Anyone?

Captain TACO did this for another hit of market crack, not because he’s ending the insane war he started. He’ll get bored and restless in a few days, need another Epstein distraction, etc, and we’ll be back at it.

But no Trump will never pay the ultimate price for this war. With that said, here’s a new ad from Lincoln Project Advocacy for your viewing pleasure.

LP Advocacy is our 501c4 arm, and they’re in charge of our big, narrative-setting message operation outside of the LP SuperPAC, which focuses more on the coming elections for the House and Senate. Lots of good content to outrage the bad guys is on the way.

You can follow Lincoln Project Advocacy over on Twitter and all the platforms!

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With Trump’s obvious threats escalating, I felt it was important to put it back out there:

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Someone asked me on Monday if I thought he would start World War III.

I replied: “Only if we’re lucky. It could be so much worse.”

Donald Trump has the strategic depth of a parking lot puddle and the historical curiosity of a lobotomized goldfish raised in a vodka aquarium. He views the map of the Middle East not as a complex lattice of ancient grievances and nuclear ambitions, but as a giant, gold-plated Monopoly board where he can just flip the table when the bank starts calling in his debts.

After all…he’s done it his entire life. When he wrecks everything, he creates a newer, bigger, uglier crisis to cover the first raging disaster. It’s not working anymore.

He honestly believes Iran is playing by his rules, but his rules are the Roy Cohn con, the Roger Stone syphilitic shuffle, the Steve Bannon bellow, the third-rate Atlantic

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The Big Picture

Firing Season

The Link: Trump Fires Pam Bondi As Attorney General

You’d think after a decade of watching the Rick Wilson School of Applied Political Thermodynamics, these people would understand the phase change from “loyal foot soldier” to “discarded husk” is an absolute, an inevitability for anyone in Trump’s crapulous orbit.

But here we are. It’s April, the cherry blossoms are screaming, and in the MAGA-verse, it’s officially Firing Season.

You know the pattern. It’s as predictable as a Florida thunderstorm and twice as loud. It starts with the “Lying, Fake News” New York Times, the paper Donald Trump claims to despise but reads with the obsessive fervor of a jilted lover, running a piece with the familiar lede: “Sources close to the President say he is ‘discontented’ with Person X.”

Then comes the phone call. Trump dials up a buddy and asks, “What do you think of John Smith? Is he good on TV? Or is he embarrassing us?” There is only one correct answer in that ecosystem. The buddy, sensing blood in the water and hoping to move up a rung on the greasy pole, says, “He’s a disaster, Mr. President. Fire him.”

The ice didn’t just crack under Pam Bondi; it shattered.

Bondi thought she was an untouchable in this administration. She spent a year running the grotesque cover-up of the Epstein Files. She threw “binder parties” at the White House for a collection of MAGA influencers who don’t possess the collective IQ of a petri dish of planaria. She thought if she threw enough red meat to Pizza Jack and the Libs of TikTok crowd, the truth wouldn’t matter.

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I also dive into why and how Todd Blanche was the guy who did her in. “I’ll take Trump’s personal lawyer in the conservatory with Epstein’s Video Camera!”

ETTD never, ever fails.

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

p.s. Filming remotely this week from my folks place in Tampa. They’re in their mid-80s and…you know…time is passing. Make the most of it.

Let’s get to the meat of the speech…wait, let me revise that…the meat of the gloopy farrago of half-slurred word vomit that dribbled from Trump’s lie hole. While the speech was notionally about Iran, it was so incoherent, so scattershot, and so full of lies and contradictions that it would take a team of semioticians, backed by a server farm of cutting-edge semantic AIs, decades of compute time to parse it into something understandable to English speakers.

He was

Let’s summarize the state of Trump’s regime after last night’s disaster of a speech as best we can.

Trump has no idea how to escape the disaster he’s created. The speech was a smoke machine, alarums and excursions, a flailing, desperate attempt to pump the markets just one more time.

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Here are some quick takeaways for a wild day.

