Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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State Department Tells Human Rights Watchdog to Ignore Trump’s Extrajudicial Killings
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “lacks the competence” to review Trump’s campaign of deadly boat strikes, a State Department spokesperson said.
By Nick Turse | April 13 2026, 1:37 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/04/13/trump-boat-strikes-iachr/
The United States is waging a pressure campaign against the leading inter-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into illegal U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the monthslong campaign of extrajudicial killings by the U.S. military.
Though the president of the IACHR disputes that the U.S. is pressuring his organization, the State Department responded to questions about the meeting with a statement urging the commission to move onto other matters. A past IACHR president said the organization may fear the “wrath” of the United States, which is the largest financial contributor to the commission’s parent organization, if it launches an investigation.
U.S. lawmakers and experts say an investigation by the IACHR could be an important mechanism to hold the Trump administration accountable for the lethal strikes. Scores of civilians have been killed in the campaign, which has seen families of victims petition the IACHR and sue the U.S. government, accusing it of wrongful death and extrajudicial killings.
Last month, the IACHR — an arm of the Organization of American States, or OAS, charged with the promotion of human rights in the Western hemisphere — held a first-of-its-kind hearing on the legality of the boat strikes. The IACHR considers petitions dealing with violations of rights by member states, including the U.S. At the March 13 hearing, the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, International Crisis Group, and the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights made the case that the U.S. boat strikes violate both U.S. domestic and international law.
Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, noted that the attacks were conducted without the authorization of Congress and were “in violation of international law on the use of force.” Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur and a professor of international law at the University of Sydney, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.” He said these “serial extrajudicial killings gravely violate the right to life” and were not permissible as law enforcement actions or in the name of national self-defense or allowed under the law of the sea, under international humanitarian law, under international counter-terrorism law, or treaties targeting narcotics.
The hearing drew sharp criticism from the United States, which sent representatives to the meeting. State Department legal adviser Carl Anderson rebuked the commission for holding the hearing and said it wasn’t fit to review legal claims. State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the commission “strayed far outside its mandate” and was being manipulated by the ACLU.
“The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue,” Pigott said. “Convening hearings under these circumstances risks undermining — not strengthening — the credibility of the inter-American human rights system.” Pigott also instructed the commission to work through decades-old petitions instead of focusing on the boat strikes.
Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 48 attacks since September 2025, destroying 50 vessels and killing almost 170 civilians. The latest strikes, on April 11 in the Eastern Pacific, killed five people and, according to the Coast Guard, left one “person in distress.” The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or mor
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It’s Not Just Iran. Trump Is Flailing on Multiple Fronts.
By Jonathan Lemire | April 15, 2026, 2:24 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/trump-iran-hungary-melani
a-epstein/686816/
You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.
Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.
Donald Trump has long ruled by fear. He demands complete fealty from fellow Republicans; he pushes around world leaders. He’s a political escape artist. But this time, he has boxed himself in without an obvious way out. The war in Iran was a conflict of his choosing, but it has not gone at all how he expected. Trump believed that it would resemble the military blitz that effortlessly snatched Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, that it would be a surgical strike lasting days or maybe just a couple of weeks. Instead, the conflict is approaching the 50-day mark. Iran is battered but emboldened, and now has greater control of the vital strait—through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes—than it did before the war, wielding it like an economic vise to squeeze the rest of the globe. Trump has demanded it be reopened, even threatening to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization if the regime did not comply. But Tehran didn’t quake in terror. Trump’s usual intimidation tactics aren’t working.
The Venezuela raid in the year’s first days altered the course of Trump’s presidency. By the closing months of 2025, the momentum of his first six months in office had dissipated and his party had suffered a series of electoral losses. He looked to some like an early lame duck. But the Caracas military operation, White House aides felt, righted the ship. Trump, though never restrained, was transformed into pure id, acting on impulse and goaded on by advisers who saw an opportunity to further expand executive power. And he fell further in love with the might of the U.S. military, telling advisers that it was an unstoppable force. Greenland. Iran. Cuba. His legacy, he believed, would be redrawing the world’s maps.
