Inside

The Spectacle of Corruption
Spotted In Sacramento
The Slush Fund Flops With…Republicans
Massie: Why Are You Surprised
Ebola, Elon, and DOGE
An AI Backlash? Faster, please!
Never Run Again, Polis
What I’m Reading
Scenes From The Home Front

The Spectacle of Corruption

They tried to get cute by making the amount $1.776 billion.

That’s the part to focus on first, not the slush fund itself, which is grotesque, and not the Acting Attorney General’s addendum permanently barring the IRS from auditing Donald Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, or “other family members,” which is so insanely unprecedented, and not even the explicit eligibility of Jan. 6 defendants for taxpayer-funded reparations, which is a category of obscenity we did not previously have a word for.

Focus on the number.

$1.776 billion. The year of the Revolution, rounded into a slush fund for Donald Trump’s thugs, degenerates, and minions. They could have made it $1.5 billion. They could have made it $2 billion. They chose to mock the founding because they wanted you to notice.

This is the week’s signature, and the signature of the era: corruption that is no longer concealed but performed. The Treasury general counsel resigned in protest after the deal was inked.

Doesn’t matter. Bloomberg Law’s columnists are flagging the DOJ lawyers who drafted it for potential fraud exposure. Doesn’t matter. Ron Wyden is promising to fight every element of what he called “self-dealing.” Doesn’t matter. The fund will be administered by DOJ with no independent oversight, will operate under Trump’s ultimate control, and will distribute taxpayer money to a class of people defined entirely by their loyalty to him. That isn’t a side effect. That is the design.

And the IRS deal is just the headline event. Look at the rest of the bill.

Monday afternoon, the Justice Department moved to drop criminal charges against Gautam Adani in Brooklyn. The same day, Treasury resolved an Adani sanctions probe. Last week, the SEC settled its fraud case. Three federal agencies, one weekend, one outcome: Asia’s richest man walks. No one at the press conference will use the word “bribery” but that’s absolutely what it is. Quid pro cha-ching

.

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Read it as a document from a party that would rather lose than offend elements of its own base. Read it as an indictment of a consultant class living on hopium from the glory days of Barack Obama. Read it as a fossil record of exactly why The Lincoln Project exists, why we keep showing up, and why the work isn’t optional anymore.

The report is titled “Build to Win. Build to Last.” A heroic title for a document whose Executive Summary section literally reads “This section was not provided by author.” The Conclusion? “This section was not provided by the author.” The Appendices? Same. The document is full of redactions and excisions. It’s the Epstein Files of political party autopsies.

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Let’s start with a number, because the number is the whole story and the rest is just decoration.

3,700.

Between January and March of this year, three months, ninety-odd days, one fiscal quarter of a man who is supposed to be running the country, Donald Trump’s required ethics filings disclosed 3,700 stock trades worth somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Microsoft. Meta. Oracle. Broadcom. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. Nvidia. Apple. An S&P 500 index fund, because even a degenerate gambler likes a hedge. Municipal bonds, for flavor.

That’s not a portfolio. That’s a casino floor. And the President of the United States is standing in the middle of it, counting cards at the table while the pit boss looks the other way, and the cameras, conveniently, are off.

You are supposed to find this normal now. You are supposed to scroll past it. That’s the entire design.

So let’s not

.

Here is the part where I am legally and intellectually obligated to be precise, so pay attention. Precision is the enemy of this whole operation, and they are counting on you being too tired for it.

Insider trading is not “rich guy buys stock.”

Insider trading, as a federal crime, has elements: actual, legally defined moving parts a prosecutor has to bolt together. You need material, non-public information. You need a trade made on the basis of it. You need a breach of a duty of trust. And you need the thing lawyers call scienter, which is a fancy Latin way of saying the person knew exactly what they were doing. (Insider trading rabbit holes are shockingly amusing. I’ve been in one for two days.)

The rabbit hole led me to the Supreme Court last night, because of course it did. SCOTUS, over time, blessed two flavors of this in United States v. O’Hagan, the “classical” theory and the “misappropriation” theory, and federal prosecutors get to reach for the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the heavy artillery of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, the criminal securities-fraud statute that carries up to twenty-five years in a federal prison. I don’t understand it all, either, but it strikes me that Trump’s legal team will need to be up on these, quite soon.

Now hold that definition in your hand like a ruler, and lay it next to the reporting.

According to the Washington Post‘s reading of these filings, Trump bought Nvidia on February 10. Days later, Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and the stock jumped roughly 2.5 percent. He sold Microsoft and Amazon in February, then bought millions more in March, shortly before the Pentagon announced it would put its technology into classified computer networks.

Let me say the quiet part at conversational volume: I am not telling you that is a proven crime. I am telling you that if you fed those two paragraphs to a hundred securities lawyers with no name attached, every one of them would say the same two words before their coffee got cold: “Lawyer up.”

The President of the United States sits atop the single largest pile of non-public material intelligence and information on planet Earth. He knows what the Pentagon is buying before the Pentagon’s vendors do. He knows the tariff rate before the market does, because he is the source of the tariff. Markets are always defined by information asymmetry. For him, the asymmetry isn’t a loophole. It’s the strategy. It’s the job.

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A normal person who traded a defense contractor’s stock the week before a classified Pentagon contract would be explaining himself to men in windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. Trump gets a $200 fine. Twice. We’ll come back to the two hundred dollars, because the two hundred dollars is the funniest and darkest detail in the entire file.

Here is the thing that turns this from a scandal into a regime: there is functionally no one on the beat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, has been hollowed out with the precision of me working a Thanksgiving turkey. Since the administration took over, the SEC has shed the order of 18% of its workforce, dropping from roughly 5,000 employees to around 4,200, the bulk of them walking out the door clutching $50,000 buyout checks dangled by the same government they were supposed to police.

