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It’s Monday, July 27. The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline has climbed to $4.11, according to AAA. Grocery prices have also increased 1.4 percent since the beginning of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At the same time, the United States has now gone three straight nights without launching new attacks on Iran after senior military officials reportedly advised Donald to stop the bombing. Iran has also halted attacks on American allies in the region, which is certainly good news. Unfortunately, from everything we know, there has been no meaningful progress toward an actual peace plan.

According to The Guardian, administration officials warned Donald that shrinking weapon stockpiles could make it difficult to sustain the campaign. Think about what that means. The United States, the country with the largest, strongest, and best-funded military in human history, is reportedly running out of ammunition.

Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly raised concerns specifically about dwindling supplies of Patriot missile interceptors and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Axios also reported over the weekend that Admiral Bradley Cooper, the top American commander in the region, told Donald the campaign had reached the limits of what it could realistically accomplish.

In other words, we are finally being told publicly what many of us have understood from the beginning. Donald lost this war the moment he chose to start it.

According to the reporting, the United States has now exhausted nearly all of its prepared military targets. Without returning to a broader combat operation, senior military officials saw little reason to continue the bombing campaign. Meanwhile, an Iranian army spokesperson described the United States as having no coherent strategy and suffering from what they called “strategic decision-making fatigue.”

As strange as it is to admit, that description is considerably more accurate than anything we have heard from the Trump regime.

Asked about those dwindling weapon stockpiles during NBC’s Meet the Press, United Nations Ambassador Michael Waltz offered an explanation that somehow managed to contradict itself almost immediately.

Welker: NBC News is reporting the Pentagon is actually rationing some defense weaponry amid diminishing supplies. Is America backing away from a larger military attack because its military stockpile has been depleted?

Waltz: Well, look, we have to take a step back here in that a lot of stockpiles were depleted, not only from what we gave Ukraine over the last however many years, four or five years, and the administration inherited, the secretary, Secretary Hegseth inherited a depleted situation from not only Ukraine, but also the ongoing fight with the Houthis under the Biden administration and a depleted military under the Biden administration. So they have decided, one, they’re going to new types of munitions, cheaper munitions, new technologies, but also with these new defense budgets rebuilding our great military.

The interviewer pressed him further.

But you acknowledge they’re depleted. I want to be clear. Do you acknowledge they’re depleted though at this moment?

This is what Michael Waltz said:

I want to be crystal clear. The U.S. military, and I’ve verified this every which way, has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be. And I have to tell you, the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.

There are certainly a lot of people who deserve to be in jail. Michael Waltz may very well be one of them.

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Let’s try to untangle what he actually said because, as usual, it makes absolutely no sense. First, he admits the stockpiles are depleted. Then he blames Joe Biden for those depleted stockpiles, nearly two years into this benighted regime. Moments later, he insists the stockpiles are not depleted at all and that anyone suggesting otherwise should be prosecuted.

Which is it?

Republicans have become so accustomed to defending Donald that they no longer seem concerned with whether their explanations are internally consistent. Their only objective is protecting him, even if that requires saying two completely contradictory things within the same answer.

Is it Joe Biden’s fault that seventy-eight million profoundly misguided Americans returned to office a man who cannot balance his own checkbook, let alone manage the American economy or oversee a $1.5 trillion Defense Department budget?

Is it Joe Biden’s fault that Republican senators confirmed perhaps the most incompetent, corrupt, and spectacularly unqualified Secretary of Defense in modern American history?

I don’t think so.

Welker was also asked the question nobody in this administration ever seems willing to answer honestly: How much longer is this war going to last?

Welker: Mr. Ambassador, a lot of people are very interested in the timeline of this because President Trump had initially said that this conflict would last for a matter of weeks, five to six weeks. We are now at the five-month mark. Will this war be over by the new year?

Waltz: Well, first, this war has been going on for 47 years.

Kristin Welker immediately pushed back.

Not in this capacity. Not in this escalation.

This is how Michael Waltz responded:

Of course, not necessarily this intensity, but at some level, Iran is diplomatically isolated, economically isolated, and militarily devastated. They’ve never been so weak, and we’re negotiating from a position of strength.

Welker tried one more time,

But very quickly, do you anticipate this conflict will be concluded by the new year?

Waltz: Oh, I’m not going to put some kind of timeline on it. The president has all options on the table, and he is exercising both diplomatic, economic, and military to achieve a very clear strategic aim. And that’s what’s different. The wars of my generation, we had policy drift. Here, the president is very focused.

I often find myself wondering why people like Michael Waltz are so eager to sacrifice whatever credibility they once had. Then I remember that people willing to lie this brazenly on behalf of Donald Trump probably surrendered that credibility long ago.

There is no strategy. There never has been a strategy. And the suggestion that the United States and Iran have somehow been fighting the same war for forty-seven years is absurd on its face.

It is also important to remember something this administration desperately wants Americans to forget. Before Donald launched this unconstitutional war of choice, Iran was arguably in its weakest strategic position in decades. Thanks entirely to Donald’s catastrophic decision-making, Iran has emerged from this conflict stronger, more unified, and in many respects more influential than it was before he decided to bomb it.

That is not what winning looks like.

That is what failure looks like.

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As if the administration’s inability to articulate even the most basic strategy were not troubling enough, the White House Correspondents’ Association, an organization that has become increasingly difficult to take seriously, decided to hold a second White House Correspondents’ Dinner after the original event was interrupted by a gunman who opened fire elsewhere in the hotel. For reasons that remain beyond my understanding, somebody thought it would be a good idea to stage a do-over, and once again Donald Trump was invited to speak.

During his rambling hour-long address, which I strongly recommend avoiding if you value your time or your mental health, Donald offered his latest assessment of the war with Iran.

Donald: It’s the only thing I’ve ever. We were talking before, I said, “So we’ve hit Iran very hard. Navy is gone. Air Force has gone. 250 jets no longer. 159 boats, good boats.” In fact, I said, “Why the hell didn’t we keep them? We could have used them.” But 159, but all at the bottom of the sea. They have no radar. They have very few drones left despite what you see. And every once in a while they’re going to set some things up, but they don’t have much left. And by the way, they are talking to us right now. They’d love to make a deal.

Iran has no interest in making a deal because, at this point, the continuation of the conflict serves its interests far more than it serves ours. And if anybody still believes Donald when he insists Iran has no functioning military, no air force, no navy, and virtually no weapons left, I have to ask whether they have been paying any attention at all.

If Iran’s military had truly been destroyed, it would not have continued striking targets until only a few days ago. If Donald’s description were accurate, Iran would be desperate to negotiate. Instead, the opposite appears to be true. Once again, Donald has managed to place the United States in a weaker strategic position while insisting we have never been stronger.

That has become the defining characteristic of this presidency. Donald declares victory while reality tells an entirely different story.

That disconnect became even more obvious when Donald was asked to explain an apparent contradiction between his own statements and those made by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Donald claimed Russia and China were not assisting Iran. Hegseth, meanwhile, acknowledged that both countries were enabling the regime we are supposedly trying to defeat.

Reporter: You said today that Russia and China are not helping. Earlier this week, the war secretary Hegseth said that they are enabling. So what is the difference?

Donald: Well, I don’t know that they’re enabling. I mean, I will tell you that President Xi said he will not partake. And President Putin said the same thing. I think I trust them. They’ve had a long-term relationship. There could be some things they do, but thus far at least it has not been major. I don’t think they’d want to have me disappointed.

Yes, of course. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are deeply concerned about disappointing Donald Trump.

Why wouldn’t they be?

Donald has spent years advancing policies that benefit both Russia and China while weakening America’s alliances, undermining our credibility abroad, and isolating the United States from many of its closest democratic partners. If I were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, I would want Donald to remain exactly where he is because I cannot imagine another American president doing more to advance their geopolitical interests than Donald already has.

While the administration continues insisting everything is proceeding exactly according to plan, the corruption surrounding this regime has reached levels that are almost impossible to calculate. Donald has reportedly made approximately $2.2 billion during the first year of his second term, yet many Republicans continue pretending they know nothing about it.

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CNN’s Manu Raju recently confronted Republican lawmakers with that extraordinary figure.

Manu Raju: Are you concerned about the possible conflict of interest here?

Mike Johnson: That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I don’t even know what Truth Social is offering this as.

Manu Raju continued pressing the issue.

But Trump has made $2 billion since becoming president again.

Rand Paul responded:

Rand Paul: He’s already a billionaire and I don’t know how his stuff has been invested.

Manu Raju asked the obvious follow-up.

But he’s not raising any red flags with you. That’s my question.

The response somehow became even more absurd.

Nancy Mace: If you come in with a billion and you double it in a couple years, math, it’s probably a high-yield savings account. I don’t really know.

A high-yield savings account.

If anyone knows where I can find one of those, I would certainly appreciate the recommendation.

More seriously, if Speaker Mike Johnson truly knows nothing about Donald’s financial dealings, then he has no business serving as Speaker of the House. The same applies to Senator Rand Paul and every other Republican pretending ignorance.

Either they genuinely have no idea what the leader of their own party is doing, which would represent an astonishing level of incompetence, or they know perfectly well and are choosing to protect him. Those are the only two possibilities, and neither reflects particularly well on them.

Donald has spent decades cultivating the myth that he is a brilliant businessman. The truth is considerably less impressive. He inherited enormous wealth, squandered much of it, repeatedly failed in business, and has now discovered that the surest path to becoming wealthier than he has ever been is to occupy the Oval Office.

Donald was never actually a billionaire until he figured out how to monetize the presidency itself.

That should alarm every American regardless of political affiliation because no president should ever use the office to enrich himself. The presidency is supposed to be a public trust, not a private investment vehicle.

Even more troubling is the way Donald and his children have accumulated that wealth. Every new business venture, every licensing agreement, every investment opportunity, and every financial arrangement creates yet another avenue through which foreign governments, wealthy interests, or political actors can seek influence over the President of the United States.

That is not merely unethical.

It is a profound national security risk.

When the President of the United States effectively hangs a sign reading “For Sale,” the consequences extend far beyond his own bank account. They affect every American because the decisions made in the Oval Office can no longer be assumed to serve the national interest. They become entangled with Donald’s personal financial interests, and those two things should never, ever overlap.

Donald has spent his entire life pursuing wealth and personal advantage. The presidency has simply become the latest, and by far the most profitable, grift of his career. That should concern every one of us because history has shown repeatedly that when leaders begin treating public office as a means of personal enrichment, democracy itself becomes collateral damage.

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Absurd. Yes, that is exactly the right word to describe these people, none of whom, by the way, has ever been to an Olive Garden. Apparently, this week’s Republican talking point is that a private restaurant promotion and a constitutional right are somehow equivalent. Newsflash: they are not. Yet this manufactured crisis, entirely of the Republicans’ own making, may only be the beginning. There are already reports of underage kids using fake IDs to gain access to Olive Garden’s Never Ending Pasta Pass. I hope you’re sitting down with your excessively creamy, garlicky, never ending fettuccine Alfredo because, apparently, that requires identification. How is that allowed to happen in a communist country?

Of course, we are not a communist country. We are still a democracy, and we are a democracy fueled by capitalism, which is precisely why you have to show an ID if you want the Never Ending Pasta Pass. Otherwise, Olive Garden would eventually go out of business. The comparison really is that simple. American democracy, on the other hand, will go out of business if Republicans continue making it harder and harder for American citizens to vote, which is exactly what they are trying to do.

So yes, welcome to this week’s edition of Trump Trolls Trump. It has been another week, another year, another decade, another millennium. In fact, it has now been seventy nine interminable weeks since this entire nightmare began, also known as the Golden Age, and five hundred fifty one days since Inauguration Day 2025.

Once again, the biggest story of the week is election denialism, the endless effort to relitigate the 2020 election, which has already been litigated to death. Donald lost that election by almost eight million votes, and he still refuses to admit it. It is pathetic. It simply is. That is not how a mature adult behaves. You take the loss and you move on. Donald cannot do that because he cannot survive the narcissistic injury of having lost. His fragile ego simply will not allow it.

Unfortunately, this is no longer just about Donald’s ego. He has transformed his personal inability to accept defeat into a sustained effort to undermine Americans’ faith in free and fair elections, and the Republican Party has enthusiastically joined him. Rather than protecting our democratic institutions, they have chosen to protect Donald’s feelings. That tells you everything you need to know about their priorities.

Do you remember the Green Bay Sweep? It has been a while since we talked about it. That was Peter Navarro’s plan to delay the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote by pressuring Republican controlled state legislatures to challenge the election results. Yes, that Peter Navarro, Donald’s longtime economic adviser and one of the loudest election deniers in the country. He returned this week to inflict yet another spectacularly ridiculous comment on the American people.

While discussing the economy on Newsmax, Navarro decided to warn the nation about what he described as one of our most pressing economic threats.

Peter Navarro: The trends are down, which is not to say we don’t have some issues. Beef has been kind of the holy grail of me trying to figure out the best ways to get it down. So we’re cracking down on the cartels that run the beef processing, things like that.

I honestly do not know how to respond to that.

What exactly is a beef cartel?

Seriously.

I think the biggest problem facing the beef industry is that Donald’s regime has so thoroughly gutted the Food and Drug Administration that our cattle are now being threatened by a deadly parasite. That probably has far more to do with rising beef prices than whatever imaginary criminal organization Peter Navarro has invented. Then again, Donald seems considerably more interested in helping prop up Argentina’s economy than supporting American farmers, so perhaps none of this should surprise us anymore.

Every now and then something happens that perfectly captures what it is like to live under the Trump regime. We have seen this pattern for decades. Donald creates a mess because he is incapable of admitting he made a mistake. Instead of fixing the problem, he tries to cover it up. In the process, however, he inevitably draws even more attention to the disaster he created in the first place.

The reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial has become the latest monument to that pattern.

By now, we have heard far more about this reflecting pool than any of us ever wanted to know. Nevertheless, it has become an almost perfect metaphor for Donald’s presidency.

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Let’s briefly review what happened.

Donald awarded a no bid contract to one of his friends to renovate the reflecting pool. The project was originally expected to cost approximately 1.8 million dollars. Instead, it ballooned into a staggering boondoggle that has now cost taxpayers more than 15 billion dollars. The contractor apparently had little idea what he was doing, but competence has never been a prerequisite for receiving lucrative contracts from Donald Trump.

Before the new liner had even finished curing, Donald, displaying the engineering expertise for which he is famously not known, decided it would be a wonderful idea to drive his presidential motorcade directly across the bottom of the empty reflecting pool. The presidential limousine alone weighs well over twenty thousand pounds. Unsurprisingly, that decision appears to have been catastrophic.

Soon after the pool was refilled, algae blooms spread rapidly across the water. The liner itself began peeling away from the bottom. The decision to paint the pool a darker color only made the algae problem worse, while removing the bubblers created additional maintenance problems. Every decision seemed designed to compound the previous mistake until the entire project became a national embarrassment.

Faced with this self inflicted disaster, Donald did what he always does. Rather than accepting responsibility, he blamed someone else. American citizens were actually arrested after being accused of cutting holes in the bottom of the reflecting pool with box cutters, an accusation that is as absurd as it is dangerous. Innocent people now have to defend themselves against charges that never should have been brought in the first place because Donald once again needed somebody else to blame for his own incompetence.

When blaming innocent people failed to solve the problem, the administration turned to its next favorite strategy: hiding the evidence. A large tarp was erected to conceal the construction site from public view. Predictably, even that failed. The tarp detached almost immediately and began flapping wildly in the wind, exposing the very mess it was supposed to hide.

It is difficult to imagine a more fitting metaphor for Donald Trump.

The self proclaimed master builder could not successfully renovate a reflecting pool. He could not keep costs under control. He could not avoid damaging the project before it was even completed. He could not resist blaming innocent people when everything predictably fell apart. And when he tried to cover up the evidence of his own failure, even the cover up failed.

Well done, Donald.

In a strange way, this entire Trump Trolls Trump tells us more truthfully who Donald is than almost anything he says about himself. Everything he touches becomes a monument to incompetence. Everything he builds eventually begins to crumble. Everything that goes wrong becomes someone else’s fault. And when reality becomes impossible to ignore, he simply tries to cover it with another layer of gold paint and hopes nobody notices what is falling apart underneath.

Donald and far too many of the people who surround him seem to inhabit a world entirely of their own creation. Actually, let me correct that because there is only one reality. There are not competing realities that are equally valid. There is reality, and then there is the fantasy Donald constructs every day, a fantasy built on lies, grievances, and endless distortions of the truth. Unfortunately, too many people have chosen to move into that fantasy with him.

Some of that is understandable, at least in the sense that the people closest to Donald know their careers, and in many cases their political futures, depend upon keeping him happy. They spend their days feeding his ego, validating his delusions, and assuring him that he is always right. But much of it goes beyond simple self-preservation. It is an endless exercise in twisting facts until they fit whatever Donald happens to believe on any given day. It must be exhausting. Every now and then, however, someone manages to say something so extraordinary that it deserves special recognition.

Florida Congressman Carlos Gimenez accomplished exactly that during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. The discussion centered on Donald’s unconstitutional war of choice against Iran and the administration’s continuing effort to pretend the American people overwhelmingly support it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Wolf Blitzer: President Trump this morning said that Americans “aren’t against the war.”

This is what Carlos Gimenez said:

Americans aren’t against the war. A poll just came out. Americans don’t want to have gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war.

Wolf Blitzer responded by pointing out what the polling actually showed.

In a recent Washington Post Ipsos survey, 68 percent of Americans said the war was not worth fighting while 28 percent said it was. How do you explain the disconnect between what the president says and how Americans feel according to almost all of these most recent polls?

Carlos Gimenez’s response somehow managed to make even less sense than his first answer.

Well, I’m not going to speak for the president. I’m not going to dispute the polls either, but I also know that prior to World War II, 85 percent of Americans were not in favor of entering the war. And then it all changed in one day.

What?

Is that supposed to be a serious answer?

Apparently, it is.

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Carlos Gimenez begins by acknowledging that he is not disputing the polling, then immediately proceeds to dismiss the polling by comparing Donald’s unconstitutional war of choice against Iran to World War II. It is difficult to imagine a more offensive historical comparison. The United States entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor as part of a global effort to defeat fascism. Donald chose this war. Congress never authorized it. The circumstances are not remotely comparable.

It is also worth remembering who opposed America’s involvement in World War II until Pearl Harbor forced the issue. There was indeed a vocal isolationist movement, but it also included people who openly sympathized with authoritarian governments overseas. That history should not be casually invoked to defend Donald’s latest foreign policy disaster.

The larger point, however, is that Republicans continue refusing to acknowledge objective reality whenever it becomes politically inconvenient. Polls no longer matter if Donald dislikes the results. Facts become optional. History becomes whatever comparison happens to serve the political moment. It is all part of the same strategy. If reality refuses to support Donald’s narrative, then reality itself must be dismissed.

Speaking of people who seem increasingly detached from reality, it is time to talk about Pete Hegseth.

The Secretary of Defense appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee requesting another seventy billion dollars to fund a war he has repeatedly insisted the United States has already won and that has supposedly destroyed Iran’s military capabilities. That request comes on top of at least thirty seven and a half billion dollars already spent, as well as Donald’s separate 1.5 trillion dollar defense budget proposal for fiscal year 2027.

One obvious question immediately comes to mind.

If the war has already been won, why exactly do they need another seventy billion dollars?

Republicans spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about waste, fraud, and abuse. Speaker Mike Johnson repeats those words almost as frequently as Donald invents new grievances. Yet somehow none of those concerns seem to apply when the administration wants another seventy billion dollars for a war they insist has already achieved all of its objectives.

That naturally raises another question.

Where is congressional oversight?

As it turns out, according to Republican Senator Steve Daines, oversight is apparently much easier than the rest of us realized.

This is what Fox Business host Stuart Varney asked:

Should the Senate step in and exercise some more control over the war?

This is what Senator Steve Daines said:

Stuart, we always have the ability to exercise oversight. Just look at yesterday. We had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, in front of the Appropriations Committee. You’ve got Secretary Hegseth. You’ve got Secretary Rubio who are in routine contact with members of the U.S. Senate. So we’re always engaged. I was at Vice President Vance’s residence recently having dinner talking about Iran. So we have lots of opportunity to issue oversight.

Apparently, congressional oversight now consists of having dinner with the Vice President.

Who knew?

J.D. Vance is, of course, Vice President of the United States, although it remains difficult to understand exactly what role he is playing in this war beyond privately opposing it while publicly pretending to support it. Like so many people around Donald, he seems perfectly willing to say one thing behind closed doors and another whenever a television camera is present.

The far more important issue is that Senate Republicans have completely abdicated one of their most fundamental constitutional responsibilities. Congress possesses the authority to check the executive branch. Congress controls appropriations. Congress can demand accountability. Congress can end this war whenever it chooses. Instead, Republican senators continue behaving as though casual conversations over dinner somehow satisfy their constitutional obligation to oversee an administration that has already asked taxpayers to spend well over a trillion dollars on national defense while repeatedly refusing to answer basic questions about strategy, costs, or long-term objectives.

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio have demonstrated time and again that they cannot be trusted to manage America’s national security responsibly. Frankly, I would hesitate to trust them with five dollars, much less nearly one point seven five trillion. Yet here we are, watching Republicans applaud another massive spending request while pretending they have exercised meaningful oversight simply because they occasionally have dinner with the people making the decisions.

That is not oversight.

It is surrender.

Entirely because of Donald’s staggering ignorance when it comes to national security, and because some of the least qualified people imaginable are now responsible for protecting this country, we spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about very real threats facing the United States. Every now and then, however, the administration introduces a danger so bizarre that you almost have to remind yourself they are speaking seriously. That happened this week during Donald’s rally in Georgia, where he warned the country about what he apparently believes is our most immediate national security threat.

I hope you’re sitting down for this one because I honestly hesitate to repeat it.

Donald: As I said in my recent address at Mount Rushmore recently, I don’t know if anybody saw it. It’s such a beautiful place. The communists want to take it down. They can try taking Mount Rushmore down. They want to blow it up. They want to take it down. They shouldn’t be up there. These people are crazy. But communism is, in my opinion, communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history, including even World War I and World War II, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. I think it’s the greatest threat that I’ve ever seen to our country. These people are stone cold crazy.

Donald really needs to stop looking in the mirror every time he talks about the greatest threat facing America because the person posing the greatest threat to this country is the one delivering that speech. The idea that communism represents a greater danger to the United States than two world wars, Pearl Harbor, September 11, or the authoritarian movement currently taking hold inside our own government is so detached from reality that it would almost be funny if Donald were not the President of the United States.

Communism?

Really?

Do American communists even exist in any meaningful sense anymore? Do they exist anywhere in numbers that remotely justify this kind of panic? Personally, I am considerably more concerned about the fascists currently running large portions of the American government than I am about an imaginary communist movement plotting to destroy Mount Rushmore.

That, of course, raises another question.

Why Mount Rushmore?

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Why has Donald become so singularly obsessed with protecting that monument? My suspicion is that it has considerably less to do with preserving history than with preserving his own fantasy. Donald has made little secret over the years of his desire to see his own face carved into Mount Rushmore alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Once you understand that, his sudden concern about the monument begins making a great deal more sense. If you believe your own likeness belongs on the mountain, you are probably going to become rather invested in convincing people someone is trying to destroy it.

The irony, of course, is that Mount Rushmore itself remains one of the most controversial monuments in the country. It was carved into land sacred to the Lakota people after the United States violated its own treaty obligations. There are entirely legitimate conversations to be had about that history, but Donald is not interested in history. He is interested in manufacturing enemies because fear has always been one of his most effective political tools.

This obsession with communism also feels strangely frozen in time. Donald remains trapped in the political worldview of the 1980s, or perhaps even earlier. Roy Cohn, Donald’s longtime mentor and one of the most destructive figures in modern American political history, built much of his career alongside Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare. McCarthyism depended on convincing Americans that communists were lurking everywhere, waiting to destroy the country from within. It was a campaign built on fear, conspiracy theories, and the destruction of innocent people’s lives. Donald absorbed those lessons well. He continues using the same language, invoking the same imaginary enemies, and relying on the same politics of fear because it has shaped the way he understands power for most of his life.

It is no coincidence that Republicans continue returning to the same collection of words whenever they need to distract the public. Communism. Waste. Fraud. Abuse. They repeat them endlessly because they believe repetition eventually becomes truth. They hope that if they invoke those phrases often enough, Americans will stop paying attention to the genuine dangers confronting this country. The real threat is not an imaginary communist conspiracy to destroy Mount Rushmore. The real threat is an increasingly authoritarian movement that continues concentrating power, attacking democratic institutions, and convincing Americans to distrust one another.

That is why ridicule remains so important.

Authoritarians depend upon appearing powerful. They depend upon convincing people they are inevitable, unstoppable, and worthy of fear. One of the most effective ways to weaken them is to expose just how absurd they actually are. Donald spends an extraordinary amount of time demanding that people take him seriously. Yet the same man who warns about communist plots against Mount Rushmore also managed to destroy a reflecting pool, blame innocent Americans for his own incompetence, invent beef cartels, and ask taxpayers for another seventy billion dollars to continue funding a war he insists has already been won.

