Start with the fireworks, because in the increasing common collision of metaphor and reality, they were a perfect example of the moment.

Boston and New York and dozens of other American cities put on magnificent shows Saturday night. Real spectacle, real craft, real joy. Trump’s “biggest ever” artillery barrage on the Mall, by contrast, disappeared into its own smoke on a still, soupy night, a thumping and banging behind a nearly opaque gray smoke curtain, flashes of color strangled in the haze. The perfect metaphor delivered itself free of charge: maximum ordnance, zero transparency, all noise.

The whole evening was like that. Tiresome and grinding, it started late and ended late, cooked by heat and hammered by storms. Melania wore the expression of a woman waiting for a colonoscopy rather than one beholding the majesty of America. At one point the cameras caught Trump watching Fox watching Trump, a recursive loop of self-regard so perfect it should hang in the Smithsonian next to the Saratoga flag. And of course we got the usual Trump-era counting games. Trump: millions! Reality: wut?

I keep coming back to 1976.

I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial, and the contrast is brutal. That celebration came at the end of a miserable American decade. We were post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, mid-malaise, a country with every reason to feel sorry for itself.

And instead, the 200th was an act of national uplift. It was about America. Our flawed, glorious, improbable history. Our journey. Our future. It was fundamentally about us.

The TrumpCo 250th Trumpapalooza, Sponsored By TrumpCoin LLC and Hosted by Trump Family Enterprises on the Trump Mall (tm), was, as always, about him.

Read more

Subscribe now

Get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.

This week, Donald Trump stood in the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, and spoke with a hologram. The AI ghost of TR, trained on his letters and speeches, gave Trump a gentle pep talk about how “the nation comes first,” and Trump, hearing words he has never once believed, called them “fantastic.”

The hologram was polite. It was programmed to be. It was built by a foundation, vetted by lawyers, and sanded down to museum-gift-shop smoothness.

The real Theodore Roosevelt was not smooth. The real TR was a human artillery barrage, a man who boxed in the White House until a punch detached his retina, who took a bullet to the chest in Milwaukee and finished the speech, who called crooked rich men “malefactors of great wealth” to their faces and dared them to do something about it.

A Word From Our Sponsor — Because The Hologram Is Only The Beginning

Quick pause before I open the curtain, because something about that hologram deserves a harder look.

Some foundation somewhere ingested every letter, speech, diary entry, and telegram Theodore Roosevelt ever wrote, ran the whole corpus through a neural network, and produced a polite museum-safe simulacrum you can chat with under a soft LED spotlight. That is the state of the art in 2026: enough data plus enough compute equals a functioning ghost.

Now ask yourself a question I never had to ask when I was a young ad man in the pre-Google era: what could someone build from what’s already sitting on the internet about YOU?

Someone just looked you up. You had no idea.

A researcher at Consumer Reports — someone whose job is online safety — typed her own name into a search engine. Her home address, age, and phone number were sitting there, on data broker sites she’d never heard of. No hack. No breach. Just her name in a search box.

Yours is there too. Right now. Available to an ex, a stranger, anyone who decides they want to find you.

Incogni removes your data from those sites and keeps it off. Try Incogni today and get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.

Every AI hologram, every deepfake, every targeted attack ad, every dead-of-night threat call to a poll worker gets sharper when it’s trained on cheap broker data. Cut the supply line before somebody builds a hologram of you and points it in a direction you don’t like.

Now, back to the show.

So let us conduct a small thought experiment. Suppose the machine glitched. Suppose that instead of the polite hologram, the actual man stepped out of history and into the gilded Oval Office, spectacles flashing, teeth bared in that famous grin that, this time, wasn’t a smile…

TRUMP: Teddy! Welcome back. A lot of people are saying this is the most beautiful Oval Office in history. The gold, the moldings, we did the ceiling, nobody’s ever seen anything like it. You had a nice office, but this, this is luxury.

TEDDY: Luxury. Yes. That is precisely the word, and precisely the problem. Luxury is an addiction of weak men who cannot meet the world as it is, cannot stand strong in wind, weather, and war.

Sir, I have seen this decor before in brothels that aspired to gentility. I saw it in the parlors of the railroad men I broke. I saw it in the townhouses of the beef trust and the sugar trust, men who believed that gilding a room could gild a soul. It cannot.

A man who needs this much gold around him is advertising naught but the poverty of his soul.

TRUMP: You should see the ballroom. Ninety thousand square feet. We took down the East Wing, which frankly was falling apart, total disaster, and we built the most incredible ballroom. Kings have called me about this ballroom.

TEDDY: You demolished a wing of the People’s House to build yourself a ballroom. By God, I put a boxing ring in this building. I brought judo masters and wrestlers, and I invited men to knock me down, because a president should be tested daily.

You built a room so that this era’s robber barons in evening clothes can tell you that you are tall and handsome. We are not the same kind of animal, you and I. I’d wager you’ve never taken nor delivered a punch, you weakling cockwollop.

TRUMP: With respect, Teddy, and I have great respect from the most handsome men, the strongest men, the most well-muscled men…I’ve done more than any president. Maybe Washington or Lincoln, they say, maybe. But probably me. The economy, the border, the canal. Speaking of which, I’m getting your canal back. The Democrats gave it away for a dollar. A dollar!

TEDDY: Do not speak to me of Lincoln, you gibbering fool. I watched Lincoln’s funeral procession from my grandfather’s window when I was six years old, and I spent the rest of my life trying to be worthy of the sight. Lincoln held this nation together with his bare hands while it tried to tear itself apart.

Washington surrendered power when he could have kept it forever, which is the single hardest thing any man in this office has ever done. Grant took Lee’s surrender and then spent his presidency trying to protect freedmen from terrorists while his own party abandoned him. These men bled for the office. You have bled from the ear from a mythical wound.

TRUMP: I’ve been shot at! In Butler. I said, “Fight, fight, fight!” Very famous moment. Iconic, they say. Maybe the most important speech in Presidential history.

TEDDY: I was shot, sir.

Not shot at or injured by flying glass. I was shot through the chest in Milwaukee in 1912. The bullet is still in me. I told the crowd it takes more than that to kill a bull moose, and then I spoke for another hour, because the speech mattered more than the wound. And here is the difference between us: I never once mentioned it again as a credential.

Courage that requires an audience is not courage. It is dinner theater.

TRUMP: People say I’m the toughest president. Strong. Very strong. So virile. The military loves me.

TEDDY: Do they?

I resigned my post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to raise a regiment and charge up a Kettle Hill into Spanish rifle fire, because I did not believe a man should send others where he would not go himself.

You had a doctor invent a foot ailment so that other boys, poorer boys, boys from the Bronx and Appalachia and the Delta, would go to the jungle in your place. You speak of toughness the way a man who has never been in the water speaks of swimming. Strenuously, and from the shore.

TRUMP: OK, but the deals. Nobody makes deals like me. I ended seven wars. Maybe eight. They’re saying Nobel Prize, everyone’s saying it.

TEDDY: I have a Nobel Peace Prize. I won it for ending an actual war between two actual empires, Russia and Japan, by locking their diplomats in a room in New Hampshire until they made peace. I did not campaign for the medal. I did not whine for it. I did the work, and the work was the reward. Your war with the Persians is shaping up to be the worst debacle in history, even worse than the war you avoided fighting in Indochina.