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But it’s also among the dumbest ideas to slither out of the wet-brained claque of Trump’s advisors and lackeys, and that’s a very, very high bar.

This executive order is going to absolutely wreck one of the GOP’s most effective election tools, because even if they lose in court, the MAGA voter now says, “Well… can’t do that mail-in ballot. George Soros has a secret army of gnomes in the mailbox to change my vote and make me trans!”

In the words of the poet and philosopher DJ Kahled: “Congratulations. You played yourself.”

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Sonnenfeld’s new book, Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox, is officially out today!

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From the gilded, Saddam’s Brothel stylings of today’s White House to the sterile, long-tabled madness of the Kremlin, to 50,000 sq ft baronial lodges in the forests outside Budapest, the would-be strongmen of the world share a singular, delusional fantasy: that they have finally figured out how to kill history.

They believe that with enough surveillance tech by their little friends in Silicon Valley, enough flood-the-zone propaganda, enough offshore bank accounts, and enough willingness to use violence against their own people, they can build a perpetual motion machine of human misery.

They think they’ve moved past the messy, “obsolete” era of consent and into a permanent state of command.

I am not, as you are all quite aware by now, a ray of sunshine, but I take this morning’s essay to remind you that three of the world’s worst, most abusive, most poisonously anti-democratic leaders are dead or dying, both physically and politically.

Look closely at the screen this morning, folks. The Strongman era isn’t ascending; it’s entering the hospice phase, that end-stage smell of decline and decay, putting one of the key test cases of the techno-authoritarian dream on life support.

Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and Peter Thiel may want a sleek Blade Runner dystopia where they control the masses through surveillance and brutality, but it’s still a future we can kill before it’s too late. In the political global alt-right, the wheels are coming off for three of today’s worst: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orban. Instead of a flying car, these mooks are behind the wheel of a Soviet-era Lada screaming at the dashboard as if that will make the engine start again

.

For years, the Bannonite “national-conservative” set looked at Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as the North Star. It was their laboratory for illiberal democracy, a place where you could maintain the aesthetic of a republic while gutting its soul. They flocked to Budapest to sip Tokaji and marvel at how easy it was to capture a state by simply rewriting the rules of the game until only one player could ever win.

America’s techno-authoritarians, political authoritarians, and white nationalist authoritarians (yes, the Venn diagram overlaps meaningfully) loved Orban with the heat usually reserved for melting Grindr servers at CPAC.

Well, the laboratory is exploding.

As we sit here in 2026, Orban is staring down the barrel of an imminent, humiliating political defeat by a (and do pay attention, Democrats) by a young, center-right coalition who broke with the ruling party and became their most dangerous nightmare; a man who knows their tricks.

The myth of Orban’s invincibility has been shattered. The Orban Model was supposed to be the blueprint for the global MAGA future; a soft autocracy leading to a harder one where the media is neutered, the courts are packed with political loyalists, and the cronies are fed like a foie gras goose.

Instead, it’s a cautionary tale: you can’t feed a nation on a diet of pure grievance and absolutely lurid George Soros conspiracy fantasies forever. Eventually, the people realize they can’t eat “sovereignty,” and the Dear Leader becomes older, fatter, and more obviously greedy, just another corrupt bureaucrat in a good suit.

The Bannonite dream is hitting a wall of Hungarian reality, and the crash is going to be spectacular, but don’t underestimate how many lessons MAGA’s elite leadership class took from Orban.

Orban did one enormous favor for the pro-democracy side; he stopped pretending he was taking control of the economy for his friends, the government for his own protection, the schools and media for indoctrination, and the mantle of power for as long as he lived. (Once again…sound familiar?)

Then there’s the reigning autocrat himself, Vladimir Putin. As his special military operation continues to bleed Russia white, both in literal blood and in the flight of its brightest minds, its economy, and its demographic future, the paranoia has reached a fever pitch.