These are not the actions of serious people.

They are the actions of profoundly unserious people exercising enormous power.

That is precisely why mockery matters. Ridicule strips away the illusion of competence. It reminds us that beneath the manufactured spectacle, the endless self-promotion, and the constant attempts to intimidate the public are people who repeatedly reveal themselves to be incompetent, dishonest, and frequently ridiculous. Donald wants Americans to fear him. He wants us to believe he is larger than life, uniquely powerful, and beyond accountability. Nothing undermines that mythology faster than exposing the absurdity at its core.

That is why we keep showing up every week. Not simply to criticize Donald or to catalogue another week’s worth of scandals, but to remind ourselves that these people are not invincible. They are absurd. They are incompetent. They are laughable. They deserve to be held accountable, but they also deserve to be ridiculed because ridicule weakens authoritarians in ways they understand all too well.

Mockery really is one of our superpowers.

We will continue using it because it remains one of the most effective ways to puncture the mythology Donald has spent a lifetime constructing around himself. Every joke that exposes his incompetence, every moment that reveals the gap between his promises and reality, and every instance in which we refuse to treat the absurd as normal chips away at the illusion that sustains him.

So we will keep doing exactly that.

Week after week, we will continue calling out the lies, exposing the corruption, highlighting the incompetence, and reminding ourselves that democracy is strengthened not only by vigilance, but also by refusing to surrender our ability to laugh at those who so desperately want us to fear them.

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Election denial has become one of the defining features of the modern Republican Party. It no longer exists on the political fringe. It is no longer confined to social media conspiracies or late night internet forums. It has become an organizing principle for the party itself, determining who advances, who receives Donald’s endorsement, and who is trusted to oversee future elections. The goal is no longer to persuade Americans that elections are secure. It is to convince them that democracy only works when Republicans win.

That reality was on full display this week in Arizona, where two prominent election deniers emerged victorious in Republican primaries. Andy Biggs secured the nomination to challenge Governor Katie Hobbs, while Alex Kolodin won the Republican nomination for Secretary of State, the office responsible for administering Arizona’s elections.

The following morning, Donald celebrated the results on his failing social media platform. In typical fashion, however, he appeared not to understand that these victories occurred in primary elections rather than the general election.

The irony is difficult to ignore because Arizona has already spent years indulging Donald’s fantasies about election fraud.

As NBC News reported in 2021, Andy Biggs testified before Congress regarding Arizona’s Republican led ballot review, better known by its wonderfully ridiculous name, the Cyber Ninjas audit. Apparently, somebody thought calling themselves Cyber Ninjas would make them sound sophisticated instead of absurd.

The Cyber Ninjas review was commissioned by Arizona Senate Republicans to determine whether Donald’s claims about the 2020 election had any merit. After months of speculation, millions of taxpayer dollars, and endless conspiracy theories, the audit reached the same conclusion every legitimate review had already reached.

Joe Biden won Maricopa County.

In fact, the Cyber Ninjas audit actually found that President Biden received slightly more votes than the certified results initially showed.

Despite those findings, Andy Biggs continued suggesting that nobody really knew what happened.

That simply was not true.

Biggs made those comments after the Cyber Ninjas report had already been released publicly. The evidence was available. The conclusions were clear. Yet facts have never mattered very much to people who are determined to preserve a lie that serves their political interests.

Donald, of course, continues promoting those same lies.

Last week, he delivered a primetime address devoted almost entirely to false claims about election fraud while using the appearance to promote the SAVE Act, legislation Republicans insist is necessary to protect elections from widespread fraud that simply does not exist.

Only days later, another story provided the administration with exactly the kind of distraction it needed.

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New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill disclosed that a software error had allowed approximately 6,600 non citizens to register to vote. Fewer than 400 of those individuals ultimately cast ballots before the error was discovered and corrected.

Donald and his allies immediately seized on the announcement as supposed proof that non citizens are flooding voter rolls across the country.

It proves nothing of the sort.

The registrations resulted from a software error, not a coordinated effort to commit election fraud. State officials identified the problem, flagged the affected registrations, and removed them from the voter rolls. The system functioned exactly as it was supposed to.

More importantly, this isolated administrative mistake says absolutely nothing about the broader Republican narrative surrounding voter fraud.

That narrative has never been supported by evidence.

Over more than a decade and well over one billion ballots cast nationwide, documented cases of people illegally voting while ineligible remain extraordinarily rare. Election experts from both parties have repeatedly concluded that voter fraud is statistically insignificant and incapable of altering election outcomes.

That has not stopped Republicans from pretending otherwise.

Even before Governor Sherrill’s announcement, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had already sent letters to New Jersey and three other states claiming that tens of thousands of non citizens could be registered to vote. Curiously, neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the administration explained how those numbers had been calculated.

I think we know why.

They made them up.

The Department of Justice wasted little time escalating the situation. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon demanded that New Jersey provide voter records connected to the software error within five days.

Governor Sherrill responded exactly as she should have.

She pointed out that Donald possesses absolutely zero credibility when it comes to election integrity.

That observation raises an obvious question.

If Donald is genuinely concerned about protecting American elections, why would he dismantle the very agency created to help secure them?

Earlier this month, Donald effectively gutted the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, the independent federal agency established specifically to help states administer secure and reliable elections.

According to NPR, Donald removed the commission’s remaining Democratic members, Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks. Republican Commissioner Christy McCormick resigned the same day, leaving the agency without a single sitting commissioner just months before the midterm elections.

It is difficult to believe that happened accidentally.

Meanwhile, Donald’s allies continue insisting the 2020 election deserves yet another investigation despite the fact that Donald’s own Attorney General, Bill Barr, publicly concluded years ago that the election was among the most secure in American history.

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That has not stopped Republican lawmakers from recycling the same discredited talking points.

This is what Senator Ron Johnson said:

The 80 courts that looked at the 2020 election, most of them never took a look at evidence. They just dismissed them on some... It was either a moot issue because the election was already certified. So again, we truly have never fully investigated what happened in 2020.

Ron Johnson is lying.

He knows he is lying.

The claim that the 2020 election was never fully investigated is absurd.

The election was investigated repeatedly.

There were recounts.

There were audits.

There were forensic reviews.

There were investigations conducted by Republican officials, Democratic officials, career election administrators, independent experts, state legislatures, and the federal government.

More than sixty lawsuits challenging the election were dismissed or rejected by courts across the country, including by judges appointed by Donald himself.

No credible investigation uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud capable of changing the outcome of the election. To be perfectly honest, even saying there was “no widespread fraud” almost grants legitimacy to a false premise. There was no evidence of meaningful fraud at all. Certainly nothing remotely capable of changing the outcome of a presidential election.

That should have ended the conversation years ago.

Instead, Republicans continue resurrecting the same conspiracy theories because they were never interested in discovering the truth. They were interested in preserving a political narrative that allows them to question every election they lose while demanding unquestioning acceptance of every election they win.

And that should concern every American, regardless of political party, because once a democracy loses faith in its own elections, it begins losing faith in democracy itself.

Donald’s effort to undermine confidence in American elections did not end with recycled claims about 2020. During his primetime address last week, he expanded the conspiracy by accusing China of interfering in the election through an illicit acquisition connected to American election infrastructure. He claimed intelligence existed to support those allegations while simultaneously insisting that much of the evidence would remain classified. That is a remarkably convenient position to take. Americans are expected to accept one of the most serious accusations imaginable against a foreign government without seeing the evidence that supposedly proves it. That alone should make people skeptical. Instead, many of Donald’s supporters simply accepted the claim because, by now, they have been conditioned to believe whatever Donald tells them, regardless of whether it is supported by reality.

Only a few days later, however, Donald’s certainty appeared to disappear. When reporters asked whether he intended to impose consequences on China for the interference he had described only days earlier, his answer was noticeably less definitive.

Donald: Well, we’re going to talk to them about it. It took place a long time ago. I think China’s maybe a little bit different today than it was then. But look, they do things and we do things to them. I’ll be honest. We do things to them too. It’s not a one way street, but we’ll be talking to them.

That is an extraordinary statement for several reasons. Donald not only retreated from the confidence he displayed during his address, but he also appeared to acknowledge that the United States interferes in other countries’ elections as well. If that is what he meant, it is an astonishing admission from an American president.

At the same time, it completely undercuts the urgency of his original accusation. If Donald genuinely believed China had interfered in an American presidential election, why would his response amount to little more than saying the two countries would talk about it? The answer seems fairly obvious. His own administration has failed to produce evidence that substantiates the sweeping claims he made only days earlier.

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That conclusion becomes even harder to ignore when you consider Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s response. If China had truly interfered in an American presidential election, any reasonable person would expect that issue to dominate conversations between the Secretary of State and China’s foreign minister. Instead, when Rubio was asked directly whether election interference came up during his meeting, he offered an answer that was almost startling in its simplicity.

Marco Rubio: We didn’t discuss that topic.

That answer raises far more questions than it resolves. Donald’s entire argument rests on the assertion that China interfered in the 2020 election to benefit Joe Biden. If the administration actually believed that allegation, why would it not be among the first issues raised in a diplomatic meeting with Chinese officials? Why would there be no discussion about preventing future interference? Why would Rubio dismiss the subject entirely? His response tells us something Donald never intended to reveal. The administration itself does not appear to believe the narrative it has been selling to the American people.

This has become one of Donald’s defining political strategies. He makes an explosive accusation, dominates the news cycle for several days, encourages his supporters to repeat the claim as though it were established fact, and then quietly abandons it once the evidence fails to materialize. By that point, however, the damage has already been done. The objective was never to prove the allegation. The objective was to create confusion, deepen distrust, and convince Americans that objective truth no longer exists.

That is precisely why the Republican obsession with voter fraud should concern all of us. It has never truly been about protecting elections. It has always been about convincing Americans that elections cannot be trusted unless Republicans win. The evidence simply does not support the claims they continue making. After more than a decade of elections, countless audits, recounts, investigations, and court cases, voter fraud remains extraordinarily rare.

Election officials from both parties have repeatedly concluded that it is statistically insignificant and incapable of changing the outcome of national elections. Yet Republicans continue behaving as though the country faces an unprecedented crisis because the myth itself serves a political purpose.

Once people begin believing elections are fundamentally corrupt, it becomes much easier to justify laws that make voting more difficult. Voter suppression can be presented as election security. Restrictions on access to the ballot can be described as protecting democracy. Gerrymandering, voter subversion, and the systematic weakening of the Voting Rights Act become easier to defend because the public has been conditioned to fear a problem that scarcely exists. That has always been the point. The real threat has never been widespread voter fraud. The real threat has been the deliberate effort to make Americans lose confidence in the democratic process itself.

That is why our responsibility remains remarkably straightforward. Make sure you are registered to vote. Continue checking your registration between now and Election Day so there are no surprises. You can verify your registration at vote.gov, and you should encourage your family, your friends, your neighbors, and everyone you know to do the same. Then, when Election Day arrives, go to the polls and vote. Bring as many people with you as you possibly can because participation remains the most effective answer to every lie Donald continues telling about our elections.

Donald and the Republican Party want Americans to become exhausted. They want people to conclude that democracy is too broken to save and that participation no longer matters. They understand that citizens who stop believing in elections are far easier to manipulate than citizens who continue showing up. That is why we cannot allow ourselves to become cynical or disengaged. The antidote to election denial has never been resignation. It has always been participation. The antidote to conspiracy theories has always been truth. And the antidote to authoritarianism has always been the willingness of ordinary people to defend democracy by exercising the right so many others have fought to protect.

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Donald traveled to Wheeler High School in Marietta, Georgia yesterday to promote what he is calling “Trump Accounts,” a new federally funded investment program for children that is expected to cost taxpayers approximately $17 billion through 2028. Before he even took the stage, however, the most memorable moment had nothing to do with his latest proposal. Protesters lined the streets outside the school, and one sign in particular stood out. It read, “I thought sex offenders couldn’t be within 1,000 feet of a school.”

It was difficult to miss the point.

The timing of Donald’s visit also could not have been more revealing. Americans remain deeply dissatisfied with his handling of the economy. According to a recent Washington Post Ipsos poll, just 33 percent of respondents approve of his economic performance. Inflation remains elevated at roughly 3 percent, despite a modest decline last month that was driven largely by a temporary drop in gasoline and oil prices during the brief ceasefire with Iran. That respite did not last. Donald’s inability to secure a lasting agreement allowed the conflict to escalate once again, and the economic consequences have followed.

Gas prices have climbed back above four dollars a gallon. Brent crude is once again approaching ninety dollars a barrel. None of this is especially surprising. Donald has always been an extraordinarily poor businessman. He understands very little about economics, even less about foreign policy, and absolutely nothing about diplomacy. Every time he insists he alone can negotiate the impossible, reality eventually reminds us otherwise.

Donald opened his appearance at Wheeler High School the way he so often does, by relitigating elections and attacking the press.

Donald: Boy, I’ll tell you what a group. We have thousands of people outside on a weekday. The weather’s nice. But we’re in Marietta. We’re in Atlanta right by it. And I just want to thank everybody. Those are places. We had a tremendous victory here and it was a big, beautiful victory. We won by a lot and we have some great candidates running. They got to win by a lot. Otherwise, we’re going communist. I don’t think anybody wants that. We’re not going to do that. But I’m thrilled to be back in the great state of Georgia with thousands of proud, hardworking American patriots. That’s what you are. And with your help in 2024, we earned more votes than any candidate in Georgia history. We’ve never been anything like it. And when I say that, I have to be careful because look at all the fake news back there. They will correct me. They will say, “He said he earned more.” If I didn’t earn, if I was two votes short, they would say, “He’s lying. He’s lying. They are sick individuals in the fake news.”

Who is still buying this?

Seriously, who?

Donald lies constantly. He has always lied constantly. Yet somehow, people continue listening to him recycle the same grievances, the same fabricated victories, and the same endless complaints about the press. Nearly two years after the election, he is still obsessing over how many votes he received. He remains incapable of moving beyond his own need for validation because, fundamentally, he cannot imagine a world in which he is not the center of it.

Of course, his nostalgia for past elections quickly gave way to a familiar pattern. Donald once again insisted that America has never been more successful, that we are living through what he continues to call the “golden age,” and that manufacturers from around the world are rushing back to the United States.

Donald: Together, we’re making our country safer and stronger and far more successful than it’s ever been before. And that’s happening before your very eyes. That’s why I call it the golden age. This is the golden age of America. We’re building more plants than at any time in the history of our country. And not just AI and all of the different things you read about. Things like auto plants, the old-fashioned way. Toyota just announced they’re leaving Mexico and they’re coming in. They’re going to be building the largest plant anywhere in the world. They’re all coming back. They’re all leaving Canada, they’re leaving Mexico. They’re coming in from Germany and Japan and South Korea. They’re coming in from all over. And people that have been doing this, people like Scott and others that have been doing this for a long time, they’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t think you’ve ever seen anything like it.

No, they have not seen anything like it because it is not happening.

Much of what Donald described simply does not exist outside his imagination. Yet he continues making sweeping claims with absolute confidence, assuming that repetition alone will transform fiction into reality. It is an approach that has defined his public life for decades. If reality contradicts him, then reality must be wrong.

Donald also attempted to explain away rising prices with the excuse he always reaches for. Nothing is ever his fault. Every problem belongs to somebody else, and every success belongs exclusively to him.

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Donald: And they tried to blame high prices on me. So think of it. When I inherited this thing on January 20th, we had the highest inflation in many, many years. Forty eight years they say. I say maybe ever. This is what I inherited. And when I had nothing to do with it, I walk into office, I have a press conference first or second day, and they’re screaming at me, “What are you going to do about high prices? What are you going to do?” I said, “I just got here. What are we talking about? Tell me. Eggs, eggs have gone up four times. Four times.” I said, “I just got here. Give me a break.” They did. They hit me with the eggs then. You remember that? Kelly, you remember I got hit with the eggs. First day, first press conference, nice friendly press conference. They treat me so nicely. What are you going to do about the prices? And they used the word first time I heard it. It was a word made up by the Democrats. Affordability. They said, “Affordability.” I said, “I’ve been here one day. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. And we’re taking care of it. We’re taking good care of it.”

I honestly could not listen to much more of that.

When I ask how people continue believing Donald’s lies, I also wonder how they continue listening to him at all. Every speech sounds exactly the same. The grievances never end. The self-pity never ends. The stories wander aimlessly from one unrelated thought to another. He cannot stay on topic. He cannot speak with clarity. He cannot modulate his voice. He cannot communicate a coherent argument. And yet millions of people continue treating him as though he is somehow persuasive, credible, or trustworthy.

Donald also reminded the audience, falsely, that he presided over the greatest economy in American history during his first term. He lamented that he never received enough credit for his handling of COVID, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily because of his catastrophic failures and deliberate dishonesty. Then, almost as an afterthought, he assured everyone that prices are rapidly coming down.

To be honest, it was difficult to determine exactly where he was trying to go. Perhaps you will have better luck than I did.

Donald: We had the best economy in history in my first term. A lot of people don’t because we had a COVID period went all over the world and we did a great job where they got no credit for it. We did Operation Warp Speed. And I’ll tell you, we did a great job, but we got very little credit for it. We should have been given big credit, but we got credit for everything else. And we had the best economy, but this economy is ready to blow everything away ever of any country. There’s never been anything like what’s happening in the United States of America right now. So I just want you to remember that if you’re paying a little bit more, a lot of it’s come down now. We got it coming down very rapidly, actually. Look at the number just released. But really, we inherited something from Biden and we’re giving it back to you thousands and thousands of dollars each family.

The reality is very different.

What Donald inherited from Joe Biden was an economy that economists around the world described as the envy of the world. What he inherited was steady growth, falling inflation, and an economy that had recovered remarkably from the global disruption of the pandemic. What he has done since taking office is inject instability into that economy through reckless policymaking, unnecessary international conflicts, and a profound inability to distinguish between governing and performing.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Donald’s presidency has always been this refusal to accept responsibility. He demands credit for every positive development, regardless of whether he had anything to do with it. Yet every failure, every setback, every increase in costs, every broken promise, somehow belongs to someone else. Leadership does not work that way. If you insist on taking all of the credit, then you also have to accept the blame.

Donald has never understood that distinction. And that, more than any speech he gives or any slogan he repeats, continues to define his presidency.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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Mary Trump: Hello, everybody!

Guess what? It’s Joyce Vance’s birthday, and I got to help her celebrate by joining her and Katie Phang. Those are two fierce, brilliant women to spend time with on a Substack Live.

So here’s that conversation. Enjoy.

Joyce Vance: Welcome to everybody who’s joining us. It’s Mary, Katie, and me just chatting this morning. We may do nothing but chat, but I’d also love to take your questions from the comments. This is very informal, and there is certainly no shortage of news.

Katie was just mentioning that a modeling scout in Paris has died. Katie, is that right?

Katie Phang: Yes. His body was found in his Paris home. Authorities are investigating the cause of death. Initially, it was reported as cardiac arrest, but they are conducting an autopsy because they are not certain.

He was the primary modeling scout, I’ll put that in quotation marks, for Jeffrey Epstein, Jean Luc Brunel, and Gérald Marie, who headed Elite Model Management. That is far too much of a coincidence, considering he worked with all three of those men, if not additional sexual predators.

Part of what I’ve been focused on lately is emphasizing that this international sex trafficking operation gained legitimacy and cover through the modeling industry. We know about the Victoria’s Secret connection through Les Wexner, and we know they transported young girls across international borders and state lines under the guise of modeling.

It’s shocking because just last week I was in a French court during the filing of new complaints from victims of Gérald Marie. The goal is to have an investigating judge appointed. Unlike our system, France has an investigating magistrate who has remarkable authority. It’s almost like having a police officer, a lawyer, and a judge all rolled into one.

The objective is to connect all of these cases and ultimately get to Ghislaine Maxwell because, at this point, she is the only person still alive, other than Gérald Marie, who is reportedly hiding out in Ibiza. The hope is to expose the broader operation because it is such a farce that the Trump Department of Justice refuses to do its job.

European authorities have moved slowly, but at least they are doing something. The only people ever prosecuted have been Epstein and Maxwell, even though we know there were many more people involved.

It is frustrating, and more than a little strange, that only four days after these new victims came forward and those complaints were filed, someone directly connected to the case is suddenly found dead.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it certainly is odd.

Joyce Vance: It’s more than odd. We used to say there is no such thing as coincidence in law enforcement, and I doubt this is a coincidence.

I was especially struck during Todd Blanche’s confirmation testimony last week when he claimed there was no evidence that any of the girls or women had been trafficked to anyone beyond Jeffrey Epstein. My immediate reaction was, “Have you looked at the evidence? Have you spoken to your prosecutors?” Because it is abundantly clear that this story is not going away.

When Todd Blanche was confirmed as Deputy Attorney General last year, Jeffrey Epstein was not mentioned once in his written responses to the Senate’s questions for the record. This time, Jeffrey Epstein’s name appears 216 times. This issue is not going anywhere.

Mary Trump: Exactly. When you’re engaged in a massive cover up, you lose all credibility. Nobody is willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.

And it isn’t just Epstein. Look at what the Trump administration did to help secure the release of Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate from Romania because they’re fans of Donald Trump.

These are people who have been at the forefront of the toxic masculinity movement. They are hardcore misogynists, and many of the people in that orbit have been accused of being pedophiles, rapists, and sex traffickers.

No, this story is not going away, and it shouldn’t. It should remain in the public eye until these victims finally receive answers.

Joyce Vance: Speaking of coincidences, my husband just brought me birthday chocolate.

Look at this. My favorite all natural dark chocolate pecans from Wilbur’s of Maine. What a wonderful husband.

Mary Trump: All right, everybody. Joyce is getting these amazing chocolates because today is her birthday. Happy Birthday!

Joyce Vance: Thank you. I really appreciate that. Thank you both for being here with me today, and thank you to everyone joining us on my birthday.

I noticed someone in the comments mentioning that the Tate brothers are supposedly friends with Barron Trump. I’m cautious about repeating that because much of that reporting comes from someone who claims to have influence with Barron Trump and says they have participated in calls together. Take that for whatever it’s worth.

Donald Trump Jr. has certainly had interactions with the Tates, and Rick Grenell was involved in helping facilitate their release from Romania while they were still under investigation for sex crimes, allowing them to travel to the United States. Ironically, they were later arrested in Katie’s neck of the woods, in South Florida, on British extradition warrants.

That also highlights an important difference between criminal justice systems. Katie talked earlier about how the French investigative system differs from ours, but the British system is different as well.

I once prosecuted a child exploitation case involving a defendant who happened to be in London. I was genuinely impressed by how quickly British authorities were able to arrest him and by how long they were legally permitted to hold him during the investigation. That turned out to be extremely valuable in building the case.

So I am very grateful for our colleagues in British law enforcement.

Mary Trump: Absolutely.

Joyce Vance: If there’s anything you’d like us to discuss, please put it in the comments. We’ll keep an eye on them.

And thank you to the person who said I don’t look a day over thirty. I am, in fact, somewhat older than thirty. Quite a bit older than thirty, but I appreciate the compliment.

Katie Phang: Joyce, you absolutely deserve the gold medal for looking the youngest on your birthday. One hundred percent.

Joyce Vance: Well, makeup certainly helps, but good genes help too.

Mary Trump: And living where you do probably doesn’t hurt, either.

Katie Phang: Absolutely. Being somewhere peaceful really matters. You’re often a product of your environment. If you can find even a small pocket of peace somewhere, hold onto it.

We’re constantly overwhelmed by the news. It never stops anymore, not even on weekends. If you can find something that gives you even a brief moment of peace, embrace it.

For me, that’s stopping to pet dogs on the street.

Joyce Vance: I love being with you when you do that because you really do stop and pet every dog.

Katie Phang: I do. Then I feel like I’m carrying that dog’s scent with me to the next dog.

I recently read something on Instagram that’s been driving my husband Jonathan crazy because I keep repeating it. It said you should let your dog spend as much time as it wants sniffing during walks. Apparently, ten minutes of sniffing provides as much mental stimulation as thirty minutes of running.

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The post explained that dogs are reading and sending what it called “pee mail.” So now every time I see a dog taking a long time during a walk, I turn to Jonathan and say, “That dog is writing a very long pee mail.”

Mary Trump: I actually learned that while walking Henry, Norm Ornstein’s dog, in Washington. Norm takes Henry on very long walks and lets him stop as often as he wants.

Dogs receive an incredible amount of information through their noses. It provides tremendous intellectual stimulation.

If you have a dog, let them take their time during walks. It really is good for them.

Joyce Vance: I’m not entirely convinced my dogs are intellectually stimulated. Most of the time they’re just thinking, “Oh look, food. Oh look, more food.”

Katie Phang: Your dogs get to spend time with the chickens and the cats. They have an entire social circle.

My dog is an only dog, although I’m actively trying to increase our dog population.

