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As evidenced in the fascist playbook Project 2025, there is definitely ideology on the right, but there is no governing philosophy.

The Trump regime is in it only for the spectacle, the grift, the propaganda, and now, it seems, crisis management.

It feels like we are living inside a reality show because that is where Donald lives.

But before we get to everything else, I want to talk about the latest grift from Donald and his useless children because somehow they have managed to combine cryptocurrency speculation, mixed martial arts, and the White House, the People’s House, into a spectacular display of out in the open, in your face corruption.

First of all, Donald and his sons are promoting Trump coins to commemorate the White House UFC fight.

The most expensive one costs a mere $12,000.

Who would not want to pay $12,000 for that?

The People’s House is apparently being rebranded as a pay per view venue from which Donald, Dana White, Donald’s children, and a few people in his inner circle will benefit, while the rest of us continue to struggle with rising costs and continue to face real problems caused by Donald’s incompetence and the mind blowing corruption of his regime.

Meanwhile, he and his family continue to treat the presidency like a licensing deal, existing solely to enrich themselves, as if the White House were nothing more than the gift shop at one of his bankrupt casinos.

Of course, the grift has expanded into the entirety of the White House Fight Night experience, which is allegedly meant to commemorate Flag Day and kick off the celebrations for this country’s two hundred fiftieth anniversary.

But, of course, every single bit of it exists for Donald’s glory, which is to say it exists solely in service of protecting his fragile ego.

On MS Now, former DOJ prosecutor Brendan Ballou exposed Donald’s massive UFC scam.

This is what Brendan Ballou said:

Yeah. So the basic issue here is this is not a lawsuit about a fight. It is a lawsuit about corruption. Right now what’s happening is the UFC and its parent company TKO are selling what are called sponsorship packages for $1 million to $1.5 million per person. Plus they’re getting exclusive licensing for showing the title card to Paramount, which is closely allied to the President, and showing ads on the White House lawn and potentially even at the Lincoln Memorial. So we’re already seeing ads, for instance, for Monster Energy Drink. We’re expecting ads for Crypto.com and others. All of this is a way for the UFC and for Donald Trump, who’s invested in that company, to make a private profit from public property. That is the fundamental problem.

If that does not enrage you, if that does not shake you to the core, I am not entirely sure how to explain just how obscene, anti American, and obviously corrupt all of this is.

If you are wondering how the people running this country justify turning the White House into an extravagant, post apocalyptic, for profit bouncy house, do not worry.

They have an explanation.

This is what Marco Rubio said:

The very idea that America, that you could have a country founded on the principle that your rights come not from your government or from your leaders, your rights come from your creator, was an audacious idea. No one else believed that in the world at that time and that’s the foundation… We are a nation founded on doing what no one else dared to do and no one else aspired to do. And at some level, that’s what this whole company, what UFC has been. And what you’ve built now is this global company that not so long ago would have seemed impossible. Back in the day, when boxing commissions or athletic commissions were a little reluctant to give you permits to stage these fights or put on these events, or when no one knew what it was, you were able to plow through that. Today you have one of the most recognizable American sports brands on the planet, and in and of itself I think reflects so much of the American spirit that is reflected in this American company.

Ah yes.

Thank you, Marco, for taking time away from the Diet Coke button to remind us that putting a bunch of greased up, steroid fueled, half naked men on the White House lawn is really what this country has always aspired to.

Yes, that is apparently the pinnacle of American greatness.

You pathetic little man.

Of course, while everyone is distracted by the spectacle, Donald continues rewriting history in real time.

Here is another update.

The war in Iran is over.

Again.

And again.

Donald would have us believe that is because of his strength, his resilience, and the military might that has supposedly pounded Iran into submission.

He would also have us believe the equally ridiculous myth that it is all because of his brilliant deal making.

But here is the truth.

He has declared dozens of times that the war is over, that the Strait of Hormuz is open, that a deal is two days away, two weeks away, almost finished, or that Iran desperately wants peace.

Every version has been a lie.

He cannot keep his story straight.

But does he even want to?

Because there is an extraordinary amount of market manipulation happening throughout this process.

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First, lets look at all the times since March that Donald has told the American people that the war is essentially over.

• March 7: Called it a “minor excursion” and suggested it would be over within weeks.

• March 9: Claimed, “We’ve already won in many ways,” while insisting the war would end “very soon.”

• March 11: Declared, “We won. In the first hour it was over,” before adding it would end “soon” and “any time I want it to end.”

• March 12: Insisted there was “nothing left to target” and that Iran was “pretty much at the end of the line.”

• March 17: Claimed the conflict “was essentially largely over in two or three days” because Iran’s military had supposedly been destroyed.

• March 20: Announced, “Oh, I think we won. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free.”

• March 24: Declared flatly, “We’ve won this war. This war has been won.”

• April 15: During a ceasefire, insisted the countries were close to an agreement and the war would be over “very soon.”

• April 17: Celebrated a “great victory,” claimed the Strait of Hormuz was “COMPLETELY OPEN,” and announced the dispute was effectively over.

• May 1: Told Congress that hostilities had “terminated.”

• May 5: Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared “Operation Epic Fury” was over, while Donald simultaneously suggested any return to Iran would last only “another two weeks, maybe three weeks.”

Yes.

Because none of that is happening.

Donald is the one desperate to make a deal because he knows he lost this war on day one.

It is unwinnable.

Every day that passes without a deal makes him look weaker and strengthens Iran’s position.

So while he declares victory, oil prices fall.

Then it becomes obvious there is no deal, and they rise again.

There is so much chaos being injected into the markets that ordinary Americans will continue paying the price as this drags on.

Now there is another story raising very uncomfortable questions inside the White House.

New reporting suggests that J.D. Vance, Susie Wiles, and other very senior members of the Trump regime met in the Situation Room.

Why?

To discuss strategy about the Iran war?

To coordinate foreign policy?

To address issues affecting the national security of the United States?

No.

They met to coordinate strategy, messaging, and damage control surrounding the Epstein files.

After years of insisting there was nothing to hide, lawmakers are now demanding testimony from everyone involved.

This is what Representative Robert Garcia said:

Yesterday’s reporting in the New York Times we find to be a bombshell as it relates to information around the Epstein case. For the very first time we have the Vice President of the United States, who we now know has been involved in directing strategy on this massive coverup from the Situation Room. The top administration officials, the vice president, the White House chief of staff, the director of the FBI, the attorney general, top communication staff are sitting around the Situation Room planning strategy on how to cover up the Epstein files. They’re talking strategy on how to ensure that Donald Trump is not accused of anything, that his name does not appear. They’re talking strategy on how to possibly get Ghislaine Maxwell a pardon or what that would look like. They actually suggest the vice president suggested that Tucker Carlson should interview Ghislaine Maxwell to exonerate Donald Trump.

Well, if there is anybody I would not want exonerating me, it is the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

But more to the point, if you did not understand what the priorities of the Trump regime were before now, you certainly do now.

Its highest priority is protecting Donald Trump at all costs from his own potential involvement in one of the most notorious criminal cases in modern history.

So ask yourself one question.

Why did people in the highest levels of the United States government need to gather in the most secure room on the planet to discuss protecting Donald from the imminent release of the Epstein files?

At this point, it is safe to say that the government of the United States exists primarily to protect Donald Trump while continuing to pursue his perceived political enemies.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary Trump: As you are probably aware, talking about the ongoing horrors is actually a full time job. Joyce Vance and I decided to do something different just a few weeks out from this country’s 250th anniversary. We decided to talk about what we would do if we were in charge. What is a positive vision for this country that we can work toward achieving? Also, if you notice, I have the same last name as somebody you’re fairly familiar with, and Joyce has the same last name as somebody else who happens to be the other guy’s vice president. So I present to you the Trump Vance alternative.

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Joyce Vance: It’s so nice to have all of you with us this morning.

Mary Trump: Hello, everybody.

Joyce Vance: We are, in fact, the better Trump and Vance, Mary Trump and Joyce Vance. If we were running the country, I dare say it would be a very different place, and hopefully a better place.

We thought we might indulge in a little whimsy this morning and talk about that, although there are obviously serious issues we need to take on too.

Mary Trump: Absolutely.

I think you’re understating it. I don’t think better is actually saying very much because we’re in the ninth circle of hell. The bar is in the molten center of the planet.

It really is the most oddly fortuitous thing that we are Trump and Vance.

Joyce Vance: That’s so weird.

Mary Trump: It’s so weird and unlikely because Trump is not really a very common name.

I guess it would be even weirder if you had the great misfortune of being related to J.D. Vance.

Joyce Vance: We’ve really tried to run away from any connection there, especially since that’s not really J.D. Vance’s name. He’s gone through various incarnations.

Mary Trump: Yes, he has.

I also want to get this out of the way before we move on to the serious stuff. If we were indeed the Trump Vance team running the country, the Knicks would have won in game 3.

Joyce Vance: Absolutely.

Mary Trump: No doubt.

We needed to burn sage after Monday night’s game, and what the Knicks did last night was poetic justice. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything like it. They came back from a twenty nine point deficit, and one of the best plays I’ve ever seen in basketball put them one point ahead after erasing that gap. It was extraordinary.

Joyce Vance: It’s the perfect metaphor for where we are as a country.

We’re down by twenty nine, but we’re coming back.

On a serious note, Mary, one change we would make almost immediately is allowing dogs to fly in the passenger cabin of an airplane.

I think this is one of the great injustices in American society. My beautiful German shepherd Bella should be able to have her own seat because dogs are people too.

Mary Trump: I don’t get it.

I think Alaska Airlines used to allow that.

Joyce Vance: They did, but I think they’ve changed.

Andrew Weissman told me his gorgeous dog always flew with him that way, but he recently said they’ve rolled that policy back.

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Mary Trump: But why?

If one airline can do it, then clearly there isn’t some FAA regulation preventing it.

That would be one of the first changes we’d implement.

And while we’re at it, people with allergies could simply choose designated non allergy flights.

Joyce Vance: Absolutely.

I always volunteer to sit next to the person with a dog on a flight, even if it means taking a middle seat in the back of the plane, because I’m there to help when the owner gets up. I want to spend time with the dog or the cat. I’m an equal opportunity pet person.

Mary Trump: I love that idea.

Although I’m sadly very allergic to other people’s pets.

Joyce Vance: I’m allergic to my own pets, but it has never stopped us.

In fact, you can probably tell my eyes are red this morning because I slept with a German shepherd on my head last night. I had been away for a couple of weeks, and our puppy Elsa decided she belonged there.

Now, on to a more serious topic.

We had some great questions from everyone after announcing this conversation, and one recurring theme was Donald Trump’s proposed slush fund.

He wants to take $1.776 billion of taxpayer money and create a fund he can spend however he wants. The number is reported as $1.8 billion, but the symbolism matters. It’s 1776, the rallying cry from January 6.

Now the administration says they’ve backed away from it.

But let’s imagine you had that money to spend. If you were President Trump, what would your priorities be?

Mary Trump: First, it’s incredibly important that when we get into office, and I’d be perfectly happy if you were president, we make one thing absolutely clear.

We need to spend that money restoring the physical manifestations of the United States and tearing down everything with Donald’s name on it.

The ballroom comes down. The proposed arch comes down. The reflecting pool, which is already growing algae, gets restored.

Joyce Vance: I was there two weeks ago. It’s awful.

Mary Trump: Exactly.

People might ask whether that’s the best use of our money when there’s so much else to do.

I would say yes, because we have to restore what was damaged before we can build something new that isn’t stained by Donald and his fascist enablers.

But even $1.776 billion won’t be enough.

We also need to take every penny Donald and his children have taken from the American people and use it to restore agencies like USAID.

And we should redirect the nearly quarter trillion dollars handed to ICE and CBP into rebuilding the agencies that have been starved or dismantled to the extraordinary detriment of the American people and people around the world.

Joyce Vance: That’s actually a very concrete legal concept.

As a federal prosecutor, we routinely used criminal asset forfeiture laws to seize ill gotten gains and return those assets for the benefit of victims.

There has to be accountability.

Where crimes have been committed, there should be prosecutions, and restoring stolen assets should be part of that process.

I’m watching what’s happening in Texas, where every day we learn about new problems with cattle, meat supplies, and who knows what else.

The CDC is no longer tracking COVID.

These things seem boring until they become emergencies, but restoring those systems has to be a huge priority.

Mary Trump: I don’t think it’s boring at all.

People should be riveted by just how comprehensive this effort has been to dismantle everything that protects us, improves our lives, and keeps us safe.

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We’re also dealing with Ebola, bird flu, and flesh eating parasites attacking cattle.

There was a program monitoring that threat which had successfully protected us since 1966.

It was defunded.

Joyce Vance: Agriculture officials testified yesterday and blamed Joe Biden.

Mary Trump: That’s how you know you’re losing.

More than a year and a half into this administration, if Joe Biden is still your answer, then you no longer have an argument.

Even things that seem minor reveal how gratuitously destructive these policies are.

There were deep ocean monitoring systems that tracked rising sea levels, fish populations, and climate data.

They removed them all.

Why?

Joyce Vance: That one really bothers me.

Climate change is the looming issue.

We’ve effectively lost twelve years of progress.

What’s especially baffling is that taxpayers already paid for this equipment. It existed. It worked. And the administration simply removed it.

If someone wanted to weaken this country, a lot of what’s happening would look exactly like this.

Mary Trump: Because they’re fascist oligarchs who want to create a permanent underclass.

They want to keep us weak, tired, sick, and poor so we’re too busy surviving to notice what’s happening while they enrich themselves.

Some of this is simply proving they can do it.

Some of it is feeding conspiracy theories by pretending climate change doesn’t exist.

And some of it is exactly what it appears to be.

Robert Kennedy is a virulent anti vaccine ideologue who believes he knows better than everyone else.

Donald simply does whatever benefits him and his family financially.

Joyce Vance: That sounds disturbingly similar to the world described in 1984.

Weaken the population until people spend all of their energy surviving instead of resisting.

Our friend Ruth Ben Ghiat would say that’s exactly how authoritarians operate.

Mary Trump: Right.

What’s frustrating is that nobody frames these actions in those terms.

Who benefits? The answer is obvious.

They do.

Joyce Vance: I’ve actually been encouraged by some Democratic leaders recently. They’re staying focused on key issues.

But Republicans in Congress remain complicit.

If we were running the country, how would we deal with that?

Mary Trump: First, people need to keep calling Republican senators because they’ve demonstrated they care more about staying in office than anything else.

If enough constituents pressure them into doing the right thing, great.

But as the executive branch, we would coordinate with Democrats in Congress to hold hearings every single day exposing what has happened.

We would reaffirm that America has three coequal branches of government and that Congress is the first among them.

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We would demonstrate that government belongs to the people and that executive power is borrowed from the people, not the other way around.

We need to make the case for good governance and expose every member of Congress who willingly enabled this destruction.

The worst possible outcome would be Republicans pretending someday that it was all just Donald.

No.

They own this too.

Joyce Vance: I agree completely.

I would establish a commission to examine Supreme Court reform, including ethics rules, expansion of the Court, jurisdiction, and term limits. Everything should be on the table.

I also want a president who uses the bully pulpit every single day to explain what democracy is and why it matters. People need to understand that democracy is what makes the lives they enjoy possible.

Mary Trump: Exactly.

We need both short term solutions and long term reforms. We need to educate, motivate, and challenge people to think beyond this moment.

Who do we want to be? What kind of country do we want to build? Those questions transcend partisanship.

At the same time, we need a comprehensive list of reforms that moves us beyond relying on norms and traditions. Those protections must be codified so the American people are never again subjected to this level of corruption, abuse, and institutional destruction.

Joyce Vance: Democrats spend so much time negotiating with themselves. Instead of focusing solely on restoring the country to where it was before Donald Trump, we should be asking what kind of country we could become.

Mary Trump: Exactly.

This is the moment to think big and to act boldly.

When Democrats return to power, they cannot make common cause with the people who created this crisis. Collegiality cannot take precedence over democracy. If Republicans want a seat at the table, they should first demonstrate that they deserve one.

Joyce Vance: One final question.

What role would Bruce Springsteen have in our cabinet?

Mary Trump: Bruce has been speaking truth to power for a very long time.

Someone suggested creating a cabinet position dedicated to fixing everything, which is actually a wonderful idea. But I think Bruce would make an outstanding Secretary of the Arts, leading the effort to restore creativity, culture, and public investment in the arts to their rightful place in American life.

Joyce Vance: That would be a perfect response to putting Donald Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center. Imagine a federal government that is once again committed to supporting artists and investing in culture.

Mary Trump: I couldn’t agree more.

Joyce Vance: Mary, thank you for making time to do this today. Please give Ronda my love, and happy anniversary.

This week also marks the fourth anniversary of Civil Discourse, which still amazes me. I only started this Substack because of you and Eugene. I still remember sitting in your apartment when the two of you encouraged me to take the leap.

Mary Trump: I remember it like it was four years ago.

Joyce Vance: Thank you all for joining us. It’s always wonderful to spend this time together, and I hope conversations like this remind everyone that imagining a better future is the first step toward building one.

Love you, Mary.

Mary Trump: Love you too, Joyce.

And thank you to everyone for spending part of your day with us. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a moment to like and share the video. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the Mary Trump Media channel so you never miss an episode. Every conversation, every share, and every new subscriber helps us continue building a community that believes democracy, accountability, and compassion are always worth fighting for.

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[Transcript Edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary Trump: I had a chance to sit down with Joanna Coles over at The Daily Beast, and we covered a lot of territory. We focused on how Donald’s incompetence, which is becoming impossible to ignore, and the extraordinary stress he is under are accelerating his cognitive, emotional, and psychological decline. I think you will find this conversation both fascinating and revealing.

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Joanna Coles: Mary Trump, welcome back to The Daily Beast podcast. You are always one of our most popular guests. As Donald Trump approaches his 80th birthday, you are in the unique position of being both a clinical psychologist and his niece.

Over the last few weeks, we have finally started to see pushback from within his own party. His proposed $1.8 billion slush fund has been abandoned, a judge ruled that his name must come off the Kennedy Center, and members of Congress have begun questioning his war in Iran.