You want the prize the way a child wants a prize. That is the whole of you, sir. What is it the children of your era call it? A participation trophy?

TRUMP: Look, we’re very similar, everybody says it. Doug Burgum says it constantly. Two transformative presidents. Two tough guys. Two...

TEDDY: Stop. I will grant you one similarity, and one only. We were both born rich in New York. There the resemblance ends, because I spent my life trying to prove that inherited money had not made me soft, and you spent yours proving that it had made you the weakest of men in every aspect of your character.

You have never kept a vow in marriage, business, politics, or life, sir, and a man who will not honor his word has no honor at all. You are a vulgar liar, a cheat, a small man in a big job, a petty thief serving nothing but your avarice.

You loathe your own family, except for your unnatural carnal desire for your daughter. I went to the Badlands and buried my grief in cattle work and grizzly country. You went to Studio 54 and paid women to indulge your low passions, when you didn’t stoop to outright rape.

I busted the trusts. You’ve broken American free enterprise and sold it for parts. I hunted predatory wealth. You practice it, from this desk, a billion dollars in snake oil, stealing more money than many can conceive from your “fans” in a single year.

From the seat where I signed the Pure Food and Drug Act to stop exactly your kind of man from poisoning this country, you’ve set loose plagues your science had defeated.

TRUMP: The environment, though. Cleanest air, cleanest water. I say it all the time.

TEDDY: And there it is. There is the thing I came to say, so hear it plainly. I set aside two hundred and thirty million acres of this country. Five national parks. A hundred and fifty national forests. Fifty-one bird sanctuaries. The Grand Canyon itself, which Congress would not protect, so I protected it anyway and dared them to undo it. I did this because I had seen the buffalo herds vanish in a single generation, and I understood that a nation which destroys its soil and squanders its forests destroys itself. It was the least Trump-like thing any president has ever done. I held that land away from mere commerce and rapine, sir. Held it as a gift to everyone. To those not yet born. To even your grandchildren, whose inheritance you are incinerating.

TRUMP: We’re unleashing American energy, Teddy. Drill, baby, drill. Very popular.

TEDDY: You have opened eighty-six million protected acres to the drillers. You have gutted the protections for the wild creatures of this continent. You even sold ninety acres of the national forest that bears my name to build the library where your hologram of me flatters you, and you brag that you ripped it from the federal government like a thief boasting of the lock he picked.

Every elk, every trout stream, every stand of ponderosa I saved, you regard as inventory. I called men like you the despoilers. I broke men like you for sport. The only reason you are not in one of my courtrooms or, if I may speak more truly, hammered into a pulp with my fists is an accident of the calendar that even this miracle of time travel cannot bridge.

TRUMP: You know, the hologram was much nicer.

TEDDY: The hologram was a machine built to please you.

So is every other low, gawping toady in this building. That is what you have never understood about this office, and why history will recoil in disgust when it says your name. The presidency is not a throneroom. It is a hill.

You charge up that hill under fire, working every day for people whom you will never know in service to this nation and our posterity. I said once that the credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.

Your face is marred by garish whore’s makeup, sir, but it reflects your character perfectly; an utter lack of manly virtues, a fancy-boy’s prissy self-regard, a foppish, soft dilettante with a bully’s character.

TRUMP: Are you going to be at the ballroom opening? Black tie. Very exclusive.

ROOSEVELT: No. I am going back to the Badlands, where the land is honest. Bully for the country that produced Washington, Lincoln, and Grant, and the boys who took San Juan Hill.

It will outlast you. That is not a prediction. That is a promise. Good day.

TRUMP: You must never disrespect the President, Teddy. Bad things can happen when you do.

TEDDY: Summon me no more, you filthy rogue, for if you do, I will pray God or your technology gives me a corporeal form to administer the beating you more than richly deserve.

This post was brought to you by Incogni. TR could go back to the Badlands. You can’t. Get 55% off an Annual Plan with code RICK55 and take yourself off the menu.

250 Years and Counting
The Trump Crime Family Cashes In
Alex Karp Has A Point
On the Devotion of Mistress Harp, a Restoration Trifle
Polymarket Vs. Putin
Madonna Is Always Back
Godspeed, Tucker Carlson
Hating Amy
Tina Peters and Her Birkin

The Big Picture

Two Hundred and Fifty Years, and Counting

My fellow Americans.

I say it that way because you’re not going to hear it said that way from this White House. You’re not going to get a speech this Fourth of July that tries to bind up the country’s wounds, that speaks to all of us, that treats the 250th anniversary of the American experiment as something bigger than one man’s ego and one movement’s grievances. So somebody has to say it, and it might as well be me.

Happy birthday to this big, messy, glorious, terrible, wonderful, astounding, frustrating, inspirational, terrifying, noisy country.

Two hundred and fifty years old this weekend, and worth every fight, every struggle, every drop of blood, sweat, and tears it ever cost us.

Here’s a truth I’ve learned the hard way, in politics and in life: you can love something that’s imperfect.

Thank God for that, because it means imperfect things can be loved, and imperfect people can love them.

That’s how I feel about America.

I get emotional about this country. I tear up about it sometimes, and I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Because, as ugly as this last decade has been, there is still a country here worth loving, worth treasuring, worth fighting for. Even worth dying for.

Most of us will never be called to that last extremity, but for two hundred and fifty years, men and women who were called answered, and paid with their lives on battlefields near and far, on streets fighting for rights.

Gratitude for that legacy is one of the most important ways there is to be an American.

Now, no country tells its story in a straight line. History isn’t a smooth curve from one point to another. It jigs, it jags, it diverges and doubles back. Ours certainly has.

The people who can’t love this country tend to be stuck on one point of the line, unable to ask the questions that matter: Did we change? Did we own it? Are we better now?

Because folks, we’ve owned it.

The fundamental flaw of our founding was slavery, the problem from hell, half a million human beings held in bondage at the moment we declared all men created equal.

At the same time, the magnificent system the Founders built could change itself. To adapt. To become a more perfect union. They didn’t promise it would be easy; nothing then was or could be. They built it to give more rights than it took. To expand more freedoms than it restricted. To give America a future where the rule of law and representative government could take on the hardest problems, even the original sin.

The founders knew it would haunt us until we faced it.

And when we faced it, it cost us 600,000 lives.

Scale that to today’s population, and you’re talking five or six million dead, more than every other American war combined, laid down to end an evil we had tolerated far too long.

The Civil War should be a source of enormous American pride. Not the Lost Cause Confederate nonsense, but the fact that ordinary men marched into terrifying conditions in staggering numbers not simply to kill a rebel army, but to kill chattel slavery dead.

The work was incomplete. It ran through Reconstruction and the civil rights era, and it runs through today. But we did the big thing. We paid the price we always knew was coming due. We’re still paying it, but the miracle of emancipation from history’s darkest institution bent the arc we still struggle to turn today.

And then there’s the other miracle, the one that runs through my own family.

When my German ancestors arrived in the 1830s, they were the scum of the earth. That’s what respectable people called them. Why are we letting those people in?

And here’s the secret: there is always some scum of the earth coming to America. That’s the whole point. The Chinese who built the railroads. The Germans, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Italians, the Irish, the Jews, the Vietnamese, the families walking up from Mexico since before there was a border to walk across.

