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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Trump’s Last Loyal Constituency
The administration delivers a win for financial crooks at the expense of honest businesses.
By David Frum | August 16, 2026, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-business-dark-money/68
8290/
“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.
So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.
The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.
After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account.
The information required was pretty basic: name, address, birth date, and a government ID—a Social Security card, say, or a passport. For the great majority of U.S. enterprises, these rules were easy to comply with. Almost 80 percent of American businesses have no employees other than the owner. You have probably divulged the requested information dozens of times without inconvenience.
For the institutions receiving the information, however, its collection was very burdensome. Most clients told the truth. Some did not. How to tell which was which—and how to authenticate the information provided by untruthful clients? The consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic for the financial institution. In 2024, TD Bank paid $3 billion in fines—and accepted limits on the future growth of its business—to settle U.S. claims that it had not properly monitored accounts opened by fentanyl traffickers.
To protect themselves, financial institutions pay third-party agencies to check information about their customers, especially those algorithmically identified as high-risk. One study puts the cost of financial-crimes compliance in the United States and Canada at $61 billion.
Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The go
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The Misery Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Why Trump is eviscerating the military
Paul Krugman
Aug 17, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-misery-will-continue-until-mora
le
According to an old military maxim, amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. But these days we need a third category: Immature, insecure guys think that war is about acting tough and looking cool.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a podcast update for today. I want to weigh in on the incredible rash of stories about how Trump and company are eviscerating the military. It is truly remarkable. If there’s one thing that we thought that the United States was still kind of number one at, it was that we had the world’s premier military. Now, of course, we managed to rather quickly effectively lose the war with Iran, although current management will never admit it.
But also just a series of stories, some of them related to that war, some of them going beyond and to other areas that just are truly shocking, even for somebody like me, who had no expectation that this administration would be doing any good for the nation.
Just to remember the story: So first we had the big warning that the U.S. military was basically running out of ammunition. That the precision missiles that are so essential to waging war were largely gone, expended unproductively against Iran. And clearly the cost benefit calculus was a disaster because the Iranians were sending cheap drones and we were using multi-million dollar weapons in an attempt to counter them.
After that, we got the story about the horrific conditions on board the USS Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that’s been stationed for a very long time without, it appears, adequate resupply and with toilets flooding. Apparently just horrific conditions, which turn out to be not unique to that ship: Other ships are having problems. There’s the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, which apparently has run out of feminine hygiene products, among other things.
Okay, so we have those horrific stories. And then we have the stories about Trump intervening. Demanding, first, that the Navy construct a whole new class of ships, Trump-class battleships, which are useless and would be sitting ducks. Then demanding that the Navy replace modern catapults with steam catapults, which he thinks are cooler. And then demanding that they relocate the command tower on aircraft carriers because he wants them to look more like the way they looked during World War II.
Is this America? I mean, think about the American way of war. We are not a warrior nation, which is fine. We are a lot of other things.
We were a nation that was supreme in the arts of peace. We were a nation of know-how. America won its wars by doing the arts of peace right, by building better and more stuff than other countries. By getting our act together in ways that didn’t necessarily involve fighting.
Of course, you always need courageous warriors. You always need people able and willing to risk death in the service of their nation. But what America was supreme at was logistics. If you ask how did America and its allies pull off D-Day, well, a lot of it was being able to deliver supplies to the beaches of Normandy in a way that the Germans never thought was possible.
America was always the place, the country that was really good at logistics. For us to be not feeding our sailors, not able to keep ships that are not, after all, under fire all the time, to keep the plumbing working, that is incredible.
The idea that the president is imposing his personal aesthetic preferences to undo design decisions that were made by military professionals is also basically incredible.
Okay, what is this all about? And what happened? Some of it is specifically military, but mostly it’s not. I think these military failings should be put in the same context as the frantic and disastrous destruction and redesign of Washington, D.C. The demolition of the East Wing. The disastrous attempt to refurbish the reflecting pool to reflect T
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Trump’s Ballroom Was His Dream of Beauty and Space. Now It’s a ‘Military Complex.’
As courts have questioned the president’s authority for the project, he has leaned in to arguments of national security
By Will Hobson and Louise Radnofsky
Aug. 16, 2026 11:00 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trumps-ballroom-was-his-dream-of-b
eauty-and-space-now-its-a-military-complex-89a7e230
WASHINGTON-President Trump’s vision for a White House ballroom stretches back more than a decade. His argument that it is “vital to our national security,” which culminated Friday in an appeal to the Supreme Court, is far more recent.
