Donald Trump’s war on Iran is a government action that is ripe for unintended consequences. In fact, we’ve already seen a few.

The initial, limited attack has given way to a lengthy stalemate over control of the Strait of Hormuz. That stalemate, along with the loss of control over the Strait and its associated energy crisis, themselves represent an unintended consequence of the airstrikes. I am 100-percent certain that Donald Trump expected a quick Venezuela-style strike followed by another capitulation and victory lap rather than a protracted quagmire that rapidly morphed into a threat to the world economy.

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A world economic collapse could be another unintended consequence of Trump’s Iran policy. Spirit Airlines has already become the first major corporate casualty of the new status quo, but it likely won’t be the last. Chevron’s CEO recently predicted “physical shortages” and economic slowdowns as the nations adapt to the new, constricted flow of oil supplies.

“Demand needs to move to meet supply,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said on Monday. “Economies are going to have to slow.”

The laws of supply and demand tell us that oil and gasoline prices will rise until they find an equilibrium with falling demand at the new level of supply. The increased price level will merely be painful for consumers and some businesses, but it will be financially fatal for others.

All this brings me to my hypotheses of the day: What if Donald Trump turns out to be a boon to the adoption of EV technology?

With the exception of a brief flirtation with Tesla Cyber Trucks when Donald Trump and Elon Musk were in the midst of their bromance, the right has long been a vocal opponent of electric vehicles. Not only have anti-EV memes been a staple of the online right, but the Trump Administration has been hostile to EV incentives. Criticism of EVs has included questions about costs and efficiency, the environmental friendliness of battery production, and prepper concerns about the availability of electricity in an apocalyptic scenario. (Spoiler alert: gasoline probably won’t be widely available in a doomsday scenario either, and it normally takes electricity to pump gas.)

One of the big roadblocks to the adoption of EVs has been low gas prices. There was little reason to consider an EV when you could fill up even the large fuel tank of an SUV for $2.50 per gallon. Even the much-maligned gas spike during the Biden Administration, which was actually due to Vladimir Putin’s attempted invasion of Ukraine, was a temporary blip lasting only a few months. Domestic energy production also spiked, reaching a record high during the Biden Adminstration although few realized or admitted it. By the end of his term, gas prices were in line with historic averages.

The irony is that Republicans have long accused Democrats of secretly trying to raise gas prices as a means of coercing Americans into transitioning to EVs. Now that gas prices are rising and will soon break records under conditions that can be traced squarely back to the policy choices of a Republican president, they call for patience and even make false claims that prices are already falling.

The current situation is much different from the short spike under Biden. Experts warn that gas prices won’t return to pre-war levels anytime soon. The war and the dueling blockades have created systemic chaos and shortages that will take months to sort out after the Strait is reopened, and there is no sign that the Strait is going to reopen anytime soon. No reliable sign anyway.

At minimum, we are looking at elevated gas prices for months, possibly for years. As I write this, the US average price for regular gasoline is $4.56 per gallon. In February, it was $2.92. To put it in consumer terms, filling up a 15-gallon gas tank just went from $46 to $68. That’s an extra $22 per fill-up. If you’re a commuter or soccer mom who fills up two to three times per week, those costs multiply. If your family has several cars, the costs multiply again.

And gas prices are still rising. Where they stop, nobody knows.

An extra $100 per week isn’t enough by itself to justify trading in your gas guzzler for a hybrid or an EV, but the Trump Effect on gas prices has removed a powerful disincentive against considering EVs: the idea that gas prices are low, so there is no reason to consider new technologies. As prices continue to rise, many consumers who are in the market for new cars will take a close look at hybrids and EVs as a way to reduce their exposure to high energy costs.

Other objections to EVs have already been largely overcome. EV prices have fallen even as ranges and efficiency have increased. Charger availability has expanded with many public chargers available at no charge. (A little EV humor there.) New battery and charger technology also allows charging so fast that charging time can rival the time it takes to make a fuel stop at a gas station. EV battery life has also improved, and many automakers include warranties that cover the battery for the typical usage life of the car.

EV technology has come a long way in the last few years. EVs are now practical for a large share of the population’s typical driving needs, but unfamiliarity and anxiety about range and batteries have made adoption of the technology slow. Few would have expected Trump’s war on Iran, a war in which he once openly fantasized about taking Iranian oil, to provide the impetus to overcome the fears about adopting EVs, but oil prices that are above $4 and climbing may be the incentive that many Americans need.

I would not be surprised if EV sales didn’t increase due to the energy crisis. I’d be more surprised if they didn’t. And like Republicans giving credit to Barack Obama for being the best gun salesman in history, Donald Trump’s failed Iran policy may get a lot of credit for unintentionally spurring many Americans to take the leap towards electric vehicles.

History shows that government programs often often have results that can be the opposite of what was intended. It looks like that will be the case with the attack on Iran in multiple ways.

And did someone say “gerrymandering?”

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TARIFF STRIKE TWO A three-judge panel at the US Court of International Trade ruled against Trump and imposed a permanent injunction on Trump’s “can too” 10-percent tariffs imposed after his loss at the Supreme Court.

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So the paper has the note, which it published, adding that it has not authenticated the claim that Epstein wrote it. It says:

They investigated me for a month - found NOTHING!

So 15 year old charges [unreadable].

It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.

Watcha want me to do - Bust out cryin!!

NO FUN - NOT WORTH IT!!

One little fact worth discussing is that this note was not left before Epstein was found dead in his cell. According to reports, it was left and obtained by Tartaglione after Epstein purportedly attempted suicide, some weeks before his actual death. So this was a suicide note that Epstein allegedly wrote before surviving a suicide attempt, and then never tried to get it back or destroy it. Tartaglione claims he found it in a graphic novel, written on yellow paper from a legal pad.

I suppose you can call it a suicide note if Epstein actually tried to kill himself on either occasion, the one where he didn’t die and the one where he did. And Tartaglione’s lawyers said they were able to authenticate the note, though they didn’t say how.

The NYT article zeroed in on phrases Epstein had used in emails, found in the note, like “No fun,” and “but out cryin’.” It would seem that the note is written in a style that Epstein would have used, but again, there’s no authoritative proof of any of this.

There will be people who will never be convinced. If Epstein was really killed in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (which has since been shut down), then his killers did a poor job of controlling the scene. Why would the killers not leave a suicide note after the second (successful) attempt, but did leave one at the first attempt, and allowed Epstein’s cellmate to have it?

What if Tartaglione was part of the conspiracy? I mean the Epstein case goes to the very top: the elite of the entire world, from now-sacked royalty, to former presidents, to the current president. College professors, CEOs of large corporations: the list seems endless—powerful or influential men caught up in the net of Epstein’s “fun.” The list of victims, young women who were paid or lured into a life of, well it is what it is, prostitution, is also long and sad.

It would seem to be within the grasp of such powerful men, some of whom at times could order a nuclear strike, or have men dressed in tactical black use seemingly alien tech to pluck a head of state from his own palace, to order and arrange the killing of a single man, and make it look like a suicide.

Then again, such men would probably want to cover this up to the point of having to kill anyone who was involved. If it was a conspiracy, how can it be that not a single stool pigeon has emerged? You’d think someone would talk.

But it’s the trade craft of conspiracy theorists to assume complete and unbreakable secrecy surrounding their conspiracies. It’s the ploy “nobody talks about this” while talking about it incessantly that feeds these unending attempts to bait others into proving a negative.

The straightforward answer here is that the walls closed in on Jeffrey Epstein. The men and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell had too much to lose by doing anything overt or risky. They simply wanted Epstein to go away, preferably to prison, for a very long time. Any claims Epstein, as a living person, made could be refuted. But as a dead man, there’s no refuting anything. Epstein was depressed, and saw the literal writing on the wall. He was surely headed to prison. Whatever claims he could make against the powerful men involved in his life would not change his fate.

To me, it seems much more damaging for Epstein to write how it’s a “treat” to decide when to exit life’s stage and let the others fight over what’s true and what isn’t true.

It’s impossible to prove a negative unless you refute every possibility, no matter how remote. So there will be people who claim that the killers wrote the suicide note, planted it in the book, or that Tartaglione was in on the scheme. Of course, I don’t see evidence of that, but perhaps if Tartaglione is imprisoned on federal charges, and ends up pardoned, we might guess why.

By ending his time on earth, Epstein has done far more damage to the people whose secrets he kept, than he could ever do on the witness stand or in interviews with newspapers. Who else would have more motivation to kill Epstein, than Epstein himself?

Yet some people will never be convinced.

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Donald Trump grew up in the backstabbing club of New York real estate developers. He end-ran them by leveraging media instead of using the regular methods of business domination. His media profile and fame allowed him to make “deals” and entice investors and banks that would not otherwise touch the risky ventures he pursued. But Trump managed to get these things done anyway. Sometimes things didn’t go the way Trump wanted, like when talk show host Merv Griffin bested him in court and took over Resorts International in 1988, leaving Trump with the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, a stone that nearly sunk the business.

Lyndon Baines Johnson emerged from the equally backstabbing Texas Democratic Party machine, which was every bit as vicious in the 1930s through the 50s as any gang of mob-connected real estate barons.

If you think Trump’s famous bouts of throwing plates of spaghetti at walls, or seething online is bad, Johnson had him beat, though much of the media coverage was suppressed in those days. Plus, there was no social media.

While it’s likely Trump and the Republicans are going to get trounced in the November midterms (but who knows, I am not willing to commit to that prediction), the president still has a firm hold on grassroots state legislative and executive races. His endorsement and support still count, as Trump has financial control of the RNC and therefore the party. Indiana stands out as an example. Seven legislators who opposed Trump’s redistricting plan, and at least five of them got the boot from Trump-supported primary opponents. From the New York Times:

“Any Republican that votes against this important redistricting, potentially having an impact on America itself, should be PRIMARIED,” Mr. Trump wrote in a November social media post that referred to two senators as Republicans in name only.

He soon followed through on that promise, endorsing challengers to seven of the eight anti-redistricting Republicans who ran for re-election this year. Other Republicans who voted against the bill have two years remaining in their terms or did not run for re-election.

Over the 12 years that Trump has been politically important, scores of House and Senate members have hung up their spurs, so to speak, rather than suffer the wrath and political fire that opposing Trump brings. That’s raw political power, whether you support him or not. And those Boomers who lived through the 60s, or some who didn’t but understand the history, remember this is not the first time we’ve seen it.

In Washington, there was something called “the Johnson treatment” and if you got it, things were very bad for you. Johnson would not leave his targets alone, engaging in humiliation—summoning them to White House meetings and then moving to the bathroom, forcing them to follow him while he sat literally on the throne—or simply getting in their face, physically. He was known to flout his, umm, manhood, in meetings, or simply to create awkward situations for those he wanted to control. Then he would flatter them, or threaten, as necessary to get what he wanted. To the blind observer, these techniques sound an awful lot like Trump (though without the physical part or the uninhibited displays, as Trump is known to be pretty shy about his body).

I think if there was social media in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson would be posting similar things to Trump about his enemies. And he had a lot of enemies. If you opposed Johnson, he never forgot a slight. He used the government to punish his opponents, and his political power to force them to heel, or simply to force them out once they lose their usefulness.

We forget that Trump is indeed capable of working across the aisle, if it serves his public media image. As Trump is totally transactional, so was Johnson. The main difference is that Johnson was very skilled in the maneuver, and use of political power inside the government, because that was his background. Trump is still an outsider, fundamentally incapable of playing the inside role.

And like Trump, who has turned on Republicans at least as much as he trashes Democrats, Johnson reserved his fiercest attacks for fellow Democrats, especially those who opposed the Vietnam War. He took it personally, and used the FBI, Justice Department, and other arms of the government to track and persecute his enemies.

It was the Vietnam War that did Johnson in. It wasn’t the war itself—anytime we fought the NVA, we won outright. But we were fighting an entrenched unconventional force in the Viet Cong, and it didn’t help that the South Vietnam government was corrupt and brutal in itself. Also, Robert McNamara’s micromanagement from Washington resulted in many failures. It wasn’t the war, it was the body count. The daily roster of dead Americans coming home in caskets ruined Johnson’s term, and resulted in his abandoning his re-election campaign.

Trump certainly remembers the impact of dead Americans on the country. He lived through it, though he didn’t live it (his “personal Vietnam” was avoiding STDs as a playboy). There is a reason our troops are standing off against Iran, and only using air power and sea power to prosecute a war. Trump has now said the war is “terminated,” in order to comply with the 60-day limit before requiring Congressional approval. There are some legal battles Trump doesn’t want to take on, and trying to get around the War Powers Act is one of them right now. So the war is “terminated” until it isn’t and a fresh 60-day window opens. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to go.

What Trump doesn’t want to do is engage in a war where hundreds, or thousands, of American troops end up dead. That’s how Johnson ruined himself, in spite of his immense political power and almost king-like authority over the government.

But people remember, they remember the Vietnam War, and the civil rights battle that Johnson used to pivot his party from the party of Jim Crow to the party of minority interests. It’s not that civil rights was a bad thing, of course, but people remember the cynicism and political dirty tricks, like turning Senator Barry Goldwater, one of the most stalwart supporters of civil rights and the NAACP, into a racist monster in the media.

People remember what happened in 1968, when the country rebelled against Johnson and put Richard Nixon in the White House. If Johnson was an autocratic, volatile, power-crazed political maniac, Nixon had him beat in paranoia and subterfuge. But the press never liked Nixon, and from day one went after him. The difference between Trump and Nixon on the media is that Trump isn’t afraid to make nice to the media, and personally praise his enemies, and give people like New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman almost unlimited access to him and his staff. And when it results in the inevitable book trashing him, he revels in the attention. Nixon just hated all of it.

The country put Nixon in office to rid itself of Johnson and his Democratic Party. Then Nixon almost destroyed the presidency, and put the nation on a road to decline for nearly a decade until Ronald Reagan brought us back from the brink of despair. The country could do the same this term, pushing so hard against Trump that it results in someone far worse than Nixon in the White House. Of course, that’s a few years in the future, so I can’t speculate on who that will be, but I guarantee it’s not going to be a joyous chorus of Kum Ba Ya by Democrats to decide. It’s going to be every bit as brutal and vicious as it’s always been, and with our primary system, it will likely result in the most two-faced demagogue winning.

It’s a good thing Trump has the instinct not to put the country on a road to a war that will kill thousands of young Americans. He doesn’t want to repeat the sins of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Of all the sins Trump has committed, politically, at least so far he has not brought us that one.

Remember, there are millions of Americans who remember all of this, and even if they are not political pundits or policy wonks, they know what is important for them. And they like Donald Trump because he is an outsider, with the same tenacity and power the Democrats took (and still take) for granted for decades. With that kind of control still at his command, which Indiana shows hasn’t completely faded, we will see how it turns out in Georgia and other states. What I do know is we should not underestimate the value of that power, or count them all as faded, and in the past.

Don’t believe all the “is Trump done?” talk, because those who waft that into the air are doing it for their own purposes as much as wishful thinking. We need to elect better people, for sure, but Trump’s political power is limiting the field on the Republican side, and also influencing who is running on the Democratic side. For the Boomers, it’s just LBJ all over again. I hope it doesn’t produce another Nixon.

