’s not about burritos. It’s really about entitlement affordability communism. Hold on … it’s really about … housing! Young people will never be able to afford a home and they know it, you see, so they have no incentive to save money and they don’t mind blowing whatever they have on extravagances.

But nobody answered the basic question, so I will. A burrito should cost $4 at a taco truck. That’s the best place to get one. At a sit-down restaurant, $12 is the ceiling, and that includes sides, chips and salsa. And yeah, DoorDash is for weenies.

Enjoy a cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

African migrant crisis coming to America. President Trump warned that thousands of African migrants would overtake the United States if Democrats ever regain power. That was Trump’s response to the migrant crisis in Ceuta, a Spanish territory in northern Africa where more than 50,000 migrants recently arrived from neighboring Morocco, many of them transported by trafficking gangs. The migrants are trying to escape poverty and hunger.

“That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” Trump told Fox News on July 31.

Does that make you feel terrified? You’re supposed to feel terrified. Please feel terrified.

Now, most of the migrants returned to Morocco because there was no food or housing for them in Ceuta. Plus, the Spanish authorities, caught by surprise at first, sent military troops to Ceuta to deal with the problem. But think about it: If the migrants can’t get into Europe, the next thing they’ll probably try to do is bob across the Atlantic, right to America. Somebody do something! 😧

Blanche checked. Trump can’t get his attorney general nominee confirmed because he won’t give up on his plan for a personal government slush fund and perpetual indemnity for tax fraud. You might recall, Todd Blanche, as acting attorney general, helped set up the $1.8 billion fund Trump would be able to use to make payments to loyalists. That deal would also have shielded Trump and his family from future tax prosecution. Bipartisan outrage ensued, and a federal judge voided the deal in mid-July.

[Check out The Weekly Matterboard: Missing Mitch Edition]

Several Republican Senators want Blanche to pledge, in writing, that he will never try to revive that corrupt deal. Blanche has said he won’t revive it—but he won’t put it in writing. A few Republicans say they won’t vote for Blanche until he does, and without those GOP holdouts, there aren’t enough Senate votes to confirm Blanche.

What’s going on? Trump clearly doesn’t want Blanche to put anything in writing, probably because he fully intends to give the slush fund another shot. Otherwise he’d tell Blanche, just do what they’re asking and get confirmed. By refusing to put the pledge in writing, Blanche is signaling that yeah, Trump is going to try it again.

For anybody keeping track, there are only three or four out of 53 Republican senators who even seem to care that the next attorney general may be planning something that is blatantly corrupt. All the others seem ready to approve Blanche and let him commit fraud. Anyway, if the Senate doesn’t confirm him, Blanche can continue in an acting capacity indefinitely. But he could face a lot more flak from Congress than a fully confirmed AG would.

[Kevin Warsh has bombed as the new Federal Reserve chair. See why]

Covid forever. Are you still stuck on Covid? Some members of Congress are, roughly five years after the nation emerged from the pandemic, hoping to forget all about it. That’s why we got the absurd spectacle of Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky holding a hearing featuring infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci, who invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during a three-hour hearing, said virtually nothing, and even declined to answer when asked what color tie he was wearing.

What’s the point of this kind of crap? Paul is a strident libertarian who feuded with Fauci, the government’s Covid czar during the pandemic, over masking requirements and other restrictions. He wanted to grill Fauci on what may have been a change of view over how the Covid virusemerged in the first place. He also clearly wanted to embarrass Fauci. Paul published hundreds of pages of diary notes Fauci kept during the pandemic, including some in which the eminent physician preened about his fame and celebrity connections. Paul got the notes because Fauci kept them on a government computer, and Trump staffers discovered them.

Fauci retired from the government in 2022, at the age of 82. He repeatedly took the fifth during the July 29 hearing because he thought Paul and other critics would try to trick him into committing perjury, which the Trump administration could then prosecute. Fauci was probably right about that. So the ultimate outcome was, two giant egos faced off, accomplishing nothing.

[Trump’s approval rating is cratering. The data explains why]

For what it’s worth, scientists still aren’t sure how Covid originated—and a vindictive congressional hearing was never going to shed any light at all on the mystery.

Hedgefund.gov. The US government has obtained ownership stakes in at least seven additional companies, as Trump operates what is becoming a kind of government-run hedge fund. The new deal involves about $870 million in funding for stakes in seven tech companies. There are now 37 deals in which the Trump administration has bought stakes in private-sector companies or announced plans to. Prominent targets include US Steel, Intel, Westinghouse, GlobalFoundries, and IBM.

Many of these deals are financed using money from the 2022 CHIPS Act, which Congress never meant to be siphoned off for equity purchases in companies. The funding was mainly for grants and incentives to spur US-based technology development. Trump changed the program without Congressional approval.

This quasi-nationalization of certain companies has drawn bipartisan criticism because it’s likely to politicize decision-making at some private-sector businesses. It also distorts capitalism by giving Trump’s favored companies the advantage of too-big-to-fail status, thanks to their imposing government investor. Uncle Sam is badly overreaching under Trump.

[Stocks have been wild. See 5 market concerns]

Elon Musk poverty watch. The tech lord has lost half his net worth during the last six weeks. After his company SpaceX went public in mid-June, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, with a net worth that peaked at $1.4 trillion. But after surging, SpaceX’s share price has plunged nearly 50% from its peak, with the value of Musk’s share of the company dropping by the same amount.

His other big company, Tesla, has been falling too, with that stock down 31% for the year. Musk’s net worth is now around $700 billion. For now, the world is trillionaireless.

China trumps America. An annual Pew Research survey finds that China now has a better reputation around the world than the United States. Once a year, Pew conducts a huge survey on global attitudes toward America. This year, in 25 of 36 countries, more people said they had a favorable view of China than a favorable view of the United States. In only six countries did the United States outrank China. In five others, views were split more or less equally.

China’s biggest fans are in Pakistan, Malaysia, Palestine, Indonesia, and Singapore. The United States is most popular in Israel, Japan, India, South Korea, and the Philippines. Canada and most European countries, including Spain, Italy, and France, now break toward China.

Something about the United States seems to have changed during the last year or two. In 2024, when Joe Biden was president, a median 47% of global respondents said they had confidence in the US president. Now that Trump is in the White House, only 21% say they have confidence in the US president. Can anybody connect the dots?

Enjoy a real cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

Trump raises taxes, again. Gasoline prices are back above $4 per gallon and inflation is once again a problem. If anybody in power could cut Americans a break, now would be a good time to do it.

President Trump has other ideas. He’s rolling out a whole new round of tariffs to replace the emergency duties the Supreme Court shot down in February. It’s almost impossible to keep up with the on-and-off-and-on-again Trump tariffs, but the upshot is that Trump has raised the average tax on imports from 2.7% when he took office to roughly 12%. By the end of the year, that will rise to around 13%.

The Yale Budget Lab says the Trump tariffs will cost the average household about $1,110 per year through higher costs and a less-productive economy. There’s virtually no payoff from the tariffs. The US trade deficit hasn’t changed, the manufacturing sector hasn’t grown, and the only sign of dynamism in the US economy comes from the AI buildout.

Nevertheless, he persists.

For those trying to keep score, the new set of tariffs puts a tax of 10% to 12.5% on most imports from 60 countries. These replace a temporary set of tariffs Trump rolled out when the emergency tariffs went away in February.

[Here’s the problem with Trump’s new tariffs]

The legal premise for the new tariffs is that these countries employ “forced labor” in some manner to produce the tariffed goods. It’s a plainly ridiculous pretext that could fail in court when the inevitable legal challenges arrive. But that could take a year or two, and ordinary Americans don’t get refunds for the higher prices they pay, even when Trump’s tariffs turn out to be illegal.

Does Trump care about Americans, even a little? He’s pushing tariff policies that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose. His Iran war is deeply unpopular and his ratings on handling the economy are terrible. Tariffs über alles.

Iran war end date. Ha, made you look. There is no Iran war end date, but Michael Froman of the Council on Foreign Relations offers a thoughtful way to guess. He cites astrophysicist Richard Gott’s take on the Copernican Principle, which stipulates that there are even odds a random phenomenon will endure as long as it already has. If so, the Iran war, which began on February 28, might wrap sometime in December.

That tracks. Iran is intensely aware that the war is a huge loser for Trump, politically. They also know his Republican party may be facing a wipeout in the November midterm elections, due to the botched war and its ugly effect on the price of gasoline and many other things. And it’s self-evident from Trump’s own bombast that he doesn’t know how to get himself out of the mess he started.

[Democratic Socialists have an awful branding problem]

The Iranians could very well be aiming to keep harassing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz until the US midterms, then try to make a deal. Froman sees three possible ways the war ends. You can find the full analysis here.

Money oopsie. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made a mistake about money. During a July 15 Fox News interview, Bessent pointed to some old silver and gold certificates depicted in a frame on a wall at the Treasury Dept. “If any of these are still outstanding,” he said, “the silver or gold for them is at Fort Knox waiting for them to be claimed.”