Read: Trump is learning that his bullying has consequences
The U.S. military has smashed much of Iran’s defenses and damaged its missile arsenal. The joint operation with Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader and many of his top lieutenants. But Iran didn’t surrender. Trump had overestimated the capacity of the Iranian people to rise up, and he had not understood the extraordinary pain that the hard-line theocratic regime was willing to accept to maintain its grip on power. Thirteen American troops have been killed. Tehran maintained the ability to strike at its Gulf neighbors and damage their energy facilities. And even though much of its navy was destroyed, it was able to seize control of the strait by wielding the threat of mines, fast-attack boats, and armed drones. Giant oil tankers avoided the danger, and prices around the world began to rise.
This is when Trump ran into the limits of his power. He was outraged that such a makeshift force would intimidate the shipping companies, demanding that they “show some guts” and force the passage. But companies balked. He urged European nations to step in, noting that they
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America’s Orange Jesus
Reflections on a week in which Donald Trump decided to feud with the Pope while comparing himself to the Saviour.
By Susan B. Glasser | April 16, 2026
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/americas-
orange-jesus
In her 2023 memoir, “Oath and Honor,” published the year before Donald Trump’s remarkable return from political oblivion, the Republican apostate Liz Cheney describes watching in amazement on January 6, 2021, as her fellow-Republicans in Congress lined up to sign electoral-vote objection sheets. Cheney, who had been No. 3 in the Party leadership throughout Trump’s first term in office, concluded that her colleagues suffered from a “plague of cowardice,” summed up by their willingness to go along with Trump’s false claims about the “rigged” 2020 election despite understanding full well that he had lost fair and square. “The things we do for the Orange Jesus,” Cheney heard one of them, Mark Green, of Tennessee, mutter as he put his name down. (Later, Green denied having made the comment; the following year, Trump praised the congressman for his many “political talents.”)
I immediately thought of Cheney’s Orange Jesus line this week when Trump, amid an escalating public feud with Pope Leo XIV, circulated an A.I.-generated image of himself as the Christian Lord and Saviour, before deleting it and telling reporters the next day, at the White House:
I did post it. And I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with the Red Cross, there’s a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. I had just heard about it, and I said, “How did they come up with that?” It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better. I make people a lot better.
It is not enough to read these words, as silly and mendacious and incoherent as they are. Trump’s remarks, in my view, make for essential viewing, thirty-seven seconds that showcase the precipitousness of our fall as a superpower. Look at how Trump stares straight into the cameras as he lies. A doctor? Seriously? It’s as though he felt no need to come up with a better excuse—or any excuse at all. (To be fair: the fact that, as Trump said this, he was flanked by a fifty-eight-year-old MAGA enthusiast from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who had just delivered to him a bag of takeout McDonald’s in a bright-red “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt suggests that God does have a pretty good sense of humor.) By Wednesday, Trump had reasserted his claim to divine authority, posting another A.I.-generated image of himself standing alongside Jesus, who has his arm wrapped around Trump’s shoulder; both of them are bathed in the soft glow of a heavenly light. Trump’s caption: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”
The point is simply this: in Trump 1.0, Orange Jesus was a snarky shorthand for the hypocrisy of Republicans who knew better but joined up with the cult of Trump anyway. In Trump 2.0, Trump thinks he has actually become Orange Jesus.
How else to explain the President’s many otherwise inexplicable acts since returning to office? The gilding of the White House to resemble a profane copy of the Vatican, the ever more baroque lies, the slapping his name on everything, and, perhaps most of all, the repeated reminders that our leader recognizes no earthly limits on his power as he wages war in the Middle East and speaks of conquering other lands. “There is one thing,” he told the Times, in January. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” America First-ism is not the ideology of this Presidency; Trump First-ism is. The fact that he serves up his megalomania with such an excess of dark farce only reinforces how shameful it is that this is the man for whom so many Republicans have chosen to sacrifice what remained of their integrity.
On Thursday, a federal commission stacked with Trump appointees voted to approve the President’s plans for a triumphal arch on the National Mall, modell
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Russ Vought slammed for omitting $2.2 trillion deficit in Trump budget, didn't want to "confuse the country"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russ-vought-slammed-for-omitti
ng-2-2-trillion-deficit-in-trump-budget-didn-t-want-to-confuse-the-country/ar-AA214bJj
U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, delivered an opening statement at a Committee oversight hearing on President Trump's FY2027 Budget request that slammed the President’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russ Vought.
