REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Monday, July 6, 2026 14:14
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Monday, June 15, 2026 7:05 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The peace deal with Tehran is an Iranian victory.

By Tom Nichols | June 14, 2026, 9:32 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-iran-deal/687547/

President Trump has announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war. “Congratulations to all!” he said in a posting on his Truth Social site this evening. He then headed off to oversee the garish public spectacle he’d arranged for his birthday on the South Lawn of the White House. The United States, however, has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary.

The details of the agreement remain unconfirmed, but the president, of course, is eager to spin the outcome as a victory. (Trump was in a hurry to sign the deal on his birthday; the Iranians, who now seem to be in charge of this whole business, instead said they will send someone to a meeting in Switzerland on Friday.) But even before we have the details, it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.

If defeat seems a strong word, consider what we do know about how this war will end. Iran has suffered significant damage from U.S. and Israeli military action. But as I and others warned at the outset, killing people and bombing things do not by themselves produce victory.

The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps;

the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks;

Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks;

the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror;

and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran.

In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own.

Indeed, the United States has perhaps done worse than gaining nothing. Iran, while temporarily weakened, is now an even more powerful political actor: The regime in Tehran stood up to a massive U.S. onslaught, survived, and then inflicted pain on various states in the Gulf as punishment for going along with Trump’s war.

The Israelis, for their part, have been left out in the cold. It is difficult to shed any tears for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who unwisely encouraged Trump to attack Iran, but he, too, is feeling the sting of humiliation. The Iranians cagily linked Netanyahu’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon to Trump’s war in the Gulf, and Trump is now angry at Netanyahu for making it harder for the United States to get out of the conflict. (When Netanyahu planned major strikes in Beirut at the beginning of June, Trump called him, swore at him, and said, “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.”)

Reportedly, the upcoming agreement requires a cessation of hostilities in the region, including in Lebanon—and Trump is negotiating as if he can deliver on that demand while leaving Jerusalem out of it. Today, the Israelis said that Hezbollah had launched weapons into Israel. Rather than calling on the Iranians to restrain their proxy, Trump took to social media to tell the Israelis to calm down, noting that the attack “was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process.”

The Trump administration will claim that it achieved a victory because it got an Iran without nuclear weapons. But this claim is both silly and redundant. Tehran had already pledged 10 years ago in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action not to seek nuclear weapons. No one should trust the Iranians, but before Trump unilaterally canceled the agreement in his first term, the JCPOA seemed to be working. More to the point, at the time Trump chose to go to war, Iran was nowhere near getting a bomb, and certainly not within weeks of a weapon, as Trump asserted. The effort to claim that this war has defeated Iran’s nuclear ambitions is merely an effort to distract from the administration’s failure to achieve regime change, which was always its main goal.

(Trump’s self-congratulations about averting the Iranian bomb are like the old joke about the London cabbie who used to throw “lion powder” out of the window to keep lions away. When told that London has no lions, the cabbie said: “And a bloody good thing, too, because the powder don’t work.”)

The agreement—if it actually gets signed on Friday—will then initiate a two-month period of further negotiations, and Trump could argue that he’ll get more in that process. But how?

Trump has for weeks talked about getting rid of Iran’s “Nuclear Dust”—his odd term for the uranium now lying under the rubble produced by U.S. bombings—and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed this morning that the United States has multiple plans for removing this material. The Iranians, however, are busily planting booby traps around the uranium to ensure that it stays where it is, and despite Hegseth’s blustering, America is not going to march into Iran and dig it out without Tehran’s consent. If anything, the Iranians now have every incentive to sprint to a bomb, and can do so with far less transparency than they had to endure under the JCPOA.

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz will “open,” but it was already open, at least to those the Iranians allowed to pass. In his celebratory message, Trump said: “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” That’s terrific, but such a statement has about as much effect as I or my wife or my cat declaring the strait open; only Iran can make that decision. Trump also declared that the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports is over, something that is indeed within his power, but that only means America will withdraw while Iran remains.

