The Friday Brief, September 26, 2025

The Petty Dictator

Welcome to the Friday Brief, my end-of-week dispatch where I cut through the noise and serve up the stories, sharp takes, and big ideas you won’t want to miss. Think of it as your survival guide to America’s ongoing political trainwreck, equal parts outrage and insight, with some gallows humor to keep you sane. If you’re reading this for free, great…but the good stuff, the deeper dives and sharper knives, lives behind the wall…as well as photos, personal stories, and my reading list for the week.

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Inside

The UN Disaster
The DOJ Hit Squad
Russia Is Burning
Sim Farm
The Vulgarity Is The Point
The Most Petty President In History
Ted Cruz Was…Right?
AI Viruses

The Big Picture

The UN Disaster

Donald Trump’s return to the United Nations stage was never going to be a quiet affair; he’d been nearly laughed out of the room on his last visit, and he clearly was not in a mangnamoius mood for another trip to Turtle Bay. As part of the Donnie’s Decline Tour, he delivered accordingly this week.

His 2025 UN General Assembly address was part grievance tour, part rhetorical blitz, part word vomit, part Grandpa Ranty in the nursing home cafeteria ranting about how uppity the minotires were getting. He blamed broken escalators and glitchy teleprompters on “sabotage,” excoriated the U.N. as a tool of globalist overreach, and scolded European nations for their immigration and climate policies. (Both the prompter and the escalator were human errors by Trump’s own team, but that didn’t stop Jesse Watters from calling for the U.N. to be nuked. I wish that was a joke.)

The MAGA commentariat praised the speech as Churchillian, hailing Trump as the anti-globalist Demosthenes, the greatest speech, delivered by the greatest speaker in Western history. Imagine the normal MAGA fellation of Trump’s rhetorical skills, only on methamphetamine.

But outside the Fox News echo chamber, the reaction was markedly colder and rightly and far more skeptical.

From London to Canberra, newspapers and international outlets greeted the speech harshly. The Guardian deemed it an “embarrassing performance,” a grievance-laden rant that flitted unpredictably between insults, conspiracy insinuations, and anti-globalist polemic. France 24 ran press reviews labeling parts of it “deranged,” “incoherent,” and a staple of Trump-era overreach.

Across European media, the recurring observation was that Trump wasn’t really speaking to the U.N.:he was talking to his base, repackaging MAGA themes in a multilateral setting. They were right.

Many capitals treated his remarks not as diplomatic communications but as domestic theater projected onto the world stage.

At a time where international institutions (NATO, the U.N., trade compacts) are more vital than ever, this was an assault on the already strained international order. The Council on Foreign Relations warned that Trump’s words effectively rejected shared problems and collective solutions. In their view, it risked undermining the very benefits that cooperative multilateralism provides, from trade and security to climate mitigation to conflict resolution.

One consistent thread in outside commentary: the speech often remained untethered from factual grounding. Claims about Europe being overrun by “illegal aliens” and dismissals of climate science were identified as either exaggerations or flat rehashing of long-debunked MAGA talking points.

Oh, do you think?

When you step back, the core lesson is this: Trump’s U.N. address was not calibrated for diplomats, the global community, or even cautious foreign capitals. It was calibrated for his core audience, as always. The MAGA base has been having a rough go of Trump’s increasingly unstable performances, Epstein freakouts, creeping dementia, Depends leakage, rambling madness, and abuse of power. It was petty, childish, counterproductive, petulant, and rhetorical slop.