Donald Trump does not like hearing the word no. How is all of this going to affect him?

Mary Trump: Joanna, it is always great to be here because we certainly have plenty to discuss.

It feels as though we are entering a singularity where everything is unraveling at an increasingly alarming pace, especially for Donald.

I think the idea that Donald is suddenly backing down or “chickening out” is a misunderstanding of how he operates. Donald has always pushed boundaries to see what he can get away with. If he succeeds, he pushes even further. If he fails, he simply pretends it never happened.

That pattern is nothing new.

The pushback is not going to fundamentally change his behavior. He will either claim he never wanted those things in the first place or find another way to accomplish them. The slush fund is not disappearing. It will return in another form. He may even find another way to attach his name to the Kennedy Center, or he will simply pretend he never cared.

He survives through ego preservation and endless reinvention.

What concerns me far more is that Donald now finds himself in genuinely unfamiliar territory. The closest comparison would be the financial disasters of the 1990s, when he declared multiple bankruptcies. The difference is that back then the banks had a vested interest in preserving the illusion that the Trump brand still meant something.

Today there is nobody capable of rescuing him from the consequences of his own actions. Not the Republican Party and not even the corrupt, illegitimate supermajority on the Supreme Court.

Events have been set in motion that nobody can control, including Donald himself. For the first time, he is losing control not only of the narrative but of himself.

Joanna Coles: What are you seeing that makes you say he is losing control?

Mary Trump: This is a man who cannot stay awake during public events in the middle of the day. Whatever impulse control he once possessed is deteriorating. He lashes out in increasingly self destructive ways and fixates on trivial nonsense.

His latest obsession is calling Democrats “Dumocrats,” apparently very proud that he has discovered a new insult.

Instead of projecting strength, he is revealing himself to be increasingly immature, petty, and emotionally unstable.

Joanna Coles: Let’s go back to Iran for a moment.

This is not a situation where Donald can simply pivot and pretend nothing happened. The conflict has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, stranded oil tankers, and threatens energy supplies around the world. Rising fuel costs will affect everything from transportation to heating homes.

Donald famously avoided military service by claiming bone spurs, yet now he has launched a conflict whose consequences will be measured not in body bags alone but in prices at every gas station.

How does he escape this?

Mary Trump: Joanna, it is astonishing what a disaster this has become, and it belongs entirely to Donald.

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He sought neither congressional approval nor the support of our allies. He never made a coherent case to the American people. Instead, he offered multiple contradictory justifications for starting the conflict.

This exposes a danger we have discussed before.

It is one thing for Americans to elect someone this corrupt, incompetent, and unqualified and then spend years rebuilding our own institutions.

It is another thing entirely to unleash somebody like Donald on the rest of the world.

Just as he cannot control what is happening in Iran, the United States cannot control how the rest of the world now sees us or how our allies will respond long after Donald is gone.

For perhaps the first time in his life, Donald has reached a situation that has no easy solution. He is discovering the limits of his ability to change the subject or rewrite reality.

Meanwhile, Americans are confronted every day with rising gas prices, increasing inflation, and growing economic uncertainty. The administration can insist everything is fine, but people experience reality every time they fill their gas tanks or buy groceries.

The world is also watching Donald’s greatest myth collapse.

He is not a master negotiator. He is not a great deal maker. He has absolutely no idea what he is doing.

Joanna Coles: You mentioned his overnight posting habits. His Truth Social activity has become relentless.

If one of your clinical patients suddenly began staying awake all night posting dozens of times, what would that tell you?

Mary Trump: It would tell me there are profound issues involving insecurity and control.

Donald has far too much time on his hands and entirely misplaced priorities. His posting is an unhealthy attempt to regain a sense of agency that he increasingly lacks.

For much of his life he has been insulated from ordinary consequences. There has always been someone to clean up his mistakes, protect him, or rescue him.

That is no longer working.

On some level he understands that the central project of his life is collapsing.

For decades he has devoted enormous psychological energy to protecting himself from the truth that he is incompetent, unsuccessful, and fundamentally unlovable while simultaneously convincing everyone else that he is brilliant and self made.

Those myths are beginning to fail.

People who once accepted them unquestioningly are starting to recognize reality.

Joanna Coles: You have previously described seeing a particular expression in Donald’s face that reminds you of your grandfather as he developed Alzheimer’s disease.

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Do you see those similarities becoming more pronounced?

Mary Trump: Unfortunately, yes.

We are witnessing a perfect storm.

There is obvious cognitive decline, serious physical deterioration, mounting stress, the loss of narrative control, and long standing untreated psychiatric disorders that existed long before Donald entered the White House.

All of those factors reinforce one another. It becomes harder and harder for him to regain equilibrium, assuming he ever truly had it.

His supporters simply ignore the obvious. They ignore that he falls asleep publicly, that he loses impulse control, and that he experiences episodes that raise serious concerns.

That cannot continue forever. The similarities to my grandfather become more striking every day. The vacant expression, the confusion, the sense that he is not entirely certain where he is or who surrounds him.

It is deeply alarming.

Joanna Coles: Marco Rubio recently denied seeing Donald asleep in meetings, only to have video shown immediately afterward proving exactly that.

Mary Trump: Marco Rubio has become one more person willing to abandon reality in order to remain close to power.

People around Donald cannot tell the truth because telling the truth risks losing their positions.

It is an extraordinary indictment of today’s Republican Party that they continue protecting someone whose deterioration is increasingly obvious.

Joanna Coles: Why does Donald continue appointing people who seem completely unqualified for enormously important jobs?

Mary Trump: In part because he likes company.

He is the least qualified person in the administration, so surrounding himself with similarly unqualified people makes him feel less isolated.

More importantly, these appointments consolidate his control over the Republican Party.

He wants people whose primary mission is protecting Donald Trump rather than serving the country.

If he appointed competent public servants who respected their institutions, they might refuse unlawful orders or challenge his decisions.

He cannot tolerate that. He requires absolute loyalty because his ego is extraordinarily fragile.

Joanna Coles: His relationships also appear increasingly isolated.

Melania lives elsewhere. Ivanka has largely disappeared from politics.

How dangerous is that isolation for someone with his psychological profile?

Mary Trump: Very dangerous.

Donald has no genuine emotional relationships. Every interaction is transactional, including those with his wife and children.

Ivanka did not step away because politics became too difficult. She stepped away because proximity to Donald no longer benefited her personally.

Even surrounded by loyalists, Donald remains profoundly isolated because there is no authentic human connection. As his world narrows, he is more likely to conclude he has nothing left to lose. Donald is fundamentally a nihilist.

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He cannot imagine a world that continues without him. If he feels everything slipping away, he will happily take everyone else down with him.

His supporters convince themselves they will be the exception, that their loyalty will protect them. It will not. Donald understands loyalty only as something owed to him.

Joanna Coles: What did you make of his decision not to attend Donald Jr.’s wedding?

Mary Trump: It perfectly illustrates how my family operates.

Humiliation has always been a tool of control.

My grandfather enjoyed humiliating weaker people because it gave him pleasure.

For Donald, humiliation serves an additional purpose. The more he humiliates people who desperately seek his approval, the more tightly they bind themselves to him.

Don Jr. has spent his life chasing his father’s respect. Donald publicly demonstrated that he simply does not care.

Joanna Coles: It is remarkable that someone so indifferent to family continues to be embraced by a party that once claimed to represent family values.

Mary Trump: Exactly.

Donald has never valued family. He barely knows his children. He speaks about them as though they belong to someone else. That should trouble anyone who claims to care about family values.

Joanna Coles: Finally, America is approaching its 250th anniversary, and Donald wants to celebrate with a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

What does that symbolize?

Mary Trump: It is a perfect expression of who he is.

Donald cannot allow anyone or anything else to receive attention. He also enjoys watching other people engage in violence. Most importantly, he has absolutely no understanding of what America is supposed to represent. A celebration of 250 years of independence should honor what we have accomplished together.

Donald cannot comprehend shared achievement because everything revolves around him.

Whether intentionally or not, he has chosen the perfect symbol for how far this country has fallen and exactly who is responsible.

Joanna Coles: Before we finish, you have some news of your own.

Mary Trump: Next Sunday, June 14, which happens to be Donald’s birthday and Flag Day, I am launching the Mary Trump Transcend PAC.

Its purpose is to move beyond division, cruelty, and the absence of empathy that have defined this era and support candidates and organizations willing to meet this moment with courage and real solutions.

We want leaders who understand what is at stake and who are prepared not only to move us beyond this crisis but to implement the structural reforms our democracy desperately needs.

Joanna Coles: Congratulations on the launch.

Mary, as always, thank you for bringing both your personal perspective and your clinical expertise to these conversations.

Mary Trump: And one last thing.

At a moment when so much of the media landscape is driven by outrage, access, and corporate interests, independent media matters more than ever.

If you would like to support what we do, please Support Mary Trump Media on any and all platforms.

Those small actions help our work reach more people and keep this platform going.

Thank you for supporting Independent Media.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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Mary Trump: I got together with my friends, Norm Ornstein and David Rothkopf of the DSR Network for their excellent podcast, Words Matter. We talked about some words that matter and, of course, the horrors unfolding around us and why it is very likely things are going to get worse before they get better. Despite all of that, we had a great time, so I think you’ll enjoy it.

Check Out Words Matter Here

David Rothkopf: This is Deep State Radio coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

Hello and welcome to DSR’s Words Matter. I am David Rothkopf, your referee here. Each week we look at what’s going on in Washington with the aid and insight of our friend and Washington guru, Norm Ornstein.

This week, in a special edition of Words Matter, we also have our friend Mary Trump, who we hope will join us every so often to provide her unique form of insight into what’s going on with her uncle. I do not know. We blame a lot of the sins of our society on the parents of the people who lead us, but maybe Mary deserves some of the blame.

What did you do, Mary? What did you do to this guy? As far as I can tell, he was just an ordinary guy from New Jersey. Instead, he is profoundly messed up.

Mary Trump: Sadly, I do not think I had much of a part to play in his deep, dark slide into insanity, to the extent that he was ever sane.

I will say this because it is fun to say. I sold more books in one day than his first book sold in three decades.

Norm Ornstein: You also wrote yours, which is a recurring difference.

David Rothkopf: You have also actually read a book, which I cannot say he has done.

Mary Trump: I wrote one or two.

David Rothkopf: Let me turn to you in your professional capacity. You are trained in psychology in addition to all of your other gifts.

Even in the past couple of months, I have seen a precipitous decline in this man’s mental makeup. He lashes out. He cannot keep his eyes open. He cannot focus for long. He disappears for extended periods. He says things that are bizarre, sometimes frightening because his ideas about the world are frightening, and sometimes simply strange.

He recently suggested leaving the UFC octagon at the White House because they left the Eiffel Tower standing. Then he proudly announced that someone had prepared a chart showing the reflecting pool is longer than many buildings are tall.

I honestly do not know what he was trying to say.

From either a psychological perspective or that of a concerned family member, what is happening?

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Mary Trump: I am concerned for all of us. First, all that is left is for him to put the White House up on cement blocks. That is where we are in the Trump regime. And because this podcast is called Words Matter, I think it is important to distinguish between horizontal length and vertical height.

David Rothkopf: You are making good points. You are obviously the black sheep of the family, yet there are still people who hear this and say it is perfectly normal.

Mary Trump: There are a lot of unintelligent people in the world and there are a lot of people with authoritarian personalities who will believe whatever the dear leader says, even when it is utterly nonsensical.

What we are seeing is a difference of degree, not kind.

Donald has been on this trajectory for a very long time, but now we are approaching a perfect storm involving his longstanding, severe, untreated psychiatric disorders together with cognitive decline and age related physical decline. Those problems are made worse by the fact that he is an extraordinarily unhealthy person.

On top of all of that, he is no longer controlling the narrative because his incompetence has become impossible to ignore.

His mission for most of his life has been protecting himself from the knowledge of who he really is while convincing everybody else that he is smart and competent.

That is no longer working.

His sycophants are working overtime praising him and blaming everything on Joe Biden, but that is not working either. Donald is incapable of restraining himself. Every failure causes another outburst, and every outburst costs him a little more of whatever grip on reality he still possesses.

It is also important to remember that he is not fundamentally different today. The cognitive and physical decline are simply revealing who he has always been. He used to hide it better.

David Rothkopf: Does that make him more dangerous?

Mary Trump: Absolutely.

Everybody should be deeply worried. Donald is a nihilist. He cannot imagine a world that survives him. If he believes he is going down, he will try to take everybody with him.

There is a reason he refuses to name a successor. It is unfathomable to him that anyone could or should succeed him. The worse things become, the more desperate he becomes, and the more dangerous he becomes.

Norm Ornstein: Before we move on, if anybody has not read Mary’s books, go buy them.

If you have not seen the beautiful New York Times profile of Mary and her wife, Ronda Cress, go read it.

And subscribe to Ronda’s Substack. It offers thoughtful reflections on humanity, her own experiences, and the work she did in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department before she left because civil rights became civil wrongs.

Mary Trump: You are making me cry.

Norm Ornstein: I do not want to make this only about Donald.

Jill Biden’s recent book discusses her relationship with Melania Trump, including Melania refusing the traditional tea with the outgoing First Lady and remaining completely detached during the inauguration ride.

What has your own relationship with Melania been? And what about Ivana and Marla Maples?

Mary Trump: I have met Melania twice.

The first time they were still dating. Donald introduced us and immediately began telling her that I had dropped out of college, become addicted to drugs, and that he had saved my life by hiring me to write his book.

None of that was true except dropping out of college.

When he mentioned drugs, she became animated for the first and only time and asked, Really?

I simply said, No.

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The second time was at the White House in 2017 for my aunts’ birthdays. We had no interaction at all.

Ivana, whom I had known since I was twelve, was cold, unaffectionate, and not much of an aunt.

Marla and I actually got along. She was completely out of her depth, and my family treated her terribly because she came from a small town in Georgia and was not considered worldly enough.

David Rothkopf: Why is Donald so afraid of his current wife?

Mary Trump: Melania strikes me as extremely calculating.

She knows where the bodies are buried and Donald knows she knows.

Every relationship Donald has, including with his children, is transactional.

Whenever she appears publicly, I find myself wondering how much she was paid.

If she were implicated in anything involving Jeffrey Epstein it would be embarrassing for her, but it would be devastating for Donald because I suspect they appear in those records in very different ways.

Norm Ornstein: Let us talk about Donald’s health.

Every doctor he has ever had has produced laughable reports. He somehow grew from six foot two to six foot three at the exact age people begin shrinking because at six foot three he was merely overweight instead of obese.

Now they claim he weighs 238 pounds.

How has his health really been?

Mary Trump: He has never been healthy.

Given his diet, his lack of exercise, and his habits, I am surprised he is approaching eighty.

Unfortunately, my family tends to live a long time. My grandmother’s oldest sister smoked and drank throughout her life and lived to ninety eight.

David Rothkopf: That is the worst thing anyone has ever said on this podcast.

Mary Trump: One family story illustrates how much appearances mattered.

Donald and my grandfather once posed for an advertisement together.

Just before the photographer took the picture, my grandfather rose onto his tiptoes so he would appear taller than Donald. Height has always been an obsession.

David Rothkopf: Another thing I notice is increasing paranoia.

He is building bunkers, hospitals, security systems, and seems increasingly afraid of public exposure.

Mary Trump: I think he is aware, at least partially, that he is unraveling.

Donald has always had an apocalyptic imagination. He is fascinated by violence while simultaneously repulsed by it.

He has obsessed over nuclear weapons for decades.

If he believes he is losing control, he becomes even more dangerous. The bunker may simply be his way of signaling that he believes everything is collapsing around him.

Norm Ornstein: One thing seems clear. He always escaped consequences because somebody rescued him.

Now Iran is deteriorating, Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing what Donald wants, and the promised quick victory has become a prolonged conflict.

What happens psychologically when Donald finds himself trapped?

Mary Trump: Donald never takes responsibility.

There is always someone else to blame.

The Iran war may become part of his undoing because it exposes his weakness.

He has always escaped disasters because somebody stepped in, whether my grandfather, New York media, banks, NBC, the Republican Party, or the Supreme Court.

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That safety net may finally be disappearing.

Republicans are not suddenly developing principles, but many are facing political survival. They may begin distancing themselves simply because it is in their own interest. That will accelerate Donald’s decline.

Unfortunately, it also makes him more dangerous.

As the war drags on he could use it as an excuse to suspend elections or expand executive power. At the same time, the agencies responsible for protecting Americans have been hollowed out by profoundly unqualified leadership.

David Rothkopf: Every week I wake up hoping something has happened overnight that makes the world a better place.

Mary Trump: Eventually we will be done with Donald.

The more important question is whether we will be done with the movement that surrounds him. The encouraging news is that there is nobody in the Republican Party capable of replacing him as its grotesquely charismatic leader.

Norm Ornstein: Let us talk about his taste.

Has it always been this garish?

Mary Trump: Yes.

Honestly, he inherited it.

My grandmother adored the British royal family and fancied herself a woman of impeccable taste. Donald inherited that sensibility.

The difference is that he is now spending public money to transform the people’s house into a version of his private excess.

Every trace of it will have to be removed. The ballroom, the decorations, the branding, all of it. The money he and his children have taken from the American people should pay for restoring what they damaged.

Norm Ornstein: One final observation.

We need a comprehensive reform agenda.

The Vacancies Act, the Federal Tort Claims Act, Supreme Court reform, campaign finance reform and many other structural protections have all been exploited.

Mary Trump: I completely agree. We need a detailed list of reforms that Democratic candidates are willing to champion publicly.

The conversation has to become far more specific than simply defending democracy. We need structural solutions.

More than anything else, I am grateful to spend time with both of you.

The last six years have introduced me to extraordinary people, including my wife, and I never take those relationships for granted.

David Rothkopf: We are grateful to have you with us.

You remain an essential voice, one people trust because you bring a perspective nobody else can offer.

We will continue these conversations and, together, conduct a little group therapy as we navigate what will undoubtedly be a difficult few years.

For now, thank you, Mary.

Thank you, Norm and David.

And thank you to everyone listening.