That’s not true, as a few gold bugs pointed out on social media. Gold redemption ended in 1934 and silver redemption ended in 1968. If you brought one of these certificates to Ft. Knox, they probably wouldn’t even let you in the front door.

You can trade in a gold or silver certificate at most banks for regular money in the same amount. But they’re probably worth more as collectibles.

[The double-haters’ guide to the midterm elections]

Does it matter that the Treasury Secretary got this wrong? He probably feels a bit foolish, like a pro infielder who lets a ground ball dribble between his legs. But Bessent counts as a relatively competent Cabinet member among the likes of Trump henchman Bill Pulte, problem drinker Kash Patel, and the punkish Pete Hegseth. We’re willing to cut him a break on this one.

Why the Elong face? Elon Musk has lost more than $600 billion in paper wealth in recent weeks and is no longer a trillionaire. That’s mainly because the stock values of his two biggest companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have hit the skids. Tesla’s share price has fallen 21% this year and shares of SpaceX, Musk’s biggest holding, are down 27% from the price they started trading at when the firm went public on June 12.

Musk’s net worth blew past $1.4 trillion shortly after SpaceX went public, when the stock peaked at $202 per share. That made him the world’s first trillionaire. It has since fallen to $118, with Musk’s net worth now around $740 billion. Eh. Easy come, easy go.

Musk is a complex figure who has alienated millions with his Trumpy political activism and controversial views. In the latest Muskstorm, an interviewer asked Musk if he’s anti-Muslim and he answered with a convoluted reference to “rape and murder” that made it sound as if, yes, he is anti-Muslim. The Economist, which conducted the interview, called Musk “plainly bigoted.”

[Check out The Weekly Matterboard, bad lettuce edition]

But Musk is also partly responsible for the striking turnabout in the Russian-Ukraine war, with Ukraine gaining a long-range strike advantage over Russia, for once. Musk’s SpaceX blocked Russian use of its Starlink Internet service in February, while Ukraine has continued to use it. That has turned into a big advantage for Ukraine. Sometimes Musk is on the right side.

Putin bombs. Military analysts are chuckling at recent efforts by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to gloss over his many reversals on the battlefield in Ukraine. The Kremlin recently released a goofy video of Putin supposedly visiting a command post somewhere near the front lines in Ukraine. But there are telltale signs it’s a fake, such as camouflage netting on the inside of the bunker and studio-style lighting.

“I could stage a better fake visit to the front,” Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks said on a recent podcast.”

“Zero stars awarded,” added Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for Intl. Peace.

As far as anybody knows, Putin has never visited Ukraine since his troops invaded in 2022. The Kremlin tends to crank up the propaganda when things are going badly, which they certainly are. Russians are fleeing the Crimean peninsula amid Ukrainian attacks, and waves of drones have been knocking out Russian energy facilities, causing fuel shortages in an energy-rich country. War is hell, especially when it backfires on you.

Enjoy a real cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

They just said no. Most of the major news networks ran other programming on their main broadcasts while President Trump delivered a prime-time address on July 16. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MS Now treated the speech as if it were a newsy curiosity, discussing Trump’s remarks as he made them but giving Trump himself little airtime. Only Fox News ran the speech in full.

Since Trump said in advance he was planning to talk about election fraud, the networks all knew he would gas on about cheating that never happened in 2020 and all the other bogus theories he has trotted out a million times before. That’s exactly what he did. The networks saved themselves a lot of fact-checking and denied Trump a platform for lying to millions of Americans about election integrity, which is actually quite good.

Trump got angry that most of the networks didn’t carry his speech, even though they’re not obligated to. He criticized ABC and NBC during the speech itself, and later threatened to revoke their over-the-air broadcast licenses. The networks have declined to carry other presidential speeches—by Joe Biden and Barack Obama, among others—without provoking any White House outcry at all. If you really want to trigger a bully, ignore him.

[Check out The Weekly Matterboard: News that’s actually worth your time]

Election theft heating up. Trump’s deranged-uncle act would be comical except he’s telegraphing what is likely to be an unprecedented federal effort to overturn opposition party gains in the 2026 midterm elections. Trump has been railing against Congress for its failure to pass the SAVE America election bill, which many critics characterize as voter suppression. Trump may have thought his July 16 speech would create momentum for passing that bill, but it didn’t. The bill can’t get past the Senate filibuster, which means the only way to pass it is to eliminate the filibuster, which even Republicans don’t want to do.

With the elections less than four months away and Republicans likely to lose at least one house of Congress, Trump’s minions at various federal agencies are likely to start working the system hard. The FBI has already sent an army of agents to intimidate election workers in Georgia. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says states that don’t “cooperate” with his department by sharing access to their voting systems will face consequences.

This is all crap. Cheating in federal elections is exceedingly rare and has probably been inconsequential since at least the days of Lyndon Johnson. States and cities don’t need Washington’s help running their elections. Trump and his goons are trying to taint legitimate elections because they know they’re going to lose. There’s a good chance they will try to block or overturn election results they don’t like. Expect November to be ugly.

[The double-haters’ guide to the midterm elections]

The White House opens an insider trading window. Trump’s media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, plans to let financial firms pay a fee of $100,000 per month to get early access to posts on its Truth Social platform. This is the outright sale of inside information for money-making purposes. Trading firms with blazing-fast computers can place trades in fractions of a second when computer algorithms think they detect something likely to move markets. Other social-media sites, such as X and Reddit, already offer faster access to posts, for a fee.

The difference is that those sites aren’t controlled by the president of the United States, who routinely moves markets with abrupt social-media announcements on tariffs, Iran war developments, regulatory actions, and specific companies he wants to reward or punish. Trump posts such market-moving announcements himself on a media platform he controls, and now he plans to sell market-moving news to the highest bidder. This is graft in plain sight.

In other graft news … A man named Gabriel Perez who has been a Trump aide for years, operating the teleprompter Trump uses to read speeches on TV, appears to be one of the Trump insiders winning bets on public betting markets because he had early information on something Trump was likely to say. Teleprompters run the words of a script across the same camera screen the person on camera is looking into, which is how TV people are able to read while looking straight out of the screen. Anybody working with a preloaded script would know what Trump was about to say. Prediction markets allow bets on whether public remarks by prominent figures will contain certain words or phrases. It’s so easy to game that, of course, somebody was going to rig it.

Betting market Kalshi apparently detected the fishy activity itself, and reported it to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. There were more than a dozen trades that netted the bettor more than $100,000. The White House says it has placed Perez on unpaid leave, pending an investigation. We think Trump will reverse himself and give Perez a medal, a raise, and a promotion, for actions completely consistent with the most visibly corrupt presidential administration in US history.

[Inflation is down, but going back up]

Beware “the Brush therein.” Trump plans to impose new tariffs on Canadian imports, to punish our northern neighbor for the wildfire smoke that has been polluting the air over much of the United States. Seems odd, given that no country has burned more of the carbon that has caused global warming, and set the conditions for out-of-control wildfires, than the United States. But we are not responsible for anything anymore here in the land of it’s-your fault-not-mine.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and the Brush therein,” Trump wrote on social media on July 17. “Cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.” Soon, some lucky trading firms will get the word early and make money off of it.

[The Weekly WTF: Trump out-gaffes Biden]

Sky black. This is what the sky over Moscow looked like on July 18 after Ukrainian drones hit a nearby oil refinery. Ukraine has been mauling Russia’s energy infrastructure, to bring the war home to ordinary Russians. Looks like it’s working.

Thank you for your participation in this matter! Trump has won an Iran War Participation Trophy for partaking in the ongoing war with Iran. An artist collective known as Secret Handshake erected the 10-foot golden statue on the National Mall in Washington, DC, about half a mile from the White House. Trump might be able to see it while gazing at the reflecting pool to see how the algae are doing.

A White House spokesperson told Time that the statue is “ugly.” She might have been missing the point.

Overcompensating. Punkish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon will test all uniformed servicemen 30 and older to make sure they have enough testosterone. That’s in response to widespread concerns among the troops that their testosterone might be deficient.

That’s a joke, nobody has even thought about servicemember testosterone levels except the ridiculous Hegseth. Was this guy forced to wear dresses as a kid, or something? Anyway, if your juice is low, the Pentagon will pay to top you off. Such treatments can cause side effects, such as lower sperm production, infertility and blood clots. But warriors ain’t afraid of no stinking blood clots! Kill harder!

Enjoy a cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

Will Trump seek retribution? He could order a US invasion of Belgium, which has had a hard time defending itself, historically. Or he could wage a trade war with Belgium. They export cocoa, pastries and some pretty good beer to the United States. Stock up.

Intimations of mortality. At the NATO summit gathering in Turkey on July 8, Trump told the world that Iran might assassinate him. “I may be gone, because I'm their No. 1 target,” Trump said.

That is almost certainly true. Iran is a terrorist state that would probably kill Trump if it could. It may have already tried. Iran would consider it justice for all the Iranian leaders the US and Israeli militaries killed after Trump launched the Iran war on February 28.

