The Friday Brief, July 3, 2026
Inside
250 Years and Counting
The Trump Crime Family Cashes In
Alex Karp Has A Point
On the Devotion of Mistress Harp, a Restoration Trifle
Polymarket Vs. Putin
Madonna Is Always Back
Godspeed, Tucker Carlson
Hating Amy
Tina Peters and Her Birkin
The Big Picture
Two Hundred and Fifty Years, and Counting
My fellow Americans.
I say it that way because you’re not going to hear it said that way from this White House. You’re not going to get a speech this Fourth of July that tries to bind up the country’s wounds, that speaks to all of us, that treats the 250th anniversary of the American experiment as something bigger than one man’s ego and one movement’s grievances. So somebody has to say it, and it might as well be me.
Happy birthday to this big, messy, glorious, terrible, wonderful, astounding, frustrating, inspirational, terrifying, noisy country.
Two hundred and fifty years old this weekend, and worth every fight, every struggle, every drop of blood, sweat, and tears it ever cost us.
Here’s a truth I’ve learned the hard way, in politics and in life: you can love something that’s imperfect.
Thank God for that, because it means imperfect things can be loved, and imperfect people can love them.
That’s how I feel about America.
I get emotional about this country. I tear up about it sometimes, and I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Because, as ugly as this last decade has been, there is still a country here worth loving, worth treasuring, worth fighting for. Even worth dying for.
Most of us will never be called to that last extremity, but for two hundred and fifty years, men and women who were called answered, and paid with their lives on battlefields near and far, on streets fighting for rights.
Gratitude for that legacy is one of the most important ways there is to be an American.
Now, no country tells its story in a straight line. History isn’t a smooth curve from one point to another. It jigs, it jags, it diverges and doubles back. Ours certainly has.
The people who can’t love this country tend to be stuck on one point of the line, unable to ask the questions that matter: Did we change? Did we own it? Are we better now?
Because folks, we’ve owned it.
The fundamental flaw of our founding was slavery, the problem from hell, half a million human beings held in bondage at the moment we declared all men created equal.
At the same time, the magnificent system the Founders built could change itself. To adapt. To become a more perfect union. They didn’t promise it would be easy; nothing then was or could be. They built it to give more rights than it took. To expand more freedoms than it restricted. To give America a future where the rule of law and representative government could take on the hardest problems, even the original sin.
The founders knew it would haunt us until we faced it.
And when we faced it, it cost us 600,000 lives.
Scale that to today’s population, and you’re talking five or six million dead, more than every other American war combined, laid down to end an evil we had tolerated far too long.
The Civil War should be a source of enormous American pride. Not the Lost Cause Confederate nonsense, but the fact that ordinary men marched into terrifying conditions in staggering numbers not simply to kill a rebel army, but to kill chattel slavery dead.
The work was incomplete. It ran through Reconstruction and the civil rights era, and it runs through today. But we did the big thing. We paid the price we always knew was coming due. We’re still paying it, but the miracle of emancipation from history’s darkest institution bent the arc we still struggle to turn today.
And then there’s the other miracle, the one that runs through my own family.
When my German ancestors arrived in the 1830s, they were the scum of the earth. That’s what respectable people called them. Why are we letting those people in?
And here’s the secret: there is always some scum of the earth coming to America. That’s the whole point. The Chinese who built the railroads. The Germans, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Italians, the Irish, the Jews, the Vietnamese, the families walking up from Mexico since before there was a border to walk across.
Every single time, we were told these people can never become Americans. Every single time, history made liars of those who said it.
Because, contrary to what the Stephen Millers of the world believe, patriotism and love of country are not a genetic trait.
You become an American.
The first generation keeps one foot in the old country, still speaks the language, still cooks the recipes. The second generation tilts toward the new world, sees the freedom, the opportunity, the security of a country ruled by law and not by a king or a dictator.
And the third generation? Those kids are Americans. They might catch a few words of the old language from grandpa at the holidays, but they are Americans, full stop.
That transformation is a grace. It is a mighty gift. And this fantasy of blood-and-soil nationalism now being sold to us is a trap and a lie and a delusion, shared by weak men led by a weak man.