The Enforcement Division and the Office of the General Counsel, the cops and the lawyers, in other words, took the deepest cuts. DOGE set up shop inside the SEC headquarters, occupying actual rooms; nothing good was ever going to come of that. The Philadelphia and Los Angeles field offices were slated to go dark. Enforcement actions against public companies are down roughly thirty percent. The new chairman publicly mused that it’s “good every once in a while to have a house cleaning.” Uh huh.

You do not need a decoder ring. When the man at the top is running a quarter-billion-dollar trading book off privileged information, and the watchdog has been defunded, depopulated, and told to think of mass attrition as spring cleaning, that is not two unrelated news stories. That is one strategy with two press releases.

This is the part that should raise the hair on your neck, regardless of your party. The genius of the grift is not that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s legal-adjacent by demolition. You don’t have to break the law if you can fire the people who enforce it and starve out the ones who remain. The cop didn’t miss the robbery. The cop took the buyout, and the robber signed the check.

Fine. You want to know how this plays as an actual case. Put on the prosecutor’s jacket for a second, because the honest answer is more damning than the cartoon.

It would be hard.

Not because the conduct smells clean. It reeks.

Going to take a moment to mention where I get my news – at Ground News – who brought you this free article today.

Donald Trump’s 3,700 stock trades — somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billion dollars in a single quarter, while he sits atop the single largest stockpile of market-moving information on planet Earth and the SEC is being deliberately starved — is one of those stories that should be everywhere. Whether it’s everywhere in your feed depends entirely on whose feed you’re in.

In writing this piece, I leaned on Ground News the same way I do every day, to cut through the static and chatter, and to test my assumptions about who is actually covering the trades and who is quietly pretending it isn’t happening. Their analytical tools let me examine the biases in the sources covering this story, the ownership of those media outlets, and the blind spots on every side of this thing.

So, how do you figure out whether the President is running an insider-trading book out of the Oval Office without getting yanked around by whoever is yelling loudest on cable? Ground News.

A lot of the coverage is, thankfully, right up the middle — Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, Axios all running the same numbers with the same skepticism — and Ground News gives me that picture up front:

On the right, seemingly desperate not to look at the actual fact pattern, the news is mostly the predictable shrug — “everyone does this,” “it’s a trust,” “his sons run it” — buried under stories about the President welcoming the Olympic hockey team to the White House:

I mean…that’s some weapons-grade misdirection. A bright spot by the loosest kind of association, I suppose.

On the left, one story hit hard: the SEC, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, hollowed out by 18%, Enforcement and General Counsel taking the deepest cuts, DOGE setting up shop inside SEC headquarters, enforcement actions down 30 percent. The corruption delivery system has a delivery address:

Amen, folks. It’s powerful enough of an idea that you can watch it travel across factuality ratings and political leans…Mother Jones on the left and the Wall Street Journal on the right arrive at roughly the same conclusion, even when the framing on each side could not be more different.

Ground News is a website and an app I’ve come to rely on for exactly these stories — the ones where the corruption is engineered to be unprovable, and the only way to keep score is to compare headlines, ownership, factuality, and lean in one place. In this story, I could see the Casino Donnie story clearly, without the noise and clutter of partisan media.

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 or scan the QR code below.

It’s hard because the structure was engineered to be unprosecutable.

The filings don’t say which accounts the trades ran through. They don’t say who placed them. Some show a broker acting as agent. The assets sit in a trust controlled by his children, and the Trump Organization’s official statement is a masterpiece of the genre: “Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.”

Read that sentence again. It is not a denial of corruption. It is a ludicrously implausible middle finger to prosecutors, notarized.

To win a criminal insider-trading case, you’d have to prove that he, personally, knew the information, knew it was material and non-public, and that that knowledge drove that trade. Occam’s Razor, sadly, is not an element of the offense. And you’d be proving it against a defendant who can shrug and point at a trust, at a broker, at two large adult failsons, at a wall of intermediaries built for precisely this moment. The materiality is arguable. The non-public part is arguable. The “who pushed the button” part is a smoke machine running at full blast.

And that is the actual scandal. Not that it’s an easy case. That it’s a hard case by design. They didn’t stumble into a gray area. They poured the foundation and moved in. A system in which the most powerful man alive can trade on information only he possesses, through a structure specifically crafted so no prosecutor can ever cleanly pin it on him, is not a system with a corruption problem.

It is a corruption delivery system with a government attached. The unprovability isn’t exculpatory. It’s a confession of guilt.

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For the record, the clock matters too. Criminal securities fraud generally has to be charged within about six years; the civil insider-trading provisions run roughly five years from the last transaction. The window is not infinite, the conduct is recent, and “wait it out” is, transparently, part of the plan. Every quarter of normalization is a quarter closer to the statute doing the job the SEC was gutted to avoid.

Here is the part where they want you to believe everyone does this. Everyone does not do this. Nobody did this.

The entire modern norm, boring, unglamorous, load-bearing, is the blind trust. You hand your assets to an independent trustee. They manage it. You don’t know what you own, you don’t know what’s traded, you can’t tip, and you can’t be tipped, because the whole point is that your right hand has no idea what your fortune’s left hand is doing. It is not a courtesy.

It is the firewall between “President” and “beneficiary,” and presidents of both parties submitted to it precisely because they understood the alternative looks exactly like this.

What Trump has is not that.

What Trump has is a trust run by Don Jr. and Eric, his own kids, his own employees, which makes “blind” do the kind of work that “REQUIRES VISION CORRECTION FOR NIGHT DRIVING” does on a driver’s license. The Daily Beast put it gently: a setup that “differs from the blind trusts typically used by other presidents.”

Oh, you think? Calling this a blind trust is like calling a one-way mirror a privacy screen. It depends entirely on which side you’re standing, and he’s standing on the side that can see everything.