Every single time, we were told these people can never become Americans. Every single time, history made liars of those who said it.

Because, contrary to what the Stephen Millers of the world believe, patriotism and love of country are not a genetic trait.

You become an American.

The first generation keeps one foot in the old country, still speaks the language, still cooks the recipes. The second generation tilts toward the new world, sees the freedom, the opportunity, the security of a country ruled by law and not by a king or a dictator.

And the third generation? Those kids are Americans. They might catch a few words of the old language from grandpa at the holidays, but they are Americans, full stop.

That transformation is a grace. It is a mighty gift. And this fantasy of blood-and-soil nationalism now being sold to us is a trap and a lie and a delusion, shared by weak men led by a weak man.

I know why some people look at this anniversary with dread instead of pride. There’s a fear that we failed, that the great experiment is over, that the propositional nation can’t survive what we’re living through. Too many of my friends on the left make the best the enemy of the good when it comes to this country’s legacies. Too many on the right live in a dreamworld of imaginary demons who worship the wrong gods or speak the wrong language.

I won’t lie to you: sometimes, in my dark moments, I feel it too. I wake up some mornings asking how the hell we get out of this, what the one magic move is that saves the country.

And the lesson of history is that there is no magic move. There’s no wizardry, no alchemical secret.

There’s just one foot in front of the other. You get up, you do the work, you vote, you love your family, you show up in your community, in your church, in your neighborhood, in your local zoning board meetings.

I’ll confess I came late to that last one. I spent thirty-five years racing through airports, always going, always gone. And I’ve come to believe that democracy practiced at home, in your neighborhood and your town and your county, may matter more than anything happening in Washington.

Because here’s what Americans do when we believe in ourselves.

We defeated Nazism and Communism. (Sorry, Fox…Communism isn’t real.) We put men on the moon with a workforce full of immigrants, some of them from decidedly dodgy antecedents. We vaccinated every American kid against polio. We went from ninety feet of powered flight at Kitty Hawk to spanning the globe to rocketing into space. We educated a generation into prosperity after World War II and built the infrastructure of an economy the world envied for decades. We built (for better or worse) the technological miracles and wonders no one could have imagined at the Founding.

We brought down a corrupt president and reminded every politician in the land that they work for us. We ended the Cold War without the nuclear exchange we spent seventy years dreading. We fought AIDS to a near standstill here and across Africa. (And we’ll do it again, Elon, no damn thanks to you.) We fed the hungry. We told old people they didn’t have to die in the dark and the cold.

We have done the hard things. Over and over, we have done the hard things.

And the challenges before us now are enormous.

AI, corruption from the Oval Office down to the county commissioner taking an envelope under the table for a zoning variance, an economy curdling into something that burns free markets to the ground, a nation so short on hope that people have stopped having children, none of it is beyond our grasp.

People don’t bring kids into a future they don’t believe in. It’s not just about health care or daycare. Those things matter, but it’s more about belief.

So the first commitment we owe this country is to recover our belief in the future. To know we can build something better. To know we can be something better.

Notice something about the crowd that’s been running things for the past decade, the ones who slap “America First” on a movement that is anything but.

They’re depressive. Revanchist. Paranoid. Backward-looking and so very delicate, feelings bruised by everything modern, fleeing toward a version of America that never actually existed.

And they never do the big hard things.

They never take on the big fights. Americans punch up, not down. Americans lift people up. We don’t kick down. The enemy was never the guy who fled a war-torn country to come here. The enemy is the person who tells you he can never become an American, that our system is so weak and so fragile it collapses unless the right kind of people are in charge.

The work of unwinding the deeds of evil men is before us. This decade has not been easy on the fabric of America. We will be cleaning up their mess, putting some of them in jail, purging more of them from politics and polite society, and peeling off the filth of their bad deeds for a generation. Some of them will need a non-metaphorical punch in the face before it’s all over.

Every generation, this country writes up a new list of everything we’ve gotten wrong. Every generation, the list refills. It is the national honeydew list, and it will never stop coming.

But here’s what makes America different: we keep the list, and we keep whittling it down. Not in a straight line, not with a gold star every time, but relentlessly, generation after generation. That stubborn, unglamorous work of self-repair is the inheritance handed down from the men who sweated it out in Philadelphia to my granddaughter, and to the grandson arriving in a few weeks who will grow up in a world I can’t imagine.

Fifty years from now, at the 300th, I want it said of us that we never broke faith with this country. That we never decided it was so polluted and so broken that it deserved abandonment.

That we kept the list, did the work, and passed the gift along.

God bless America. God bless every one of you.

Have a wonderful Fourth, and we’ll all be back in the fight next week.

Intel and Observations

The Trump Crime Family Cashes In
The Link: The Trump Family and ‘Honest Graft’

When the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal editorial board, the house organ of America’s gentry conservatives, the paper of record for people who own second yachts, looks at your financial disclosure and reaches for the word “graft,” you have achieved something special.

The 927-page Trump financial filing this week revealed a portfolio of facts even the WSJ found utterly unspinnable: the capo di tutti capo of the Trump Crime family pulled down $1.4 billion from a crypto rugpull alone last year: $635 million in royalties

Read more

There are days the Supreme Court hands you a small, bright coin and while picking your pocket in the same motion. Today is one of them.

If nothing else today, the Supreme Court let the ruling that the rapist Donald Trump committed sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll and he’s going to pay for it. Donald Trump (R-Rapist) will have this decision haunting him despite all the favors the Roberts Court did for him today, and calling him a rapist is perfectly in-bounds because the lower court determined that Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend, the raping rapist who rapes who currently sits in the Oval Office is, in fact, a rapist.

Read more

Get notified for the next show by signing up below!

This video really struck a chord with folks.

Subscribe now

Share

Ground News is a website and an app I’ve come to rely on when it comes to making sense of the big, noisy news stories. Ground News lets me compare headlines, ownership, platform bias, and factuality in one place. At a time when real journalism counts, Ground News breaks through the noise and gets to the heart of the matter.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Subscribe to Ground News by using my exclusive link for 40% off their Vantage Plan…the same one I use. Just go to Ground.News/Rick

Get more from Rick Wilson in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

RIP Jilly Wilson
Please Clap
MAGA’s Hot Dog Men
Don’t Let The Door Hit You On The Ass, Tulsi
Scoreboard
Mark Zuckerberg’s Panopticon
Blind Item
SETEC ASTRONOMY
What I’m Reading
Scenes from the Home Front

RIP Jilly Wilson

We lost Jilly yesterday.

She’d been part of our family for 14 years, a remarkable run for a big dog like a German Shorthair Pointer. She fell in the garage on Thursday morning, coming in from her first outing of the day. For a long beat, I couldn’t get her to move at all. When she came to, her back end was shot, she could barely walk, and I was sure she’d broken something.

Within a few minutes, it was clear that it wasn’t a broken bone, and we raced to the vet.

When they took her back for bloodwork, she collapsed again, her heart failing.

The decision was made.

The strokes and the syncopes were only going to get worse, and her quality of life was no longer a possibility. We sat on the floor with her, feeding her cheese and treats, a last charcuterie raid for a dog famous for her charcuterie raids, and loved on her while the vet did the last kindness. We were next to her when she went, softly and quietly, held by the people she loved and who loved her.