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But that isn’t what I want to talk about today. It’s just one of the exhibits in my menagerie of doom. I’ve used Destin Sandlin’s grill cleaner as an example before. The Smarter Scrubber costs $79. Besides being a good grill cleaner, that won’t shed shards of metal wire into your food like the cheap ones you buy at the hardware store, it is notable for the designers’ effort to manufacture it using 100 percent American-made parts. Until someone tries to make something physical, a consumer good, using no Chinese, or Vietnamese, or any foreign part or design, down to screws, nuts and washers, I don’t think they can know how giant a challenge it is.

Back in the 1950s, 60s, and even the 70s, it was easy to find metal shops, tool and part manufacturers in the United States. That is not true now. We have lost much of the ability, and the knowledge and skill, to make these things. We are too dependent on computers, CNC machines, 3D printers, and cheap Chinese supply chains to understand that our economy has fundamentally changed in the last half century.

We are no longer a manufacturing powerhouse, except in a few areas like military hardware and passenger aircraft. We don’t make ships anymore. We don’t make “white goods” like kitchen appliances. We don’t make televisions. We don’t even make computer chips; most are made overseas in Taiwan, mainland China, or South Korea. We are number four, with about 10 percent of the market.

America now relies mostly on services for our economic output. According to the St. Louis Fed, the services sector provides about 72 percent of American jobs. It accounts for $24.32 trillion, or 83.3 percent, of our GDP. Manufacturing, by contrast, contributes just $2.96 trillion, or about 10 percent. Services continues to grow at about a 2.3 percent rate, while manufacturing continues to shrink by about 1.8 percent, according to Q4 2025 figures.

There’s nothing wrong with being a services powerhouse, but the problem is services relies on recurring revenue, not goods and supply chains. There’s no real inventory for services, no “work in process” (WIP) goods. It’s based on contractual relationships, data, and people. That’s a problem in that U.S. public debt now exceeds our entire GDP. Kevin D. Williamson noted that we owe $31.27 trillion, while our GDP is $31.22 trillion. Our government debt is choking our nation, and mortgaging our children’s futures.

As of March, 2026, public sector employment accounts for 14.7 percent of U.S. non-farm employment. So, of the services sector, a giant chunk is consumed by taxpayer money, which is financed by debt, a debt we cannot pay even if we committed 100 percent of our entire economic output to paying it for a whole year. Uncle Sam is eating our entire economy bite by bite. And our elected officials do nothing but whistle past the graveyard and crow about how they are going to cut taxes and increase services at the same time (if you don’t know, that’s not possible unless you increase the debt).

Picture a three-legged stool, like the ones used to milk cows. One leg is the public service sector, one is healthcare, and the final one is education. These three services areas are cutting the legs from beneath our economy.

In 1980, public college tuition and fees averaged $1,679 per year, and private college was about $7,200. By the year 2000, it had risen to $7,040 and $25,700 respectively. Today it’s $11,950 and a whopping $45,000. Most of this is paid through scholarships (some public money, some private endowments), student loans, and from the pockets of parents. No wonder schools are failing. Hampshire College in Massachusetts was founded in 1965, and 2026 is its last year. Since 2024, the percentage of colleges merging or closing has increased from the historical 1 percent to between 2 and 2.5 percent. That’s a significant bump, and you can’t really say it’s all related to COVID-19. Costs and economic misery simply can’t support the same number of colleges that we’ve had in the past.

Where does the money go? Well, for education, it goes to the middle management, the deans, and the college presidents. In the years since 1999, college president salaries have increased 75 percent. In 2011, the New York Times revealed that Constantine Papadakis of Drexel University’s estate was paid $4.9 million (he died in office). William R. Brody of Johns Hopkins earned $3.8 million; Donald V. DeRosa of University of the Pacific earned $2.3 million; and the president of Northwestern University earned $2.2 million. The average salary for a college president is now just over $300,000 a year.

In healthcare, for-profit corporations buying up hospitals grab money by the bushel. And sometimes, they rape their victims and walk away with the cash. Steward Health Care bought public non-profit hospitals in Massachusetts, while its CEO, Ralph de la Torres lived on a private ranch in Waxahachie, Texas, and cruised in a $30 million superyacht. Steward went bankrupt and de la Torres walked away with $80 million. The hospitals that used to serve the public as non-profits, their land stripped and sold, can no longer afford to pay rent for their facilities, and now many have to close, so residents in those cities get less health care.

And large corporations, like the one that owns the hospital I was in (I got very good care), charge $19,006 in “Coronary Care Unit” fees, for “HC Telemetry.” What they did is hook me up with leads and a little box to monitor my heart. I was not in the hospital for a heart problem. After four days, they removed the leads. I had my own prescription medicine, which costs $15 for a bottle at Publix, but the hospital pharmacy insisted on giving me the same pills and charged $5.90, or $4.80, or $5.70 for each pill. I had a CT scan and they billed $3,255. If you go to a clinic and pay cash, you can get a CT scan for as little as $300.

Medical costs and the layers of administration sucking the money out of the system, along with insurance companies complicit in the scam, are hiking the prices of everything in our service sector economy.

One day, it can all crash very quickly. All those jobs, those good jobs with good pay, can come to a fast end. All those tech jobs that we think AI will replace, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the collapse of healthcare, education, and public sector.

We are in trouble in America. We have to get back to making things, and employing people to make things. Our economy is having the legs sawn from under us, and it’s our kids who will be falling to the ground to rebuild what we have so weakened.

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As with many sudden deaths, the focus quickly shifted from the life and legacy of the departed company to the question of “Whodunnit.” I’ve been doing Community Notes for a while now, and normally it’s difficult to get Notes published, but I noticed that a bevy of Notes were somehow approved with astonishing speed accusing Elizabeth Warren of orchestrating the carrier’s demise. While it’s true that Warren did oppose a proposed Spirit merger, that is not the full story of Spirit’s death.

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When I said that Spirit had suffered from a prolonged illness, I wasn’t kidding. The airline was a company that people loved to hate. Just 10 years ago, the company was very profitable as an ultra-low-fare carrier that introduced American travelers to a la carte pricing, but that business model was never very popular.

If you’ve never flown Spirit, here’s how it operated. When you booked a fare, you would see a really low base price, but that price would rise as you paid extra for services that other airlines included with their fares. Spirit was the first US airline to require passengers to pay for checked bags, but it didn’t stop there. You had to pay for snacks, you had to pay to pick a seat, you even had to pay for a boarding pass and to put a carry-on bag in the overhead bin. If you bought the extras, you might end up paying more to the low-fare airline than you would for a ticket on a more well-known competitor.

Spirit was a niche airline that specialized in flying a small number of routes with a small number of flights. It didn’t try to be everything to everyone. It mainly tried to get vacationers to tourist hot spots as cheaply as possible, not necessarily as conveniently as possible.

Spirit boomed in the 2010s with both profitability and a number of safety awards, but then came the pandemic and the havoc that it wreaked on the travel industry. Spirit’s niche of elective travel to leisure destinations was hard hit.

In 2022, the company was the subject of several takeover attempts. The first suitor was Frontier Airlines, another low-fare carrier, but Spirit shareholders rejected that offer in July. Shortly after, JetBlue came calling with another attempt to acquire rather than merge with Spirit. This is the deal that you’ve seen referenced on social media.

The Biden Adminstration’s Department of Justice sued to block the deal, saying “If allowed to proceed, this merger will limit choices and drive up ticket prices for passengers across the country” and “eliminate Spirit’s unique and disruptive role in the industry.” It was ultimately a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, rather than Joe Biden or Merrick Garland, who blocked the deal. Elizabeth Warren, a senator at the time, opposed the deal but was not directly involved.

After the deal was blocked, Spirit’s stock value was halved and the company filed for bankruptcy in November 2024 amid mounting losses in the post-COVID world. The company reorganized to trim its costs and went on flying, emerging from bankruptcy in March 2025 after rejecting yet another offer from Frontier.

In August, it was back after posting losses and burning through much of its cash. Frontier tried to do what most airlines do at that point and cut costs, parking airplanes and furloughing (i.e., laying off) employees. The airline planned to reduce its workforce by about a third and its flights by 25 percent.

Then came the Iran war. After Donald Trump launched his attacks on Iran in February 2026, the Iranian regime blocked the Strait of Hormuz. The number of tankers carrying oil from the Persian Gulf dropped from thousands to a trickle.

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Airlines have three main cost centers: Labor, aircraft, and fuel. The first two are relatively predictable. Fuel prices are not.

To address the volatility of fuel prices, airlines “hedge,” that is, they buy contracts for future fuel deliveries at a given price. These futures contracts are a gamble because the price can either go up or down, but at least the company has reduced an unknown variable to a known quantity.

The problem for Spirit was that an airline in bankruptcy has a difficult time getting the money or credit to hedge fuel. Spirit’s “shrink to shine” plan was undercut by the skyrocketing price of jet fuel that increased its operating costs and the fact that it did not have a fuel hedging program in place.

Patrick De Haan of GasBuddy pointed out that Spirit’s restructuring plan assumed jet fuel prices of $2.24 per gallon for 2026. Instead, they were faced with $4.51 per gallon and rising. The price of fuel was double what Spirit had planned for.

Why didn’t Spirit just raise its fares and pass along the higher costs to its passengers, you might ask. There are several reasons with the most obvious being that a low-fare carrier’s customers are very price sensitive. Further, the low-fare customers that were Spirit’s target market are also being squeezed by higher prices for gasoline, food, and other consumer items. They have less disposable income than they did a few years ago.

Finally, Spirit’s rising prices eroded its edge over airlines that were able to hedge their fuel prices. Delta Air Lines even owns its own refinery. If the price of the ticket is close, most passengers would fly one of the traditional airlines, especially considering Spirit’s added fees and more limited schedules.

So who killed Spirit? The answer is not as simple as either side would have you believe.

In aviation, we have a model called the accident chain. A crash rarely has one cause. In almost every crash, there is a chain of linked causes that contribute to the accident. If one or more of these links is broken, the chain is broken and the accident can be avoided. The same theory applies here.

Could the merger (acquisition) by JetBlue have prevented Spirit’s ultimate crash? Perhaps, but there is no way of knowing for sure. The failure of the deal definitely left Spirit weakened and vulnerable, but JetBlue is also on the verge of bankruptcy and may declare it by the end of the year. Combining the companies might have given them enough strength to carry on, but it might have only delayed the inevitable.

And it could also be true that the deal might have been good for the company, but not the country. I, along with many other Americans, am concerned about the steady growth of monolithic megacorporations that reduce our consumer choices. Merrick Garland may have been right that the merger would have reduced consumer options while driving up prices and making it harder for new companies to enter the airline marketplace.

Earlier this year, United and American discussed a possible merger as a way to better compete with foreign carriers. The combined company would have been twice the size of Delta, with 2,800 planes and about 40 percent of the US domestic market. How big is too big, and do consumers really benefit when “all restaurants are Taco Bell?”

One thing that the merger would not have done was save the Spirit we know. This would have been JetBlue acquiring the weaker company, and buyouts seldom go well for aviation employees. Many jobs would still have been lost from duplicated positions and the fact that the new company likely wouldn’t need as many pilots and flight attendants as the two separate companies had. Flight crews who kept their jobs would have likely lost seniority, which is very important at the airlines.

Whether the merger would have saved Spirit or not, it is indisputable that high fuel prices were the final nail in the company’s coffin. Even with the JetBlue deal, the new company might have failed anyway, but without the fuel price spike, Spirit would be flying today. Spirit specifically cited high fuel prices in its announcement that it was shutting down, while making no mention of failed mergers.

Spirit isn’t the first airline to be killed by high fuel prices. I don’t like to brag, but my career has lasted longer than three of the airlines that I worked for. One of those was Independence Air. Independence was a low-fare carrier that was formed in the wake of the airline bankruptcies of the 2000s. The company was an attempt to reinvent Atlantic Coast Airlines, a regional carrier that had operated as United Express and Delta Connection but lost its contracts as those companies restructured.

A major reason that Independence failed was that another fuel spike occurred in 2003 just as the company was taking off. Like Spirit, the newborn Independence was in a weak state, and like Spirit, fuel prices that were dramatically higher than expected killed it.

The point here is that a strong company can weather storms that a company in a weakened position cannot. A strong company can absorb the shock of unexpected higher costs that can be the death knell for a company with other problems. Spirit had problems.

Weak companies can also be a bellwether for stronger companies and the larger economy. The weak die first, but if the problems continue to mount, even companies perceived as strong can fail.

With oil and fuel prices continuing to rise and no relief in sight, Spirit is likely to be the first of many to suffer serious problems. As fuel prices rise, fares will rise, and demand will fall. There is already concern about a looming shortage of jet fuel, and many airlines, even big, strong ones, are cutting costs and reducing flights.

And the problems extend beyond the airline industry. Farmers are another sector that is perennially on the edge of failure, and farm bankruptcies are already rising sharply. In addition to last year’s tariffs and trade wars, farmers now face higher fuel costs and shortages of fertilizer, yet another commodity that is tied to the Persian Gulf.

The partisans on both sides are spinning their simplified versions of Spirit’s demise, and to a certain extent, they are both right. But a merger deal might have saved only one (maybe two) companies, while high energy prices threaten countless businesses and farms, the entire economy. And as the failures mount, it will be increasingly hard to blame Biden.

And as the sticker says, Donald Trump can point to all the “creative destruction” that his Iran policy has wrought and say, “I did that.”

THE WAR IS OVER As I predicted last week, Donald Trump announced on Friday that the war with Iran was over. The announcement came as the conflict reached the 60-day deadline established by the War Powers Act.

LONG LIVE THE WAR But the US blockade of the Iranian blockade, an act of war, continues, and on Sunday, Trump announced that the US will escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, following an Iranian attack on a cargo ship, also an act of war. Trump’s announcement allegedly coincided with another multimillion-dollar market bet that paid off handsomely for some insider.

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU In celebration, enjoy the viral AI video of General Grievous appearing on Pawn Stars.

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I’ve lately been immersing myself in a few studies and videos on war. There’s a 3-hour documentary in the style of Ken Burns on Youtube on the roots that led to World War I. There’s another on the psychological destruction of Nazi beliefs of World War II German POWs held in the United States. And in the back of my mind, there’s this one where Youtuber Destin Sandlin—a mechanical engineer—with his partners is attempting to manufacture the simplest item, a better grill cleaner, entirely from U.S.-made parts, and so far is failing.

Destin’s channel, SmarterEveryDay, also did a series on war, which is a must-see for anyone concerned about the current prospect for one happening. Against this background, I can’t help but think that my generation, the one conveniently poised between the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of both Gulf wars, who grew up with the Cold War, apocalyptic expectations, but no real understanding of how it feels to have a war with real loss, might face, in our remaining years, a war that America can lose, with our kids (or for some, grandkids) desperately fighting it.

Then I look at how I could pray against this.

I think of Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” which he demanded not be published while he still lived. It is a short piece, where those in church are given to pray for our troops in a foreign war. A man, whom Twain calls “the stranger” enters this church, walks up to the pastor and bids him stand aside. The minister, startled, does so, and the man begins to speak: “I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” He brings to the ears of the congregation the “unspoken” part of their prayer:

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

When we pray for our troops, is this not implied in the transaction offered before God? We pray that Cain, not Abel, be slain. We pray that the Almighty has blessed our righteous cause and that we march not for our own glory, honor, or way of life, but endued with purpose from on high. We pray that God Himself has given us our marching orders, to destroy the enemies of heaven. We fashion ourselves like King David and his armies, or King Saul sparing the last of the Amalekites, against the specific word from the prophet Samuel, as recorded in 1 Samuel 15:13-15. We like to think it’s our mercy to spare the enemy, and our actions are not rebellion against the Lord, but our own obedience, as we concoct it.