He’s shuffling his cabinet like a deck of greasy cards, looking for anyone who hasn’t realized yet that the emperor has no clothes (and no tanks, air defense systems, no Black Sea fleet, and after China, just one meaningful international ally left in the form of Donald Trump). He’s surrounding himself with yes-men who are too terrified to tell him that the map doesn’t match the ground.

The Kremlin is now trying to pull the plug on the Russian internet, a desperate, late-stage attempt to turn the Runet into a digital North Korea. They want to entirely ban Telegram, which is a deeply-wired part of Russian online life, throttle the broadband, and force 140 million people into a state-sanctioned coma. It’s the ultimate admission of failure. If your regime is so brittle that a few memes and some honest reporting from the front lines can topple it, you aren’t a strongman.

The brilliance of the Ukrainian campaign to cripple Russia’s entire oil-production and sales infrastructure is making life increasingly dangerous for Putin, who lived the techno-authoritarian dream without even bothering with most of the messy signifiers of democracy in the two decades. His claque of oligarchs and supporters is being bled white, and his campaign to win a war to stay in power has doomed Russia. (I know…that sounds familiar, right?)

Every night, Ukraine’s drones rule the skies over Putin’s Russia, hitting strategic, energy, and military targets without meaningful air defenses. Russians are locked in an inflation trap, soaring energy prices, a ruined economy, and there’s no convenient scapegoat. Even the most jaded Russians (and Russians, in my experience, can be pretty damn jaded) know Putin started this war and knows Putin wrecked their nation, and knows the only way he’s leaving is either out a third-story window, accidentally drinking a radioactive isotope, or the old-fashioned Tokarev-to-the-back-of-the-head method.

Putin’s days are numbered.

And that brings us to the home game.

This past weekend, millions of Americans took to the streets for yet another round of No Kings protests. From the Twin Cities to the reddest places in the reddest states (shoutout to the Village in Central Florida this weekend), the message was sent with a loud, clear, collective middle finger:

We don’t do royalty here.

The nascent Trump dictatorship, built on the fever dreams of tech-bro AI takeovers, Project 2025, retaliatory DOJ investigations, monstrous corruption, and a blatant disregard for the checks and balances that have held this experiment together for 250 years, has hit a wall of American resolve.

Trump’s attempt to wear the crown is failing not because he’s a genius, but because he’s a chaotic, cognitively declining narcissist.

Let’s be honest: Trump’s mental and physical health are doing the heavy lifting right now. The slurred speech, the confusion of names, the visible glitching on stage, his necromancer’s claw of a hand, are all increasingly obvious.

Biology is a cruel mistress to a man who wants to live forever as a deity. But we can’t just sit back and wait for the Last Hamberder to do its work.

We need a democratic wave this fall that doesn’t just win, but cleanses. We need to sweep the Vichy Republicans and the MAGA cultists out of power at every level, from the school board to the Senate. We need to remind the party of America’s would-be dictator that in this country, we don’t serve men; we serve the Constitution, the law, and America’s deep values.

As the brilliant Anne Applebaum has meticulously documented, these guys aren’t just lone wolves. They are part of a global club, which she called “Autocracy, Inc.” They don’t share an ideology; they share a business plan. They use the global economic system to wash their money and, increasingly, the digital world to control the populace.

“The members of Autocracy, Inc. aren’t linked by a unifying ideology... but by a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity.”

When they offer “concessions,” they are lying. When they hold “elections,” it’s just a feel-good DLC in a terrifying alternate reality game where they always hold the controller. They want you to think the game is rigged, so you stop playing. They want you to believe that everyone is corrupt, so you stop caring when they are corrupt.

The Soviet Union fell because it was a hollow shell of lies. China’s current trajectory toward hyper-surveillance, ahead of its massive demographic collapse in the mid-2030s, is a sign of fear, not strength. These regimes fall, but they never learn the lessons of their fall.

They always blame “foreign agents,” “deep state” saboteurs, or “traitors” rather than their own inherent rot. They can’t admit that freedom is a more powerful operating system than fear…if we do the work.