[Check out The Matterboard: What’s worth your time and what isn’t]

When a reporter asked Trump about this on Air Force One afterward, Trump said, “I’m No. 1 on their list. But if I go, you go.” He seemed to be referring to the plane itself, as if there were some Iranian effort underway to blow up or shoot down the president’s aircraft.

Something fishy is going on with Air Force One. Trump flew to Turkey on the refurbished jet Qatar gifted him, which the Air Force has retrofitted to comply with the president’s security and communication needs. But Trump flew out of Turkey on the old Air Force One, which was built from scratch to military specs. The two planes are both Boeing 747s, but they’re easy to distinguish. The old one has light blue livery, while the Qatari vintage has red.

Trump first told reporters they were taking the older version “for old time’s sake,” and also so the newer model could go to a US base in England, so servicemembers could take a tour. That seemed like a ruse, so the White House later said the plane switcheroo was part of a “misdirection” effort, as if bad guys were on Trump’s tail and the Secret Service needed to shake them. 🙄

More likely, the retrofitted plane lacks advanced security measures such as anti-missile defenses and aerial refueling capability, as the New York Times reported. The fact that Trump is discussing this publicly is a tell. It sounds like intelligence detected some threat to Trump in Turkey—which borders Iran—and briefed Trump on it. It could have been a plan to shoot down Air Force One. That’s probably why it was on his mind. Then the Secret Service decided they needed the old plane for maximum security.

Trump can fly around in his fancy free jet when he’s back home and the skies are safer.

[See how Trump is mimicking the socialist Mamdani]

Shinto Muslims. Trump said on July 8 that the “Islamic Republic of Japan” had fired 111 missiles at a US aircraft carrier. It was an obvious slip. He meant Iran, not Japan. But how does a brain substitute Japan for Iran? Because they sort of rhyme?

We’re calling it. Trump’s gaffes have surpassed Joe Biden’s impressive tally. Presidential age limits, anyone?

Trump ^💗 Zelensky? Trump may have finally realized he’s been backing the wrong side in the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump has sharply cut back on US aid to Ukraine, while repeatedly spouting Russian talking points meant to justify President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric invasion. But at the NATO summit on July 8, Trump said he supports Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia, aimed at dismantling Putin’s energy infrastructure. Trump also said he’d allow Ukraine to make Patriot interceptors, which it desperately needs to defend against Russian missile barrages. He also praised Ukrainians’ bravery and said more US military cooperation with Ukraine was possible.

[How the AI bubble could burst]

This is a stark change in posture for Trump. Maybe he somehow realized that Ukrainians are the good guys and Putin is the enemy. More likely, Trump has caught on that the tide of the war is turning in Ukraine’s favor—and he just wants to be aligned with the winning side.

Also: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shut off Russian access to the Starlink Internet service earlier this year, while Ukraine still has access. That has given Ukraine a big advantage in navigation and communications and helped with strikes that are wrecking Russia’s battlefield logistics. Trump and Musk are complex people, objectionable in many ways. But they could help Ukraine win if they wanted to. 🤞

Mitch mum. The staff of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell is denying rumors that he’s dead. The Kentucky senator appears to have had a heart attack at his Washington, DC home in mid June, with emergency responders finding him unconscious. He’s been in the hospital ever since, and hasn’t said anything publicly.

If McConnell dies or vacates his seat, an interesting drama could develop over who replaces him. Normally, a state’s governor would appoint a replacement to serve the remainder of the term. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is a Democrat, so he’d likely appoint one of his own, which would cut the Republican majority in the Senate from three to two.

[More WTF: Icky presidential bedroom]

But Kentucky’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed a law in 2024 saying that if anything happens to McConnell, his seat is to remain vacant until the next election. That was a blatant effort to prevent Bashear from appointing a Democrat, as McConnell’s health worsened. The law may be unconstitutional and Beshear could challenge it by appointing a McConnell replacement and sending the whole matter to the courts.

McConnell is retiring, and two other candidates are running for his seat. So a Beshear appointee would have a very brief tenure. But if a Democrat takes the job, even for a short spell, the power of incumbency could help in the November election. Another Democrat could also scramble a few Senate votes into 2027, when the November winner would take office. Beshear is a possible presidential contender and would probably welcome the opportunity.

SpaceX, wink wink. More than a dozen Wall Street analysts published their first recommendations on Elon Musk’s rocket company this week, and the average target price is $242 per share, according to S&P Global. The highest estimate is $800 per share, from Raymond James. The stock meanwhile, trades at around $147, 37% lower than the Wall Street target price. And it’s down 27% from its peak on June 16, which was two days after SpaceX went public.

Target prices are typically forecasts for what analysts think the stock will trade at in 12 months. So SpaceX could grow into the Wall Street consensus. But Wall Street critics argue the price targets are inflated by investment banks eager to please the company and get a chunk of future business. As a reminder, Morningstar—which is a research firm, not an investment bank—values SpaceX at just $63 per share.

Musk clearly favors the stratospheric view. On July 9, he said on social media that “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.” If you believe that, add 10 or 20 zeroes to that $800 target.

Enjoy a cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

Cryptobrohaha. President Trump made more than $2 billion in 2025, increasing his net worth by roughly one-third in a single year. It wasn’t from presidential pay. Most of that money came from crypto ventures he and his family formed after Trump won a second presidential term in 2024. Trump made money by licensing his name and likeness to meme coins that other people buy and selling stakes in his companies to others. Many critics see these businesses as pump-and-dump schemes peddling bogus assets as a way of collecting tribute from wealthy people seeking presidential favors.

Did crypto investors share Trump’s success in 2025? Um … no, it’s more like they just gave Trump their money. The Trump memecoin spiked in value for a couple of days after it launched on January 17, 2025, kind of like a hot IPO. Insiders who bought early and sold during the frenzy made bank. But the coin quickly tanked, and most of the people who bought the coin lost money. If you bought at the peak, by the end of 2025, you were down 97%. Analysts estimate buyers of the coin lost around $4.5 billion. Some of that went right into Trump’s pocket.

[If the AI bubble bursts, it might look like this]

Even bitcoin, the most established cryptocurrency, has lost value under Trump. Crypto bros backed Trump in 2024, because he promised looser rules for crypto and other ways to make it more mainstream. Bitcoin surged for a while in 2024, but ended the year down 7.5%. It has since plunged in value, and is now 35% lower than it was at the start of 2025. The Trump crypto pump seems to have run its course. Trump rarely talks about crypto anymore. He made his killing, mission accomplished.

Trash of the United States. Trump’s bedroom is a mess, according to a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. They report that Trump leaves junk food wrappers scattered about while noshing at night, and stains the carpet with spilt food. Trump also has carpeted bathrooms, they say, which grosses people out because carpets can get defiled with bathroom fluids (🙄). Haberman and Swan imply that Trump is kind of a pig.

When I see stories like this, it makes me wonder who is leaking (sorry, groan) and why. Is it current or former housekeeping staff at the White House or Mar-a-lago? Or are Trump’s sloppy personal habits an open secret among his inner circle? If somebody is trying to embarrass him, why? Could it be Melania? Is the bathroom carpet really a problem, like does it regularly rot away? And will presidential historians be studying this in 50 years?

[America 250 isn’t as grim as it seems]

Election goons. The FBI is rushing several hundred agents to Georgia to investigate election fraud that never happened. It’s all part of Trump’s fixation on his 2020 loss to Joe Biden in the state. Is the FBI going there to plant evidence and claim Trump won? Maybe. But this is probably about the 2026 midterms, with Trump and his crony thugs running the FBI trying to intimidate election workers and possibly set the stage for Trump to cheat in November, when Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff faces a Trump-backed challenger. Trump’s megalomania would be comical if he weren’t vastly abusing federal power in the service of his fragile ego.

Birthright ruckus. The latest emergency among extremist Republicans is the Supreme Court’s appalling refusal to overturn birthright citizenship, which has been enshrined in the Constitution since 1868. The court killed a Trump order that would have limited birthright citizenship to certain people, so now some fringier members of the party are talking about legislation that might do the job.

[The Trump economy is barely improving]

One idea is to ban pregnant women from entering the country, just in case they’re coming here to give birth on American soil. How would that work? Declare your pregnancy status at customs? Would there be physical exams and pregnancy tests to make sure nobody’s lying? And Trump’s ever-trusty customs agents are going to handle this? Will they shoot pregnant women who step out of line?

It’s a dumb idea that can’t die fast enough.

Sweaty socialists. With temperatures in New York City soaring toward 100°, mayor Zohran Mamdani urged city residents to conserve energy and set their air conditioners at 78°.

Wrong temperature! He should have said 68°, or maybe 58°.

Republicans immediately attacked Mamdani:

• “The Social Democrats are coming for your AC.” (Sen. Lindsey Graham)

• “This is communism at work.” (Sen. Rick Scott of Florida)

• It’s “an act of war against women in menopause.” (Rep. Nancy Mace)

• “Telling New Yorkers to set their air conditioning at 78 degrees is an open admission of the failure of the left.” (Windbag Newt Gingrich)

Funny, though, the federal government’s own guidelines for AC say to set it at 78°. Many states recommend the same thing, including Trumpy-red Texas and Florida. Maybe they don’t get heat waves there.