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It is easy to see modern Israel in this image. Since 2023, the Israelis, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the most American-like figure in Israeli politics since the country was founded, have engaged in what they call “jungle rules” of war—there is no target unworthy of elimination if they are in command of, or even aiding, the enemy. Israel has wiped out the entire leadership of Hamas, more than once. It has destroyed the command structure and senior commanders, including the political leaders, of Hezbollah, and is not working on the next echelon as Israeli troops seek to scrub all traces of the group’s military presence from southern Lebanon.

And Israel, joined by the United States, eliminated—killed—the entire top leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a single raid, on a single morning, as targets of opportunity. Given the talk from both Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, you’d think they had a plan for the people of Iran to rise up and depose the despotic theocracy ruling that place. But no such plan has revealed itself. In fact, it seems that both leaders are content to deal with the replacements in the Supreme Leader and political masters’ places, who are also loyal to the death to the Islamic Republic. Instead of crushing the ruling faction, this war has exposed the immense power the regime still possesses to choke world commerce, and inflict great harm upon the United States and other free nations.

It seems we now have a war that we could conceivably lose. From a global perspective, I believe Iran is really a proxy for a World War, one we must win. But from a spiritual perspective, are we really doing God’s will, or engaged in His righteous work, by fighting this battle?

So how shall we pray?

The prophet Jonah was instructed by God to go to Nineveh, which today is Mosul, in Iraq, and bring the message that God is displeased with their idolatry and hedonism: “its wickedness has come up before me,” said the Lord to Jonah. Jonah did not want to preach that message to Nineveh, because they were a people reviled and hated by the Children of Israel, why would anyone want to extend to them God’s mercy? So Jonah fled. If anyone is familiar with Bible stories, or attended Sunday School, we’ve all heard the story of Jonah in the belly of the whale. Most people think that the miracle of the story is the whale and Jonah’s survival, having been tossed from the ship he was on after the crew heard Jonah’s confession of disobedience in the midst of a terrible storm.

That’s not the miracle at all. Jonah was selected by God to deliver the message to Nineveh, and God was not about to let Jonah escape his assignment by running. (Who can run from God’s presence, anyway?) Whether you believe the “big fish” story or think it’s just an analogy for God’s persistent pursuit of Jonah, the result is the same. Jonah went to Nineveh and brought God’s message: repent or be overthrown; you have forty days to consider your ways. When the message reached the king of Nineveh, he repented, as did the entire city.

The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. Jonah 3:5.

The Lord, as promised, brought mercy.

When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened. Jonah 3:10.

Jonah was furious. How could God have mercy on such wicked people? He prayed for death. God brought understanding by using a plant under which Jonah had sought shelter from the sun, then allowing worms to consume the plant. Jonah was again angry and prayed for death.

⁹ But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”

“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

¹⁰ But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. ¹¹ And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?” Jonah 4:9-11

The people of Nineveh were not obedient to God because they did not know good from evil. God used Jonah to bring that message and welcome 120,000 people into communion with Him. That is the miracle.

Our troops are sitting at sea and in bases around the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Some of our sailors and Marines at sea cannot be resupplied, and the Navy, envied for decades for its great food, is reduced to serving canned slop. This image of the United States, who in every war has been the masters of logistics, does not project well in the world. We have been pulling our punches in fear of taking casualties, but in the process, making ourselves targets, or suffering the humiliation of leaving without having achieved any kind of victory.

So how shall we pray?

The fastest-growing underground Christian community in the world is in Iran. Some estimates say there are more than a million believers in Iran, up from under a thousand in 1979, when the Islamic Republic took over. There are 90 million people in Iran, a country roughly the size of Alaska. The fact the one percent of them are believers in Christ, and that number is greatly added to each day, is a miracle. Should we pray for that as God’s will? It is certainly God’s will, from the Christian perspective.

The Islamic Republic and the IGRC believe there is a supreme, unitary god. They believe they know who he is. They believe in their scriptures and that their god, the god of Islam, of Mohammad, will bring about paradise. They are willing to kill, and die, for their god. The IGRC has over 190,000 military members; in all our strikes, along with Israel’s, we have killed between 3,500 and 6,000, depending on whose numbers you believe. We have done billions of dollars of damage to the country’s infrastructure. They have inflicted upon us $9.4 billion in added costs per month; that’s an additional $52 per American each month.

We are engaged in a war of attrition with Iran, and we could conceivably lose that war. The Iranian theocrats are willing to kill their own, or die themselves, for their cause. Economic chaos is not something they will bend to. However, if some of them begin to see Jesus Christ in their dreams, and hearken to His call for faith, well that will be a miracle, and it could end the war.

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Which victory do we want to pray for?

Will we pray for our troops to prevail, for Iran’s “roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger”—which we see in Gaza, by the way, as the result of “jungle rules”, or will we pray for mercy at the hands of a loving God?

I believe in a strong military, for the sake of defending our freedom. But doing half a job is worse than doing none at all. Our leaders have placed us where we can suffer more harm than doing good, and that our failure to finish has left Iranians worse off, and the regime more powerful over its people, than before we arrived.

I pray for victory, but the victory of faith. For the Christian, we believe Ephesians 6:12:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

The IRGC and its henchmen do not know their right hand from their left. God can extend mercy to them, and in this age, the Christian’s commission is to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The war is not against the people of Iran, but against the spirit that motivates them to wickedness. God is able to do miracles.

I will not pray for our troops to prevail in martial glory, though if we must pursue military ends, I pray we do it quickly and with maximum impact. Let’s get it done and finished. I pray that God extends his mercy to Iran, and that our suffering is not in vain. I pray that God gets the glory, not our leaders, or our troops.

I pray that the words of the stranger not come to pass: that we not “drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief…” That is not the will of the Almighty.

“Jungle rules” only work for a time, and only under the shelter of the wings of the Most High. For now, it appears that Israel is operating under that shelter, for God’s purpose is His own to ponder. Nowhere in scripture does it say the United States is similarly protected. One day, God may withdraw His protection for Israel, as His will is to provoke their jealousy. Perhaps, that is the day Iran becomes a Christian nation. I don’t know; there are many more learned in theology and eschatology than me.

But I do know that American Christians are playing with fire if we believe that we are somehow the Scourge of God (what Attila the Hun called himself), and that our martial supremacy is somehow an expression of God’s will and power. All we will achieve is death, destruction, and our own suffering. I pray, above all, that American Christians will awaken from our political nap, and see the world with spiritual eyes. That our prayers would not tend toward the church in Mark Twain’s story.

The members of that establishment concluded about the stranger: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”

I am hopeful that churches in America, today, do not arrive at that same place. May we repent of our own wickedness.

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In Article I, Section 9, the language was even more oblique: “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.” They were talking about the slave trade. In 1807, Congress enacted a law banning the importation of slaves, effective on the earliest possible date allowed by the Constitution, January 1, 1808.

When the southern states ratified the Constitution, they knew slavery had its days numbered, but they sought to continue the “peculiar institution” as long as possible through the number of enslaved Black people already in the country. Georgia was the first southern state to ratify, on January 2, 1788, in a unanimous vote. North Carolina was the last southern state, eleven months later, and it was not unanimous (N.B.: Georgia used a ratifying convention of just 26 members; Georgia had sent six delegates to Philadelphia; North Carolina’s convention had 271 delegates, 77 voted against.)

The end of the slave trade was not the end of slavery. The Supreme Court did its best to preserve the delicate balance of the Union, and in the process, trashed every moral insight that the practice itself is wholly against God and man. It took the election of anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln as president to finally push the southern states into rebellion and secession. Lincoln’s first inaugural address closed with this plea:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The words fell on deaf ears. The bloody civil war that followed ended over 600,000 American lives. In the practical sense, it ended slavery, as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation gave U.S. troops the ability to free enslaved people. In law, the 13th Amendment ended slavery, as federal troops occupied the southern states. The 14th Amendment made the rights of freed slaves the same as all other citizens, and prohibited states from stripping those rights.

But it didn’t stop racism, and institutional racism, from infecting every aspect of American life. In the industrial north, where Blacks migrated in search of jobs and opportunities, as well as fleeing persecution in the south, a practice known as “white flight” kept the races separate. In the south, Blacks and whites lived in close proximity, but people were expected to “know their place.” The way I learned it, racism in the north was Blacks can be “high but not close,” while in the south, it was “close but not high.” This means northern Blacks could hold office, start businesses, and be respectable members of society in many ways, but they could not live among the white residents, and their children were not welcome to mix with white people. In the south, Black and white kids did play together, but those same kids grew up to become racist adults, believing that Blacks were inherently inferior, because that is what they were taught.

In the military and federal service, integration began, and continued through President Teddy Roosevelt, and then the racist Woodrow Wilson ended it and implemented segregation, which continued through WWII. In the south, the “separate but equal” doctrine, made legal by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, extended from schools, to bus seats, to bathrooms, and water fountains. Blacks were given every sign to “know their place” and grew up inculcated with a racist society against them.

In the 1960s, much of that was overthrown. In a stunning switch, Democrats went from the party of slavery to the party of civil rights in just a decade, under President Lyndon Johnson. There were many Republicans who believed in, and practiced, racial equality, notably Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. The smearing of Goldwater into some kind of right-wing monster is a sin against history.

In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to end racist practices in the south that were designed to keep Blacks from political office. In 1917, Georgia adopted the “County Unit System” that favored rural and “town” counties over urban, by using a winner-take-all formula for allocating votes. The Supreme Court struck this system down in 1963, as a violation of the 14th Amendment and “one person, one vote.” The VRA went further, and in its amendments by Congress through the 1970s and 80s, had developed formulas for representation, and legal review of southern district maps.

In 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated the “preclearance” formula passed in 2006, in Shelby County v. Holder. Since then elements of the VRA have been dismantled as the Court became more “originalist” in nature. This has been a back-and-forth between Congress and the Supreme Court, dealing with formulas and provisions to keep systemic racism out of districting decisions.

The Supreme Court, this week, struck down Louisiana’s district map, which was drawn in compliance with VRA, in response to a challenge by a group of “non-African American” votes. This didn’t, as so many news outlets in the progressive bubble have claimed, strike a “severe blow” to VRA. It did, in fact recognize that Section 2 of the Act prohibits any racial discrimination, including against white people, in the drawing of district maps.

And this is the heart of the argument.

Modern liberal progressives, drawn to the Democratic Party, believe that racism only works in one direction: white people discriminating against Blacks. In their view, there is no such thing as “reverse racism,” and many have gone further, to say that Black people cannot be racists, since the definition of the word implies white racism against non-whites. The very conception of a group of “non-African Americans” winning a case in the Supreme Court indicts the majority of the Justices as themselves racist, or supporting racism, even Clarence Thomas, who is Black.

The modern core of the Democratic Party does not recognize racism against Asians, who are displaced in education due to affirmative action programs that favor other minorities. It does not recognize systemic persecution of Jews with hate crimes, because the vast majority of Jews are white. It does not recognize the tilt of drawing two majority Black districts, gerrymandered to make them Black majorities, in Louisiana, in order to satisfy “anti-racist” VRA interpretations.

But here’s the rub. The Trump administration cheers rulings that roll back affirmative action, that weaken VRA, and that make the kinds of institutional racism that used to exist, possible once again.

The question at the heart of the SCOTUS rulings is, what will the Republican Party in the Trump era, and businesses who have aligned themselves with that power structure, do with the space now created by those decisions? Is racism at the heart of the Trump administration’s policies?

Democrats say it is. Trump defenders deny it. The future will show who is right and who is wrong. Many conservatives of all ethnicities are not racist. But some who flirt with the White House, are definitely racist in their beliefs and actions. These people are empowered to go back to old ways and institute racist practices that laws like the VRA were designed to eliminate. Assuming that there are no racists (or new ones won’t rise up), in the quest to enable truly race-blind laws, the Supreme Court might have made space for people who are indeed racist to do racist things. And the Trump administration is giving them plenty of leash to run.

Another SCOTUS ruling that we await is the one extending the stay on the Department of Homeland Security ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and other immigrants. I wrote before about this sad situation, which I consider to be, in many ways, evil. Sure the government has the right and legal ability to end TPS protection, and send many who are here under that visa, back to their home country. But doing that in the environment where other types of visas are now unavailable, is that racism, or at least bigotry?

It’s clear that people like Stephen Miller are not only against illegal immigration, but also any immigration. This is an expression of the “blood and soil” belief in American exceptionalism. That, of course, is trash, because America is built on immigrants. But the actions of the Trump administration, ending processing of applications for the long-running “Green Card Lottery,” assessing huge ($100,000) fees for H1B visas for immigrant applicants who are not in the U.S. already. It takes nine months for a new H1B designation to go into effect; immigrants who have their TPS status revoked can’t stay that long, which means few companies are willing to pay that huge fee to get them back.

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Not only Haitians, but others like Ethiopians and others are waiting for the ruling on TPS, because if the Court rules with the Trump administration, they could all be deported almost immediately, whether they are here working, or raising families. They will go from “legal immigrant” to “illegal alien” in one day. Is racism at the core of this systemic approach to clearing out immigrants, both legal and illegal?

Giving space to the executive branch to do things it is legally mandated to do by the Constitution is definitely within the purview of the Court, and in the doctrine of textualism or originalism. But the Court also has a mandate to keep the United States from doing harm to people who live here, to be loyal to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, that states “all men are created equal,” and entitled to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is it proper for the Court to give space to the executive branch, when it is engaged in denying those rights to people based on race, or some pre-ordained determination of which countries are “good” and which are “bad” for America?

We could find our future selves, and our children, looking back on these decisions as another Plessy v. Ferguson, enabling the worst of us to institute systemic racism where so much has been accomplished to banish that from our society. Just because progressives are wrong about the existence of racism against white people, Asians, and Jews, it doesn’t mean the rise of racism against Blacks is not worth defending against.

Just like we’d never want to go back to slavery, why should we believe that there are not people who would not return to the systemic racism, against minorities, or immigrants, or Blacks, if given the chance? Why give them the chance? The Supreme Court and the Trump agenda may do exactly that.

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This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

That phrase resurfaced in my mind in recent weeks as the ceasefire with Iran was extended over and over again. The president has repeatedly renewed the ceasefire despite Iran's refusal to meet his demands and despite the continuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, the president seems more focused on his ballroom plans, which are now requiring taxpayer funding, and railroading James Comey than winning the Iran war.

Trump’s Iran strategy seems to have devolved into making occasional vague threats, like this one on Truth Social that depicts Mr. Trump in another AI cosplay, this time seemingly as a Secret Service agent or a Man In Black (and I don’t mean Johnny Cash). Trump urged Iran to “get smart soon” and “sign a nonnuclear [sic] deal,” which presumably means a deal that would make them non-nuclear. The consequences if they don’t are unclear, but they would most likely face another empty ultimatum.

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Trump’s partisans call his tactics “the madman strategy.” They believe that Trump is not literally crazy; it’s just a role he plays to frighten opponents into submission. The problem with this theory, aside from the fact that Trump may have actual and literal mental problems, is that for the madman strategy to work, there has to be follow-through on his mad threats. So far, TACO has trumped the madman strategy.