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Norman Ornstein

Norman Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Need to Know by David Rothkopf

McQuade: Saving America from a Mob-Style Government

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10 days ago · 32 likes · 1 comment · David Rothkopf

[ Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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It was supposed to be one of the most highly anticipated playoff games in New York City history.

Everybody was ecstatic. Thousands of New Yorkers lined up for watch parties or tried to get into Madison Square Garden. The Knicks were appearing in the NBA playoffs for the first time in twenty seven years. They have not won a championship since 1973, when I was a tiny child.

And then, at the last minute, Donald decided he wanted to come to the game.

Granted, the awful owner of the Knicks invited him, but nobody, and I promise you this is an accurate statement, nobody else wanted him there.

Block parties around Madison Square Garden for fans who could not afford tickets were canceled so the Secret Service could secure the area. People who had paid a minimum of $8000 a ticket were forced to wait for hours and go through TSA style checkpoints just to get inside.

To nobody’s surprise except Donald’s, he was booed mercilessly by the New York crowd when his image appeared on the jumbotron during the national anthem.

That is exactly what Donald deserved.

Also, Donald is not an active duty service member and has never served a day in his life. He has no business saluting the flag during the national anthem.

Then, in the middle of the game, as Knicks fans cheered their team on, Donald appeared to settle in for yet another nap. He was clearly riveted.

No, I apologize. Donald was not napping at the Knicks game.

You know what that was?

That was his conscious mind shutting down because he could not bear the deep narcissistic wound of knowing that an entire city he spent his life trying to impress rejected him emphatically and loudly.

His appearance, and yes, I am absolutely going to blame him for this, brought the New York Knicks’ thirteen game winning streak to an end.

So thank you, Donald. And stay out of our city.

Now, I want to turn to a story that should be much bigger than it is.

Donald and others in his inner circle are claiming that California’s elections are rigged after his preferred candidate, Republican reality television personality Spencer Pratt, fell behind in the Los Angeles mayoral race and appears headed for a third place finish.

This conspiracy theory is clearly an effort to soften the ground for contesting a potential loss in the 2026 midterm elections.

This is what House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju:

I’m not saying it’s rigged. I’m saying it stinks to high heaven and everybody knows that. Let’s remove the appearance of impropriety. Let’s have votes on Election Day. That’s what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.

When asked what evidence existed to support that claim, Johnson responded:

Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove, but I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here and that’s a concern. We need people to believe in the integrity of our election system.

Oh, sure.

We need people to believe in the integrity of elections by lying about how rigged they are whenever Republicans lose. Apparently, we do not need proof. We are simply supposed to trust Mike Johnson’s instincts. Of course, Mike Johnson may be as big a liar as Donald Trump, which is really saying something.

Let’s remember what they would have us believe.

Los Angeles is one of the bluest cities in the country, probably second only to New York City.

Karen Bass, the incumbent mayor, finished first in the primary and would advance to a runoff against the candidate who finished second.

That race was between a progressive Democratic challenger and the aforementioned completely unqualified Spencer Pratt.

According to polling, Bass would have comfortably defeated Spencer Pratt in a head to head race.

Instead, she now trails her Democratic challenger by four points.

It seems pretty ridiculous to suggest that the incumbent mayor somehow wanted to engineer a runoff against another Democrat who has a better chance of beating her in the general election.

Nevertheless, that is exactly what this Republican Party wants people to believe.

Unfortunately, the Speaker of the House is not alone in pushing this nonsense about election integrity.

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This is what Senator Ron Johnson said:

There was so much evidence of irregularities in the 2020 election, but all you have to do is say there is no evidence, there is no proof. There are all kinds of irregularities that occur. The fact that California still cannot call the race days after the election...

When challenged on the lack of proof, he continued:

People that do things cover it up. I am getting very tired of this. There is no evidence. There is no proof. There are tons of evidence. There are tons of irregularities. We need to take them seriously because what is absolutely true is Americans on both sides do not have confidence in our elections. That is unsustainable.

Americans on both sides do not have confidence in the integrity of American elections anymore because of people like Ron Johnson.

By the way, Ron, you are losing your Senate seat because Donald endorsed your corrupt opponent. So what exactly are you doing?

We are apparently supposed to trust people like Ron Johnson, who absolutely and unequivocally refuse to show us any proof while simultaneously eroding Americans’ faith in free and fair elections.

JD Vance, remember him? I believe he is still vice president, has also joined the chorus.

Vance: Fundamentally the problem here is that Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place and this other woman was in third place. You would expect these mail in ballots to follow that same pattern. But somehow they are still receiving ballots and the way they are coming in just so happens to work out so that the Republican gets kicked out of the final two and it is a Democrat versus Democrat runoff. That seems pretty shady to me.

Okay.

The City of Los Angeles has roughly four million people. Los Angeles County has nearly ten million people. A lot of votes were cast.

The other candidate, Nythia Robin, pulled ahead because the districts reporting later voted for her at higher rates than they voted for Spencer Pratt.

It really is that simple. That is precisely how statisticians can project elections before every vote has been counted. They follow trends.

For JD Vance, Mike Johnson, and Ron Johnson to pretend otherwise simply demonstrates how willing they are to lie to the American people in order to undermine confidence in election results.

So where is all of this coming from? You know the expression, the fish rots from the head.

During an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press over the weekend, Donald was asked a remarkably simple question.

If California’s election is rigged, where is the evidence?

Rather than respond like an adult, which he is incapable of doing, Donald threw a tantrum. He shouted at Welker, berated her, threw his microphone on the floor, stepped on it, and stormed away like a toddler.

Donald: The election was rigged. It was a dirty election and it is happening again right now in California. Look at what is happening in California. Four days and they are not even close to coming up with the totals. That is how they count the votes. You know why they are doing that? Because they are cheating on the election.

When Kristen Welker asked whether he had any evidence, Donald replied:

All I have to do is look. All I have to do is listen. Let us see what happens.

When she pointed out that looking is not evidence, Donald continued:

They are crooked. You are crooked. Your press is crooked and Meet the Press is crooked.

When Welker attempted to continue the interview, Donald concluded:

You are either crooked or you are stupid. You play right into their hands with this. You know these elections are rigged.

That is now what it means to be presidential.

I think it is time we stop putting up with this nonsense and elect people who take responsibility for their actions and speak a complete sentence without lying.

Clearly we are not there yet.

But there is always hope.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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Mary Trump: I had a great conversation with my friend Erich McElroy about the latest corruption coming out of the Trump regime, the assault on independent media, the family’s endless grifting, and why the fight for democracy is far from over. We covered everything from Donald’s latest tax scheme to the capture of major news organizations and what it all means for the future of America.

Erich McElroy: Mary, it’s always wonderful to have you back. Every time we talk, the news cycle somehow becomes even more surreal, and yet here we are again.

Mary Trump: Erich, first of all, it is so great to be back. I cannot believe how long it has been.

We are living in an entirely different universe from the one we were living in two years ago, and things were already bad then. It feels as if, since the beginning of this year, America has simply fallen off a cliff.

The important thing for everybody to understand is that when you are talking about Donald and, as it turns out, the Republican Party, there is no such thing as “worst.” It can always get worse.

I think the upcoming events perfectly illustrate that. There is Donald’s birthday celebration on June 14 and the country’s 250th anniversary. In many ways, America has become completely unrecognizable.

Erich McElroy: Whenever we speak, I always think back to your first book and the way you described your family. Does it ever become less surreal that your own uncle is at the center of all of this?

Mary Trump: It never goes away because it is simply a fact. I cannot undo it.

What has changed is the emotional impact. When Donald first entered the Oval Office in 2017, hearing his name was incredibly jarring. I constantly had MSNBC on and was endlessly scrolling Twitter, and I had not yet learned how to separate the public figure from the family member.

At least once or twice every day I would stop in my tracks as the reality crashed over me.

America had done this to itself.

Donald was sitting in the Oval Office.

That particular shock no longer happens, and I feel completely disconnected from that family. My relationship to them is purely biological. It carries no emotional significance anymore.

What remains is a profound awareness that my uncle is actively destroying our country and potentially causing enormous damage around the world. That is something I take very seriously, even if it no longer affects me in the same personal way.

Erich McElroy: There are certainly members of my family I would never hand nuclear codes to.

Mary Trump: Exactly.

Erich McElroy: The family continues to make headlines as well. Ivanka Trump is facing protests in Albania over plans to develop an island there.

Mary Trump: The thing about this family that continues to amaze me is that every single one of them is awful.

There is not one of them with redeeming characteristics. The cluelessness, the selfishness, the greed, and the belief that they are somehow superior to everybody else, despite being completely unqualified, is astonishing.

Of course they believe they deserve a private island. Of course they believe they should be allowed to destroy an ecosystem if it benefits them financially. Entitlement is the defining characteristic of every member of that family.

The only encouraging part of that story is that people are pushing back against it.

Erich McElroy: One report described Ivanka discovering the island while walking barefoot across it, only for later reports to reveal that parts of the island still contain unexploded land mines.

Mary Trump: That certainly would make for an interesting walk.

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Erich McElroy: Someone suggested she probably sent Jared ahead of her.

Mary Trump: That sounds entirely plausible.

Erich McElroy: Speaking of family privilege, Todd Blanche is now proposing IRS audit immunity for members of the Trump family. Maybe you qualify.

Mary Trump: That’s actually a very good point.

I should find out how broadly that language is written because, technically speaking, I am a member of the Trump family.

The proposal itself, however, should outrage every American.

We are talking about using taxpayer dollars to protect people who have spent years enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense. It is another example of the Trump regime creating one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else.

It is also important to remember that Donald still faces enormous potential tax liability. Those audits existed for a reason, and this proposal looks very much like an effort to make those problems disappear.

Anybody who pays taxes should be deeply offended by this.

At the same time, Donald has systematically weakened the IRS’s ability to investigate corporations and the wealthiest Americans, ensuring that ordinary taxpayers carry an even greater burden.

Erich McElroy: Donald has always argued that paying taxes is for losers, yet his supporters continue paying theirs while watching him spend their money on ballrooms, renovations, and personal vanity projects.

Mary Trump: Some supporters genuinely do not care because Donald is giving them something they value even more.

One mistake Democrats have made for decades is assuming that everybody votes based on economic self interest.

That simply is not true.

For many people, preserving white privilege, targeting immigrants, rolling back civil rights, and making life harder for people they dislike is more important than improving their own economic circumstances.

Others are trapped inside a cult that convinces them sacrificing Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid is somehow necessary to make America great again.

Donald has spent years preparing people to accept exactly that.

The encouraging news is that reality is becoming impossible to ignore.

Prices continue to rise. Inflation continues to increase. We are involved in another unnecessary war that Donald promised would never happen. The economy is struggling, and many of the people who believed his promises are beginning to understand that they were deceived.

That does not solve our problems, but it does create an opportunity for people to start paying attention again.

Erich McElroy: One of the challenges has always been getting people to recognize the difference between spectacle and governance.

Donald seems completely focused on creating distractions while institutions quietly deteriorate underneath him.

Mary Trump: That has always been his strategy.

Donald creates chaos because chaos prevents accountability.

If everyone is reacting to the latest outrageous statement or manufactured controversy, they are not paying attention to the dismantling of institutions, the erosion of democratic norms, or the extraordinary corruption taking place in plain sight.

That is why it is so important to remain focused.

Every day there is another scandal, another outrage, another attempt to normalize behavior that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.

We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to it.

The normalization of corruption is one of the greatest dangers we face because once people begin accepting it as ordinary, democracy becomes much easier to dismantle.

Erich McElroy: It feels as though exhaustion has become part of the political strategy.

Mary Trump: Absolutely.

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People become overwhelmed. They stop paying attention because it feels impossible to keep up. That is exactly what authoritarians want. They rely on people becoming exhausted, cynical, and disengaged. The antidote is community, persistence, and continuing to tell the truth no matter how overwhelming the moment feels.

That is why independent media matters so much right now.

We need places where facts still matter and where people are willing to speak honestly about what is happening instead of pretending everything is normal.

Nothing about this moment is normal.

Erich McElroy: One thing that continues to surprise me is how often Donald attacks institutions that Americans once took for granted. Whether it is the justice system, universities, or the media, nothing seems off limits.

Mary Trump: That’s because institutions represent accountability, and Donald has spent his entire life avoiding accountability.

He cannot function in an environment where rules apply equally to everyone because he has always believed the rules should bend for him.

What we’re seeing now is not random. It is a systematic effort to undermine every institution capable of holding him responsible.

If you convince people that the courts are corrupt, that elections are rigged, that journalists are dishonest, and that experts cannot be trusted, then the only remaining source of truth becomes Donald himself.

That is the foundation of authoritarianism.

Erich McElroy: And yet people continue to ask whether Donald actually believes the things he says or whether he is simply performing for an audience.

Mary Trump: I think people spend too much time trying to answer that question. Donald believes whatever is useful to him in the moment.

He has no fixed principles, no consistent ideology, and no moral center. The only constant is that he believes he deserves power, admiration, and immunity from consequences. Everything else is negotiable.

That makes him extraordinarily dangerous because there is no line he will not cross if he believes crossing it benefits him.

Erich McElroy: You have often described him as profoundly weak, which seems counterintuitive given the amount of power he currently holds.

Mary Trump: Donald mistakes intimidation for strength.

Strong people do not need loyalty oaths. They do not need military parades celebrating themselves. They do not need to threaten journalists, universities, judges, or political opponents.

Strong leaders welcome criticism because they understand that disagreement is part of democracy.

Donald cannot tolerate disagreement because any challenge to his authority feels like a threat to his identity.

Everything he does comes from fear and insecurity.

Ironically, that is one of the reasons I remain hopeful.

Authoritarian systems built around one deeply insecure individual are inherently unstable because they require constant demonstrations of power to hide fundamental weakness.

Erich McElroy: Do you think more Americans are beginning to recognize that?

Mary Trump: I do.

People may disagree about politics, but they understand instability when they experience it.

They understand rising prices, uncertainty about their jobs, and the feeling that the country is moving in the wrong direction.

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Donald promised competence. Instead, Americans are watching dysfunction unfold every single day.

Eventually propaganda collides with reality.

Erich McElroy: One of the things I appreciate about your work is that, despite everything, you continue to make room for optimism.

Mary Trump: I think optimism is a choice. Hope is not something that simply appears. It is something we create through action. If I truly believed nothing could change, there would be no reason to keep doing this work.

Instead, I see extraordinary people organizing in their communities, showing up at town halls, supporting independent journalism, protecting vulnerable neighbors, and refusing to accept authoritarianism as inevitable.

Those people remind me every day that America is bigger than Donald Trump.

Erich McElroy: Which brings us back to the title of your Substack, The Good in Us.

Mary Trump: Exactly. The title is aspirational as much as it is descriptive. The good exists, but it requires participation. Democracy requires participation. Kindness requires participation. Community requires participation. We cannot simply wait for someone else to solve these problems.

Every generation is eventually asked whether it will defend democracy or quietly surrender it. Unfortunately, that is the question our generation is being asked right now.

Erich McElroy: It is a sobering way to look at the moment, but also an empowering one.

Mary Trump: I think so. People often underestimate the cumulative impact of small acts of courage. Showing up matters. Voting matters. Supporting independent media matters. Having difficult conversations with friends and family matters.

Defending facts matters.

None of us can solve these problems alone, but millions of people making those choices every day can absolutely change the direction of a country.

Erich McElroy: Before we wrap up, I want to ask one final question.

After everything that has happened, what keeps you going?

Mary Trump: Honestly, the people.

Everywhere I travel, I meet Americans who are exhausted, frightened, and frustrated, but who still care deeply about each other and about the future of this country.

They volunteer, organize, donate, protest, teach, write, and refuse to give up.

Donald thrives on convincing people they are powerless. The best way to defeat that message is to prove him wrong. We still have agency. We still have each other. And as long as we continue showing up for one another, I believe we have every reason to keep fighting.

Erich McElroy: That feels like the perfect place to end.

Mary, it is always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for joining us.

Mary Trump: Thank you, Erich. It is always wonderful to be here.

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This is Trump Trolls Trump.

It has now been 502 days since Inauguration Day. Yes, that was January 20, 2025.

And how dare you not be on your hands and knees kissing Donald’s feet because of what he has done to America.

You know the drill. I’m going to mock these people relentlessly, partly because they’re so eminently mockable, but also because I take issue with the fact that they keep lying to us. I have a problem with that, you see.

So we’re going to take a look back at another week of the so-called golden age.

This week at the White House, Donald had, credit where credit is due, a cutting-edge, no-holds-barred, hard-hitting interview with his daughter-in-law.

Yes, Lara Trump.

The interview took place in front of a giant portrait of Donald himself, just in case you weren’t sure who she was interviewing. Basically, it was Donald, the tin-pot dictator, being interviewed by his family.

In that context, Donald explained to the Fox State TV audience, and indeed the nation, how he has come to define his political opponents.

Donald: It’s just a terrible thing for our country and to really be great, you need a fair media and we don’t have a fair media. That’s all they can do is lie. That’s the Democrats. They have no policy. They’re Democrats. They have no policy. We have a new name for them. Dumocrats. I will always call them Democrats until they straighten up because they want women to be put in danger by having men play in women’s sports. Think of it. They want the transgender mutilization of your children. We call them Dumocrats and it works out well because I take the word dumb. Take the B off because most people don’t know that dumb ends with a B. Most people don’t know. All I do is switch the E with a U and you have a Dumocrat. I came up with that by watching Hakeem Jeffries because he’s a dumb person. I said, he’s really dumb. Wait a minute, he’s a Dumocrat. I think it works. I don’t know that it’s going to be as good as Pocahontas or Fake News or so many of the others we’ve come up with, but I’m going to call them Dumocrats because I don’t understand how they can be so stupid.

Says the stupidest person ever to draw a breath. In fact, he’s so stupid I’m shocked he even knows how to breathe. He doesn’t really understand how to stay awake anymore, but that is a conversation for another time.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week to defend the Trump regime’s foreign policy priorities and answer questions about everything from Iran and international diplomacy to the State Department’s budget requests.

During the hearing, California Democrat Sarah Jacobs asked Rubio a very simple question:

Who won the 2020 election?