When Trump announced last year that he was demolishing part of the White House to make way for the project, he framed it as a matter of aesthetics and space.
“It will be a great legacy project, and I think it will be special,” the president said that July. “I think it will be really beautiful.”
Trump on that day and many others said it was unbefitting for a nation of the U.S.’s stature to have to erect temporary tents for large events. “When it rains, it’s a disaster,” he said. “And the tent is a hundred yards— that’s more than a football field—away from the main entrance, and people are schlepping down to the tent. It’s not a pretty sight.”
Trump raised the ballroom idea in 2010, in a private phone call with David Axelrod, then senior adviser to President Barack Obama. The conversation came in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and Trump called to suggest he could help. After Axelrod politely declined, Trump offered to build a White House ballroom.
“They turned it down,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016. “I was going to put up $100 million to build a ballroom at the White House, because having a tent is not that good.”
In a signing ceremony shortly after returning to office last year, Trump said he had been rebuffed on the ballroom “three or four times,” including during the Biden administration, but joked that he would be more receptive to his own proposal now that he occupied the White House. “I’m going to try and make the offer to myself, you know? Because we could use a bigger room,” he said.
The White House news release on the project touted the need for “a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests.” It said the Secret Service “will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.”
Construction began in September, and the demolition of the East Wing soon followed. The first major legal challenge was filed in mid-December.
An early Justice Department legal submission cited the tent issue and emphasized the president’s role as “the sole organ of American foreign policy,” requiring him to be able to receive ambassadors and other public ministers in an appropriate setting. “It is entirely fitting, then, that the presidential residence and workplace be equipped for that purpose,” the government said. “Given modern needs, the White House is not.”
By January, the administration’s legal arguments on security were growing, with its lawyers telling a judge that halting the construction project midstream would endanger the safety of the president and others who work in the White House. Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn added in a court declaration that a permanent structure for screening guests and hosting events would “also increase the safety and security of all attendees at those events, including the President and foreign leaders and dignitaries.”
In late March, Trump aboard Air Force One shared renderings of the project and emphasized the security upgrades that he said came at the request of the military. “They wanted additional security, drone-proof roofing, and reinforced glass,” he said. “And unfortunately, we’re living in an age where that’s a good thing.”
Two days later, U.S. Judge Richard Leon ordered construction of the ballroom to halt above ground, unless and until it was blessed by Congress. The Justice Department quickly appealed, and construction has been allowed
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It may seem a small thing to Trump voters, but President Donald Trump told a story about South Korea on Monday. Every single part of it is false.
August 17, 2026
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/17/politics/fact-check-trump-south-korea-c
ost-sharing-biden
Trump has delivered versions of his fictional story before; CNN debunked one telling last year. The president delivered Monday’s version the day after he announced the US would reduce military exercises with South Korea – citing his “very good relationship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and also mentioning that South Korea declined to participate in the US war with Iran.
The latest version of Trump’s tale, which you can watch in full here, went like this:
Start at 19 minutes 13 seconds
South Korea “essentially” didn’t pay for the cost of the US military presence in the country before Trump first became president. Trump then got South Korea to unhappily agree to pay “$3 billion” in a year, with further increases the following year and the year after that. But then the 2020 election was “rigged” against him. When Joe Biden became president, South Korea convinced Biden that Trump was “probably a bad person” and they shouldn’t have to pay the money, so Biden “immediately rescinded” Trump’s “order.”
Let’s walk through why all of this is wrong. The facts show that Trump’s comments include at least five separate inaccurate claims – in addition to his usual exaggeration of the size of the US military presence in South Korea, which he put at “39,000” but the Pentagon said was actually 26,589 as of the end of March.
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “Just so you understand with South Korea, look: South Korea has been protected by us for many, many years, and during my first term, they agreed to pay close to $3 billion a year for protection, because we don’t – you know, they essentially weren’t paying.” Last year, he explicitly said South Korea’s cost-sharing payments didn’t exist before he became president.