Merkley said: “Immediately upon opening this budget, I was struck by what was missing. No plan to bring down gas prices. No plan to bring down grocery prices. No plan to save Social Security, which will start running out of money in just six years, requiring a 28 percent cut to seniors' benefits according to the most recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.”
Merkley continued: “No funding for aid to farmers hurt by Trump's tariffs. No additional funding to deal with unexpected disasters, like wildfires, floods, or hurricanes. No meaningful revenue proposals. And no credible plan to reduce the debt, which is now over 100 percent of GDP.”
The lack of debt reduction planning in the budget led Merkley, who mentioned his own budget bona fides, to accuse Vought of breaking the law in his report by inadequately assessing the ballooning deficit.
“In addition,” Merkley said, “as a former Congressional Budget Office analyst, I went looking for the deficit projections, but you didn't bother to put them in, yet again ignoring the law – 31 U.S. Code § 1105 – which requires the President's Budget to include at least 5 years of deficit and debt projections – but yours does not. So, you are breaking both the spirit and letter of the law.
“What your budget does include are projections that the President's tariffs will raise an eye-popping $1.6 trillion in revenue more than CBO estimates. And CBO's estimates were made before the Supreme Court ruled Trump's tariffs unconstitutional. So, your revenue projections should have been even lower than CBO's, not higher. Making your estimates here simply fictional.”
When Merkley asked Vought why he didn’t include deficit numbers in the budget, as required by law, Vought said: “It’s a discretionary budget. One of the things that I think is important is not to confuse the country when we’re in the middle of several reconciliation efforts over the next year.”
Merkley responded: “I disagree with the notion that it’s discretionary to follow the law. The law did require deficit numbers.”
Extrapolating from the budget’s revenue numbers — even as he portrayed those numbers as dubious — Merkley reported that he did the math and that the deficit amounts to about $2.2 trillion. Merkley told Vought, “I think perhaps the reason you didn’t want to include deficit numbers is you didn’t want to draw attention [to them].”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Could Be Political Suicide for Republicans
In normal times, this budget would be dead on arrival.
By Fred Kaplan | April 20, 2026 5:45 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/trump-defense-budget-iran-
war-hegseth-republicans.html
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans criticized Democrats for “throwing money at a problem.” Now here comes President Donald Trump, proposing a military budget for next year of $1.5 trillion, and most GOP lawmakers are just nodding.
If passed, this would be, even when adjusted for inflation, the United States’ largest defense budget ever—larger than the amount spent (again, adjusting for inflation) in any year during World War II, when the nation’s entire economy was geared to war.
Joe Biden was the first president who, just two years ago, nudged a military budget up against the $1 trillion mark. The world is a turbulent place, to the point where almost nobody in politics proposes cutting defense spending. But is the world so turbulent, and is our position in it so precarious, that we need to increase the budget by almost 50 percent in a single year? Nobody in the Trump administration has made the case, and it’s particularly puzzling, given that Trump’s “National Security Strategy” proposed reducing America’s security commitments abroad.
Let’s say we do need to buy a lot more weapons. Are the weapons he proposes to buy in larger quantities the sorts of weapons we need? And to clarify matters, most of this $1.5 trillion will be spent on weapons. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth touts that the budget includes a 7 percent pay hike for members of the armed forces (about twice the national inflation rate), but the total proposed cost for military personnel is just $205 billion (about 13 percent of the defense budget), which exceeds this year’s amount by only $8 billion.
By contrast, Trump and Hegseth propose boosting the budget for weapons procurement from $223 billion to $413 billion—a staggering 85 percent increase. Research and development for new weapons rise almost as steeply, from $210 billion to $344 billion—a 64 percent increase.
There is almost no precedent for such a surge.
The Pentagon has not yet released all the line items in the budget, so it’s hard to break down these figures in much detail. Some of the growth seems somewhat related to advanced satellites (a $24 billion increase for Space Force) and A.I. (a $42 billion increase for “autonomous” systems). But steeper increases (and larger stacks of money) go for traditional Cold War–era systems, such as piloted combat planes (money for Navy aircraft alone doubles from $17 billion to $34 billion), and warships (up from $45 billion this year to $66 billion next year).