Joyce Vance: Jonathan needs a German Shepherd.

Katie Phang: He absolutely wants one.

Since my dog is by himself, I make sure he gets plenty of time at the park with other dogs. And I always let him spend as much time as he needs reading and sending his pee mail.

Joyce Vance: German Shepherds are like living with Secret Service agents. They’re constantly on guard. They’re always watching, always alert, always barking if something seems even slightly out of place, even a leaf falling from a tree.

But I will admit, I always feel protected.

Mary Trump: I recently met a long haired German Shepherd, and he was the sweetest dog imaginable.

Joyce Vance: Our German Shepherd sheds enough already, but the long haired ones really are beautiful.

I actually need to buy a truck. I had been researching Silverados because the truck bed would comfortably fit two dogs. When I mentioned that to my husband, Bob, he immediately asked, “Will it fit three dogs?”

So now I have very high hopes for my birthday. Maybe a long haired German Shepherd is in my future.

Mary Trump: You two are unstoppable.

Joyce Vance: Usually, stray dogs just show up at our house, so we never have to put much thought into getting another one. We haven’t had a stray dog arrive in quite a while, though, so I feel like we’re overdue. At the very least, it would be nice to foster a rescue for a while.

Mary Trump: Foster or foster fail?

Katie Phang: I’m looking at the comments, and people are asking why we’re not talking about more serious topics.

Joyce Vance: All right. Let’s talk about serious topics.

Mary Trump: I have a question.

Is there even a legislative branch of government anymore?

Katie Phang: Where’s Mitch McConnell? He’d probably be the only one who could answer that question, Mary. Unfortunately, his own staff can’t even seem to confirm that they’ve actually spoken with him, so I don’t think you’re going to get an answer as to whether we still have a functioning legislature.

Joyce Vance: Can we talk for a minute about how unbelievable it is that we watched the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate reportedly leave in an ambulance, then saw a photograph that many people have questioned as possibly being AI generated, and then... nothing?

Instead of his staff coming forward with proof of life, a video, or even a brief message from Mitch McConnell himself, they’ve remained completely silent. That certainly doesn’t inspire confidence.

There is an important context here. If he is no longer capable of serving, there are procedures in place to replace him. Instead, it appears they’re simply trying to run out the clock and avoid addressing the issue altogether.

I think Governor Andy Beshear is beginning to force that conversation. I spoke with one of my former U.S. Attorney colleagues in Kentucky, and he said there is absolutely no certainty within the state that their senator is actually able to perform his duties.

Mary Trump: None.

It’s an extraordinary cover up. It’s deeply cynical, and it absolutely looks like an attempt to run out the clock.

Here’s the thing, though. Andy Beshear almost certainly wants to run for president one day. He needs to step up here and force the issue.

If what the legislature is doing is likely unlawful, then make the Republicans defend it. Tell them, “I need to meet with Mitch McConnell by tomorrow. If that doesn’t happen, then I have to conclude he cannot fulfill his responsibilities, and I will appoint a replacement.”

Then let the Republicans scramble. Make them sue you. Put them on defense.

Joyce Vance: Exactly. Let them take it to court. Force them to defend what they’re doing.

Mary Trump: I completely agree.

Katie Phang: I think Mitch McConnell is physically alive. I’m not convinced he’s mentally capable of serving.

That’s why we’ve only seen a written proof of life letter. We’ve seen what some people believe is an AI generated photograph with Elaine Chao. His staff refuses to tell reporters whether they’ve actually seen him or spoken with him.

Scott Jennings says he has, but I don’t find that persuasive.

Mary Trump: Well, I could say I talked to Mitch for twenty minutes too.

Joyce Vance: Exactly. That entire morning was just bizarre. Then... nothing.

If Mitch McConnell were improving, Scott Jennings would probably be doing interviews talking about their latest conversation. Why haven’t we seen anything?

Katie Phang: Exactly. Where’s the video?

Why can’t he simply record thirty seconds saying, “Hello, everyone. I’ve been sick. I’m recovering. Thank you for your concern.”

Even if he were physically limited, people would understand. Instead, we have absolutely nothing.

If I were Governor Beshear, I would personally go to the medical facility. I’d say, “As Governor of Kentucky, I’m here to check on the wellbeing of one of my citizens.”

More importantly, because he represents the people of Kentucky in the United States Senate, I need to determine whether those constituents are receiving competent representation.

The political fallout from doing that would be far worse for Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party than it would be for Governor Beshear. That’s exactly what I would do.

Joyce Vance: Beyond McConnell, can we talk about the latest insanity involving Steve Scalise and his comparison between voting and showing identification at Olive Garden?

Did either of you see that? Apparently, people have to show identification at Olive Garden.

Has Steve Scalise actually ever been to an Olive Garden? I have four children. I’ve certainly been to Olive Garden.

Mary Trump: Well, if you go to Olive Garden looking as young as Joyce does and you order a glass of wine, then yes, they’ll probably ask for identification.

That is not remotely the same thing as voting. These are entirely different issues.

Scalise has also started calling Democrats Bolsheviks and communists. It’s beginning to feel like we’ve been transported back to the 1950s. I’m waiting for the House Un American Activities Committee hearings to begin again.

Steve Scalise seems determined to become the next Joe McCarthy.

I think it demonstrates just how desperate Republicans are. Donald Trump wants them to pass the SAVE Act, and they know that if they fail, November could become a political bloodbath for them.

Joyce Vance: That’s exactly where all of this is headed.

Katie made an important point earlier about finding moments that help restore your balance. The reason that’s so important is because we’re about to begin a sprint that lasts all the way through the midterm elections.

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Mary Trump: That’s true.

Joyce Vance: Katie, you’ve been in Paris. What’s the reaction there to everything happening in the United States? Do people talk about it? I know your French is pretty good.

Katie Phang: They think we’re crazy. What’s really changed is that there is now a genuine lack of respect for the United States. They honestly think we’ve lost our minds.

What is remarkable, though, is that the French have more respect for the institution of democracy than many Americans or, more specifically, than Donald Trump, MAGA, and today’s Republican Party. Europeans, especially the French, understand what it was like to barely survive the march of fascism. They understand just how fragile democracy is because they’ve lived through that history, and they never want to repeat it.

Now, let me be clear. I think allowing Marine Le Pen the opportunity to run again is a mistake. No country is perfect. Every nation has political struggles involving its parliament, its prime ministers, and its presidents. But there is a genuine respect for history and for the sacrifices that were made to preserve democracy.

The ignorance being displayed by the United States right now is impossible to ignore on the global stage. That’s why I think it’s important for Americans to understand the international context. It’s also why conversations with people like Dr. Kim Lane Scheppele are so valuable. Understanding what happened in Hungary helps us understand what is happening here.

I also think about South Korea, where a president declared martial law for eight minutes and was immediately impeached, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Prosecutors even sought the death penalty. Meanwhile, in our country, someone who attempted to overturn an election was returned to the Oval Office.

The same is true in Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro and many of those who helped him have faced prosecution. Yet here in the United States, our own Department of Justice and FBI are not investigating what may be one of the largest international sex trafficking operations in modern history. Other countries continue to pursue these investigations while we refuse to do so.

It really demonstrates a kind of American exceptionalism—but not the kind we should be proud of.

Joyce Vance: Who leads the Department of Justice truly matters. When you vote for a president, you’re also choosing the person who will appoint the Attorney General. If you have an Attorney General who cares about justice, then allegations like those surrounding Jeffrey Epstein receive serious investigation. If you don’t, they don’t.

Mary, what are you seeing from your perspective?

Mary Trump: I think there was a time when people outside the United States could separate ordinary Americans from what our government was doing. They understood that many of us opposed these policies and weren’t blaming every American for them.

But the longer this continues, and the longer Republicans refuse to use the constitutional authority they already possess to rein in the executive branch, the harder that distinction becomes to maintain.

To Katie’s point, Europeans understand the danger of fascism because they’ve lived through it. If Americans had a better understanding of that history, we’d recognize the tragic irony that the country which once fought fascism now finds itself embracing many of its characteristics.

Europeans also understand how essential the United States has been in protecting democratic nations from future authoritarian movements. Every European country still has a dangerous far-right movement. Katie mentioned Marine Le Pen, but we also see similar movements in Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

They need America to stand as a democratic leader opposing those forces. Instead, we increasingly appear to be aligning ourselves with them.

When you combine America’s retreat from democratic leadership abroad with the failure of our own Attorney General to uphold the rule of law at home, it’s an incredibly dangerous combination.

Joyce Vance: That’s something I’ve been thinking about as well, especially when Steve Scalise uses terms like “Bolshevik.”

I don’t think that’s accidental. I think they’re deeply concerned about being accurately labeled as fascists because if you look at immigration policy and so many of this administration’s actions, that description fits.

So what do they do? They reach back into history and dust off another scary word. “What’s worse than fascist? Bolshevik.”

It’s classic bumper-sticker politics. Most people don’t even know what the word means anymore, but they recognize it as something that’s supposed to sound dangerous.

If you have low-information voters, they hear “communist” or “Bolshevik” instead of focusing on whether the administration itself is embracing authoritarian tactics.

I think we need to pay close attention because Republicans have become extremely effective at this kind of simplistic messaging.

Katie Phang: It’s almost like they all got the same memo: start using the word “communism” everywhere.

The irony, of course, is that the American political figure who is closest to Vladimir Putin is Donald Trump.

When I talked about Lindsey Graham’s replacement on my show, I pointed out that Darlene Nordeen—I’m intentionally not calling her Darlene Graham because that’s not her name—was selected by Donald Trump to serve out Lindsey Graham’s Senate term.

During an interview with Sean Hannity, she proudly described meeting Donald Trump and told him that she was known for being loyal. Hannity even joked that Trump probably liked that part the most.

If she’s going to continue Lindsey Graham’s legacy, I’m curious how she’ll approach issues like Ukraine. Lindsey Graham had just returned from meeting with President Zelenskyy before his death, where support for Ukraine against Russia was a major topic.

Meanwhile, Republicans accuse everyone else of being communists and socialists while the person occupying the Oval Office consistently demonstrates admiration for Vladimir Putin.

We shouldn’t allow Steve Scalise or anyone else to throw around those coded terms without pushing back. We should immediately point out the hypocrisy. If anyone is advancing Vladimir Putin’s interests, it’s Donald Trump.

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That’s why media literacy matters so much. People need to understand what these political messages are actually doing.

Mary Trump: That’s exactly what I wanted to ask Joyce about because we’re constantly dealing with multiple crises at once.

Republicans accuse Democrats of doing precisely what they’re doing. Donald has built an entire political career on projection.

In addition to helping people understand what words like “communism,” “socialism,” and “fascism” actually mean, I also think we need to point out Republican hypocrisy much more directly.

Take DEI. Republicans attack Democrats over diversity initiatives while simultaneously embracing blatant nepotism. Donald Trump’s appointments repeatedly demonstrate that loyalty matters far more than qualifications.

Do you think Democrats need to become much more aggressive in highlighting those contradictions?

Joyce Vance: I do.

I’ve probably been less critical of Democratic leadership than either of you because my experience at the Department of Justice taught me how difficult it is to create a consistent message across a broad coalition.

But we absolutely have to do better.

Republicans have handed Democrats an extraordinary opportunity. The messaging should be disciplined, coordinated, and repeated every single day.

One day the message is voting rights. Another day it’s democracy. Another day it’s the economy. Another day it’s corruption.

Each message should explain the problem and end with a concrete action people can take.

Republicans succeed because they reduce everything to bumper stickers. Democrats often respond with thirty-page policy papers. Important ideas have to become understandable without sacrificing the truth.

We also need to continue calling out hypocrisy.

If you were Russia trying to weaken the United States, many of the outcomes you’d hope for—eroding confidence in elections, dividing Americans against one another, undermining democratic institutions—are exactly what’s happening.

There is enormous political opportunity here if Democrats are willing to communicate more effectively.

Mary Trump: What’s remarkable is that Republicans manage to stay on message despite being, in many respects, completely incompetent.

We always seem to have detailed white papers while they have slogans.

Although, to be fair, it’s difficult to compete with someone like Donald Trump, who apparently invents new words every week.

Joyce Vance: What did he invent this time?

Mary Trump: Apparently he invented the word “earthquake.”

Katie Phang: The Marco Rubio memes are still better.

Joyce Vance: They really are.

Well, we’ve been together for about half an hour, so let’s wrap things up. Mary, would you like to start with some closing thoughts?

Mary Trump: I just want to wish you the happiest birthday. I love you very much, and I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day.

Joyce Vance: Thank you. I love you too.

Mary Trump: And I love you too, Katie—even if today isn’t your birthday.

Katie Phang: Mine’s next week, so I’ll happily borrow some of Joyce’s birthday love.

My closing thought is this: for anyone who was disappointed that we spent part of this conversation talking about dogs and “pee mail,” what you saw today is exactly who we are.

This is how Joyce, Mary, and I talk when we’re together. This is how we talk on the phone, over Zoom, and in person.

Those moments matter because they’re what keep us going. We have this incredible Substack community, and yes, we’re fighting for democracy every day. But we also have to make room for joy, laughter, friendship, and the little things that remind us why the fight matters.

For me, that’s stopping to pet someone’s dog on the street.

We can be fierce. We can be sarcastic. We can be angry. We can also be funny, kind, and completely goofy. Those things aren’t contradictions—they’re what sustain us.

I hope all of you are finding your own little pockets of peace too.

Joyce Vance: That was beautifully said.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We’re not fighting for democracy because it’s some abstract ideal floating out there somewhere. We’re fighting for it because democracy is what allows us to have happy, meaningful, joyful lives.

If we can’t fight as happy warriors, then we’re losing something important along the way.

Thank you both for spending part of my birthday with me. I love you both.

And Katie, next week we’ll celebrate your birthday too.

Mary Trump: Absolutely.

Katie Phang: Maybe I’ll walk my dog during the livestream.

Mary Trump: Perfect. Let’s all walk our dogs.

Joyce Vance: Thanks, everyone, for joining us today.

Bye, everybody.

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Katie Phang

Law and Disorder

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Let's Talk About It: Katie Phang, Mary Trump and me on Life and Politics

In case you missed us live this morning, here’s the recording…

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6 days ago · 926 likes · 48 comments · Joyce Vance, Mary L Trump, and Katie Phang

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Donald has always viewed the presidency as an investment opportunity. Long before he returned to the White House, we knew he had no interest in serving the American people unless doing so also served him. What has changed during his second administration is not the existence of the corruption. It is the scale. It is the brazenness. And it is the complete absence of any effort to conceal it. They are no longer pretending to separate public service from private enrichment because they no longer believe they have to. The corruption is happening in broad daylight, and they expect us simply to accept it.

As one commentator recently put it, this is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is so blatant and so obvious that they are not even attempting to hide it anymore. Eric Trump becomes a strategic adviser to defense companies that suddenly begin winning Pentagon contracts. Jared Kushner travels the world after receiving a two billion dollar investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, earning more than one hundred million dollars in management fees while the investment itself produces virtually nothing. Donald Trump Jr. continues opening hotels and business ventures in the very countries where his father is conducting American diplomacy. Donald himself is wealthier than he has ever been. His sons are wealthier than they have ever been. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are wealthier than they have ever been. None of that is a coincidence.

It is also worth reminding ourselves that this has nothing to do with competence. None of them possess extraordinary business skills. None of them suddenly became innovators. None of them developed expertise that the rest of the marketplace somehow overlooked. They are becoming richer for one reason and one reason only. Donald is President of the United States.

Eric’s newest venture illustrates the point perfectly. He became Chief Strategy Advisor for Foundation Future Industries, a robotics company that, almost immediately afterward, secured twenty four million dollars in Defense Department contracts to develop humanoid robots for potential battlefield use. We are expected to believe this happened because Eric Trump possesses unique expertise in robotics. The company told CNBC that Eric invested before joining as an adviser. If you believe that, I have a bridge I would be delighted to sell you.

When Eric appeared on Fox Business to celebrate the Pentagon contract, he sounded remarkably enthusiastic about the future of military robotics.

Eric Trump: We have to win robotics in the United States of America. You had a great segment two days ago, Maria, about the robot in Beijing that was literally running marathons and beating the fastest marathoners by what, seven, eight minutes for a full marathon. I mean, these are in the very early days. We better be winning this race in the United States of America. We’re the greatest economy in the world. And that’s exactly what Sankett’s doing. And I’m telling you he’s doing a phenomenal job. When you go up and you interact with these robots and they fist bump you, they high five you, they follow your commands, you bring in AI autonomy. It’s going to change industry. It’s going to change military application. It’s going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited and I think it’s a very beautiful thing, but we must win this race.

Yes, apparently we must win this race because Eric Trump does not yet have enough money. The robots also sound considerably more human than most members of the Trump family, present company excluded, I hope.

Foundation Future Industries later announced that it would unveil a second generation model, proudly describing it as the strongest humanoid robot anywhere in the world, including China. A company spokeswoman insisted Eric played no role in securing the Defense Department contracts.

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Again, see my earlier comments regarding bridges for sale.

Eric also remains Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization, which increasingly appears to mean Executive Vice President in charge of finding new ways to separate American taxpayers from their money.

The robotics investment is only one piece of a much larger strategy. A Washington Post analysis published on July 13 found that investment funds linked to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump had poured money into more than a dozen defense technology companies that later received billions of dollars in government contracts. There is that remarkable coincidence again.

One of the largest investment vehicles behind those holdings is 1789 Capital. Donald Trump Jr. joined the firm as a partner within days of his father’s 2024 election victory. The company is run by Chris Buskirk, a political strategist for Vice President J.D. Vance, along with investor Omeed Malik. During the past year alone, the firm’s assets under management exploded from roughly two hundred million dollars to approximately three and a half billion dollars. Apparently that just happened because the firm is extraordinarily gifted.

In October 2025, Donald Trump Jr. traveled to Riyadh to promote 1789 Capital at a Saudi investment conference. During the event, he explained exactly why investors should trust the firm.

This is what Don Jr. said:

We understand what the administration wants to do because we helped craft some of that messaging so we can be on the outside but still have that understanding of what they plan to do. And that’s logical. When you look at what’s going on, I mean, one of the first stops was right here. Two trillion dollars in foreign direct investment since the start of the administration.

Think about what he is actually saying.

The selling point is no longer investment expertise. It is no longer financial performance. It is access to the President of the United States. Donald Trump Jr. openly tells investors that his firm understands exactly what the administration intends to do because it helped shape the messaging. He is not even pretending anymore. The value proposition is his proximity to presidential power.

For years we watched Republicans investigate Hunter Biden over allegations that he benefited from his father’s political position. Whether those investigations were justified is almost beside the point. What the Trump family is doing bears no resemblance to that. Hunter Biden did not openly travel the world telling investors they should hand him money because he helped shape White House policy. Donald Trump Jr. is doing exactly that, and he is doing it publicly.

When somebody pointed out that this represented an entirely different level of corruption, I could not have said it better myself. With Hunter Biden, we were talking primarily about nepotism. It was not a good look, but it was not a threat to the integrity of the American government. What Donald, Don Jr., Eric, Jared Kushner, and the rest of the family are doing is something altogether different. It is infinitely more corrupt, infinitely more dangerous, and infinitely more damaging to our institutions because they are monetizing the presidency itself.

Donald Trump Jr. could have saved everybody a great deal of time by simply saying, invest with us because our father is President of the United States and he is for sale.

That, unfortunately, would have been the honest version.

Of course, a Pentagon spokesperson insisted that no company receives preferential treatment and that outside political connections play absolutely no role in funding decisions. We know that is simply not true. Don Jr. has publicly discussed assisting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with personnel decisions, despite holding no government position, receiving no Senate confirmation, and having absolutely no official authority to influence the Department of Defense.

Think about that for a moment.

Don Jr., a private citizen whose primary qualification is sharing DNA with the President of the United States, was reportedly helping decide personnel matters inside the Pentagon. More specifically, those conversations centered on candidates who supported expanding spending on military drones. That is not merely inappropriate. It represents an extraordinary collapse of the distinction between private financial interests and public decision making.

Government ethics attorney Kathleen Clark captured the problem perfectly. This is what she said:

Clark: Even if not buying drones from China is in the public interest, it’s completely reasonable to doubt that it’s in the public interest when the Trump family is benefiting financially from it.

Exactly.

Even if a particular defense policy could be justified on its own merits, it becomes impossible to separate that policy from the financial interests of the people making it when the President’s family is actively investing in the very industries that stand to benefit. That is precisely why conflict of interest laws and ethical standards exist. They are designed to ensure that decisions affecting national security are made because they serve the country, not because they enrich the President’s family.

Instead, we are watching Donald and his children siphon money from the federal government into investment portfolios that continue growing more valuable as military spending increases. That is not only profoundly corrupt. It presents a genuine threat to national security because every military decision becomes clouded by legitimate questions about personal financial gain.

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The timing makes the situation even more disturbing.

After the ceasefire with Iran collapsed on July 8, the war resumed. Independent estimates now place the cost to American taxpayers at well above one hundred billion dollars, and that number continues climbing. Every additional weapons system purchased, every new military contract awarded, and every expansion of defense spending creates another opportunity for people connected to the Trump family to profit.

That is not a coincidence.

The defense investments are only one part of an ever expanding Trump business empire that has flourished since Donald returned to office. Donald’s financial disclosure, released at the end of June, reported that he earned approximately 2.2 dollars during 2025 alone. Roughly 1.4 billion dollars of that came from cryptocurrency ventures. Separate estimates now place Donald’s personal net worth at approximately 6.5 billion dollars.

If Donald truly is the brilliant businessman he has spent decades pretending to be, there is an obvious question.

Why was he unable to generate this kind of wealth before he regained the presidency?

The answer, of course, is that he could not.

During an interview with CNBC from the Oval Office on July 2, Donald attempted to explain how his fortune continues growing while insisting he remains completely detached from the process.

Donald: I’ve made money. I’ve made a tremendous amount of money, more than I would’ve ever thought I would’ve made. And I let people invest it. I don’t even know who they are, but it’s given to big firms that are on your show all the time. My son Eric handles it. I don’t talk to him about things such as this.

No.

That is neither true nor remotely believable.

We should remind ourselves that before Donald became President, the principal source of his wealth was his father. Fred Trump spent decades transferring enormous sums of money to Donald, often through questionable financial arrangements. Donald did not suddenly become a financial genius in his late seventies. He simply acquired something far more valuable than business talent. He acquired the presidency.

That is why World Liberty Financial has become one of the most lucrative enterprises in American political history.

The cryptocurrency venture enriching Donald and his children is operated largely by Eric and Donald Trump Jr. Yet somehow we are expected to believe there are no conflicts of interest. The White House has actually said as much, apparently assuming the American people are incapable of recognizing the obvious.

The remarkable part is that Donald himself effectively admitted the opposite during that same CNBC interview.

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After insisting Eric manages his investments independently, Donald acknowledged something that completely undermined his own defense. He admitted that because the presidency is so powerful, virtually anything his children do creates a conflict of interest.

Exactly.

That is the point.

Donald understands perfectly well that his family’s wealth is growing because of the office he holds. He simply does not care. Rather than avoiding those conflicts, he has embraced them. Rather than separating public office from private enrichment, he has fused the two into a single enterprise designed to benefit himself and his family.

Presidents, thanks to a deeply misguided Office of Legal Counsel memorandum, are generally exempt from the federal criminal conflict of interest statute. That legal reality explains why so much of this discussion revolves around ethics, disclosure, and public trust instead of criminal prosecution.

But legality has never been the appropriate standard.

The Presidency is not merely another job. It is a public trust. The American people expect the person occupying the Oval Office to make decisions based upon what benefits the country, not what benefits his own investment portfolio or the portfolios of his children.

Donald has rejected that principle entirely.

What concerns me almost as much as the corruption itself is how quickly we are becoming accustomed to it.

Simply documenting the corruption cannot be where the conversation ends. Democrats need to explain exactly what they intend to do when they regain power. They need to explain why this behavior is so dangerous to democratic government. They need to promise meaningful reforms that ensure no future president, regardless of party, can transform the office into a family investment fund.

Because if we fail to respond decisively, this becomes the new normal.

Donald has spent decades convincing millions of Americans that corruption is simply another form of success. During his second presidency, he has taken that idea to its logical conclusion. The presidency itself has become another Trump brand, another business venture, another mechanism through which public power is converted into private wealth.

Even if none of this surprises you because we are talking about Donald Trump, it should still sicken you.

It should sicken every American who believes public office exists to serve the public rather than enrich the people fortunate enough to occupy it. The danger is not only what Donald and his family are doing today. The danger is that future presidents may conclude they can do the same thing because nobody stopped them.

That is why this matters. It is bigger than Donald. It is about whether the presidency remains a public trust or becomes a private business. And if we allow that transformation to continue unchecked, we will lose far more than taxpayer dollars.

We will lose one of the most fundamental principles of American democracy: that public office belongs to the American people, not to the family of the person who happens to hold it.