The reality: For decades before Trump took office, South Korea spent substantial sums to share the cost of the US military presence in the country; its cost-sharing “Special Measures Agreements” with the US began in 1991. Under the final five-year agreement signed before Trump became president in 2017, negotiated by the Obama administration, South Korea agreed to spend more than $800 million per year from 2014 through 2018. Trump is entitled to argue that this was insufficient, but it was far from not paying at all.
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “But we agreed for a short term that it would be $3 billion…” Later in his remarks, he referred to the supposed arrangement as “$3 billion a year” from South Korea.
The reality: Under a one-year Special Measures Agreement negotiated by the Trump administration in 2019, South Korea agreed to an 8.2% increase in its spending – but the new total was still less than $1 billion, not $3 billion.
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “But we agreed for a short term that it would be $3 billion, and next year it would go up and the next year it would go up, so that they start paying for their protection.”
The reality: Trump did not secure three years of spending increases. He did achieve the one-year increase for 2019, but negotiations on a post-2019 deal stalled amid Trump’s demands for a massive increase in South Korea’s contribution, and the talks were still unresolved when Biden took office in January 2021.
South Korea did come to a narrower deal with the Trump administration in mid-2020 to spend $200 million that year to pay South Korean employees of US forces, who had been put on leave because Trump’s one-year deal expired at the end of 2019. Clearly, though, that wasn’t two years of spending hikes over the supposed “$3 billion.”
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “When the election was rigged and I ended up watching for four years and then coming back…”
The reality: Trump was lying. He lost the 2020 election fair and square to Biden.
It’s not tru
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Quote:It may seem a small thing to Trump voters, but Trump’s staff claims he could never do anything unethical.
Originally posted by second:
It may seem a small thing to Trump voters, but President Donald Trump told a story about South Korea on Monday. Every single part of it is false.
What Trump Officials Mean by “Never”
The claim that the president could not possibly do something unethical marks a new frontier of impunity by the administration.
By Jonathan Chait | August 17, 2026, 5:16 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/todd-blanche-trump-power-abu
se/688310/
Attorney General Todd Blanche has made abundantly clear that he will not act independently of President Trump’s desires. So yesterday, NBC’s Kristen Welker posed an obvious question to Blanche on Meet the Press: “If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied confidently, “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”
This particular formulation—never has, never will—has become a new mantra for the administration. Last month, in response to reports that Trump had personally gained $2 billion in the previous year, the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.” When ProPublica reported in December that Trump had personally used the same mortgage-application fraud that he has called an imprisonable offense for various political targets, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”
This is an epistemic frontier of impunity that can be understood only in the context of Trump’s disregard for legal or normative guardrails against his abuses of power.
In some circumstances, to state that you never have and never will do something bad might be unremarkable, and perhaps reassuring. But when the category of behavior is something you engage in constantly and with little disguise, the effect is quite different, akin to a company accountant solemnly promising that he would never dip into the kitty as he boards a helicopter to his private island.
To begin with, we know that giving an improper order to the attorney general is something Trump would do, because he has more or less done it. Last year, for instance, in a social-media post that was intended as a private message for her but was mistakenly posted on Truth Social, he pressured then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge several people that Trump wished to punish for political reasons. Blanche has personal experience with Trump’s obsessive habit of demanding federal investigations of his enemies, having been asked to bring new charges against David Hearn for his alleged defacement of the Reflecting Pool, even after the Justice Department conceded in a court filing that it had no evidence that Hearn had done such a thing, and that the damage to the floor lining had been caused by faulty installation.
Likewise, Trump’s conflicts of interest are of the most flagrant variety. Since the 1970s, previous occupants of his office have placed their investments in blind trusts. Jimmy Carter gave up control of his peanut farm to avoid the appearance of even the subtlest pro-peanut bias creeping into his decision making. Yet Trump has controlled a business empire and made numerous decisions that benefited it directly.
The same holds true for the assertion that he has never violated the law. Trump’s first brush with fame occurred in a lawbreaking context—he and his father were charged with excluding Black tenants from their apartments. They settled with the Justice Department without admitting wrongdoing but also agreed to abide by the Fair Housing Act. Trump was also convicted of falsifying business records in New York in 2024 and escaped more criminal charges (for stealing classified material, storing boxes of it in his home, and refusing to return it while lying to federal officials about it) through d
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Quote:A New Level of Trumpian Evil
Originally posted by second:
It may seem a small thing to Trump voters, but President Donald Trump told a story about South Korea on Monday. Every single part of it is false.