Meanwhile—and again, these are the terms that so far have been leaked to the press, mostly from the Iranians—Iran claims that it will not only get some $12 billion up front, but get another $12 billion within 60 days. Down the line, the Iranians are claiming that they will get a $300 billion fund for reconstruction. (U.S. officials have insisted to reporters that any release of funds will be performance-based, a fuzzy condition that raises more questions and could invite the Iranians to dig in and haggle if the Americans balk at delivering the money.) The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker, with important stocks of weapons depleted, and with its consumers paying the price for the war at the gas pump.

Trump today also claimed that he is perfectly willing to restart hostilities if the Iranians don’t cooperate. Tehran, however, can be forgiven for smirking at the idea that Trump is going to tie down U.S. forces and then ignite a second conflict just weeks from the midterm elections, especially because the American people—and, perhaps more important from Trump’s perspective, the international markets—have soured on the conflict.

Trump began this war by promising the Iranian people that they would be able to seize their government from the theocratic tyrants who oppress them, and he repeatedly said he would settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender.” Had Trump toppled the regime in Tehran, he would have had the thanks of most of the world—and congratulations from even his most dedicated critics. Instead, the United States has been defeated, and this evening found Trump out on the lawn waiting for the rain to clear so he could begin his party.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 12:36 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


All Israelis are displeased with Trump's surrender to Iran

Ministers say Israel won’t be bound by Iran deal, as opposition castigates Netanyahu’s ‘absolute failure’

Defense minister vows the IDF will remain in southern Lebanon, hit Iran hard if needed, despite Trump-Tehran MOU ending Lebanon fighting; Bennett calls Trump-imposed terms a product of failed Israeli leadership

By Emanuel Fabian, Ariela Karmel, Sam Sokol and ToI Staff

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-vows-to-stay-in-south-lebanon-if-
iran-strikes-well-hit-it-with-full-force/

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the agreement was “bad for Israel and for the entire free world. Period.”

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said Netanyahu “lost the war,” and collapsed in the “moment of truth,” adding: “There has never, ever, been a more absolute failure than Netanyahu’s diplomatic failure on the Iranian front.”

“The time has come for us to recognize the fact that Netanyahu simply cannot do it anymore,” Lapid charged, complaining of “an American president openly and publicly telling the prime minister of Israel: ‘I am your boss, and you will do what you are told.'”

“The State of Israel won the battle; Netanyahu lost the war. The Israel Defense Forces fulfilled its missions, Netanyahu failed to deliver the goods,” Lapid told reporters ahead of his Yesh Atid party’s weekly faction meeting.

Much more at https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-vows-to-stay-in-south-lebanon-if-
iran-strikes-well-hit-it-with-full-force/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 2:52 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.

You've opened your big, fat, stupid mouths every single day about Iran and you've been wrong about everything.

Nobody believes you now.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, June 15, 2026 5:49 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:

Yes, the Nazi regime persecuted thousands of gay men, but their primary method of dealing with them was forced labor in concentration camps, rather than systematic extermination in death camps. While some gay prisoners were killed in gas chambers or died as a result of gruesome medical experiments, most died from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

Here are the specific, localized details of how the Nazis targeted homosexuals:

• Paragraph 175: The Nazi regime aggressively broadened the existing German penal code, Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual relations between men. They arrested an estimated 100,000 men under this law. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

• Concentration Camps: Between 5,000 and 15,000 of these men were deported to concentration camps, where they were forced to wear an identifying inverted Pink Triangle on their uniforms. Holocaust Encyclopedia

• Treatment: Gay inmates were at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy. They were heavily isolated, subjected to severe torture, assigned the most dangerous labor, and were frequently victims of forced castration without their consent. The National Holocaust Centre and Museum

• Casualties: Historians estimate that around 60% of the gay men imprisoned in these Camps perished due to the extreme conditions. The Wiener Holocaust Library

Google concluded that Trumptards are Nazis, as is 6ixStringJack. Sieg Heil, my Führer Trump!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 6:10 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


TRUMP CELEBRATES ACHIEVING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN IRAN

To end his war on Iran, Trump was forced to return to the status quo with the Strait of Hormuz open and no nuclear deal in place.