The warships are especially expensive ($13 billion for a new USS Gerald Ford–class aircraft carrier, $2.7 billion for a DDG-51 destroyer) and take many years to build. It could be argued we need more ships, but do we need the kinds of ships we’re buying? They are far more capable than ships of older times, but they’re also more vulnerable, given the swarms of anti-ship missiles and drones, which, for instance, China has prepared to fire in case of a war near the Taiwan Strait.
A few years ago, some analysts noted that big ships were good for crisis management—all those attack planes and missiles could intimidate an adversary—but they should probably be moved out of harm’s way if bullets started to fly. (Submarine crews have a related joke: “There are two kinds of warships—submarines and targets.”) This spring’s war with Iran shows they’re of limited use for crisis management: Two aircraft carriers and their escort ships didn’t scare the Iranians into backing down. (However, against a country of limited military power, such as Iran, the carriers can still launch a lot of firepower.)
There’s another, more mundane problem with this budget, especially with the scads it devotes to shipbuilding—the largest sum (adjusting for inflation) since 1962. Even if Congress passes it, the Navy won’t b
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Pope James David Vance the First
The vice president has decided he’s a more accomplished theologian than Leo XIV.
By Tom Nichols | April 16, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/pope-jd-vance-iran/686826/
The Trump administration doesn’t seem to have many rules, but one of them is that once the president picks a fight, his posse must show up to support him, no matter how ill-advised the conflict. And few senior officials are more eager to back up the boss in every embarrassing beef than Vice President Vance, who recently seems to have decided that he, and not Pope Leo XIV, is the true arbiter of Catholic doctrine.
President Trump is personally angry with Leo because the pontiff has been deeply critical of America’s war of choice in Iran. Accordingly, Trump lashed out at His Holiness twice over the past few days. Vance might have seen this as a valuable opportunity to say nothing and let the storm pass; Leo, naturally, doesn’t seem to care all that much what Trump thinks. (As my colleague Liz Bruenig wrote, Leo answers to a higher authority.) Had the vice president remained silent, Trump might have moved on, and Vance, a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, would have been able to stay out of a dustup between his president and his spiritual leader.
But no. Vance just had to speak up. He could have taken his cues from John F. Kennedy or Mario Cuomo, Catholic politicians who were careful to note that their faith was personal and important to them, but that in their public life, they must govern as Americans according to the Constitution. Vance decided on a different approach: The pope, he implied, wasn’t a very good, or very smart, Catholic.
Vance’s response to Leo’s statements came during an interview at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia. It was a sour cocktail of equal parts hubris and ignorance with a spritz of Vance’s trademark smarm, and it is worth considering in full:
Quote:Vance just told the bishop of Rome that theology should be “anchored in the truth”? What does that even mean? Whose truth? Somewhere in the nether gloom, Pontius Pilate is rubbing his aching temples and thinking he’s heard this one before.
In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.
And I think that one of these issues here is that there has been—if you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful; you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth, and that’s one of the things that I try to do, and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy, whether they’re Catholic or Protestant.
Catholics, of course, believe that the pope is infallible when he issues ex cathedra pronouncements on faith and doctrine and, yes, morality, so challenging his pronouncements on war and peace seems a tad presumptuous for a member of the faithful. (My own faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, does not have a figure with power like the pope, but you can bet I’d think twice before telling our top cleric, the patriarch of Constantinople, that he was all hosed up on some important theological stuff.) Vance’s slap at Leo—including the pompous implication that he needs to go back and do some theology homework—illustrates the political and religious risks that Vance is willing to take not only with the Vatican, but with a country whose population is one-fifth Catholic, in order to demonstrate his utter fealty to Trump.
Some years ago, I wrote a book, The Death of Expertise, in which I examined the strange phenomenon whereby every person thinks they’re an expert, to the point where they are willing to lecture actual experts about those experts’ own field of competence. Doctors, lawyers, professors, and people in trades such as carpentry and electrical work can tell stories of some layperson who had ideas about medications, the law, or what kind of circuit breakers to use. It’s human, it’s silly,
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The Aides Keeping the President in the Dark
Donald Trump’s advisers are treating him like he can’t handle the reality of the war in Iran. They might be right—but that fact is a danger to the constitutional order.