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The 2026 World Cup came to an end on Saturday in New Jersey, where Spain defeated Argentina one nil in extra time to claim only its second World Cup championship. After six weeks of competition, the Spanish squad finally got its hands on the trophy after an extraordinarily long drought. It was a bizarre match because Spain had something like twenty shots on goal while Argentina, remarkably, had none until extra time.

I honestly could not believe Spain won by only a single goal. Argentina’s goalkeeper was phenomenal and kept his team alive for as long as humanly possible. But in the end, Spain prevailed. When FIFA President Gianni Infantino stepped forward to present the World Cup trophy, however, somebody else apparently decided he had won the tournament. Donald Trump absolutely refused to move out of the way as Spain celebrated its victory.

I do not think anything better encapsulates who Donald Trump is than that truly pathetic moment. Pathetic. Shameful. Humiliating. Embarrassing. Take your pick because every one of those words applies. That is what losers do. They bask in the reflected glory of people who actually earned something. Donald once again managed to make somebody else’s triumph about himself. Thank you, once again, for humiliating America on the world stage.

Fortunately, we also live in the age of Photoshop. Donald may have planted himself front and center during Spain’s celebration, but Spain’s official championship photograph tells a different story. Donald is nowhere to be found because, of course, he did not belong there in the first place. He did not play for Spain. He did not play for Argentina. He would not be able to kick a soccer ball more than a yard if you paid him and, of course, he would happily let you pay him to try.

There is another reason Spain probably was not interested in immortalizing Donald alongside its players. Over the last year, he has repeatedly insulted, denigrated, and threatened the Spanish government simply because Spain refused to capitulate to his demands, particularly regarding his illegal war of choice against Iran. Yet there he was, attempting to insert himself into one of the country’s proudest sporting moments as though none of that history existed. That level of entitlement has become so commonplace that we almost expect it now.

The reaction from the crowd at MetLife Stadium was equally revealing. As Donald walked onto the pitch, which for those Americans unfamiliar with international football simply means the field, the fans made their feelings unmistakably clear.

This is how the crowd greeted Donald:

Boo!

That was not simply a rejection of Donald personally. It was an auditory demonstration of just how respected America has become throughout much of the world under his leadership. It was also a useful reminder that it is no longer just Americans who cannot stand Donald. He has managed to unite people around the globe in their contempt for his behavior. That is quite an accomplishment, although probably not the one he was hoping for.

If this all seems strangely familiar, it should. During last year’s FIFA Club World Cup trophy ceremony, Donald helped present medals to Chelsea after its victory over Paris Saint-Germain. Most Americans probably did not notice because international club football does not receive much attention here. What happened next, however, was vintage Donald. After taking possession of one of the medals, he appeared to slip it into his pocket before walking away.

America has often been described as a kakistocracy under Donald, government by the least qualified people imaginable. Increasingly, however, it also resembles a kleptocracy because nobody steals quite like that guy. I have to admit, I was ninety nine percent certain he was going to try to walk away with the World Cup trophy itself. At this point, that almost would have been predictable.

While Donald was busy embarrassing himself at a soccer match, the consequences of his foreign policy continued to grow more severe. Axios reports that oil prices have now climbed above ninety dollars a barrel, nearly thirty dollars higher than they were before Donald launched his illegal and unconstitutional war of choice against Iran. Gasoline prices have climbed to nearly four dollars a gallon as the conflict enters its fifth month with no sign of ending. Donald continues to demonstrate that he is incapable of reaching a deal while ordinary Americans continue paying the price.

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Returning from the World Cup aboard Air Force One, Donald was asked about the Iran war. Once again, the justification for remaining in the conflict shifted dramatically from what he had previously claimed.

This is what Donald said:

Four or five weeks. Well, you keep hitting me. This is a far bigger job that we’re doing. We were doing a little job of stopping them from having a certain capability. Now we’re just ending it. So it’s really not the same thing. What we’re doing now is we’re ending any chance where they can have a nuclear missile. If you look at it after a week and a half, not four weeks, a week and a half, two weeks, we stopped them from probably, but I don’t want to have the word probably.

We stopped them from probably. I do not even know what that sentence means. Donald now insists this has become a much larger mission than originally described. First, we were supposedly preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear capability. Now we are permanently ending every possibility that it ever could. Never mind that Donald spent more than a year insisting that objective had already been accomplished. Never mind that President Obama actually achieved precisely that through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action before Donald recklessly dismantled it. The rationale for this war changes every time Donald opens his mouth because the war itself has slipped completely beyond his control.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Iran, which Donald repeatedly claimed was on the verge of collapse, is now wealthier and more influential throughout the region than it was before the war began. Donald refuses to articulate a coherent objective because there no longer appears to be one. Instead, he invents a new explanation each time somebody asks why American troops remain trapped in a conflict he promised would be short and decisive.

As this disaster continues, three more American service members have been killed. Two died in Jordan. One was killed in northern Iraq. Another remains missing. Those are not numbers. They are Americans whose families have paid the ultimate price because Donald launched a war he neither understood nor prepared for.

When asked about those losses, this is what Donald said:

Well, we feel very badly, but those great people, those great patriots who are out there fighting that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Iran has been very, very badly damaged. They’ve lost everything almost militarily. They’ve got very little left. They’ve got some missiles. They’ve got some drones. They’ve got some manufacturing ability, not much. We control the Strait. They don’t control anything. So we’ll see what happens, but we hit them very hard again tonight.

There is an obvious contradiction here. If Iran has truly lost everything militarily, why are American troops still dying? If Iran no longer poses a meaningful threat, why does Donald keep announcing new retaliatory strikes? He cannot simultaneously claim complete victory while acknowledging that Iran continues killing American service members. The reality is that Iran still possesses significant military capabilities, continues controlling the pace of this conflict, and has demonstrated that it is willing to absorb tremendous pain in order to drag the war out. Donald is the one desperately trying to negotiate an exit because he has no strategy beyond dropping more bombs.

The New York Times also reported that an earlier Iranian strike injured dozens of American service members and damaged multiple helicopters, yet the Pentagon withheld that information from the public. Military officials defended their silence by arguing that releasing additional details could provide Iran with useful intelligence for future attacks. That explanation might carry more weight if this administration had not repeatedly compromised sensitive information through its own breathtaking incompetence.

Central Command has also stopped releasing daily strike totals inside Iran, making it increasingly difficult to understand the true scope of this conflict. We are receiving less information about American casualties and even less about the number of Iranian civilians who are being killed. The administration that claimed it wanted to liberate the Iranian people appears increasingly determined to prevent Americans from learning what this war is actually costing.

I have said this many times because it remains true. We should never elect somebody who cares about nothing except money and his own enrichment. Anybody who cares about nothing but money ultimately cares very little about other human beings. That is exactly what we are witnessing now. American service members become statistics. Iranian civilians disappear behind classified reports. Human suffering becomes secondary to Donald’s political image and personal ambitions.

We have to do better next time. Above all else, we need to bring empathy back.

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Welcome back to Trump Trolls Trump, the weekly reminder that the most effective response to authoritarian absurdity is not fear. It is ridicule.

We are now 544 days into Donald’s second occupation of the Oval Office. Somehow, January of 2025 already feels like several geological eras ago, and yet here we are, looking back on Week 78 of a presidency that continues to redefine incompetence in increasingly creative ways.

As it turns out, we did not need to spend two full days watching Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing to understand why he should never be Attorney General of the United States. Republican Senator John Kennedy, Foghorn Leghorn of Louisiana managed to distill the entire problem into a single question.

This is what Senator John Kennedy asked:

Are you and President Trump friends?

This is how Blanche responded:

I’m his lawyer. Was his lawyer.

That should have ended the conversation.

Todd Blanche accidentally admitted exactly what everyone already knew but what he could never publicly acknowledge. He is not an independent public servant. He is Donald’s lawyer. Or, as he awkwardly corrected himself, Donald’s former lawyer. Either way, it is an extraordinary admission from somebody seeking to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

That brings us, naturally, to Donald himself.

Donald spent part of the week in Pennsylvania attending a summit on defense and weapons production. At least, that was supposedly the reason he was there. Before long, his attention wandered toward something he clearly considers far more important than national security.

The midterm elections.

More specifically, Donald wanted voters to remember a brand-new word he believes perfectly captures the Democratic Party. Not affordability, because according to Donald, that is apparently a fake word.

This is what Donald said:

I had my first news conference the day after I took office and they said, Affordability. Affordability. That’s a fake word that they use. They cause the affordability problem. It’s called high prices. They came up with this word. They’re good at coming up with words, but we came up with a good word too. They’re Democrats. Dumb. You take the B out. Most people don’t know that dumb is a B, okay? But the U replaces the E and you have a Dumocrat. And I just don’t understand because their policy is so dumb, what they’ve done to this country and what they will do to the country. If we don’t win the midterms or win the election, everything that I’m talking about, you can just write it off.

There is a lot to unpack there.

First, the only person who apparently did not know the word “dumb” ends with the letter B is the person attempting to explain it.

Second, Donald accidentally revealed what this election is really about for him.

When he warns that everything can simply be “written off” if Republicans lose the midterms, what he is really saying is that accountability might finally catch up with him. Donald understands perfectly well what losing congressional protection could mean. It could mean investigations. It could mean consequences. It could mean that he, along with several members of his family and administration, may finally have to answer for what they have done.

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That possibility appears to terrify him far more than inflation ever could.

Donald, of course, quickly moved on to another subject he understands even less than economics.

Physics.

To be fair, narrowing down the subjects Donald fails to understand has become increasingly difficult. We could spend hours discussing water pressure, shower heads, windmills supposedly murdering whales, or any number of other longstanding obsessions. This week, however, Donald returned to one of his favorites.

Magnets.

Nobody has spent more time proving they do not understand magnets than Donald Trump.

Sometimes magnets are dangerous. Sometimes they do not work. Sometimes they stop working because they get wet. Sometimes they are apparently the key to unimaginable wealth.

The rules change from sentence to sentence.

Donald: The elevators are no good, sir. They’re lifted up by magnets. So here’s my deal. I said, when Caterpillar tractor, and I watch more tractors than any human being on earth, rip earth, rip rock, right through a rock. It’s all hydraulic. So I said, when Caterpillar goes into the business of using magnets to lift up their little blades, and when they go away from hydraulic, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to do something. I’m going to start using magnets, but we don’t want to use them. So we’re not letting any... Pete, we’re not letting any more ships be built with the ridiculous... And the same thing with the magnetic elevators. We want them to be made hydraulic, which it can be hit by lightning. It can be hit by anything. When a little water touches the magnets, it doesn’t work anymore. You’re in the Atlantic Ocean with waves at a 60 feet high and the Pacific Ocean with waves at a 70 feet high. And they’re talking about magnets. It makes you want to get sick.

Personally, I would think sixty or seventy-foot waves would make most people sick long before magnets entered the conversation. I also remain completely unclear about which elevators Donald believes are suspended by magnets somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

What continues to amaze me is not simply that Donald says things like this. It is that tens of millions of people still listen to him as though any of it makes sense. There are weeks when it feels impossible for him to become more ridiculous, more uninformed, or more detached from reality.

Then he opens his mouth.

As though the first explanation were not bewildering enough, Donald somehow managed to contradict himself only moments later.

Donald: I hope you’re going to do magnets. Somebody out there, I hope you’re all brilliant people. Magnets. Do magnets. Okay. I’ll tell you how to make money. Do magnets. You’re doing a lot of great stuff. Do magnets because one thing we don’t have, but we’re getting close, but do magnets so... I hope John Gray is listening to me so he can give him a couple of bucks and go into the magnet business. I guarantee it’s going to be a success. It’s one thing we don’t, for some reason, it’s not complex, not hard.

Only Donald could spend several minutes insisting magnets are a catastrophic engineering failure before pivoting seamlessly into investment advice about the magnet industry.

Hydraulics are good.

Magnets are terrible.

Actually, magnets are the future.

Invest in magnets.

Avoid magnets.

All within the span of a single press conference.

It almost feels as though making sense has become optional inside the Trump regime.

Then again, perhaps consistency has never really been the point. Donald has spent his entire public life saying whatever serves him in the moment, regardless of whether it contradicts something he said thirty seconds earlier. Logic is irrelevant. Facts are negotiable. Reality is simply another obstacle to be ignored.

Unfortunately, that same approach extends well beyond magnets. It now shapes the propaganda ecosystem surrounding Donald, where television hosts, political allies, and administration officials spend every day asking Americans to reject what they can plainly see in favor of whatever fantasy Donald happens to be selling at that particular moment.

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And that is where we turn next.

If there is one thing the Trump propaganda machine has perfected over the last decade, it is convincing people that corporations and human beings have exactly the same interests. They do not.

Nevertheless, Fox State TV devoted another segment this week to making precisely that argument. Laura Ingraham triumphantly cited a survey ranking the best states in which to do business, pointing out that many of them are governed by Republicans. She then expressed genuine confusion over another ranking showing that many of those same states were among the least desirable places to live. Apparently she could not reconcile how a state could simultaneously be attractive to large corporations while failing the people who actually live there. This is, of course, only confusing if you deliberately ignore how the modern economy works.

Laura Ingraham: Now check out this recent list. Six hundred fifty CEOs were polled and they rated the best states in which to do business. The top ten, including Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina are Republican. They’re run by Republicans except Virginia, which is at number ten and North Carolina, kind of a purple state at number five. So money and people, resources are pouring into red states. So how do the socialists brush this off? Well, they do so either by ignoring it or distorting the data or with a little help from their friends. This CNBC report just comes out. They listed the ten worst states to live in for 2026. All the states on this list, okay, Trump won. Every state except Georgia in 2020. And the list included four of the top ten states for business. How does that make any sense?

The answer is remarkably straightforward. Businesses are not people, despite what the Supreme Court has spent years trying to convince us otherwise. Corporations evaluate states according to tax structures, labor costs, regulations, and how cheaply they can maximize profits. Human beings tend to care about somewhat different things.

They like functioning public schools, affordable healthcare, clean air and water, decent wages, safe communities, and the ability to build a stable life. Those priorities do not always overlap. A state can become extraordinarily profitable for corporations while becoming increasingly difficult for working families. In fact, that is often exactly how those corporations become so profitable in the first place. Workers produce the wealth while executives and shareholders collect the rewards. People are left paying higher costs for housing, education, and healthcare while being told they should celebrate because somebody else’s quarterly earnings look terrific. Oddly enough, most people do not enjoy being exploited, even if the corporations doing the exploiting happen to love the business climate.

Personally, I have always thought there was a fairly simple metric for determining whether a place has become politically unlivable. If Donald continues winning elections there, chances are something has gone terribly wrong. Fortunately, Fox State TV is no longer even pretending to understand that distinction. They simply conflate corporate prosperity with public well-being and hope viewers never notice that those are two entirely different conversations.

If Fox occasionally asks its audience to suspend disbelief, Newsmax asks them to abandon reality altogether. This week the network enthusiastically promoted Donald’s latest voter suppression effort, misleadingly titled the SAVE Act, by comparing voting in a constitutional democracy to shopping at Costco.

I wish I were exaggerating. Representative Ryan Zinke apparently decided that the best way to defend restricting voting rights was to point out that warehouse clubs require membership cards. Somewhere along the way, constitutional rights became interchangeable with bulk paper towels from Costco.

Representative Ryan Zinke: The bill before them, the SAVE America Act, demands that you should have an ID to vote and you should be a US citizen. You need to have an ID to go into Costco. But this is exactly what we face with the Democrats.

I actually like Costco. It is one of the few large corporations that has continued supporting diversity initiatives while paying employees a living wage. None of that, however, has anything whatsoever to do with voting. I have never walked into a polling place and been asked to present my Costco membership card. Nor have I ever been informed that buying mayonnaise in industrial quantities somehow establishes my citizenship. The comparison collapses almost immediately because it was never intended to withstand scrutiny. Like so many of the Trump regime’s arguments, it exists solely to distract from the actual objective. This legislation has never been about election security. It has always been about making voting more difficult for the people Donald assumes are less likely to support him. Dressing that effort up in the language of “common sense” does not change what it is.

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Of course, none of this exists in isolation. It is simply the latest chapter in Donald’s endless campaign to relitigate the 2020 election, a contest he lost by nearly eight million votes despite spending years insisting otherwise. Every recount confirmed the outcome. Every serious investigation confirmed the outcome. Court after court rejected the conspiracy theories because there was never credible evidence that widespread fraud changed the election. Donald lost. That simple reality has become the one fact he appears constitutionally incapable of accepting. So this week he tried again, delivering yet another nationally televised speech insisting that newly declassified documents proved China interfered in the election on behalf of Joe Biden. Thankfully, several major television networks recognized exactly what they were being offered and declined to broadcast another uninterrupted stream of misinformation.

By the following morning, the White House communications team had already begun defending Donald’s newest fiction. Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson reached for what may be one of the strangest analogies I have heard in quite some time. Apparently unlimited pasta at Olive Garden now provides an important constitutional lesson about American democracy.

Jackson: I saw a tweet yesterday from Olive Garden of all places that in order to take advantage of their never-ending pasta pass, you have to show voter ID. And I thought, that’s weird. Olive Garden takes pasta pass security more seriously than Democrats are taking election security. So yes, President Trump is going to keep pushing this and it just shows how absurd the Democrats are that they can’t even get behind common sense policies that even somewhere like Olive Garden can say, Hey, we need this for us too.

I honestly do not know where to begin. Voting as a registered American citizen is not remotely comparable to qualifying for discounted fettuccine. Constitutional rights are not loyalty programs. The right to participate in American democracy is not contingent upon satisfying the same requirements as an unlimited pasta promotion. The absurdity of the comparison is almost beside the point because it serves the same purpose as every other analogy this administration invents. It shifts attention away from the fact that Donald is still attempting to convince Americans that the 2020 election was stolen despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating otherwise.

The irony is that Donald’s own administration continues undermining his claims. Even the documents he released fail to support the conspiracy theory he desperately wants Americans to believe.

More importantly, they continue reinforcing what investigators concluded years ago: Russia interfered in the 2020 election in ways intended to benefit Donald Trump. That finding has not changed simply because Donald wishes it would. Evidence has an irritating tendency to survive propaganda campaigns, no matter how often they are repeated. Reality is stubborn that way.

That is ultimately why these performances have become so predictable. Every week there is another manufactured crisis, another conspiracy theory, another bizarre analogy, another desperate attempt to convince Americans not to believe their own eyes. Donald cannot defend his record, so he invents alternate realities. His allies cannot explain away his failures, so they compare constitutional rights to Costco memberships and Olive Garden promotions. The details change from week to week, but the strategy never does. Distract people long enough and perhaps they will forget what actually happened.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Donald keeps making the same mistake. He never stops talking. Every press conference, every rally, every interview, every rambling explanation about magnets, elections, or whatever new obsession captures his attention provides another reminder that beneath all the manufactured spectacle is simply a profoundly insecure man who cannot keep his own stories straight. These people desperately want to be feared. They want to project strength, inevitability, and power. Strip away the propaganda, however, and what remains is something considerably less impressive.

There is nothing intimidating about a movement that compares voting to buying bulk groceries, treats unlimited pasta as constitutional scholarship, and cannot decide whether magnets are destroying civilization or creating unimaginable wealth. There is only absurdity. And absurdity deserves exactly what we continue to give it. Not reverence. Not intimidation.

Ridicule.

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As the war of choice Donald started with Iran continues to spiral outward, he insists everything is under control. He points to oil production, praises the American military, and congratulates himself while the ceasefire he touted as a victory has collapsed, regional instability continues to spread, and the economic consequences of his decisions ripple across the globe. Donald continues to treat every setback as a public relations opportunity instead of acknowledging the damage his decisions have caused.

Unsurprisingly, given how feckless and indecisive Donald has been throughout this unnecessary, illegal, and unconstitutional war, the ceasefire between the United States and Iran has now collapsed. Over the weekend of July 11, Iran struck tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, prompting the United States to respond with strikes against Iranian targets. On July 14, the United States reinstated its naval blockade on ships traveling to and from Iranian ports, signaling that whatever brief pause existed has now given way to another dangerous escalation.

Rather than addressing the renewed fighting or explaining how the Trump regime intended to restore stability, Donald once again declared victory. Posting on his failing social media platform that same day, he wrote:

Oil is flowing like never before, thanks to the awesome power of the United States military.

The reality changed almost immediately. Within hours, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that it would move to close additional export routes beyond the Strait of Hormuz, declaring that regional energy exports are either shared by all or denied to all. That threat completely undermined Donald’s triumphant narrative. If anything, it demonstrated that Iran remains capable of disrupting global energy markets despite Donald’s repeated insistence that its military has been completely obliterated. Every new attack, every new threat, and every additional escalation makes it increasingly obvious that Donald is not controlling events. He is reacting to them.

The conflict has already expanded far beyond the narrow military objectives Donald initially claimed would bring peace to the region. Iran has also struck the Ras Laffan LNG terminal in Qatar, the Yanbu oil terminal in Saudi Arabia, and the Fujairah oil terminal in the United Arab Emirates. These are all critical pieces of regional energy infrastructure that will take months, and in some cases years, to repair. These are not symbolic targets. They are critical pieces of regional energy infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen continue threatening retaliation should Saudi Arabia expand its military operations, making it increasingly clear that this is no longer simply a conflict between the United States and Iran. Donald has helped transform it into a broader regional crisis.

As the conflict widens, the economic consequences continue to mount. Because the peace process has effectively collapsed, oil prices have climbed for a fourth consecutive trading session. By July 15, Brent crude had risen above $85 per barrel while West Texas Intermediate crude exceeded $80 per barrel. Both benchmarks are now approximately twelve percent higher than they were before the ceasefire collapsed, marking the sharpest sustained increase since the fighting resumed. These numbers are not simply market fluctuations. They are direct consequences of a war Donald chose to start and now appears incapable of containing.

Those consequences extend well beyond the price Americans pay at the gas station. The World Food Programme estimates that forty-five million additional people could be pushed into acute food insecurity this year if the conflict continues.

The World Bank projects fertilizer prices will increase by thirty-one percent during 2026, driven largely by a sixty percent jump in the cost of urea. Fertilizer affordability has now reached its worst level since 2022, creating enormous pressure on farmers already struggling with rising production costs and increasing uncertainty.

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This is not the first time Donald has celebrated rising oil prices as though they somehow represent an American victory. He consistently evaluates economic events through a single question: does this make wealthy people like him richer? If the answer is yes, then he considers the outcome a success regardless of how much pain it causes everyone else.

Months before this latest escalation, on March 12, Donald posted on social media:

The United States is the largest oil producer in the world by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.

That single word, we, reveals exactly how Donald views the presidency. He is not talking about American families paying more to fill their gas tanks. He is not talking about farmers facing soaring fertilizer costs or consumers watching grocery prices continue to climb. He is talking about himself and the extraordinarily wealthy oil executives whose profits increase as energy prices rise. They benefit from higher prices while everyone else bears the cost.

Ordinary Americans do not make more money when oil prices increase. They spend more money. Farmers pay more for fertilizer, transportation becomes more expensive, food production costs rise, and families ultimately pay higher prices at the grocery store. Donald’s wealthy donors and corporate allies may celebrate higher oil prices because they improve quarterly profits, but working Americans experience those same price increases as another financial burden. Once again, Donald’s policies reward the people who need help the least while shifting the costs onto everyone else.

The disruption extends well beyond the United States. Roughly eleven million barrels of crude oil per day have effectively disappeared from global markets compared to the approximately twenty million barrels that moved through the Strait of Hormuz before this conflict began. Before Donald launched this unnecessary war, the Strait remained open and global energy markets continued to function. Nearly all of the world’s spare oil production capacity sits in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which depend on that narrow waterway to export most of their oil. As long as the conflict continues, those supplies remain vulnerable.

As energy prices continue climbing, agricultural production becomes more expensive across the globe. Asia has already borne much of that burden because most Persian Gulf oil is exported there. Pakistan has closed schools in an effort to conserve energy, while India has experienced shortages of liquefied petroleum gas used for cooking. These are the real-world consequences of Donald’s decisions. A reckless war launched without constitutional authority has made it more difficult for families thousands of miles away to cook meals, for farmers to grow crops, and for millions of people to afford food.

Donald continues to boast about military strength and rising oil production as though those numbers alone define success. The rest of the world is left confronting the far more meaningful measure of his presidency: higher prices, greater instability, a widening regional war, and a growing humanitarian crisis that becomes more severe with each passing day.

The political consequences of this war have become just as difficult for Donald to ignore as the economic consequences. Americans were promised that Donald would end wars, lower prices, and restore stability. Instead, they have watched him launch an unnecessary conflict that has driven up the cost of living, destabilized an already volatile region, and weakened America’s standing abroad. Unsurprisingly, the public is beginning to respond.

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A new Economist/YouGov poll conducted between July 3 and July 6 found Donald’s job approval at its lowest level on record, matching the worst numbers of both of his presidencies and even the lowest point of Joe Biden’s administration. A separate poll released by Focaldata that same week described Donald’s standing as an all-time low, placing him twenty-three points underwater with voters. Those numbers are not simply a reflection of dissatisfaction with one policy decision. They represent growing frustration with an administration that has repeatedly demonstrated incompetence while insisting everything is proceeding exactly according to plan.