Some dictators end violently; it’s the occupational hazard of the job, the Ceaușescu exit. To be honest, I’m a big fan of it pour encourager les autres.

But for the sake of the American republic, we need to end this one politically. We need to defeat the apparatus of Trump, Trumpism, and their financial sponsors so soundly at the ballot box that the ideology itself becomes toxic.

Not just for the man at the top, but for the allies, the family members, the useful idiots, and the corrupt associates who enabled the evil. We need to treat them like the racketeers they are. Punish the corruption, seize the ill-gotten gains, claw back their profits and their payoffs, and make it clear that trying to overthrow the American experiment carries a price that no bank account can cover.

This is why I’m terrified the Democrats will win, but miss the reason they did. Yes, reversing the economic harms of Trump is important, but unless Democrats understand that the millions of people in the streets and the millions more who will race to the ballot box to destroy Trump and MAGA this fall are giving them power to end this regime from top to bottom.

The economy and accountability are the only real issues, and if Democrats screw this up because they think America wants to, there’s no second chance.

The worst dictators and strongmen in the world are dying, politically and physically.

But the men behind Trump, Orban, and Putin aren’t going away. The systems that they built to win and hold power aren’t going away. The greed, mania, and will to control aren’t going away.

Unless people are willing to truly fight for freedom and democracy to utterly and finally break the systems and the men who put them there, more will arise, powered by money and tech that makes today’s systems look primitive.

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Donald Strangelove Goes To War
The Death of the Old Order
Florida. Florida? Florida!
Bio-Horror In The Valley
The Robed Insurgency
The Kremlin’s Chaos Playbook
The Algorithm of Regret
The Democratization of Lethality
What I’m Reading
Scenes From The Home Front

The Big Picture

Donald Strangelove Goes To War

We might go to war this weekend. We might not. Donald Trump could TACO or he could simply ratchet the tension, turning the dial until the global economy really starts to scream.

My money is on the war.

Not because of some grand, Clausewitzian strategic necessity. Not because the “intelligence is clear.” We’ve been down that road before, and it usually ends with a decade of “nation-building” and a trillion-dollar bill. No, if the Marines land on Kharg Island this weekend, it’s because of the singular, fractured psychology of the man in the Oval Office.

For Donald Trump, war isn’t the “extension of politics by other means.” It’s the ultimate season finale. It’s the highest-rated show on earth, and he’s the only one with the remote.

Trump’s psychology of war is built on a foundation of deep-seated insecurity masked by weird performative hyper-masculinity. He spent a decade being told by the Adults in the Room…the guys with the stars on their shoulders and the Ivy League degrees, that he couldn’t do certain things.

Well, the adults have been purged. The guardrails have been melted down to make commemorative coins. The current iteration of the National Security Council is less a strategic body and more a collection of taint-kissing MAGA influencers who think Call of Duty is a training app.

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Making this public on the free side of the payroll, thanks to a generous sponsor.

Dear Republicans:

If you’re a Republican candidate or strategist this fall, take a moment, pour yourself a very stiff glass of Olde Ocelot Bourbon, neat, stare into the middle distance, and repeat the mantra: “We have so much to run on.”

Because you do.

Oh, you absolutely do.

Never in modern American politics has a party assembled such a glittering arsenal of voter-repelling, focus-group-failing, swing-district-destroying, coalition-breaking issues. It’s like watching a NASCAR pit crew deliberately replace all four tires with cinder blocks and then wondering why the car won’t turn left.

It’s like watching Melania pretend to hold Trump’s hand in public, when all she’s thinking is, “Vere is . It’s like imagining J.D. Vance, a pleather couch, and a 55-gallon drum of Temu lube. It’s like Ghislaine Maxwell opening a chain of day care centers.

None of it is pretty. Much of it is politically fatal. And you own it all.

Let’s review this embarrassment of riches.

1. Donald Trump’s Awesome Land War In Asia!

Nothing says “trust us with your future” like a war that the American people didn’t want, don’t understand, and increasingly suspect was launched for reasons that have all the factuality of a Trump Crypto scam pitch deck. It’s expensive, it’s dangerous, and it’s politically toxic.