And the public is not confused about this. Eighty-eight percent of Americans say public officials should not be trading individual stocks while in office. That is not a partisan wedge. That is one of the few things left that Americans agree on, and the President is doing the precise opposite of it, at nine-figure scale, in writing, on a government form.

Because of course he is. You didn’t think the trading floor had only one trader.

The same two sons who run the not-blind trust run an empire that has, in the family’s boom years, expanded into crypto and real-estate licensing across the Middle East and Asia. Forbes clocked Eric as roughly ten times richer than he was when this started, net worth in the neighborhood of $400 million, now the wealthiest of the Trump children. The New Yorker reported the family is on track to pad its wealth by something like $3.4 billion by the end of the term. The Daily Beast reported a new Trump Tower in Tbilisi tied to a firm linked to a sanctioned pro-Kremlin billionaire. I know you’re as shocked as I am. And Jared Kushner, the son-in-law who collected two billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund after a White House tour spent conspicuously friendly to the people writing the check, is practically a footnote now. When the two-billion-dollar Saudi guy is the part you almost forget to mention, the baseline has moved somewhere no republic should ever let it go.

That’s the texture to hold onto. The stock trades are not an anomaly poking out of an otherwise clean presidency. They are one instrument in an orchestra: the crypto ventures, the foreign licensing, the tower in Tbilisi, the Gulf resorts, the pay-to-play pardon machine, the wrecked SEC, and an Acting Attorney General who still seems to think he’s Trump’s personal lawyer. These aren’t scandals, plural. This is one scandal, and it has a household.

I’m not going to insult you with a tidy bow. Here are the only three things that are actually true.

It is not normal. Not “unusual.” Not “norm-breaking” in the gentle NPR sense. A sitting president running a quarter-billion-dollar securities book, minimum, atop the largest stockpile of market-moving secrets in human history, through a trust run by his own kids, while the agency that polices exactly this is deliberately starved, has no American precedent, because every previous occupant of that office understood, on a gut level, that this was the bright line you do not so much as lean on.

It is built to be impossible to prosecute, which is not the same as innocent. Those are opposite things wearing the same coat. “You can’t quite prove it” is the product, not the defense.

And it is only invisible if you agree to stop looking. That is the entire wager. Not that you’ll approve. They know you won’t; the 88 percent won’t. The wager is that you’ll get tired. That the number becomes wallpaper. That Casino Donnie ends up a punchline instead of an indictment of all of us for leaving the table open.

It’s not that Trump paid no price for the spree. He did.

He paid a two-hundred-dollar fine. Twice. For the late paperwork on hundreds of millions in trades.

Four hundred dollars and a shrug.

That’s not the penalty. That’s the receipt of the United States government, in its own ledger, pricing the corruption of the presidency, and daring you to care more than it does.

This article is brought to you free by Ground News.

It was a daylight robbery, a smash and grab of $1.8 billion of your money.

This essay isn’t about simply what happened, and why we’re so numb to it, but on how to turn this on Trump, the corrupt Todd Blanche DOJ, MAGA, and the GOP and make this robbery a political poison pill they’ll regret for a very long time.

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Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy spent five years trying to outrun a vote. This weekend, Trump and ETTD caught him.

Let me start with the part that I’ve been screaming into the void since approximately 2015, the part that the political-obituary writers at the legacy outlets will gently elide because it’s impolite to say I told you so over a man’s still-warm career: Everything Trump Touches Dies.

ETTD. It’s not a slogan I coined to sell books. It’s a law of political physics, as reliable as gravity and twice as merciless, and Bill Cassidy just became its latest case study, splayed out on a slab in Baton Rouge while the coroner reads the cause of death aloud.

He came in third. Third! In a three-way race!

That’s because Cassidy was stupid. Oh, he’s not a stupid man, but he thought he was an exception to ETTD, to the cult of power and personality led by a sociopathic would-be dictator who cannot be appeased, a Temu Terminator of his fellow Republicans because he’s obsessed with revenge and retribution.

On paper, Cassidy should have been fine.

A two-term incumbent senator, chairman of the Senate health committee, sitting on a $10-plus-million war chest he’d loaned himself, outspending his rivals by a margin that would make a defense contractor blush…over seventeen million in ads against Julia Letlow’s five and John Fleming’s pocket lint, and he finished behind both of them with a wet, sad 24.8 percent.

And lest anyone pretend this was about ideology, about Cassidy being some squish, some closet liberal in a lab coat: the man voted with Trump 89% of the time across his first term…and 90% in the first two years. His own campaign was bragging about it, waving the numbers like a hall pass.

Cassidy agreed with Trump eighty-nine percent of the time and got branded a traitor anyway over one vote, five years ago, that wasn't about policy at all. That's the tell. The modern GOP doesn't run on Reagan's math. It runs on a loyalty oath, and the oath has no partial credit.

The last time an elected Republican senator lost a primary, Barack Obama was president, and we were all worried about Mayan calendars. Cassidy didn’t just lose. He got curb-stomped by a congresswoman Trump endorsed from his phone in January and a treasurer nobody outside Louisiana could pick out of a lineup.

And here’s the thing that should be tattooed on the inside of every surviving Republican’s eyelids: none of them will learn from this. None. Not one. They will study Cassidy’s corpse the way a man studies a car wreck on the opposite side of the highway…with a brief, queasy fascination…and then they will accelerate into the night.

“I’ll never be the guy in the wrecked car that Trump ran off the road,” they whisper. “I’m one of the lucky ones…Trump will always love me.”

Let’s talk about the original sin, because that’s what this was, in the rituals of the modern GOP. Cassidy voted to convict Donald Trump in the second impeachment trial. He was one of seven. Seven Republican senators who looked at the smoking wreckage of January 6th, at a mob hunting Mike Pence through the Capitol with zip ties, and concluded that maybe the man who summoned them shouldn’t be president again.