We all know this is part of the deal. They love us without condition, and we get them for the briefest moment. Jilly had a phenomenal life in this family, and she brought love to the kids and everyone who knew her from the second she crossed the threshold. We were so touched today by the comments, calls, and messages from friends who loved her as much as we did, even though many of the stories involved stolen food.

Every dog is a good dog, but she was exceptional.

An amazing bird dog, she was a fierce huntress with astounding prey drive. A cuddler of the highest order, big as she was. An Ocean’s 11-level food thief. She loved swimming in the pool, and too often, the pond. A ninja who’d creep into any bed, couch, or chair for warmth or a snuggle. When Renee moved in a few years ago, Jilly took to her at once and was rarely more than a step behind her.

As her age crept in, we knew this day was close. At last year’s checkup, they told us another year was possible, but more than that might be cruel. So we gave her the best final year we could, and we like to think she enjoyed it.

Jane, her companion GSP, is devastated.

Rarely more than a few feet from Jilly her whole life, Jane wanders the house now with a lost look, searching for her best friend, and it is the most heartbreaking thing in the world to watch. We’re remembering our dear, beloved friend Jilly, and so is she.

I hope Jilly is on point now in a field thick with quail, the autumn air crisp and the sky a sharp, deep blue, the wind carrying scent for miles, knowing she’s working at the thing she loves and that she’s loved for being the best girl.

And if there’s a paradise like that, I hope I see her there.

Read more

The smart money, as ever, was right, and the sweeping damage from Trump’s own actions, both to his agenda and their political survival was the spoken and unspoken topic of the entire meltdown.

One lesson you should take from this, when reading the after-action comments, is to always multiply the downside by 10x. A “spirited disagreement” is code for near-fisticuffs.

This wasn’t a conference lunch in the normal sense of Washington folkways. It was a wake for a reeking corpse, and everyone in the room who later played Rashomon with the press was, if they were being honest, a mere attendee arguing over the cause of death.

Read more

This post is brought to you free by Incogni — the service I personally use to keep my home address, phone, and family off the data-broker sites the MAGA enforcement apparatus uses to find people the President has decided to make a problem.

Get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.

There is a photograph taken by WUSA TV reporter Spencer Allen Brooks from the air on the morning of June 19, and you should look at it before you read another word.

The shot is wide, and it takes a moment to sink in, but there it is, a perfect metaphor for the work of Donald John Trump colliding with reality.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool glows a sick fluorescent green, algae-choked, dead. Behind it, the Ellipse lies stripped to bare dirt, fifty-two acres of brown scab where the soft grass used to be.

One frame. Two monuments to the same man’s instincts, side by side, and nobody had to stage it. Donald Trump did all of it himself. In the upper right of the frame, we see the Capitol, the site of another of Trump’s attempts to redecorate Washington, D.C., in his foul image, but the physical damage done there has been repaired. (The moral damage is ongoing.)

This is the week the metaphor of his destructive tendencies stopped being a metaphor.

For years the people who study Trump have reached for the obvious image. Wrecking ball. He breaks what he touches. He rots institutions the way rust rots steel, slowly and then all at once.

Everything Trump Touches Dies, as some of us have been saying since back when saying it got you uninvited from the green room. It was always a figure of speech, a way of describing what he does to people and courts and agencies and the rule of law and the Republican Party I spent my career building before it ate itself.

It’s not a figure of speech anymore. He has done it to the literal ground of the capital. Stone, water, dirt, and grass. The wreckage is visible from a helicopter.

Start with the pool. Trump looked at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the long gray mirror where Martin Luther King stood and told a quarter million people about a dream, and decided the real problem was the paint job. Too gray. Too “filthy.” He wanted it “American flag blue.”

So Interior shoveled a $14.7 million no-bid contract at a Virginia coatings outfit owned by a ludicrously on-the-nose criminal, plus another no-bid sweetheart deal to an Ohio company owned by a Trump donor who just happens to summer near Mar-a-Lago, and they drained the thing and painted the bottom of it like an above-ground pool from Temu. Trump drove past during construction and bragged. “It never had the color people wanted, but now it’s going to have the great color.”

Within two weeks the paint was peeling off in strips and floating on the surface like a dead jellyfish. Within two weeks, the water bloomed a deep swamp green because that is precisely what shallow, sunny, freshly disturbed water fed directly from the Potomac River does, a fact known to every guy in America who has ever owned a pool skimmer net and apparently to no one in this administration.

The Pool is now surrounded by enough cops, National Guard troops, and Federal police to overthrow a small nation. The Park Service is now dumping hydrogen peroxide into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and vacuuming dead algae off the bottom like a busboy at closing time.

And Trump? He’s declared it sabotage. “Radical left lunatics” vandalized the pool. The algae is a crime. People should do years in prison. He painted a national shrine the color of a Mt. Airy Lodge hot tub, the paint failed, and the water turned green right on cue, and his answer is to threaten the citizenry with hard time.

A Word From Our Sponsor — And Pay Attention, Because The Threat In That Last Paragraph Is Real

Got an enemy? They already know where you live.

The Independent reported this year on a woman who barely touched social media. A stalker found her home, her relatives, her workplace anyway, all from a single name search on a data broker site.

These sites don’t ask why someone is looking. They just answer. Your address. Your family. Your daily patterns. Available to anyone: an angry ex, a stranger, someone who didn’t like something you posted.

If you’ve ever mouthed off about the green pool. If you’ve ever given a dollar to a Democrat. If you’re a teacher who got crosswise with a school board, a journalist, a poll worker, a doctor, an election official, or one of the 81 million Americans who voted against this president and can feel the room getting warmer, your file is already up on a data broker site, available for pocket change to anyone with a grudge.

Incogni hunts down every site exposing your data, pulls you off, and pulls you off again when you reappear. Get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.

Take yourself off the menu before the next round.

Now, back to the rubble.

Now the Ellipse. For his 80th birthday, Trump staged a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House. A $60 million modern gladiatorial spectacle of oiled men grappling under hot lights, with a steel monstrosity they actually named “the Claw,” and the overflow mob of 85,000 got herded onto the Ellipse to watch on jumbo screens.

President’s Park South. The same patch of ground he packed in 2021 with the crowd of angry and deluded Trumphadis that he aimed at the Capitol like a loaded weapon. When the party left, it left the park looking like Woodstock ‘99 in a drought, a brown wasteland with a few sad islands of green hanging on. Scotts’ Miracle-Gro tossed in a million bucks and a “proprietary grass blend,” which is corporate for “we’ll figure it out.”

The Park Service paperwork about hauling off the equipment somehow forgot to mention restoring the lawn. Nobody has said who fixes the Ellipse, or when, or with what. It just sits there, scorched, a public park burned down for one night of an 80-year-old man watching younger men hit each other for his amusement.

Then the East Wing, and here’s where my sarcasm fails me and where the laughing should stop. In October, with almost no warning, Trump sent the excavators into the East Wing of the White House and tore it down. Not renovated. Flattened. The first major structural demolition of the White House complex since Truman gutted it to the studs in 1948, except that Truman was rescuing a building that was about to fall down around him, and Trump was just clearing room for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom nearly twice the size of the mansion itself. He told Jesse Watters the quiet part, plain as day. “It’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself, because no one else will.”