What followed was a bizarre and increasingly awkward exchange that eventually devolved into something else entirely.

This is what happened:

Mr. Secretary, who won the 2020 presidential election?

I’m not here to answer inquiry. We’re talking about 2020. This is a foreign affairs committee.

Okay, great. You can’t answer the question. We all know President Biden won.

I don’t answer the question because, as Secretary of State, I do not participate in domestic political issues…

Mr. Secretary, it seems like you have an issue admitting facts. You can’t say that President Biden won the 2020 election, just like you won’t admit President Trump is losing this reckless war of choice. And just like you couldn’t admit that the shoes the president bought you were too big. You clearly don’t know what winning means, and not because the facts are unclear to you. It’s because telling the truth would cost you your job, and the American people are entitled to a Secretary of State who tells them the truth even when the president doesn’t want to hear it. And my constituents and our service members deserve better.

I don’t know what shoes she’s talking about. What is she talking about?…

Yeah, I don’t know about the shoes. He gave me some Ferragamo shoes. They’re actually pretty good. They fit fine. I don’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe that’s what she’s referring to.

Your shoes look very nice today, Mr. Secretary.

How can you see them? They’re way down here. We’re talking about shoes. Are you guys kidding me? Is this the Foreign Affairs Committee or is this like a circus? What is this?

I have to admit, for a second I thought she was talking about the clown shoes Rubio has been forced to wear on occasion.

Are you not entertained?

Also, she misspoke. It’s not job. It’s jobs.

Because remember, Marco Rubio apparently being Secretary of State is not a full-time gig. He’s acting head of, I think, the archives, the ATF, and half the federal government. And don’t forget, his most important job is keeper of the Diet Coke button on Donald’s desk in the Oval Office. I think that’s really where his talents lie.

National Economic Council Director and Inappropriately Smiley Guy Kevin Hassett appeared on Fox State TV this week and was asked what message he had for Americans struggling with credit card debt and rising interest payments.

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Did he focus on the millions of Americans who are carrying credit card balances from month to month and therefore having to pay extremely high interest rates?

Or did he seem more concerned about something else entirely?

Fox Reporter: Credit card debt, though, because that’s another issue. The Wall Street Journal says in the first quarter of this year the percentage of credit card balances that were at least 90 days delinquent rose to 13.12%, according to data released in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s the highest level in 15 years and the most since the period following the 2008 financial crisis. People say they’re using those cards to get through necessities because they can’t afford what’s going on. So your message to them?

Hassett: We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time and we do see some increased stress like the numbers the Wall Street Journal quotes. But for the most part, delinquency is different from default and there’s not any kind of financial threat to the credit card companies. They don’t feel like they’re heading toward default scenarios. It’s just that people are taking a little bit longer.

Thank God.

Thank God the credit card companies are going to be okay.

That truly should be our most important priority.

How awesome is it for them that people are taking longer to pay back their credit card bills because they’re having to put things like rent and healthcare payments on them, making the balances bigger and forcing them to take longer to pay them back?

And what happens then? As I mentioned before, much bigger interest payments. Why in the world would credit card companies care? And certainly, why would that inappropriately smiley guy care?

Dr. Mehmet Oz also appeared in the White House briefing room this week to discuss the Trump regime’s healthcare agenda.

Before long, however, he found himself answering questions about Donald’s repeated cognitive tests. I mean, truly, how many annual tests can you have in a one-year period? I naively thought the answer to that question was one.

What did I know?

One reporter pointed out the obvious contradiction. If Donald is as mentally sharp as he keeps telling us he is, why do doctors keep ordering more cognitive assessments?

Oz: I think he likes the results. He does really well. He aces the test every single day and I do actually believe that he’s curious to make sure everything’s going in the right direction. He’s a very meticulous person in so many ways that are often under appreciated.

Yes, meticulous is one of the words that springs immediately to mind when thinking about Donald Trump. And also, who has the time to go back and get sometimes involved test procedures just for fun?

He likes the results.

I have never heard anything so absurd in my life.

Donald didn’t have time to go to his son’s wedding. Well, that makes sense, actually. Why would he want to?

But Donald doesn’t have time to do other things, allegedly because the Iran war is keeping him so busy. So how could he possibly justify going back to Walter Reed repeatedly for tests he’s already taken just because he likes the results?

These people are practiced liars, but their lies are getting increasingly unbelievable.

It’s going to be interesting to see how that continues to play out as Donald increasingly cannot stay awake in public, for example.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr appeared on Fox this week to discuss the effects of excessive screen time on children.

During the interview, Carr made an observation that was revealing, though perhaps not in the way he intended.

Carr: The last several years, particularly during COVID, screen time use inside of schools has surged through the roof and we’re seeing research pour in now, including from President Trump’s surgeon general, showing that excessive screen time is now being associated with reading disabilities, math comprehension problems, and cognitive declines.

Just saying.

Can you think of anybody who spends an excessive amount of time in front of screens?

All right, that does it for us.

We will be back next week for another episode of Trump Trolls Trump.

Thank you so much for being here.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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Mary Trump: I got together with my friend and fellow Nerd Avenger Wajahat Ali, and we discussed the devastating impact of the incompetent hack Bari Weiss on CBS News in general and 60 Minutes in particular. Please enjoy.

Wajahat Ali: Before we talk about all the idiocy, let’s start with some good news. Mary was in The New York Times over the weekend, and my parents called me and said, “Did you know Mary was married?” And I said, “Yes, of course.” Then I remembered Mary had told me not to tell anyone. They said, “No, we just saw this wonderful profile in The New York Times.” It was such a lovely story about your relationship. So congratulations, Mary. Your wife seems brilliant, talented, and wonderful. It was a great profile.

Mary Trump: I’m very happy. We’re really pleased with the profile. Apparently, I forgot to tell you that you didn’t have to keep it a secret anymore, so sorry about that. It was a lot of fun to do. My wife, Ronda Cress, is an extraordinary person. In addition to being someone I’m incredibly lucky to be with, she’s a former attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She was one of the many people who left in the wake of Donald’s election. That’s a tragedy, but she’s incredible. It was nice to be able to share that part of our lives with the world, unlike the things we’re about to talk about.

Wajahat Ali: One of my favorite parts was Ronda saying she wasn’t all that impressed with you at first. I immediately liked her.

Mary Trump: She is not easily impressed.

Wajahat Ali: I was also shocked to learn you’re a lesbian.

Mary Trump: I’ve been keeping that under wraps.

Wajahat Ali: That explains why trying to set you up with men never worked.

Mary Trump: And I keep forgetting to tell you to stop doing that.

Wajahat Ali: We need moments of joy because we’re living under an authoritarian and corrupt regime. Speaking of that, let’s talk about what happened with CBS and 60 Minutes. This isn’t just media news. This is about freedom of speech, the role of the press, and an authoritarian government silencing criticism.

But before that, let’s discuss the Supreme Court’s latest decision. The Court effectively allowed an intentionally discriminatory congressional map in Alabama to stand, despite lower courts finding that it disenfranchised Black voters. At this point, if a Democrat isn’t running on Supreme Court reform, I don’t need them. Without the Court, we get nothing.

Mary Trump: A lot of us have been saying that for years. It has always astonished me that Democrats failed to focus enough on local races, failed to build media infrastructure, and failed to make the Supreme Court central to every presidential campaign.

Without the Supreme Court, you get nothing. With the Supreme Court, you can protect everything: civil rights, voting rights, elections, and the regulatory state. Those are not minor details.

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I have nothing but contempt for the corrupt and illegitimate supermajority on the Court. None of this surprises me. We live in an age of brazen corruption. At least two of those justices are among the most corrupt ever to serve.

As horrifying as this decision is, my hope is that it forces Democrats to stop pretending the Court is above criticism. If you’re running as a Democrat, Supreme Court reform should be nonnegotiable. Not cosmetic reform. Expand the Court. Implement term limits. Establish enforceable ethics standards. Undo the most destructive rulings. Create a Court that actually cares about the Constitution and the rights of the American people instead of serving a white Christian nationalist minority.

Wajahat Ali: The reason I criticize the Democratic establishment is because the stakes are so high. ICE is killing Americans and covering it up. We warned this would happen. The Israeli government is led by extremists who have no interest in peace. Billionaires continue to accumulate power. Yet many Democrats still refuse to call for meaningful action.

Even now, many Democratic candidates are not talking about Supreme Court reform, are still taking money from powerful interests, and are still missing the moment. People are fed up. It feels like pitchfork time.

Mary Trump: I agree. Democrats continue to miss the moment. They don’t seem to understand that this could be the year not only to win decisively but to move the party toward where most Americans already are.

And let’s be clear. Moving left doesn’t mean moving to the fringe. The Democratic Party today is roughly where the center-right was decades ago. Most Americans support positions that Democrats are still afraid to embrace.

So voters need to force the issue. Primary establishment Democrats when possible. Demand support for Supreme Court reform, ending the filibuster, electoral reform, and accountability for the people who have damaged our institutions, our Constitution, and our democracy.

Wajahat Ali: That brings us to the media. The people sitting in the front row at Donald’s inauguration weren’t journalists. They were billionaires and tech oligarchs.

Larry Ellison, one of the richest men on Earth, has enormous influence through Oracle. His son David Ellison has taken control of Paramount and CBS. A merger moved forward after Paramount settled with Donald Trump for millions of dollars. Then came the cancellation of Stephen Colbert and the upheaval at CBS.

Scott Pelley has now spoken out and accused leadership of undermining 60 Minutes. He said there was interference, pressure, and meddling in coverage involving both Donald Trump and Israel. Why is this so important?

Mary Trump: First of all, Bari Weiss is a hack. Good for Scott Pelley for saying what needed to be said.

This is the destruction of an American institution. I grew up watching 60 Minutes and Walter Cronkite. It represented real journalism.

What is happening at CBS should alarm everybody. It is a symbol of where we are headed. We should all be deeply concerned.

And it highlights the fact that Democrats need to be doing more. Social media platforms need regulation. The FCC needs real authority. We need stronger protections for journalism.

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I don’t think people fully appreciate how damaging this will be if it continues unchecked.

Wajahat Ali: It’s already happening everywhere. Elon Musk transformed Twitter. Facebook serves whoever is in power. TikTok, CBS, and potentially CNN are all being influenced by the same wealthy interests. Local newspapers are disappearing. Right-wing talk radio dominates. Algorithms reward outrage.

These billionaires are buying everything.

Mary Trump: And we can’t overstate how damaging that is.

Independent and neutral voices are being pushed out. It’s not just left-wing voices. Entire spaces for factual reporting are shrinking.

Podcasting is dominated by heavily funded right-wing personalities. Social media platforms increasingly suppress independent voices. The answer isn’t to give up those spaces, but we need support.

People who care about democracy need to invest in independent media. We need institutions committed to facts, truth, and democratic values.

So far, I don’t see enough people stepping up.

Wajahat Ali: And the problem is that money influences both parties. Many politicians are still funded by the same billionaires who are consolidating media and building what looks increasingly like a techno-authoritarian future.

Mary Trump: Which is exactly why Citizens United needs to be overturned.

There’s an organization dedicated to that mission called End Citizens United. Taking money out of politics levels the playing field. It reduces the influence of special interests and gives candidates who genuinely want to serve their communities a fighting chance.

It’s absurd that Senate races cost hundreds of millions of dollars. During the 2024 cycle, enormous sums were spent on consultants and advertising. Take money out of politics, and the entire dynamic changes.

It’s infinitely worse on the right, but it remains a serious problem everywhere.

Wajahat Ali: Meanwhile, consultants continue to make fortunes while missing obvious opportunities. Instead of embracing successful new voices and ideas, they spend millions trying to manufacture them.

But let’s talk about the media itself. Many journalists still seem more interested in maintaining access than telling the truth. What does that say about the profession?

Mary Trump: It’s disgraceful.

Selling your soul for access is a betrayal of journalism’s purpose. Journalism should be committed to facts and inherently supportive of democracy.

If staying close to authoritarians matters more to you than integrity, then you need to rethink your priorities.

Wajahat Ali: That’s why the story of 60 Minutes matters so much. It was one of the last broadly trusted institutions in American journalism. Walter Cronkite was once considered the most trusted man in America. Now institutions like that are being hollowed out and replaced by people willing to serve power.

Freedom is one of the reasons people came to this country. The freedom to criticize leaders. The freedom to mock presidents. The freedom to challenge authority.

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And now we’re watching those freedoms come under attack.

Mary Trump: Which is why people need to understand that all of this is happening because Donald is weak.

Strong people do not need to rig systems in their favor. They don’t need to silence critics. They don’t need to control institutions.

Donald does.

And as dangerous as this moment is, that fact should give us some comfort. His behavior is proof of weakness, not strength.

I still believe we are going to prevail.

I apologize for being a little under the weather, and thank you for ending a little early today.

Everybody can check out my Substack, The Good in Us. We’re on YouTube at Mary Trump Media. We’re also on social media platforms and Patreon.

Wajahat Ali: Patreon is great because people can support your work directly.

Mary Trump: Exactly. We share bonus content there, behind-the-scenes material, bloopers, and other things that don’t fit elsewhere. It helps support everything we’re doing.

Wajahat Ali: If you want Mary to stay healthy and continue her work, support her on Patreon.

Everything at The Left Hook is free. If people want to support us, wonderful. If not, that’s okay too. But support independent voices you trust because they matter.

Mary Trump: And I just need to say that Wajahat Ali remains an even worse capitalist than ever.

Wajahat Ali: That’s true. But if people are going to spend money, I’d rather they spend it on something worthwhile.

Mary, congratulations again on your marriage. My parents were genuinely happy for you after reading that profile.

Mary Trump: Please send them my best. They’re wonderful, and I’d love to meet them someday.

Wajahat Ali: Thank you all for watching. Be kind, be informed, and please don’t be a fascist.

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The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali

The Murder of 60 Minutes and the Death of Corporate Media with Mary Trump

Goodbye, 60 Minutes…

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9 days ago · 1106 likes · 73 comments · THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali and Mary L Trump

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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I had the honor of appearing on the premier episode of Steven Becshloss, “Six Questions.” And in addition to talking about the very serious events going on in the world today, he also asked me six awesome questions. Hope you enjoy.

Steve Beschloss: Mary, I’m so excited that you could join me. Honestly, there’s no one I wanted to talk to more than you to get a read on where things are. The last few weeks have seemed particularly reckless and chaotic. The near-daily flip-flopping on the war with Iran, the extreme and violent threats, and the more frequent expressions of indifference.

Donald Trump said yesterday, “I don’t really care if the talks with Iran collapse.” It mirrored, to me, his recent careless remark: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” In the last few weeks, he’s been posting extreme AI images of self-delusion, portraying himself as Jesus, on Mount Rushmore, on horseback beside George Washington, along with a lot of his usual hostile targeting of perceived enemies.

So let’s jump in. My first question: How would you describe Donald’s current state of cognitive decline, and is it accelerating?

Mary Trump: First of all, Steven, it’s so awesome to be here with you on your new show. I’m very excited to be here. Thank you.

Because everything is bad, last I checked. And one of the things that’s very bad is Donald’s cognitive decline, which is worsening. I’m not a neuropsychologist or neurologist, but I don’t think one has to be. One just has to be observant.

As some people know, my grandfather, Donald’s father, had Alzheimer’s, and I see a lot of similarities in the way they look, the way he talks sometimes, and his lack of impulse control. It’s very worrying because, of course, this is on top of other issues he’s clearly having in terms of poor physical health, which we see evidence of, and about which the White House continues to lie.

And then there are his longstanding, undiagnosed, untreated psychiatric disorders, which are also worsening over time.

Steven Beschloss: Right. We’ve talked before about malignant narcissism and sociopathy, which have been playing out for decades. How much of this, in your view, is about dementia, combined with those other disorders?

Mary Trump: I think it’s a perfect storm of all of those things, plus the enormous stress anybody in Donald’s position would be under.

That stress is exacerbated by the fact that, perhaps for the first time in his life, he has painted himself into a corner he can’t get out of. The 47,000 plates he has spinning in the air aren’t working anymore. A lot of them are falling to the ground, and they’re no longer distracting people from his unbelievable incompetence and corruption.

The dementia is a serious problem because you don’t want somebody in a position of power suffering from cognitive decline, especially when that person is surrounded by sycophants and yes-men who refuse to step in.

But, Steven, I’ve heard a lot of people say Donald is different now, that he’s not the same guy he used to be. I would push back vehemently against that. I think what we’re seeing is a stripping away. His cognitive decline is actually revealing who he’s been all along.

Steven Beschloss: We’ve talked before about narcissistic collapse and looked for moments when some humiliating event might finally break through his self-delusion. Are there signs that we’re seeing that now?

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Mary Trump: Absolutely.

Part of it is the cognitive decline and the resulting loss of impulse control. But I also think it’s the dawning realization, even if not entirely conscious, that he’s losing control of the narrative.

Donald has been on the brink of narcissistic collapse for decades, but there has always been somebody there to pick him up, to assuage him, to remind him that he is the greatest creature who has ever existed.

It’s important for people to understand why he may finally be approaching that collapse. Donald has spent his entire life trying to avoid humiliation. If there is one thing that terrifies him more than anything else, it is being revealed as the pathetic loser he knows deep down he is.

So much of his psychic energy has been devoted to protecting his fragile ego from the truth about who he actually is.

Steven Beschloss: Let’s move to question two. Is there anything about his cognitive state that surprises you? Are there surprises still to come?

Mary Trump: No and no.

One thing you can credit Donald with is consistency. Nothing he does should surprise us based on what we know about him. And there is no bottom.

One of my mantras is that there is no worst. He will always get worse. I think the last decade has proven that.

Steven Beschloss: We’ve talked before about the possibility that, if things get bad enough, he’ll burn it all down. What does that mean?

Mary Trump: When you’re dealing with a deeply psychiatrically disordered person in cognitive decline, who is losing what little impulse control he ever had and who possesses enormous power, we need to keep our eyes wide open.

In addition to everything else, he’s a nihilist. One reason we have no idea who in the Republican Party may try to succeed him is that Donald doesn’t believe anybody can or should. He doesn’t believe that anybody or anything should survive him.