At least it wasn’t an obituary. Did you hear that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is retiring? He isn’t, but NPR published a story on June 30 saying that he was. Famed Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg told her editors Alito was retiring because somebody at the Supreme Court told her there was a retirement announcement and she assumed it was Alito. So NPR published an Alito profile she had prewritten in anticipation of his farewell.

[Tech inflation is now a problem]

The story was only live for five minutes and Totenberg apologized to Alito, plus NPR fully explained itself. So they made amends. Still, this is a journalist’s nightmare scenario. I’ve made published mistakes, and you endure a kind of panic until making the correction. Then you sulk for awhile, feeling stupid.

That’s for small mistakes. This was one the entire journalism world noticed. Somebody obviously cut corners at NPR, but the underlying problem is the rush to be first with a story, which can be a perverse incentive that forces hasty and incomplete reporting. Most people don’t care who’s first, they just want a timely and trustworthy account.

There’s been a lot of speculation about Alito retiring this year after the court’s term ends, which it just did. It would be kind of funny if he retired sometime soon and Totenberg turned out to be right, just premature. Would NPR publish the same Alito retrospective some readers already got a glimpse of? Or does she have to start all over and write a fresh one, to make it seem spontaneous?

Enjoy a real cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

“The pool monologues.” That’s the Internet’s new sobriquet for President Trump’s regular harangues against the algae that keep fouling the reflecting pool on the National Mall that Trump is trying to clean up. Trump hosted NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office on June 24, and the biggest newsmaker from the session wasn’t the Ukraine war or the future of NATO or the Iran situationship, but the status of the algae and who might be abetting the algae in its vile scheme to drive Trump mad.

The upside to this scandal is that we’re all getting an overdue education on these plucky little organisms. For instance: This is why Trump can’t defeat the algae. Here’s why the algae turn everything green. This is why Trump attacked the algae at the wrong time of the year. Here’s an argument for leaving the algae alone and turning the reflecting pool into a huge aquarium, with fish and everything. And if you’re wondering if the algae is a metaphor for Trump’s entire presidency, well, many serious commentators can verify that yes, it is.

[Trump v. Trump: Why the first Trump economy was better.]

Aya-toll. Iran is firming up plans to charge tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz by copying the way Turkey charges fees for passage through the Dardanelles Strait, which a 1936 treaty allows. The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran could earn $40 billion per year in fees for “security, safety and environmental services,” and that Iran is offering to share some of this bounty with other Persian Gulf nations, to get them to buy in.

You might be wondering, hold on, was new money for Iran one of the goals of the war Trump launched against Iran on February 28? Well, it wasn’t then, but maybe it is now. Trump is desperate to end his Iran misadventure. Nobody supports this slipshod war any more, and Trump’s own Republicans are turning on him. With oil and gas prices now falling back toward normal ranges, there’s basically no chance Trump will face down Iran again and risk another energy crisis.

The combative algae and the defiant Iranians have conspired to drive Trump’s approval ratings to new all-time lows in the 30-percent range. The algae will probably retreat once fall arrives and the weather cools down. Iran will remain a menace for years, and future presidents will have to deal with the mess Trump leaves behind.

[Remember the Mag 7 trade? It’s now a bust]

No housing for you! I was getting ready to write an explainer of the housing-affordability bill Congress just passed, which is a rare bipartisan effort that might actually do some good. But Trump is standing in the way. Congress passed the bill on June 23, but the next day Trump said he wouldn’t sign it. He’s not vetoing the bill. What he’s doing is trying to hold the government hostage by blocking everything he can until Congress passes a janky election law, misleadingly called the SAVE America Act. Critics characterize the bill as a voter-suppression effort.

The SAVE America Act has passed the House, but all Senate Democrats oppose it, which means there’s no way it can get past the filibuster. So Trump is pressuring Senate Republicans to scrap the filibuster, in order to get it passed. They don’t want to.

Most Americans are not clamoring for a voter-suppression law. Many do want relief from high prices, including housing, which is the biggest monthly bill for most families. Trump will probably sign the housing bill, even if the delay means Congress has to pass it again. But he’s giving Democrats a gift by taking a stance against affordable housing, if only for a spell. And this comes after Trump said on camera on June 10, “I love the inflation.” Americans have peculiar tastes in presidents.

Shutdown, sure, why not. Imagine that your regular airline said it might shut down for a while in the fall. Or Amazon or Walmart or Netflix. It might be days or weeks, who knows. Sorry, customers, you’ll have to do without.

[Are you better off than one year ago? Our Better-Off Index has the answer]

Well that’s what Congress is signaling. Disputes over spending bills needed to keep the government operating after Sept. 30 are already so severe that members of both political parties are warning of a government shutdown just before the November midterm elections.

The death penalty seems a bit too severe for politicians who can’t keep the government open. But jail time might be appropriate? Fines? Hefty community service requirements, like cleaning trash off the Cross-Bronx Expressway for a couple of months? Whichever candidate makes this part of her 2028 presidential campaign gets my vote.

Is this thing on? When Trump signed an executive order on quantum computing on June 22, he stumbled while trying to read the words “quantum cryptography,” then asked a group assembled in the Oval Office, “does anybody know what that is?” You can watch brief clips here or here. Ask yourself if Trump has any idea what he’s signing, and if he doesn’t, who drafted the quantum cryptography order? Then send me your best joke about Joe Biden’s autopen.

[Here’s the real issue with the SpaceX IPO]

Can you spare some gas, brother? Russia, normally one of the world’s largest exporters of petroleum products, is running so short of gasoline that it’s quietly trying to import 50,000 tons of gasoline from Kazakhstan. That’s about one tanker full of gasoline, or 18 million gallons. More could follow.

Normally, nobody would care. But Ukraine is battering Russia’s energy infrastructure to the point that domestic shortages are developing in a fossil-fuel colossus, which is remarkable considering that Ukraine had essentially no long-range strike capability when Russia invaded in 2022. Now, Ukraine is wrecking refineries and other facilities in Moscow and elsewhere, with some of the world’s most advanced drones.

I provide updates on the Ukraine war from time to time because nobody should zone out on the biggest European conflict since World War II. Also, if life in America is bumming you out, it’s a good reminder that it could always be worse.

Solar power ^🌞. Here’s an upbeat WTF. The Energy Information Administration says electricity consumption from the grid in New York state is declining because of all the solar panels people are installing at the household level. Nobody tracks the amount of solar power generated home-by-home, because it never enters the grid. But household solar installation is up in New York and springtime demand for metered electricity declined this year, which EIA attributes to solar. As a wintry northeast state, New York isn’t what you think of as a solar hotbed. But as the cost of solar equipment declines, homeowners do the math and decide solar makes sense.

Trump’s atavistic hostility toward renewable energy hasn’t killed it. Even though Trump and his fellow Republicans axed most of the green-energy incentives Biden signed into law, most new power generation in the United States is still solar and other renewables. It’s a good example of how progress continues even with troglodytes in charge. Once Trump is out of the way, renewables will rise again.

Enjoy a real cartoon.

You can order this cartoon👆 and play cartoon-themed puzzles and word games at CartoonStock.com.

Iran … won? That’s the conclusion of a wide spectrum of pundits and analysts now that President Trump has signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Iran to end the war Trump launched on February 28. Here’s a sampling:

“Iran is a bigger defeat than Vietnam” (Foreign Policy)

“Iran has Trump ‘by the balls’” (news site Zeteo)

“Trump’s MOU: Surrender on paper, spin on cable” (Economist Brad DeLong)

“Hawks lament disaster on Iran” (The Hill)

“America has lost its war with Iran” (The Independent)

“Iran wins” (former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley)

A lot of this criticism comes from Trump’s fellow Republicans, who are dismayed that Trump seems to be giving Iran a pathway to rebuild its wrecked military, maintain its nuclear weapons program, resume oil sales, and basically carry on as the same terror-sponsoring bunch of thugs they’ve been for decades.

The MOU, which is not in itself a peace deal, does the following, assuming both sides abide by it:

• Ends the fighting

• Reopens the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days

• Ends the US blockade of Iran, meaning Iranian oil exports resume

• Glides over Iran’s nuclear weapons program

• Lifts all sanctions on Iran

• Unfreezes all Iranian assets

• Establishes the possibility of a $300 billion reconstruction fund to help Iran rebuild from the war

Is this a better deal for the United States than if there had been no war at all? What an inconvenient question. Without the war, sanctions on Iran would remain, Iranian assets would still be frozen, the Strait of Hormuz never would have been closed, and there would have been no energy crisis or resurgence of inflation. Trump doesn’t want you to think about any of this because his war looks like a debacle that could end up empowering Iran without making the United States better off.

But the reality of the MOU is that it’s mostly a fig leaf allowing both sides to avert looming economic disaster, with months or years of haggling ahead. Iran’s not going to give up its nuclear weapons program, but it probably doesn’t want to endure another withering aerial attack by the United States and Israel. So the nuclear material buried under rubble will probably just stay there for a while.