CNN’s Harry Enten recently explained just how dramatically public opinion has shifted on Donald’s handling of foreign policy.

This is what Harry Enten reported:

Bad. Bad. I mean, he came into office during the campaign saying, “I’m going to end the wars.” Well, the wars aren’t ending and, if anything, we’re adding to them. Trump and foreign policy in 2024 versus Kamala Harris—foreign policy was a strength for this president. He was trusted more on foreign policy than Kamala Harris by a ten-point margin. Among independents, he was trusted more by fourteen points. Now look at his net approval on foreign policy in 2026. Down he goes right into the negative direction. Look at this. Twenty-two points in the negative, a minus twenty-two net approval rating. That’s a drop of over thirty points.

The idea that anybody ever believed Donald Trump would be better on foreign policy than almost anyone else has always been astonishing to me. Somehow, millions of people convinced themselves that an ignorant, ill-informed man with no understanding of history, diplomacy, or international alliances would excel at managing the most complicated geopolitical crises in the world. The fact that he was trusted more than his opponent on foreign policy says far more about the success of his political mythology than it does about his actual competence. Unfortunately, mythology has a way of collapsing when confronted with reality, and the reality of Donald’s foreign policy has been catastrophic.

Despite those polling numbers, the White House continues insisting that Donald’s presidency has been an unparalleled success. A White House spokesman recently told Newsweek that no president in American history has accomplished more for the American people than Donald, pointing to job creation and efforts to cool inflation as evidence of his success.

Oddly enough, I agree with the first part of that statement.

Donald has accomplished more than almost any president in American history, depending entirely on how you define accomplishment.

He has enriched himself more than any president in American history. He has shattered democratic norms more aggressively than any president in American history. He has demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to place his own interests above those of the country. And he has managed to inflict extraordinary damage on the American economy with remarkable speed and breathtaking efficiency.

If those are accomplishments, then yes, Donald stands alone.

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The polling suggests that more Americans are beginning to recognize exactly what this war has cost them. Earlier surveys tied the decline in Donald’s approval directly to the conflict with Iran and the resulting spike in gasoline prices. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May found that Donald’s approval rating had failed to rise above thirty-six percent after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. Only a year earlier, that number had hovered around forty percent.

Even more revealing, three-quarters of respondents—including roughly half of all Republicans—said Donald’s administration was at least partly responsible for soaring gasoline prices, which had increased dramatically since the war began. That should alarm Republicans far more than any overall approval number. General election voters can be persuaded. Members of your own party are much harder to convince once they begin abandoning you.

The economic concerns extend well beyond energy prices. An Associated Press-NORC poll conducted in mid-May found Republican dissatisfaction with Donald’s handling of the economy had reached a new high, while only one-third of Americans approved of his stewardship of the economy overall. Those numbers reflect something much larger than temporary frustration. They suggest that Americans are beginning to connect the consequences they experience in their daily lives with the decisions Donald continues making in the White House.

That connection matters because Donald has always depended on one central political myth: that he is uniquely competent on the economy. Throughout his political career, he has cultivated the image of a brilliant businessman capable of solving complex problems simply through instinct and force of personality. That myth has survived repeated bankruptcies, failed businesses, criminal convictions, and endless evidence of financial incompetence because enough people continued believing the fiction. But higher gas prices, rising grocery bills, increasing costs for farmers, and an expanding war are much harder to explain away.

Americans can see those consequences every time they fill their gas tanks, buy groceries, or hear reports of yet another escalation in the Middle East. They do not need economists to explain that their lives have become more expensive. They are living it.

These numbers should be a political death knell, or at least they should be. If I were a Republican running for office this year, I would be doing everything possible to distance myself from this increasingly destructive lame duck president. Every week this war continues, every additional rise in energy prices, and every new escalation further ties Republican candidates to an administration that has become synonymous with instability, higher costs, and failed leadership.

Donald promised strength. He promised peace. He promised prosperity.

Instead, he delivered a war that has destabilized an entire region, driven up the global cost of energy, increased the price of food, damaged America’s credibility abroad, and left millions of people paying for a conflict that never needed to happen in the first place.

That is not successful leadership.

It is simply the latest reminder that Donald continues measuring success by what benefits him personally while the rest of the world bears the consequences.

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Justice delayed has always been justice denied. That is especially true for survivors of sexual abuse.

While Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sits before the Senate Judiciary Committee seeking confirmation to permanently lead the Department of Justice, his department continues to face mounting questions over its handling of the Epstein files and its refusal to provide critical records to New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. Those records are needed to continue an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch on behalf of survivors who have been waiting far too long for justice.

On June 30, Attorney General Torrez sent a letter to Todd Blanche warning that every day those records remain out of reach makes future prosecutions more difficult. On June 9, Torrez publicly expressed hope that the Department of Justice would cooperate with New Mexico’s investigation by providing the requested federal records. He explained that those documents are essential if his office is to fully investigate what happened at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch and pursue justice for survivors.

This is what Raúl Torrez said during an interview with NBC.

Reporter: To do this, to conduct this investigation, you obviously need materials. You need information. And you have asked, and you referenced this yesterday too, that you’ve asked the DOJ for unredacted access to the Epstein files and you still do not have it. Why do you think that is?

Torrez: Well, look, we’re working through a process. It’s called the two week process. It’s complicated, but the bottom line is there is a longstanding practice of federal law enforcement and state law enforcement collaborating, coordinating, sharing information. We have engaged the Department of Justice. We are still waiting for that access. It is frustrating. I’ll tell you that it is hindering our ability to move this investigation forward at the pace that I would like.

As of July 15, two weeks had passed since Torrez sent that letter accusing the Department of Justice of withholding records necessary to continue the investigation into Epstein’s ranch. According to Torrez, those records still had not been produced.

His warning could not have been more direct.

Without complete and prompt access to relevant, unredacted federal records, survivors are being denied justice. Every delay makes accountability more difficult. Witnesses relocate. Memories, already burdened by years of trauma, become less reliable. The opportunity to bring meaningful prosecutions continues to deteriorate.

Torrez wrote:

Every day that the USDOJ withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes. Witnesses relocate and become unreachable. Memories, already strained by years of trauma, fade further.

After Torrez’s letter became public, a US Department of Justice spokesperson insisted the agency had already provided a substantive response to New Mexico’s request and remained willing to assist the investigation.

If that is true, then what exactly is the problem?

Provide the records.

Saying you have provided “substantive” materials is not the same thing as providing all of the materials investigators need. More importantly, this Department of Justice has done very little to earn the public’s trust. Since the beginning, first under Pam Bondi and now under Todd Blanche, the department has consistently delayed, obscured, and resisted efforts to fully release the Epstein files.

At this point, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that delay itself has become the objective.

Whether the goal is to protect powerful individuals whose names may appear throughout those records or simply to prevent additional scrutiny, the practical effect is the same. Survivors wait while evidence grows older and opportunities for justice diminish.

That issue followed Todd Blanche into his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15. During the hearing, Senator Dick Durbin questioned Blanche not only about transparency surrounding the Epstein files but also about the Department of Justice’s obligation to the survivors themselves.

This is what Senator Dick Durbin asked Todd Blanche.

Let me talk to you for a moment about the survivors who are in the room. There are ten individuals who were exploited and abused by Mr. Epstein. They are here today. None of them have had a chance to speak to anyone in the department or FBI, though they’ve asked repeatedly. So can I get your word under oath that within the next thirty days you will personally sit down with these ten victims and hear their case in terms of what needs to be done by the Department of Justice?

This is how Todd Blanche responded:

Chairman, I appreciate them being here today. I also have somebody from my office who’s spent her entire career working on cases like Mr. Epstein’s. She’s in charge of our task force investigating human trafficking. She’s available to talk to them.

Senator Durbin was not asking whether someone else could meet with them.

He was asking whether Todd Blanche would.

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Durbin continued.

She can sit right next to you. She can sit right next to you when you meet with these survivors.

Blanche responded:

I have never said I will not meet with survivors.

Durbin pressed him again.

Will you meet with these ten survivors? I’m asking you on the record.

Blanche replied:

If they have lawyers, as you know, I’m prohibited from meeting directly with them. I have met with counsel for survivors, as have many people in the Department of Justice. But if they are represented by counsel, we will work with their counsel. If they don’t have a lawyer, I will certainly make arrangements to make sure the right people at the Department of Justice meet with them.

Durbin continued.

Will you get it done within the next thirty days?

Blanche answered:

I will get it done today if that’s necessary. My point is there’s somebody here who can meet with them today, get their information and arrange to meet with them.

Durbin closed with a point that should never have needed to be made.

I think you ought to be in the room because you ought to hear this. You have singular responsibility for these files.

That exchange speaks volumes.

Todd Blanche repeatedly searched for ways to delegate the responsibility. He pointed to staff members. He pointed to procedures. He pointed to lawyers. At no point did he simply embrace the opportunity to sit down with the survivors himself.

That reluctance stands in stark contrast to the time Blanche voluntarily spent meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co conspirator in the rape and sex trafficking of girls and young women.

Blanche did meet with the 10 survivors after pressure from lawmakers on Thursday. He also found the time to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell. He has struggled to find the same urgency for the people she victimized. That contrast is impossible to ignore.

As the New Mexico Attorney General continues to make clear, the Department of Justice is withholding records that could allow investigators to continue pursuing crimes connected to Epstein’s New Mexico ranch. Every day those records remain unavailable makes meaningful accountability more difficult.

That is unacceptable.

It also raises an obvious question.

Why does Todd Blanche appear so committed to slowing investigations that could help survivors finally obtain justice? His actions increasingly suggest that his highest priority is not uncovering the truth but controlling access to it.

Time and again, Todd Blanche demonstrates that he is not acting like the Attorney General of the United States. He continues to act like Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney.

That distinction matters because the Attorney General’s client is not the President. It is the United States of America.

The Department of Justice exists to pursue justice wherever the facts lead, regardless of politics or personal relationships. When it instead becomes an institution that delays investigations, withholds evidence, and frustrates efforts by state prosecutors to seek accountability, it ceases to fulfill its most fundamental purpose.

The survivors deserve better.

The American people deserve better.

And until the Department of Justice begins acting in the interest of justice rather than in the interest of protecting powerful people, those questions will only become more urgent.

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Donald’s nominees continue to struggle with the most basic facts. They reject any history that does not fit the mythology he has created, and they seem far more concerned with demonstrating personal loyalty to Donald than with telling the truth to the American people.

Over the past several days, that pattern played out repeatedly during confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill.

Donald’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence refused to acknowledge who won the 2020 presidential election. Another nominee claimed ignorance about Tulsi Gabbard’s role in the FBI raid on Fulton County’s election office in Georgia, despite the fact that it happened only months ago. Donald’s nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control could not even commit to refusing an illegal order from the President. And Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche once again tied himself into knots attempting to defend the indefensible while continuing to shield Donald from accountability over the Epstein files.

Taken individually, each exchange was disturbing. Taken together, they reveal something much more dangerous. Donald is not selecting public servants. He is selecting people willing to deny objective reality if doing so pleases him.

Donald’s nominee’s are lying through their teeth because they desperately want to continue working for, or begin working for, a pathetic little man they are apparently terrified of offending.

The Senate Intelligence Committee held this confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, Donald’s nominee to replace Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. It is difficult to overstate how important this position is. The Director of National Intelligence oversees the nation’s intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the NSA, and works closely with the FBI and countless other intelligence organizations. The entire purpose of the position is to provide the President with accurate intelligence, even when that intelligence is inconvenient or politically damaging.

The job is not to protect the President’s feelings. The job is to tell the truth. Does anybody honestly believe somebody unwilling to acknowledge who won an election four years ago would tell Donald something he does not want to hear today?

Not if he wants to keep his job.

Jon Ossoff, Democratic Senator from Georgia recognized exactly what was happening and continued pressing Clayton during the hearing.

This is the exchange:

Ossoff: It’s a simple question, Mr. Clayton.

Clayton: I’ve answered it.

Ossoff: Who won the 2020 presidential election?

Clayton: I’ve answered it.

Ossoff: You are here asking for the support of senators to lead America’s intelligence community. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with this committee and with the American public, but you refuse to answer a simple matter of fact about the 2020 election. Is that right?

Clayton: No, that’s not right.

Ossoff: Then answer the question. Who won the 2020 election?

Clayton: I have answered the question.

Ossoff: Answer it. What is your answer?

Clayton: I’ve given you my answer.

Ossoff: What is your answer? You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election, but you ask to lead America’s intelligence community. Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know you know. Everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question. Why can you not give it?

Clayton: I think I gave you the answer.

No.

He could not given the answer because he knows exactly what would happen if he did.

If he simply stated the obvious fact that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election by nearly eight million votes, Donald would immediately withdraw his nomination.

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Clayton understands that. Every nominee understands that. Their confirmations are contingent upon demonstrating absolute loyalty, not competence. That is why they continue speaking in this absurd coded language about certifications, procedures, and Electoral College votes while refusing to utter one simple sentence.

Joe Biden won. Donald Trump lost. Those facts remain intolerable inside the Trump regime because Donald himself cannot tolerate them.

If I had been asking questions during that hearing, I would have taken a different approach. I would have asked who won the 2016 election. Then I would have asked who won the 2012 election. Then 2008. Then 2004.

I suspect they would answer every single one correctly. Only one election has become unspeakable. Only one historical fact has been erased from acceptable Republican discourse. That tells you everything you need to know.

The hearing became even more disturbing when Clayton was questioned about Tulsi Gabbard’s involvement in the FBI raid on Fulton County’s election offices in Georgia earlier this year.

This was not an obscure historical event. It happened only six months ago. It involved the very office Clayton hopes to lead. And yet he suddenly developed an astonishing case of selective amnesia.

This is what Senator Jon Ossoff asked.

Ossoff: Are you aware that Director Gabbard was present at the Fulton County raid in Georgia earlier this year?

Clayton: You discussed that with me yesterday in your office.

Ossoff: Are you aware that Director Gabbard was present at the Fulton County raid earlier this year?

Clayton: You brought it to my attention yesterday.

Ossoff: What is going on here? You’ve said at the beginning of this you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee. I’m asking a very simple question. Are you aware that Director Gabbard was present at the Fulton County raid earlier this year? Yes or no?

Clayton: I was...

Ossoff: You won’t answer that question either.

Clayton: I just said I was made aware of it by you yesterday.

Ossoff: The first time you learned that Director Gabbard was present at that raid was in my office yesterday?

Clayton: It was the first time that, in my recollection, I’ve thought about it recently. Now, was I aware of it before? You brought it to my attention yesterday. I had not thought...

Ossoff: So you had not known until...

Clayton: I had not thought about it until you brought it to my attention yesterday.

Ossoff: Your answers lack credibility. Your testimony lacks credibility. You’re being evasive and you’re not being candid or forthright. Everybody across the country is going to watch this and know that.

Ossoff: Are you aware that former Director Gabbard testified that her presence at the raid was requested by the president?

Clayton: I’m not aware of that until now.

What?

How could he possibly not know? This is a man seeking confirmation to oversee the nation’s intelligence apparatus. He either knew and lied about it, or he truly did not know one of the most controversial actions taken by the office he hopes to inherit. Neither possibility inspires confidence.

As Senator Ossoff pointed out, these confirmation hearings are job interviews. The nominees are expected to answer questions honestly, demonstrate competence, and reassure senators that they can be trusted with enormous responsibility.

Donald Trump’s nominees do exactly the opposite. They evade. They deflect. They pretend not to remember. They refuse to acknowledge reality when reality happens to inconvenience Donald Trump. And somehow they expect the American people to forget everything we have watched unfold over the last several years.

That is not intelligence. It is obedience. And that increasingly appears to be the only qualification Donald requires.

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The same pattern continued when the Senate Health Committee held a confirmation hearing for Dr. Erica Schwartz, Donald’s nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan asked Schwartz a direct and entirely reasonable question: if Donald instructed her to take an action that violated the law, would she follow the law or obey him? For anybody seeking to lead one of the most important public health agencies in the world, the answer should have been immediate and unequivocal.

This is what Senator Maggie Hassan asked Dr. Erica Schwartz:

Hassan: Dr. Schwartz, just a few minutes ago, you said in response to a question from Senator Kaine, you will always follow the law. So just to be clear, if the President of the United States instructs you to take an action that would break the law, will you follow the law or follow the President’s instruction, Dr. Schwartz?

This is what Dr. Erica Schwartz said:

Schwartz: The President would never ask me not to follow the law, but I will always follow the law.

Senator Hassan responded:

Dr. Schwartz, there are multiple examples of the President actively instructing people to break the law over and over again. So I hope you will update yourself on that because it’s not a satisfactory response to say he would never do that.

Yes, Donald would never do the thing he does on a regular basis. That is like saying Donald never lies. Give me a break. This is the quality of nominee we are getting from the Republican Party: people who cannot answer basic questions because the truthful answer might offend Donald. Schwartz could have simply said she would obey the law under all circumstances. Instead, she began by protecting Donald from a hypothetical that is barely hypothetical, given the number of times he has pressured officials to ignore legal limits or bend institutions to serve his personal interests.

Then, of course, there is the execrable Todd Blanche, Donald’s former personal attorney, although he still behaves very much like Donald’s personal attorney, who is also serving as Acting Attorney General. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee opened a two day confirmation hearing on whether to give Blanche the position permanently. Doing so would inflict untold damage on a Department of Justice that has already been profoundly compromised.

Blanche is the person Donald can rely upon to help with his Epstein problem, and he has repeatedly demonstrated that he is willing to bend over backwards to do exactly that. He is also the Justice Department official who personally met twice with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co conspirator in the rape and sex trafficking of girls and young women. Blanche was instrumental in Maxwell’s transfer to a minimum security facility, where she now enjoys privileges unavailable to most inmates convicted of comparable crimes.

Blanche is despicable, and yet he is poised to assume the most powerful law enforcement position in the country. During the hearing, Senator Dick Durbin asked whether Blanche would extend to Epstein’s survivors the same personal attention he extended to Maxwell. Ten survivors were sitting in the room. According to Durbin, none of them had been given an opportunity to speak with Blanche or anyone else at the Department of Justice or FBI, despite repeatedly asking to do so.

This is what Senator Dick Durbin asked Todd Blanche:

Let me talk to you for a moment about the survivors who are in the room. There are ten individuals who were exploited and abused by Mr. Epstein. They are here today. None of them have had a chance to speak to anyone in the department or FBI, though they’ve asked repeatedly. So can I get your word under oath that within the next thirty days you will personally sit down with these ten victims and hear their case in terms of what needs to be done by the Department of Justice?

This is what Todd Blanche said:

Chairman, I appreciate them being here today. I also have somebody from my office who’s spent her entire career working on cases like Mr. Epstein’s. She’s in charge of our task force investigating human trafficking. She’s available to talk to them.

Senator Durbin pressed him:

She can sit right next to you. She can sit right next to you when you meet with these survivors.

Blanche responded:

I have never said I will not meet with survivors.

Senator Durbin asked again:

Will you meet with these ten survivors? I’m asking you on the record.

Blanche replied:

If they have lawyers, as you know, I’m prohibited from meeting directly with them.

Blanche does not care about the survivors. He cares only about doing Donald’s bidding. Blanche had no difficulty personally meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and Epstein’s co conspirator, but when ten survivors ask him to sit down and hear them, he suddenly discovers procedural complications and delegates the responsibility to somebody else.

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This is not Blanche’s first time obfuscating about Epstein and the Epstein files. During a Senate hearing in May on the Justice Department’s budget, Senator Jeff Merkley asked Blanche whether the Epstein investigation remained open. Blanche, who now leads the Department of Justice, suddenly appeared unsure what the term “Epstein investigation” even meant.

This is what Senator Jeff Merkley asked Todd Blanche:

I want to go on to the Epstein investigation. Is it closed or open?

Blanche responded:

When you say the Epstein investigation, what are you referring to, Senator?

Senator Merkley clarified:

Well, the FBI said last year in July that it had closed the Epstein investigation. So I’m just using their words. Is it open or closed?

Blanche replied:

I don’t believe the FBI said that. I mean, if you’re referring to...

Senator Merkley interrupted:

Well, you’re head of the Department of Justice. Is the Epstein investigation open or closed?

Blanche answered:

I guess I don’t understand what Epstein investigation means. The investigation of Jeffrey Epstein himself?

These people are liars, but it is so much worse than that. They are seeking positions from which they can destroy the rule of law in this country. Blanche, in particular, has demonstrated that he is absolutely and utterly willing to do so in order to protect one of the most prolific and recidivist criminals in American history, Donald Trump.

The evasions in these hearings are not isolated incidents. They are part of a pattern. Jay Clayton refuses to say who won the 2020 presidential election because Donald cannot tolerate the truth. Clayton claims ignorance about Tulsi Gabbard’s involvement in a federal raid he should understand if he wants to run the intelligence community. Erica Schwartz cannot simply say she would reject an unlawful order because even acknowledging that Donald might issue one is apparently unacceptable. Todd Blanche will meet personally with Ghislaine Maxwell but will not commit to meeting with Epstein’s survivors. He then pretends not to understand what senators mean when they ask about the Epstein investigation.

They all know what they are doing. They are denying reality, evading basic questions, and humiliating themselves because protecting Donald is more important to them than telling the truth. That is not public service. It is submission to a criminal boss.

The danger is not merely that these people lie. The danger is that they are being placed in charge of institutions whose legitimacy depends upon truth, independence, and fidelity to the law. The Director of National Intelligence must tell the president facts he does not want to hear. The head of the CDC must follow science and the law, even when the president objects. The Attorney General must serve the United States, not the person occupying the Oval Office.

Donald does not want any of that. He wants officials who will indulge his delusions, erase inconvenient facts, and protect him from accountability. He wants people who understand that their positions depend entirely upon refusing to acknowledge reality whenever reality threatens him.

That is why they are lying. They are not confused. They are not forgetful. They are not struggling to understand the questions. They know the truthful answers, and they know that giving them could cost them Donald’s approval and, therefore, their jobs.

Every one of these hearings is exposing the same thing. Donald is not building a government of qualified public servants. He is assembling a collection of loyalists willing to discredit themselves, corrupt the institutions they lead, and deny what everybody knows to be true in order to protect their criminal boss.

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This week, protesters gathered outside the office of Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, after an ICE agent shot and killed a twenty-six-year-old Colombian man. The circumstances surrounding the shooting remain deeply contested because federal officials themselves cannot seem to agree on what happened.

The Department of Homeland Security claimed officers had been conducting surveillance at the home of someone believed to be in the country illegally and subject to a final removal order. According to DHS, when officers attempted to stop a vehicle leaving the property, the driver tried to flee and an ICE agent, “fearing for public safety,” opened fire.

Senator Angus King, however, said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gave him a different explanation entirely. According to King, Mullin claimed the driver attempted to use his vehicle as a weapon against ICE officers. King also revealed something equally disturbing: the arrest warrant officers were attempting to serve was not even for the man they ultimately killed.

According to the Associated Press, the officers involved were not wearing body cameras, leaving enormous questions unanswered and perhaps forever unanswerable. It remains unclear how close the agents actually were to the vehicle, whether they ordered the driver to stop, or why ICE believed he posed a threat to the public.

The driver has been identified as Johan Sebastian Guerrero.

Local residents gathered to mourn him.

This is what protesters in Biddeford, Maine, had to say:

We are not afraid. Everyone has a right to be here. Everyone has a right to be alive. No one has a right to be killed.

Local television also documented the aftermath.

This is what WCVB Channel 5 Boston reported:

With candles and signs, hundreds in Biddeford marched together as the family of Johan Sebastian Guerrero grieves. The twenty-six-year-old husband and father from Colombia was shot and killed by ICE agents this morning.

They’re terrified and they are trying to figure out what to do next.

I just heard really loud bangs and I kind of looked out the window and here we go with tons of cops.

New video shows the moment a white car is going in circles in the intersection as agents walk over.

All of a sudden all these plainclothes vested men started running down the street, abandoning their cars kind of everywhere.

Maine Senator Angus King says the Secretary of Homeland Security told him the man shot by ICE was not their target. Immigration advocates say he was authorized to work in the United States and had a Social Security number. But in a statement, DHS says it was conducting surveillance, saying a car left the residence, but when the driver didn’t stop, an officer started shooting, fearing for public safety.

Not one word that comes out of the Department of Homeland Security should be accepted without scrutiny. This is a corrupt agency that, increasingly, appears to operate outside the law.

Law enforcement officers, including ICE agents, are not supposed to fire into moving vehicles except under the most extreme, life-threatening circumstances. Looking at the video that has been released so far, there is no obvious evidence that such circumstances existed. That is precisely why body cameras matter. That is precisely why transparency matters. And that is precisely why so many questions remain unanswered.