A vote of conscience. A vote that, in a healthy party, would be unremarkable. In this one, it was a death sentence with a five-year stay of execution.

Because here’s what Cassidy did next, and this is the part that elevates the story from tragedy to Trumpian farce. Having committed the unforgivable, he spent the next several years frantically trying to be forgiven. He didn’t double down on the principle. He didn’t go full Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger and welcome political martyrdom in the name of principle.

He negotiated. He tried to split the difference with a movement that does not do nuance, does not do partial credit, does not grade on a curve.

The crowning achievement of this strategy of appeasement was the RFK Jr. vote. Bill Cassidy…a physician, a man who has presumably read a medical study or two, and who chaired the committee overseeing the nation’s health, voted to confirm a raccoon-penis-snipping, worm-brained anti-vaccine conspiracist to run Health and Human Services.

He held his nose, extracted some worthless verbal assurances, and put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of American public health, apparently believing this act of submission would buy him a permission slip back into the tribe. He even spent the following year sparring with RFK over vaccine safety and the gutting of the CDC advisory panels, which is the political equivalent of setting your own house on fire and then complaining about the smoke damage.

It bought him nothing. It was always going to buy him nothing. That is the part Cassidy and the entire cowering remnant of the institutional GOP cannot, will not, are constitutionally incapable of internalizing.

There is no appeasement price that satisfies Trump’s hunger.

The bill is never paid, because the debt isn’t financial; it’s a loyalty oath sworn in blood, and there are no installment plans. You cannot impeach the man and then confirm his cabinet and net out even. The ledger doesn’t work that way. The ledger only records the betrayal.

Donald Trump really, really didn’t like Bill Cassidy. But he always knew where to find Cassidy…for those of us who want to protect our privacy, here’s a reminder that your data and your privacy are for sale to people who want to take advantage of you.

The Independent ran a piece this year about a woman who’d barely used social media. Barely. A ghost. And her stalker still rolled up with her home address, her relatives, and her workplace anyway ,the whole dossier, gift-wrapped, off a single name search on a data broker site. No hack. No breach. No shadowy Russian intelligence asset in a Moscow hotel room. Just a search box, a few bucks, and a website with the moral compass of a parking meter.

These sites do not ask why somebody is looking you up. They never have. They never will. They just hand over the goods. Your address. Your family. Your daily patterns. The names of your kids, the make of your car, the church you go to on the Sundays…all of it, available to any person on planet earth with the price of a sandwich and a grudge. An angry ex. A stranger on the internet. Some absolute lunatic who didn’t like the thing you posted at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday, because he was drunk and you happened to be right.

Incogni is the only service I’ve come across that actually fights back. They hunt the data brokers down, one sleazy little site at a time, force the takedown, and then do it again, and again, and again when the data crawls its way back into the daylight — which it absolutely will, because data brokers are cockroaches in a suit and tie. Set it once. Let it run. Sleep better.

We use it. We trust it. Check out Incogni today.

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This is the GOP’s terminal blind spot, and it’s worth naming precisely: they keep believing they can transact a deal with Trump, that somehow he won’t turn on them if they ever betray the slightest tendency to principle.

They think there’s a deal in there somewhere, a position, a vote, a sufficiently groveling Fox hit that squares the account. There is not, and will never be.

Trump’s grip on the primary electorate isn’t a policy preference that can be bargained against. It’s his superpower, the one durable asset in the whole gaudy, failing, criminal enterprise he calls a Presidency; the ability to walk into a closed primary in ruby-red Louisiana, where he won 60 percent in 2024, point a finger at a sitting senator, and end him. He didn’t even bother to campaign there in person. Gravity did the rest.

And so we arrive at the moral, the one Trump himself supplies at every rally when he reads “The Snake”…that interminable, terrible poem about the kindly woman who nurses a frozen serpent back to health and gets a fatal bite for her trouble. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.

He thinks he’s the woman in that story, betrayed by the migrants, the deep state, the disloyal. He has never once understood that he is the snake. He is always the snake. We told you. We keep telling you.

Cassidy took him in. Voted his agenda, confirmed his cabinet, swallowed the RFK poison pill, and stood there with his arms open, expecting gratitude. Last night he got the bite. He’ll spend his lame-duck months, per his concession speech, finally being the thorn he should’ve been all along, which is the timing of a man who orders the sprinklers after the building’s already been reduced to ash.

The next Republican is already in line. They watched the whole thing. They learned nothing. For all the gushing over J.D. and Marco now, when 2028 revs up, expect Trump to suddenly remember the sins of Marco from 2016 or J.D. Vance before 2024.

Expect Trump to always exercise his one, crappy superpower of making the Republican base exact revenge on the men and women who have given their honor, their principles, and their careers in escrow to his manias and paranoia.

Ronald Reagan once famously said, “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20 percent traitor."

Not in Trump’s world.

And that’s why ETTD works on people who try to appease him.

Every single time.

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It’s recursive and boring.

Pratt’s message, delivered with a comic, postmodern AI flourish, is…and I cannot believe I’m typing this about a Hills alum…quite frankly very well done. It’s not an endorsement; it’s an observation.

For a man who has no business being in a close second place, Pratt is doing something politically that Democrats should learn from once they’re done pretending that campaigns will stay the same, forever.

What’s the message? Crime makes the city unlivable. Filth makes the city unlivable. Bureaucracy makes the city unlivable. Kids are unsafe. You are unsafe. Decline is a choice. The ads themselves are the campaign. There is no campaign apart from the ads.

And that’s ok.

And what ads they are. Picture this: an AI-generated Gotham-grade dystopia where

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The Big Picture

Why Culture War Is Enough for MAGA

Here’s the question that should be keeping every Democratic strategist up at night, somewhere between the third organic fair-trade Erehown matcha and the fourth existential crisis: why is it enough? Why don’t the MAGA hardcores understand how well and truly Trump is screwing them?