Trump has to get oil and gasoline prices down before real shortages start to wreak havoc. The $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran will probably never materialize. The 60-day deadline for an actual peace deal will probably get extended indefinitely, maybe for the rest of Trump’s presidency.

It’s an epic failure for Trump, who failed to anticipate the asymmetric leverage Iran’s overmatched theocracy could gain by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Trump looks like an idiot and so does his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.

But worse than Vietnam? You’ve got to be kidding me. That war killed nearly 60,000 Americans and as many as 4 million Vietnamese civilians. It wrecked American power and prestige for nearly three decades. The US-Iran war was one man’s arrogant folly, entailing 13 American deaths and probably hundreds of dead Iranian civilians. It’s a tragic screw-up, but not an enduring national nightmare for the United States.

Markets, meanwhile, are overjoyed at the end of hostilities, even if Iran will live to terrorize another day. Oil and gasoline prices are heading back toward pre-war levels and stocks are rising. Iran’s rising stature as a survivor of American bombardment could still roil the Middle East. But if gas prices drop back to $3, most Americans don’t really have to care. Trump, meanwhile, probably hopes the next president who has to deal with a belligerent Iran isn’t him.

Library smackdown. Barack Obama’s presidential library opened June 19 in Chicago, and Trump can’t stand it. He’s been trashing the library on social media after calling it a “disaster” last year, well before it opened. A presidential-library expert told the Washington Post, “a president taunting another president about his library isn’t something that has previously happened.” Another first for Trump!

The current president plans to install his library in a 47-story skyscraper in Miami, with the number of floors matching the rank of the president. Wait, sorry, 47 matches the chronological rank of Trump’s presidency, not the qualitative rank. But it might end up representing Trump’s qualitative rank, as well.

One unique feature of Trump’s library will be a hotel, so you can stay for a week or a month if you really want to bask in Trump’s presidency. When you go, make sure to allot plenty of time for the Iran war display.

Make Algae Great Again. How much do you normally think about the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC? Never? Me too. Until now. Trump decided to “fix” the pool by giving two friendly firms no-bid contracts to paint the bottom of the pool blue and get rid of algae that has been a nuisance in the stagnant water for nearly 100 years. But the algae is back, the new blue paint is already flaking off, and everybody who visits the DC monuments now checks out the pool to see how the algae is doing.

The algae is triumphant. Federal workers are still pumping fetid green water out of the pool. Imagery companies are now training satellite cameras on the pool to document how the algae flummoxes federal workers trying to scrape it off the bottom and kill it with hydrogen peroxide. Trump has blamed his predecessor Joe Biden for the “filthy” state of the reflecting pool, but the algae seem apolitical. Maybe Trump should sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the algae.

Enjoy a real cartoon.

You can order this cartoon ^☝️ and others like it, plus merch featuring cartoons, at CartoonStock.com.

I 💖 Inflation. After the inflation rate hit 4.2% in May—the highest level in three years—President Trump said, “the numbers were great. I love it. I love the inflation.”

It’s possible Trump doesn’t even know what inflation is, and he thinks a higher number is better, because that’s the way it is when you’re selling real estate or trying to pass a dementia test. Trump doesn’t buy anything for himself. He probably doesn’t know how a gas pump works. Everything is just a corporate expense and now he doesn’t even have to pay taxes. Paying no taxes makes everything cheaper. Didn’t he just cut everybody’s taxes? Why would anybody be complaining about inflation when taxes are so low and the migrants are gone?

“I love the inflation” could be the saddest thing a president said since Joe Biden told Americans, “we finally beat Medicare,” during his meltdown debate with Trump in 2024. You’ll see “I love the inflation” over and over again in Democratic campaign ads this fall.

[Trump’s affordability plan has unraveled]

Ayatollah Hegseth. The Defense Dept. may have deliberately committed a war crime by targeting a civilian water-processing facility in southern Iran that serves around 20,000 civilians. Trump has repeatedly threatened attacks against Iranian “civilization,” and punkish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dodged the question when asked if US Central Command deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure, as the New York Times and other media outlets reported.

Small minds might argue that Iran and other rogue nations attack civilian targets, so why shouldn’t we? If you don’t accept the moral argument that it’s simply wrong, then consider the rational argument that it’s just stupid. Harming civilian populations achieves no military or strategic aim, and it can undermine both by turning populations against you and eroding international support.

Hegseth is an embarrassment and we’ve argued that Trump should fire him. It’s possible the strike on the water facility was an accident or mistake, but neither Hegseth nor Trump deserves the benefit of the doubt.

[Everybody calm down about the SpaceX IPO]

Strait of Hormuz still closed. Trump has claimed a peace deal with Iran is imminent at least 38 times, according to a CNN tally. He’s been wrong every time and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to most shipping. How long can this go on? Probably all summer. American drivers are getting by on gas around $4.15 per gallon and markets are finding workarounds to the energy crisis Trump created. Iranian officials are probably looking at Trump’s plunging approval rating and wondering how low they can push it.

Social Insecurity. The latest annual report on the financial health of Social Security and Medicare finds that Social Security will run short of money in 2032, with Medicare running short in 2033. This is a depressing annual exercise that demonstrates how feckless the federal government has become. The eventual insolvency of these two programs has been apparent since the 1990s, yet no Congress or president has made a serious effort to fix the problem.

[Trump has a Joe Biden problem on jobs]

If Congress does nothing, Americans participating in the programs will get their benefits cut once the money runs short. What will probably happen is a last-minute fix to prevent that from happening. But the longer Congress delays, the higher the cost of fixing the two retirement programs. With the national debt already at $38 trillion, something will eventually have to give: interest rates will go higher, productivity will shrink, living standards will decline and there will be less room to stimulate the economy when another recession hits.

But let’s worry about that some other time.

60 Minutes of revenge. Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley aired his side of the story in an hourlong interview with the New York Times, which is worth a listen. If you sympathize with Pelley, as I do, you’ll come away thinking CBS News boss Bari Weiss and her lieutenants are thin-skinned chickenshits not qualified to run a national news network. Weiss has been a gaffe machine since taking over CBS News last year and her days may be numbered.

[The AI bubble might be deflating]

But there are three oddities in Pelley’s rendition. One is that he refers to Weiss’s clumsy dismantling of 60 Minutes as being “like your spouse being murdered,” a metaphor he repeats. Sorry, but what happened at 60 Minutes is not like anybody’s spouse being murdered. Everybody gets to live another day, find another job, reunite down the road and tell war stories. The comparison is overkill to the point of being kind of gross.

Second, Pelley expresses disbelief that a corporation would break up a “family” operation like 60 Minutes used to be. News flash, Scott: This has been happening at scale throughout the whole country for the last 40 years. Ever hear of outsourcing?

Third, Pelley, 69, said he had never heard of Bari Weiss before parent company Paramount appointed her head of CBS News. Okay, she may not have been a household name, but everybody in the news business (sorry, almost everybody) knew about her public spat with the New York Times and her accusations of excessive wokeness at the paper of record. She also founded a startup, The Free Press, that turned out to be pretty successful. No? Doesn’t ring a bell?

Weiss has suggested the oldsters at 60 Minutes are behind the times. Two things can be true: She can be right, and she can also be a hack.

Grim war milestones. Russia’s war in Ukraine has now gone on for longer than the entirety of World War I. That’s 1,569 days and counting. The Russian death toll could be as high as 500,000, according to a new estimate. That exceeds the entire US death toll in World War II. Yet Putin persists. The Russian dictator can’t win but he can’t admit defeat, either. So legions die.

Hunter Risin’. Need more Bidens in your life? No? Well, sorry, the Biden family doesn’t care. We recently got Jill Biden’s memoir, and now wayward presidential son Hunter Biden is making some sort of comeback. The Atlantic reports that “Hunter is winning unexpected praise” by going on podcasts to talk about his addiction issues and writing social media posts poking fun at his drug-addled past. Hunter claims to be seven years sober and says he plans to start a Substack with more serious musings. Please, Hunter: No memecoins!

Enjoy a real cartoon:

You can order this cartoon ^☝️ or others like it, plus merch featuring cartoons, at CartoonStock.com.

Director of national incompetence. There’s a new Worst Trump Cabinet Official: Bill Pulte, who Trump has picked as the next director of national intelligence, or DNI. The DNI, in theory, is an important job. This official oversees 18 intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the NSA. Prior DNIs include a senator, two retired admirals, a retired general, and an ambassador. Like, serious people with lots of worldly experience.

The current DNI is Tulsi Gabbard, the former House member who Trump’s inner circle shunned. The inside joke was that with Gabbard in the job, DNI stood for Do Not Invite. She’s leaving this month. Nobody will miss her.

Trump wants to replace Gabbard with Pulte, who’s 38 and currently in charge of the agency that manages the housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte has never worked in intelligence, or diplomacy, or the military, or been elected to office. But he donated money to Trump, plus he’s punkish and abrasive. Trump’s kind of guy.