And it’s just getting bloody.

But the real genius here is the messaging. Republicans can now campaign on a conflict that has no clear endpoint, no clearly articulated objective or strategy, and no measurable success. Voters love ambiguity in wartime, especially when it comes with a rising body count and a mounting bill.

Sure, historically, wars tend to get less popular over time, not more. But maybe this one will be different. Maybe this is the war that finally reverses the trend. Maybe voters will wake up in October and say, “You know what I love? A land war in Asia! A geopolitical disaster that made us less safe and made gas cost more!”

2. Tariffs Are Making Us Rich!

And by “us” I mean, “no one.”

If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like to deliberately raise costs on American consumers while calling it patriotism, wonder no more. The MAGA GOP has cracked the code.

Tariffs are the political equivalent of setting your own house on fire and then blaming the smoke damage on your neighbor. Prices go up. Supply chains get squeezed. Small businesses and farms get screwed. And somehow, the pitch is, “This is good for you.”

And yet…oddly…still no tariff checks for MAGA voters. Weird.

There’s a certain perverse elegance to it. Republicans spent decades branding themselves as the party of free markets, only to pivot into a kind of drunken nostalgia for grievance-soaked protectionism that leaves voters paying more for everything from groceries to clothes to technology.

Nothing says “economic leadership” like kicking off more inflation and making life more expensive on purpose.

3. Five Hours Of Fun! The TSA Shutdown!

Ah yes, governance by tantrum.

Shutting down a core function of government like airport security is one of those ideas that probably sounded great in a late-night strategy session fueled by Stephen Miller emerging from his H.R. Geiger-themed masturbatorium wearing the skin of a small child and shrieking, “MASTER! I am a GENIUS!”

In practice, it looks like chaos: backed-up lines, missed flights, furious travelers, and a creeping sense that the adults have left the building. Deploying the supercops of ICE isn’t making the lines move any faster.

Airports are one of the few places where Americans of all political stripes come together in shared misery. Republicans have managed to take that baseline irritation and crank it into full-blown rage. No one is buying that the Democrats, who have now offered eight times to fund TSA, but your boy Donald won’t budge. Strategery!

But sure, run on that. Tell voters you broke the thing that gets them safely from point A to point B. I’m sure that’ll poll great in the swing seats.

4. Drain The Swamp Into Trump’s Wallet!

In a more innocent time, corruption was something politicians tried to hide. There was at least a nod toward shame, a fig leaf of plausible deniability.

Those days are gone.

What we’re seeing now is corruption that’s loud, proud, and practically daring voters to do something about it. Trump crime family members are cashing in. Jared is offering Ivanka foot pics to MBS for more “investments” into his “hedge fund.” (And by “investments” we mean bribes, and by “hedge fund” we mean Trump’s pocket.

Yesterday, we learned Trump stole classified documents from the White House to help his post-2020 business deals. Voters love that!

Cronies embedded everywhere. Government contracts for sale, as long as the right people get a cut, right, Lewandowski? Everyone inside gets a deal, a handshake, a pardon. Everyone else? Screwed.

And the worst part? It’s sloppy. It’s not even competent corruption. It’s the kind of brazen, in-your-face grift that makes voters feel like suckers for playing by the rules.

“Drain the swamp” has become “Venmo me, bitch,” and voters are catching on.

5. America Loves Higher Health Insurance Prices!

If there’s one issue that reliably terrifies American voters, it’s health care. People may disagree on policy details, but they’re united in one simple desire: not to go broke or die because they got sick.

So naturally, Republicans have decided this is the perfect place to pick a fight.

Cut access. Raise costs. Wrap it all in bureaucratic language and hope no one notices until it’s too late. Do it so Elon Musk gets a tax cut.

It’s a bold electoral strategy: “Vote for us, and we’ll make your life more precarious.” I’m sure that Russell Vought has the memory of writing this policy somewhere in his cruelty spank bank, but for people who worry about health care, and MAGA voters are just as likely to have taken the ACA subsidy per capita, it’s great messaging.