I do believe there is ample evidence that Donald Trump has age-related mental problems in addition to a general lack of intelligence and competence. I don’t think he’s mad, however. He has not only backed away from his threats to kill a “whole generation” of Iranians, possibly with nuclear weapons, and to attack the power plants that Iranian civilians depend on, but he has also retreated from apparent plans to invade portions of Iran such as Kharg Island. We moved Marines from the Far East to the Middle East early in the war, but so far, they are still sitting aboard their ships.

The problem with the madman strategy is that if other countries call your bluff and you back down, opponents don’t believe your future threats. The madman act doesn’t hold up if you only talk like a madman and don’t act like one.

In truth, Trump is acting carefully towards Iran. He has to. He is hemmed in by competing and mutually exclusive goals. He wants Iran to back down, but he also does not want to stop the flow of oil. He wants to save face, but he does not want the stock market to crash. He wants to appear strong, but he knows the war is unpopular and does not want to fuel the opposition by committing ground forces. In addition, he is operating without congressional authorization and is nine months away from facing a much less friendly Congress.

When all this is taken into account, it seems almost certain that Trump will not expand the war. Further escalation runs the risk of upsetting oil and financial markets, as Iran could further tighten the screws on the “trickle” of ships currently transiting the Strait of Hormuz and have their Houthi allies close the Bab el-Mandeb strait that leads into the Red Sea towards the Suez Canal.

On the other hand, Trump can’t back down and appear weak to either his MAGA base, his domestic opponents, or his international rivals. A clear Iranian victory would embolden others to ignore Trump’s madman act, as well as come at a political cost at home.

Trump’s conundrum is reminiscent of the classic battle of wits scene from “The Princess Bride,” in which Fezzik reasons that he obviously cannot choose either of the poisoned goblets. Ironically, this scene also gives us the quote about falling “victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia,” in addition to another Man in Black reference.

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Trump obviously cannot continue to escalate the Iran war for political reasons, yet he clearly cannot de-escalate either. So, what is a cornered president to do? Probably nothing. Many animals, when cornered, will freeze and hope the predator doesn’t see them. I think that’s what we can expect in Iran. Trump’s Iran policy will be like a deer in headlights.

Donald Trump’s war on Iran may end, not with the bang of a nuclear explosion or even the “rolling thunder” of another “shock-and-awe” air campaign. Like Douglas MacArthur and the Korean War, the Iran War may never die, but “just fade away.”

Continuing the blockade allows Trump to act like he’s still fighting, even as Iran defiantly calls upon the US to end hostilities in exchange for reopening the Strait. The war could continue this way indefinitely, from ceasefire to ceasefire, with both sides claiming to have the upper hand.

There are downsides to the status quo, however. The price of oil is high and rising higher as markets realize that the Strait is not going to be fully open anytime soon. That will be a strain on the US and global economies, as well as weighing down Republican chances in this year’s midterms. In addition to energy prices, fertilizer also transits the Strait of Hormuz, and its shortage around the world could spark a food crisis in addition to the energy crisis. The status quo also means continuing expensive and morale-sapping deployments of US forces in the Persian Gulf region.

For Iran, the status quo offers time to rebuild its defenses and prepare for a possible ground invasion, but the regime also faces the possibility of widespread unrest as millions of its citizens fall into poverty. Of course, the regime has few compunctions about murdering thousands of dissidents to maintain order, but a popular revolt would mean that the mullahs would be fighting a two-front war.

There are a few things that might break the logjam of the current status quo. One of those things is if the supply of oil to world markets is inadequate to keep the economy going. CNN reports that the number of tankers transiting the Strait went from about three thousand per month to 154 in March. While some oil is still moving through the Gulf and along alternate routes, inventories are dropping, and if stocks run low enough to become a security threat, Trump and/or others might be forced to roll the dice and invade to topple the regime or at least open the Strait.

For the moment, there seems to be enough oil reaching markets to keep the economy moving, albeit at greatly elevated prices. Nevertheless, some experts predict a “day of reckoning coming.” That day is more likely to arrive if the Iranian regime remains at the switch, controlling access to and from the Persian Gulf, but at the moment, there is no good way to change that reality.

That’s especially true when the man in control of the effort against the Iranian regime is reminiscent of another reference from high school English lit, specifically William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth:” “… an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

VRA GO BYEBYE? SCOTUS struck down a Louisiana congressional map that created two majority African-American districts. The Court did not strike down the Voting Rights Act, but effect of the decision will likely be felt across the South. Justice Alito wrote in the opinion, “The Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.”

UAE GO BYEBYE The United Arab Emirates will leave OPEC on May 1. The move will further weaken the cartel’s control of oil prices and production.

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Before I tell you, let me vent about something in the Georgia Republican race. All of the Republican candidates are from the northern part of Georgia. The furthest south any of them are from is Jackson, a.k.a. Hawkins from “Stranger Things”. Jackson, to me, is the home of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, a.k.a. Death Row. One time, early in the era of ubiquitous GPS, my car’s navigation system decided it would be a great idea to avoid a crash on nearby I-75 northbound by routing me through Jackson, and straight through the prison. I realized about the time I saw the “Guard Line” sign, that me, plus the firearm in my glove box, plus driving past that sign, equals a stay longer than I wanted at said prison. I should have known better than to turn left at Prison Blvd. (“Steve, did you turn around?” “Duh”.)

Jackson is about a half hour north of Macon, which is what you would call Middle Georgia. To people whose entire existence is ITP (IYKYK), Jackson is nowhere if not for the link to a Netflix show. Macon is less than nowhere. The other candidates call home: Dunwoody, Johns Creek, and Alpharetta. All nice places, and all north of Atlanta proper. There is not one single Republican running for Georgia governor who calls south Georgia, west Georgia, or coastal Georgia, home. It’s a metropolitan race run by largely wealthy metropolitan Republicans. It bothers me.

The candidate from Jackson is Burt Jones, who is currently serving as Lieutenant Governor. In Georgia, the Lt. Gov. and the Governor do not run as a ticket, they run separately. When Burt Jones was a state senator, in 2020, he was one of the organizers and participants meeting in a locked room at the capitol, signing documents making them electors for the Electoral College in the State of Georgia, except that none of them was actually an elector in the State of Georgia. They signed up to be the alternate slate, or as everyone else calls them, fake electors, to be placed in the hands of then-Vice President Mike Pence, on January 6th, 2021. Such was the cockamamie plan hatched by John Eastman to keep President Donald Trump in power after his loss to Joe Biden.

Burt Jones was part of that plan. He was indicted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was as incompetent as her predecessor was corrupt—wait, Willis was corrupt too, except she did it for love, not money, but her amour definitely did it for money. When Willis was tossed—not for her brazen indiscretion, but for hosting a political fundraiser for a political opponent of Burt Jones—the person who by law was required to find someone to prosecute Jones, attorney Pete Skandalakis, chose himself after a two-year search. Then Skandalakis decided not to prosecute Burt Jones.

In my mind, Jones is disqualified. He should not be the sitting Lt. Gov. He should not be in government at all, but then again, look at the cast of characters worse than Burt Jones who currently hold high positions in the federal government.

It is vitally important to me that Burt Jones not win the Republican primary for governor. And should he win, God help Georgia, because we will end up with Keisha Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta, as governor. All the polls have Bottoms leading by double digits, between 18 and 44 points, in the primary. You know, better her than Roy Barnes (the once and finished governor from the 1990s), or Geoff Duncan.

Duncan was the Republican Lt. Gov. under Gov. Brian Kemp in his first term, a man who once rode with President Donald Trump in The Beast, and decided he despised the man in a burst of revelation. Then Duncan wrote a book, “GOP 2.0: How the 2020 Election Can Lead to a Better Way Forward for America’s Conservative Party”. Then Duncan became a Democrat to run for governor of Georgia in 2026. I have no respect for Geoff Duncan. His story is a rerun of his mediocre minor league baseball career, followed by his mediocre political career, studded with his one meeting with Donald Trump. The Democratic Party welcomes Duncan, but they will never trust him.

Jason Esteves was a teacher, who later won a seat on the Atlanta Public School Board. In most of the polls, Esteves lags behind “don’t know.” The strongest Democratic contender against Bottoms is Michael Thurmond, one time CEO of DeKalb County. I don’t know Thurmond personally, but his office helped me on multiple occasions dealing with various issues with county services. Thurmond has held posts in the state executive branch, legislative branch, and served as an interim school superintendent. He is a solid administrator, and he is the top candidate besides Bottoms. If the Democratic race comes down to a runoff, because Bottoms can’t break 50 percent, Thurmond could conceivably steal it.

In any case, if Burt Jones wins the Republican primary, either Keisha Bottoms or Michael Thurmond would beat him in the general election, hands down. If Burt Jones wins the Republican primary, I would vote for either of them over him.

Let me be clear, I’d rather not vote for a Democrat. So, to reiterate, it’s vitally important to me that Burt Jones not win.

Besides Jones, running on the Republican ballot, there’s Chris Carr, the currently serving state Attorney General. He’s a solid candidate, who has raised nearly $5 million in his bid to be the nominee. But for all that cash, none of the polls has Carr breaking 10 percent, and he is consistently polling in last place behind the other candidates.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is polling just above 10 percent in most of the polls, and as high as 15 percent. In every poll he trails Burt Jones. Raffensperger is hated among Trump supporters, as you might remember, for being the one who wouldn’t agree with Trump’s facts about finding 12,000 votes so he could win Georgia, which he clearly lost in 2020. He is the one whose phone recording was provided to the Washington Post, and he is the one who suffered vitriol from Trump and the Georgia Republican Party, which all but expelled him.

Leading the race in just about every poll is Rick Jackson, who is running a clockwork campaign, and financing it himself. Jackson is a billionaire, whose company, Jackson Healthcare, provides medical personnel to hospitals and other organizations. In the polls, Jackson is running between 24 and 37 percent, above Jones who has not broken 25 percent.

And I’m not going to vote for Rick Jackson in the primary.

My vote is going to Brad Raffensperger. He’s the only one in the race who would not bow to Donald Trump or his lackeys. I know this because Brad Raffensperger had not bowed to Donald Trump the last time he was president. The current governor, Brian Kemp, has my respect for not bowing to Trump despite being the target of the president’s ire and online flames. Even during COVID-19, Kemp held to his guns, though he showed deference and grace toward Trump. The best person to succeed Brian Kemp as governor would be Brad Raffensperger, and he will get my vote.

But Brad Raffensperger will not win the primary. And if he won the primary, he would likely not beat either Michael Thurmond or Keisha Bottoms. Voting for Raffensperger is throwing away my vote for someone who, in 2027, will not be sworn in as governor of Georgia. But that’s not my goal. My goal is for Burt Jones to lose.

I believe that Rick Jackson will not get 50 percent plus one vote in the primary. Neither will Burt Jones, I think. So it will go to a runoff. Ideally, the runoff will be between Jones and Jackson. But who knows, maybe it will be Jackson and Raffensperger. If the runoff is between Jackson and Raffensperger, my vote once again will be for Raffs.

But if the runoff is between Jackson and Jones, I will vote for Jackson. I will vote for anyone against Jones. He cannot be governor. And Jones is running a dirty, dirty campaign, attacking Jackson over and over, calling him corrupt, a featherbedding billionaire who will use the governor’s position to fatten his company’s coffers. Jackson Healthcare does have large contracts with the State of Georgia, but Jackson himself said he’d unwind those if he becomes governor.

During the latest debate, Jackson was asked if he had any illegal aliens working for him. Truthfully, he said “I don’t know.” That’s the answer I’d give too, but I’d say why I don’t know. It’s because people who were once legal immigrants, when they were hired, are now made into illegal immigrants, with no options to stay in the U.S. or to become citizens. And even naturalized citizens, under the Trump DOJ, are being pursued for denaturalization. How can anyone know if they employ illegal aliens right now? Rick Jackson can’t say that because he has to win votes from Trump supporters, so he can’t trash Trump.

But Raffs, he can say anything. He can say the truth. I am going to throw my vote away this May, and cast it for Brad Raffensperger. I hope he wins, but I have no illusions it will happen. The best I can hope for is that Burt Jones, conspirator, fake elector, disqualified disgrace, will lose. If that means we end up with Rick Jackson, so be it. If it means we end up with Democrat Keisha Bottoms, or Michael Thurmond, so be it.

Maybe I’m not throwing my vote away at all.

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At this point, Trump has survived three assassination attempts as well as a number of other plots and security incidents. This has sparked online claims that Trump has survived more assassination threats than any other president and that Democratic presidents have not been subject to any attempts at all. The first claim depends on how you count, and the second is outright false, but it is true that Trump has had a number of close calls, particularly the Butler, Pennsylvania, attempt in 2024. It was the Butler attempt that was the focus of the Wired article, although there is a new one that deals with the WHCA attack.

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At this point, I’ll make two statements. First, I am a political opponent of Donald Trump, but I don’t think assassination is justified, moral, or should be condoned. Further, I don’t think Trump’s death or injury would benefit the Trump opposition. The president is running the Republican Party into the ground. The GOP is at a very unpopular level and is about to get “shellacked” in the midterms. I don’t think most Democrats want to make him a martyr or a sympathetic figure.

Second, I don’t think the attempts were fake. It would be very difficult to find patsies who would risk life and freedom so that Donald Trump could gain a few percentage points in the polls.

And these are real risks. Thomas Crooks was killed on top of a building in Butler, Pennsylvania, with an AR-15 that he used to shoot at Trump and with which he killed a rallygoer. Ryan Routh is serving life in prison for his attempt on Trump’s life in West Palm Beach in 2024. Cole Thomas Allen will probably spend the rest of his life behind bars as well. There are many reasons why someone might want to kill a president, this president in particular, but I can’t really think of a good reason why anyone would mortgage their future in a fake attack.

Having said that, I do have a lot of questions about the attack last weekend. For starters, why was Trump there in the first place? Trump has never attended a White House Correspondents Association dinner as president. The last time he showed up to the event was in 2011 when he was roasted by Barack Obama. A theory that I have some sympathy for is that Trump was so humiliated by the incident that it inspired him to run for president as revenge against those who mocked him.

Further, why were so many members of the cabinet present? Of 16 people in the presidential line of succession, 11 have been confirmed in attendance at the dinner. This includes seven of the next 10 in line to be president, including Vice President Vance (first on the list of succession), Speaker Mike Johnson (second), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (fourth). We very nearly experienced the emergency presidency of President Pro Tempore of the Senate Chuck Grassley (third).

While it is not unheard of for cabinet members and congressmen to attend the dinner and there are no designated-survivor rules for the event, unlike the State of the Union, this seems like an extraordinarily top-heavy list of attendees. Of course, the simple explanation may be that this was Trump’s first time at the dinner as president, and the sycophants in the cabinet and congressional leadership know that Trump loves nothing more than to have his ego stroked. Not attending could have been viewed as professional suicide or at least a slap in the president’s face.

The attempt also raises questions about security and the effectiveness of the Secret Service. This is especially true in light of security lapses that came to light following the Butler attempt, as well as older scandals about unprofessionalism, including partying and drunkenness of Secret Service agents.

The dinner, which was not a state event, was being held at the Washington Hilton. Since it was not a state dinner, the argument that a gold-plated ballroom might have prevented the attack is a non sequitur, even though the White House was apparently pushing this pretty hard shortly after the incident. Trump himself plugged his ballroom project as a security solution in the aftermath of the attack. Ironically, the Washington Hilton was also the site of the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

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A dinner in a hotel ballroom can be a security nightmare. It would be difficult to screen every guest in the hotel, and Cole was reportedly checked into the Hilton as a guest. Much like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, Cole probably took his weapons into the hotel several days before the attack.