By Nick Turse | June 15 2026, 2:41 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/15/trump-us-iran-war/

The Trump administration is boasting about pending plans to conclude its war with Iran, having achieved none of the original objectives laid out by President Donald Trump.

With a commitment to a ceasefire and the scheduled signing of a “framework” later this week, Iran is expected to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. Negotiations over an agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program are expected to take place in the 60 days following Friday’s signing ceremony.

If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.

Trump also teased the prospect of a U.S. protection racket under which Middle Eastern nations would be forced to pay monetary tribute to America if the U.S. and Iran do not finalize a nuclear accord.

On Monday, Iran’s government declared victory and appeared to vow revenge on the U.S. for the war.

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, his 80th birthday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” An hour later, Trump offered a caveat, stating the strait would only be opened “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday.”

“This victory was achieved through absolute national cohesion, under the wise guidance of the Supreme National Security Council and all state pillars,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei announced on Monday, claiming that the conflict “cost the aggressors heavily.”

“Moving toward diplomacy does not mean we will ever forgive or forget the crimes against the Iranian nation; the pursuit of justice for our martyrs is permanent,” said Baghaei.

The White House did not reply to a request by The Intercept for comment on Iran’s declaration of victory and apparent vow of revenge for its dead.

The new “deal” is a complete capitulation for Trump who claimed, on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” No such surrender occurred.

Nor is it the first ceasefire Trump has claimed would result in a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

“Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” the White House announced on April 8, essentially the same agreement publicized on Sunday. That original ceasefire collapsed months ago, but the fiction was observed by the administration and mainstream news media outlets alike, until the new agreement was rolled out.

Pakistan says it will oversee a formal signing of a memorandum of understanding on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the National Assembly session in Islamabad “the immediate and permanent cessation of military operations has been announced across all fronts, including Iran, America, and Lebanon.”

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed on Sunday that the agreement guarantees “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won’t seek one, won’t buy one, won’t have one.” Iran previously agreed to those terms when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. Trump unilaterally withdrew from that pact during his first term.

Trump indicated Hegseth was lying or uniformed in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. The president said the U.S. was still negotiating whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years but hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension.

Trump has consistently criticized the JCPOA. “Barack Hussein Obama gave them 1.7 Billion Dollars in ‘Green” Cash,’” he wrote during a social media rant in April. Iran’s Mehr news agency reported that the U.S. would release $12 billion in frozen assets to Iran before the start of nuclear negotiations. “The accord secures the unfreezing of all Iranian assets and addresses compensation for wartime damages,” said Baghaei.

Trump said that if the U.S. does not sign a final nuclear agreement with Iran, the United States might assume the role of “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. The proposed extortion scheme appears akin to the 19th-century Barbary States, which practiced state-supported piracy to exact tribute from other nations. The United States fought two separate wars against two of these North African states: Tripoli from 1801 to 1805, and Algiers from 1815 to 1816.

A recent Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, his stated objectives, and supposed American achievements found the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted.

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out his most ambitious objectives. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

Since April, the White House has not replied to requests for further information about Trump’s inability to achieve world peace. Trump has also failed to accomplish even his more modest goal, as the region remains mired in conflict. Israel continued its war on Lebanon on Sunday and said it was not involved in the new pact. “Trump’s agreement does not bind us. … We are not party to this agreement,” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote on Telegram on Sunday.

“He’s a very difficult guy,” Trump said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “He should be very thankful to us for doing this,” he said of the war, lapsing into typical hyperbole. “Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 6:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:


Oh... I think you misunderstand me.

I don't have a problem with gay people.

Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.


You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.