I know why some people look at this anniversary with dread instead of pride. There’s a fear that we failed, that the great experiment is over, that the propositional nation can’t survive what we’re living through. Too many of my friends on the left make the best the enemy of the good when it comes to this country’s legacies. Too many on the right live in a dreamworld of imaginary demons who worship the wrong gods or speak the wrong language.
I won’t lie to you: sometimes, in my dark moments, I feel it too. I wake up some mornings asking how the hell we get out of this, what the one magic move is that saves the country.
And the lesson of history is that there is no magic move. There’s no wizardry, no alchemical secret.
There’s just one foot in front of the other. You get up, you do the work, you vote, you love your family, you show up in your community, in your church, in your neighborhood, in your local zoning board meetings.
I’ll confess I came late to that last one. I spent thirty-five years racing through airports, always going, always gone. And I’ve come to believe that democracy practiced at home, in your neighborhood and your town and your county, may matter more than anything happening in Washington.
Because here’s what Americans do when we believe in ourselves.
We defeated Nazism and Communism. (Sorry, Fox…Communism isn’t real.) We put men on the moon with a workforce full of immigrants, some of them from decidedly dodgy antecedents. We vaccinated every American kid against polio. We went from ninety feet of powered flight at Kitty Hawk to spanning the globe to rocketing into space. We educated a generation into prosperity after World War II and built the infrastructure of an economy the world envied for decades. We built (for better or worse) the technological miracles and wonders no one could have imagined at the Founding.
We brought down a corrupt president and reminded every politician in the land that they work for us. We ended the Cold War without the nuclear exchange we spent seventy years dreading. We fought AIDS to a near standstill here and across Africa. (And we’ll do it again, Elon, no damn thanks to you.) We fed the hungry. We told old people they didn’t have to die in the dark and the cold.
We have done the hard things. Over and over, we have done the hard things.
And the challenges before us now are enormous.
AI, corruption from the Oval Office down to the county commissioner taking an envelope under the table for a zoning variance, an economy curdling into something that burns free markets to the ground, a nation so short on hope that people have stopped having children, none of it is beyond our grasp.
People don’t bring kids into a future they don’t believe in. It’s not just about health care or daycare. Those things matter, but it’s more about belief.
So the first commitment we owe this country is to recover our belief in the future. To know we can build something better. To know we can be something better.
Notice something about the crowd that’s been running things for the past decade, the ones who slap “America First” on a movement that is anything but.
They’re depressive. Revanchist. Paranoid. Backward-looking and so very delicate, feelings bruised by everything modern, fleeing toward a version of America that never actually existed.
And they never do the big hard things.
They never take on the big fights. Americans punch up, not down. Americans lift people up. We don’t kick down. The enemy was never the guy who fled a war-torn country to come here. The enemy is the person who tells you he can never become an American, that our system is so weak and so fragile it collapses unless the right kind of people are in charge.
The work of unwinding the deeds of evil men is before us. This decade has not been easy on the fabric of America. We will be cleaning up their mess, putting some of them in jail, purging more of them from politics and polite society, and peeling off the filth of their bad deeds for a generation. Some of them will need a non-metaphorical punch in the face before it’s all over.
Every generation, this country writes up a new list of everything we’ve gotten wrong. Every generation, the list refills. It is the national honeydew list, and it will never stop coming.
But here’s what makes America different: we keep the list, and we keep whittling it down. Not in a straight line, not with a gold star every time, but relentlessly, generation after generation. That stubborn, unglamorous work of self-repair is the inheritance handed down from the men who sweated it out in Philadelphia to my granddaughter, and to the grandson arriving in a few weeks who will grow up in a world I can’t imagine.
Fifty years from now, at the 300th, I want it said of us that we never broke faith with this country. That we never decided it was so polluted and so broken that it deserved abandonment.
That we kept the list, did the work, and passed the gift along.
God bless America. God bless every one of you.
Have a wonderful Fourth, and we’ll all be back in the fight next week.
Intel and Observations
The Trump Crime Family Cashes In
The Link: The Trump Family and ‘Honest Graft’
When the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal editorial board, the house organ of America’s gentry conservatives, the paper of record for people who own second yachts, looks at your financial disclosure and reaches for the word “graft,” you have achieved something special.
The 927-page Trump financial filing this week revealed a portfolio of facts even the WSJ found utterly unspinnable: the capo di tutti capo of the Trump Crime family pulled down $1.4 billion from a crypto rugpull alone last year: $635 million in royalties