Gas is $4.55 a gallon. Foreclosure filings are at a six-year high. Trump’s approval is mired in the low 30s. He hasn’t ended a war; he’s threatening two more. The grocery bill that was supposed to crater on Day One has done the opposite. By every transactional measure, the measure we were all trained to believe decides elections, this administration is a failure in a saggy Brioni suit.

The 2026 election will be regarded in this space, this moment, this misery that will not stop and will not improve. A reader asked me a question earlier this week, asking for a deeper “why” on the sticky 30% of so who will not leave Trump. It percolated in my head for a few days.

And the base does not care. Not a little. Not at the margins. They do not care.

The instinct on our side is to treat this as a riddle, or a mass delusion, or a failure of messaging that one more chart will fix. It’s none of those things.

It’s the most rational thing in the world once you understand what MAGA was actually buying. They were never buying cheaper eggs. They were buying a feeling, a warm glow off the engine block of the Hate Machine, the feeling of winning, of dominance, of watching the people they resent get humiliated in real time. And culture war is the only product Trump sells that reliably delivers that feeling on schedule.

That’s why Democrats need to prepare for the pivot, and not allow it.

Think about the structure of it.

Material governance is hard, even for smart people. It requires competence, follow-through, trade-offs, and the patience and compromise missing from the MAGA party.

Trump has none of those things and never will.

But culture war? Culture war is infinitely renewable. It costs nothing. It doesn’t require a supply chain, a Senate vote, Fed cooperation, governance, or anything but a shameless willingness to hate.

There is always another enemy to manufacture, another terror to drag on to the Fox airwaves from the Catalog of Imaginary Demons: a flag, a pronoun, a migrant, a professor, a late-night host, a magazine columnist. The supply is endless because the supply is imaginary. You can’t run out of grievance the way you run out of money for a ballroom.

The Trump economy isn’t simply bad…it’s designed to break, to transform us into an

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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.

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

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We need to talk about November.

By now, you know the Trump cycle as well as you know the back of your own hand.

It runs like this, every time, with the metronomic predictability of a Swiss train: Trump floats an egregious thing. A “joke.” A musing. A Truth Social all-caps incontinence at 3:14 a.m.

The decent people of the republic react with appropriate horror. The MAGA media apparatus of Fox, Newsmax, CBS, the Twitter-poisoned podcast bros, and the MAGA Influencer-Industrial Complex fan out to tut-tut the horrified for being humorless scolds. He was kidding. You people are unhinged. Touch grass. Then, a beat later: well, he was kidding, but you have to admit he has a point. Then, a draft executive order leaks. Then it’s policy. Then it’s the law. Then it’s the new floor, and the next joke starts the cycle again, one rung lower.

We are now somewhere between phases three and four on stealing the 2026 midterms. And I want to walk you through, in plain Florida English, what is coming, because the political apparatus on our side keeps treating each new outrage as a one-off, when in fact it is a system, and the system has a name, and the name is the takeover.

The North Star is this: whatever they accuse the Democrats of, they are planning to do themselves. Always. It is a deeply reliable rule in MAGA politics, more reliable, certainly, than their spines. Rigged election? They are rigging it. Foreign interference? They are inviting it. Voter Fraud? You’re soaking in it.

Here is the menu they have already half-cooked.

Cleta Mitchell runs the operation. She already is, frankly, you just haven’t been paying attention. The 73-year-old Oklahoman who sat on the “find me 11,780 votes” call with Brad Raffensperger now runs the Election Integrity Network out of the Conservative Partnership Institute, and the EIN has become the connective tissue between the White House, DHS, and the entire 2020-denier diaspora.

ProPublica’s reporting from February laid it out: a 30-person summit convened by Michael Freaking Flynn, attended by White House lawyer Kurt Olsen and DHS “election integrity” official Heather Honey…who used to work for Cleta.

They sat in a room and openly war-gamed a “national emergency” executive order that would let Trump “get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states,” ban voting machines, kill mail-in ballots, and force everyone in America to re-register. Patrick Byrne, the Overstock weirdo, reportedly told the room Trump needed to do “the muscular thing.” That draft EO is sitting on someone’s desk right now.

Expect the DOJ to start indicting state election officials. Not maybe. Not eventually. Soon. The FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office in January, based on a ludicrously thin affidavit that echoed Cleta Mitchell’s old 2020 fever dreams almost word-for-word, was the pilot episode.

Harmeet Dhillon at Civil Rights may likely become the legal showrunner. Expect grand juries in Maricopa, in Philadelphia, in Detroit, in Milwaukee. The point isn’t conviction. The point is to terrorize the clerks, the secretaries of state, the polling-place volunteers, the unglamorous but vital work done by middle-aged women and tired men in cardigans who actually run American democracy, until they quit or break.

Expect ICE and CBP at polling places. Mark Wayne Mullin, your new DHS Secretary, has pointedly declined to rule it out. Twenty-seven of 37 election experts in the recent Votebeat survey said federal law enforcement at the polls is “at least somewhat likely.” Steve Bannon has been publicly demanding it for a year. The chilling effect is the point …you don’t actually need to arrest anyone if the green uniforms in the parking lot keep the abuelas at home.

Expect the National Guard. Trump told the Times in January that his single regret of 2020 was not deploying troops to seize voting machines. He has spent the year since federalizing the Guard against governors’ wishes in Chicago, in Portland, in DC. The Supreme Court has narrowed but not closed that door. This is a dress rehearsal. In any red state with a compliant governor, expect Humvees within sight of polling places on November 3.

Expect the AI fake tsunami. Forty-eight hours out. Audio of Hakeem Jeffries “confessing” to ballot fraud. Video of Gretchen Whitmer “ordering” precincts closed. Synthetic robocalls in the voice of every Democratic candidate in every swing district. The 2024 fakes were the demo. 2026 is the product launch.