A federal judge named Richard Leon has spent months trying to apply the English language to this. When the administration’s lawyers called the demolition an “alteration” under the statute, Leon wrote that you’d need “some brazen interpretation of the laws of vocabulary” to pull that off.

He called the private-donor funding gimmick a “Rube Goldberg contraption” engineered to dodge Congress. He gently reminded the government that a president is a “steward” of the White House, a temporary tenant, not the landlord with a sledgehammer. None of it landed.

A planning commission Trump packed with his own West Wing aides rubber-stamped the thing anyway, days after Leon ordered the work stopped. The price is up to a billion, now mostly borne by taxpayers, and climbing by the week. The first architect got shoved aside for the crime of clashing with Trump over the ballroom’s metastasizing size, and because his shop was too small to keep pace.

The early renderings featured a grand exterior staircase that climbed majestically to a blank wall with no door, plus fake windows, plus columns positioned to strangle the daylight. He only fixed the staircase to nowhere after the New York Times pointed and laughed.

Add the Kennedy Center, where the farce achieves a kind of perfection. Trump seized the board, crowned himself chairman, bolted his own name onto the building over lawsuits and over the black-letter law, and announced he’d shutter the place for two years to “rebuild” it.

A court ruled the renaming flatly illegal and blocked the closure. So in the small hours of June 13, his people threw up scaffolding, draped an enormous flame-retardant tarp across the entire facade, and scraped his name off behind the curtain where no camera could catch it.

That tarp is still hanging. Ten days, then two weeks, still up, hiding the front of the nation’s performing arts center from every tourist who walks down to the plaza hoping to watch a small man’s vanity get peeled off the marble. The official excuse is “maintenance.” The plaintiffs in court call it what it plainly is: a literal cover-up. A man so mentally incapable of losing that he shrouds a national monument in a tarp rather than let his own country watch his name come down.

Look at what Trump pours his soul into. The columns in the ballroom. The exact saturation of blue at the bottom of the pool. The upholstery on the seats at the Kennedy Center, which one source close to him swears has his fingerprints all over it, just as his fingerprints are all over the ten lawsuits. The man told an interviewer he has “two jobs,” and that the construction one is “like relaxation for me.”

He stood in the West Wing on the exact day the United States was trading proposals to end a shooting war with Iran, and what consumed him? Interrogating a staffer about why some columns looked missing from the latest ballroom rendering.

The gravest decisions a President can make, you know, the little things like war and peace, risking the lives of soldiers and civilians, the fate and future of our nation, and whether a city gets bombed slide past him untouched while he agonizes over crown molding.

He’s gilded the Oval Office in tasteless gold-leaf geegaws, “none of the fake stuff,” he assures visitors, as if the tackiness were the achievement. He ripped out the Kennedy-era Rose Garden lawn and paved it with a stone patio because the grass got soggy and women’s stilettos sank in at his parties, then wired the whole thing for sound so he could DJ off his iPad like a pervy divorced uncle at a Mar-a-Lago quincañera.

He’s reportedly carpeted the White House bathrooms. The People’s House is being slowly redecorated into a 1970s crash pad by a man who genuinely, sincerely believes that gold and stone and his name screwed into a wall are what greatness looks like. If Trump had a shred of taste, you’d know it by now.

This is a specific kind of authoritarian leadership failure, and it has a specific pedigree.

There was another man who styled himself the great builder, who couldn’t be bothered with the grinding work of actually governing but came fully alive over two things: sending people to camps, and building scale models and renderings and the colossal structures that would carry his name into a glorious forever.

Adolf Hitler dreamed of leveling Berlin and raising in its place a capital called Germania, a fever-city of impossible domes and triumphal arches built to make every human who passed beneath them feel like an insect.

He had a man for it, Albert Speer, who drew the plans for the Welthauptstadt Germania, built the models, and fed the fantasy of a thousand-year Reich graven into a monument of stone. They fussed and frittered over the boulevards and the marble while the country Hitler ran descended into evil and depravity.

Germania never rose. What rose instead were the Americans from the west and the Russians from the east, and a sea of rubble, and an evil little man who committed suicide in a hole in the ground beneath the ruins of everything he’d sworn would stand forever.

Spare me the ragey email, MAGA snowflakes.

I am not comparing the body counts. The crimes don’t rhyme, and I won’t insult the dead by pretending they do. I’m comparing the tell.

The same hollow vanity. The same iron conviction that a leader proves his greatness in marble and arches and sheer scale. The same fatal preference for the model over the country. The same congenital inability to grasp that the building was never the point.

And Trump’s even got the props now. A desktop model of his planned triumphal arch for Washington. Renderings of his ballroom/Führerbunker, a new hardened complex the military is digging beneath his ballroom, “droneproof,” with “bio-defense all over.” He keeps telling us what he’s building down there in the dark while he can’t keep paint stuck to a pool in the daylight.

That’s the eternal con of the man who measures himself in monuments. He always promises you a thing that can never be torn down. “The one thing they can’t tear down will be the East Wing,” a source close to him said. “That is his lasting impact.”

The East Wing is gone. He tore it down himself. The pool is green. The lawn is dirt. The Kennedy Center is cowering behind a tarp. Everything Trump touches dies, and now you can finally see it from the air, in a single photograph, on the morning of America’s 250th year.

He promised us a monument. He handed us the rubble, algae, and a moment where we don’t need metaphors to know what he’s done to Washington and the country.

The reality is right in front of us.

This post was brought to you by Incogni. Don’t let the next algae “investigation” start with your home address. Get 55% off an Annual Plan with code RICK55 and take yourself off the menu.

Not eleven, the number that looked at him in 2019. Not fourteen, last year’s tally. Twenty-two. A record, but weirdly, not the kind Trump enjoys boasting about.

The most specialists ever assembled for a single presidential physical in the modern history of the office, and when the cardiologist who used to keep Dick Cheney’s heart beating asked the obvious question, the answer came back in corporate fog: “a comprehensive, multidisciplinary evaluation consistent with best practices for executive-level medical care.” Translation: shut up and read the three-page memo Trump drafted for us.

”

The lies, the coverup, and the endless game played by too many people close to the President, be they staff or reporters, that he’s doing just fine is wearing mighty thin. He’s rotting, a Zombie President shuffled from one photo-op to another, wailing on Truth Social at all hours, broken, reeking of the end, and staining the damn upholstery.

Read more

Subscribe now

Get more from Rick Wilson in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Subscribers to Against All Enemies get 40% off the Vantage plan here.

Kash Patel built a slush fund inside the FBI to hand out fat cash bonuses the men who do his (and by extension, Todd Blanche’s and Donald Trump’s dirty work. This is what the rot consuming our Republic looks like up close.

There’s a particular tell in the way a regime decays, and Kash Patel just gave us the textbook example. When the people in charge of the law start paying cash, out of view of oversight and largely off the books, to the people who break it for them, you are no longer watching a Justice Department. You are watching a retribution protection racket with a federal seal on the letterhead.

Let’s be precise about what we now know, because the precision is the point. According to a letter from Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Patel signed off on more than a million dollars in taxpayer-funded “bonus” payments to a small, curated circle of agents.

Not for valor. Not for cracking a kidnapping ring or rolling up a cartel pipeline.

For loyalty.