North Korea is the worst government on Earth; Trump prefers it to the prosperous democracy next door
By Paul Krugman | Aug 18, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-new-level-of-trumpian-evil
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump wrote:
Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises! While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, "No thanks!" Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
20 ReTruths 61 Likes
Aug 16, 2026 at 4:04 PM
I know that Donald Trump does something new and terrible every day, sometimes several times a day. Yet his betrayal of South Korea in favor of his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” stands out even among his many betrayals.
Why? Because North Korea isn’t simply a bad government, just another murderous authoritarian regime. It is something that has become rare, even among dictatorships: a full-blown totalitarian state, in which the government controls every aspect of life and even thinking dissident thoughts is a crime.
Let’s be clear: Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an ugly regime, a kleptocracy in which critics of the leader have a habit of falling out of high windows. Xi Jinping’s China isn’t a free society either. But they’re mild and open compared with North Korea, where indoctrination is constant, where everyone must, if they value their lives, constantly praise the leader, whose name and portrait are everywhere:
Deeply creepy': Enormous brooding banner of Trump now hangs next to Lincoln outside Department of Agriculture
Wait, did I get the right country?
North Korea is, in short, arguably the worst regime on the planet.
South Korea is, by contrast, one of the happiest stories in history. Obviously it’s not utopia, because no nation is. But it is a functioning democracy, which beat back a former president’s attempt to impose martial law — then put him on trial, convicted, and imprisoned him. (Is that the real reason for Trump’s hostility?)
It’s also an incredible economic success story, which transitioned over the course of just two generations from a desperately poor, war-ravaged nation to a standard of living comparable to that in Western Europe. It’s one of America’s biggest trading partners, a crucial supplier of semiconductor chips.
And South Korea is or was one of our most important military allies, with a military budget roughly the same size as Ukraine’s.
Much of the commentary I’ve seen about Trump lashing out at South Korea has focused on the damage to U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. How can anyone consider us a reliable ally at this point? Fair enough.
But it’s even more important to realize that Trump clearly prefers a nightmarish, totalitarian dictatorship — the worst regime on the planet — to a vibrant, successful democracy. A democracy, by the way, that more than 36,000 Americans gave their lives to defend during the Korean War.
America has a president who hates everything our nation was supposed to stand for.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Top 10 Ways Trump Has Made America Weaker
He’s been one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history—in all the wrong ways.
By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
August 17, 2026, 4:36 AM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/08/17/top-10-trump-america-weaker/
MAGA: “Make America Great Again.” That was U.S. President Donald Trump’s promise to the American people. Elect him, and the country would recover its mojo and return to a golden age of internal harmony, economic vitality, domestic sovereignty, and global influence. It was a seductive vision, especially for those Americans who had been buffeted by globalization and believed that immigrants and “globalists” were undermining the country from within.
As Trump’s second term nears the midway point, there can be little doubt that he is one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history. Unfortunately, almost all the consequences of his actions have been harmful, not just for most people in the United States but also for America’s relative power and standing in the world. His cronies and family members may be reaping the benefits, but the cumulative impact of his actions will be not a return to greatness, but a weaker and more divided America.
Let me count the ways.
1. Destroying confidence in U.S. promises. The importance of credibility is sometimes exaggerated, but other states will be less inclined to cooperate with Washington if they do not believe that it will keep its promises. As he did throughout his litigious and bankruptcy-prone business career, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that his threats are mostly empty bluster and his pledges mean nothing. He tore up the successful nuclear deal with Iran (didn’t that work out well?), and he now condemns the same trade agreement that he negotiated with Canada and Mexico during his first term (and that he said was the best deal ever). His on-again, off-again approach to tariffs, repeated threats to withdraw support from key allies, and unexplained reversal of his offer to let Ukraine build Patriot interceptors make it abundantly clear that his word means nothing. Zip. Nada.
This has real consequences: For example, Trump’s well-deserved reputation for double-dealing and unpredictability is one reason why he is having such trouble ending the war with Iran. Its leaders don’t believe a word he says—and why should they?—and they understandably want concrete concessions up front before they let him off the hook. It is also why more countries around the world are hedging their bets and looking for more reliable partners.
2. Reducing U.S. military capability. Despite spending unprecedented sums, boasting of the United States’ “lethality,” and making sure male troops have enough testosterone, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made the country’s military forces weaker and undermined the U.S. ability to deter attacks on its partners.