The BBC discusses the security measures at the hotel in detail, noting that the hotel was closed to the public hours before the event and that the heaviest security, including metal detectors, was around the ballroom where the banquet was to take place. Cole never penetrated the security cordon and never got close to the president.

Nevertheless, there was criticism of the security plan. Gary O'Donoghue, a BBC correspondent at the dinner, said that security was not “particularly heavy” and noted, “The man on the door outside only took a cursory look at my ticket from what must have been six feet away.”

A newly unearthed clip of local Fox personalities talking on hot mics backs up that observation. They observe that “two random chicks” are holding the door open and joke that the Secret Service should “just get a doorstop.”

Former UK ambassador, Kim Darroch, criticized the lack of security in depth, noting, "If you were there [as a hotel guest] and you had bad intentions about breaking into this dinner, there's just one security thing you had to get past... and then you're in the ballroom.”

Even the perp criticized the lack of security in his manifesto, writing, “What the hell is the Secret Service doing… No damn security. Not in transport. Not in the hotel. Not in the event.”

Allen allegedly armed himself with a shotgun, pistol, and knives (no AR this time) and attempted to breach the security checkpoint going towards the hotel ballroom. He exchanged fire with law enforcement before being detained and captured without injury, but this brings up another question: With all the bullets that were flying, how did he survive without being hit? Did the Secret Service Agents attend the Star Wars Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship?

With Butler and the other recent plots against Trump, there are legitimate questions about whether security was too light or perhaps whether the Trump Administration’s lack of competence has infected the agency. The current director of the Secret Service is Sean Curran, who was appointed by Trump in January 2025 and has been with the agency since 2001. I don’t see any obvious red flags with Curran, but the investigation into what went wrong should include a look at the morale and culture within the Secret Service.

One thing that has been mentioned that was demonstrably not a factor is the ongoing DHS shutdown. Secret Service agents are among the DHS employees who are being paid through Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” ICE, CBP, Coast Guard, and TSA are also being paid.

There are also questions about the alleged shooter. Cole Thomas Allen (maybe we should be suspicious of people named Thomas) is a 31-year-old resident of Torrance, California, near LA. Allen is reportedly very intelligent, graduating from Caltech with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2017 and a master’s in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. Per NBC News, he donated $25 to ActBlue, a Democratic organization, in 2024, and was a member of a Christian fellowship at Caltech.

Prior to the attack, he sent a manifesto to members of his family (read it in full here), who forwarded it to police. Despite claims by Trump and others that the manifesto was “anti-Christian,” Allen specifically tried to explain and rationalize his actions to Christians in the manifesto, arguing that “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes,” citing “yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” as an objection to his plan, and thanking his church for its love. What little we know of his religious beliefs comes across like a liberal version of right-wing Christian Nationalism, although he probably sees himself more as a latter-day Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I suspect that we may eventually learn that Allen has a high-functioning form of some mental illness or disorder. The manifesto, in which Allen called himself “Friendly Federal Assassin,” presents a very odd picture of the shooter and his thought processes.

Mental illness is a common factor in many similar cases, perhaps more so than the always-assumed trope that to shoot a political figure, you must be radically political from the opposite end of the spectrum. Often, there is no coherent political ideology or evidence of strong political views, although, in this case, the manifesto does allude to a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” that even the president assumes to be a reference to Trump, an adjudicated rapist and friend of Jeffrey Epstein (463 days into Trump’s second term, the Epstein files have still not been released). The manifesto also notes that other cabinet members, “not including Mr. Patel,” for reasons unknown, were targets.

Alternatively, it may be that Allen was influenced by both Trump’s corrupt and authoritarian behavior and the very online world we all inhabit. Again, I’m not going to justify or condone any act of political violence, but I think it is fair to point out that Trump’s rhetoric and actions have likely had the result of inciting violence against him. Again, that does not justify the violence, but it is an explanation.

As to the possibility that Trump and MAGA manufactured the whole incident (or incidents) as a public relations stunt, while I wouldn’t say that Trump is ethically above such behavior (or above possibly wearing a bandage on his ear for far longer than was medically necessary), the logistics make it very unlikely. It is far more likely that the attempt was real and that the president will use it to his political advantage. That is one reason among many why there should be no more violence against Donald Trump.

LINKS YOU CAN USE A lot of pundits are claiming that the left is more accepting of political violence than the right. That claim does not stand up to scrutiny. Numerous polls, such this Marist poll from 2025 and this PRRI poll from January 2026, show that support for violence is higher among Republicans. Further, in recent years, deaths from right-wing political violence have exceeded those from left-wing violence. Both sides tend to blame the other for violence, but the good news is that majorities on both sides reject violence.

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The venue here is no stranger to assassination attempts. In 1981, John Hinckley, Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan as the president exited the building, heading for his limousine. Donald Trump is no stranger to assassination attempt, either. We remember the summer of 2024, when 20-year-old Thomas Crooks fired a shot that nearly killed Trump, but only grazed his ear (one of Crooks’ shots did kill firefighter Corey Comperatore). Later that summer, Comperatore’s firefighter gear hung on stage at Trump’s nomination speech—his family grieved while the man’s death was used as political grist. I have no idea if a man seated on the platform at a Trump rally would want to be remembered in this way, or if anyone would choose that memorial. I wouldn’t.

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Some say that if the White House Correspondents Dinner was held in the massive ballroom under construction (again halted by a federal judge) to replace the demolished East Wing of the White House, such security breaches would be a thing of the past. Trump himself wrote on Truth Social (I have no link, the site is crashed right now, so I am paraphrasing) that security measures “never seen before” would be the norm at the ballroom. This is sad. The White House is the “people’s house,” a term coined by President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s. This gained popularity as an argument to justify using government money to build it.

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy founded the White House Historical Association, said “The White House belongs to the American people.” I don’t think either John Quincy Adams or Jacqueline Kennedy meant having security “never seen before” as the end goal of their vision. It is certainly clear that Donald Trump believes that the White House is the President’s House, not the people’s.

Further separating the public from its political leaders is not the real danger stemming from near-security breaches and regular assassination attempts on political figures. Other presidents have been assassinated, of course. Teddy Roosevelt took a bullet to the chest while reading a speech in his failed Bull Moose Party run at the White House. He continued the speech after being shot, famously declaring “I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” It was Teddy’s long speech, in his coat, that he claims saved his life by slowing the bullet and preventing it from piercing his heart.

Each assassination attempt has resulted in more security; ironically it was President Abraham Lincoln who signed the act creating the Secret Service on April 14, 1865, the day he was assassinated. The act took effect in July. The organization was founded to combat financial crimes, but in 1901, after the assassination of President William McKinley, it took on the role of protecting the president full-time. A congressional report revealed that Donald Trump’s campaign had repeatedly requested more personnel and resources to protect the candidate in 2024, which were denied before the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt.

Protecting the president, presidential candidates, and government officials is, and should be, a priority for our nation. There is no shortage of disaffected kooks capable of violence against our political leaders, never mind the rest of us. The cost of this, besides taxpayer dollars, is further separation of the public from those who represent us, and those who are chosen to govern.

But as I wrote, that’s not the danger we face.

This nation’s governmental system was founded on a document created by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Fifty-five delegates debated, voted, and struggled behind closed doors for 116 days, until the final document was produced and signed by 39 of them. Delegate George Mason (namesake the the university named for him) famously declined to sign, saying he would rather “chop off his right hand” than affix his name to the document. It’s not that Mason hated liberty, or the carefully crafted design of the constitution; it’s that he wanted the Bill of Rights to be included in the final draft, instead of left to the states to ratify after the fact, and that he believed the method of selecting a president, and the powers of the presidency, would lead to despotism.

Inherent in the constitution is a foundational belief in many of the precepts held by John Locke, such as “natural rights” to life, liberty and property; that government is a social contract between the governed and the system of governing; that government should be in tension with itself to prevent one faction or body from having absolute power over the people; that the people have a right to rebel against a government that violates the social contract.

The reason our government was crafted the way it is, is because the founders followed these precepts. They created a government where legislators had the power to make laws, but not the power to enforce them; where judges had the power to strike down laws, but not without a case before them duly brought by someone injured by the law; where the executive branch was sworn to uphold laws that Congress passed, but could do so with the greatest degree of freedom and discretion. Congress was explicitly divided into two houses, one that represents the people, and one that represents the states, and given different powers of oversight, though both must agree to any law before it goes to the president.

These things are known and taught in every government and civics classroom, including lessons that must be learned by every naturalized citizen, who must pass a test to gain their citizenship.

There are many leaders in our government and political space who believe that our government is ineffective, and inefficient at attaining the end goals of protecting life, liberty, and property. It was designed to be inefficient, as its purpose is to arrive at the best (or least worst) solution to complicated problems, having the greatest good (or least harm) to the most residents of our nation. And our nation is large and diverse. The founders future-proofed our government by parceling out powers, dividing and limiting the federal government, while reserving all other powers to the states, and the people (Tenth Amendment).

With the exception of the United Kingdom, which has no written constitution, the United States is the oldest surviving democracy among nations with large populations and ethnic diversity. Our constitution has survived 128 years longer than Mexico’s, 161 years longer than India’s, and 169 years longer than France’s. Other countries, such as China, Japan, and Germany, have long-lasting government systems (though Germany is a lesson in the dangers of populism), but these are either totalitarian in nature, based on racial dominance, or both.

Our government was designed specifically to govern a rabble, who cannot agree on anything, never mind major issues, and has the right to be armed for the specific purpose of defending itself from excessive government incursions. It was designed to create a pen for our passions, so that they do not run red with blood in any direction. Only slavery has breached the constraints of this iron prison of federalism and republicanism, and that issue was known (and consistently avoided) by the founders. The delegates to the constitutional convention refused to even mention slavery in the final document. Tortured language was used to infer it, but never directly. It was known that one day things would resolve, but breaking the union and a bloody was was hoped to be avoided—it could not be avoided.

Right now, the danger of these assassination attempts and the political violence encouraged by both parties in our factional system, is that we would forget and dismantle the iron prison of federalism and republicanism. With a congress that refuses to legislate or exercise oversight, an executive that believes it has the right to govern without limits, a federal system that subverts the rights of states to self-government, and a progressive cabal who would like to totally dismantle the electoral college, which was the shim to keep us from electing demagogues, because the electoral college has elected demagogues to the office, our system of government is broken.

It is broken but at least it can be fixed, because the elements to fix it are inherent in the constitution, and the institutions to fix it still exist in their more-or-less original form. However, if the Supreme Court, or the Senate, or the electoral college, or the states, allow our political groups and leaders to dismantle any element of our system, the entire system could fail, and fail spectacularly. The balance, or rather, the tension, that keeps the balance, cannot endure if the systems that create that tension are removed.

Those who tinker and toy with it do so at our peril. There is no issue so important that it requires our government to be dismantled or deformed to the point of failure. There is no issue so important that it requires political violence to solve; we took care of slavery 150 years ago.

The danger we face is not from would-be assassins, or even the massive security culture to protect against them. It is in the loss of inherent rights and foundations of our constitution. The people have the last say, and our votes and selections in elections matter. That is how we defend against the danger; we elect people fit for the task. That is the duty of the electorate. If we abandon the social contract that Locke elucidated, we abandon our government to the passions of demagogues, sycophants, and corrupt criminals.

Elect better people and let the constitution keep the iron prison intact.

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The FA and FO that I had in mind is a common phrase these days. If you don’t know what it means, it’s an acronym containing the same, not suitable for family values voters word that was in the “Let’s go, Brandon” chant. To clean it up a little, I’ll say it means “Fart Around, Find Out.” Essentially, it means that when something bad happens to someone, they had it coming.

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MAGA’s FAFO moment came on Tuesday when Virginia voters decided that they wanted to cast aside the state’s fair and balanced congressional districts and replace them with a new map that will likely net Democrats a total of 10 seats and leave Republicans with one. When the votes were counted on Tuesday, there was much weeping, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments from the MAGA set.

Ironically, most of the people who were upset on Tuesday were cheering last year when Texas redrew its congressional map. To hear the MAGA crowd talk about it, Virginia’s referendum was a shot fired out of the blue at constitutional democracy.

“Virginia is about 55 percent Democrats, and they want to force by majority vote that the state send 91 percent Democratic representation to Congress,” Republicans argue, but what they conveniently forget to mention is that Virginia was a response to Texas. Some probably really have forgotten about Texas, because I’ve seen several people online threatening to have Texas reconfigure its districts yet again.

For those who don’t remember, let me bring you up to speed. States typically redraw congressional districts after a census, which occurs every 10 years. After Republicans saw gains in Hispanic voters in 2024, Donald Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw their lines again to gerrymander the state’s congressional seats in an attempt to blunt expected Democratic gains elsewhere in the midterms. It was abnormal, but not unconstitutional. The Texas legislature approved the new map in August 2025, and Gov. Gregg Abbott signed the measure into law.

In response, California Democrats put Proposition 50 on the ballot to draw new congressional districts that would gerrymander away several Republican seats. That measure passed in November and is expected to erase many of the extra seats Republicans hope to gain in Texas.

But it didn’t end there. Other states, including Maryland and New York, also considered action. Virginia actually put it to the voters, and the voters said, “Go for it.”

The redistricting war did not begin in New York in 2024, as some claim, by the way. New York’s map was approved in 2024, but the process started years earlier and was delayed by litigation. It was not a mid-decade redistricting attempt.

So the Republicans may (more on that later) get a handful of seats from Texas, but they will lose them in California, where redistricting used to be based on maps drawn by an independent commission, and Virginia, which formerly had one of the fairest maps in the country.

Republicans may have awakened a sleeping beast. Both states take advantage of gerrymandering, but of the states that try to draw fair maps, most are Democrat-leaning, while quite a few red states have only one or two congressional districts.

The Texas mid-decade gerrymandering war has moved us backwards from what I’d like to see: nonpartisan districts everywhere and a national gerrymandering ban. I think that gerrymandering is to blame for a lot of the extremism in both wings of American politics because politicians who don’t have a viable opposition party have no reason not to be as extreme as possible to win the primary.

But that dream is going to have to come from the legislatures because, as I said earlier, gerrymandering is not unconstitutional. As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court held that gerrymandering is permissible with the exception of drawing districts that are racially discriminatory, except to the extent that racial discrimination is required by the Voting Rights Act. If that sounds like a tight line to haul, it really isn’t because, to a great extent, racial lines are also political lines, at least for some groups. Gerrymandering usually faces a low bar for lawfulness.

So don’t fret about the recent injunction from a state judge that seeks to invalidate the results of Tuesday’s election. Remember that both Texas and California had legal challenges to their new maps. The Supreme Court affirmed both redistricting plans. In Virginia’s case, the state supreme court overturned previous rulings that would have killed the referendum.

I can also point out that both California and Virginia put their gerrymandered maps to the voters; Texas did not. If there are any complaints to be made about the lack of democracy in gerrymandered maps, they should be directed towards the Texas statehouse in Austin, but newfound Republican critics of gerrymandering never seem to have problems with the Texan casus belli.