The recipients sit on what the Bureau internally calls the Director’s Advisory Team, plus the agents who guard Patel’s body and, conveniently, witness whatever there is to witness. Some of these men collected five consecutive payments of roughly eight thousand dollars apiece, pushing nearly forty grand per person on top of salaries that, in several cases, had already blown through the statutory caps Congress set precisely to prevent this kind of thing.

The money went out so fast, to so few, that Raskin says the account ran dry and some of the payments bounced. Bounced. The director of the FBI was firing taxpayer cash at his loyalists with such frantic, grasping speed that the checks started coming back like a degenerate gambler’s rent check.

There is a word for an institution where the boss raids the treasury to reward the muscle, and it is not “law enforcement.”

Now connect it to the machine it feeds.

The Director’s Advisory Team isn’t a book club or a think tank.

Inside the Bureau, they have a nickname, and the nickname tells you everything: the Payback Squad. The reporting is damning in its specificity.

This is a team of agents assembled to build cases against the president’s enemies, the way you’d assemble a pit crew, except the car is a federal grand jury and the race is a vendetta. Their assignment is to manufacture a “grand conspiracy” theory, the fever dream that a cabal of former officials secretly conspired to wrong Donald Trump, and to turn that fever dream into indictments.

Their next intended trophy is John Brennan, the former CIA director. Among the names doing the work is John Eckenrode, a veteran of the John Durham misadventure, that years-long, multimillion-dollar fishing expedition that produced almost nothing but the satisfaction of the grievance that launched it.

The Durham well ran dry, so they dug a new one and called it the Payback Squad.

This is where Todd Blanche walks onstage, and where the corruption stops being a Patel problem and becomes a Justice Department problem, root and branch.

Blanche is the acting attorney general, and in a matter of weeks he has compiled a record that would have gotten a Tammany Hall ward boss arrested. He revived a prosecution of Jim Comey so flimsy that career prosecutors had already concluded no crime occurred, the now-infamous seashell case, built on a Insta post and a presidential grudge.

He installed an eighty-one-year-old Trump loyalist, Joseph diGenova, who I knew in the Before Times as a barking lunatic, to drive the Brennan investigation, but only after the career prosecutor in Miami who actually knew the file got shoved out the door for committing the cardinal sin of doubting the case had merit. He indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center.

He has reportedly greenlit investigations into Cassidy Hutchinson, into E. Jean Carroll, into ActBlue, a parade of the president’s tormentors marched one by one toward a grand jury. And here is the exquisite hypocrisy: this is the same Todd Blanche who, as Trump’s defense lawyer, wrote with wounded eloquence about “biased prosecutors” who “pursued charges despite the evidence, rather than based on it.” He knew exactly what a vindictive prosecution was. He could spot one at fifty paces. He just decided he’d rather run them.

A Word From Our Sponsor…And Pay Attention, Because This Is The Story Too Many Outlets Won’t Tell You

Quick exercise. After you finish reading this, go look at the front page of Fox News. Then Newsmax. Then, The Daily Wire. Then check your favorite MAGA podcaster’s feed.

Count the words “Patel,” “slush fund,” “Payback Squad,” and “bounced.”

I’ll save you the suspense. You are going to find approximately zero. The Guardian has the slush fund. NOTUS has the Payback Squad nickname. Jamie Raskin has the letter.

But on the half of the American media ecosystem that 70 million voters live inside, the story does not exist. It is being actively, deliberately, and professionally disappeared in real time.

This is why I read Ground News every day to check my facts…and my assumptions.

Ground News pulls a single news event together from across the spectrum — left, center, right, foreign press…and lays it side by side. Who covers it? Who buries it? How they frame it. What facts does each outlet leave on the cutting room floor?

The Blindspot feature is the killer app. It surfaces stories one half of the media is refusing to touch. The Patel slush fund. The bounced bonus checks. The Payback Squad. The Brennan grand jury. The diGenova install. The Comey seashell case. You see, in cold, clean visualizations, exactly which outlets are silent, which are screaming, and which are working overtime to convince their audience that none of it is happening.

For a recovering Republican strategist who helped build the message-discipline machine Fox runs on and now spends his life dismantling it, Ground News is not a luxury. It is a defense system. It is how I keep from being played, and how you keep your Facebook uncle from being played, either.

Substack subscribers get 40% off the Vantage plan right here.

Patel and Blanche are not just spending the institution’s capital. They are betting that half the country will never see them spend it. Don’t be in that half.

Now, back to the racket.

So you have Blanche at Main Justice supplying the legal cover and the prosecutorial muscle, and Patel at the Bureau supplying the agents and, now we learn, the cash bonuses to keep them motivated and quiet.

That is not two scandals. That is one apparatus. The DOJ writes the indictment, the FBI builds the case, and the slush fund pays the men who do both. It is vertically integrated corruption, the kind you usually have to fly to a failing kleptocracy to study in the wild.

Here is the part the MAGA cheering section never wants to think about, because thinking about it requires a time horizon longer than the next news cycle.

You cannot un-ring this bell.

The Justice Department is not just a building or a budget line; it is a hundred years of accumulated trust, the radical and fragile idea that the federal prosecutor coming through your door is doing it because of what you did, not because of who you voted for or who you crossed. That trust is the only thing that separates a subpoena from a shakedown.

And it is the slowest asset in American life to build and the fastest to destroy. Every juror who now wonders whether the case in front of her is real or political, every agent who watches the Payback Squad collect its bonuses and quietly updates his understanding of how you get ahead at the Bureau, every honest line prosecutor who decides the integrity isn’t worth the career risk and walks, every one of them is a brick pulled out of a wall that took generations to lay. Patel and Blanche are not spending political capital. They are spending the institution’s capital, the real and irreplaceable kind, and they are spending it like men who have already bounced the checks.

Subscribe now

When this passes, and it will pass, because these things always do, the rebuilding will take a generation, and some of it will not come back at all.

The decorated agents who got purged to make room for the loyalists, men like former Acting Director Brian Driscoll, a Medal of Valor recipient, do not come back. The norm that a prosecutor can doubt a case and say so without losing her job does not come by memo. You will be able to rename the Payback Squad. You will not be able to un-teach the lesson it taught every ambitious agent watching.

Which brings us to the reckoning, and I want to be very clear-eyed about it, because false comfort is its own kind of lie.

Right now Raskin is in the minority, and the minority cannot compel a thing. He can write letters. He can demand documents by June 29. Patel can, and so far has, simply ignored him, secure in the knowledge that a ranking member has subpoena power roughly equivalent to a strongly worded Yelp review. That is the present tense, and it is genuinely grim.

But political winters end.

When the House flips in November, and the forecasts increasingly suggest it might, the entire calculus inverts overnight. The letters become subpoenas. The polite requests become compelled testimony under oath. Every bounced bonus payment becomes a document Patel must produce or be held in contempt to withhold.

Every member of the Director’s Advisory Team becomes a witness. Every dollar of that million-plus becomes a line item somebody has to explain to a committee with the power to make the explaining hurt. Patel, who has spent his career writing enemies lists and promising retribution, is constructing the most meticulous paper trail of abuse in modern Bureau history, and he is doing it in a town where the gavel changes hands. The man who built the Payback Squad should spend some quiet evenings contemplating the precise meaning of payback when the subpoenas finally run the other way. I am so excited to see Patel under oath…and Kash, buddy…we’re also visiting the Poodle Room, and reports you’re a blackout drunk. Enjoy!