The shooting in Maine marked the second time in a single week that ICE agents used deadly force. It is also at least the ninth death linked to Donald’s immigration crackdown.

My suspicion is that the real number is significantly higher.

We still have remarkably little visibility into what is happening inside ICE detention facilities, where transparency has steadily disappeared and independent oversight has become increasingly difficult.

Just days earlier, federal immigration agents fatally shot longtime Houston resident Lorenzo Salgado Araujo while pursuing him through Houston’s East End. Authorities initially claimed he had attempted to use his vehicle as a weapon against ICE officers.

Video evidence tells a far more complicated story.

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This is what NBC News reported:

New video shows the clearest images yet of what led up to the deadly shooting of fifty-two-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents. This video posted by his son shows Araujo leaving for work that morning. Surveillance video later picks him up turning a corner, being tailed by a dark SUV that appears to try to get around the van. Another angle shows a second SUV cutting through a parking lot to catch up. Moments later, the vehicles circle back around and ICE agents appear to pull someone from the van. Salgado is then seen on the ground moments after being shot.

DHS initially said Salgado weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE officer who fired in self-defense. That is simply false.

Tonight, Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia says the acting ICE director told her Salgado wasn’t the target.

Once again, the man who died was reportedly not even the person ICE had been looking for.

ICE was searching for someone subject to a final removal order whom officers believed had entered the van.

That explanation raises even more disturbing questions.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire has since said the FBI is refusing to share evidence with the Houston Police Department, preventing local investigators from conducting what should be a routine homicide investigation.

This is what Mayor Whitmire said:

The FBI has all the evidence that would normally go into an HPD or other law enforcement agency’s investigation. They have the evidence. In this instance, the van, the passengers, the deceased, and they’re tightly controlling it. We’ve reached out to them and asked them, share that information with HPD.

That should alarm every American regardless of political affiliation.

When deadly force is used by federal agents, transparency should increase, not disappear. Evidence should be shared with investigators, not withheld from them. Public confidence depends upon independent investigations, especially when the government itself is responsible for taking a human life.

None of this should have happened.

Johan Sebastian Guerrero should still be alive.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo should still be alive.

Every other person who has died during these operations should still be alive.

That remains true even if the individuals ICE was attempting to arrest had committed crimes because this country still has something called due process.

The Constitution guarantees that people accused of crimes are entitled to have those accusations tested in a court of law. They are entitled to legal representation. They are entitled to present evidence in their own defense. They are entitled to have guilt determined by a judge or jury, not by an armed federal agent making a split-second decision on the side of a road.

Increasingly, however, ICE agents appear to be operating with the blessing of Tom Homan, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the rest of the Trump regime as though those constitutional protections no longer matter.

They are behaving as judge, jury, and executioner.

That is incompatible with any functioning democracy.

Going forward, anybody who is serious about seeking public office in the United States, whether in the House of Representatives or the Senate, should be prepared to answer a very simple question.

What are you prepared to do about ICE?

In my view, every candidate who claims to believe in democracy and the Constitution should commit to doing everything within their power to defund the agency in its current form.

ICE has become so deeply corrupted by violence, secrecy, and authoritarianism that meaningful reform no longer appears possible. Institutions that repeatedly escape accountability while accumulating greater power rarely reform themselves. They become more abusive, more insulated, and more dangerous.

There has to be a better way.

The only way to find it is to start over.

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Last night in the Oval Office, Donald signed proclamations stripping federal protections from millions of acres surrounding Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah. The move clears the way for expanded drilling, mining, grazing, and commercial development across landscapes rich in archaeological sites, fossils, and lands sacred to Native American tribes.

This is what Donald said:

We’re terminating certain monuments. They call it monuments, not the ones we have outside, but these are large thousands of acres. It’s a total of almost three million acres and we’re going to be discussing it. But in fact, I think we’ll start discussing it right now before I sign. After that, we’re going to be signing two documents that are close to a million and a half acres each.

I keep making the same point because it bears repeating. This is what happens when we put men in power who are so rapacious, so greedy, that they care nothing about our natural resources, the natural beauty of this country, our history, or our traditions if those things stand in the way of making another dollar.

This decision will have an enormous deleterious effect on this country, especially on the wildlife and the people who have long treasured these extraordinary public lands.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is exactly what happens when we continue empowering people who value nothing if it gets in the way of their ability to make a buck.

Having, with the stroke of a pen, put at risk wildlife and landscapes that had, until now, been protected, Donald’s press conference quickly turned to his illegal and unconstitutional war of choice against Iran.

He was asked how long he expected the war to continue.

His answer was revealing.

Donald: Well, I think it’s going very fast. We’ve demolished their military. We’re hitting them very hard. We had a deal yesterday or the day before yesterday. It was all done. And then they broke up that deal immediately because they found out there was something in the deal they didn’t like. And they’re wired differently and we’re not going to put up with it. We are just going forward. We’re attacking them tonight. We’re taking out all of their capability for anything having to do with the strait, with the Hormuz Strait. And I think in the end, we will end up controlling the whole thing.

So which is it exactly?

According to Donald, we have completely annihilated Iran’s military capabilities.

At the very same time, he insists we must continue bombing Iran in order to destroy those same military capabilities. Both things cannot be true. Then there is the matter of the Strait of Hormuz itself.

The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway. The United States has no sovereign claim to it whatsoever. Donald talks about “controlling the whole thing” as though the United States can simply declare ownership over one of the world’s most strategically important shipping lanes. It cannot.

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What Donald is really trying to do is restore the situation that existed before he launched this illegal and unconstitutional war of choice.

He was then asked whether a negotiated settlement with Iran was still possible.

Donald: We’re hitting them very heavy tonight as you know. We’re hitting them. We have tremendous amounts of ammunition. We have numbers that we haven’t had in years and we’re hitting them very hard and it’ll continue and we’ll see what happens. But we’re knocking out all of their offensive capability and we’re controlling the straits. We’re putting the blockade back. And it’s a blockade not for anybody but Iran. In other words, anybody doing business with Iran can’t go through. Everyone else will be able to go through. So it’s a blockade. It’s a very strong blockade. The blockade was probably more effective even than hitting them, but I think the combination is the thing that really does.

When asked directly whether a deal remained possible, he simply replied:

Yeah, I think a deal is possible. Sure. I do.

Well, I certainly hope so.

He’s the one who is desperate to make a deal. Since the beginning of this war, which has already cost American taxpayers well over $100 billion, the United States has become weaker, not stronger. Donald lost this war on day one. We continue depleting our military stockpiles while making ourselves increasingly vulnerable to future conflicts.

Iran, meanwhile, has only become stronger strategically.

And despite everything Donald has claimed, nothing has actually been done to rein in Iran’s nuclear program.

Why?

Because years ago Donald ripped up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, and has done nothing to replace it with an agreement that actually prevents Iran from enriching uranium or developing nuclear weapons.

Donald continued defending his bombing campaign by insisting previous presidents should have attacked Iran years ago.

Donald: This should have been done by Bush and Obama and Biden and people before them, frankly. It’s 47 years they’ve been ripping off everybody and really hurt again, killing thousands of people. So they killed 52,000 protestors, but they killed many, many people with Soleimani who I killed in the first term. Soleimani killed many people, many, many people. And not only killed. When you see a young former soldier walking around with no legs, no arms, a face that’s been horribly, horribly hurt, that was done by Iran.

My brain completely short-circuited. I often say we should never put somebody in power whose only concern is making money. Perhaps we should also stop putting people in power who seem genuinely fascinated by mutilation and physical violence.

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That is not strength. It is not leadership. It is certainly not foreign policy. Donald appears to revel in this kind of destruction because he is so deeply damaged and so profoundly depraved. And that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all.

This war is no longer being justified by any coherent strategy. Every time Donald speaks, the rationale changes. One day it is about nuclear weapons. The next day it is about controlling shipping lanes. Then it becomes protecting allies or exacting revenge.

The objectives continue shifting because reality keeps exposing the failures of the previous ones.

And that is precisely what makes this conflict so dangerous.

Donald also seems to believe the United States should be reimbursed for guarding the Strait of Hormuz. Except that is not what is happening. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States responded by attempting to blockade that closure, which makes very little strategic sense. Then again, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about.

Donald: Because they’re stone cold crazy. They are crazy. We can get reimbursed. And we’re not going to put it up. Yeah, I want to be reimbursed because we’re protecting a very rich portion of the world. We’re spending money. And so what we’ve done is we are going to be reimbursed for protection by the countries that we’re helping. For instance, you look at the five countries. You have Saudi Arabia, you have UAE, you have Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others. They will do very well. But we think it’s appropriate. We don’t need them. We have more oil than any other country in the world.

So now we have yet another justification for this war. Apparently, it no longer has anything to do with preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It no longer has anything to do with protecting the Iranian people from their authoritarian regime. Instead, Donald now says the purpose is to protect wealthy allies and then send them the bill afterward. That is not how alliances work, and it certainly is not how international law works. You do not get reimbursed for the costs of a war you chose to start. You admit you made a catastrophic mistake, accept responsibility for the consequences, and work to end the conflict. Of course, Donald is incapable of doing any of those things.

It is worth noting what other members of the Trump regime had to say about Donald’s proposal to impose tolls and fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Rubio: It’s an international waterway. No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway. That’s existing international law. We believe international waterways should be free of tolls. I know of no country on the planet that supports tolling or fees for the use of the straits. Trying to impose a tolling system is a form of international extortion. There is zero support among the Gulf countries for any sort of toll or fee for the use of international waters.

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It should surprise absolutely nobody that Donald’s claim that he would impose a twenty percent toll on ships using the Strait of Hormuz quietly disappeared. Did he abandon the idea because his own Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense explained that it violated international law? No. He abandoned it because he spoke with kings, emirs, and other leaders he happens to like, and they asked him not to do it. Once again, American foreign policy appears to be dictated not by strategy or law, but by whichever conversation Donald had most recently.

Donald ended the press conference by returning to one of his favorite obsessions. He called CNN “fake news,” claimed the network’s reporting was treasonous, and insisted that Iran desperately wanted to make a deal.

Donald: Their leadership is all gone. Their first-tier leaders are all dead. Their second-tier leaders are all dead. Their third-tier leaders, who we’re dealing with more or less, some of them are already gone. And then you read fake news like your network, CNN. You have them say, “Well, actually, aren’t they doing quite well?” Let me just tell you, they have inflation of over 300 percent. They don’t have any military. There’s not a thing they can do about it. All they have is fake news because the fake news would rather see us lose the war than win the war, which is really treasonous. We’re doing another very major attack tonight. They want to make a deal. We made a deal two days ago, and they want to make a deal. They’ve been negotiating for forty-seven years, but nobody’s ever hit them militarily. We’re hitting them very hard.

Nobody has been reckless enough to launch this kind of military campaign because, from every available indication, it is not going well for the United States. It certainly is not going well for the Iranian people, although Donald has demonstrated repeatedly that their suffering is of little concern to him. And the idea that CNN is somehow committing treason by reporting verifiable facts tells us everything we need to know about how Donald views a free press.

What actually sounds treasonous? Inciting an insurrection against your own government. Stealing highly classified documents. Potentially exposing those documents to unauthorized people. Those sound considerably more like acts of treason than journalism ever could. But Donald has always projected onto others the very conduct of which he himself stands accused.

The bottom line is remarkably simple. If we have completely obliterated Iran’s military capabilities, as Donald repeatedly claims, then this war should already be over. If Iran is desperate to make a deal, and if a deal supposedly existed just two days ago, then why is there still no agreement? Donald will never answer those questions because doing so would require him to admit failure. He will never acknowledge that this war has weakened the United States, depleted our military resources, cost American taxpayers more than one hundred billion dollars, and left us no closer to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons than we were before he tore up the JCPOA years ago.

There is no coherent strategy here. There is no endgame. There is only Donald’s determination to avoid admitting that he was wrong, no matter how much longer Americans are forced to bear the consequences.

And while he continues changing the justification for this war every time he steps in front of a microphone, one other fact remains impossible to ignore: Donald Trump is mentioned more than one million times in the more than three million pages of Epstein documents that have been released thus far. That is a story the Department of Justice still refuses to explain.

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[Transcript edited for clarity and flow]

Big Tent USA invited me to sit down with Jessica Yellin, former White House correspondent for CNN, journalist, and founder of News Not Noise. We had a fascinating, wide-ranging, in-depth conversation about Donald’s state of mind, the state of America, and what a path forward looks like, not only for American politics but for the American people.

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Jessica Yellin: I want to start with what’s happened this week at the NATO summit. There’s so much we could discuss, but just yesterday Donald appeared to call Volodymyr Zelenskyy “Putin.” He referred to the Islamic Republic of Japan. For months we’ve consistently seen bruising on his hands, reports of swelling in his legs, and he frequently appears to be falling asleep in public.

As a psychologist, and as someone who knows him personally, how do you assess his current mental and physical state?

Mary Trump: I think the most important way to understand where Donald is emotionally, psychologically, physically, and cognitively is to recognize that we’re looking at a perfect storm.

He’s somebody who has lived for decades with longstanding, undiagnosed, and untreated psychiatric disorders. As with many illnesses, including psychiatric illnesses, when they’re left untreated, they worsen over time.

We also know, from Donald himself, that he is continually being asked to take cognitive assessments, which suggests there may be concerns about cognitive decline. Alzheimer’s disease runs in my family. I’m desperately hoping it skips my generation, but there is a very strong genetic component. There are many moments when I see striking similarities between Donald’s behavior and my grandfather’s behavior as Alzheimer’s progressed.

As you mentioned, there’s the hypersomnolence. He simply cannot stay awake during the day unless people are talking about him. That appears to be the only thing capable of keeping him alert.

We also see increasing impulsivity, which can be another symptom of cognitive decline. My perspective comes partly from my background as a clinical psychologist and partly from having watched what happened to Donald’s father.

Then there are the obvious physical symptoms: the swelling in his hands and ankles, the bruising, and his growing difficulty walking normally. There is so much happening simultaneously that it shouldn’t surprise us he’s becoming increasingly erratic, belligerent, and violent.

Jessica Yellin: Violent.

Mary Trump: Yes. Just listen to his rhetoric about Iran. It’s completely unhinged.

Jessica Yellin: There’s a bloodlust to it that’s deeply unnerving.

I’m curious what you think the public most misunderstands about Donald Trump.

Mary Trump: I think part of the misunderstanding comes from the fact that people are being encouraged to misunderstand him.

We’ve heard former supporters, including people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, say that Donald isn’t the same man they once knew. The truth is almost the opposite. Because of his cognitive and psychological decline, we’re actually seeing more of who he has always been. He’s simply no longer capable of hiding it as effectively as he once could.

The other thing people consistently overestimate is his strength.

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Donald is an extraordinarily weak person. One of the reasons he’s been allowed to continue behaving this way for so long is that people confuse the enormous power of the office he occupies with personal strength. Those are two entirely different things.

He possesses tremendous institutional power, but as an individual, he is profoundly weak. Unfortunately, too many people have been intimidated by the office and, as a result, missed countless opportunities to challenge him directly.

His vindictiveness is actually one of the clearest signs of that weakness.

Jessica Yellin: You’ve often said that if we understand Donald’s psychology, we’ll understand how to deal with him. How does what you’ve just described explain the election lies, the loyalty demands, the rage whenever he’s criticized, the constant lying, and the greed?

Mary Trump: It’s a really important question.

The explanation sounds almost too simple, but I genuinely believe it’s the truth.

Donald has always been, and remains today, a terrified little boy.

As an adult, the thing he fears most is being exposed as a loser, being seen for who he truly believes himself to be.

In my family, being considered a loser, according to my grandfather’s definition, was essentially a death sentence, literally or metaphorically. Donald witnessed what happened to my father, who was the oldest son and more than seven years older than Donald. He internalized that lesson at a very deep level.

So Donald spends every waking moment trying to avoid being exposed as the failure he believes himself to be.

More fundamentally, however, Donald is what I’ve long described as a black hole of need.

The tragedy for him, and for the rest of us, is that the thing he has always wanted most is to be loved. Because of the way he was raised by a sociopathic father and a deeply dysfunctional family, he became incapable of accepting genuine love.

That leaves him endlessly trying to fill the void with more money, more power, more praise, more threats, and more violence.

None of it is ever enough.

Take the military parade he staged for his birthday, that astonishingly expensive spectacle on the White House lawn. That was another attempt to fill the emptiness inside him.

He probably woke up the next morning feeling exactly as empty as he did before.

Jessica Yellin: Today he’s covering part of the North Portico with construction while redesigning the White House yet again. It’s almost as though he can’t stop changing something that belongs to the American people.

If someone understands narcissism, they know it can’t simply be fixed. But it can sometimes be managed. We’ve seen Donald react strongly to ridicule and to having his incompetence exposed.

Why do those approaches work better than ordinary criticism?

Mary Trump: That’s such an important question because so many people have fundamentally misunderstood how to deal with him, and that misunderstanding has only increased both his power and the damage he’s capable of causing.

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The worst mistake you can make is allowing Donald to believe you think he’s strong.

Calling him a criminal, a thug, or even a rapist doesn’t necessarily affect him because he often interprets those labels as evidence that he’s tough.

We’ve seen that repeatedly. Every time he escaped accountability, portions of his political base became even more devoted to him.

At the same time, we’ve watched universities, prestigious law firms, NATO allies, and major media organizations capitulate.

Every capitulation teaches him he can push farther.

One thing Donald has always been remarkably good at is testing boundaries. He keeps pushing until somebody finally says no. Unfortunately, far too few people have done that.

Whenever a reporter asks a factual question he doesn’t like, especially if it’s a woman asking it, he loses control.

We need more of that.

I’ve often wondered why White House reporters didn’t coordinate their efforts. If he refused to answer one question, why didn’t the next reporter ask exactly the same question, and then the next?

He’s the President of the United States, not a king.

He owes the American people answers.

For far too long, he’s been allowed to avoid giving them.

The other tool we have is ridicule.

Donald is eminently mockable. He’s incompetent. He’s frequently out of his depth.

Whenever someone holds up a mirror and forces him to confront reality, he falls apart.

Jessica Yellin: I’ve often thought if I ever interviewed him, I’d simply ask the same question over and over with slight variations. Eventually he wouldn’t be able to escape it.

Why can’t he answer?

Mary Trump: Because so much of what drives Donald exists outside his conscious awareness.

If he were forced to confront the truth about himself, I genuinely don’t think he’d be psychologically capable of functioning.

He’s built extraordinarily powerful defense mechanisms to protect himself from that reality.

When somebody else points out the truth, he experiences it as an existential threat.

The missed opportunity came years ago, long before he became president.

Back in the 1980s, and again during the 2015 and 2016 campaign, journalists could have pressed him much harder because he couldn’t yet hide behind the presidency.

Nobody demanded evidence when he claimed to know more than military generals or insisted he substantiate his endless exaggerations.

Today, when he doesn’t like a question, he simply removes the microphone, walks away, and throws a temper tantrum.

Jessica Yellin: According to recent reporting, only a very small group of people are effectively running the government around him.

Has his inner circle become smaller?

Mary Trump: Donald has never evolved.

My grandfather created the myth that Donald was a brilliant, self-made businessman, then spent decades protecting him from the consequences of his own incompetence.

Once my grandfather decided Donald, rather than my father, would inherit the family business, Donald became completely insulated from failure. During my grandfather’s lifetime, he received more than $410 million through gifts, loans, and forgiven loans.

He’s never had to function independently.

In many ways, Donald has always been institutionalized.

He moved from the protection of Trump Management to the Trump Organization and ultimately to the White House.

He requires a tiny group of people to satisfy not only his material needs but also his emotional needs by constantly reassuring him that he’s wonderful, brilliant, popular, and successful.

The danger is that those people acquire enormous power in return.

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When people say someone like Stephen Miller is effectively running much of the government, I think there’s truth in that.

That’s a frightening reality.

Jessica Yellin: Why do Republicans remain so obedient?

Mary Trump: I think there are several different groups.

Some people are simply cynical. They understand that if they donate enough money or remain loyal, they’ll receive enormous financial rewards through government contracts or political influence.

Others are genuinely afraid of Donald.

Personally, I’ve never understood that because I don’t see him as frightening. But fear clearly motivates some people.

Then there are the true believers.

Those are the people who genuinely embrace the cruelty, the racism, the misogyny, the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the authoritarianism.

They’re helping build exactly the country they want.

Those groups present different dangers, but together they’ve made Donald far more powerful than he ever could have become alone.

Jessica Yellin: As we approach the election, what should Americans focus on?

Mary Trump: Donald desperately needs Republicans to win because he knows losing could finally expose him to accountability.

Ironically, his efforts to rig the system demonstrate weakness, not strength.

People who know they can win fairly don’t spend all their time trying to suppress votes or manipulate elections.

The response is simple.

Vote.

Vote in overwhelming numbers.

Despite everything this administration and the Supreme Court have done to make voting harder, we must overwhelm those efforts through participation.

If pro-democracy, pro-Constitution candidates prevail, we still have an opportunity to repair the damage.

If we fail, the challenge becomes much greater.

Jessica Yellin: What gives you hope?

Mary Trump: Looking away doesn’t help anyone.

Things are difficult. They’re frightening. Pretending otherwise serves no purpose.

At the same time, hope comes from other people.

Many powerful institutions have surrendered, but countless individuals have not.

People like E. Jean Carroll, Letitia James, dedicated public servants, neighbors protecting one another, and ordinary Americans standing up to injustice every day remind us that courage still exists.

Community matters.

History teaches us that some of humanity’s greatest advances have emerged from its darkest moments.

America has always possessed extraordinary potential.

We still have the opportunity to become the truly representative, multicultural democracy we’ve always claimed to be.

That possibility remains within our reach if we continue believing in one another and remember that, ultimately, the power belongs to the American people.

Jessica Yellin: That reminds us exactly what’s worth fighting for.

Thank you so much, Mary. I’ve admired your work for a long time, and your willingness to bring both your personal experience and professional expertise to these conversations helps people understand what’s happening and empowers them to act.

Mary Trump: Jessica, thank you. This has been such an incredible conversation. I don’t often have the opportunity to speak this deeply with someone who has such a profound understanding of what’s happening. I truly appreciate it, and I had a wonderful time.

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News Not Noise

Separating the news from the noise. We give you information, not a panic attack.

By Jessica Yellin

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Donald promised the biggest fireworks display in human history to celebrate our country’s 250th birthday, which, as you probably know, was on July 4. Well, there were just a couple of problems. The fireworks did not technically happen until July 5 because, like most people on the planet, Mother Nature hates Donald and sent some truly awful weather. Then there was another problem.

As you can see, those are actually fireworks, but you cannot really tell because, pro tip, do not set off fireworks during a heat dome. Otherwise, all you get is one enormous cloud of smoke and a whole lot of asthma attacks. It looked less like a celebration of America and more like the apocalypse because that is exactly what living through the Trump regime feels like.

Of course, this is also exactly what we have come to expect from Donald: a complete disaster. An expensive and unnecessary disaster entirely of his own making. So, as always, credit where credit is due. Donald, well done.

Welcome to this week’s episode of Trump Trolls Trump. It has now been 537 days since Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025. Thank you once again to the 78 million people who voted for him. And thank you to the more than 80 million eligible voters who could not even be bothered to vote. Truly.

Now, we do know that at least one person was extraordinarily proud of the fireworks display. In fact, he seemed so overwhelmed by the spectacle that he could barely contain his excitement. Yes, Donald was doing what he does best: sleeping through very loud, very bright fireworks. Actually, no. That was not sleeping. That was loss of consciousness brought on by overwhelming humiliation. There he was exercising perhaps the only genuine superpower he possesses, the remarkable ability to sleep sitting upright under the loudest and brightest conditions imaginable.

Just before the fireworks began, Donald took the stage. He claimed that there had originally been 375,000 people in attendance before storms forced everyone to leave. Then, according to Donald, he told somebody to “bring my people back,” and somehow another 150,000 people returned simply to hear him speak. Did they? That seems more than a little unlikely, especially judging by the photographs and video footage we have all seen.

Donald: Tonight we come together for one of the most joyous and glorious milestones of all time. And you know what that is? The 250th anniversary. And I do have to say this, one of my very brilliant people backstage said, “Don’t worry. Backstage, there’s plenty of seating out front.”

Apparently there was.

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Just to remind us once again what an extraordinary student of American history Donald is, let’s hear what he had to say about the Civil War during his rambling speech.

Donald: Few heroes remind us of these truths more than William Carney, who escaped slavery to become a Union soldier in the Civil War, which was a very big, big deal at the time.

Was it?

No way.

The Civil War was a big deal at the time?

I honestly never knew that.

I truly do not know what to say.

Because we all deserve to stay informed about Donald’s latest grifts, he also hosted a Trump Accounts launch event inside the Oval Office this week, allegedly celebrating a new federal investment program for American children. Personally, I think we should just start children gambling as early as possible. Why stop there? Let’s get every kid a Polymarket account and a Kalshi account while we’re at it.

Anyway. Here is Donald attempting to explain something.

