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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The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed
As Donald Trump faces one humiliation after another, he is attacking those he blames.
By Jonathan Lemire | August 5, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-humiliated-iran-ref
lecting-pool/688184/
One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.
But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.
His recent targets include an Olympic canoeist accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a rushed and botched renovation project, and journalists who reported about the security deficiencies of Trump’s new Air Force One. In the first matter, he pushed for a prosecution after an arrest was made; in the other, he ordered a criminal investigation. (The case against the canoeist and other alleged vandals fell apart, and the subpoenas of the journalists have been dropped, at least for the moment.)
For months now, Trump has been on the receiving end of another humiliation: He has been repeatedly mocked and ignored by the hard-line leaders in Iran. Once more this week, the president reacted with rage when Iran again contradicted his claims about negotiations to bring the war to a close. How will he lash out this time?
Trump really, really does not want to be forgotten, and he cares deeply about leaving his physical mark on Washington. He is a developer at heart who spent decades obsessing over the details of his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach while also overseeing the design of luxury golf courses around the world. He mostly kept that impulse in check during his first term, but now, facing his political mortality, he has decisively shifted his focus to his legacy, whether that be trying to claim territory for the United States or reshaping the nation’s capital. You know the list: the East Wing, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the municipal golf courses, a helipad on the White House South Lawn, and so on. Trump has long prized symbols—particularly when the symbols can project his power—and seized upon America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to further beautify Washington, his backdrop as he presided over the grandiose celebrations. His attention was particularly drawn to the Reflecting Pool.
Trump was not wrong in thinking it could use a little love. The Reflecting Pool, which stretches east from the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall, toward the Washington Monument, has long leaked and showed its age, bedeviling administrations for decades. In April, Trump announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner that would be, in his words, American-flag blue. To complete the project before the July 4 festivities, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. Instead, the algae flourished, the pool turned green, fences went up, and mitigation efforts failed. The R
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U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s clash with President Trump over the handling of the Reflecting Pool case is raising questions about Trump’s sanity.
There is video of Trump explaining that vandals, not incompetent workers, caused the Reflecting Pool liner to peel. Trump is crazy.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/31/doj-reflecting-pool-damage-bo
tched-installation-not-vandalism-01021291
The video of Trump being senile and talking faster than his brain works.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Watchdogs Are Barking Themselves Hoarse
The scandals of the president’s first term now seem quaint.
By Marie-Rose Sheinerman | August 9, 2026, 8 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-ethics-corruption-c
rypto-watchdogs/688187/
Last May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading GRIFTER IN CHIEF and DON THE CON.
But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”
Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.
This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.
That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, espe
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The Man in Charge of Immigration Data Just Resigned
The Department of Homeland Security has stopped releasing timely, reliable statistics on immigration enforcement.
By Nick Miroff | August 10, 2026, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-dhs-deportation-dat
a-ice/688220/
Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed.
During the past year and a half, as the White House directed DHS to run the largest deportation campaign in history, Trump officials blocked Rosenblum’s team from publishing monthly reports. The office’s website went stale, and its immigration-enforcement tables became frozen in 2024, as if nothing has happened since then. In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum said he was glad to quit an administration whose values he didn’t share but sad to leave his team operating in a “hostile work environment.”
It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.
Arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data categories most crucial to understanding what Trump is doing in his second term. With DHS’s data office muzzled, the only public source for immigration data has been the ICE website, where the agency periodically publishes enforcement statistics—but it has sometimes gone months without posting updates. ICE statistics show that the agency deported about 400,000 people during Trump’s first year in office, a figure well short of the White House’s goal of 1 million annual removals. Trump officials, starting with Kristi Noem during her time as DHS secretary, found a way to gloss over this fact by claiming that a far greater number of immigrants left the United States voluntarily than were removed by ICE. The department has counted these estimates as “self-deportations,” as if they were confirmed departures rather than rough guesses.
I asked DHS why Rosenblum’s team had been blocked from publishing monthly reports. The department’s press office didn’t answer that question, but it sent a statement: “This is the most transparent administration in American history.” The email was unsigned, and sentences appeared in different-size fonts, as if they had been copied and pasted. The statement said that during the president’s first year in office, “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.”