By David A. Graham | April 20, 2026, 5:48 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/04/donald-trump-aides-ira
n-war/686875/
Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.
The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down. Commanders were scrambling to create and execute an operation to rescue both. The second was the president’s temperament. As plans developed and went into effect, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, “aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.”
It’s a stunning bit of news: During a national-security crisis, top advisers decided the commander in chief’s presence was a liability. This incident is only the latest example of how Trump’s aides have been trying to keep him in the dark and build a protective bubble around him.
A president whom aides do not view as reliable and steady is a danger in any situation, but the war in Iran has brought many of these issues to the fore. In the lead-up to the war, which Trump launched without consulting Congress, making a case to the American people, or assembling allies, many of his aides believed that Trump was not taking seriously the risks and trade-offs involved, according to Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. (The fact that these aides have voiced none of these concerns publicly but said enough privately that the comments leaked later does not speak well for the Cabinet’s judgment or courage.)
Once the war began, Trump received updates that were screened and bowdlerized for him. He has long been inattentive to briefings—early in his first term, aides realized that he liked maps and graphics and would glaze over if given much information in text—but he has reportedly been starting his day off with a sizzle reel of stunning explosions rather than with hard info. These clips, which show the real prowess of the American military, did not convey the ways that the U.S. was losing the war on a strategic level. According to Time, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles became “concerned aides were giving the President a rose-colored view of how the war was being perceived domestically.” Trump was reportedly shocked at how easily Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, even though the military had warned of the possibility.
Although Trump’s erratic and horrifying social-media posts have absorbed much of the media’s attention of late, his live appearances haven’t done a lot to assure the public of his steadiness either. He unconvincingly told reporters that he had believed that a picture that depicted him as Christlike actually showed him as a doctor. Trump has never excelled at reading from a teleprompter, often coming off as stiff and bored, but his delivery has been especially rough in recent weeks. He seemed tired and unfocused delivering lines in his April 1 White House speech, has waffled on whether the action in Iran is or isn’t a “war,” and declared the war complete even as hostilities continued. Trump also said he wasn’t made aware of a curious press statement by First Lady Melania Trump, where she denied any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, before it was made.
Every president eventually feels trapped in a bubble. In 2014, an evidently claustrophobic Barack Obama reveled in the act of just walking to Chipotle from the White House. Other predecessors have complained about receiving heavily filtered information and feeling removed from the real world. The Biden administration raised new questions of whether the president was bein
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People should be free to build gratifying fantasies free from unpleasant facts.
When I first wrote about Trump in the 2017 edition of The Death of Expertise, I was willing to believe that Trump’s political base did not hold him accountable for his ignorance and errors because they lacked the ability to see his errors as actual mistakes. At the time, I quoted psychologist David Dunning—who along with his colleague Justin Kruger discovered the Dunning-Kruger Effect—when he noted that “some voters, especially those facing significant distress in their life, might like some of what they hear from Trump, but they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes.”
Today, we have to reconsider that view. Many Americans who support Trump have doubled down on their loyalty, at levels that now suggest a cult-like following rather than political support.
In Trump (and other celebrities, such as Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), the American public has found public figures who indulge their paranoia about shadowy forces ruining their lives. Citizens feel they know these celebrities and can trust them. Social scientists call such attachments “parasocial relationships,” in which people feel a deep personal connection to famous people who, in the main, have no idea who they are. -- Tom Nichols, THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Second Edition [2024]
parasocial-relationships
https://www.findapsychologist.org/parasocial-relationships-the-nature-
of-celebrity-fascinations
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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‘The Right Amount of Crazy’
In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality.
By Fintan O’Toole
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/the-right-amount-of-crazy-
fintan-otoole/
In January, when The New York Times asked Donald Trump whether there were any limits on his global powers, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.” Since whatever morality he ever possessed has long since departed, the remaining question is whether he has also lost his mind. Given that, in the course of his war on Iran, he has chosen to present himself to the world as a genocidal maniac—posting on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”—the answer may seem all too obvious.