Donald: There’s a thing called TikTok. Have you heard of it? I was watching Maria Bartiromo this morning. She’s fantastic. They were talking about the dangers of TikTok because it’s Chinese and all the spying. Well, except the new numbers just came out. You know who’s number one on TikTac by far? Trump. Me. I’m number one. Taylor Swift was number eleven. I’m number one by far. They sent me the list. Number one, number two. I was number one by a lot. I think it helped me win the election in a landslide.

There is apparently somebody working inside the White House whose full-time job consists of inventing statistics, printing them on official-looking paper, and handing them to Donald so he can confidently repeat them in public. He is not number one on TikTok. But even if he were, apparently national security concerns cease to matter the moment Donald personally benefits from them.

Later in the week, Donald spoke to reporters from the Rose Garden and decided to lecture the country about a subject with which he is intimately familiar: criminals.

This is what Donald said:

Ninety-one percent of the crime in Washington, D.C., as an example, was caused by 2.1 percent of the population. These are career criminals. Sick people. Mental problems.

Donald really should stop looking into mirrors while giving speeches. When he talks about career criminals and deeply disturbed people, he is speaking from extensive personal experience. He has spent his entire adult life committing crimes. The only meaningful difference between Donald and most career criminals is that he has never experienced the consequences. He has never gone to prison. As a result, he simply continues committing more crimes.

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There were also significant political developments this week. Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner withdrew from the race after serious and, I have to say, highly credible allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman. Platner, who proved himself to be exactly what many of us feared from the very beginning, a deeply depraved narcissist, finally dropped out on Thursday, leaving Democrats only a few weeks to find a new candidate capable of taking on Susan Collins.

That, however, did not stop Republicans from lecturing everybody else about character, integrity, and the importance of holding bad candidates accountable. So when Fox State TV rolled out former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this week, he was more than happy to deliver exactly that message because, apparently, somebody is still paying him to say these absolutely insane things.

McCarthy: The one thing I know about Republicans, when we had a very bad candidate and found out, we didn’t vote for that person. We walked away. For better or for worse. When Matt Gaetz came forward, we got rid of him.

Well, they did it once. Congratulations.

Let’s see. George Santos. David Vitter. Dennis Hastert. Newt Gingrich. The list is remarkably long. But I’m trying to think of a Republican politician whose name might resonate with even more people so we can fully appreciate just how breathtaking this hypocrisy really is.

Let’s see.

He was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

He has been credibly accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women.

He stole highly classified government documents.

What on earth was his name?

Donald Trump.

That’s right.

So tell me again, Kevin, how Republicans always get rid of bad candidates?

Tell me how the same Republican Party that rallied behind Donald after January 6th is somehow the party of character and integrity.

If Kevin McCarthy had possessed even one ounce of integrity and stood by what he initially said after January 6th, we might not be living through this second Trump occupation today. Instead, only days after Donald almost got him killed by a violent mob, Kevin climbed aboard a plane, flew to Mar-a-Lago, and kissed Donald’s ring.

So please, spare me the lectures about Republicans holding their own accountable.

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Speaking of bad candidates, that brings us, finally, to Baby J.D. Vance, who traveled to Milwaukee this week to promote the Trump regime’s anti-fraud initiative.

Actually...

No.

That doesn’t sound quite right.

Their pro-fraud initiative.

Yes, that feels much more accurate.

Officially, the White House insisted the event was about combating government waste, fraud, and abuse, which apparently has now become one very long word: wastefraudabuse.

Curiously absent from the discussion were subjects such as flying two Air Force Ones to Europe at the same time or the countless other examples of government waste generated by the Trump regime itself.

In reality, this was simply another midterm campaign stop in the battleground state of Wisconsin, where J.D. Vance attempted to do what he always attempts to do: energize Republican voters.

Baby J.D.: So I ask you a very simple question. When you come to vote in November, are you going to vote for the pro-fraud party? Are you going to vote for the party who is sending your tax money to the fraudsters? No, we’re going to support the party that is sending the fraudsters to jail and is protecting your money. We’re going to vote for Derrick Van Orden and for Bryan Steil.

So...

The eleven people in the audience are apparently voting for Democrats?

Is that what just happened?

Honestly, J.D. Vance should quit his day job and become a motivational speaker because I don’t know about you, but after watching his performance, I feel considerably better about Democratic chances in the midterm elections.

I have to say, I have never seen someone work so hard to generate so little enthusiasm.

Perhaps that’s his real political gift.

Well, thank you so much for joining me for another episode of Trump Trolls Trump.

Remember, mockery is one of our greatest superpowers. Authoritarians desperately want to be feared. They want to be treated as powerful, untouchable, and inevitable. Ridicule reminds them that they are none of those things.

We’ll be back next week to continue ridiculing this inept, corrupt, and profoundly misguided administration because, as always, they simply cannot help themselves.

They keep giving us more material than we could ever ask for.

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[transcript edit for clarity, flow and length]

I stopped by Jacob Soboroff’s new show to discuss the unprecedented, gobsmacking corruption of Donald and his immediate family, and the ways I believe their grift endangers American national security. I hope you enjoy.

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Jacob Soboroff: Joining me now is Mary Trump, the president’s niece. She is the host of Mary Trump Media on YouTube and author of The Good in Us on Substack. She is also the author of multiple books, including Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

Mary, it’s so good to talk to you.

Mary Trump: Hey, Jacob. It’s great to be here.

Jacob Soboroff: My guess is you weren’t surprised, but when you heard the amount of money the president has made during his first year back in office, I wondered how all of that landed with you.

Mary Trump: It doesn’t land well, and it shouldn’t land well with any of us. Once again, Donald has positioned himself to benefit from a position he neither deserves nor earned. Even more alarming is, once again, the number of people willing either to look the other way or actively enable him.

It should infuriate every American. We’re looking at a situation in which Donald and his useless children are enriching themselves by leveraging the power of the presidency and doing so off the backs of the American people. At the same time, many of the people who placed their trust and faith in Donald Trump have lost significant amounts of money. Nearly one million people have reportedly lost more than $3.8 billion, averaging roughly $3,800 per person.

That is absolutely despicable.

Jacob Soboroff: During his interview with CNBC on Thursday, the president said the Oval Office serves a much bigger purpose than whether or not he makes money.

This is what Donald Trump said:

You know why I don’t care? Because I have a much bigger purpose. This is the Oval Office. It’s a much bigger purpose than whether or not I make money. As an example, the president’s the highest paid person in government and by some standards he gets a lot of money. I’m the only president, they say, that’s ever given up my salary. I gave up my salary.

What’s it like for you to hear that?

Mary Trump: It’s appalling.

Yes, the president earns a substantial salary by the standards of most Americans. I don’t know the exact figure, but it’s somewhere around $450,000 a year. Donald refusing that salary is nothing more than a fig leaf designed to distract from the extraordinary grift and the potentially criminal conduct he’s engaged in to enrich himself.

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We also can’t overlook another part of his financial disclosures. They revealed that he received tens of millions of dollars that were, in effect, bribes from social media platforms and corporate media companies. Those same companies later received billions of dollars in government contracts.

The grift is comprehensive.

More importantly, I believe that when the President of the United States openly signals that he doesn’t care about enriching himself through his office, expects the public simply to accept it, and demonstrates that he is effectively for sale, that poses a genuine threat to American national security.

Jacob Soboroff: It’s not just the president. It’s Melania, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr. as well. You’ve written extensively about your cousins. They’re making money in ways we simply haven’t seen from previous first families.

How does the broader Trump family fit into all of this?

Mary Trump: I think it’s all of a piece.

The Trump family has engaged in this kind of potentially illicit conduct for decades. It began with my grandfather, who accepted tens of millions of dollars in financing from the Federal Housing Administration to build rental housing in Brooklyn and Queens. He then turned around and significantly undervalued those same properties to reduce his tax burden.

This has been the family business model for generations: enriching themselves at other people’s expense.

I suppose you could say Donald’s children come by it honestly.

But in the end, it’s an appalling reflection on the United States. What’s even more disturbing is that no one currently in a position of power seems willing to do anything about it.

To me, that underscores what must happen if people who actually believe in accountability return to government.

If we once again have leaders who understand that presidents and their families should not be permitted to enrich themselves by exploiting the presidency, one of the very first priorities must be to clearly define the Emoluments Clauses and establish meaningful penalties for presidents who engage in this kind of corruption.

Jacob Soboroff: Mary Trump, it’s so good to have you with us on Connect. Mary is the host of Mary Trump Media on YouTube and the niece of President Donald Trump.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Mary Trump: Thank you.

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Jacob Soboroff

Let's Connect

Connect with Jacob Soboroff is a show about you. About us. About “We The People…

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a month ago · 363 likes · 63 comments · Jacob Soboroff

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Todd Blanche, Donald’s former and current personal defense attorney, has served as Acting Attorney General of the United States since April 2. In that time, he has helped create a slush fund benefiting Donald’s allies and January 6 insurrectionists. He has shielded Donald and his family from IRS scrutiny, reportedly helping Donald avoid a $100 million tax bill. He has pursued a second indictment of James Comey based on an Instagram post featuring seashells on a beach. And, of course, he continues refusing to release the Epstein files.

On July 7, the Department of Justice alumni group Justice Connection sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. More than 1,200 former DOJ employees signed it, representing fourteen presidential administrations spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations.

The letter itself runs fifty-nine pages, and those pages contain nothing but signatures.

Its central message was unmistakable: the culture of fear Todd Blanche has created inside the Department of Justice must end.

It is not just former Justice Department lawyers raising the alarm.

On June 22, 101 former judges filed a seventy-three-page ethics complaint accusing Blanche of conflicts of interest, incompetence, and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.

The Department of Justice dismissed the complaint as a “pathetic stunt,” which is a curious response given that it made little effort to refute the substance of the allegations.

The consequences inside the department have been staggering.

Roughly 16,000 of the Department of Justice’s more than 100,000 employees have left since Blanche assumed leadership. That includes more than one-quarter of the department’s career attorneys.

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Former colleagues and members of the judiciary have described Blanche’s tenure as unprecedented.

They do not mean that as praise.

On April 7, Blanche was asked whether he hoped to become Attorney General permanently.

Blanche: I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to keep me as acting, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate me, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and I go back to being the DAG, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, thank you very much. I love you, sir. So I don’t have any goals or aspirations beyond that.

I often wonder whether people like Todd Blanche realize just how pathetic they sound.

“Thank you, sir. May I please have another?”

That was all I could think while listening to the ghost of Heinrich Himmler answer reporters’ questions.

As Deputy Attorney General, Blanche also oversaw the questioning of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2025 after she had been transferred to a minimum-security prison, a move that ran contrary to Bureau of Prisons policy governing convicted sex offenders.

Let’s remember exactly who Ghislaine Maxwell is.

She was Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator.

She is a convicted sex trafficker.

She is a convicted predator who abused girls and young women.

And yet Todd Blanche apparently believed she deserved special treatment.

A federal court later cited Blanche’s own public statements from that same period as evidence supporting its May 22 finding that the Department of Justice could not overcome the presumption of vindictive prosecution in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador before being returned to the United States to face criminal charges the government has yet to prove.

The pattern extends well beyond those cases.

Blanche initiated a leak investigation targeting reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal after Donald reportedly handed him a stack of newspaper articles marked “treason” in his trademark Sharpie.

In the Broadview Six case, the Department of Justice agreed to pay the defendants’ attorneys’ fees while simultaneously attempting to block discovery, a move legal experts argue was designed to prevent scrutiny of Blanche’s own conduct.

Nor has Blanche demonstrated any meaningful commitment to transparency regarding the Epstein investigation.

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His Justice Department has released millions of pages connected to Jeffrey Epstein, but more than three million additional pages remain either withheld entirely or so heavily redacted as to be virtually unreadable.

A federal judge is now demanding that the department explain why so much material continues to be concealed.

The obvious question is also the unavoidable one.

Do we honestly believe that the documents already released contain the most damaging evidence while the remaining three million pages contain nothing of consequence?

Of course not.

We still do not have the full story.

The Epstein files remain incomplete because somebody inside the Department of Justice has decided the American people should not see everything.

Todd Blanche is protecting somebody.

The judges are not alone in sounding the alarm.

On July 2, Special Counsel Jack Smith gave his first televised interview since resigning after leading the two federal prosecutions against Donald before they were ultimately dismissed.

Smith: Well, as I said earlier, I, from my perspective, have seen a number of cases. James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell. I mean, right? There’s not criminality here. I mean, seashells. I mean, so the only reasonable explanation is the president has it out for these people and he has people who are his former personal lawyers who are going to do what he says regardless of the facts or law. Again, just to juxtapose it, I didn’t have people on my team resigning because they refused to go along with a scheme to go after somebody. That was not what happened. You see that in all these cases. Imagine if I had been told, “Jack, wherever you think the facts and law dictate, that’s what we’ll do.” That’s what happened then. Can you imagine that happening now if there were allegations of corruption inside this administration? They would never appoint an outside independent person to investigate. We all know that. That’s the difference between following process, following the facts, and preserving independence.

Smith later told Nicole Wallace that the United States is facing an attack on the rule of law that is, in his words, “different in kind and scope to anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

He went on to explain that the Department of Justice can no longer perform the basic functions necessary to represent the American people in court because judges increasingly no longer trust federal prosecutors.

It is difficult to overstate how devastating that assessment is.

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The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice once represented the gold standard of federal law enforcement. Career attorneys built cases carefully. They pursued prosecutions only after assembling overwhelming evidence. Their credibility before the courts was among the department’s greatest assets.

Today, many DOJ attorneys walk into federal court carrying exactly the opposite presumption.

Instead of assuming competence and integrity, judges increasingly approach them with skepticism, doubting not only the strength of the government’s evidence but also the motives behind its prosecutions.

That collapse of institutional credibility did not happen accidentally. It was built.

Blanche’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled for July 15 and 16. Assuming every Democrat votes against his nomination, all twelve Republican members of the committee would have to support him in order to advance his confirmation.

By the time Jack Smith sat down for that interview, he had already spent months under direct pressure from the very administration he once investigated.

He had been subpoenaed before the House Judiciary Committee, participated in a closed-door deposition, and later testified publicly for hours.

Then, one month later, U.S. District and Donalds pocket Judge Aileen Cannon, the same judge who dismissed Donald’s classified documents case, ruled that the remaining volume of Smith’s final report could not be released.

She continues, much like Todd Blanche, to function less like an independent public servant than as another member of Donald’s legal defense team.

During the interview, Smith acknowledged that he believes it is entirely plausible the Department of Justice could eventually indict him as well, joining former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James on the ever-growing list of Donald’s perceived enemies now facing criminal investigations.

This is all happening in plain sight.

The Department of Justice has become a profoundly corrupted institution under Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche because Donald has completely erased the wall that traditionally separated the White House from the Department of Justice.

As I warned this would happen, the Department of Justice has become Donald Trump’s personal law firm. Its mission is no longer to pursue justice impartially.

Its mission is to protect Donald, punish his enemies, and advance his political agenda.

That is not how constitutional democracies function.

It is how authoritarian regimes do.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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Donald traveled to Ankara, Turkey, this week for the NATO Summit, where he once again managed to humiliate the United States of America. According to The New York Times, however, there were really two separate summits taking place simultaneously. There was Donald’s summit, dominated by grievances, insults, unrealistic demands for loyalty, and his decision to launch additional airstrikes against Iran in violation of the peace agreement. Then there was the actual NATO summit.

While Donald monopolized headlines with his bizarre behavior and increasingly detached commentary, NATO leaders quietly continued the real work. They focused on increasing defense spending, expanding military cooperation, reaffirming support for Ukraine, and preparing for a future in which Europe assumes greater responsibility for its own security. Implicit in that future is something far more consequential: Europe is preparing for a world in which it can no longer rely on the United States because, thanks to Donald and the Republican Party, America has proven itself to be an utterly unreliable partner.

Political scientist Nathalie Tocci described the contrast perfectly. Donald’s summit was little more than a political performance while the real work continued behind closed doors. European leaders largely ignored his complaints, treating them as the familiar outbursts they have grown accustomed to rather than coherent policy proposals worthy of serious consideration.

Donald, meanwhile, continued attacking Iran with the kind of projection that has always defined him.

Donald: It’s a very interesting question. To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people and they’re vicious violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. I’ll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate they’re good people. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, but they have to come back to me as far as I’m concerned. It’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars. We make a deal. If I make a deal with him, we have a deal. And he goes out, he talks. We make a deal. Everyone’s agreed. No nuclear weapon. We make a deal. They go outside, talk to the press, they say we never even talked about it. There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.

I keep telling him he needs to stop looking in the mirror when he says things like that.

Do I know what scum is? As a matter of fact, I do. I’ve known Donald my entire life. I’ve also seen photographs of the reflecting pool, so yes, I’m well acquainted with scum.

The irony, of course, is impossible to miss. Donald is accusing somebody else of refusing to honor agreements. This is the man who has spent his entire political career ripping up treaties, abandoning commitments, betraying allies, and changing his mind whenever it serves his immediate interests. His complaints would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous.

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Nor are these kinds of insults likely to advance any diplomatic effort involving Iran. Nevertheless, Donald continued digging himself deeper, later insisting that the conflict with Iran was not even a war.

Donald: Including trying to end the war with Iran or whatever you call it. It’s not even a war, it’s a military operation. It’s a denuclearization. That’s really what it is of Iran because I don’t think he wants to see them have a nuclear weapon either. I’m pretty sure of that.

If preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was truly Donald’s priority, perhaps he should not have torn up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement that was already accomplishing exactly that.

Donald then turned his attention to NATO itself.

Sitting beside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Donald aired yet another list of grievances, this time complaining that the alliance had somehow failed him because its members declined to join his illegal and unconstitutional war of choice against Iran.

Donald: And I want to thank Mark. He’s been a great secretary general of NATO. I’m not happy with NATO because of what they did with Greenland. And I’m not happy with NATO because of the fact that they didn’t want to help us with the number one state sponsor of terror that’s Iran. They were unwilling to help us. Now in all fairness, they didn’t speak to Mark about it. I think if I did, it might’ve been different, but we didn’t need help. But I was really testing. I wanted to see whether or not they’d be there. But the answer is they were. I spoke to Germany, I spoke to France, spoke to UK, spoke to Italy. I didn’t speak to Spain. Spain is a wasted cause.

NATO countries have absolutely no obligation to assist another member in a conflict that country voluntarily starts. Article 5 exists to ensure that allies come to one another’s defense when one of them is attacked, not when one member decides to launch a war of choice and expects everyone else to clean up the mess.

In fact, Article 5 has only been invoked once in NATO’s history. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, our allies came to America’s aid in Afghanistan and Iraq. They honored their commitments to us. Donald, however, now appears offended that they declined to participate in a war he chose to start without consulting them.

Donald’s resentment toward Spain became even more unhinged.

Donald: Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore... Cut off all trade with Spain... They’re hopeless. They’re bad people... Please, please, we want to trade with you, sir...

I am so tired of him.

I am tired of the constant complaining, the endless lying, and the sheer ugliness of his character. The only reason Donald appears to like Mark Rutte is because Rutte has chosen the path of appeasement. Rather than challenging Donald’s misinformation or defending a fellow NATO ally, he simply sat there while Donald launched an entirely baseless attack on Spain.

Nobody bothered pointing out the obvious.

The United States does not negotiate trade agreements with Spain. We negotiate with the European Union. Donald apparently does not know the difference.

That ignorance has become one of the defining characteristics of his presidency. Whether the subject is trade, diplomacy, military alliances, or international law, Donald repeatedly demonstrates that he neither understands how these institutions function nor has any interest in learning. Yet he continues making decisions that affect the entire world as though his ignorance were somehow a substitute for expertise.

Donald’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did little to inspire confidence either. Throughout the exchange, he stumbled over his words, confused countries, mixed up world leaders, and appeared increasingly disoriented. At this point, it feels less like an isolated incident and more like another ordinary day.

Donald: I told this story yesterday. We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan. They were shot at the aircraft. JCPOC, what a terrible, what a terrible deal. I call it the Obama nuclear waste deal because what he did with that deal is he caused tremendous hardship in the Middle East. It was a terrible, terrible... You have a question for President Putin, please? Do you have a question for President Putin? Not so much. And what would you like to ask him? Because I’m going to ask him that question.

Good catch, Donald.

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First of all, it is the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, not the “JCPOC.” Although, judging from what came next, perhaps he had something else in mind entirely.

Second, unless something has changed dramatically overnight, Donald started a war with Iran, not Japan. I’m sure Japan is more than a little concerned hearing the President of the United States confuse it with a country he is actively bombing. Of course, Donald is constitutionally incapable of admitting a mistake, so rather than acknowledging that he meant Iran instead of Japan, I suppose we should all hope he doesn’t decide the easiest solution is to start a war with Japan as well.

Then there was the moment he referred to President Zelenskyy as President Putin before attempting to recover by joking that he would ask Vladimir Putin whatever question the reporter had intended for Zelenskyy. The joke, if that’s what it was, landed exactly the way most of Donald’s jokes do: awkwardly and at America’s expense.

As though that weren’t enough, Donald once again demonstrated his breathtaking inability to understand the difference between an aggressor and a victim when discussing Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Donald: And I just think it’s sometimes I used an analogy and it sounds simple, but it’s sort of true. You have two kids in a park and they don’t like each other and they start fighting. Sometimes you have to let them fight. Let them see that it’s tough. It’s tough. Fighting is tough.

No.

Russia illegally invaded a sovereign nation. It has bombed civilian infrastructure, abducted thousands of Ukrainian children, murdered civilians, destroyed entire cities, and inflicted unimaginable suffering on millions of people.

That is not remotely comparable to two children getting into a fistfight in a park.

Reducing an illegal war of aggression to a playground dispute is not wisdom. It is moral blindness. It ignores the reality that one country chose to invade another and continues committing atrocities against the Ukrainian people. Donald’s analogy does not simplify the conflict. It trivializes it.

Donald later returned to Iran, making clear that despite repeatedly insisting the conflict was over, he remains more than willing to continue escalating it.

Well, first of all, we took out additional... They were trying to rebuild their radar and they had about 60% built. Now they have to start all over again. Look, we’re not attacking at the highest level. The highest level of the bridges which we can knock down. I would say in one day we knock down every single bridge in Iran. There’s not a thing they can do about it. Their electric manufacturing facilities, right? Their electric plants where they make their electricity there. If we have to, we’ll take them out. I don’t want to do that, but if we have to, we’ll take them out. They have desalination plants, we’ll take them out if we have to. I hate to do that. That’s probably the one I would like not to do least. We attacked Kharg Island last night. We knocked out a piece. I said, Don’t touch the oil because maybe we’ll take over Kharg Island. We may take over Kharg Island. There’s not a thing they can do about it. But I said, Don’t hit the pipes, just hit everything else. And they hit it. They may hit it again tonight. So as per your question, normally I’m not that way, but they really deserve it.

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“Normally I’m not that way.”

Really?

I’m fairly certain Donald has spent his entire adult life demonstrating precisely who he is.

What makes these comments especially disturbing is what they reveal about his priorities. Donald explicitly said he wants Iran’s oil infrastructure left intact because he may want to seize it later. Meanwhile, he is perfectly willing to destroy civilian infrastructure including bridges, electrical grids, and desalination plants that millions of ordinary Iranians rely upon for survival.

For somebody who repeatedly claimed he wanted to liberate the Iranian people from an oppressive regime, he seems remarkably comfortable threatening the very infrastructure those people depend upon every single day.

I am no longer sure how many times somebody has to threaten actions that sound indistinguishable from war crimes before members of his own party decide enough is enough. Apparently, we have not yet reached that number.

Instead, Republicans continue pretending everything is perfectly normal. They are even pretending it is perfectly acceptable that Mitch McConnell has essentially disappeared from public view because preserving a Senate seat apparently matters more than answering basic questions about the functioning of our government.

Finally, Donald offered his assessment of how the summit had gone.

Just again, if you could have seen the respect and the love in the room, and it’s love really for the country, for our country. I don’t want to say me because you’ll say, Oh, he’s so conceited. He’s such a conceited person. But they do. I mean, they like the job I’m doing. They said, Sir, we love you. These are grown people saying that. Isn’t that nice? I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to get to me.

For perhaps the briefest moment, Donald demonstrated something approaching self awareness when he acknowledged that people might think he is conceited.

On that point alone, they would be correct.

Everything else is fantasy.

Nobody, with the possible exception of Mark Rutte, is telling Donald they love him. Nobody at NATO is calling him “sir.” Quite the opposite. Our allies increasingly view him with contempt. They are exhausted by his threats, his lies, his endless grievances, his abuse of allies, and his complete inability to distinguish leadership from domination.

Most importantly, they have concluded that the United States can no longer be relied upon to honor its commitments.

That is the true story of this NATO summit.

While Donald obsessed over personal slights and imaginary praise, NATO quietly adapted to a world in which American leadership can no longer be taken for granted. Europe is investing more heavily in its own defense. It is strengthening military cooperation independent of Washington. It is preparing for the possibility that the United States may no longer be a stable partner in defending liberal democracy.