And that brings us to the potential fly in Texas’s ointment, namely the looming possibility of a blue wave election amid what is turning out to be Republican unpopularity of historic proportions. You see, gerrymandering is often accomplished in a way that gives districts a lopsided partisan majority, making them safe for the party in power. However, Trump’s Texas redistricting did the opposite. Republicans assumed that Hispanic voters who voted Republican in 2024 were part of a new permanent majority and redrew lines to encompass their new red Hispanic voters. If that is a bad assumption, then Republicans may have just diluted their strength. turning safe districts into battlegrounds.

And it looks extremely doubtful that Hispanics will stay red. A recent AP-NORC poll found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics had fallen to about 25 percent after an estimated 42 percent voted Trump in 2024. Who could have imagined that treating Hispanics and immigrants like criminals who were presumed guilty would backfire at the polls?

The cratering among Hispanics is only part of public opinion turning against Trump and the Republicans nationwide. Trump’s overall approval is only 43 percent in Texas, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick recently said that Republicans will have a “tough time” keeping their majority in the state House.

When the full story of the redistricting war is written, it may be said that Trump broke norms to try to pick up a few seats and ended up losing several states, including Texas. People say that Texas will never go blue, but Trump may have found a way.

One of many lessons to be learned, both in Texas and Iran, is that bullying only gets you so far. When you make people angry enough that they start fighting back, things can go south pretty quickly.

FAFO.

WARNING AND REQUEST I noticed that things got a bit heated in the comments section of a recent post. I’d like to remind everyone to keep it civil and do not feed the trolls. We prize civil discussion and a friendly atmosphere here. We tend to be light on the moderation, both because Steve and I have real jobs and because our followers tend to be self-policing and decent people. Let’s try to keep it that way.

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The image was posted to the X account of the Department of Homeland Security, with the tag line “Our nation and our people are worth fighting for.” Hoo boy, it got a scorching reception. From the Boston Globe:

“This is our [expletive] city, and nobody is going to dictate our freedom,” Representative Seth Moulton, a Salem Democrat, wrote on his repost of the DHS meme. His comment echoed David Ortiz’s famous declaration in the first Sox game at Fenway after the 2013 Marathon bombing.

Oh, and the timing: the post was scheduled for 6:30pm, 15 minutes before the first pitch of a nationally televised Red Sox game against the hated New York Yankees. I have to think it was done on purpose. The Globe contacted the DHS for comment:

“America’s homeland and the rich heritage of its national pastime should fill every citizen with a sense of pride,” said a DHS spokesperson in response to Globe questions. “Our unique achievements in sports and culture are worth defending, and DHS will continue to promote Americanism in the public square.”

Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass), chimed in:

“They were once again targeting us and Fenway Park and this place, which does reflect the uniform resistance that we have to the authoritarian king,” Markey said.

Trolling Massachusetts, a political hive-mind of Democrats, progressives, and various stripes of socialists, using DHS and simple imagery, seems easy, but I think it’s a skill to come up with just the right thing. As a boomer, I lack this skill. My social media talents are non-existent. But the guy who’s posting this stuff is talented.

I decided to look him up.

His name is Peyton Rollins, he’s 21 years old, and a student at George Washington University. Here’s his government picture

Rollins is the Digital Communications Director for DHS. Before that, he was the Digital Content Manager for the U.S. Department of Labor, where he used his graphic and social media skills to post some attention-getting content. Prior to that, according to his LinkedIn profile and his resume on SquareSpace, Rollins was a digital assistant for (former) Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who is the now-sacked former Secretary of Labor, a press intern for South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a press intern for the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and an intern for Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).

Quite the achievement list for a kid who’s barely old enough to drink a glass of wine.

A 2022 graduate of James F. Byrnes High School in the tiny town of Duncan, S.C., Rollins received the $1000 Blair Beasley Scholarship, as a theater kid, appearing in the One Act Play Festival, “Gutenberg: The Musical!”. In 2021, he won All Star Cast accolades in “All My Sons.” It’s no small thing to overcome stage fright and appear in one of these high school plays. I know for a fact, as one of our friends’ kids is doing the same thing in Georgia.

Peyton Rollins has another skill: photography and video creation. He’s got a website (peytonrollins.com) where he posts his portfolio. It’s not bad. You might not agree with his politics, but I find 21-year-olds, when they are 40, almost never agree with their young selves either.

I said all this to make a point.

This political climate will not last forever. Some think the U.S. may be on the edge of a “tipping point” or precipice where we’ve deformed the mode and institutions of our federal government beyond their ability to snap back. But I don’t think we’re there yet, or even close to there. This country suffered a terrible civil war and recovered the Union. Some trolling social media, MAGA takeover of the executive branch, and lording over the military like they are toy soldiers is not a permanent feature of our Constitutional Republic.

Remember, the 10th Amendment limits the power of the federal government, and yields all other powers to the states, and the people. It’s the people who get the final say, and I’d say, by what I’m seeing election-wise, they’re about to have the last word. Getting the ire of Massachusetts politicians using an image of Fenway Park, that’s a skill thing.

I support young Peyton Rollins. He has a skill set perfect for the 21st century, and he’s not scared to work the political system, at the same time he’s attending college to gain an education and a degree. More power to him and those like him. If the Trump years can produce ore of this (yes, even those we disagree with), then the country is not lost. Education can produce rational and critical thinkers, who when they see some of the messes people like Lori Chavez-DeRemer leave in their wake, will act to rein in the worst of our grifters and instincts. In other words, I’d rather have Rollins than the execrable Nick Fuentes.

We should all look at each other through a human lens, not a political lens. People like Peyton Rollins should be praised, even if his job means posting government propaganda online—as if the Obama administration, which pioneered this kind of thing, did anything different.

Plus, what’s so bad about “Worth Fighting For” over Fenway Park? It is worth fighting for. Anyone who wants to tear that place down is going to have to fight me first (and many other fans). Now if Rollins had posted a Yankees picture 15 minutes before that game, that’s a different story. I may have written a completely different post (I kid).

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Pancreatic cancer is one of the scary ones, even by cancer standards, where every diagnosis is scary. It’s difficult to test for, so by the time you’re diagnosed, it’s often terminal. Treatments have had a low probability of success. Per NBC News, fewer than 13 percent of people with pancreatic cancer live past five years.

Until now.

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The big medical news over the weekend was the result of a long-term trial that used an experimental mRNA vaccine to attack pancreatic cancer cells. The trial began in 2019, a year before mRNA vaccines became widely known during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists tailored vaccines to the specific cancer cells in each of 16 patients in the trial. In eight patients, the vaccine triggered immune system cells to attack the invasive cancer cells. Seven of these patients are still alive after four to six years. Of the eight patients whose immune systems did not respond, the median survival time was 3.4 years. Only two were still alive when the announcement was made.

The study represents a giant step forward in the fight against pancreatic cancer, but it is not a panacea. Participants in the trial first had to have surgery to have the tumor removed, but surgery is only possible in about 20 percent of cases. The 50 percent success rate of the experimental vaccine is still long odds, even if it’s much better than no treatment.

While the advancement is important in the fight against pancreatic cancer, this treatment is only the beginning. The same technology shows promise against many other diseases and forms of cancer. There are already vaccines for other forms of cancer in the works, including prostate cancer.

[As an aside, let me point out that the phrase “a cure for cancer” is a bit misleading.] There are many types of cancer, and some of them are more curable than others. There is not likely to ever be a single cure for cancer, but we are likely to see an increasing number of successful treatments for various forms of the disease, that’s why I use the plural term “cures for cancer.” Former Senator Ben Sasse, who announced that he has metastatic pancreatic cancer last December, is reportedly in a separate trial.]

The promise of the new technology is what makes it so ironic and tragic that Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. head up the federal government at this momentous point in medical history. Cancer research was a big target and a big loser in Elon Musk’s DOGE war on federal spending. In the first half of 2025, the Trump Administration cut 1800 grants and $8 billion in cancer research funding. RFKJR’s HHS continued with an emphasis on cutting research into mRNA vaccines, a favorite bogeyman of the anti-vax right, despite their real world successes.

Some anti-vax conspiracy theories are based on a misunderstanding of what mRNA vaccines do. Contrary to popular belief, they do not change your DNA. Rather, as the National Medicine Library explains, mRNA vaccines introduce a protein that corresponds to proteins found in a virus or other foreign cell. The body’s cells then produce antibodies that target the protein, fighting off the foreign cells.

Other conspiracy theories claim that mRNA vaccines cause so-called “turbo cancer,”rather than cure diseases. While it is true that there had been a surge of cancer cases among younger people, the increase predates the advent of mRNA vaccines and is likely due to lifestyle factors. There is no known link between the COVID mRNA vaccines and cancer, “turbo” (which does not exist) or otherwise. In fact, some studies have identified potential benefits from the COVID vaccines in fighting cancer.

A favorite trope of Trump supporters has been, “Trump could cure cancer, and you’d still hate him.” The chances of Trump curing cancer are about the same as the chances of Trump flying to the moon by flapping his arms, but the reality is closer to the opposite. Trump and his cohorts not only did not cure cancer, they cut the funding for numerous promising research programs and undermined public faith in mRNA, a technology that has the potential to remake medicine as we know it. Trump killed cures for cancer, yet his base still loves and trusts him.

There are few areas where MAGA has been so dramatically, tragically wrong as it has been with its opposition to mRNA vaccines and research. Research will go on, but precious time is being lost because of the loss of federal funding. Many scientists will go to other countries where more funding is available, and for many scientists and doctors who are immigrants, to places where there are more friendly immigration policies. They will take their American education and work for our competitors because our government no longer wants immigrants.

A few years might not seem like much, but if you or a loved one has been diagnosed with a fast-moving disease like pancreatic cancer, days matter. The loss of four or more years of research could be the difference between life and death.

Because I frequently beat up on President Trump, I will also give him some credit here. During his first term, Trump signed the Right to Try Act, a law that allows terminal patients access to experimental trials. If a patient is likely to die anyway, they should have the right to try new treatments, even if they are in the testing stage. Give them a shot at life.

Nevertheless, as a two-time cancer patient (read about my experience here), I take it personally that the Administration has made such draconian cuts to such promising programs. That’s especially true since any savings from DOGE have been squandered on spending increases for items like the massive growth of ICE and the war on Iran (more than $1 billion per day). Spending and borrowing have increased under Trump, even as cancer research was thrown under the bus.

It’s a sign of the times that we can get confirmation of the existence of UFOs or a promising new treatment for one of the most deadly strains of cancer, and no one bats an eye. So much for all the old movies in which characters opined that the government couldn’t tell the truth about UFOs without causing a mass panic. I guess we just needed a trumpian dumpster fire as a distraction when they dropped that rhetorical bomb, but the news of the pancreatic cancer vaccine is news that deserves to be celebrated far and wide.

There is mounting evidence that America bet on the wrong horse in 2024, but none so stark as the realization that we chose tariffs and unnecessary wars over cures for cancer. We will have an opportunity to correct that mistake, starting in just a few months. We should fire those members of Congress who offer Trump their unquestioning support and hire those who will restore funding to cancer research projects and rein in an out-of-control president.

We are on the cusp of a tremendous scientific breakthrough that has been dreamed of for generations, but like the old joke about what makes airplanes fly (the answer is “money”), highly technical medical research also takes large piles of cash, and when large piles of cash are required, for better or worse, usually the primary source is the federal government.

If the issue for the midterms is spending to create cures for cancer or deport elderly immigrant grandparents, I’m pretty sure I know what Americans will choose.

VIRGINIA VOTES Virginia voted to redistrict to add Democrat seats in response to Texas’ mid-decade redistricting.

TACO TUESDAY Trump extended the Iran ceasefire indefinitely.

FLU NOT Pete Hegseth announced that US troops would no longer be required to get annual flu vaccinations.

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Until yesterday, Lori Chavez-DeRemer was the Secretary of Labor for President Donald Trump. Her stewardship of the department was marked by (accusations of) abuse of power, having a sexual relationship with a subordinate, and lots of drinking at the taxpayers’ expense. The folio of (alleged) abuses includes telling aides to take care of her family’s wishes, planning personal trips under color of official business, and drinking alcohol on the job. While she was having her bender, the department under her leadership cancelled contracts to combat child labor and slave labor, and roll back protections for home health care workers, while promoting the unionization of federal employees.

Now Chavez-DeRember is gone. She has joined the ranks of former Trump cabinet members whose incompetence have gotten them the boot: Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem.

There are three more imbeciles in power who need to go next, and their incompetence at their jobs may actually make things easier for the next administration to clean up their departments. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t necessarily incompetent, from the point of view that he really believes and is invested in his booby-headed idiotic fringe ideas about vaccines and “precious bodily fluids.” In his devotion to these ideals, RFKJr is totally competent at dismantling many of the health protocols which have protected American children from debilitating diseases. But as a protector of American health, he’s the most incompetent person ever to head the gargantuan Health and Human Services department.

The problem with RFKJr is that he hasn’t embarrassed his boss enough to get booted, and he has no intention of leaving on his own. This is his shot to do the thing be has been touting for decades. I only hope that HHS itself will offer enough benign resistance to slow the agenda.

It’s a different story with Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth. Patel is suing “The Atlantic” for defamation over a long-form piece detailing his own abuses, drunken parties, and abandonment of the FBI as a professional law enforcement organization, to use them as a personal vengeance squad for his boss and himself. The suit alleges that the magazine and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick “published these statements with actual malice.”

Funny thing, the First Amendment. Even if Fitzpatrick’s article is a genuine hit piece, it’s protected. Even if her allegations turn out to be false, she cannot be compelled to give up confidential sources, or be sued for writing what she believed to be solid reporting. That’s how the press works. Patel is a public figure, a government employee in a high position. Hit pieces are part and parcel of the job, and suing the magazine and reporter, he will find out, has no effect at all, as a judge will throw the suit out with gusto.

The real question is, what does it say about Kash Patel that he copes with reporting alleging he is a drunken sop, unfit for his position? I think perhaps the reporting is a bit too on the nose, to provoke a lawsuit. Patel may not only be incompetent at runing the FBI, he may also be incompetent dealing with an unfriendly media. At least Donald Trump has the knack for dealing with the press, even when they trash him repeatedly. Trump gets that all publicity is good, even negative publicity, to the narcissist.

What to say about Pete Hegseth? He has tried to put a veil around his “Department of War” that won’t call the war in Iran a war. A federal judge overthrew the DOD’s draconian rules for reporters, citing the same First Amendment that will plague Kash Patel. The press has a right to report on the activities of the government, and the government can’t willy-nilly shut them down and only allow friendly propaganda-spewing outlets to repeat their spoon-fed lines. Of course, making actual friends with reporters and allowing them to decide how to report works a whole lot better than making every reporter an enemy.

I am no fan of Washington-based press. They are among the most self-indulgent, self-important, big-headed people in all of media. However, when they get things right, Hegseth has no right to stop them, even if it results in some bad press for him. We haven’t yet found the bottom of the ocean of bad press for Hegseth, but we may be close. During a Pentagon worship service, Hegseth, at the pulpit, quoted the fake version of “Ezekiel 25:17” that Quentin Tarantino wrote for Samuel L. Jackson’s character to say in the movie “Pulp Fiction”. No, he really did.

The actual verse deals with God’s wrath upon the Philistines and the Kerethites: “I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I take vengeance on them.” The fake version…well it’s what a hit man says to sound cool before he pops someone. It also embodies Hegseth’s approach to life and war. He is the “ate up major” who thrives on chest-bumping and making everyone who isn’t like himself feel small.