Even the immigration hard-liners in Trump’s MAGA movement aren’t buying it. They say that the administration is backing off the president’s campaign pledge to undertake the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, swayed by pro-business Republicans who are worried about labor shortages and political strategists who warn that aggressive enforcement will hurt the party in the midterm elections. Critics on the right—including Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, the Fox News host Tomi Lahren, and the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer—have most recentl
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Replenishing Stocks Will Just Recreate A Failed Military
The US Military Must Be Remade--Not Reconstructed As It Was
Phillips P. OBrien | Aug 11, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/replenishing-stocks-will-just-r
ecreate
Lately there has been a great deal of discussion of how the USA has run down its stocks of certain classes of advanced military equipment. I know, as I have been a part of that debate starting here, and also in the Atlantic. This expenditure of ammunition is indeed shocking, and even before the latest Trump escalation in July had led to dangerously low stockpiles in certain areas; stockpiles so low that, I for one, do not believe that the US military will be capable of fighting a major war for years.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donors to Trump’s ballroom include 14 companies that have received new or increased government contracts over the last 6 months worth over $50 billion. 16 corporate donors are either facing federal enforcement actions or had actions suspended by the Trump administration, including antitrust actions, merger reviews, and SEC investigations. https://www.citizen.org/article/ballroom-billions/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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There is a new book on Trump.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan | Jun 23, 2026
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00
Download for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Maggie+Haberman+Jonathan+Swan&ch
eck=1
or from https://z-lib.gl/s/Maggie%20Haberman%20Jonathan%20Swan
From the Introduction
History is full of ironies. For Democrats, there could be no irony more painful than the realization it was their own success in removing Donald Trump from the White House in the 2020 election—and their subsequent determination to ensure he would never return—that has made him the most consequential and feared President of our lifetimes.
Had Trump eked out a victory over Joe Biden in that election, he would have begun his second term in a sorry state. The pandemic was still raging in early 2021, still killing Americans by the thousands, warping the economy, and disrupting global trade. Inflation would soon arrive, as it did across major economies worldwide, dragging down the approval ratings of incumbent leaders in nearly every liberal democracy and fueling the rise of right-wing populists. There is no reason to think Trump would have been the exception. He has insisted that inflation would never have happened on his watch, but that claim, while impossible to disprove, was equally impossible to take seriously. That spring, Trump was set to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. He had wanted to move much faster than that, and it had required a concerted effort by his military leaders and national security advisor to stop him from initiating a wildly precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East and Africa before he left office on January 20, 2021. Who knows whether Trump’s withdrawal from Afghanistan would have been smoother, more competent, than Biden’s disastrous exit, but the withdrawal was never going to be easy and would have added yet another burden to a consecutive term.
Where Trump envisaged success in a second term, it is not hard to instead imagine him hobbling through those four years, reacting to the pressures that would soon pile up, throwing him off balance and preventing him from ever taking full command of the presidency. Trump had felt stymied for much of his first term, starting with the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, then impeachment, and then Covid. By the end of Trump’s first term he was deeply unpopular, with his approval rating in the thirties. And given the trajectory he was on, it was certainly feasible that he might have finished a consecutive term with an even lower approval—which would have made him an historically unpopular President. Had that happened, Trump’s MAGA movement would have been greatly weakened. And the old-line Republican establishment would have had a fighting chance to yank the party away from the populism that Trump had channeled and fueled so masterfully.
All those what-ifs.
Instead, Joe Biden won the 2020 election—a fact Trump would never concede. When, in early 2021, Trump’s aides sent out a press release from the office of the “former” President, he made sure it never happened again. For months, he inhabited a fantasy world where, encouraged by oddballs and diehards, he would insist that what he portrayed as the greatest crime in American history—the supposed theft of the 2020 election—would soon decisively be proved and he would return to office as early as August of 2021. To admit he had lost—not to mention that he had lost to an aging politician who struggled on the stairs—would have been psychologically impossible for this New York developer and reality TV star who had spent his life trying to avoid humiliation, trying to brand himself as the world’s greatest “winner.”
Another irony: Some Trump aides eventually would concede, though only privately, that it was precisely because of Trump’s unique pathologies—especially a delusional capacity that they thought at the time was entirely self-destructive—that he pulled off the improbable fe
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Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s inside account of the Trump administration portrays a president with a vast appetite for power but who repeatedly backs down when the costs of his actions become too high.
By Mark Danner | August 20, 2026 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/08/20/trumps-constitutional-dict
atorship-regime-change-haberman-swan/
Reviewed:
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00
Download from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Maggie+Haberman+Jonathan+Swan&ch
eck=1
or from https://z-lib.gl/s/Maggie%20Haberman%20Jonathan%20Swan
Amid the tumult and the bluster and the noise, what exactly makes our singular president tick? After revisiting in minute detail the innumerable outrages and atrocities of Donald Trump’s second term we come upon, in the epilogue to Regime Change, the purported answer. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, having mostly completed their epic chronicle, arrive at the now-gilded Oval Office for their “fact-checking” interview. The president, in an expansive mood, greets them and guides them to their seats in front of the Resolute Desk. “No other president,” he had recently declared with his customary eloquence, “could do some of the shit I’m doing.”