[Trump has a Joe Biden problem on jobs]

Pulte is one of 25 grandchildren of the man who founded Pulte Homes. But he never did much at the company except parachute in as a board member for four years. The well-regarded Pulte Family Charitable Foundation the grandfather established has publicly dissociated itself from brash young Bill.

Last year, at a private event, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Pulte, “I’m going to kick your ass.” That altercation came after Bessent felt Pulte was talking trash about him to Trump. He probably was. That may be one reason Trump likes him.

Pulte is best known as the Trump crony who combed federal mortgage records looking for dirt on Trump enemies. Wait: There’s his intelligence-gathering background! Pulte’s snooping led to accusations that Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook and New York State attorney general Letitia James committed mortgage fraud. Cook and James both say that’s crap.

Democrats in Congress say Pulte’s appointment as DNI is a joke, and some Republicans agree. That means the Senate may never confirm Pulte, leaving him in lame-duck “acting” status indefinitely. But that won’t stop him from plowing through the reams of intelligence data you and I pay for to find even better dirt on people Trump wants to punish. Maybe he’ll get even with Bessent. Trump also reportedly wants Pulte to clean house within the intelligence services, like DOGEing the spooks.

The Pinpoint Press has had good instincts on the Worst Trump Cabinet Officials. Our first two picks—Kristi Noem at Homeland Security and Lori Chavez-DeRemer at Labor—are both gone. They were so bad even Trump couldn’t abide them.

We think Trump should fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. We’ve also noted that FBI Director Kash Patel (sorry, Ka$h) is vindictive, self-serving and drunk too often for comfort. Pulte has tough competition as WTCO. But Hegseth, at least, served in the military. Patel is a lawyer. Pulte is uniquely unqualified. That, alas, may endear him to Trump even more. 🙄

The case for Hegseth. If you’re rooting for Hegseth as WTCO, you’ve got some fresh ammo. Hegseth’s Defense Dept. hired a rioter who marauded through the US Capitol with a metal pipe on January 6, 2021, to work in a counterterrorism job that requires a top-secret security clearance. Elias Irizarry, who was 19 at the time, ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor and apologizing for his actions. He’s one of hundreds of J6 rioters Trump pardoned in 2025.

[AI is saving the Trump economy]

Nothing against second chances. But there are probably thousands of former USAID workers who are more qualified for any job at the Pentagon than this guy.

Latest tariff sham. There is actually some non-Trump WTF this week 👇, but organizational logic suggests we stick with Trump until we run out of material. So you might want to know that the great human-rights activist Donald Trump is taking on slave labor. He now plans to impose new tariffs on imports from Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and nearly 60 other trading partners because his trade advisors have mustered evidence that forced labor contributes to the production of some goods in these countries’ supply chains.

If they investigated the United States using the same criteria, they’d probably find that America, too, relies on slave labor. Then they could really clean up this dreadful practice, starting right here at home.

[The Weekly WTF: America the immoral]

You didn’t know Trump is a crusader for worker rights? Neither did anybody else. What’s obviously going on is Trump told his trade people to find some new pretext for imposing tariffs, now that courts have struck down his main rationale for tariffs and may soon strike down the backup tariff plan he rolled out earlier this year. Assume the latest effort will face legal challenges as well, given that it is absurd.

More abuse of American businesses. When the Supreme Court overturned Trump’s emergency tariffs in February, it set in motion a refund process for some 330,000 import businesses that had paid nearly $170 billion in bogus taxes to the US government. The Trump administration is now trying to wriggle out of something like $40 billion of those refunds. Trump’s trade shysters basically say certain importers need to file a lawsuit to get their money back, which will impose the heaviest burdens on small businesses that don’t have trade lawyers on staff, and may not be able to afford hiring them.

Here’s the short version: Trump imposed an illegal tax on thousands of businesses, and now that the courts have said no, give it back, he’s erecting legal and logistical barriers to refunding money those businesses never should have sent to the government in the first place. It’s theft. Trumpism is worse than socialism.

[Are you cashing in on the epic stock boom? Most Americans aren’t]

Microhard. What’s your attitude toward Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates? For a long time, he seemed like a better billionaire, devoted to lofty causes such as improved sanitation in Africa. He helped start The Giving Pledge, a promise by some of the world’s richest people to give the majority of their money to charity.

But Gates has a dark side. The Epstein files released earlier this year suggested Gates had a couple of extramarital affairs while married to Melinda French Gates. Now the Wall Street Journal suggests Gates had at least 20 affairs.

That would be a lot of affairs for a normal person to have during a 27-year marriage. But debauched billionaires have a lot of staff to manage these types of things and cover them up. Ordinarily, we don’t find out. But Gates’s connection with the sleazebag Epstein opened a peephole that is becoming a picture window. Epstein emails suggested that Gates acquired STDs and got antibiotics from Epstein to treat them. Now it looks like there’s a lot more dirt on Gates than even Epstein had. Two affairs have now become 20. Is this going to become a geometric progression?

Breaking CBS News. Longtime 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley has a lot of media friends, and it was probably a dumb move by new CBS News boss Bari Weiss to fire him. Weiss took over CBS News last year after David Ellison’s company Skydance bought CBS parent Paramount. Ellison and his father Larry are Trump pals. CBS News is on the Trump Enemies List, and it seems like the Ellisons hired Weiss to hollow out the news network as a sop to Trump.

There’s more going on. The audience for traditional news networks has been declining for years, for obvious reasons (the internet, streaming, podcasts, social media, Substack). All the news networks are trying to adapt. CBS is now doing it worst. But it wasn’t exactly thriving before Weiss arrived.

Pelley, 68, is an elite media bigshot who will end up fine. CBS supposedly fired him “for cause,” the cause being, he criticized management. Ha. CBS will probably have to make him a big payout. If there’s no confidentiality agreement, Pelley will probably write a juicy book dumping all over Weiss and the Ellisons. Sources will line up to dish on these corporate jerks. Pelley will get his revenge. If he retired tomorrow, he’d have a distinguished career to be proud of and more money than most journalists can dream of.

What gets far less attention is the demolition happening throughout journalism, where no TV stars are involved. I’ve been a journalist for 35 years, and for about two-thirds of that time, digital technology has been wrecking journalistic business models and making it damn hard to earn money in the news business. Many good journalists simply leave because they can’t make a decent living. I’m not complaining! Everybody has to adapt. The creative destruction has also brought great innovation. I’ve benefited personally from many of those changes.

The political and corporate hostility toward CBS News is repugnant. But no more so than the countless firings and sad outcomes at many other news ventures. Please support good journalism, people. And not just when it’s an infuriating national story.

Jill Biden is officially annoying. The former first lady says that when she watched her husband’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, 2024, she thought, “he’s having a stroke.” That’s what a lot of us thought that night, as President Joe Biden demonstrated in real time, before an audience of millions, that he was too old and frail to run for reelection.

But at the time, Jill Biden was the only person on Planet Earth who publicly praised her husband’s debate performance. She also pushed him hard to stay in the race afterwards, according to multiple press reports. Put it all together, and it’s a portrait of a woman who had deep concerns about her elderly husband’s health but still compelled him to campaign for one of the world’s most stressful jobs.

The biggest disappointment about Joe Biden is that he turned out to be an egomaniac like so many other politicians who think they’re irreplaceable and refuse to leave the stage. That selfishness obviously extended to his wife and other inner-circlers who didn’t want to give up the perks of the presidency. You can read all about it in Jill Biden’s new book, if you really want to be reminded of one of the main reasons we now have President Donald Trump.

[Most Americans are missing out on an epic stock-market rally]

Immoral majority. The portion of Americans who think the nation’s morals are “poor” hit the highest level ever in Gallup polling that dates to 2002. Fifty-six percent of Americans think the nation’s moral values are “poor,” while 30% say they’re “fair” and only 12% say “excellent.” Eighty percent think America’s moral values are getting worse, while only 15% think they’re getting better.

Something’s off here. The Trump presidency, rife with abuse and corruption, has obviously led to that downgraded estimation of America’s moral character. But Americans who answer poll questions like these are the same ones who gave Trump a winning margin and a second presidential term in 2024.

The breakdown by political party shows a sharp increase in Democrats who think the country is immoral since Trump took office. That’s about what you’d expect for a party that totally lost political power. But Independents and Republicans have also soured on the nation’s morality. That means many people who voted for Trump think the nation has become less moral under his stewardship. Duh?

[How older homeowners locked up the housing market]

I dunno, people. The leaders we choose reflect who we are. What those numbers say to me is that Americans, as in the people who live here, are becoming less moral. The country is the people.

The expense report of your dreams. Most workers who file expense reports have faced dreary battles with company auditors over a few measly bucks. They do things differently at the CIA. An agency official named David Rush put in for $2 million in cash and 303 gold bars worth around $40 million, claiming it was for “work-related expenses.” The agency complied. 😱

Then, maybe, the CIA got suspicious? The CIA says it investigated Rush when he started asking for gold bars, then turned it over to the FBI, which raided his Virginia home on May 19 and found the loot, plus a bunch of Rolex watches. The FBI found that Rush had been lying about his qualifications and his background for years. He appears to be a scam artist.