And contemplate it he should, because the people he is targeting and the people who will eventually hold the gavel have learned the same lesson Trump’s own deputies admitted out loud. Blanche himself, at CPAC, said the quiet part into a live microphone: everybody’s afraid that if they lose, they’ll all be investigated. He understands the machine perfectly, because he is the machine. He just assumes he’ll never be on the wrong end of it. That is the assumption every operator of a corrupt regime makes, right up until the morning he is wrong.

Let me say the thing plainly, without the comfortable euphemisms that let people pretend this is normal politics played a little rough.

This is not “tough on crime.” This is not “draining the swamp.” This is not even, despite the Bureau’s own grimly honest nickname, merely “payback.”

Payback is personal and bounded; it ends when the grudge is satisfied. (Well, mostly. I’ve been known to drive a bit harder on this front than some.)

What Patel and Blanche are building has no natural endpoint, because it is not about settling scores. It is about establishing a principle: that the apparatus of federal law enforcement belongs to one man, points only in the direction he aims it, and rewards the people who pull the trigger.

A justice system that exists to punish the leader’s enemies and pay the leader’s enforcers is not a corrupted democracy. It is the functioning core of something else entirely, and we have a word for that thing, and squeamishness about using it is exactly how it wins.

It isn’t payback.

It’s fascism.

Subscribe now

This post was brought to you by Ground News. Don’t let half the press make this story disappear — get 40% off the Vantage plan here and see who is, and isn’t, telling you the truth about your Justice Department.

Moscow Is Burning
Iran Won: It’s Official.
Don’t Think, Don…It Hurts The Team
Florida Resident Tommy Tuberville
The Far Right Is Winning In Britain
American Flag Blue, Algae Green
Another Old NYC Favorite Goes Dark
So You’re Telling Me Vaccines Work?
Mythos, Fable, and Worse

The Big Picture

Moscow Is Burning

Donald Trump’s role model, friend, blackmailer, and boss, Vladimir Putin, is hearing the sound of death coming for him, with Ukrainian drones bringing the fight to Moscow.

For four years, Vladimir Putin sold his people a three-day “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine. It was a war against someone else’s cities, someone else’s children, someone else’s apartment blocks turned to dust, the whole cost of war borne by Ukrainian civilians. Russia was too big, too powerful for tiny Ukraine to survive, much less retaliate.

It went wrong for Russia, fast.

Russia rolled everything they had in a play to take Kyiv. They were crushed. They’ve taken ground by inches in the East, lost it against Ukraine’s drones and technology. Russia’s military is gutted, hollow, and failing.

Putin’s American allies Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, and paid-off, treasonous MAGA influencer class did everything they could to delay and starve Ukraine of weapons and support.

They failed. Ukraine changed the game. Ukraine is winning. Slowly, at terrible cost, but Russia and Putin smell of death.

Putin will die. Russia will fall. And that’s the ballgame.

Four years in, and with over a million Russian boys dead for Putin’s war, the battlefield was stalemated; Russia couldn’t win, but Ukraine wouldn’t lose. Then came the Ukrainian realization that Trump was Putin’s ally, and long-range attack help was never coming. So they built their own.

Read more

Trump’s power, success, and competence, all imaginary, drove their own sense of self, reshaped their identities. Feeding him praise fed them a sense of purpose.

But it was never enough.

The raw, endless black hole of need, the most powerful addiction in Trump’s portfolio of pathologies, is the demand for automatic, unquestioning praise, bordering on worship. Trump has always expected a hallelujah chorus for everything he did, including soiling his XXL Husky-Fit Depends for Big Boys. And damn, did MAGA and its paid scamfluencers and media mouthpieces deliver.

This week, that’s over. The Iran deal seems to have broken that spell across MAGA, and they’re very, very, very angry with…of all people…Donald Trump.

This week the United States and Iran initialed the now-infamous memorandum of understanding to end the war Donald Trump started in February, the one branded “Operation Epic Fury” by a man with no sense of irony whatsoever. (One friend who spent a lot of time executing big operations in the last couple wars said it should have been called “Operation Erectile Flaccidity.”)

It was, and will remain throughout history, an absolute capitulation on the part of the United States. Setting aside the utter strategic calamity of this war and this deal for the United States, the MAGA wailing and lamentations over this utter trainwreck are hilarious.

Read more

It needs people who do not break. It needs people who will fight the fight that matters most, and for the next two years, that fight is against Donald J. Trump and his corrupt, vile criminal enterprise.

That is why I am endorsing George Conway for Congress in New York’s Twelfth.

I know George. George is a friend. Hell, the origin story of the Lincoln Project is a long lunch at Quality Meats with George, myself, and Molly Jong Fast in 2018. Even then, he knew that Trump would be the target of the biggest fight of our lives.

I have watched him take fire that would have sent lesser men into witness protection. When Trump aimed the full firehose of his rage at George, the nicknames, the threats, the late-night unhinged posting, George never flinched. He did not issue a clarifying statement. He did not call his consultants to ask whether the polling supported having a backbone. He laughed, and then he hit back harder, and he did it with a litigator’s precision that left marks Trump still can’t shake.

I wish all Democratic leaders had his spine, his legal brain, and his determination.

That matters now more than it has ever mattered. Because here is the ugly truth about the next two years. The fight is going to get hot, and a lot of Democrats are going to get weak.

You have seen it before. The press release courage. The strongly-worded letter caucus. The members who talk like Churchill in the green room and vote like Chamberlain on the floor.

When the pressure comes, and it is coming, half of Washington will rediscover the ancient art of finding their car keys when the hard vote is called. They will tell you the moment requires nuance. They will tell you to wait for the next election. They will tell you anything except the truth, which is that they are scared.

George Conway is not scared. He has already proven it, in public, for years, at the cost to his own family and his standing in a party that once treated him as royalty. He gave all that up to tell the truth about an authoritarian. You do not need a focus group to know how a man like that votes when the lights are off and the cameras are gone.

Now, a word about the alternative being marketed in this race.

Jack Schlossberg is a famous young man with a famous last name and a social media feed that is, let us be charitable, about Jack Schlossberg. There is a version of Democratic politics that believes the answer to a constitutional crisis is a charismatic posting machine with good genes and a famous name.

Share

I do not share that belief. The Twelfth District does not need a content creator. It needs a constitutional litigator who has spent the better part of a decade in the trenches against the exact threat the next Congress will be sworn to confront. One of these men has been studying Trump’s lawlessness like a brief he intends to win. The other has been studying his own engagement metrics.

This is not complicated.

The stakes here are not abstract. The next two years will determine whether the guardrails hold or whether they are quietly dismantled by a regime that has told you exactly what it intends to do. Congress is the firewall. And a firewall made of people who fold under heat is not a firewall. It is kindling.

George Conway is not kindling. He is a human flamethrower.

He is the rare creature in our politics who went looking for the fight, took the worst they could throw, and asked for more. He has the legal mind to expose the corruption, the temperament to withstand the assault, and the proven, scar-tissue-deep willingness to stand his ground when standing your ground is the only thing that counts.