Exactly what shit might he have had in mind? Sending masked ICE agents to seize and deport hundreds of thousands of largely law-abiding people and imprison 60,000 more? Overturning the eighty-year-old world trade system by imposing arbitrary tariffs? Launching a war of choice against Iran with nary a word to Congress or the American people? Firing hundreds of thousands of government workers and gutting USAID, PBS, and the Kennedy Center? Attacking law firms and universities and television networks?
One could go on, but the president wishes to make a broader point. A loyal-unto-death aide, Natalie Harp—known to her colleagues as “the human printer”—is dispatched to fetch a document, and the president begins to read from it,
reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as US President. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror—“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around.” Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. Tamerlane. “Napoleon,” he said with relish. “Hitler. Mao. Stalin.”
These leaders “maintained power through fear,” he said. “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?”
Trump lingered on the document’s central argument: that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But his was not.
“I never thought of it in terms of that,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting, the power.” Then he added: “But when I read it, I said, ‘He’s right.’”
And the “he” in question? The “historian” whose name had slipped the president’s mind, Harp later texts them, was actually the golfer Gary Player’s longtime caddy. No matter. “What was revealing,” they write,
was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis but the way he inhabited it: the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture, and detention, and Napoleon—and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear. He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed.
The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of
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Buttigieg slams Trump over ‘completely unacceptable’ USS Lincoln crisis
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Quote:Speaking of aircraft carriers, Trump thinks he knows a better way to design them, and he doesn't care about cost increase because he is not paying for it:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Buttigieg slams Trump over ‘completely unacceptable’ USS Lincoln crisis
Navy weighs major warship redesign to match Trump’s preferences
The president wants the new fleet of aircraft carriers to more closely resemble those from World War II. The change could cost billions.
By Noah Robertson and Tara Copp | August 15, 2026 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/15/navy-weigh
s-major-warship-redesign-match-trumps-preferences/
The U.S. Navy is considering a major redesign of its new aircraft carriers to better match President Donald Trump’s preferred aesthetic for the warships, according to seven current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The service is evaluating the feasibility of moving the multistory tower that acts as the carrier’s command center farther forward, toward the middle of the ship, to resemble older vessels, the officials said. The review, which has not been previously reported, is in response to Trump’s concerns about the “look” of the new Ford-class ships, where the tower is near the rear, these people said.
The timing and extent of the Navy’s evaluation is unclear, with current and former officials cautioning that the service was concerned that such a change would require significant time and money. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.
Moving that command center, known as the “island,” would be the second major design change prompted by the president, who on Thursday issued a national security memorandum directing the Navy to develop a plan to revert to older steam-powered catapults on future carriers. The systems help launch jets off the ships’ flight decks.
Trump’s preference, current and former officials said, is for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those that were in service during World War II.
The Navy also examined the issue during his first term as president, said a former senior U.S. official. A study found that moving the island could cost billions of dollars in redesign costs and significantly delay the program, this person said.
“It came back that the cost and time to do so would just be extraordinary,” the former official said.
There are three Ford-class carriers in various stages of development. The USS John F. Kennedy is undergoing sea trials and getting closer to joining the fleet while the USS Enterprise and USS Doris Miller are under construction. The first carrier in the class, USS Gerald R. Ford, is already in service and recently finished a lengthy combat tour in the Middle East.
Plans call for building up to 10 Ford-class carriers over the next four decades, at a projected future cost of $22 billion each, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Navy’s most recent shipbuilding plan.
Relocating the island would be “a major redesign,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy officer who studies the service at the Hudson Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington. Such an alteration to the carrier’s layout, he said, would affect the ship’s buoyancy and weight and come at a significant cost.
“You could change it,” he added, “but it’s very disruptive.”
The Pentagon and the Navy referred requests for comment to the White House, which pointed to the new national security memorandum when asked about Trump’s desire to relocate the island on future Ford-class aircraft carriers. The memorandum does not address the issue. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/rebuilding-the
-united-states-navy-and-americas-shipbuilding-industrial-base/
Another U.S. official familiar with both the potential changes to the catapult and the island said that the Navy is taking both matters seriously because of the delays and severe cost overruns it could create.
Tru
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