6. The Unpopular 4.2% Inflation

Inflation is one of those unspinnable kitchen-table issues that voters feel every single day. It’s not abstract. It’s not theoretical. It’s right there in the grocery aisle, the gas pump, the monthly bills.

Republicans have spent years weaponizing inflation as a political cudgel, right up until the moment they’re the ones presiding over it. The new number? 4.2%. It’s higher than when Biden left office. Ooopsie.

The new Scott Bessent/Kevin Hasset spin is weaker than Lindsey Graham’s knees in a truck stop. “It’s complicated. It’s global. It’s out of anyone’s control.” Funny how that works.

Voters, however, tend to notice patterns. They remember who screamed about inflation yesterday and who’s shrugging about it today. Hypocrisy isn’t just a moral failing; it’s a political liability.

7. Gas Prices Are So Cheap!

And speaking of kitchen-table economics, let’s talk about the big glowing sign every voter sees on their drive home: gas prices. How watching the bill to fill up the F-250 cross the $100 dollar mark twice a week isn’t something Trump gets, but working folks sure as hell do.

You don’t need an economist to explain it. You don’t need a white paper. You just need a credit card and a growing sense of irritation as the numbers tick higher and higher. Every spike is a reminder that Trump’s war did this and that someone is in the Oval Office. The weak-sauce spin of “energy dominance” and “bringing prices down” has petered out like the rest of the “Golden Age” greatest hits.

Gas prices are the most small-d democratic political issue in America. Everyone sees them. Everyone feels them. And right now, they’re screaming a message Republicans would very much prefer voters ignore.

Good luck with that.

8. Trump 🧡 Epstein!

And then there’s the ghost at the feast. The thing they hoped would vanish under the weight of distraction, outrage cycles, and a conveniently timed war.

It didn’t.

The Epstein saga lingers, festers, and mutates. Every one of Pam Bondi’s attempts to wave it away, every vile, snarling burn book screech, makes it worse. Every redaction, every disappearing document, every moronic Gym Jordan hearing tells the public, including many Republicans, what they already know in their gut: there’s more beneath the surface. Voters know when something smells off, and the Epstein cover-up reeks like Donald’s Depends on an August afternoon.

You can try to bury a story like that. You can try to drown it in noise. But the problem with a story rooted in Epstein and Trump’s degeneracy, secrecy, and lies is that it doesn’t go away. It waits. It seeps. It corrodes.

And it’s still there, sitting just offstage, ready to walk back into the spotlight at the worst possible moment.

9. You’ve Done So Much For No One!

Other than passing a tax cut for Elon Musk, The SAVE Act is the only thing the MAGA GOP has invested any political energy in for the entire time Trump’s been in office for his second term.

That’s it. That’s your big take-home item? The soon-to-be-dead SAVE Act?

On the list of the most important problems for voters, the SAVE Act ranks around 428, just above murder hornets and below Nickelback.

It’s really a crowning achievement: a legislative agenda so thin it’s diaphanous. There’s no serious plan to lower costs, and the economic vision seems limited to tariffs and “What Does Donald Want?”

Which is why you’ve brought us shutdowns, Jordan/Comer hearings where no one emerges smarter, weak-ass hashtag spin, and a governing philosophy best summarized as “own the libs and hope Fox covers it.”

It’s almost impressive, in a bleak, end-of-empire way.

You’ve had the power, the majority, the spotlight…and what have you delivered?

Fuck-all. Gridlock, grievance, and a masterclass in doing absolutely nothing for the people you claim to represent.

Truly, gentlemen, you’ve done so much…for no one.

10. And Finally…America’s Beloved President!

And here we arrive at the main event for Republicans, especially those in swing seats…and seats are swinging harder than Trump’s favorite Florida gubernatorial candidate. (More to follow on that, friends, but there’s a literal cuck chair involved.)