But hold on a minute. The CIA is supposed to aggressively vet every employee. They didn’t catch any of this? Why did they give him the gold bars when he started asking? Is that unusual, or totally normal at the CIA? How much gold does the CIA have on hand, anyway? What kinds of receipts do you have to turn in when you spend the CIA’s gold?

Rush began asking for the cash and the gold last November, so that part happened during the Trump administration. Maybe Rush figured everybody else in government is on the take, so why not him. But he’s been lying to the government about his qualifications since at least 2006, and nobody caught on until now. WTF.

Latest Trump outrage. President Trump’s Justice Dept. has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the woman who successfully sued Trump for sexual assault and is due $88.3 million in damages from him. Prosecutors think she may have gotten financial help paying for lawyers from an outside group, even though she said she was paying her own legal fees. A real Justice Dept. working in the national interest would never bother with something like this, but Trump is using taxpayer assets to pursue his own personal vendettas. Trump has appealed the Carroll case, and the Supreme Court will likely decide if he has to pay.

[Trump says to hell with affordability]

Trump wants to get into your wallet. Trump wants Congress to change the law so his face can appear on a commemorative $250 bill the Treasury wants to print, to honor America’s 250th year as a country. Current law says no currency can feature the face of a living president. But Trump thinks we need to see more of him.

He probably won’t get his way. Trump has made some enemies among Republicans in Congress recently, by endorsing Trumpy challengers to party stalwarts. That’s eroding his Republican support in Congress, especially for kooky ideas such as this. He may also get his name whitewashed from the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, now that a judge blocked the rebranding Trump attempted earlier this year.

But never assume your wallet is safe from Trump.

Let freedom wane. The “Freedom 250” concert series Trump is planning for Washington, DC in June and July is shaping up as an apt tribute to a declining nation in disarray. The announced headliners are mostly warmed-over acts from the ‘80s and ‘90s, as if to remind America, things were better then.

But we can’t even do nostalgia right these days. A bunch of the performers dropped out once they realized it was a Trump event, including Young MC, Martina McBride, Morris Day, and The Commodores. The organizing group listed Milli Vanilli as one of the acts, but the duo said they were “shocked to see our name” because nobody had booked them.

How did we ever make it to 250?

Trump criminal fund. These are historic times! A new scheme by President Trump to give taxpayer money to convicted criminals and absolve himself of tax liability is “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” according to a government watchdog group. It’s not every day you get to experience such unprecedented events!

The Trump plan is a new fund of $1.8 billion to compensate Trump supporters who marauded through the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, along with others Trump wants to reward for their loyalty (to him, not the country). Another part of the deal is immunity for Trump, his family, and his “affiliates” for any tax evasion they may have committed. Ever.

The whole plot is so galling that it may finally have set the limit for how much corruption Trump’s fellow Republicans are willing to tolerate. Some prominent GOP senators are pressuring Trump to cancel the slush fund by delaying action on immigration legislation Trump wants, and possibly on other priorities. Congress could also pass a law prohibiting Trump from doling out the money, but he could veto it. Plus, Republicans want to avoid a vote that puts their most vulnerable members on record opposing Trump.

[Trump says to hell with affordability]

Two things matter: One is whether Congressional Republicans will actually grow a spine and start to buck Trump in material ways. Be skeptical. The other is whether Trump has lost all interest in governing and is now willing to burn every bridge if it serves his own personal interests. It increasingly looks that way.

If you want to know the details of the Trump criminal fund and why it may actually be legal, Lawfare offers this thorough breakdown.

How to lose by winning. Trump has vanquished some foes within his own party by endorsing challengers who are defeating sitting members of Congress in Republican primary elections. So Trump gets revenge on people who voted to convict him of impeachment or opposed him in other ways, such as Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Both recently lost primaries to Trump-backed opponents, ending their Congressional tenures. Trump has also endorsed the far-right Ken Paxton over the more moderate John Cornyn in the Texas Senate primary, endangering Cornyn’s reelection odds.

So Trump remains the don within his party. But the MAGA candidates he’s helping elect will be weaker candidates against Democrats in the November general elections, and that could ultimately tip the Senate to Democratic control. If Paxton ends up as the Republican nominee, in Texas, for instance, a Democrat could actually win a Texas Senate seat for the first time in nearly 40 years.vThat’s another reason Senate Republicans are growing furious with Trump. So yeah, maybe Trump is giving up on governing because personal revenge is sweeter. Punchbowl News has this nice summary of the situation.

[5 things to know about the midterm elections]

The Democrats still suck. Trump has spotted the Democrats an 8-0 lead in the seventh inning, and they’re cruising to an easy win, right? Um, no, not at all. Dysfunction remains the Democrats’ most prominent feature, underscored by the publication of an overhyped “autopsy” of what went wrong when Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election to Trump.

You or I could have written a better report. Harris lost because Joe Biden never should have run for reelection and he bailed out too late. Harris was a mushy candidate who might not have even been the nominee if there were a normal primary election process. And the Biden-Harris record of high inflation and out-of-control illegal immigration was a loser to start with.

Anyway, don’t waste any time reading the Dems’ own analysis of what went wrong, which even Democrats are mocking as vapid. The main takeaway is that the Democratic Party remains leaderless and rudderless. It can make gains in this year’s midterm elections simply because of Trump’s plummeting popularity. But we still have a huge political problem: Neither of the two political parties represents the practical sensibilities of a huge part of the electorate, maybe even the majority.

[Voters hate both parties more than ever]

Send a wedding postcard! Donald Trump, Jr. is getting married this weekend in the Bahamas. His father might be too busy to attend. “This is not good timing for me,” Trump explained on May 21. “I have a thing called Iran, and other things.”

Trump also has an Air Force 747 that can take him wherever he wants and cut every air-traffic control line. It will be Don, Jr.’s second wedding. Trump Sr. has been married three times. Maybe weddings are no big deal in the Trump family. Trump will catch the next one.

Just quit now? Matthew Prince, the CEO of tech company Cloudflare, wrote a remarkably candid essay in the Wall Street Journal on May 20 explaining which employees he’s replacing with artificial intelligence. The safest workers, Prince said, are “builders” who create products and “sellers” who bring in the revenue. The most vulnerable, he said, are “measurers” who analyze processes, including auditors, marketers, operations analysts and a lot of middle managers. Cloudflare recently cut 20% of its workforce, and “the vast majority of those we laid off were measurers,” Prince said. Consider yourselves warned, measurers.

To err is human! Written typos and other mistakes now count as signs of authenticity—as in, proof that AI didn’t write this. That’s the conclusion of an Atlantic essay claiming that people are deliberately making catchable mistakes on resumes, dating profiles and social-media posts to demonstrate that a human actually composed the material. How kwaint.

[I asked AI for investing advice. It’s pretty good]

Energy crisis, whatever. Trump’s latest stance on the Iran war he can’t end is he’s in “no hurry” to make a deal with Iran and get oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again. It’s only oil, after all, and we’ve got plenty of that right here in the US of A. But Trump is still too busy to make Junior’s wedding.

No price is too high. When running for president in 2024, Donald Trump promised, “I will immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.”

Maybe he meant, starting on day one and ending a few days later? Like a temporary sale, rather than everyday low prices?

That’s basically what has happened. Inflation bottomed out more than a year ago and is now roaring again, thanks to Trump’s war with Iran and his taxes on imports. And high prices no longer bother Trump, now that he’s president.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” Trump said in front of the news cameras on May 12, when a reporter asked if soaring prices affected his peace negotiations with Iran. “I don’t think about anybody,” he stressed. “Not even a little bit.”

Trump was trying to make the point that his only priority in dealing with Iran is to stop its nuclear weapons program. You might be wondering, didn’t President Obama have a plan to stop Iran from getting the bomb?

[Inflation would be tamed, if not for Trump]

Yes, he did! Under the 2015 Obama deal, Iran agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program and let international inspectors monitor the progress. Trump canceled the program in 2018. Only since then has Iran been stockpiling bomb-grade uranium, as the New York Times recently explained.

If Trump hadn’t canceled the Obama deal, Iran wouldn’t be building atomic weapons, which means there would be no 2026 Iran war and no 2026 Trump energy crisis. Trump still wouldn’t care about voters, but it would be less infuriating if gas prices were still $3 per gallon and there was no new inflation outbreak.

Instead, we have gas at $4.50, and maybe heading to $5. Higher costs for transportation and production will soon send the price of groceries and many other things higher. Nothing to worry about here.

Fertile imagination. Here’s a challenge for Hallmark: Design a greeting card for Fertility Father’s Day. Of course, it would have to feature Trump’s likeness.

At a May 11 White House event focused on maternal health care, Trump called himself “the father of fertility.” If you didn’t know the context, what would you think? Even in context, what do you think? Is Trump bragging about his sperm count? Does he compare his sperm count with Joe Biden’s?

Maybe, but Trump says he is the father of fertility because he signed an executive order giving health insurers the option to cover the cost of IVF, the expensive fertilization procedure for couples with difficulty conceiving. Trump has been thinking about his fertilization legacy for a while. In 2024, he called himself “the father of IVF” because he planned to sign legislation making it a covered insurance benefit. Earlier this year, he dubbed himself the “fertilization president.”