It is a good thing that the actual warfighters are competent, well-trained, and motivated in their jobs. Hegseth is inside his Pentagon bubble, spewing incompetent drivel, which is about where such a person should be—always promote incompetence up the chain, says the Peter Principle.

Getting back to the core of Yuval Levin’s walk through the Constitution, when a president decides to take hammer and tongs to the executive branch, the people he has to surround himself with (second term) must be invested in the task of destruction. That creates kinetic tension of its own, as the incompetents, drunks, abusers, and self-important hosers make their own beds and have to lie in them. Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer have found that bed is cold, hard, and full of thorns, not roses. I am waiting for RFKJr, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth to come to the same ends. My money is on their eventual ejection from the job before Trump’s term is done—if not by impeachment.

Thus Levin’s contention that the Constitution limits and through competing power claims, corrects, the worst instincts of politicians, and begins to heal the wounds these people create. Thank God for, and let’s drink to, James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. Their foresight may be our national salvation.

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What annoys me is how the Georgia Department of Transportation Torture uses weekends to perform lane-closing construction on roads that might take people to places they’d like to go on a nice Saturday or Sunday afternoon. But I’m too happy to be annoyed by that. A group of teenagers at my son’s high school practiced their tails off for months, including him. After winning the Scholastic Class A state championship in Georgia for five years straight (they’ve only had indoor percussion for five years), they headed to WGI World Championships in Dayton, Ohio, the flagship event for all indoor percussion teams, for the first time. Like a movie script: they came out of nowhere, dominated, and won. Not only won, but won with (I hear) the second highest score ever recorded.

Nothing can get me down after that high.

What annoys me is how many people throw the Hitler thing around so casually, then others deny that the Nazis indeed did engineer the systematic liquidation of six million people for only the reason that they happened to be Jews, or even have Jewish lineage. For decades, the wealth of these Jews, paintings, money, gold, was stashed in places like Swiss banks, and had to be sleuthed out and exposed. People are making money online as influencers and podcasters, doing it off Zenhitler, either making their favorite targets into Adolph, or excusing the man himself and his cohorts of the crimes against humanity they did commit.

Worst are the ones who accuse Israel of genocide. It’s sad that the IDF had to destroy so much infrastructure in Gaza City and other places in Gaza. It should not have been necessary, but you must understand that Hamas stole billions of dollars in foreign aid, direct payments from Qatar and other friendly nations, and money it earned in the markets, and used it solely for the construction of tunnels under every city and village in Gaza. There are so many tunnels that the IDF has still not destroyed them all after three years of war. Innocent Israelis were held in these tunnels, in intolerable conditions, starved, tortured, both physically and mentally, for nearly two years. The tunnels stored arms, rockets, and command-and-control equipment. The tunnels still exist, ready to be put into operation the second the IDF leaves.

If Israel’s goal was genocide, they could easily have accomplished it. Firebombs kill more people, more efficiently than bulldozers or bunker-busting GPS-guided bombs. If the IDF was as indiscriminate as those who throw Zenhitler around say, they could have killed not 70,000, but 700,000 Gazans very easily. But they didn’t, haven’t, and won’t do it.

The Islamic Republic of Iran didn’t even blink to murder over 30,000 of its own citizens in order to preserve its own power. The IRGC is still in control of the country, and our president, on whose image many make a living online and as influencers and podcasters, throwing around Zenhitler accusations, is trying his hardest to make a deal with them. President Trump and his administration’s negotiators have so many holes in their backs from Iran’s constant betrayals that it’s a wonder they can drink a glass of water without it leaking out.

If there’s any Zenhitler to be thrown around, it should be thrown at Tehran. But we will probably end up with a deal of some kind, because the alternative for both sides will kill many soldiers. The United States population lacks the will to finish the job properly, so Iran will go back to developing a nuclear weapon in secret, and Israel will go back to stopping them by any means possible.

I believe this is the reason we haven’t seen more “pager” style operations happen inside Iran. Israel killed the top three or four echelons of IRGC and supreme leadership, and they’re content to let the new masters consolidate control and keep their powder dry for the next time. Exposing more of the Mossad’s assets in Iran is not on Israel’s agenda, because it will not accomplish regime change at this time. Not while the media’s Zenhitler is negotiating with the actual Zenhitlers in Tehran over shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.

I’m annoyed that so many goods are about to get very expensive. Either we pay in cash, or we pay in blood. It’s not the best choice, but this is where our government has landed this country, for now.

I’m annoyed we can’t elect more wise or sane people to office. I’m annoyed we can’t stop watching and listening to grifters from all sides who profit of Zenhitlerism.

But there’s a core of people who are also annoyed, of that I am sure. One day, these people will have their say and topple the Zenhitler cottage industry. I’m hoping and praying for that day to come soon.

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Russia has made it their goal to eliminate Ukrainian culture and assimilate all Ukrainians into Russia; literal genocide. Iran’s evil regime has executed or murdered in cold blood at least 30,000 of its own citizens, for protesting against the government.

The total population of Israel, the West Bank (Israelis call it by the ancient name of Judea and Samaria), and Gaza is about 15.5 million. Of the 10 million estimated Israeli citizens, 20 percent are Arabs. There are about 500,000 to 700,000 Israeli “settlers” in East Jerusalem, while 3.2 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. In Gaza, the population is about 2.2 million, at least half are under 20 years old.

Both the IDF and Hamas agree that at least 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza war. While Israel believes that around 50,000 or more are actual fighters, of course Hamas claims 70 percent are women and children. This is not a minor discrepancy. In Hamas’ version, they are not fighting at all, just lambs to the slaughter. It’s as if 10/7 never happened. Deniers keep saying that Hamas didn’t murder 364 civilians at the Nova Music Festival, or slaughter 36 children and even babies. They say there was no rape, or texting of parents, or joyful displays over dead Jews. Of course, there were; all those things happened.

Israel’s reaction to losing 1,200 citizens in one bloody morning is no different than the U.S. reaction to losing 2,977 on 9/11. As a percentage of total citizens, 10/7 was a dozen times more deadly than 9/11. In the Iraq war, up to 432,000 civilians died as a result of the violence. In Afghanistan, the U.S. killed between 46,000 and 47,000 civilians. As military operations go, the U.S. and Israel are among the most careful when dealing with collateral damage. U.S. forces have embedded lawyers (JAGs) who have tremendous influence to call off an operation due to risk of civilian deaths. In Israel, military lawyers also have input into the quick-reaction systems in place to eliminate targets of opportunity. The main difference between the U.S. and Israel’s military structure is that Israel is always fighting on its own borders, while the U.S. fights expeditionary battles 10,000 miles from home.

Israel’s AI-assisted targeting is designed to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah assets before they can attack Israelis, or to remove command-and-control elements of those groups, and the myriad tunnels used to store, move, and fire rockets. The U.S. has similar goals in the Iran war, while its misses (a school) become public spectacles.

Outside of the Iran war, and Israel’s war in Gaza and southern Lebanon, none of the safeguards are present. The other wars are simply brutal and deadly. Syria’s civil war made no distinction between rebels and civilians. The Russians grind entire villages and cities in Ukraine into rubble. Israel tells civilians to evacuate before attacking. They go so far as to drop leaflets, text cellphones, and “knock” on buildings using flash-bangs before attacking. Yesterday, Russia attacked Ukraine in the deadliest wave in 2026: 17 people, including a 12-year-old child, were killed, along with many more wounded, by drones and missiles. Russia does not care if civilians die; in fact, they target civilians to inflict more pain.

It’s fine for the American people and American media to hold the U.S. to higher standards than the rest of the world regarding civilian deaths and collateral damage when we use our military might. The U.S. is the strongest nation on earth, and as the de facto leader of the free world, should be accountable on a moral level. Israel is fighting for its existence.

Those who scream and holler when Israel acts in its own interest, on its own borders, or against enemies who have sworn to destroy it, I think have a different agenda than simply opposing genocide. They are using genocide as a fig leaf.

Last Monday was Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust. In Israel, sirens blare, and everyone, in vehicles, or at work, stops—cars pull over to the side of the road—and stands in silence over the deaths of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and other Jew-hating people during WWII. These died for no other reason than they are Jews. Not over land, or property (though the Nazis used their property), or knowledge, or power, but only because they are Jews.

There are only two countries in the world right now where large populations of Jews live in relative peace and prosperity: Israel and the U.S. In the U.S., consistently for decades, the highest number of hate crimes have been against Jews. Since 1991, when the FBI started tracking statistics, Jews have made up 60-70 percent of religious hate crimes, reaching over 1,100 since 2020. In Israel, Jews are the target of terror simply because Israel is the only Jewish state in the world. There are over 50 official Islamic countries in the world, and other nations have adopted state religions (though most only as a token), but only one is for Jews, and regardless of how brutal wars against and between Muslims might get in other countries, it is the Jews who get blamed for all genocides.

Regardless of how terrible the Ukraine war is, it’s the fact the Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Jew that gets people all into conspiracy theories. It’s the fact that Jews punch above their weight in population, in media, in entertainment, in the medical fields, and in scientific achievement, that gets some Americans, like the awful Candace Owens, or even Tucker Carlson, to believe that there’s some cabal of Jews making decisions about the whole world, or somehow forcing President Donald Trump to make war on Iran on behalf of Jews.

The fig leaf of genocide, as Israel wins wars it’s been fighting since 1948, when the loss of even one means the country’s destruction, is used when the real motivation is hatred of Jews.

There is a lot of hate to go around in the world. In Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, the DRC, and other places, millions have been displaced, and hundreds of thousands killed, in the name of some religion, or over the reins of raw power. But the hate reserved for Israel and Jews is of a different category and nature.

I believe the best argument of the existence of God in the world is the presence and persistence of Jews. Over centuries, so many have tried to dispose of the Jews, convert them, assimilate them, or expel them. Yet the Jews are still here. In WWII, the Nazis nearly succeeded in emptying Europe of all Jews, leaving 600,000 as refugees, living in the same death camps that were liberated, two years after the end of the war. Commissioners from the Allies and the U.N. said it was impossible for the ancient land they called Palestine to support that many people, not to mention an equal number of Arabs paid to occupy the territory to maintain a 1:1 ratio of Arabs and Jews. Now that land supports about 15 million, with those who live in Israel enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world.

There’s something that eats at people who believe the Jews should not prosper in the world, that Israel can defend itself, and win. There’s something that eats at people who attack Jews in New York City and other places, that Jews should have influence or contribute to their own society. I believe this is a spiritual sickness; it is the darkness that stands against the light of God. There is a God, and He chose the Jews to be His people, and He has sustained them and protected them through thousands of years. Those who reject this notion want to prove themselves right by destroying the Jews. All they prove is that there is a God, which is the whole point the Jews exist. It’s not a blessing to be chosen, to have so many in the world blame and hate. It’s a sign and a wonder over generations.

There is no limit to how much humans can hate. But there is a special hatred reserved for Jews, because it is fueled by the enemies of God in the spiritual realm. If the Bible is correct (and I am a believer), then satan’s main goal is to defeat God. It is satan who places the hate for Jews above other hate. It is the enemy who sends the delusion of blaming Jews for genocide when others commit worse crimes. That’s what I believe and I think the evidence is overwhelming.

You don’t have to agree with me. You can say there are other explanations, like culture and family and education, and you’d be right in many instances. But to be consistently right, you’d have to discount all the other civilizations in the world that value family and culture and education, and all the other dead civilizations, like the Roman Empire, or some of the ancient dynasties in China and southeast Asia, that no longer exist in their original form. But the Jews exist in the same form as they did in 90 A.D. when Titus, who became emperor, destroyed the Temple. The Torah has not changed one jot or tittle. I ask how this can be, that a people could endure such hate for so long?

As for today, the only emotion I have is shame for those who ignore all the death, brutality and hate in the world, to focus on one small nation fighting groups sworn to destroy it from all sides. Shame on those who use the fig leaf of genocide to cover their hatred of Jews.

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For those who might be living under a rock, a USAF F-15 fighter-bomber, call sign Dude 44, was shot down over Iran on April 3, Good Friday. The pilot was rescued quickly, but the Weapons Systems Officer, the WSO or GIB (Guy In Back), was the subject of an intense search and rescue effort that culminated in his retrieval during the early morning hours of Easter Sunday.

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Where the conspiracy theories come in is that in the weeks following the rescue, little, if any, additional information has come out about the status of the crew, their identities, or their condition. Given the need for good PR regarding the unpopular and seemingly unsuccessful war in Iran, it seems likely that the Department of Defense (which is still the real name of the agency) would like to treat both the rescued and the rescuers as heroes and parade them around in public. That has not happened. The only positive information about the identities of the crew was a remark by Donald Trump that the rescued WSO was “a highly respected Colonel.”

As is often the case, the lack of information has created a vacuum that is being filled by conspiracy theories. That includes speculation that the crew was captured, fed by bad information such as a 1990 video from the Gulf War reposted to Facebook, or that the operation was a cover story for a raid into Iran with a different purpose. Some deny that the raid occurred at all.

First, I think we can reasonably be sure there was a rescue mission. The F-15 represents one of only two airborne losses to Iranian fire from the war so far. The other was an A-10 that was heavily damaged about the same time. That pilot was rescued after flying out of Iran and ditching in or near the Strait of Hormuz. Essentially, the Air Force wouldn’t have a reason to lie about the F-15 shootdown and give the Iranians credit for a kill that they didn’t earn.

We can also know that Iran did not capture or kill the crew. If live prisoners or dead bodies were in Iranian hands, the images would be widely broadcast by Iranian media. They have not been.

Further, the US has historically made immense efforts to rescue downed aircrew where possible. Going back to Vietnam and beyond, downed pilots and crewmen would be the subject of large rescue efforts that included helicopters, attack aircraft, and sometimes fighters, bombers, tankers, and even ground forces. Rescue efforts were important for aircrew morale as well as to deny the enemy a source of propaganda. Additionally, it takes years to train crewmen so there is a logistical reason as well.

So why the cover-up? I’m venturing into speculation, but there are a few possibilities.

The most obvious answer is that to protect the crew’s privacy. Maybe, like many soldiers who do heroic things, they didn’t want the notoriety. Along the same lines, it would not be unreasonable to fear that they or their families could be targeted by Iranian terror cells back home. Maybe their injuries were significant enough that they are still hospitalized.

Or maybe there is some reason that releasing the crew’s identities would be embarrassing. The possibilities here run the gamut from crew members being involved in Never Trump politics to being gay to being members of a minority related to military DEI policies. Again, this is all speculative, but in the past, the military has been known to cover up operational screwups that reflected poorly on the service. The 2004 friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, an NFL player who walked away from the Arizona Cardinals to fight in Afghanistan after September 11, was one such case.

With a notoriously secretive and closed Administration, it’s difficult to say what might be embarrassing enough to justify a coverup. If there is a move to cover up something embarrassing, it may be related to why two MC-130 transports had to be destroyed after one reportedly got stuck in the sand at the hastily established forward runway inside enemy territory or why the F-15 was shot down in the first place.

A more likely explanation, however, is that the coverup is related to military secrets. We don’t know the precise mission that the F-15 was on or what its target was, but there is speculation that it was related to Iran’s nuclear program. It might be that revealing the crew’s identity would provide information to the Iranians about their mission.