That is Donald’s legacy.

He believes he dominates every room he enters. In reality, the rest of the world has begun planning for a future without him and, increasingly, without us.

They are not strengthening NATO because Donald inspired confidence.

They are strengthening it because he destroyed it.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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Mary Trump: So let’s start with Graham Platner, shall we? Let’s start with the fact that he dropped out of the race yesterday.

I have a couple of questions about how we got here. Why do Democrats keep choosing candidates like this or putting forward challengers who have absolutely no hope of inspiring the base during a moment that requires thinking outside the box? I’m looking at you, as always, Chuck Schumer. There is a lot of blame to go around.

I blame the people who failed to properly vet this guy, even when there were very troubling warning signs early on. I blame establishment Democrats who thought they were playing it safe by running the only Democrat I’m aware of who had previously won statewide office. This isn’t ageist, it’s simply reality. They wanted a freshman senator who would begin serving at the age of seventy-eight, and whose campaign pitch was that she would only serve one term. That’s not exactly inspiring.

I also blame the people who endorsed him without addressing the obvious concerns. Bernie Sanders, for example, had still not, as far as I was aware, revoked his endorsement. So how did we get here? Why do we keep getting here? And when are Democrats going to stop pretending that because Republicans have Nazi rapists in office, somehow we can lower our standards too? That seems like a terrible argument.

Most importantly, what are we going to do now? We have until July 27 to field a replacement for Platner.

Wajahat Ali: I think this is actually a really good microcosm of American politics over the last ten years.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, we have to ask how Donald Trump, a man with countless warning signs, no governing experience, and obvious disqualifications, managed to defeat Hillary Clinton. Neither of us was particularly enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton, but we both did everything we could to help her because she was unquestionably qualified and we knew we wouldn’t be living through this nightmare if she had won.

Instead, America chose Donald Trump once, and then chose him again.

Some of those voters are committed MAGA supporters. They’re part of the cult. But many others voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and later decided they were finished with the establishment. They looked at the status quo and concluded they were willing to take a chance on someone as dangerous as Donald Trump because they believed he might shake up a system that had failed them.

I think that’s the broader context we have to keep in mind when we talk about Graham Platner.

He had no political experience. There were numerous warning signs. People on the left had discussed them for months. I spoke with people who knew him personally. They mentioned the tattoo, Blackwater, the PTSD, and a series of other concerns. Yet, despite all of that, he represented something many voters were desperately looking for.

He wasn’t the establishment.

He campaigned against forever wars. He campaigned against billionaires. He opposed ICE. He presented himself as someone completely outside the traditional political system.

Mainers looked at him and saw someone familiar. They saw veterans. They saw people who had struggled. They saw a redemption story. They heard him explain the mistakes in his past and say, “I was drunk when I got the tattoo. I joined Blackwater, but I’m a different man now.”

For a long time, that explanation worked.

Then The New York Times story appeared just before the primary. I’ll be honest. Before I read it, I thought that if it involved allegations of rape or sexual assault, he would be finished. I read the article and saw that six former girlfriends described very different experiences, while one woman, who did not accuse him of rape or sexual assault, had ties to the political right and there wasn’t corroborating evidence.

At that point I thought, “All right, this is up to the voters of Maine.”

And despite everything, they overwhelmingly chose Platner.

The really striking part is what happened after the scandals became public. Among voters who had heard about the controversies, he was essentially tied with Susan Collins. But once many voters concluded that the establishment was trying to destroy him, he actually gained support.

That’s what I think people need to understand.

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We’re living in a political environment where huge numbers of Americans no longer trust institutions. They don’t trust establishment politicians. They don’t trust establishment media. They don’t trust either political party.

Before the scandals overwhelmed his campaign, Platner represented opposition to the billionaire class, opposition to endless wars, opposition to ICE, and opposition to politics as usual.

Janet Mills may be perfectly competent, but to many voters she represented more of the same.

That is why Mainers embraced Platner.

My position all along was simple. Whoever Maine Democrats nominated, I would support because defeating Susan Collins had to remain the priority.

Now we’re in a completely different situation.

I do think there’s a path forward. Troy Jackson is someone many people respect. He has credibility with both progressives and the Democratic establishment. If Platner has to step aside, and I absolutely believe he has to, then Democrats need to unite quickly behind somebody who can actually win.

I’m also glad to see more Democrats coming to that conclusion. Ro Khanna has spoken up. Zohran Mamdani’s supporters have spoken up. Elizabeth Warren has now spoken up as well. Michelle Goldberg said exactly what many of us were thinking. Once you learn enough information, it’s over.

Platner has to step aside.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans has to matter.

Look at Republicans. Ken Paxton remains in office despite endless scandals. Pete Hegseth survived allegations that would have ended almost anyone else’s career. Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump.

That’s the distinction we have to preserve.

Mary Trump: Exactly. I’m not equating Democrats with Republicans because, at least in recent history, Democrats have generally maintained a no-tolerance policy when it comes to this kind of conduct.

My frustration is that they consistently ignore early warning signs. They fail to properly vet candidates once they begin gaining momentum, and they convince themselves they can simply ride the wave all the way to victory.

I refuse to believe that, in the entire state of Maine, the only viable Democratic candidates were Janet Mills and Graham Platner. That’s simply not credible.

Janet Mills is perfectly fine. I’ve met her. She’s lovely.

But this is not the political moment for playing it safe.

Wajahat Ali: That’s exactly the problem, Mary. The Democratic establishment essentially told voters, “Platner isn’t good enough. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Our choice is Janet Mills, and you’ll support her because we told you too.”

People kept asking, “Who else do you have?” The answer was always the same: Janet Mills.

That reminds me of what happened a year and a half ago. After Donald won a second time, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put herself forward to lead Democratic Oversight, and Jasmine Crockett sought the communications position. Nancy Pelosi, from her hospital bed, personally worked the phones to line up the votes for Jerry Connolly instead of AOC.

Connolly, who was about to turn seventy-three, had already announced he was battling lung cancer. He became head of Oversight. Jasmine Crockett, one of the party’s strongest communicators, was passed over for Debbie Dingell, who is also in her seventies.

That’s what people are reacting to. The Democratic establishment says, “These are our choices. You’ll vote for them.” Meanwhile, voters are saying, “We want something different.”

That’s why Platner continued gaining support despite the red flags. Voters were looking for someone outside the system, and the establishment never offered them a compelling alternative.

Mary Trump: Exactly. And they also sidelined another candidate who would have been stronger. If I remember correctly, he owned a brewery in Maine. Instead of allowing the field to develop naturally, they decided very early that Janet Mills was the only acceptable option and poured all of their energy into that strategy.

What establishment Democrats still don’t understand is that the Republican base and the Democratic base are fundamentally different.

The Republican base is reactionary. It is driven by authoritarian personalities who overwhelmingly want to preserve the status quo. They will tolerate almost anything in a candidate as long as he is a straight, white, Christian man. We’ve already seen that they will overlook rape, corruption, criminality, and even fascism because they simply want someone who reflects their identity and worldview.

The Democratic base is completely different, especially now.

Democratic voters want change. They want younger leadership. They want people willing to fight. They want left-wing populism. They want leaders who will stand up for working people and who are prepared to pursue deep, structural reform instead of nibbling around the edges.

When I talk about younger leadership, I don’t necessarily mean people in their twenties. I mean people who haven’t become disconnected from the political reality we’re living in. There are certainly older Democrats who remain extraordinarily effective communicators, but too many have simply lost touch with what this moment requires.

That was part of the problem with the AOC and Jerry Connolly example. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has an enormous social media following because she understands how to communicate with people where they are. Jerry Connolly barely had any digital presence at all.

Communication matters. It’s part of governing now, and Democrats continue to underestimate that reality.

Wajahat Ali: I remember watching Jerry Connolly struggle just to position his camera correctly during Zoom meetings. His own staff apparently hadn’t even shown him how to frame himself properly. At the same time, we were being told, “It’s his turn.”

That’s exactly the mentality we’re fighting.

The Democratic base is saying, “We’re in crisis. Nobody is entitled to these positions anymore.”

The political standards have changed dramatically over the last decade because Donald Trump changed them. There’s now a convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist in the White House. Once that becomes normalized, people inevitably begin saying, “Well, Platner isn’t Donald Trump. He made mistakes, but he wants to tax billionaires, abolish ICE, and refuses AIPAC money. The only alternative you’re giving me is Janet Mills.”

Whether we like it or not, that’s how many voters are thinking.

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I also thought Hannah Pingree handled yesterday exceptionally well. As the Democratic candidate for governor in Maine, she called on Platner to withdraw, but she also recognized something important.

She said that Platner had tapped into something genuine, that voters who were hungry for change had shown up with tremendous passion and energy. She argued that energy shouldn’t disappear simply because Platner was no longer the candidate. Instead, Democrats should find someone new to carry it forward.

I thought that was exactly the right message.

Mary Trump: I completely agree with her.

And to anybody trying to excuse what happened because Republicans routinely get away with this kind of conduct, stop.

It doesn’t matter what Republicans tolerate. We cannot lower our standards simply because they abandoned theirs years ago.

We have to continue distinguishing ourselves from the people currently running this country because they are, quite simply, criminals.

Of course, Republicans immediately tried to exploit the situation. Kevin McCarthy rushed out to claim that Republicans would never stand behind a candidate with this kind of baggage.

That’s an astonishing statement coming from someone who repeatedly voted to support the adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal currently occupying the Oval Office.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

But I also blame the mainstream media because they have normalized Donald’s behavior.

Donald was found liable for sexual abuse. He was found liable for defamation. He was convicted on felony counts. He faced dozens of criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions. Many of those cases disappeared only because of corrupt judges and political interference.

Yet much of the media now treats him as though he’s simply another ordinary president.

That should never happen.

People like our friend Katie Phang continue referring to him exactly as they should: convicted criminal Donald Trump and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump.

That cannot become optional language simply because people have grown tired of hearing it.

Those facts should remain attached to him forever.

Wajahat Ali: That brings us to another extraordinary double standard.

We have a Republican senator who has effectively disappeared for weeks.

We know Mitch McConnell is hospitalized. Rumors continue circulating about the severity of his condition. His wife left almost immediately for China, where she reportedly met with senior government officials. His daughter deactivated her social media accounts.

If Democrats were hiding the condition of a sitting senator this way, Republicans would be conducting wall-to-wall investigations twenty-four hours a day.

Instead, almost nobody seems interested in asking basic questions about what’s happening.

The silence itself tells you everything about the standards that exist in Washington today.

Mary Trump: One of the things that concerns me most is how quickly people have become accustomed to living in an environment where the unacceptable is treated as ordinary. We keep moving the goalposts instead of asking why we’re tolerating behavior that would have ended any political career just a decade ago.

That is why I keep coming back to the importance of redefining what the political center actually is. For far too long, Democrats have allowed Republicans to dictate the terms of every debate. The moment Republicans lurch farther to the right, Democrats reposition themselves somewhere in between, believing that’s where the center lies.

It doesn’t.

The center should be determined by where the overwhelming majority of Americans actually are on the issues. Most Americans support protecting Social Security and Medicare. They support reproductive freedom. They support stronger gun safety laws. They support voting rights. They support LGBTQ rights. They support taxing the wealthiest Americans fairly. Those are not fringe positions. Those are mainstream positions.

If Democrats actually campaigned unapologetically on the policies most Americans already support, instead of constantly worrying about how Republicans will respond, they would find themselves in a much stronger position politically.

Wajahat Ali: That’s exactly right. Republicans have spent decades pulling the political conversation so far to the right that many Democrats now treat basic liberal democracy as though it’s some kind of radical agenda.

Meanwhile, voters are dealing with housing costs, healthcare, childcare, student debt, and wages that haven’t kept pace with inflation. They want somebody who’s willing to fight for them instead of constantly explaining why meaningful change isn’t possible.

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That’s one of the reasons Zohran Mamdani generated so much enthusiasm. Whether people agree with every one of his proposals or not, he offered a vision that addressed people’s lives directly. He spoke confidently about affordability, public investment, housing, and government actually working for ordinary people.

That kind of optimism matters.

People don’t just want someone who’s against Donald Trump. They want someone who’s for something.

Mary Trump: Exactly. That’s what I’ve been saying for years.

Being anti-Donald is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

We have to offer people a compelling vision of the future. We have to explain not only what we’re fighting against, but what we’re fighting for. Otherwise, people understandably become discouraged and disengaged.

The other mistake Democrats continue making is assuming voters will simply reward competence.

Competence matters. Of course it does. But competence without inspiration isn’t enough during a moment like this.

People want leaders who acknowledge the seriousness of the crisis while also giving them genuine reasons to believe things can improve. That’s one of the reasons I’ve become so encouraged by younger leaders entering politics. Many of them understand that communication, authenticity, and hope are just as important as policy expertise.

The country is hungry for leadership that speaks honestly about where we are without surrendering to cynicism.

That’s a balance we absolutely have to strike.

Wajahat Ali: Before we wrap up, I have to ask about something a little lighter.

The World Cup is coming to North America, and I know you’re not exactly the world’s biggest soccer fan.

Mary Trump: That’s putting it politely.

I’ll confess something that may disappoint a lot of people. I really don’t understand soccer.

I appreciate that billions of people around the world love it, and I respect that completely. I just didn’t grow up with it, so I don’t have that emotional connection.

What I do appreciate is what major international sporting events can represent when they’re done well. They can bring people together across cultures and remind us of our common humanity.

Unfortunately, because Donald has a way of inserting himself into everything, I worry that even something as positive as the World Cup could become another opportunity for division or self-promotion.

It’s exhausting.

Wajahat Ali: That’s the challenge with everything these days.

You’d like to enjoy something as simple as sports without politics intruding, but politics keeps showing up whether we invite it or not.

Still, I think people also need reminders that joy matters. Community matters. Friendship matters. If we don’t protect those things, then we’re allowing authoritarianism to take more from us than it already has.

Mary Trump: I couldn’t agree more.

One of the lessons I’ve learned over these last several years is that community isn’t optional. It’s essential.

We survive difficult moments by finding each other, supporting one another, and refusing to become isolated. That’s true in politics, and it’s true in our personal lives.

No one gets through periods like this alone.

That’s one of the reasons conversations like these matter so much to me. They remind people that there are still thoughtful, compassionate communities working toward something better.

I think that’s ultimately what gives me hope.

Hope isn’t something that simply appears out of nowhere. It’s something we build together, one conversation, one relationship, and one act of courage at a time.

Wajahat Ali: Mary, as always, it’s a pleasure talking with you. Thanks for joining me, and thanks for continuing to fight the good fight.

Mary Trump: Thank you, my friend. It’s always wonderful talking with you.

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The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali

A political, cultural, and intellectual playground for the rest of us with writer Wajahat Ali

By THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali

[Transcript edit for clarity, length, and flow]

Mary Trump: Hey, everybody. I had a chance to talk with my amazing friend, Katie Phang, and we talked a lot about E. Jean Carroll’s victory, once and for all, over adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump, as well as the importance of friendship and community during these very trying times. I hope you enjoy it. I always have the best time when I talk to Katie.

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Katie Phang: Joining me now is somebody with whom, frankly, I could just hang out and talk for hours, but we actually have a purpose today beyond simply catching up. That’s Mary Trump, the amazing founder of Mary Trump Media and the outstanding host of The Good in Us on Substack. You’re really becoming a multimedia queen these days. You have the videos, the writing, and you’ve created a place that brings people together.

Mary, I especially wanted my viewers to hear about your incredible new political action committee, Transcend PAC. Tell everyone what it’s all about.

Mary Trump's Transcend PAC

Mary Trump: First of all, Katie, it’s so good to be with you. And yes, I’d much rather just be sitting down having coffee with you. Although, if it were later in the day, we’d probably be drinking something a little stronger than coffee.

I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this because, as everyone knows, our political system has been deeply corrupted by massive amounts of dark money. We’ve reached a point where many elections are literally decided by wealthy individuals pouring millions of dollars into races. That inevitably attracts the wrong kinds of candidates, but that’s the reality we’re living with. And, of course, the Supreme Court continues making that reality worse.

Ronda and I started Transcend PAC to identify, support, endorse, and fund candidates who, first, understand exactly what’s at stake in America right now. Second, they have the courage to meet this moment. And third, they understand what public service actually means, which is something that has, unfortunately, been lost for far too many politicians.

We started working on this a few months ago and officially launched just two weeks ago. We’ve been incredibly encouraged by the response because we genuinely believe 2026 represents a unique moment in our history. Sometimes it takes living through our darkest periods before people are willing to come together and make bold, meaningful changes for the better. I think we’re entering one of those moments.

This is a long-term project. We’re looking far beyond 2028 and even beyond 2032 because it took us a very long time to arrive at this difficult place. It will take sustained effort, determination, and people working together to build what America has always aspired to become: a truly representative, multicultural democracy where all of us are treated as equals.

Katie Phang: What makes Transcend PAC different from the many other PACs already out there?

Mary Trump: I don’t want to suggest we’re the only organization doing good work because there are many outstanding PACs. What makes us different is our commitment to making sure as much of the money we raise as possible goes directly to the candidates and causes we support.

We’re focused on finding candidates who truly understand what’s happening in this country in ways that, frankly, too many politicians still do not. We want candidates with the courage to reject the status quo and promise real reform instead of simply trying to restore what existed before.

We need people willing to expand the Supreme Court, eliminate the filibuster, and pursue meaningful structural reforms. Most importantly, we need leaders who recognize that Donald is not the only problem. The current Republican Party isn’t the only problem either. The issues we’re confronting are systemic.

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If we’re going to preserve our democracy, we need fundamental changes in how we govern and how we think about the future of this country.

Katie Phang: One of the things I really appreciate about Transcend is that it calls for action. One criticism Democrats often hear is that they’re always against something but don’t stand for anything. I don’t think that’s true at all, and I think Transcend is looking for candidates who actually stand for something. We have to oppose the bad, but we also have to build something better.

Mary Trump: Thank you for saying that. Maybe I should just let you promote the PAC because you’re doing a fantastic job.

You’re absolutely right. We have to do both. There are things that absolutely need to be resisted and undone, but Ronda and I have also recognized that people are exhausted. They’re worn down by the constant negativity and the relentless bad news.

Unfortunately, we cannot move forward by pretending things aren’t as bad as they are. We have to face reality honestly. We have to understand how we got here before we can create an effective strategy for getting out of it.

At the same time, people deserve something hopeful to believe in.

That’s why our emphasis is on supporting candidates and causes that not only promise accountability but are also focused on strengthening the institutions, safeguards, civil service, and courts that can help us finally become the democracy we deserve.

Katie Phang: I love that you said “the democracy we deserve” rather than the one somebody decides to give us.

I’ve said many times that I’m tired of fighting over crumbs. This administration, along with those currently in power, has conditioned us to compete with one another for scraps while they indulge themselves completely.

We deserve the whole pie, not just the crumbs.

They’ve also become very good at turning us against one another while they continue enriching themselves.

What I appreciate most about Transcend is that it isn’t trying to rebuild what we had before. It’s trying to create something entirely new because I don’t think simply restoring the old system is enough. Whether Democrats or Republicans were in power, there were systemic failures that brought us here.

This goes beyond who’s occupying elected office. It’s about how we’ve treated each other as fellow Americans.

That’s why I’m glad Transcend is looking for candidates and causes that aren’t simply rebuilding. They’re creating something fundamentally better.

Mary Trump: Exactly.

We need to clean the slate and start over. We need to codify protections because we can no longer rely on norms or traditions. Clearly, those aren’t enough anymore.

We also can’t rely on shame because these people have demonstrated repeatedly that they are incapable of feeling it.

Approaching this from a completely different perspective is essential.

We’re also no longer willing to accept a system where Democratic voters are expected to save democracy every election cycle, only to be told afterward that equal rights, voting rights, or other priorities have to wait because something else is more important.

Obviously, the greatest immediate threat remains the fascist Republican Party.

We cannot allow Republicans to pretend, once Donald leaves office, that he alone was responsible. They enabled him every step of the way. They share responsibility for everything that has happened.

At the same time, Democrats are overwhelmingly on the right side of issues that matter: protecting working people, addressing the climate crisis, defending voting rights, and preserving the rule of law.

Unfortunately, because of decisions made by Chief Justice John Roberts and this corrupt, illegitimate Supreme Court majority, too many Democrats have become comfortable preserving the status quo.

America has always possessed extraordinary potential.

It’s time we finally realized it.

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Katie Phang: Where can people go to learn more about Transcend PAC?

Mary Trump: The website is marytrumptranscendpac.org. Transcend PAC

That’s admittedly a bit of a mouthful, so the easiest thing to do is simply search my name along with the word “Transcend,” and you’ll find us.

Of course, donations are always appreciated because, unfortunately, that’s the reality of American politics. We need resources to support great candidates.

Even if you aren’t in a position to contribute financially, we’d love for you to sign up for updates. This month we’re announcing our first slate of endorsed candidates, and we’re incredibly excited to introduce people to leaders we believe are ready to meet this moment.

Even simply sharing your email address and staying connected would mean a great deal.

Katie Phang: Everything you support always seems to succeed, Mary, so I have every confidence Transcend will too. Having Ronda involved makes me even more excited.

Before we finish, though, can we take a moment to celebrate our friend E. Jean Carroll?

Mary Trump: That’s exactly where I wanted to go next.

Absolutely.

What an extraordinary woman. What a legend. What an absolute force.

Sometimes I still can’t believe she’s my friend because she’s simply remarkable. Through relentless attacks and years of abuse, she never gave an inch. Alongside the incomparable Robbie Kaplan, she has prevailed once and for all.

Katie Phang: I was talking with our other dear friend, Joyce Vance, on Substack Live the other day, and I said this victory belongs completely to E. Jean and Robbie.

At the same time, those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to be part of E. Jean’s circle feel like we’ve been on this journey alongside her. I remember being together during the Second Circuit arguments years ago.

Through multiple trials, endless appeals, and constant attacks, she has remained optimistic while somehow still finding the emotional capacity to support everyone else.

She’s truly been an inspiration.

Mary Trump: She really has.

Over the last six years, there have been some incredibly dark moments, and E. Jean has always been one of those steady, uplifting people who somehow managed to encourage the rest of us.

Even while carrying the enormous burden she has carried, she continued writing on Substack, published another book, and now has an extraordinary documentary.

If you haven’t seen it, please do. It’s called Ask E. Jean. It’s a beautiful film, and we were fortunate enough to attend the premiere in New York.

The legal victory is extraordinary because this $5 million judgment is now final. Donald’s legal team can pretend they’re asking the Supreme Court to reconsider, but that’s simply not how it works.

The money has been sitting in escrow, accruing interest, and she should receive it immediately.

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There’s also the separate $83 million judgment, also accruing interest, and I hope we’ll soon see the same outcome there because E. Jean, Robbie Kaplan, and their entire legal team have earned every bit of it.

One broader issue I’d love to discuss with Robbie someday is how absurd it is that litigation like this can drag on for years, overwhelmingly benefiting people with wealth and power.

But one part of the system worked exactly as it should.

A jury found Donald liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb that verdict.

That’s an extraordinary victory.

Katie Phang: That’s my favorite part.

I’m thrilled E. Jean is receiving the money, but what matters even more is that those findings remain untouched. They weren’t reversed, revised, or overturned.

A jury of Donald Trump’s peers reached those conclusions, and they remain true today.

That’s the greatest victory of all.

It’s also a reminder of the power of friendship.

You, me, E. Jean, Joyce, we’ve all been through so much together over these years. Supporting one another has mattered enormously.

Mary Trump: It really has.

I was talking with a friend yesterday about how many of my closest friendships actually began on Twitter in 2020.

As difficult as that platform can be, the community I found there truly helped save my life during the first Trump administration and throughout the pandemic.

It’s a reminder of how critically important it is to stay connected, especially when times are hardest.

Katie Phang: Community can mean two people or two hundred people. It can be one group or many groups.

That’s exactly why organizations like Transcend matter. That’s why leaning on your friends matters.

None of us gets through this alone.

Mary Trump: Absolutely.

Katie Phang: Mary, thank you so much for joining me. Everyone should search for Mary Trump’s Transcend PAC and learn more.

And remember, you’re always welcome to come hang out with me anytime.

Mary Trump: Thank you. I love everything you’re doing, and I especially love that you’re doing it from Paris.

The Parisians may need a little convincing that Americans aren’t all terrible, but you are an extraordinary ambassador.

I also want to say something because it deserves to be said.

You have been an incredible example of grit, integrity, determination, and steadfastness. As a friend, as a journalist, and as someone who has never backed away from this fight, you’ve shown extraordinary courage, tenacity, and compassion.

I appreciate you more than I can say.

Katie Phang: I love you right back, my friend. I’m always here for you, and I’m grateful to everyone who’s joined us today.

Mary Trump: Thanks, Katie.

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Katie Phang

Law and Disorder