Oh yes, the headliner. Big Don. The Umber Overlord. Your Daddy. Your Boss. Your God-Emperor.

The man whose gravitational political pull for the MAGA GOP is a crapulous Singularity like no other.

The man you handcuffed yourself to years ago is now a President with sagging poll numbers, deeply underwater on literally every economic issue. He’s not an uplift for you: he’s a source of relentless chaos and damage, and a governing style that can best be described as “impulse control is for the little people.”

“But muh primary” ain’t cutting it with independents and non-MAGA Republicans, guys.

He dominates the news cycle, alienates key constituencies, and turns every issue into a personal grievance marathon. And you own it. You own all of it.

Republicans aren’t just running with him; they’re running as him. His brand is their brand. His chaos is their chaos. His unpopularity is now baked into the entire ticket. Why are Democrats not just winning a few special elections but all of them?

Because Republicans know the stinking corpse of Trumpism is on their backs, and nothing will wash it away. Their base is disheartened, and their coalition is fracturing. Independents are now voting almost 3:1 for Democrats.

They can’t pivot away.

They can’t distance themselves.

They’re locked in, all the way down the ballot.

Democrats are running for once with the wind at their backs. Don’t screw it up.

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Hardly.

Let’s be clear right from the jump: Trump is not responding to negotiations with Iran. In fact, Iran has denied there has been any contact with the United States government or its representatives.

He’s following the same shopworn path from the now year-long tariff disaster: threaten something that will cause an economic disaster, watch as American markets crash out, and then pull back from the brink only to return to the same policy a few days or weeks later.

Given that Trump has as much historical, diplomatic, geographic, political, and cultural knowledge of the Gulf (and Iran in particular) as the average toaster oven, it’s important to view his motivations as they are, not as we (and certainly not his gullible Baghdad Bobs and assorted deadenders) wish them to be.

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The Intel Trainwreck
Why The $200 Billion Supplemental Means Ground War
The Ghost in the Machine: Russia’s Helping Hand
Target’s Long Year of Living Dangerously
Yes, Yes They Effing Will
ICE-ing The 1st Amendment
$166 Oil and the Strait of Hormuz
Digital Iron Curtain
Magazine Covers Are Art

The Big Picture

The Intel Trainwreck

By now, you’ve seen the headlines. The “imminent threat” that supposedly necessitated Operation Epic Fury, the massive joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign launched on February 28, is looking less like a concrete intelligence assessment and more like a fever dream cooked up in the West Wing.

What? Was Curveball not available?

This week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went before the Senate Intelligence Committee for the annual “Worldwide Threats” hearing. It was, to put it mildly, a slow motion car crash on the top of Burning Tire Mountain. In her written testimony, the DNI’s office stated that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” by strikes back in June 2025 and that there had been “no efforts” to rebuild it since. But when she opened her mouth to testify, she pivoted, suggesting Iran “maintained the intention” to rebuild.

The disconnect is staggering. We are currently three weeks into a hot war. American B-2s have turned Iranian missile facilities into rubble, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed to commercial traffic sending global oil prices into a vertical climb, and 13 Americans have already come home in flag-draped coffins.

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She was the last of a series of man-on-the-street interviews by NBC’s great Jon Allen at a Pennsylvania gas station, deep in Trumplandia. Her name? Amanda Robbins.

They were all MAGA, but the cracks and worries over the war were creeping in. Some of the Fox talking points were there, some of the reflexive defenses of Trump were present, but there was a brittle edge to it all, a fragility we’re not used to seeing.

Sunglasses on, leaning near her mid-size SUV at a gas pump in Millersburg, PA. When Allen asked what she’d say to Donald Trump right now, she didn’t offer the reflexive, defensive crouch we’ve come to expect. She didn’t offer aesthetic Republican discomfort.

No, she went for the jugular.

“You’re a worthless pile of shit,” she said when asked to address Trump. The words landed with the weight of a decade’s worth of accumulated resentment.