--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 6:50 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Theory of the Vulgar Class

Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger

Paul Krugman
Jun 16, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-theory-of-the-vulgar-class

Surreal UFC White House press conference plays out at Lincoln Memorial

On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday with a cage match on the White House lawn. The match and the events that surrounded it — especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — were a desecration of America’s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues. The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar.

That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms. As I argued yesterday, these norms historically played a key role in mitigating abuses of power and privilege during the Gilded Age, the last time America suffered from extreme income and wealth inequality (though not nearly as extreme as what we have now).

Norms matter. In his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class — published in 1899, at the apogee of the Gilded Age — Thorstein Veblen famously argued that much of the behavior of his era’s elite was driven not by the desire to enjoy life but by the desire to impress others. Partly they did this through conspicuous consumption. Thus they built lavish mansions staffed by legions of servants.

However, members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society:


John D. Rockefeller and family

The contrast with the public behavior of Trump’s band of uber-wealthy is startling:

Grimes makes heartwrenching plea to Elon Musk accusing him of ignoring their child's ill health on his platform X

In addition to modeling upstanding behavior, the extremely rich of the Gilded Age were expected to have, or pretend to have, some virtues that were part of the aristocratic ideal, including a sense of noblesse oblige displayed by good works. Veblen was quite cynical about philanthropy, yet even he didn’t dismiss it completely, stating that:

The fact itself that distinction or a decent good fame is sought by this method [such as the endowment of a university, public library or museum] is evidence of a prevalent sense of the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a consistent factor in the habits of thought of modern communities.

(Veblen’s lasting intellectual influence did not come from his sparkling prose style.)

Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

So in a real sense we are living in the midst of a reenactment of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, not a second American Gilded Age. No, I’m not one of those men who thinks about ancient Rome all the time. But there are some obvious parallels.

While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex, there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?

The death throes of the Republic went on for many years. Politicians declared their rivals enemies of the state, deployed violent gangs to disrupt the rule of law, established temporary dictatorships, and more. The installation of Augustus as emperor in 27 BC was just the final act.

And during this long twilight of constitutional government, one of the ways the extremely wealthy and powerful sought both to demonstrate their wealth and to curry favor with the mob was by sponsoring gladiatorial games.

The vulgarity of the Trumpian elite isn’t in itself that important. But it’s a symptom of a collapse in values and norms that, unless confronted and reversed, may herald the end of the American experiment. We should heed the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 7:01 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:


Oh... I think you misunderstand me.

I don't have a problem with gay people.

Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.


You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.
6ix,
you lost your teeth
you have a hole in your lung from an infection
you are diabetic
you are an alcoholic
you spend your days smoking and watching porn
you pay no income tax because you have no job
you have no children
you have no life beyond your yard, your house's leaky basement, your secret computer projects
lot more failures you don't talk about

The Nazis joined the party because they were failing at life, compared to those awful, rich Jews controlling everything. Hitler made them feel strong.

Trump makes 6ix feel strong. 6ix is no longer a failure when comparing himself to those awful, rich Democrats controlling everything.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 8:41 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump, Cynicism and the Deal

GLOBAL VIEW By Walter Russell Mead | June 15, 2026

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-cynicism-and-the-deal-00cfce74

The great Iran deal is here, President Trump has declared.

Big if true, as they say on the internet. The agreement was announced and, according to Vice President JD Vance, “digitally” signed on Sunday, but the formal signing is scheduled for Friday. The text hasn’t been released, and Iranian and American officials describe its contents differently. The underlying issue—Iran’s drive for regional hegemony and the American determination to block it—remains unresolved. If anything Tehran appears more eager than before to assert control over its neighbors and the flow of oil from the Middle East. Moreover, Israel, which has its own war proceeding in Lebanon, wasn’t part of the negotiations.

The fate of Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to contain the political and economic fallout from the Iran war without openly abandoning his key objectives will become clear with time. In the short term, Mr. Trump has agitated and distressed the pro-Israel, hawkish wing of his political coalition, while reassuring his isolationist and anti-Israel supporters by demonstrating some distance between Washington and Jerusalem. With the Group of Seven summit under way, the president has calmed financial markets, talked down the oil price and given the leaders of allied countries reason to hope for a quick peace.