How? By starting a foolish war with Iran, depleting stockpiles of critical weaponry, and keeping ships, squadrons, and service personnel on station for months on end, reportedly leading to a wave of suicide attempts. These actions have burned through valuable military capacity to no good purpose, showed potential adversaries where the country’s vulnerabilities are, and eroded service members’ morale in potentially tragic ways. While Trump and Hegseth have been squandering U.S. military assets, potential future adversaries have been arming, studying, training, and preparing.
To make matters worse, Trump and Hegseth are trying to politicize the uniformed services and make them a loyal part of the MAGA movement. Hegseth has actively sought to purge officers he regards as “woke,” fired or denied promotion to a disproportionate number of women and people of color—despite their stellar records and recommendations from the senior officers who know them best—and tried to impose ideological conformity on the entire military establish
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There is a contest that Trump is winning: ‘Easily the Worst President in U.S. History.’
By Thomas B. Edsall | April 21, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/trump-legacy-history-presid
ents.html?unlocked_article_code=1.clA.StLj.wTYHj_IJskBa&smid=url-share
The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.
It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.
One way to bring home the depth of Trump’s callousness is to look at a specific case. In May 2025, Anjee Davis, the chief executive of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News:
We have a member who is being treated for Stage IV colorectal cancer. She had just qualified to enter a clinical trial that was going to be her last-chance effort to slow the spread of her cancer.
Her trial was about to start when N.I.H. funding was pulled overnight, and the trial was canceled.
Davis replied to my inquiry about the case by email. “This patient has since passed away without receiving the clinical trial she was counting on,” she wrote.
“What we will never know,” Davis added, “is whether that trial could have given her more time with her children.”
I have described in earlier columns bits and pieces of Trump’s destructiveness, but the list grows daily.
Projections suggest there will be millions of dead men, women and children as a result of his budget cuts, which were made without direct congressional approval. A study published in The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, found that Trump administration cuts in U.S.A.I.D. funding “would result in approximately 1,776,539 all-age deaths and 689,900 deaths in children younger than 5 years” in 2025 alone.
“Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”
There are the fraud victims who will never get court-ordered restitution because Trump pardoned the guilty. In a June 2025 report, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found that “Trump’s pardons cheat victims out of an astounding $1.3 billion in restitution and fines, allowing fraudsters, tax evaders, drug traffickers to keep ill-gotten gains.”
It doesn’t stop there. America can thank the president for environmental deregulation that could sicken and kill people by the tens or even hundreds of thousands.
Everything happens in such a rapid and scattershot way with Trump that it is easy to forget what happened as recently as last year.
An Associated Press investigation published in 2025 found that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency was seeking to eliminate or weaken “at least 30 major rules that seek to protect air and water and reduce emissions that cause climate change.”
If successful, the E.P.A. would gut pollution rules that were estimated, according to The Associated Press, to save “more than 30,000 lives annually.”
At the same time, the administration has been canceling funding for lifesaving scientific and medical research. In November, JAMA Internal Medicine published “Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health.”
It said that “in the first half of 2025, the N.I.H. terminated grants supporting 383 unique clinical trials, affecting 74,311 individuals.”
In an accompanying commentary, two researchers, Dr. Teva D. Brender and Dr. Cary P. Gross, wrote about the JAMA study:
There is a more direct and sobering impact of premature and scientifically unjustifiable trial terminations: the violation of foundational ethical principles of human participant research.
First and foremost, it is betrayal of the fundamental principles of informed consent
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This cocktail party proves Trump has no idea what's coming | Opinion
By John Casey | Aug 22, 2026
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-reality/
Christof, the megalomaniacal director of The Truman Show, played brilliantly by actor Ed Harris, had a line he loved to repeat: “We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented.”
I’ve been thinking about that line as of late because of the avalanche of stories about Trump’s “human printer” (or whatever she is), Natalie Harp, who prints out things for Trump to read since the climate skeptic in him can’t get enough of paper.
According to lots of media reports, she only prints out good news for him, with the intensity of a star-crossed paramour, or whatever she may be. If these reports are true, then Trump is only seeing the world that he is presented.