Releasing information about the mission might also endanger Iranians on the ground. Dissidents who opposed the regime reportedly assisted the Special Operations troops responsible for rescuing the crew. Publicity might place those Iranians in danger.

Publicity might also give away the secret technology used to locate the WSO. The crewman was reportedly located using a secret CIA tool called “Ghost Murmur” that can detect heartbeats at extreme distances. But Ghost Murmur may just be a cover story or a red herring. Experts in the field say that the technology, as described, may be scientifically impossible. That leaves the question of how the colonel was really found.

Finally, with respect to the theories that the operation was a cover for some sort of raid, perhaps targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, I think that would look very different from the operation that the world saw. Attack aircraft and troop carriers would converge on the target, rather than using different types of aircraft to search over a wide area while suppressing Iranian forces that were moving in.

Iranian media posted pictures of the downed American plane (although it was initially misidentified) so we know without a doubt that an F-15 was really lost. The Iranians themselves seem convinced that the shoot-down and rescue effort were real, even offering a bounty for the stranded aircrew.

Logically, if we lost a plane in Iran, then we also lost a crew. If the Iranians didn’t capture the crew, then the US must have retrieved them.

At this point, there is simply no way to know the full truth about what happened Easter weekend deep Iran, but there is little reason to suspect that the entire incident was a hoax. The most likely explanation for the inconsistencies and unanswered questions are that they relate to military secrets. There is almost certainly a coverup of some sort going on, but it’s likely related to garden variety classified programs rather than a sinister hoax perpetrated for unknown reasons.

SOME MEN YOU JUST CAN’T REACH Days after triggering a backlash for a blasphemous post presenting himself as Jesus, Donald Trump shared another image that showed him with Jesus and labeled him God’s “Trump card.”

451 DAYS of the Second Trump Administration and the Epstein files have still not been fully released.

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But today I want to change roles. I want to play the optimist. I know, it’s going to be saccharine, but really, there are some things worth considering, because though we know the people in charge of these levers of power are pulling them like a cocaine-addicted monkey in an unethical experiment, there is a chance things will work out.

Israel and Lebanon are in talks about how to disarm Hezbollah. They are hosted by Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Regent of Venezuela, the future Shah of Iran, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The skeptic says Hezbollah controls the largest bloc in Lebanon’s parliament, and there’s no way the government can stand if the executive, who by their law as president is a Christian, makes some deal with Israel, the sworn enemy of Hezbollah, to disarm that group and remove it from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is more than just a military arm of the IRGC, it functions as the government in southern Lebanon, where the population is mostly Shiite Muslims, Palestinian refugees, and Syrian refugees from that nation’s long war.

The skeptic says there’s no way Lebanon or Israel could govern southern Lebanon. But what if the optimist got his way? What if the Lebanese army was able to cooperate with Israel and expel Hezbollah from southern Lebanon? Wow. Turkey and Syria would have no choice but to do business with the new reality in Beirut. Of course, the government in Beirut would fall, but what if Lebanese voters turned from Hezbollah? What if the religious extremism that plagued that nation and divided its population was rejected by the people, who are tired of being human shields?

For one thing, the half million or more Syrian refugees might be repatriated to Syria. For another thing, the Palestinians might end up with full citizenship in Lebanon, or given the option to live in Israel, and if they behaved, to become citizens there (it would not affect the political balance in a huge way, like Gaza or the West Bank would). What if Lebanon got its head on straight and signed an actual, real peace treaty with Israel to provide mutual security on Israel’s northern border?

It would be so transformative to the Levant that it is the best possible outcome. Israelis would be able to focus on rejecting their own religious extremists, and bring the terrible acts of violence by its own settlers under control. Israelis would be able to return to their homes in northern Israel, and Lebanese would be able to live in peace in southern Lebanon and Beirut. Hezbollah would be defanged and separated from the IRGC. Iran would be even more isolated.

If it could be pulled off, this would be even more transformative than the Israel-Egypt treaty under Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It would be way more transformative than the Abraham Accords, and would likely lead to quick normalized relations with Saudi Arabia. It might even spur Turkey’s people to dump their own religious extremist government, but that might be too optimistic. Turkey runs on corruption and thievery, so Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is unlikely to be dumped.

The Israel-Lebanon talks is one of the biggest opportunities for optimism. The skeptic says “no way,” but less probable things have happened in the Middle East.

Next, Iran. The skeptic says the only way the regime will be removed is by a massive amphibious operation followed by a march from Bandar Abbas to Tehran, about 1,200 kilometers, or 750 miles. This would take around a half million U.S. troops, and even with air superiority, it would be a difficult battle. It might take a whole month to get to Tehran and boot the current regime, which would then turn into an insurgency. We’d have to win the support of the Artesh, the Iranian army, to turn on the IRGC to root them out. If we could not do that, we’d “win” only to get bogged down in something worse than Iraq and ISIS. The skeptic says it’s the only way, but it’s not a good path.

The optimist says the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz might be the right strategy. The Union Army won the Civil War by following the aged General Winfield Scott’s strategy: blockade the south, choke them off, split their forces along the Mississippi, then tighten the noose. General Ulysses Grant generally followed this, though with more fighting than choking. The optimist says that choking Iran, not allowing them to sell oil or anything to transit the Strait of Hormuz takes control of the strait out of their hands and puts it in American hands.

If we choke off Iran, eventually they will feel the pain, as their banking system collapses, and they are unable to buy what they need to operate the country. With a water shortage, and basic needs not met, the people, 50 percent of whom hate the regime, will rise up again, and this time, the Artesh might defect to our side, with the right motivation. Remember, Israel’s Mossad is still very robust and operational in Iran. We don’t know the unpulled levers they’ve got in their arsenal. Things could swing very quickly if the right levers are pulled.

We don’t know everything that U.S. intelligence and analysts are telling President Trump and his cabinet. While Trump is out there playing the jerk imbecile, more competent people might be executing the strategy they recommended to him and he approved. The blockade is a much safer path than invasion. The optimist says it could lead to the internal overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Or, if not that, a deal that would place the Strait of Hormuz into international hands, for freedom of navigation. That would yield major fruit, as 50 percent of the world’s economic needs, like petroleum for plastics and fertilizers, pass through that strait.

International, or U.S.-led control of the Strait of Hormuz would lead to lower oil prices, lower prices on gasoline, and basically every consumer and industrial good. It could give the Trump administration room to reduce tariffs and instead charge a small security tax for shipping traffic through the strait. That is way more efficient than the byzantine tariff system which has been struck down by the Supreme Court. And it would be legal.

The optimist says that the Strait of Hormuz will be in U.S. control or international control before the November elections. The optimist says that the religious extremists running Iran will either be deposed or defanged by that date, and it may lead to a new day for Iran, where the world can do business with them. The optimist says the people of Iran might take control of their country and ban the IRGC; the skeptic says there is no way for that to happen. The optimist says we don’t know what might be happening out of our knowledge or sight.

Iran still has plenty of missiles, it’s the launchers that are their problem. They’ve been getting targeting and intelligence data from Russia, and supplies from China. During the cease-fire, they’ve likely rearmed and moved assets around to better attack us and our allies. But the U.S. has also rearmed and reloaded our ships and aircraft to suppress and destroy Iran’s ability to attack. The skeptic says it will be a long and difficult battle. The optimist says we haven’t yet deployed some of our most advanced weapons; we haven’t executed the Venezuela option. We haven’t deployed the “discombobulator”.

The skeptic bases his opinions on what is already known or reported. The optimist bases his hope on what isn’t known, and what hasn’t been done. The fact that Israel and Lebanon are talking is amazing; the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is blockaded, along with all Iranian ports, is encouraging. The fact that China and Russia are taking our action seriously means it is having an effect. The fact that Pakistan is playing peace-maker with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, promoting “regional peace and security” as one of Iran’s neighbors. The optimist says international cooperation and agreement is important, but the European powers whose noses have been in the Middle East for centuries don’t need to be the drivers here.

The optimist says a new era of U.S.-led cooperation and coalitions based on Asian and Middle East power, versus European and NATO power, would be a stronger foundation to deal with the current threat of an axis between China, Russia, and North Korea. Iran is key to that coalition. Iran could swing either way; right now, it’s swinging toward the China-Russia axis, but U.S.-led pressure could flip it. We know that the Iranian people would rather be free than under the boot of their theocratic despots.

The skeptic says this is all fantasy, living in Donald Trump’s deranged brain. The optimist says there’s reason for hope, and there’s more than enough evidence to believe in the gateway to a golden era, where Europe deals with Ukraine (which could become a military powerhouse, by the way, because war tends to do that to a country) and Russia, and the U.S. deals with Asia, China, and the western hemisphere.

If we believe the optimist, we might get everything we dreamed of: cheap gas, lots of money to pay our debts and national obligations, a screaming hot economy, and freedom for hundreds of millions of people around the world, to rise up out of totalitarianism and poverty into a new golden age. Of course, there’s a middle ground where we win some, and we lose some.

The real answer lies somewhere between the skeptic and the optimist. Since I tend to be the skeptic, sometimes it’s good to consider the other view. Things are not necessarily as bad as we think. Then again, Eric Swalwell, a whole bunch of fallen preachers, and every other politician who is featherbedding (the Trump family leading the pack) makes the skeptic a lot more believable. If our leaders put their own pecuniary interests ahead of the nation, we know where that leads. Maybe we can focus on our own leadership problems, and then heal the world. But as Mick Jagger sang, you can’t always get what you want. (Says the skeptic.) But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need. (Replies the optimist.)

That might just be the best answer we have. Pray for the best and prepare for the worst. The outcome is likely somewhere in the middle.

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The post has obvious messianic overtones and has drawn criticism even from avowed Trump supporters like Riley Gaines of Fox News. It goes way beyond Christian Nationalism into blasphemy and cultism. At the same time, Trump posted a rant against Pope Leo on Truth Social,

Interestingly, the picture was apparently first posted by another account in February. At some point, one of the figures resembling soldiers in the sky in the original picture was altered to appear as something vaguely demonic. This makes the whole weird episode even more bizarre.

I have waffled on whether Trump should be labeled a false prophet. In the past, most of the messianic claims were made by people around Trump, rather than the man himself. He was surrounded by false prophets and did not reject their claims. I considered Trump an antichrist in the biblical, 1 John sense, because, not only did he reject the messianic claims made by his followers, his platform, policies, and behavior were often diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ and the Bible. But with this post, the evidence seems clear that Trump is claiming divinity and had clearly crossed into false prophet territory.

Let me be clear about one thing: In America, our First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion protect the right of Trump and his disciples to claim that he is the Messiah. MAGA has the freedom to literally worship Trump if they want.

I’ll go further. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for any public office. Trump and MAGA don’t have to be Christian, and they can campaign on a platform Trump worship if they so desire. That’s all constitutionally protected.

Having said that, it is delusional behavior. Donald Trump has apparently gone way beyond believing his own press. If the president believes that he is the “chosen one,” as he said in 2019 during his first term, and can resurrect dead Epsteins, it is a clear sign of mental problems akin to the trope of dressing up like Napoleon.

The Old Testament gives us a biblical test for prophets that should be applied to Trump and his followers: “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” This verse should be applied to Trump and the other false prophets who try to deify him.

If Trump is the messiah, let him raise the dead for all to see. To paraphrase Jesus, which is more difficult, to post a picture of yourself healing someone or to actually heal someone of a real affliction?

It should be obvious at this point that Trump is either stunningly incompetent and delusional or a dangerously malevolent force. There really is no middle ground.

Some have tried to explain it away or deflect. Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s press secretary, theorized that it was a mistake, saying, “President Trump’s team never should have posted this image. If he saw it first, he never should have approved it.”

As I write this on Monday, both posts are still up, which undermines the theory that someone other than Trump posted them (although the text post is uncharacteristically free of misspellings and randomly capitalized letters). If it was a mistake, it would be easy to take them down and apologize. Neither has happened. [Note: The picture was apparently quietly deleted on Monday afternoon. The rant against Leo is still up.]

Others try to shift the focus. I’ve seen numerous accounts argue that a) Democrats booed God in 2012 or that b) Democrats only care about anti-Catholic bias or anti-Christian behavior when it benefits them. On the first point, bad behavior by Democrats does not excuse worse behavior by Trump. The second and third points rely on stereotypes of the Democrats that are easily proven untrue. Many Catholics and other Christians are Democrats. This was true before Trump and is even more true 10 years into the MAGA cult.

The Trumpist argument becomes a “no true Scotsman’ logical fallacy when it is pointed out that 36 percent of Protestants and 39 percent of Catholics voted for Harris in 2024. “Well, those aren’t real Christians,” the MAGA apologists often say. In reality, neither party has a lock of Christianity or Christian voters.

An alternative explanation that emerged was that the original context of the image was that Trump was not “portraying himself as Jesus,” but rather, was “doing the work of God to heal our nation.” I saw a number of posts making this argument that appeared to be copied and pasted, possibly shared by an army of bots.

The first problem with this argument is that nothing in the context of the photo suggests that it is symbolic of Trump healing our nation. The second problem is that it still portrays Trump in a messianic fashion, healing not just one person, but the entire country. That’s arguably much worse.

I haven’t seen Speaker Johnson’s reaction, but my guess is that he would say he hasn’t seen it.

As Monday wore on, faced with the choice of being seen as blasphemous or monumentally stupid, Trump went with stupid. An official White House account posted a video of Trump admitting that he shared the video. His explanation?

Trump said, “I did post it. I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with the Red Cross as a Red Cross worker, which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one.”

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“I just heard about it,” Trump continued, “and I said, ‘How do they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better, and I do make people better, I make people a lot better.”

If Trump explained why he was sharing a picture that portrayed him as a doctor, which is only slightly less crazy than portraying himself as Christ, it was not in the clip. For added context, the Red Cross was one of the organizations that lost funding due to Trump and Musk’s cuts to USAID, and no doctor I’ve ever seen dresses like the man in the picture.

However, the truth is that this is not the first time that Trump has shared images of this nature. There was the picture of Trump dressed as the pope, an image that said he was on a “mission from God,” and the infamous golden idol, among others. These previous posts did not make the splash that Sunday’s post did, but they were of the same vein. With Trump, it’s always helpful to look at the big picture of his general bad behavior rather than letting his supporters rationalize away specific instances.

The frightening truth is that our nation is being led by a man with a messiah complex who believes that he can do no wrong. This man is surrounded by people who only tell him how great he is. This man has started a destructive war that threatens to cripple the global economy as shortages of oil disrupt entire supply chains from both the transportation and manufacturing sides.

We are at the mercy of a madman.

In a sane, healthy democracy, the answer would be the constitutional process of the 25th Amendment. In our reality, the constitutional process is an inadequate answer that would require a majority of the sycophants in Trump’s cabinet to support his removal. That is unlikely in the extreme.

Our best hope at this point, other than hoping that the cabinet wakes up to the danger, is that we can survive until a midterm backlash occurs that will hopefully install enough Democrats to impeach and remove the president. But November is a long way off with a delusional madman in control, and January is even further away.

In the meantime, feel free to weigh in on whether Trump really thinks he is the best thing since and is on an equal footing with Jesus Christ or whether he’s just so monumentally stupid that he thinks doctors wear flowing white robes and have glowing hands. Maybe he just thinks we are stupid. Maybe it’s all of the above.

Pick your poison.

TWO REPS DOWN A Democrat and Republican will both be leaving Congress. Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Cal.) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) are both resigning amid sex scandals.

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