Steven Beschloss: Let’s zoom out. How has his mental illness infected the country? Are we seeing a kind of mass psychosis and rising sociopathy?

Mary Trump: It’s very alarming.

We’re probably going to spend the rest of our lives trying to understand this. Clearly, we haven’t learned all of the lessons we needed to learn from World War II and the Holocaust.

We need psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others to help us understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

One factor is that there are a lot of people with authoritarian personalities. They are susceptible to charismatic leaders, and whether it makes sense to us or not, Donald is one of them.

He has tapped into people’s discontent and given them permission to be their worst selves.

Shockingly, there are people who genuinely like his cruelty. They relate to him. They see themselves in him. They are often weak people who feel the world has treated them unfairly, even when they occupy positions of privilege.

We’ve been building toward somebody like Donald in the White House for decades. This is not a one-off.

Steven Beschloss: George Washington worried about the rise of despotism and warned that a demagogue would feed upon the ruins of public liberty. It feels remarkably prophetic.

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What about leadership? Will this sociopathic style continue influencing future leaders?

Mary Trump: This is the Republican Party now.

We cannot allow Republicans who enabled every horror Donald Trump committed against this country, its people, and the world to later point at him and pretend he was the only problem.

There is no returning to normal because there is no normal to return to.

Quite frankly, the Republican Party has been a party of authoritarians and fascists for some time. They laid the foundation for this moment, and every one of them needs to be held accountable.

The Democrats’ mistake has always been saying we need to look forward, not back. In my view, that has been a tragic misjudgment.

Steven Beschloss: Again and again in American history, people who committed profound betrayals have escaped accountability because leaders preferred to move on.

Mary Trump: And it’s worse than that.

Gerald Ford is known for pardoning Richard Nixon, which was an awful mistake. But he also pardoned Robert E. Lee. Then Jimmy Carter pardoned Jefferson Davis.

It’s not just that we fail to hold people accountable. We wipe the slate clean.

Steven Beschloss: Let’s talk about national trauma. How traumatized is the country?

Mary Trump: We’re so traumatized that many of us don’t even recognize it.

Some people were traumatized by the 2016 election. Virtually all of us were traumatized by COVID.

The problem is that you cannot heal from trauma while you are actively being traumatized. If you don’t recognize the foundational trauma, then every new trauma compounds the original one.

We are in very deep trouble. We’ve always been terrible about mental health in this country.

We are a nation of traumatized people who lack the tools and language to grapple with what we’re experiencing. Unless leadership helps the country heal and understand what that means, things will only get worse.

Steven Beschloss: Which brings me to my final question. How long will it take to repair the damage once he’s gone?

Mary Trump: This is a generational project.

It assumes Democrats regain power and understand what their responsibility is. We need leaders who understand what’s at stake and who are willing to make serious systemic changes.

We need to protect civil rights, protect human rights, and reimagine what this country stands for. We need to redefine who we are and who we want to be.

Part of that process may require stepping back from the world stage. We’ve done enormous damage over the last decade, largely because of Donald and the Republican Party, but also because Democrats failed to do enough when they had the opportunity.

We need serious soul-searching about America’s future role in the world.

This is not something that changes over a couple of election cycles. It requires long-term dedication.

Steven Beschloss: I think that’s exactly right.

The trust that has been broken with allies around the world will take generations to rebuild. The soft power that once connected America to the world has been badly damaged.

And we also need to confront issues like gun violence, which remains a profound source of trauma for millions of Americans.

Mary Trump: I agree.

Steven Beschloss: Before we finish, let’s do a lightning round.

What makes you happy?

Mary Trump: My people.

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Especially after 2016 and COVID, I became very isolated. Finding my way back to the people I love has meant everything. They’ve helped me get through these dark times.

Steven Beschloss: What makes you angriest?

Mary Trump: That people like Donald, who are corrupt, undeserving, and incompetent, continue to fail upward and gain power at the expense of what really matters: kindness and empathy.

That continues to enrage me.

Steven Beschloss: What’s your favorite word?

Mary Trump: Paradigmatic.

Steven Beschloss: Why?

Mary Trump: I don’t know. I just think it’s a cool word.

Steven Beschloss: What living person do you most admire?

Mary Trump: Jane Fonda.

And as a group, the people of Ukraine.

Steven Beschloss: What historical person do you most admire?

Mary Trump: I’m terrible at answering that question.

Instead, I’ll say the people throughout history who were part of resistance movements, whether the Underground Railroad, the French Resistance, or other acts of courage in dark times.

We need to learn from them and try to emulate their bravery.

Steven Beschloss: What gives you hope?

Mary Trump: Just look around.

There are so many people standing up for their neighbors, their communities, and their values. People are putting themselves on the line while corporations and institutions fail us.

The willingness of ordinary people to act, often without support and without knowing whether their actions will matter, gives me hope.

There are still so many people like that in this country and around the world, and I am deeply grateful to them.

Steven Beschloss: You give me hope too.

You’ve been an incisive observer, but more importantly, you’ve committed yourself to helping people make sense of what we’re living through.

Your work matters now, and it will matter just as much when the time comes to repair the damage.

Thank you for taking the time today.

Mary Trump: Thank you.

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In the past sixteen months, the Trump regime has moved to dismantle environmental and public health protections at a scale never before seen in modern American history. Federal protections covering public lands, air pollution, climate oversight, disaster preparedness, and environmental monitoring have been weakened, delayed, or eliminated. The administration describes this effort as deregulation and energy expansion. Critics argue that the long-term costs are simply being shifted from industries onto the public, which is to say, onto us.

On May 13, Representative Jared Huffman accused the Trump regime of treating public lands and natural resources as assets for private industry and political allies.

Huffman: President Trump is gutting funding and personnel in the agencies that manage our public lands, ordering what’s left of the beleaguered National Park Service staff to whitewash history, shutting down projects that are ready to bring cheap, reliable, clean energy to millions of families who are struggling with skyrocketing utility bills and bullying the offshore wind industry into abandoning billions in investments that would bring even more affordable energy online. Oil and gas prices are soaring. As America pulled back from global leadership on clean energy technology, China stepped right in to fill the void. Trump’s policies have been terrible for our competition with China, terrible for workers and families trying to pay their bills. There is only one group that benefits from these policies and that is the oil and gas oligarchs who funded Trump’s campaign.

The reason for this is very simple. Donald is pro-oligarch. He aspires to be one himself. If protecting the interests of oligarchs comes at the expense of our environment, our natural resources, and the health of future generations, so be it. Donald and the people around him do not value those things.

They know that they will always have access to clean water because they can afford expensive filtration systems. The rest of us are increasingly expected to accept a world in which basic environmental protections disappear and contaminants like arsenic become somebody else’s problem.

There is, however, a limit to how far even the wealthy can outrun the crises they are creating. Unless they intend to spend the rest of their lives in bunkers, they need clean air too.

The Trump regime has proposed cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by roughly fifty percent, a reduction that would rank among the largest in the agency’s history. According to the Climate Action Campaign tracker, the administration has logged tens of thousands of environmental rollbacks, funding pauses, regulatory delays, and enforcement changes since returning to office.

The question is not simply why the administration is doing this. The answer to that is obvious. Deregulation enriches industries that no longer have to bear the cost of cleaning up their own pollution. The more difficult question is why so many Americans have been convinced that agencies designed to protect them are somehow the enemy.

For decades, beginning in large part with Ronald Reagan, Americans have been taught that government itself is the problem. In reality, government is simply a tool. When functioning properly, it exists to solve collective problems that individuals cannot solve on their own.

The Environmental Protection Agency was created so Americans could have clean air, clean water, and protected public lands. The Food and Drug Administration was created so Americans would not die unnecessarily from contaminated food and unsafe products. These institutions exist because history repeatedly demonstrated what happens when corporations are left entirely to police themselves.

On May 12, the Trump regime finalized the repeal of the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule. The rule, finalized under President Biden in 2024, required conservation to be considered alongside drilling, mining, logging, grazing, and energy development across 245 million acres of federal land.

Donald’s repeal removes conservation as an equal-use priority and reorients federal land policy toward extraction and development.

Those lands contain habitat for more than 300 threatened and endangered species and more than 2,400 species considered at risk. The Bureau of Land Management is now planning to remove hundreds of bison from federal land in Phillips County, Montana because ranchers want additional grazing space.

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It is worth noting that roughly eighty-one percent of Bureau of Land Management land is already open to oil and gas leasing. Only a small fraction is managed primarily for conservation, and even that limited protection is now under attack.

The administration is also pursuing changes to the Roadless Rule, which currently limits development on nearly sixty million acres of national forest land.

At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency under Lee Zeldin has moved aggressively to weaken major Clean Air Act protections. In March 2025, industrial facilities were invited to request exemptions from federal air quality requirements through a process requiring little more than direct written requests.

ProPublica later described the internal system handling those requests as the “inbox from hell.”

The EPA has since pursued exemptions for coal-fired power plants and other major industrial sources while rolling back mercury and air toxics standards. These standards limit pollutants including mercury, benzene, acid gases, and particulate matter, substances linked to neurological damage in infants and fetuses, lung disease, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Perhaps most significantly, the Trump regime rescinded the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the legal foundation for much of the federal government’s climate regulation framework.

Lee Zeldin called it the single largest act of deregulation in American history.

It may also be one of the most destructive.

Donald: Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers. This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically.

As usual, Donald makes his priorities perfectly clear. None of them involve protecting public health or safeguarding the environment.

That brings us to what the EPA is currently doing to our drinking water.

The administration has rolled back rules governing so-called forever chemicals, known as PFAS, in drinking water supplies.

This is how Washington Post’s Amudalat Ajasa described them:

PFAS are a class of thousands of carbon fluoride compounds used to repel grease, water and oil, and they’re the strongest bond in chemistry. They’re really persistent. They have the nickname forever chemicals for a reason.

When asked how widespread they are she explained,

Scientists estimate that PFAS are in the blood of almost every American and they’re found in remote regions around the world, even as far as Antarctica.

And when asked where they can be found:

It’s in the environment. It’s in the air, it’s in the soil, it’s in the water, but people are primarily exposed to PFAS through drinking water.

Another reason the Trump regime appears so unconcerned about pollution is that the effects disproportionately fall on poor communities. Air pollution, contaminated water, and environmental degradation rarely affect the wealthy first.

Rescinding the Endangerment Finding does not change the scientific reality of climate change or pollution. It simply removes the federal government’s legal obligation to address those realities.

That distinction matters.

The science remains the same. The danger remains the same. The consequences remain the same.

What has changed is that the government under the Trump regime no longer pretends its responsibility is to protect the public. Its priority is protecting the industries responsible for the damage.

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Iran has suspended negotiations with the United States. Missile exchanges between Iran and American forces continue. The Strait of Hormuz remains in crisis. Energy prices are rising. Global tensions are escalating. Confusion appears to be growing inside both the White House and the Pentagon.

The result is exactly where Donald’s illegal and unconstitutional war of choice with Iran was always likely to lead: a deepening strategic stalemate marked by rising costs, fractured leadership, and no clear path toward de-escalation.

As of this week, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported that Iran has stopped all dialogue and exchanges through mediators. The reason given was Israel’s ongoing strikes in Lebanon. Iran has also moved to block the Strait of Hormuz again. Meanwhile, late on the night of May 31, two Iranian ballistic missiles targeting U.S. troops in Kuwait were intercepted by American forces.

This follows a Situation Room meeting last week that lasted more than two hours and produced no announcement, no agreement, and no apparent progress of any kind.

Naturally, Donald responded with one of his trademark social media posts. Early Monday morning, he assured everybody that there was nothing to worry about.

This is what Donald posted:

Iran really wants to make a deal and it will be a good one for the USA and those that are with us. But don’t the Dumocrats and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans understand that it’s much tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate when political hacks keep negatively chirping at levels never seen before over and over again that I should move faster or move slower or go to war or not go to war or whatever. Just sit back and relax. It will all work out well in the end. It always does.

Says the man who is wrong about almost everything, lies about almost everything, and somehow manages to make nearly every situation worse.

The fact that Iran keeps walking away from negotiations suggests something Donald refuses to acknowledge. Iran is not in a hurry because it understands something he does not: it has the leverage. Donald continues to insist that he holds all the cards. Iran’s actions suggest it believes otherwise.

As for the instruction that we should all “sit back and relax,” an American service member and a British service member were killed on Monday because of Donald’s war.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted online that the ceasefire between Iran and the United States applies across all fronts, including Lebanon, and warned that the United States and Israel would bear responsibility for any violations. At the same time, Kuwait’s Foreign Ministry condemned what it described as “repeated Iranian attacks” and reserved the right to take whatever measures it deemed necessary to defend itself.

It is worth remembering that while the Iranian regime is indeed an authoritarian regime, the United States attacked Iran. Iran, like any country under attack, has the right to defend itself and its people.

Meanwhile, oil prices continue to climb.

After widespread criticism that he had effectively offered Iran a deal more favorable than Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Donald attempted to toughen his negotiating position. The revised proposal demanded stricter limits on Iran’s nuclear materials before any agreement could move forward.

Iran was unimpressed.

Its Foreign Ministry accused the United States of constantly changing its position and introducing contradictory demands that naturally prolong negotiations. That assessment should sound familiar. The key sticking points, according to CBS News and The New York Times, remain the removal of highly enriched uranium from Iran and Iran’s demand to charge transit fees for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz once it reopens.

The United States says the fees are unacceptable.

Iran says they are non-negotiable.

And on June 1, Iran simply walked away from the table.

That is how little urgency Iran feels. More importantly, it demonstrates how clearly Iranian leaders understand who is actually driving events right now. It is not Donald Trump.

Despite repeated claims by the Trump regime that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was obliterated, international monitors estimate that Iran still possesses more than 970 pounds of near weapons-grade uranium.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, however, appears to believe the real problem lies elsewhere.

Hegseth: The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.

Apparently, the greatest threat facing the United States is not an escalating regional war, rising energy prices, global instability, or deteriorating alliances.

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It is criticism of the Trump regime.

That level of incompetence would be funny if the consequences were not so serious.

The administration’s drawdown of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has pushed emergency oil stockpiles to their lowest level in more than forty years. Current reserves sit at roughly 365 to 375 million barrels, near early-1980s levels and barely above half of total capacity.

That means the United States has less emergency protection than almost any point in modern history while actively burning through those reserves in an effort to stabilize markets during a war Donald started.

Economists warn that replenishing those reserves will be expensive, slow, and politically difficult. Even if the immediate crisis ends, the long-term vulnerability will remain. That is one more reason not to believe promises that prices will rapidly return to normal once the Strait of Hormuz reopens. They will not.

According to Fortune, energy executives warn that prices could surge within weeks as inventories approach historically low levels. While Brent crude prices have fallen from their recent peaks, they remain more than $25 per barrel higher than they were before the war began.

The Brookings Institution predicts significant price increases the longer the conflict continues. Donald insists that Iran is in a weak position. Experts disagree.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies argues that Iran’s strategy has been to absorb pressure, impose costs, and shift the center of gravity outward. By those measures, Iran is succeeding.

As I have said repeatedly, Iran is now in a stronger position than it occupied before Donald attacked it. The United States has burned through difficult-to-replace munitions. European and Asian allies face growing shortages. Rising gas, fertilizer, and energy costs are damaging economies worldwide and increasing the likelihood of a global recession.

And when that recession comes, the United States will almost certainly bear much of the blame because the United States, and specifically Donald Trump, created this crisis.

The result is increased anti-American sentiment across the globe and a growing reluctance among allies to cooperate with us at precisely the moment when cooperation is most needed.

Yet Donald continues pretending otherwise.

Donald: Iran is in a very bad position. They have no military. All they have is good talk and they have a fake press. The fake news is probably their biggest asset.

At this point, it is fair to wonder whether Donald is describing himself.

The only thing keeping him afloat is a press corps that too often treats obvious falsehoods as legitimate political arguments. He does not have the facts. He does not have the leverage. He is operating from a position of weakness while continuing to put lives at risk.

Perhaps most disturbing of all was a recent interview with NBC in which Donald was asked about the ongoing negotiations.

His response was breathtaking.

Donald: I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.

He then added that the discussions were becoming “very boring.”

That is the level of seriousness Donald brings to the war he started.

He does not care because he is incapable of caring. He is an incompetent toddler who constantly requires entertainment. Right now, his attention appears divided between his absurd White House ballroom project and his determination to transform America’s 250th birthday celebration into a monument to himself.

Meanwhile, people are dying, global markets are destabilizing, and the world continues paying the price for Donald’s recklessness.

And his advice to the rest of us is simply to sit back and relax.

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There is a version of Donald that millions of people still cling to despite decades of evidence to the contrary. It is a version carefully constructed by his enablers and sold to the public through branding, mythology, and relentless repetition. It is the Donald who is supposedly self-made.

The brilliant businessman. The master negotiator. The entrepreneur who built an empire from nothing and then wrote a book explaining how everybody else could do the same. Remember The Art of the Deal?

The problem is that none of it is true.

Donald has never built anything.

What he has done instead is license his name. He sold other people the right to slap it on buildings, hotels, bottles of water, vodka, steaks, universities, board games, and virtually anything else somebody thought they could sell. What exactly has Donald ever created from the ground up with his own vision, capital, and skills? The answer is nothing.

Even the mythology surrounding his rise is false. Donald has long claimed he started with a “small” loan from his father. In reality, a 2018 investigation by The New York Times, based on more than 100,000 pages of financial records, revealed that Donald received at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire over the course of his life. Much of that money was transferred through what the Times described as dubious tax schemes, including outright fraud.

Donald did not build his fortune. He inherited it. And what took my grandfather decades to build took Donald very little time to destroy.

Between 1985 and 1994, Donald lost more than $1 billion. He filed for corporate bankruptcy six times. The Trump Taj Mahal casino, which he opened in Atlantic City in April 1990 and proudly called the “eighth wonder of the world,” entered bankruptcy the following year. That failure was hardly an isolated incident.

Lawyers for one of Donald’s own investment banks later wrote in court filings that the Trump name had become associated with a company that lost money every year and properties suffering from significant deferred maintenance.