It’s either that, or Trump’s dementia has progressed to a point where he lives in a reality that bears no resemblance to reality. There have been some who have generally compared Trump to Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank but, after what happened on Wednesday, Trump has truly drifted into a fictitious universe, a reality that he is now presenting himself.
Truman Burbank’s reality was a meticulous, white-picket-fence cage called Seahaven. For Trump, it’s a cacophony of appliqués, granite, gold, tarp-covered Corinthian concrete, marble and placards, a proverbial White House soundstage, and this week, in the midst of a war and cratering economy, he gave the press corps a tour of his far-from-reality set.
Wednesday’s tone-deaf press gaggle wasn’t about inflation, or the war he’s dragged the country into with Iran, or the dismal jobs reports that keep getting updated and downgraded.
No, it was his vaunted, stylized and once-uneven helipad, which is made with some super-duper granite he claims can withstand 35,000 pounds per square inch, or whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Trump explained, “That’s stone that, if you took a hammer and you started hammering right now, all day long, you wouldn’t see a mark on it.”
I think the same thing could be said about Trump’s obtuse head?
He put his autograph on a piece of the $5 million helipad going in on the South Lawn, then laid out this so-out-of-touch scenario that it makes Truman Burbank look like a realist. He said that guests could step out of the car onto “a beautiful new roadway,” walk the path, “have cocktails and everything outside of the White House,” on the helipad he meant, and then head into the ballroom.
It was a remarkable half hour of enthusiastic fantasy from an 80-year-old man who has genuinely lost his mind, lost his marbles, lost his way, or is lost in space.
Somewhere behind him, out of frame, is the criminality of a crater where the historic East Wing was reduced to rubble by a wrecking ball for a shiny eight-figure ballroom.
You might think of that demolition the same way Trump has torn down the American economy. The ballroom is supposed to be underwritten by corporations and private donors who are the only ones benefiting from Trump’s destructive economy.
But in the end, we, the taxpayers, will be footing some or most of that bill because Trump inevitably dumps the excesses of his soiling on us.
Outside the gates of the metaphorical Seahaven, a different reality is unfolding for everyone not invited to a cocktail reception on the helipad. Grocery bills keep climbing. Premiums keep climbing. Treasury yields are sitting at levels that make economists nervous, and the jobs numbers have been weak for three straight months.
But for Trump, that’s all negligible compared to slabs of stone with “a million-year life.” In the reality that is presented to Trump, only lives that last a million years count. Those of us who are mere mortals don’t have a place in his Seahaven.
Now, here’s the part of the Truman Show comparison that used to feel like a stretch and now doesn’t. Remember the studio light that falls out of a clear blue sky and shatters at Truman’s feet? That was such an obvious, glaring sig
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Why does Trump attack California? Is it because it matters so much to the world?
California's economy ranks as the fourth-largest in the world, with a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) passing $4.2 to $4.4 trillion. If treated as an independent country, the state trails only the rest of the United States, China, and Germany, narrowly fluctuating ahead of or alongside Japan.
How Trump is trying to crush California’s environmental policies
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration has taken a series of extraordinary steps to attack California’s position as a national leader in environmental protection, enlisting at least a half-dozen federal agencies to undermine the state’s efforts to pivot away from fossil fuels.
The stakes are high. Because of its market muscle as the world’s fourth largest economy, California’s environmental regulations have influenced the manufacturers of automobiles and other consumer goods. And its green policies have spread to some other states in what’s known as the “California effect.”
But President Trump has marshaled the full power of the federal government to clamp down on the state’s climate initiatives. He has been vocal in his contempt for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat and possible 2028 presidential contender whom he refers to as “Gavin Newscum.”
Mr. Newsom, a loud and pointed critic of Mr. Trump, pledged soon after the 2024 election to insulate California’s environmental policies from a second Trump administration — perhaps making the state an inviting target for a president who has been using government levers to punish perceived enemies.
There are almost too many examples to list.
Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have blocked California from setting its own limits on automobile pollution, which federal law has permitted since the 1970s. The Energy Department has announced $75 million for a new coal export terminal in Oakland, Calif. The Interior Department has paid energy companies to cancel planned wind farms off the coast of California and other blue states. The president ordered a company to restart a pipeline that caused one of the state’s largest oil spills in 2015.
And just last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signaled it could curb the power of the California Coastal Commission, a state agency that has protected the shoreline from threats like oil spills for more than half a century.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/climate/trump-california-climate.ht
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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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