The Friday Brief, August 15, 2026
Inside
The Coward and The Catering Truck
The Wrecking Ball Comes for The Midterms
Hasan Piker
How Can It Be Worse Than Interns?
Does This Explain Stephen Miller
Don’t Play With Ukraine, Part 4617
Dark Oxygen
The Big Picture
The Coward And The Catering Truck
The Link: Trump Said to Have Secretly Used Military Jet to Leave Turkey Amid Threats
The Link: The Five Scandals Within the “Air Force One” Scandal
Garrett Graff’s excellent Doomsday Scenario Substack (linked above) has the single best rundown of the Qatari jet scandals from top to bottom, and I strongly recommend reading it to get more clarity on why this story is beyond just a single Trump scandal du jour.
American history has given us many undignified presidential moments.
Ford and the stairs. Carter and the rabbit. Bush the Elder and the Japanese prime minister’s lap.
None of them come within a country mile of what the Washington Post dropped this week, which is the President of the United States climbing the stairs of Air Force One in Ankara, walking straight through the cabin, and being lowered out the far side on a catering truck like a pallet of indifferent airline catering.