A Temple University study found that Donald’s casinos lost more money, destroyed more jobs, and experienced more bankruptcies than any major competitor in Atlantic City. In direct competition, researchers concluded the casino’s were not average. They were the worst. And yet Donald walked away richer.

The investors lost. Bondholders lost. Contractors lost. Workers lost. Entire retirement accounts collapsed.

Stephen Perskie, New Jersey’s top casino regulator during the early 1990s, described Donald’s departure from Atlantic City in blunt terms.

Perskie: He put a number of local contractors and suppliers out of business when he didn’t pay them. So when he left Atlantic City, it wasn’t sorry to see you go. It was, how fast can you get the hell out of here?

After the casino failures proved Donald was incapable of operating a thriving business without his father’s money and influence, he pivoted to something far easier. He sold his name. That is what Donald’s business career amounts to once the mythology is stripped away.

Trump Steaks. Trump Vodka. Trump University. Trump Airlines alone lost $128 million in its first eighteen months and never became profitable. Once again, Donald created none of it.

He simply sold the illusion that his name meant something, collected his fee, and left somebody else holding the bag when things inevitably fell apart. The same pattern extends to The Art of the Deal, the book that helped cement Donald’s reputation as a business genius.

There is just one problem. Donald did not write it. He did not even co-write it. The book was ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz, who later described the experience as his greatest regret in life.

Schwartz said the title itself was a marketing construct he invented to package an autobiography that bore little resemblance to Donald’s actual life. He later told CBS News that, “ Donald not only lies constantly, but does so without guilt or concern.” Schwartz even suggested a more accurate title for a sequel. The Sociopath.

Increasingly, people are beginning to understand what Donald actually is.

Iran certainly does.

In 2018, Donald withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear agreement. He called it the worst deal ever made and promised something better. Of course, he never delivered.

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The agreement had taken years to negotiate and represented the most effective mechanism for constraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Donald destroyed it and replaced it with nothing. Then, after five rounds of failed negotiations during his second term, he launched an illegal and unconstitutional war.

Now Iran is refusing his terms, advancing its nuclear program, and showing little interest in ending the conflict. Donald’s own envoy, Steve Witkoff, admitted reaching an agreement was “difficult, if not impossible.”

Donald’s response was to demand that Iran “cry uncle.” That is not strength. It is desperation. Donald continues insisting that he holds all the cards. The opposite is true. With every passing day, America becomes weaker and Iran becomes stronger.

The same pattern appears everywhere else Donald touches.

Take the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation.

Donald awarded a no-bid contract to a company with no prior federal experience. The project was initially estimated at $1.8 million. It now costs $3.1 million and is being paid for with money collected from visitors to America’s national parks.

Money that should be preserving public lands is instead being spent covering another one of Donald’s vanity projects. Naturally, Donald has spent far more time admiring the pool than explaining the cost overruns.

The Greeks had a name for somebody who became obsessed with his own reflection. Narcissus. It did not end particularly well for him either.

Then there is the White House ballroom.

Donald originally claimed the project would cost $200 million and be funded entirely through private donations, including some of his own money.

Neither claim proved true.

The price tag doubled to $400 million. Senate Republicans attempted to allocate up to $1 billion in taxpayer funding for the project. When procedural rules got in the way, Donald demanded the removal of the Senate parliamentarian.

The pattern is familiar. Costs spiral out of control. Somebody else pays. Anybody who objects gets removed. And then Donald finds another group of sycophants willing to carry out his wishes. That brings us to perhaps the most brazen example of all.

In February 2026, Donald filed a $10 billion lawsuit against his own Internal Revenue Service because an IRS contractor leaked his tax returns. That contractor was prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. So what exactly were Donald’s damages?

Every modern president released tax returns voluntarily. Donald did not.

Legal experts immediately dismissed the lawsuit as frivolous. Yet through a settlement negotiated by his own Justice Department, Donald effectively won anyway.

A $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded compensation program was created, benefiting people who claimed they had been unfairly targeted by the Biden administration, including January 6th rioters. The Treasury Department’s top lawyer resigned in protest.

Then came an even more disturbing revelation.

A provision quietly added to the agreement permanently barred the IRS from pursuing tax claims against Donald, his family members, or his businesses.

Think about that.

Donald and his family have effectively been granted protection from future tax enforcement while Republicans remain in power. It is impossible to imagine a clearer example of corruption. It is also the logical conclusion of the myth Donald has spent decades selling. The myth of the brilliant businessman.

The reality is much simpler.

Donald inherited wealth he did not earn, destroyed businesses he did not know how to run, shifted losses onto other people, and spent decades convincing millions of Americans that failure was success.

Now he is running the country the same way he ran everything else.

And we are all being handed the bill.

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TrumpRx is not healthcare.

It is not insurance. It is not universal coverage. It does not guarantee treatment, preventative care, emergency services, or even access to a doctor. It is a coupon and referral website wrapped in the branding and self congratulation of a regime that has spent years dismantling the already inadequate healthcare system millions of Americans depend on.

And naturally, Donald is pretending that it is a miracle.

Donald: I think it’s maybe other than medical itself, like a cure, I think it’s the biggest thing to happen in healthcare ever maybe. We paid the highest price in the world. Now we’re paying as of now, we’re paying the lowest price in the world.

None of that is true.

Donald recently announced that TrumpRx would expand by adding more than 600 generic medications through partnerships with Amazon Pharmacy, GoodRx, and Cost Plus Drugs. The Trump regime claims this will dramatically lower prescription costs for Americans.

But according to reporting from the Associated Press, most insured Americans are still better off using their insurance while uninsured people and people with high deductibles are left comparison shopping for life saving medications inside an already fragmented system that Republicans continue making worse.

TrumpRx does not provide healthcare coverage. Patients still have to pay out of pocket for doctor appointments in order to get prescriptions. The discounts do not count toward insurance deductibles, making long term care even harder to afford.

In other words, it sounds like a scam because it is one.

The timing of this so called expansion also matters. Republicans simultaneously cut Medicaid and allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, driving premiums and healthcare costs even higher for millions of Americans. As a result, millions of people can no longer afford healthcare at all.

Critics argue that TrumpRx does nothing to solve the healthcare crisis. It simply forces Americans to navigate a collapsing system on their own while Donald pretends handing people coupons somehow counts as governance.

And then there is the math.

During a Senate Finance Committee hearing in April, Senator Elizabeth Warren questioned Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. about Donald’s claim that TrumpRx lowered drug prices by as much as 600 percent.

Senator Warren: The president pitched his Trump RX website as the answer for Americans who are worried about healthcare costs. He claims that Trump RX has reduced prices by as much as 600%. Six hundred percent, which I think means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.

Warren then pointed to a specific example. A thirty day supply of Protonix cost approximately $200 on TrumpRx while the identical generic version, pantoprazole, cost only $16 at Costco.

When Warren asked Kennedy whether he knew the price difference, he admitted he did not.

Instead, Kennedy attempted to defend Donald’s mathematically impossible claim.

RFK Jr. : President Trump has a different way of calculating. There’s two ways of calculating percentage. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to 10, that’s a 600% reduction.

There are not “two ways” of calculating percentages.

The truly alarming part is not simply that Kennedy said something so obviously false. It is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services felt compelled to invent an entirely new version of mathematics rather than admit Donald was wrong.

That is where we are now.

Senator Warren later concluded that people using TrumpRx actually have better than a one in four chance of paying more for medication, not less, because the site often steers consumers toward expensive brand name drugs rather than cheaper generics.

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And while Americans struggle to afford healthcare, the man overseeing the Department of Health and Human Services remains one of the most aggressively anti vaccine figures in modern American politics.

Before becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr. built his public profile on anti vaccine conspiracy theories and medical misinformation. That history came under renewed scrutiny as measles cases surged across the United States.

As of April 16th, 2026, there were already 1,748 confirmed measles cases and nineteen separate outbreaks nationwide. That follows a record breaking 2025, which saw 2,288 cases, the highest total in three decades.

The United States is now at serious risk of losing its official measles elimination status because vaccination rates have fallen below the threshold necessary to prevent outbreaks.

And still, Republicans continue lying about the cause.

On CNN, Republican Congressman Ryan McKenzie blamed the spread of measles on immigrants entering the country.

This is what he said:

Many of these instances that are coming into our country are from illegal immigrants who have crossed the border with no checks, no actual health records, and they are bringing these diseases into our country.

That is racist nonsense.

Measles is spreading because vaccination rates are collapsing, largely due to years of anti vaccine propaganda pushed by people like Robert Kennedy Jr. And even if immigrants were introducing measles cases into the country, there is a very obvious solution to preventing outbreaks.

Vaccinate your children.

But that would require the Trump regime to care about public health more than political grievance and conspiracy theories.

It gets worse.

Before entering government, Kennedy sued Monsanto over glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer. In 2018, he helped secure a $290 million verdict against the company on behalf of a man who developed cancer after using the product.

Kennedy himself once said Monsanto acted with “reckless disregard for human health.” And yet, after entering the Trump regime, Kennedy suddenly stopped talking about glyphosate almost entirely.

Senator Ed Markey confronted Kennedy about the disappearance of glyphosate concerns from later MAHA reports after Bayer executives reportedly met multiple times with the White House.

Kennedy claimed he was unaware of those meetings.

Even so, the administration issued executive protections benefiting Monsanto while offering vague promises about eventually reducing glyphosate use with no timeline, no enforcement mechanism, and no binding requirements whatsoever. Apparently poisoning people became less important than protecting corporate interests and keeping Donald happy.

TrumpRx is not designed to make Americans healthier. Robert Kennedy Jr. is not running Health and Human Services to improve healthcare outcomes. Donald Trump is not interested in lowering costs for ordinary people. They are interested in maintaining a system that keeps Americans exhausted, financially insecure, chronically stressed, and too overwhelmed to fight back.

As of 2026, two thirds of American adults say they are worried about affording healthcare. Four in ten Americans carry medical debt. One in three adults delayed or skipped medical treatment in the last year because they could not afford it. Nearly one in five of those people reported their health worsened as a result. Half of Americans say they could not afford an unexpected $500 medical bill.

And this regime knows all of it. They know TrumpRx is not healthcare. They know the system is failing. They know millions of Americans are getting poorer, sicker, and more desperate. That is not a flaw in the system they are building. It is the point.

The Good in Us by Mary L. Trump is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support independent media, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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On February 28th, 2026, Donald announced a full scale military campaign against Iran in the middle of the night on his failing social media platform. Congress learned about it at the same moment the American people did. Since the war began, at least seven American service members and thousands of Iranian civilians, including at least 254 children, have reportedly been killed. The war is now estimated to be costing American taxpayers roughly $1 billion per day.

The sixty day deadline required under the War Powers Resolution has long since expired, which means a war that was likely already illegal has now also become unconstitutional. Congress voted on whether Donald required authorization to continue the war and that vote failed. Donald then sent Congress a letter claiming that because he had ordered a two week ceasefire on April 7th, the clock should somehow reset and he no longer needed congressional approval.

Legal scholars said the argument has no basis in law. Common Cause, a national advocacy group formally called on the cabinet to invoke the Twenty Fifth Amendment.

And still, Donald insists the real problem is the Constitution and the War Powers Act.

Donald: Most people consider it totally unconstitutional. Also, we had a ceasefire, so that gives you additional time, but no other country’s done it. We’re in the midst of a big victory. This is a victory like we haven’t had since Venezuela. We’re on our way to another victory, a big victory. I don’t think that it’s constitutional what they’re asking for. These are not patriotic people that are asking. The strait is totally shut down. It’s flawless. It’s totally 100% shut down.

The increasingly bizarre exaggerations and easily disproven lies Donald keeps telling are alarming not just because they are false, but because they reveal how completely detached from reality he has become and how disconnected he is from the consequences of the chaos he continues to create.

America is not winning the war in Iran.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not some strategic triumph. Iran closed the strait, which means oil prices continue to rise because critical shipping routes have been disrupted. The war is burning through defense appropriations Congress never authorized for combat operations in the first place. Eventually, Donald will return to Congress demanding lawmakers fund a war they never approved.

More than 200 organizations signed a joint letter urging Congress to reject supplemental war funding. At the same time, Pete Hegseth and Donald are demanding that the Department of Defense budget increase from $900 billion to $1.5 trillion despite the fact that both men have demonstrated profound incompetence and an utter inability to understand what the United States military is actually for.

And then there is Cuba.

On May 1st, 2026, Donald signed Executive Order 14404, escalating the economic campaign against Cuba by authorizing secondary sanctions against foreign financial institutions doing business with entities on a newly expanded Cuban sanctions list.

On May 7th, United Nations experts warned that the American fuel blockade had pushed Cuba into what they described as “energy starvation.” Cuba’s energy minister confirmed the country had effectively run out of fuel.

The New York Times described the blockade as the first effective naval blockade of Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet Donald continues treating all of this as some kind of performance.

Donald: … a place called Cuba, which we will be taking over almost immediately. No, Cuba’s got problems. We’ll finish one first. I like to finish your job. On the way back from Iran, we’ll have one of our big, maybe the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, the biggest in the world. We’ll have that come in, stop about a hundred yards offshore and they’ll say, “Thank you very much. We give up.”

That is not how a military conflict works.

Legal analysts now say the Trump regimes stated goal is regime change in Cuba before the end of 2026. Apparently Donald has decided that in addition to wanting to be president of Venezuela and prime minister of Israel, perhaps he should become president of Cuba as well.

Analysts writing for Newsweek and Just Security concluded that the blockade violates both the United Nations Charter and the Charter of the Organization of American States. In the United Nations General Assembly, 165 of 193 member states voted to demand an end to the blockade.

Because Cuba is literally running out of fuel.

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Hospitals cannot reliably power ventilators or other lifesaving medical equipment. Neonatal intensive care units are at risk. Food distribution systems are collapsing. People are burning trash in the street. People are starving. But again, none of that matters to Donald because human suffering has never mattered to Donald unless he can exploit it for himself.

Meanwhile, Donald’s illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran has further destabilized America’s relationship with its allies. Because he launched the conflict without consulting NATO partners or securing any legitimate international framework, several allied governments refused to participate. Austria, which has maintained neutrality under international law since 1955, denied American military overflight requests connected to the war.

Donald responded the only way he ever does when people refuse to comply with his demands: by publicly attacking America’s allies and once again questioning the value of NATO itself. He even suggested that countries refusing to support his war effort might no longer deserve NATO protection.

That statement alone demonstrates either a complete misunderstanding of how NATO functions or a deliberate disregard for it. NATO is a defensive alliance. Article 5 applies when a member nation is attacked.

Reuters later reported that internal Pentagon communications included options for punishing allies that refused to support the Iran war. Donald has made it very clear that he interprets neutrality and independent decision making as personal disloyalty to him rather than the sovereign right of allied nations.

In this scenario, the United States and Israel are the aggressors. Unfortunately, this lawlessness extends far beyond foreign policy.

Here at home, Donald and members of his regime are increasingly defying court orders outright. Public Citizen warned in March 2026 that war has historically been used to expand executive power and suppress dissent. World War I was used to criminalize anti war speech. World War II was used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans. After September 11th, the United States constructed an enormous surveillance infrastructure that still exists today.

Legal scholars argue the difference now is that the authoritarianism already existed before the war began. The war is not the cause of the fascism consuming the Trump regime. It is an accelerant.

A president who wages war without congressional authorization is no longer operating within the boundaries of constitutional democracy. Neither is a president who defies court orders without consequence, blockades nations into starvation, or threatens allied governments for refusing to comply with his demands.

And at this point, it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that those constitutional boundaries exist at all.

And Donald himself admitted exactly how he views his power.

Reporter: Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage?

Donald: Yeah, there’s one thing. My own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop and not international law. I don’t need international law.

His morality? The most amoral human being imaginable believes his morality is what will restrain him.

There are no internal mechanisms limiting Donald Trump because there never have been. There is no ethical framework, no conscience, no respect for fairness, truth, or restraint. And externally, there is no meaningful co equal branch of government left willing to stop him. There is only the corrupt, illegitimate supermajority of the Supreme Court and a Republican Congress so cowardly and compromised that it continues surrendering its own constitutional authority to the most corrupt and incompetent man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

An Associated Press review of more than thirty one active lawsuits found that the Trump regime has defied federal court orders at a rate legal scholars say has no precedent in modern American history. Judges identified more than 250 additional instances of noncompliance in immigration cases alone.

One federal judge warned that Trump officials were attempting to “erode any semblance of separation of powers” and could only succeed in a world where the Constitution itself no longer exists.

That is where this ends if nobody stops him: a country where Congress no longer matters, the courts no longer matter, alliances no longer matter, and the Constitution itself becomes little more than a document Donald ignores whenever it inconveniences him.

The Good in Us by Mary L. Trump is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support independent media, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

I had a chat with my friend and fellow Nerd Avenger, Brian Karem, about Donald’s patriotic $1.776 billion slush fund. Brian had just returned from France, where his documentary was screened at the Kharkiv Film Festival. While he was there, a Romanian reporter asked him a question for me: whether I still have hope for the future of America. So check it out.

Brian Karem: Donald Trump is now throwing taxpayer money at January 6 rioters through what he calls an anti weaponization fund. It is not enough that he pardoned them. Now he wants to reward them financially as well.

Mary Trump: And just to prove how corrupt this is, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general and Donald’s personal defense lawyer turned government official, said the amount was arrived at by carefully calculating damages. It just happens to total $1.776 billion. They are not even trying to hide it anymore. This is all happening in plain sight because they know they are going to get away with it.

Brian Karem: The fund was supposedly created to hear and redress claims from Americans who suffered from “lawfare” and government weaponization. According to their definition, it means people unfairly targeted by the government. Well, you and I have both been targeted. Can we file claims too?

Mary Trump: Apparently anybody can apply, including people who violently attacked police officers on January 6. That tells you everything you need to know about how much this regime actually supports law enforcement. It is another scam. And remember, there will be a committee deciding who gets money, and every single member is appointed by Todd Blanche, which means Donald.

Brian Karem: Harry Dunn told me to say hello, by the way.

Mary Trump: He is terrific.