She wasn’t an “infiltrator” or some political false flag. She was of the tribe. She told the camera, with a haunting mix of bitterness and clarity, that she had voted for him three times. Three. Times.

Demographically and socially, she should have been a dead-ender, one of the faithful who would follow the motorcade off a cliff. But something broke. It wasn’t just the $3.54 on the sign behind her, though the cost of living is always a potent catalyst.

It was the stinging realization of a betrayal one time too many. Her closing line was the most telling: “Apparently, I’m an idiot.”

Oh, Amanda. We know it hurts, but you get it. You really do.

For a decade, since those early focus groups where voters insisted Trump was the richest, most successful man to ever breathe, we’ve lived under a spell. 80 million believed then, and about 55 million believe now, that he would both enrich them and punish their enemies. People were so entranced by the mojo that they would deny the reality slapping them in the face.

But that era is passing. The necromantic grip of his decaying claw is slipping.

Make no mistake: there will be a hardcore of sycophants for the next 50 years. Well into the 1960s, there were still Germans who believed that if only the Generals hadn’t betrayed the Führer, the dream would have survived. MAGA is mutating into something perhaps more dangerous, a movement led by people who are more educated, more worldly, and less burdened by Trump’s obvious cognitive decline…but fortunately, they lack his singular, transgressive charisma.

The cracks are widening because the “protection” Trump promised has turned into a predator. If you described Trump’s current platform to his base without using his name, they’d recoil: massive tariffs, that sales tax on the working class, has hit them hardest. The war with Iran is an unpopular foreign entanglement where their sons, not Barron Trump, will go to die. Healthcare subsidy cuts are threatening the Obamacare benefits that his base loves to hate, but equally, they base relies on.

You can’t eat a trans bathroom ban. No ICE deportation army ever filled a pothole or lowered the price of gas. You can’t pay a mortgage on digital rage over imaginary liberal demons. When the economy was robust, it was easy to let those things be the only things.

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The attraction was never about what he was doing; it was about to whom he was doing it. But when the doing starts hitting the voter at the pump in Pennsylvania, the high of owning the libs wears off. Trump sensed this instantly; note how quickly he pivoted his war rhetoric to “they tried to kill me.” He knows he can’t sell the war on its merits, so he has to sell it as a personal vendetta to rally the tribe.

Even the MAGA media feels the shift. Watch an hour of Fox News lately, and you’ll see the anchors looking squirmy, less confident. The old talking points, the ones they used to dust off and deliver with a smirk, aren’t landing the same way.

America’s relationship with Trump has always been grotesque. He was the guy every father feared his daughter would bring home: narcissistic, abusive, and mendacious, yet holding a strange power over her mind. I was lucky that my daughter never had that problem, but it falls into the shotgun-and-shovel category of fears for most girl dads.

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We aren’t at a full divorce yet. That hardcore 25–30% will stay until the bitter end. But we are officially sleeping in separate bedrooms. Even the Republican establishment is staring at the ceiling, praying for the day the papers are signed and the house is sold.

I’ve watched MAGA followers willingly break friendships, marriages, and families for a decade.

Watching that Amanda Robbins in Millersburg, PA, and hearing the bitter self-incrimination and recrimination in her voice as she called herself an idiot, felt like watching a ghost realize it’s been haunting the wrong house. The damage will take a generation to heal, but the wind has changed. When the criminality is finally held to account, we can stop pretending this was a “middle finger to the establishment” and admit it was just a long, painful scam.

And here’s the part they don’t want to say out loud: the bill is coming due. Not just for Trump, but for everyone who carried his water, laughed at the cruelty, and called the con a revolution. The war, the lies, the corruption, the cheap theatrics of grievance as governance…it all ends the same way every grift ends, with the mark staring into the mirror and realizing the joke was always on them. Amanda Robbins just said it first.

Millions more will follow. And when they do, there won’t be enough Trump flags to wave, enemies to hate, or conspiracies to hide behind. Just the cold, hard truth that they were played by a washed-up con man who promised them greatness and delivered nothing but ashes.

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