Mr. Trump has also preserved his freedom of action. The unusual interval between the dramatic announcement of a deal and its scheduled formal signing gives the president the option of walking away from the agreement if political blowback is too severe. Meanwhile, he has again seized center stage in global politics as virtually every government and every private business in the world hangs on his every word.

The memorandum of understanding is, in other words, a thoroughly typical example of Mr. Trump’s second-term diplomacy. He is driving world events with an agreement that hasn’t been formally signed, whose specifics are unknown and whose prospects are at best murky.

Viewed from that angle, this deal exemplifies both the strengths and the weaknesses of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. He is a master of political theater, producing, directing and starring in the greatest and most compelling spectacle of our time. Yet faced with opposition from serious and determined opponents, he often fails to achieve the kind of concrete results that mark the difference between a P.T. Barnum and an Otto von Bismarck.

Mr. Trump’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. The president is a cynic. Unencumbered by deep convictions and free from the constraints imposed by conventional morality or codes of honor, he can alter his tactics to the exigencies of the moment without hesitation or scruple. Cynicism has its uses. No statesman can succeed without a healthy dose of it. But like most potent drugs, it works best in small doses.

Mr. Trump comes by his cynicism honestly—his career in New York real estate, casinos and reality television led naturally to a dark view of human nature. As his political power grew and so many early critics and opponents swallowed their principles to kiss his ring, Mr. Trump’s intuitive belief that ideas and ideals don’t matter was powerfully reinforced.

But cynicism has limits. A cynic would have predicted that Britain would throw in the towel in 1940. Adolf Hitler held more cards than Winston Churchill did. But Churchill rejected Hitler’s peace offers and fought on to the end.

Mr. Trump’s disregard for ideas, ideals and people who claim to believe in them leads him to underestimate the strength and determination of people who mean what they say. His failure to understand the power of nationalism blinded him both to the resilience Ukraine has demonstrated in its conflict with Russia and to Vladimir Putin’s determination to pursue the struggle regardless of cost. Mr. Trump’s peacemaking efforts as a result have fallen flat.

Ideas matter in the Middle East as well. However perverse and depraved the ideas that animate the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah, they inspire the kind of conviction that motivates people to fight grimly on against the odds. In the end, Mr. Trump underestimated Iran’s determination and resilience and launched a war that is proving much costlier and harder to end than he’d expected.

Mr. Trump’s apparent contempt for ideals like democracy and the rule of law also costs him. Threats to conquer Greenland reduced his ability to call on allies in the Iran crisis. And the American failure to work more closely and effectively with pro-democracy Iranians gives the regime one less problem to worry about. Additionally, Mr. Trump’s penchant for aggressively unpredictable course changes weakens the confidence of allies and bolsters cohesion among his opponents.

Mr. Trump is a supreme and often supremely successful opportunist. But that quality alone won’t see him through the tests that lie ahead.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 12:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:


Oh... I think you misunderstand me.

I don't have a problem with gay people.

Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.


You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 12:57 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh... I think you misunderstand me.
I understand that Trump is a thief, a liar, and the leader of America's Nazi Party. If Hitler had stolen this much money, his own people would have assassinated him:

Records reveal a $600,000,000 estimate for Trump’s ballroom project, with half from taxpayers

An internal cost estimate in March by the project’s contractor ran $200 million more than Trump has said publicly and counters his claims that no taxpayer money will be spent.

June 16, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

By Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O'Connell

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/06/16/records-revea
l-600m-estimate-trumps-ballroom-project-with-half-taxpayers/

Five months after the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, President Donald Trump claimed that the project to construct a massive ballroom and a bunker in its place would cost up to $400 million and that private donors would pay for all of it.

“This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on March 31, describing the project as including bomb shelters and major medical facilities.