Expect more “emergency” redistricting, more stolen-election rhetoric pre-loaded for November 4, more Election Day “irregularities” surfaced by an RNC legal team that has spent four years training poll watchers to be performatively aggressive. The chaos is not a bug. The chaos is the deliverable.

A Word From Our Sponsor — And Pay Attention, Because This One Is Personal

Re-read that last section. The clerks. The Secretaries of State. The polling-place volunteers. The unglamorous people the Trump DOJ is about to spend the next six months trying to terrorize out of their jobs.

Now ask yourself: how do you think the Bannon-poisoned podcast army finds the home address of a 64-year-old county clerk in Maricopa? How do you think the “performatively aggressive” poll watcher at your precinct locates you afterward? How do you think the swatters know where to send the SWAT team?

I’ll tell you, because I’ve been on the receiving end of it for years now.

Have someone who doesn’t like you? They already know where you live.

The Independent reported this year on a woman who’d barely used social media. A stalker still found her home, her relatives, her workplace — 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 members. Your daily patterns. Available to anyone — an angry ex, a stranger, someone who just didn’t like something you posted.

If you are a poll worker, an election official, a reporter, a precinct captain, a Democratic donor, or simply a normal American who is going to vote in November in a state MAGA has decided to make a target, you have a problem. The threats don’t materialize out of thin air. They come from a $200 billion data-broker industry that has packaged your life and put it up for sale to anyone with a credit card and a grievance.

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So what do we do? Lawyer up. Now. Not in October. Every Democratic governor, AG, and SOS should already have:

1. Pre-filed TROs ready to drop on the WH, DOJ, DHS, RNC, and the MAGA election fraud groups like CPI and EIN the minute any one of them sets a boot near a polling place. Have the judges on speed dial. Have the media briefed in advance. Have people streaming every interaction with the Feds.
   

2. A public, unambiguous vow from every Democratic governor that any federal agent, armed or otherwise, who attempts to interfere with the lawful administration of an election in their state will be arrested by state troopers on the spot and charged under state election-interference statutes.
   
   Say it on television. Repeat it weekly. Make Trump back down or escalate.
   

3. A 50-state shadow election-protection army. Give Marc Elias and the best election lawyers in every state a blank check and a go-order. Rope in retired judges, paralegals, and law students sworn in as deputized poll watchers, paired with veterans and clergy in every precinct. Make every act of intimidation visible, livestreamed, and federally documented within minutes.
   

4. A pre-built deepfake war room. We need a coalition newsroom funded by the major Democratic donors that exists for one purpose: to debunk AI fakes inside 30 minutes, with cryptographic provenance and a media response strategy ready to go.
   

5. A National Compact of Governors…we need Democratic and any honest Republican governors who will sign a public pledge to certify their state’s results based on the actual vote count, full stop, no matter what theater the White House stages.

We are not in a normal election cycle. We are in the part of the movie where the audience screams don’t go in the basement and the protagonist goes in the basement anyway.

Don’t be the protagonist. They are telling us what they are going to do.

Believe them. Then beat them.

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Before the MAGA chorus warms up its dull, predictable shrieking, hear me out, because this is what serious countries do.

Serious countries conduct an honest accounting after a defeat. They look the disaster in the eye, they name it, and they learn from it. They do not retreat into the warm bath of denial, propaganda, and the cheap copium of grievance politics.

We lost. Iran won. The war is over, even if we want to believe otherwise.

The pill is bitter. Swallow it anyway, because everything that comes next depends on our willingness to face what just happened.

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Donald 3:28-34

28. And it came to pass in the year of the Tariff, whilst war raged across the lands of Elam, that the people of all the tribes of MAGA gathered upon the fairway on the Plain of Doral; and the priests came down from among them, both evangelical and influencers, with oil, with incense, and with selfie sticks and cameras.

29. And they said unto the multitude, “Bring forth thy pelf and thy gold, clicking here, patriots, that we may overlay it; for behold, we have made thee a god of fourteen cubits, that the great orange LORD may know whom thou servest.”

30. “Thou shalt make unto thyself a graven image; yea, the taller the better, and the gilding shall be thick, and the thinness of the frame shall show the orange LORD’s svelte and manly figure to best advantage.”

31. And they said to the tribes of MAGA, “Thou shalt bow down before it, and serve it, and thou shalt photograph thyself beside it; for the patron thy god is a jealous patron, and exceedingly photogenic.”

32. “As for the commandment of old which said ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ behold, we have CAST DOWN the Hebrew God; and VERILY we worship the One Orange God at Temple of the Reality Star, for it pleases the Donald, and the Donald’s pleasure is the law.”

33. And the priests laid their hands upon the statue, and pronounced it good; and the people cried, ‘This is thy God, O MAGA, who delivered the billionaires from taxes, who clothed you in the red hats sacred to his worship, who didst provide you with the sacred crypto of his name, and who gave unto you his Tweets.”

34. And Moses, hearing of it, came down from the mount in haste, with tablets in his hand; but the Secret Service would not admit him at the gate, for his name was not on the list and he had not offered either his donations or his worship.
    

    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.

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Picture it. A crisp early summer Tuesday morning, Moscow time.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Tsar of All the Russias, Conqueror of Crimea, Bare-Chested Equestrian of the Steppe, Owner of a Stolen Super Bowl Ring discovers the unique cardiovascular properties of the third-floor window plunge workout.

Or the tea tastes…off. You know…oolong with a note of polonium. Or some cousin or younger brother of a Wagner remnant takes his shot. Or by sheer dumb luck, a Ukrainian drone swarm finds Putin’s motorcade.

However it goes down, the small bald man is gone, and the world wakes up to a Russia-shaped hole in the geopolitical map.

Like most of you, I can’t wait.

Why does this matter more than the death of any other autocrat?