There will come a day when we’re back to regular order, back to trying to pass legislation that matters and help people who need help. But the war before us is vicious, political, and without fighters dedicated to wrecking Trump’s efforts to overturn our democracy before it’s too late, Congress will recede into the darkness the way the old Republican party did.

I have spent my career making ads designed to find the soft spot in a candidate. George is a candidate designed to find the soft spots in Trump…and break him.

That is the highest compliment I know how to give.

Send him to Congress. We need George Conway in this fight.

Share

P.S. Not that it matters that much, but I was a resident of today’s 12th District for several years; Yorkville, baby, 81st between 1st and 2nd.

Get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.

Let’s start with the photograph, because the photograph tells you everything.

Donald Trump, in France, at the G7, slumped at a table in Evian-les-Bains with the affect of a man who has just been told the buffet closed early. Macron beaming beside him. Von der Leyen on a tear about energy weaponization. The Emir of Qatar getting his own bilateral. And the President of the United States sitting there like a deflated parade float, eyes half-lidded, the famous motor mouth idling at a stoplight that never turns green

.

This is what victory looks like, apparently. This is the wind-at-his-back, page-turning, global-security breakthrough we were promised. A tired old man in a foreign chair, surrounded by allies he spent fifteen weeks insulting, signing nothing while claiming everything.

He started a war with Iran. And he lost it. And the proof is the room.

Look at who’s running that room. It isn’t us. Macron invited Egypt, Qatar, and the UAE to the Middle East session, the Gulf money that actually demanded an end to, and then settled this thing...with cash. Von der Leyen is lecturing on how to wean Europe off the Strait of Hormuz so it never again depends on an American president’s mood swings. The G7 has politely promoted the United States from leader of the free world to an amusing, if rather dotty, guest.

We are a peripheral player at the table we built. Trump didn’t turn a page. He transformed America into a footnote in the global power structure we should steer. Odd how abandoning every value will do that.

Now to the deal. And I use that word the way I’d use “Michelin Star” to describe a gas station hot dogs on the roller for 36 hours.

What did they sign? A page and a half. JD Vance said it himself: a page and a half. The text won’t be released until Friday, after a signing ceremony that Trump may not even bother attending, because of course he won’t: the man has the attention span of a goldfish at a rave. A page and a half, signed virtually, by a president and a vice president on one end and an Iranian parliament speaker on the other.

That’s not a treaty. The Senate ratifies treaties. That’s not even a real memorandum of understanding. That’s a DocuSign. That’s an agreement to make an agreement, a coupon for a future deal that may or may not be honored, redeemable nowhere, expiring whenever Tehran decides it’s bored.

The whole thing is another Trump prank, the same con he ran with North Korea, the same beautiful-letters routine, the same handshake-and-a-headline with nothing underneath. He didn’t end a war. He scheduled sixty more days of talks and called it peace.

And here’s the part that should make your teeth itch because it’s an article of faith with the GOP that Secret Muslim Sleeper Agent Barack HUSSEIN Obama shipped C-17s full of cash to Iran.

It’s the Trump bribe.

Reporting now indicates the United States secretly approved a financial arrangement letting Qatar funnel billions to Iran, some of it disguised as tanker fees through Hormuz, a credit line opened for Iranian purchases, the whole thing greased while the U.S. Navy ran a blockade with one hand and held the cash spigot open with the other.

A dual policy. Tough-guy press releases up top, financial oxygen pumped to Tehran underneath. Qatar says no funds have moved yet. Trump stood next to the Emir on Tuesday and swore up and down that America isn’t “investing any money in Iran.”

Sure. And the check is in the mail, and he’ll respect you in the morning.

This is what the maximum-pressure tough guy actually delivered. He gave the regime he bombed a financial lifeline. He gave the Iranian state a bridge loan. He campaigned for a decade, calling the Obama deal a catastrophe that funneled billions to the mullahs, then turned around and built a worse version with a Gulf cutout to keep his own fingerprints off the cash. Everything Trump touches dies, and then he bills you for the funeral.

A Word From Our Sponsor — Speaking Of Cons Being Run On You In The Background

While Trump was busy in Evian arranging for billions to flow to the mullahs through a Gulf cutout, a smaller, quieter, considerably more relevant con was being run on every American with a phone, an inbox, and a mailing address.

Got scam calls? The worst part hasn’t happened yet.

When scammers get hold of your data, they don’t just take your money. They sell what’s left — your name, address, phone number, the names of people close to you — to the next buyer.

Congress put a number on it: four breaches alone have cost Americans $20 billion. But the financial loss is round one. That same data is what anyone who means you harm uses to find you and your home.

Incogni removes your data from those databases before round two. Get 55% off annual plans with code RICK55.

Twenty billion dollars vanishing into a scam economy is the kind of catastrophic loss a normal president would notice. This one is too busy DocuSigning love letters to Tehran. So you’re going to have to handle it yourself.

Now, back to the loser-in-chief.

So why now? Why the sudden urgency from a man who told us for weeks that time was on our side, that we shouldn’t rush, that gas at the pump was “a small price to pay”?

Two reasons, and neither of them is strategy.

One: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve hit the floor. Three hundred and forty million barrels, the lowest since 1983, when the number-one song was something you danced to in parachute pants. (Did I own them? I’ll never tell.) Trump drained it faster than Biden ever did, the same Biden he spent years savaging for draining it. He’s been burning the national emergency stockpile like a trust-fund kid torching the principal, and the tank is now scraping bottom heading into hurricane season with no cushion left.

But gas prices never came down. They sat high and ugly through a war he started, an unauthorized war nobody voted for, with families eating fifty-cent-a-gallon increases while he told them to tough it out. He needed this over not because we won but because the meter was running and the wallet was empty.

So he caved. He grabbed the first page-and-a-half he could DocuSign and ran to France to call it a triumph.

And here’s the cruelest joke. The relief won’t come fast. The energy analysts are blunt: months, not days. Maybe September. Maybe October. Conveniently, the relief arrives right around the midterms, which I’m sure is a coincidence.

Because prices work like a ratchet, and Trump just learned the physics of it the hard way. The ratchet is lubed. Prices rocket the second a chokepoint waterway closes, or a missile flies. But the ratchet down is sticky as hell. It crawls. Rockets and feathers, the economists call it. Up like a rocket, down like a feather, and the feather is in no hurry.

That’s the whole presidency in a metaphor. Impulsive on the way up, paralyzed on the way down, and the American family pays for the differential.

He started a war he didn’t have to start. He drained the reserve we swore to protect. He bribed the same enemy he bombed..and enemy now arguably more extreme and dug in. He signed an IOU and called it a treaty. He handed power to Iran and China in ways only Trump could accomplish, and while they’re grateful, they also simply have to pinch themselves to believe it’s true.

And we did it all so a tired man could sit in a French chair, half-asleep, and pretend the room still revolved around him.

Of course, he lost. He was always going to lose. You don’t win a war you started for a headline. You just find out, eventually, what the headline costs. Finally, and in the delicious category of “there’s always a Tweet,” I will close with this gem: “The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don’t win anymore!”

So true, Mr. President. So true.

Rick Wilson’s Against All Enemies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This post was sponsored by Incogni. Don’t let the con get to you, too — get 55% off an Annual Plan with code RICK55 and take your data off the market.

Subscribe now

Share