But a detailed project summary prepared for the White House by the contractor more than three weeks before Trump’s comments estimated the total construction cost at $600 million — with more than half coming from taxpayers, according to a copy of the contractor estimate obtained by The Washington Post.

By the time Trump made his comments in March, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor overseeing the work, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds, according to a log of the contractor’s invoices obtained by The Post.

Since first announcing the East Wing project last July, Trump has repeatedly said that the price tag would not exceed $400 million and that private donations routed through a nonprofit would cover its entire cost. At other times, he has said that the Secret Service and the military would contribute security enhancements, without elaborating on the price of those upgrades.

Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.

The White House did not answer questions about the internal cost estimates or taxpayer funding.

“President Trump and generous American patriots are funding the ballroom to the tune of approximately $400 million, which will be a secure and appropriate venue for Presidents for generations to come,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle wrote in a statement.

A spokesperson for McLean, Virginia-based Clark Construction said all project details are confidential and referred questions to the White House.

The Post obtained six cost estimates for the entire East Wing project, dated from July 2025 to March of this year, that show an increasing price tag as well as the expected sources of funding. Those records, as well as invoice logs and correspondence, provide the clearest accounting yet of Trump’s most ambitious construction project in the nation’s capital. The project is deeply unpopular with most Americans, and even some Republican lawmakers have balked at funding it.

When the White House first announced the plan to build a ballroom on July 31, 2025, it said in a news release that contributions from Trump and “other patriot donors” would cover the cost of the project, which it said would be $200 million. The White House added that the “United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.” There was no mention of an underground military bunker.

The records obtained by The Post show that the administration and Clark worked hand in hand starting last June to determine the scope and cost of construction.

White House officials received a preliminary estimate, dated July 11, projecting that construction would cost $270 million, with over $100 million coming from taxpayers through the Secret Service and the White House Military Office, the records show.

Emails from that time show that administration officials planned to use $3.6 million of Secret Service money to cover initial expenses for site preparation before demolition.

A White House lawyer explained in an email to colleagues on July 30 that she had added a line to contract language “to tie the project more closely to security-related issues since USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is providing the funding.”

“We believe this edit is important to comply with fiscal law principles,” wrote Caroline C. Hunter, general counsel in the White House Office of Administration. Hunter did not respond to messages seeking comment.

More than $1.6 million in Secret Service funds was also budgeted to cover part of the demolition itself, according to a cost estimate. The U.S. Secret Service did not provide answers to questions before publication of this report.

Three contracting and procurement experts who reviewed the documents at The Post’s request said the demolition of the East Wing appeared to fall outside the scope of the Secret Service’s mission of protecting government leaders.

“That is a stretch,” said Anthony Costa, a former General Services Administration official who oversaw complex government real estate projects during a career that spanned four presidential administrations. “How is that something Secret Service should do and fund?”

On Oct. 22, in the same week Clark began demolishing the East Wing, Trump told reporters that the price had risen to $300 million. He said that the military was involved but that the project would be paid for “100 percent by me and some friends of mine.”

However, a project summary dated Oct. 20, the day the demolition began, shows that Clark expected the full project to cost $478 million. Taxpayers were expected to fund nearly half of that, the documents show.

Speaking at the White House in December, Trump said the cost could reach $400 million. “We’re donating a building that’s approximately $400 million,” he said.

By March, Clark had informed the White House that the projected cost had increased to $600 million. A project summary dated March 5 shows that nearly half of that, $293 million, was expected to come from “private sources.” The estimate said an additional $155 million would come from the Secret Service, $149 million from the White House Military Office and $3 million from the Executive Residence, all sources funded by taxpayers.

That month, the administration acknowledged that the project included underground security features, including what Trump has described as a hospital.

A court issued an injunction in March, pausing construction above ground but allowing work to continue on the secure underground bunker after a historic-preservation group filed a lawsuit arguing that the White House had failed to seek necessary reviews.

In April, an alleged would-be assassin attempted to access the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner before he was apprehended by law enforcement. Within days, the administration said that rebuilding the East Wing, including the ballroom, was a national security imperative.