Brian Karem: Harry and other Capitol Police officers put their lives on the line that day. Yet Republicans are still trying to rewrite history and claim the attack was staged or never happened. I was there. I saw it. It was one of the most documented riots in American history.

Mary Trump: We all watched it happen in real time. But Donald has always believed he can convince enough people not to believe their own eyes. It is obscene.

Brian Karem: You have often said there is no bottom with Donald Trump. It always gets worse. So how much worse can this get?

Mary Trump: Use your imagination. Donald is deteriorating psychologically, emotionally, and cognitively every single day. As that happens, he becomes even more desperate, more ambitious, and greedier.

The slush fund itself is proof of that. Donald did not come up with this idea. He is not capable of strategic thinking. The people around him are designing new ways for him to enrich himself, enrich his useless children, and consolidate more power. They are helping him enact even crueler policies and feed his imperial fantasies. One day he wants Canada, then Greenland, then Cuba. He wants to rule everything.

Donald is an empty, desperate man, and the people around him know exactly how to exploit that weakness. They keep feeding his worst impulses because it benefits them too. Every Republican enabling this shares responsibility.

Brian Karem: One thing the documentary I worked on points out is that all of this was planted during the first hundred days of Donald’s first administration. The pardons, the corruption, the normalization of criminality. What we are seeing now is just an extension of that.

What frightens me most is watching so many institutions cave to him, especially parts of the media. Reporters and executives are showing fealty to Donald and people like Stephen Miller and Susie Wiles instead of confronting what is happening.

When I was in France recently, someone told me they still loved Americans and American culture, but our government now frightens them more than Turkey’s. I never thought I would see something like this happen in the United States.

Mary Trump: We are Orbán’s Hungary at this point.

And the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore. People cannot afford groceries anymore. Hunger is growing. The economy is collapsing for ordinary Americans while Donald and his allies continue enriching themselves.

Brian Karem: Reporters Without Borders now ranks the United States sixty fourth in press freedom. Donald Trump is cited as one of the major reasons why.

What concerns me even more is the way he accuses everyone else of weaponizing government while openly doing exactly that himself.

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Mary Trump: That is how he operates. Every accusation is a confession. He constantly claims nobody has ever been treated more unfairly than he has, or that January 6 rioters were victims, or that his free speech has been violated.

Meanwhile, look at what has happened to the Department of Justice. The Civil Rights Division barely exists anymore.

Brian Karem: It has become the Trump Rights Division.

Mary Trump: Exactly. The DOJ is now Donald’s personal law firm. The rule of law has effectively disappeared. Hearing him accuse others of corruption while he openly destroys democratic institutions is infuriating. But we also cannot let every blow land emotionally because none of us will survive that.

Brian Karem: A filmmaker in Romania asked me whether there is still hope for the United States. I told her I would ask you.

Mary Trump: Of course there is hope. If there were not, none of us would still be here doing this work every day.

But hope depends on whether we are willing to reckon honestly with how we got here. We need leaders who are willing to make difficult choices about what America must become moving forward. That includes holding establishment Democrats accountable as well. We cannot pretend this crisis appeared out of nowhere.

America also has to take responsibility for the damage caused globally by Donald and his allies. Elon Musk dismantling USAID alone created catastrophic consequences around the world.

Brian Karem: The real fight in this country is not simply left versus right. It is the wealthy and powerful versus everyone else. How do we build a coalition strong enough to stop this?

Mary Trump: Unfortunately, things probably have to get worse before enough people wake up.

I hate saying that. I wish people responded more strongly to the suffering of others. I wish the deaths caused by the destruction of USAID or ICE terrorizing communities were enough. But for many Americans, what finally gets their attention is when gas prices rise or groceries become unaffordable.

That is tragic, but it is reality.

Brian Karem: Donald keeps claiming the economy is thriving even after firing officials who produced economic data he did not like.

Mary Trump: The stock market is being artificially manipulated because it is one of the only numbers he still cares about besides polling. But people know the truth the second they go grocery shopping or fill up their gas tanks.

There will always be a core group of supporters who remain loyal no matter what. But that group is not large enough to sustain Republican power long term. They know they will lose if elections remain free and fair.

Brian Karem: What gives me some hope is hearing from people who voted for Donald Trump and now regret it because they realize he lied to them.

Mary Trump: Of course he lied to them. He promised no more wars and transparency around the Epstein files. Instead, he launched an illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran while doing everything possible to bury the Epstein files.

And look at the consequences. The United States is weaker now. China is stronger. Russia is stronger. Iran is stronger. Donald’s reckless decisions have destabilized everything.

Brian Karem: Any final thoughts on what comes next?

Mary Trump: I think we are learning that our government is no longer functioning properly. Senate Republicans are not going to stop this. We are watching people who attacked our democracy receive taxpayer funded rewards while this country still refuses to provide reparations to the descendants of enslaved people.

Brian Karem: We cannot even provide decent education for children anymore.

Mary Trump: There is barely a Department of Education left.

Brian Karem: What would you like to plug?

Mary Trump: People can subscribe to my newsletter, The Good in Us, on Substack. We also have the Mary Trump Media YouTube channel and are still trying to survive across social media despite the fascist takeover of so many platforms.

Brian Karem: Mary, thank you so much for being here.

Mary Trump: Thanks, Brian.

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Brian Karem Reporter's Notebook

Mary Trump vs. Donald's slush fund

In this episode of “Just ask the Question” Mary Trump and I discuss Donald’s slush fund, the hope for the midterms, the president’s downward spiraling mental health, the challenges we face ahead and have a few laughs in the process.Brian Karem Reporter's Notebook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becom…

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20 days ago · 102 likes · Brian J Karem and Mary L Trump

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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I got to hang out with my friend and fellow Nerd Avenger, Dean Obeidallah, and we covered a lot of ground, including Donald’s slush fund, his obsession with the ballroom, Stephen Colbert’s final show, and Donald’s predictably petty response to it. We also tackled one very important question: How long has Donald actually known his oldest son? Enjoy.

Dean Obeidallah: Welcome to The Dean Obeidallah Show. Joining us right now is our friend Mary Trump, activist and bestselling author of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Her Substack is The Good in Us by Mary Trump, and her YouTube channel, Mary Trump Media, is wildly popular. Mary, it’s great to see you.

Mary Trump: Dean, it’s great to see you too. I apologize for the circumstances, but what else can we say at this point?

Dean Obeidallah: There’s a lot to cover. From both a family perspective and your background as a psychologist, Donald Trump seems uniquely unable to tolerate being mocked. Before politics, he sued Bill Maher over a joke. He fought publicly with Jon Stewart. As president, he tried to pressure networks over late night hosts. Now he’s celebrating Stephen Colbert leaving CBS, saying Colbert is finally finished and calling him talentless. Why does mockery get under his skin so deeply?

Mary Trump: Because he knows what a pathetic loser he is. He knows it’s all pretense and smoke and mirrors. What terrifies him is the possibility that more people will finally see him for who he really is.

Most people with any sense already do, but he’s had a tremendous amount of help perpetuating the myth that he’s a brilliant businessman and self made success story. He’s also deeply threatened by people who actually have talent because he doesn’t.

Dean Obeidallah: He also wants fear, not laughter. Dictators hate being mocked because ridicule strips away power. Donald wants people intimidated by him.

Mary Trump: Exactly. But the irony is that every time he attacks somebody like Colbert or Kimmel, he only elevates them. If he were actually strong, he would ignore it. Instead, he reacts emotionally every single time because he’s profoundly insecure.

And let’s be clear, the reason people cater to him now is because he sits in the Oval Office. That office comes with enormous power, and people around him want things from him. It has nothing to do with Donald himself being powerful.

Dean Obeidallah: Do you think it bothers him that he’ll never be loved the way somebody like Stephen Colbert is loved?

Mary Trump: Honestly, the reason we’re in this mess is because Donald has never been loved. That’s the tragedy at the center of all of this.

Because of the way my grandfather raised him, Donald became somebody who desperately wants to be loved but who is fundamentally unlovable. He’s incapable of intimacy, empathy, or genuine connection.

And he knows it. That’s where the rage comes from.

Dean Obeidallah: We saw another example of that recently when Donald was asked whether he’d attend Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding. He said he’d “try” to make it because he has “Iran and other things” going on. This is a man who golfs constantly but apparently cannot commit to attending his own son’s wedding.

Mary Trump: It tells you everything. Donald is incapable of loving people in a healthy way. Why would anybody expect him to behave like a normal father?

And honestly, the way he referred to Don Jr.’s fiancée as simply “a person I’ve known for a long time” says a lot too. There’s no warmth there.

Dean Obeidallah: Let me ask you as a psychologist. Many people are noticing changes in Donald’s behavior. He falls asleep publicly. He lashes out impulsively. He seems increasingly erratic. What are you seeing?

Mary Trump: I’m not a neuropsychologist, but I am somebody whose grandfather suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Some of the behaviors we’re seeing, like falling asleep during the day and the increasing lack of impulse control, can absolutely be associated with cognitive decline.

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But I also think we’re watching the continued deterioration of somebody who has had serious psychiatric issues his entire life that were never treated. Untreated disorders worsen over time.

Part of why he’s becoming more volatile is because, on some level, he knows he’s losing control. He’s losing control of the narrative and increasingly losing control of himself.

Dean Obeidallah: Dr. John Gartner recently said Donald now seems to enjoy violence in a way that’s become more pronounced. During the first term he was chaotic, but now there’s something darker.

Mary Trump: I don’t think he’s fundamentally changed. I think the deterioration is simply revealing who he has always been.

Donald has always been violent psychologically. He has always reveled in cruelty. Remember when he encouraged police officers not to be “too nice” with suspects? Remember how he talked about immigrants committing crimes?

The difference now is that he no longer has whatever minimal restraint he once possessed.

Dean Obeidallah: And nobody around him tells him no anymore.

Mary Trump: Exactly. Nobody around him has the courage or integrity to push back. That’s part of why everything escalates.

Dean Obeidallah: We also learned about the massive settlement involving January 6 defendants and the IRS. Any functioning attorney general would recognize how corrupt this looks, but nobody in this administration seems willing to object.

Mary Trump: It’s grotesque. We still haven’t seriously addressed the lasting economic and social damage caused by slavery and systemic racism in this country, but suddenly there’s endless money available for insurrectionists who violently attacked police officers.

And let’s not pretend this was accidental. The administration knows exactly what it’s doing. Donald surrounds himself with people who invent increasingly corrupt schemes because corruption is now the organizing principle of this administration.

Dean Obeidallah: Tulsi Gabbard also resigned abruptly this week. What do you make of that?

Mary Trump: Honestly, I think she was likely on her way out anyway. She had clearly been sidelined.

But this administration is filled with deeply unqualified people, so her departure doesn’t exactly solve anything. We still have Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and others who should never have been entrusted with public office.

Dean Obeidallah: Do you think Donald eventually pardons everybody around him?

Mary Trump: Absolutely. I think he’ll hand out pardons broadly because he understands how vulnerable everyone in his orbit is legally.

And frankly, one lesson we should take from all of this is that presidential pardon powers need serious reform. Every president has abused power in some way, but what we’re seeing now is corruption on an entirely different scale.

Dean Obeidallah: You’ve said before that this isn’t just about Donald Trump. Can you explain that?

Mary Trump: Donald is obviously dangerous, but he is also a symptom of much larger failures. The Republican Party enabled him. Media institutions normalized him. Wealthy interests benefited from him.

Even after January 6, Republicans had opportunities to stop him and chose not to. That tells you this problem runs much deeper than one man.

Dean Obeidallah: So where does that leave us?

Mary Trump: It means we need to stop pretending any of this is normal. We need to stop assuming institutions will automatically save us.

The good news is that more people are paying attention now because Donald’s failures are affecting them directly. The bad news is that democracy requires active participation. It requires vigilance.

Dean Obeidallah: Before we go, where can people follow your work?

Mary Trump: People can find me at The Good in Us on Substack and at Mary Trump Media on YouTube. I’m also on social media and Patreon.

Dean Obeidallah: Mary, always great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Mary Trump: Thanks, Dean. Always good to see you too. Check out Dean’s Substack below.

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The Dean's Report by Dean Obeidallah

Saving American democracy from the GOP's FASCISM one fact (and punchline) at a time! Only the truth--never the corporate media's "both sides" BS!

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Welcome to Trump Trolls Trump, where the lies, grift, corruption, and incompetence continue piling up around somebody named Donald Jeffrey Epstein Trump. Once again proving that the most effective response to authoritarian absurdity is mockery and ridicule.

It is Saturday, May 23rd. We are now 488 days into Donald’s second occupation of the Oval Office, also known as the ongoing collapse of American democracy. Somehow, unbelievably, we are wrapping up week seventy of this nightmare, which frankly feels rude to everybody involved.

One person who never seems remotely interested in doing his best is my cousin Donnie, who, because it is apparently wedding season among the Palm Beach socialite class, is heading to the Bahamas to marry Bettina Anderson.

Donald was asked by reporters whether he planned to attend his own son’s wedding, which honestly feels like the kind of thing we should not have to ask a parent.

Apparently it was exactly the right question.

This is what Donald had to say:

He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small little private affair and I’m going to try and make it. I’m in the midst. I said, “This is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things. That’s one I can’t win on. If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed.” By the freak news, of course. But he’s got a very person who I’ve known for a long time and hopefully they’re going to have a great marriage.

That answered questions I did not know I had.

Apparently, very small weddings sometimes exclude the groom’s father. Apparently Donald has “known” his son Donnie for “a long time,” which I assumed was implied in the parent child relationship. And apparently attending your child’s wedding is now politically controversial.

The thing is, I actually believe Donald may skip the wedding because he is far too busy talking to reporters about his ballroom. So, sorry Donnie. Keep trying. Maybe one day your father will discover basic human attachment.

Unfortunately, we now have to turn to Louisiana Senator Foghorn Leghorn otherwise known as John Kennedy.

Senator Foghorn Leghorn appeared on Fox State News to defend the idea of the United States taking over Cuba. During the interview, he launched into his usual performance, pretending to be a harmless backwoods philosopher while discussing Cuba, but ended up accidentally describing the Trump regime instead.

Foghorn: Fidel Castro, the original Castro was pretty smart. He was evil, but he was smart. But these ass hats since then have just been incompetent. They’re like three wheeled shopping carts. They’re incompetent. All they know how to do is oppress people. They take all their money and they give it to the military and the police and themselves and to hell with the good people of Cuba. And that’s not a model for success.

Except it increasingly is the Trump regime’s model for success.

Take everybody’s money. Funnel it toward militarization, authoritarian enforcement, and self enrichment while ordinary people suffer. It turns out Kennedy accidentally described the modern Republican Party almost perfectly.

Once again we are forced to discuss Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, she of the “raise backyard chickens to survive egg prices” economic recovery plan.

Rollins appeared on Fox State News to explain soaring beef prices, and her explanation somehow managed to be both absurd and deeply revealing.

Rollins: There is no doubt that we are facing very high beef prices, specifically in ground beef. And you mentioned that we’re at about 670, you mentioned 690. That’s about a dollar above where it has historically been. And we don’t take that for granted, right? A dollar is too much more than where it has been. But this is also combined with make America healthy again. People are eating more beef than ever before. This is an amazing testament.

An amazing testament to what exactly?

Apparently, according to the Trump regime, skyrocketing beef prices are proof that Robert Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign is succeeding. Which is an interesting way to describe Americans paying more money for basic food while being told to celebrate it.

The truly shocking part of the interview is that Rollins did not recommend everybody purchase backyard cows the way she previously recommended backyard chickens.

Although give it time.

At this rate, the Department of Agriculture is going to start encouraging Americans to personally raise livestock in studio apartments while billionaires continue price gouging them into oblivion.

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Speaking of scams masquerading as healthcare policy, Robert Kennedy Jr., Mehmet Oz, and others joined Donald this week to promote Trump Rx, the administration’s so called prescription drug discount scam.

Donald, naturally, described it as the single greatest medical achievement in human history.

Donald: We now pay the lowest price in any country. We went from the highest to the lowest that I think outside of maybe a cure itself. It’s the biggest thing to happen to healthcare and everything having to do with medical in any way, shape, or form. There’s never been anything like this.

There has indeed never been anything like this because almost every word of it was false.

Donald continues to insist that America now pays the lowest drug prices in the world despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But this is what he always does. He takes an existing system, repackages it with his name attached to it, lies about what it does, and then expects applause. And somehow there are still people willing to give it to him.

But perhaps the most absurd moment of the week came during Donald’s impromptu press conference at the site of his proposed billion dollar ballroom monstrosity.

While showing off the construction project, Donald proudly announced that the reflecting pool would soon become waterproof.

Donald: I’m doing a job on the reflecting lake for a fraction of what they paid. I’ve upgraded it like you wouldn’t believe. It’s going to be beautiful. It’s going to be waterproof. It’s going to be reflecting again. I took over a dirty, filthy thing that wasn’t open and it was disgusting.

First of all, nobody’s friends call them “sir.” Donald does not have friends. He has employees and enablers.

Second, the original budget for the reflecting pool renovation was reportedly $1.8 million. Donald then handed the project to his Mar a Lago pool contractor through a no bid contract, and somehow the cost exploded to $13 million in taxpayer money.

But the truly remarkable part is that Donald appears to believe “waterproof” is an optional feature for pools. I genuinely thought waterproofing was implied in the entire concept of “pool.” Apparently not in Donald’s world.

And finally, this week’s recipient of what should probably become a permanent award for catastrophic stupidity within the Trump regime.

This week’s winner is Wisconsin Republican Derrick Van Orden, who managed to summarize the entire delusional mindset of Trumpism in a single sentence.

Donald Trump doesn’t make threats. He makes promises.

That is genuinely incredible.

Because so far Donald’s “promises” to Iran have resulted in Iran effectively telling the United States to go to hell while continuing to strengthen its position.

And honestly, that feels like the only appropriate way to end another week inside the escalating absurdity of the Trump regime.

The lies keep coming. The corruption gets deeper. The incompetence becomes more staggering by the day. These people want to be feared. They want to be treated as powerful, untouchable, and inevitable.