Yet to arrive at it we have to tease out the relationships that are always at the heart of his persona: the complex connections between performance and reality, method and madness, bombast and bombs. With Trump, these oppositions are never absolute. The borders between them are always porous. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that in Trump’s chaotic mind there lurks the Madman Theory, a belief that acting crazy is a rational strategy. Richard Nixon coined the phrase for his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, during the Vietnam War:
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
The belief that Trump has been following Nixon’s playbook in relation to Iran has been a staple of recent media analysis. It is certainly valid. Yet it raises a further question: Is it possible for someone to act the lunatic while actually being one? We are faced with a vastly more consequential version of a Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s novel, claiming to be crazy is taken as evidence of sanity. Likewise the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.
To get our bearings in this maze we might begin with Irving. He appears, shorn of a surname, in the book Tony Schwartz ghostwrote for Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987). While still at college, Trump has done his first deal, buying with his father and refurbishing an apartment complex in Cincinnati. He hires Irving to manage the project. Trump suspects that he is a thief and calls him “a short, fat, bald-headed guy with thick glasses and hands like Jell-O, who’d never lifted anything in his life beside a pen, and who had no physical ability whatsoever.”
But his saving grace is “an incredible mouth.” According to Trump, Irving would collect rents from the most recalcitrant tenants by putting on a show of frenzy:
He’d ring the doorbell, and when someone came to the door, he’d go crazy. He’d get red in the face, use every filthy word he could think of, and make every threat in the book. It was an act, but it was very effective: usually they paid up right then and there.
One day, while Irving was on his rounds, he knocked on a door, and a little ten-year-old girl answered. Irving said, “You go tell your father to pay his f—ing rent or I’m going to knock his ass off.”
Irving, says Trump, “left a very vivid impression on me.” Trump learned early on that screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls and making every threat in the book was a good way to get what he wanted. There would seem to be a clear path from Irving to the flamboyantly demented Trump of his Easter Sunday morning post: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
For Trump’s apologist
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Trump fought to keep the ballroom fundraising contract secret. Here’s what’s in it.
The agreement governing hundreds of millions in private donations was kept secret until a watchdog group sued and a judge ordered it disclosed.
By Jonathan Edwards, Dan Diamond
April 21, 2026 at 6:03 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/21/trump-ballroom-dono
r-deal/
The Trump administration’s contract governing hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to build President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom shields donors’ identities, excludes the White House from conflict of interest protections and was disclosed only after a lawsuit and a judge’s order, records obtained by The Washington Post show.
The agreement establishing the legal and financial framework for the planned $400 million undertaking — the most significant change to the White House in decades — was signed in early October, less than two weeks before demolition crews started destroying the East Wing. Public Citizen, a government watchdog organization, sued to obtain the contract between the White House, the National Park Service and the Trust for the National Mall, the nonprofit managing donations for the project, and shared the document with The Post.
“The Trump administration’s failure to disclose this contract was flatly unlawful,” said Wendy Liu, a Public Citizen attorney and lead counsel on the lawsuit, filed after the Park Service and the Interior Department failed to fulfill a public records request for the document. “The American people are entitled to transparency over this multi-million-dollar project.”
The secrecy surrounding the contract mirrors the administration’s broader approach to the project. White House officials have declined to disclose the total amount raised, the identities of all donors or, until recently, basic details about the building’s design. Court documents show Trump knew he was going to tear down the East Wing at least two months before doing so, but he never told the public.
The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public.
“President Trump is working 24/7 to Make America Great Again, including his historic beautification of the White House, at no taxpayer expense,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement defending the administration’s process.
White House officials said not publicly posting the agreement was standard practice for contracts involving the executive residence, citing security concerns. They also said offering anonymity for donors was standard for significant projects and framed the use of private funds as a boon for taxpayers. The administration did not respond to questions about failing to respond to the public records request for the contract or fighting the release of the document in court. Trump has said that the administration has raised about $300 million for the project.
The contract resembles templates used by the Park Service for more routine fundraising partnerships — with several notable differences: Provisions peppered throughout the agreement prevent the signatories from revealing the identities of anonymous donors, and a review process for detecting conflicts of interest with the Park Service and Interior Department makes no mention of doing the same for the president, other White House officials or the 14 other executive departments he oversees.
White House ballroom fundraising agreement
Dozens of the project’s known donors — which include Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Google — collectively have billions of dollars in federal contracts before the administration. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) Critics have argued that allowing anonymous gifts to a sitting president’s signature project creates precisely the kind of conflict the contra
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