But the order won’t do much. There’s no federal money to help pay for IVF, and insurers aren’t required to cover it, just encouraged to do so. Maybe Trump should don his Jesus smock and perform some immaculate conceptions.

Petty Ka$h. The wonderful Kentucky bourbon Woodford Reserve has an unfortunate problem with the FBI. Director Kash Patel, who seems to be a problem drinker, apparently gives out personalized 750-millimeter bottles engraved with his name and title, according to the Atlantic. Sometimes Patel signs the bottles, using the charming spelling he prefers: Ka$h. It’s a pretty weird branding mashup, given that the FBI doesn’t make bourbon or have a stake in any liquor company.

[Nobody’s fixing anything 😡]

People on social media are calling for a boycott of Woodford. That seems unfair. Brands don’t need to be punished just because jerks like them. Should Trump foes boycott Diet Coke and Heinz ketchup because they’re Trump staples? Nah. Leave Woodford alone, unless it turns out they’re giving Patel free bourbon or dishing secret dirt on Jack Daniel’s.

Patel is a problem child. The Atlantic previously reported that Patel is a heavy drinker who sometimes misses meetings without explanation and has other hallmarks of an alcoholic. Leaks like this usually happen because a dogged reporter finds a source who really wants to dump on the target. The Atlantic seems to have found many. Patel has upended the FBI and fired a lot of agents far more qualified than he is, no doubt earning the ire of many expert leakers. Some are shivving him now.

Patel is such a snowflake that he sued the Atlantic for $250 million. That’s a show lawsuit that won’t go anywhere, and if it did, would involve a discovery phase likely to turn up more Patel embarrassments. Patel has also reportedly ordered an investigation to find out who’s leaking to the Atlantic. Trump might fire him before any of this gets anywhere. Trump doesn’t care that his aides are incompetent, but he does care if they embarrass him. Patel may be too shabby even for Trump.

There’s one more farcical tidbit. During Senate testimony on May 12, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland asked Patel to take an alcohol disorder test. Patel basically said, I will if you will. So Van Hollen took the test and posted the results on social media on May 13. He’s pretty dull, reporting just 3 drinks per week. So now Patel gets to report on his own drinking habits. If he can’t remember, maybe some FBI agents could help him reconstruct the details.

Senate slaps its own wrist. The Senate passed a measure on May 14 that will halt its pay if the government shuts down, starting once the midterm elections are over in November. Good start, but it should go further.

[5 things to know about this year’s midterm elections]

The rule restores full back pay once the shutdown is over. Nope. Members of Congress should forfeit pay for every day they shut down the government, like professional athletes who lose their pay when they get suspended for an infraction. And the House should adopt a similar rule, so that the people responsible for shutting down the government pay for it.

James Tacorico. Texas is abuzz over James Talarico’s lunch order at the Taco Joint in Austin on May 12. Talarico is the Democrat with a fighting chance of flipping a Texas Senate seat in this year’s election. Barack Obama paid him a visit, and while campaigning, the two stopped in for a bite, with a news throng in tow.

Obama ordered one steak and one chicken taco. Normal.

Talarico ordered two potato, egg and cheese tacos. Questions arose.

Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, said it was evidence that Talarico was a closet vegetarian, as if that would be a mortal sin against cattle ranchers. A taco podcast debated eggs for lunch. (Easy answer: Yes) The taco editor at Texas Monthly told the New York Times that both the establishment and the order were good choices for a candidate trying to appeal to moderates and centrists.

Hot sauce is still okay, right?

Iran war running hot and cold. Does anybody know if the Iran war is on or off? The Trump administration says it’s both.

US and Iranian forces are still shooting at each other. Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Iran has attacked US forces more than 10 times since President Trump declared a ceasefire on April 7. Iran sporadically fires at tankers in the Gulf. US forces recently sank six Iranian vessels in the region, and they continue to disable Iranian cargo ships trying to run the US blockade. The Strait of Hormuz is still blocked to most oil shipments.

But everything is fine, seriously. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on May 5 that the war is over and the mission has been accomplished. What mission? Well, not deposing Iran’s authoritarian regime. It remains in place. The Iranian people have had no chance to take back their country, either, even though Trump promised they would when he launched the war on February 28. All of Iran’s nuclear weapons material is still in the country. Rubio says reopening the strait to oil shipments is now a humanitarian mission, as if it would be a nice gesture to the rest of the world, but not really that big a deal.

Here’s what is really going on. Trump is in a bind that’s the political equivalent of each of his six business bankruptcies. He completely failed to foresee the consequences of attacking Iran, like a hustler who takes on too much debt and then can’t pay it back. He’s desperate for a face-saving solution that doesn’t look like defeat. So he keeps telling his creditors that he’ll come up with the money, hoping for some kind of miraculous intervention, such as a bailout from his dad. But dad isn’t around to help on this one. So, a mess.

The Internet thinks this captures Trump’s Iran predicament:

Cartoon Pete. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a two-and-a-half minute cartoon video featuring himself trying to explain why taxpayers should gladly raise the defense budget by half a trillion dollars, to $1.5 trillion. “We’re putting the American taxpayer first,” Hegseth lies in the video. There’s a cameo appearance by Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, in cartoon format, smoking a cigar at a big desk, like an old-timey tycoon who doesn’t care if smoking is banned. Then he orders “Deal Team Six” into action. They’re going to go out and whip the military-industrial complex into shape, you see.

Hegseth doesn’t mention the bill for the unnecessary Iran war, which is at least $25 billion so far, and could easily end up double or triple that. His idea of putting American taxpayers first is giving sweetheart defense contracts to Trump family members, who had zero experience in defense technology before their Dad became president. Defense contracts to the president’s family would be prohibited in any other administration. Where’s Hunter’s laptop?

Hegseth promises us there will be more videos like this, so you might want to wait for the whole series to drop before gathering the family in the home theater. Meanwhile, here are a few highlights from the pilot.

The people’s ballroom. The Justice Dept. will probably be prosecuting Trump for cost overruns at the new White House ballroom any day now. When Trump announced the ballroom project last year, he said donors and friends would pay the $200 million cost, and taxpayers would cover nothing. Then the cost doubled, to $400 million. And now, some Republican senators are trying to appropriate as much as $1 billion for the project, which means taxpayers would be footing the bill, after all.

Trump said on social media that the cost went up because the size of the project doubled and the quality improved, following “deep rooted studies.” Somehow, it is still “under budget,” Trump says. Now that’s some next-level developer talk.

The White House hasn’t explained why taxpayers should cover the bill, though.

Trump’s Justice Dept. launched a prosecution of the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome Powell, because a Fed renovation project is running about 30% over budget, due to unforeseen asbestos contamination at two 100-year-old buildings, and construction costs that spiked after the Covid pandemic. If taxpayers get stuck with the ballroom bill, then the entire project is a cost overrun, because the actual cost to taxpayers should be 0. If Congress funds the $1 billion ballroom, they should throw in several million more to make sure the prosecution is well-financed.

Put up your dukes, Trump. Polling firm YouGov ran a survey asking people if they thought they could beat Trump in a fistfight. I checked the date to make sure it wasn’t April 1. It wasn’t. I looked at the web site address to make sure it wasn’t a spoof. No, it was the actual YouGov.

They ran the poll because Trump held a May 5 White House event highlighting physical fitness, and asked one boy in attendance, “you think you could take me in a fight?” YouGov jumped on the bandwagon by asking more than 2,600 Americans three questions: Could an eight-year-old boy beat Trump in a fight? Could a typical American beat Trump in a fight? And could you personally beat Trump in a fight?

The survey results are below. The YouGov pollsters didn’t reach me on the question, but if they had, I would have said that Trump would run like a banshee from any fight where he didn’t have a bodyguard. The fight I’d most like to see is Trump against a transgender woman, because in addition to getting beat up, he’d probably pass out from cooties.

Anyway, here’s what Americans think about this timely topic:

Art diss. I’ve never been invited to the Met Gala and never will be, but I do enjoy checking out the world’s most elaborate Halloween costumes and wondering how you go to the bathroom inside one of those contraptions. This year’s event was controversial because billionaire Jeff Bezos and his arm-cleavage wife Lauren Sanchez-Bezos co-chaired it, and they represent everything that’s bad about conspicuous consumption, I guess. Of course, it’s a FUND-RAISER for the Met’s Costume Institute, so maybe you’d want RICH PEOPLE helping you raise all those funds?

Anyway, the whole thing is meant as spectacle and the Bezos involvement didn’t bother me, and if did, who would care?

But this was fun: The theme of the event was fashion as art, and what do celebrities know about art? Not much, is what real art mavens think. So the Whitney Museum, a few miles south of the Met, posted on its Instagram account after the gala, “I hereby order all celebrities to take an art history class.”

That’s what I’m talking about! A museum-on-museum diss track!

The Whitney followed up by pointing out they have free tours every day at 1 and 2 pm. Well worth a visit! I love the Whitney. And the Met, too.