They are none of those things.

They are grifters, cowards, and opportunists hollowing out this country in real time, and they deserve to be treated exactly as they are.

Not with reverence. Not with intimidation.

With ridicule.

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Former French ambassador Gérard Araud warned that the Trump regime has turned the United States into an unreliable ally. At this point, that feels less like a warning and more like a statement of fact. The damage has already been done.

Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt described Donald’s foreign policy as “a wrecking ball” aimed directly at the postwar international order. At the 2026 Munich Security Conference, European leaders openly questioned whether the United States could still be trusted as the anchor of the Western alliance, a question Donald has answered repeatedly over the last sixteen months.

One senior European diplomat reportedly described the Trump regime as “the greatest threat to transatlantic stability in decades.”

Meanwhile, Donald insists the exact opposite is true,

A year ago, our country was an embarrassment and all over the world they laughed at us and they don’t laugh anymore. They are not laughing anymore.

A year ago Donald was already in the Oval Office, so yes, there was plenty of reason for the world to laugh at the United States of America because seventy eight million Americans decided it was somehow a good idea to put him back in power.

Things have become far too dangerous for that. The rise of fascism in the United States, the abandonment of our alliances, and the corruption and incompetence of the Trump regime have fundamentally altered the way the rest of the world sees us.

According to a Spring 2025 Pew Research Center survey conducted across twenty four countries, only thirty four percent of respondents had confidence in Donald to do the right thing in world affairs. Sixty two percent did not. Eighty percent described him as arrogant. Sixty five percent described him as dangerous. Only twenty eight percent described him as honest.

And it has only deteriorated further.

In April 2026, Gallup released the results of its annual world poll spanning more than one hundred and thirty countries. For the first time in nearly two decades, China surpassed the United States in global approval ratings. The United States is now viewed less favorably than China for the first time since the George W. Bush administration. That should terrify us.

The Munich Security Conference described the era ushered in by the Trump regime as a “demolition man” period, one in which the pillars of Pax Americana, the stability that largely defined the postwar West, have begun to collapse.

The damage to America’s reputation is undeniable.

European Council President António Costa warned that Europe must protect itself not only from adversaries, but from allies who challenge it. It was obvious who he meant.

A March 2026 Politico European Pulse survey found that only twelve percent of respondents across six major European Union nations still considered the United States a close ally. Thirty six percent viewed the United States as a threat, more than the twenty nine percent who viewed China as a threat.

As with everything Donald touches, the numbers keep moving in the wrong direction.

And nowhere has the deterioration been more obvious than in America’s relationship with Canada.

After Donald repeatedly threatened Canadian sovereignty by referring to Canada as America’s “51st state” and mockingly calling the Canadian prime minister a “governor”, Prime Minister Mark Carney responded with words that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

This is what Mark Carney had to say:

The foundations of the international order, the order which Canada helped to build and from which we have long benefited, that order is crumbling and many of our former strengths built on our close ties to the United States have become our weaknesses. The US has changed. That’s their right and we are responding. That is our imperative.

America has changed, and our allies are adjusting accordingly.

Canadian travel to the United States dropped sharply in 2025, resulting in billions of dollars in lost tourism revenue and threatening tens of thousands of jobs. Polling also showed Canadian views of the United States reaching their lowest levels since researchers began tracking the issue more than two decades ago.

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Prime Minister Carney has already begun pursuing new trade agreements with Europe, India, and China specifically to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States. Canadian businesses are increasingly looking elsewhere because they no longer see America as stable or reliable.

And honestly, why would they?

There is perhaps some possibility that once Americans reject the fascism we have empowered and recommit ourselves to building the kind of multicultural democracy we should have been all along, some of this damage can be repaired.

But the more likely outcome is that it cannot be repaired.

After putting Donald in the Oval Office twice and handing Republicans control of all three branches of government, there is very little reason for other nations to trust us. The consequences of that betrayal may last for generations.

Since returning to power, the Trump regime has withdrawn the United States from dozens of international organizations, undermined NATO, threatened allies with tariffs and territorial aggression, sided repeatedly with Russia over Ukraine at the United Nations, and destabilized long standing diplomatic relationships around the globe.

At the Munich Security Conference, Senator Lindsey Graham was asked about Donald’s threats toward Greenland. This is how he responded.

So here’s what I tell my European friends. Greenland is behind us, but the goal is to get outcomes. Who gives a shit who owns Greenland? I don’t.

I suspect Greenland cares. Denmark certainly cares. NATO cares. Russia absolutely cares.

And the fact that somebody as weak and pathetic as Lindsey Graham attempts to posture this way only highlights how dangerous and unserious these people truly are.

Greenland belongs to Greenland and Denmark. That is not going to change unless Donald becomes even more emboldened by his lawlessness and by his disastrous war of choice against Iran, which we are currently losing. And because Donald consistently mistakes recklessness for strength, that possibility cannot simply be dismissed.

The collapse accelerated after the February 28th United States and Israeli airstrikes on Iran. Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly twenty percent of the world’s oil and gas supply passes.

Nearly every major NATO ally refused to participate in the conflict, both because the war itself was reckless and because the United States failed to consult them beforehand.

Spain denied access to military bases jointly operated with the United States. Italy blocked the use of a major base in Sicily. France denied overflight clearance for military flights. Poland refused to move Patriot missile systems to the Middle East.

Donald responded by calling NATO allies cowards and announcing the withdrawal of thousands of American troops from Germany, making absolutely nobody safer.

Meanwhile, China continues expanding its influence across telecommunications, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and global supply chains. But the larger concern is not merely economic dominance. It is the spread and normalization of authoritarian governance itself.

For decades, the United States claimed to stand for democratic norms, civil liberties, free expression, and the rule of law. But as the Trump regime weakens those institutions at home while alienating democratic allies abroad, authoritarian systems gain legitimacy.

And this is how democratic decline actually happens.

It is rarely immediate collapse. It is normalization.

People become accustomed to corruption. They become accustomed to grift, incompetence, politicized law enforcement, and attacks on democratic institutions until eventually they stop believing there is any alternative. That is the Trump regime’s real agenda.

They want Americans exhausted. They want us demoralized. They want us to stop believing a better future is possible because people who lose faith are infinitely easier to control. And that may be the most dangerous thing of all.

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[Transcript edit for clarity, flow and length]

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Senate Republicans are now considering dropping the proposed $1 billion security package tied to Donald’s ballroom project after the measure failed to gain enough support, even from Republicans on Capitol Hill. At the same time, divisions within the Republican Party are growing over the nearly $1.8 billion so called anti weaponization fund, which is nothing more than a slush fund by another name.

The fund exists because Donald agreed to drop his frivolous $10 billion lawsuit against his own Internal Revenue Service. In exchange, the Department of Justice, under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, created a taxpayer funded compensation pool for people claiming the Biden administration weaponized the government against them.

According to Blanche, that could potentially include January 6th defendants who assaulted police officers during the attack on the Capitol and who have already been pardoned by Donald. Democrats are attempting to block or restrict those payments, particularly if they go to people who committed violence against Capitol Police officers or participated in the insurrection against the United States government on January 6th, 2021.

On Wednesday, Donald addressed the growing controversy.

Yeah. Well, what happened is I was suing IRS for a lot of different reasons. One of the reasons is they released my tax returns, which they’re not allowed to do. Now they showed I pay a lot of tax. I may even release my current returns because they show I pay a lot of money, but they’re not supposed to do that…I guess, a private firm, but it released them to a lot of the fake news and the fake news went, and you’re just not allowed to do that… I wasn’t involved in the settlement. I could have been involved, but I didn’t choose to be.

Also, the anti-weaponization of people. I mean, people were destroyed. They went to jail. Their families were ruined. They committed suicide. All the Biden administration and the Obama administration, both of them. I mean, the Obama administration started it. The Biden administration was horrible in terms of what they’ve done to people. It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen in politics.

Punishing people who engaged in an insurrection against the United States government, attacked Capitol Police officers, built gallows outside the Capitol, threatened to hang Mike Pence, and hunted for members of Congress is now considered “violent” according to Donald Trump. The violence, apparently, was not what they did. The violence was that they faced consequences for it.

Todd Blanche was later asked directly by CNN whether he was comfortable with individuals who assaulted police officers receiving taxpayer payouts through the fund.

This is what Todd Blanche said:

Just to be clear, people that hurt police get money all the time. There’s a process where if you believe your rights were violated, you can apply for funds, you can sue, you can file a claim, you can go to court. In some of those cases, the state, the government, the federal government settles those cases. It’s abhorrent to ever touch a law enforcement officer, which is why anytime anybody does that and it’s a federal officer we’ll prosecute them. But that’s a completely different question with whether an individual is allowed to apply for a claim.

In other words, Todd Blanche is perfectly comfortable with people who brutalized police officers receiving taxpayer money because the entire purpose of this deeply corrupt slush fund is to financially benefit Donald’s political allies.

The Republican Party is no longer the party of law enforcement. It is the party of protecting, defending, and enriching anybody loyal to Donald Trump. Tragically, that now includes the acting Attorney General of the United States.

Jay Clayton, Donald’s former SEC chairman and now United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, also appeared on CNBC and insisted that everyone should simply move on.

I don’t think we’re going to be talking about this issue in a week because the American people are going to say, look, they leaked his tax returns. They tried to name and shame him. They tried to destroy him. We resolved that. As I read the settlement, the audit going forward, the tax returns that are filed going forward are subject to the same scrutiny as anybody else.

It’s in the past.

What I love is everybody’s like, “Let’s just move on.” And then when we move on, people are like, “I don’t like that we’re moving on.”

The only people who want to move on are Donald and the people benefiting from this corruption because they understand perfectly well that this may be one of the most corrupt arrangements in modern American history. Most Americans do not want to “move on” from the fact that taxpayer money is being diverted into a nearly $2 billion slush fund that could reward criminals and political loyalists.

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And the corruption does not end there. Part of the agreement reportedly prevents Donald and his adult children from being audited moving forward. Past audits are also reportedly being dropped despite the IRS explicitly stating that Donald potentially owes more than $100 million in unpaid taxes. Guess what will never be collected.

Even as House Speaker Mike Johnson promises Republicans will ultimately pass whatever version of the slush fund legislation Donald wants, there are signs of resistance from within the Republican Party itself. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy has raised concerns. Senate Majority Leader John Thune admitted Republicans are struggling with votes behind the scenes.

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis put it even more bluntly.

It will invariably put us in a position where your taxpayer dollars and my taxpayer dollars could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer, admitted their guilt, got convicted, got pardoned and now we’re going to pay them for that. That’s absurd. The American people are going to reject this out of hand. When you take money from me to give to a purpose that I vehemently disagree with, that’s tyranny and that’s what that account is.

That is a Republican senator describing Donald’s proposal as tyranny. And honestly, he is right. These people were punished because they committed actual crimes against the United States government, against Capitol Police officers, and against the American people. If they lost money, relationships, or years of their lives because of those crimes, that responsibility belongs to them. Now they are not only being absolved, they are potentially being rewarded.

At the same time, the Trump regime appears increasingly eager to expand its foreign confrontations. Following its disastrous and unconstitutional war of choice against Iran, the administration now seems to be escalating tensions with Cuba.

The United States has tightened the blockade around the island, worsening an ongoing energy crisis that has left large portions of Cuba without reliable electricity for months. The administration has now indicted former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, who is ninety four years old, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is openly describing Cuba as a national security threat.

Cuba not only has weapons that they’ve acquired from Russia and China over the years, but they also host Russian and Chinese intelligence presence in their country. Cuba’s always posed a national security threat to the United States. They have been one of the leading sponsors of terrorism in the region. The other thing that poses a threat to the national security of the United States is to have a failed state ninety miles from our shores run by friends of our adversaries.

I am no fan of the Cuban government, but if Cuba is supposedly such a major military threat, why is the administration simultaneously maintaining policies that leave the country economically devastated and struggling to maintain basic infrastructure? The logic makes no sense because the point is not truth. The point is fear.

And the same pattern is now playing out with Iran. Today, Iran’s Supreme Leader rejected one of the central demands of the United States and Israel by insisting that Iran’s near weapons grade enriched uranium remain inside the country. In other words, one of Donald’s central justifications for this war has completely collapsed.

Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal had successfully constrained Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Donald destroyed that agreement for no legitimate reason. Iran then resumed advancing its nuclear program. Now, after this war, Iran is stronger financially, more politically entrenched, and further advanced in its nuclear development than it was before.

The United States will have gained nothing.

And all of it, once again, comes back to Donald Trump.

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It is difficult to express just how egregiously corrupt, this $1.8 billion so called anti-weaponization fund truly is.

To put this in context, Donald sued his own Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over allegations that the IRS leaked his tax returns. The fact that the case was even allowed to move toward a settlement is itself deeply corrupt, because Donald is effectively the boss of the very agency he is suing. The level of self dealing involved here is extraordinary.

Donald’s Department of Justice, currently run by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, one of the most breathtakingly compliant, sycophantic, and corrupt figures in our government, agreed to the deal. Blanche appeared before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee this morning to defend the decision to hand over nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to a fund controlled by Donald’s allies and co-conspirators.

Donald responded,

Well, it’s been very well received… I know very little about it. I wasn’t involved in the whole creation of it and the negotiation, but this is reimbursing people that were horribly treated, horribly treated. It’s anti weaponization. They’ve been weaponized…I mean, it was a terrible period of time in the history of our country and they worked on it. I know the Justice Department has really been working on it very hard. There’s been numerous other occasions over the years where things like this have been done, but these were people that were weaponized and really treated brutally by a system that was so corrupt with corrupt people running it and they’re getting reimbursed for their legal fees and the other things that they had to suffer.

Of course, nobody in Donald’s mind has ever been treated more unfairly than Donald himself.

But let us be very clear about who he is talking about. He is referring to the people who participated in the insurrection he incited against the United States government. These are the same people he already pardoned or had their sentences commuted.

Todd Blanche was later questioned directly about the fund and whether violent offenders, including those who assaulted Capitol Police officers, would be eligible to receive taxpayer money.

This is what Senator Chris Van Hollen asked Todd Blanche today:

Van Hollen: Mr. Attorney General, this is an outrageous unprecedented slush fund that you set up. Simple question. Will individuals who assaulted Capitol Hill police officers be eligible for this one?

Blanche: As it makes plain, anybody in this country is eligible to apply if they believe they’re a victim of weaponization.

Van Hollen: Are there going to be rules that say that if you’ve assaulted a Capitol Hill police officer or committed a violent crime, you will not be eligible? Why not make that a rule?

Blanche: Because I’m not one of the commissioners setting up the rules. I expect that there will be rules.

Van Hollen: You’re appointing four of the five members, aren’t you, Mr. Attorney General?

Blanche: I am appointing all five.

Senator Van Hollen can hope for accountability all he wants, but Blanche made something very clear. He will personally appoint all five members overseeing the distribution of nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money.

That means a hand selected board, chosen by Todd Blanche and almost certainly with Donald’s direct input, will decide who receives the money, with no transparency and no accountability.

This is a slush fund.

It is yet another mechanism to enrich Donald, his allies, and his political movement while punishing everybody else.

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To make the arrangement even more corrupt, part of the deal reportedly blocks the IRS from auditing Donald and members of his family moving forward. It is difficult to imagine something more blatant in what is supposed to be a functioning democracy. But that is the point, The United States is no longer functioning like one.

The corrupt and illegitimate supermajority on the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that they view Donald’s presidency as imperial. He exists beyond the rule of law. At this point, it is difficult to argue there even is a meaningful rule of law left in America when people like Todd Blanche are running the Department of Justice.

Republicans in Congress have the power to stop this. They will do nothing. So Donald will once again get away with another grift, another theft, another abuse of power, while the American people are expected to simply accept it.

Part of what makes this so maddening is that all of it exists solely for Donald’s benefit. One of the most useless and undeserving men on the planet continues to have everything handed to him despite accomplishing nothing of value.

The pattern has repeated itself for his entire life.

As soon as Donald graduated from college, he went to work for Fred Trump. At the age of twenty four, despite the fact that Fred Trump Jr. had already spent more than a decade with the company, Donald was handed the presidency of the business, complete with luxury apartments, million dollar bonuses, and a chauffeur driven limousine.

When Donald decided he wanted his own real estate projects, Fred Trump used his wealth, political connections, and influence to make that happen.

Then Donald entered the casino business against his father’s wishes and proceeded to drive three casinos into bankruptcy while filing for bankruptcy many times. The only reason he survived financially was because Fred Trump continued funneling him enormous sums of money, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s terms.

Even after those failures, banks kept him afloat, not because he was successful, but because they believed preserving the Trump brand was the only way to recover their losses. The banks placed Donald on an allowance so he could continue maintaining the illusion of wealth and success.

At one point, Donald was reportedly receiving roughly $450,000 a month from lenders simply so he could preserve the image of being rich.

Then Fred Trump died, and Donald pushed his siblings into selling the family empire quickly because he desperately needed cash. He received another massive financial windfall and burned through that money too because he is not just a terrible businessman, he is profoundly irresponsible.

Then NBC stepped in and rescued him with The Apprentice.

Eventually, in search of yet another grift, Donald ran for president. Unfortunately, enough people in this country decided that putting him in the Oval Office was a good idea.

What Donald and the people around him learned during his first term was how far they could push the system before anyone stopped them. Now in his second term, just in the last year and a half alone, the damage done to this country has surpassed much of what happened during his first term.

At every stage there were people capable of stopping him. There still are. But because of greed, fear, selfishness, ambition, cowardice, and the endless pursuit of power and approval, they refuse to act.

The truth is that Donald is profoundly weak. His greed exposes that weakness constantly. He needs more money, more validation, more loyalty because there is a black hole inside him that can never be filled.

Every single day he reveals himself to be exactly what he has always been: a frightened little boy desperate for approval and incapable of ever having enough. That is not strength.

And yet he continues to be enabled over and over again by people who know exactly who and what he is. They are complicit. They are guilty. And someday they must be held accountable.

Because this is a very dark moment in American history.

The President of the United States is not merely committing crimes against the American people while escaping consequences. He is doing exactly what he so often accuses everybody else of doing.

He is destroying this country.

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