Because there has never been a more uniquely pernicious figure since World War II. Putin isn’t just a thug with nukes; he’s the patron node of a global authoritarian franchise. Financial sanctuary for kleptocrats. Mercenary infrastructure (Wagner, Africa Corps, whatever they’re calling the rebrand this quarter).

Think about what Russia funds and pushes: Kompromat archives that go back to the Cold War, including one on the current President of the United States of America. An ideology factory pumping Duganist garbage into every Western post-liberal podcast feed. The source of global election interference on an industrial scale. And an alliance of grievance states, big cheese of the Axis of A-holes: Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Venezuela (still), Cuba (still), and dozens of proxies all running on Russian cash.

Look at the May 9 parade. No tanks. No ICBMs. No mobile column. For the first time since 2008, Red Square’s cobblestones carried some iffy-looking infantry and prerecorded propaganda videos because the actual hardware is either on fire in Donetsk or rusting in Novorossiysk. The guest list was Lukashenko, the King of Malaysia, and the President of Laos, a tableau so threadbare that even Slovakia’s thirsty Robert Fico couldn’t bring himself to attend the parade itself.

Forty-five minutes, start to finish. They call it “scaled back.” It was a wake.

And then there was Zelenskyy. The day before the parade, Kyiv issued Presidential Decree 374, a formal document, with coordinates, “permitting” the Russian Federation to hold a parade on Red Square and graciously excluding that exact patch of Moscow from Ukrainian targeting plans for the duration.

Ukraine’s government Twitter account posted it with a hand-over-mouth giggle emoji. Russia’s Dimitri Peskov sputtered about “silly jokes.” It was the geopolitical mic-drop of the decade: a smaller, four-times-invaded country reminding the world’s nominal second-place military that Kyiv now decides whether the parade happens. Putin (if it was Putin and not one of his many doubles) sat under a portico in body armor, a cope cage for his wee frame, while a former sketch comic rented him Red Square for an afternoon.

So how does the actual exit go?

Forget the Hollywood coup. Russian power transfers, when they happen, are sloppy, internal, and humiliatingly mundane. The most likely scenario isn’t tanks on Red Square (that was a one-off) it’s three guys from the FSO, a doctor with a flexible conscience, and a Wednesday afternoon.

The siloviki don’t want a rando Wagner colonel running things any more than the oligarchs do. What you get is a frightened committee that pretends for a few days as if nothing happened, a quick selection of some thick-necked nobody as caretaker, and a frantically negotiated exfiltration of oligarch billions before the ruble fully evaporates.

Someone just looked you up. You had no idea.

Remember that old phrase to describe the creepy frisson one gets from time to time?

“Someone is walking over your grave?”

Well, on the Internet, someone is searching for you. Right now.

Picture it. Someone, somewhere, has decided you’re their next target. For a scam. For a phishing attack. For online harassment. For trolling and stalking.

Out there in the dark corners of the Internet, data broker servieces let anyone pop you name into a search engine, and up comes you home address, age, phone number, social security numbers, credit info…all served on a silver platter by a shady data broker sites you’ve never heard of, never visited, and sure as hell never wanted to have your private information.

All those creepy databases, all those sites with one-click access, available to an ex with a grudge, a stranger with an obsession…anyone who decides they’d like to find you and is willing to spend thirty-nine cents to do it.

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The thick-necked nobody is almost certainly Sergei Shoigu, who’s spent the post-Prigozhin years quietly clawing back to relevance as Security Council Secretary.

Picture him as the new Andropov: ex-defense apparatchik with no real constituency, propped up by the security services because he’s the least scary option, geriatric kidney drama optional but highly likely, useful chiefly for the fifteen-month interregnum he can buy the actual successor faction to organize itself. We’ll know the coup is real when state TV swaps Swan Lake for a slickly choreographed Shoigu rollout with K-pop production values, synchronized backup generals, a bridge, a key change.

It’s 2026. Everything is downstream of TikTok now, including Russian succession theater.

The weirder timeline: Shoigu 2, Russian Boogaloo, in which some opportunistic frontline commander or warlord with a militia and a death wish marches on Moscow, and this time nobody calls him off. Either way, the new boss is weaker, broker, and wildly more interested in personal survival than in Novorossiya dreams.

What follows Putin’s entry to the Hot Place?

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Russia stops being a European power. China takes the lease on the east.

Without the war machine, the gas leverage, or the nuclear bluff still working, Russia is Italy with worse winters and a drinking problem. Beijing has spent a decade eating the Russian Far East with a delicate economic move, leasing timber stands, farmland, Vladivostok commerce, and mineral rights. The entire energy pipeline infrastructure that flows energy West falls under Xi’s control.

With Moscow on its back and unable to project force east of the Urals (or for that matter, outside the Moscow Ring Road), Xi doesn’t invade anything. He doesn’t have to. He calls in the markers. Russian governors east of Krasnoyarsk start taking very long meetings with Chinese delegations. Welcome to the world’s largest tributary state.

The Axis of Upheaval implodes.

This is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. Iran’s air defenses, what’s left of them, were Russian. North Korea’s hard-currency lifeline is Russian artillery contracts. Venezuela’s sanctions-evasion playbook was written in Cyrillic. The Houthis’ anti-ship targeting flowed through Moscow and Tehran.

Every grievance regime on the planet has been nursing at the Russian teat for survival, and when the milk dries up, none of them survives intact. Tehran scrambles for a deal with China because it has to. Pyongyang loses its munitions client. Lukashenko has roughly six weeks to decide whether to flee to Caracas or hang from a Minsk lamppost.

Pull the central node, and the entire structure degrades. The global offensive against liberal Western democracy deflates. In the UK, the Russia-stoked hatred of Europe evaporates.

Suddenly, the “multipolar world” the Global South kept publishing op-eds about looks like just another Putin fantasy.

Ukraine wins. Loudly. Permanently.

Crimea was already going. The Black Sea Fleet HQ in Sevastopol got slagged this winter, the ships fled to Novorossiysk, and Novorossiysk itself is now in range. Ukrainian naval drones…the $50,000 ones, mass-produced in commercial workshops have made the entire northwestern Black Sea functionally a Ukrainian lake.

The ground war finally caught up with the sea war this spring: Russian advances are down two-thirds in eighteen months, Kyiv has clawed back 470 square kilometers this year, the Pokrovsk axis is stalling, and Russian regional governors are conscripting employees from local businesses to make the manpower numbers.

With Putin gone and a panicked caretaker in the Kremlin, Russian conscripts on the Donetsk steppe will drop their rifles the second Moscow starts cutting deals, because no Russian boy wants to be the last one to die for a dead man’s vanity project.

Crimea goes home. The Kerch Bridge becomes a Ukrainian customs post. Donbas stays Ukrainian, and the reconstruction money flows. Zelenskyy gets his Churchill statue, and rightly so. NATO accession for Kyiv accelerates, and frankly, the Ukrainians may not bother waiting.

I’d lay even money they develop a bespoke nuclear arsenal within five years. Nothing massive…just a kind of DeGaulle-level “rip off an arm or a leg” style deterrence. After what they’ve been through, can you blame them?

Ukraine becomes the Israel of Europe, except, importantly, well-liked.

This dimension nobody has fully digested. Ukraine ends this war as the world’s leading authority on drone warfare, electronic warfare, contested-spectrum operations, and combined-arms innovation under fire.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan are already lined up for joint drone production deals. Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines…everyone with a certain scary hostile neighbor wants a piece of the Ukrainian curriculum.

The IDF will quietly send delegations to Kyiv to learn how to think about Iran. The Pentagon’s force structure gets rebuilt from a Ukrainian template after Trump’s breif flirtation with wanting battleships and cavalry regiments.

Twenty years from now, Ukrainian defense exports will be an order of magnitude larger than Israel’s, and the brand will be “the country that beat Russia” rather than “the country under perpetual attack.”

The ocean of dirty money recedes.

There’s an ocean of stolen Russian cash parked in Miami condos, London townhouses, Dubai marinas, Limassol shells, and Vienna foundations, in holding companies in the UAE, Panama, and the Caymans…and the second the regime cracks, you’ll know it.

Every sanctions lawyer from Mayfair to Brickell starts billing 24/7. Some cash gets repatriated. Some gets frozen and clawed back to fund Ukrainian reconstruction, mark my words, this is where the West finally finds its spine. And some, the most interesting some, vanish into that network of shell companies that suddenly seem very flush indeed.

Watch which Florida real estate developers, which Kensington estate agents, and which Trump Organization filings start mysteriously catching fire. The cleanup produces indictments for a generation. Russians have become very, very good at exfiltrating their money from Russia in the last 30 years. This flood will make the post-1991 moves look mild in comparison.

The Mitrokhin Archive 2.0

This is the part that keeps me up at night, friends, in the very best way. Imagine the FSB and SVR’s hard drives dumped on the open internet by a vengeful colonel looking for asylum and cash.

Imagine the receipts. The wire transfers. The compromised congressmen. The useful-idiot podcasters whose who mysteriously cleared $400k a month. The NRA delegations to Russia suddenly make a lot more sense.

The “America First” influencers whose rent gets paid in Bitcoin. The Tucker pilgrimage to the Moscow grocery store stops being a punchline and starts being Exhibit B. Half the MAGA commentariat gets re-classified overnight from “edgy populists” to “registered foreign agents who forgot the registering under FARA part.”

And Trump? Oh, Trump. Here is the thing nobody on the populist right has internalized yet: Trump can no longer save Putin. That ship sailed in October 2025, when the Budapest summit collapsed and Trump, frustrated, embarrassed, finally registering that he’d been played a decade, dropped blocking sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil onto the desk.

Which means when the kompromat finally leaks, and it will leak, because the new Kremlin needs leverage on Washington, and the new oligarchs need cash, and Russian counterintelligence will be a sieve, there will be no White House protection, no DOJ slow-walk, no friendly Cabinet to bury it.

The tapes from the 1990s. The Deutsche Bank back channel via Malta and Cypress. The “we own this clown” memos will drip, drip, drip out. The financing trail. It lands on a news cycle where Trump is politically diminished and Putin is dead. The carefully constructed Trumpist mythos of “deep state lies” collapses under the weight of actual, documented, dollar-denominated Russian influence operations and blackmail.

NATO becomes the most powerful economic bloc on earth overnight.

The defense premium evaporates. European energy markets stabilize. The euro strengthens. German manufacturing, already pivoting hard, takes off. Poland becomes the new Germany. The Baltics stop sleeping with one eye open. A Nordic-Baltic-Polish axis emerges as the continent’s actual center of gravity, and Berlin and Paris belatedly realize they need to keep up. Defense spending stays elevated for a decade, but it’s productive spending: drones, AI, semiconductors, shipyards. Ukraine’s tech becomes the security spine of the continent.

Duginism dies, finally.

Aleksandr Dugin’s grease-stained Eurasianist fever dream, the “Fourth Political Theory,” the mystic Russian-Orthodox-civilizational nonsense that’s become the lingua franca (even if they don’t realize it) of every Bannon podcast and Heritage Foundation post-liberal panel, collapses the moment its sponsoring state collapses. Ideologies need patrons.

Without Kremlin oxygen, Dugin becomes what he always was: a long-bearded crank yelling at clouds. The American post-liberal right loses its theoretical scaffolding and reverts to what it actually is: racial grievance, retconned and kitschy Americana, and grift, without the borrowed Slavophile gravitas to make it sound profound.

The Vance-Hawley-Hegseth axis spends a decade hunting for a new philosophical sponsor. They don’t find one.

Sic semper, indeed.

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