Trump and some elected Republicans said a new ballroom could more securely host events like the correspondents’ dinner. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and others introduced legislation that would have authorized $400 million in spending “to upgrade the presidential ballroom and strengthen the White House’s security infrastructure.” Seven Republican senators joined Democrats to block the idea.

“President Trump indicated that the ballroom was going to be built with private donations,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the senators who opposed it. “I think that’s the commitment that should be kept.”

In May, with the legislative proposal pending, Trump provided reporters with another update, showing off the construction site and saying all the parts of the project were intertwined. “This is one well-knit building. One thing doesn’t work without the other,” he said.

This time the president made more of a distinction over who would pay for each part of the structure. The government would pay for part of the construction on the new East Wing, he said, describing that work as “for the security of that and the whole White House premises.”

“They have a budget in Secret Service and the military to do some of the work that you see right here,” Trump said. The ballroom itself, he said, “is not going to be paid for by the taxpayer. This is a gift to the United States of America.”

The Secret Service and the White House Military Office (WHMO) have long held roles in securing the White House complex for the president, his family and staff members.

The three experts who reviewed documents related to the project said it was appropriate for the Secret Service and the WHMO to pay only for parts of the project that fall within their mission. Trump said some security spending would go toward defenses including “the greatest drone empire … to protect Washington” on the building’s roof.

But the experts also said the project documents contradicted the administration’s statements claiming that the East Wing would be paid for by donors. Stan Soloway, a former Pentagon acquisition official who is board chair at the National Academy of Public Administration, said that from a contracting and budget perspective, “you can’t disentangle the entertainment space from all of the other parts that are in here.”

He said it was clear from the documents that taxpayers are footing the bill for parts of the ballroom: “I think it’s inevitable that it bleeds over. It’s one structure.”

Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond contributed to this report.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 6:29 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Donald Trump Is Finally Cracking Up for Real

His recent tirades confirmed what more than half of America now believes: The president is mentally unfit. How will we survive two and a half more years of this? And what’s he got in store for us?

By Molly Jong-Fast, Michael Tomasky | May 21, 2026

https://newrepublic.com/article/210114/donald-trump-cracking-up-mental
ly-unfit

Angelo Carusone and Aaron Rupar share a distinction that we imagine many Americans would happily cede to them: They have likely watched more Donald Trump rallies, speeches, and press briefings than any other living Americans. Carusone is the chairman and president of Media Matters for America, the liberal media watchdog group; Rupar is an independent journalist who fires off dozens of posts a day about Trump to his two million followers across Blue­sky and X. Carusone reckons he’s watched around 650 Trump events over the course of a decade. Rupar estimates that, while he may have missed a few events in that time, he has endured “probably like 98 percent of his speeches and rallies.” And both closely monitor the president’s social media posts.

So they’re pretty well-qualified to assess the question: Has Trump deteriorated over the years?

“The past year, I will say it’s accelerated more than anything,” Carusone said. “It’s really noticeable.” For starters, he said, Trump simply sounds different: “There’s a lack of crispness in his articulation.” And at rallies, which Trump is doing very infrequently these days, “He just reads the room less effectively. He’s less nimble … less responsive to where the crowd is.”

Rupar sees things a bit differently. “He’s always been extremely incoherent, very untruthful, impulsive,” Rupar said. “So I don’t really think any of those core things are new. I just think that it breaks through now more than it did in the past.” Even so, Rupar counted himself surprised, he said, on the morning of Easter Sunday, when someone DM’d him Trump’s latest Truth Social post. “And my very first thought when I saw it was, ‘That’s the craziest thing he’s ever posted,’” Rupar said.

The post he’s referring to is the first of two that, even by Trump’s standards, will live in presidential infamy. For the record: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” It was followed two days later by the post Trump opened with the sentence: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

These posts were a turning point: They lit a match that started a bonfire of new speculation about Trump’s mental state. It consumed social media and cable news; by the next week, it made A1 of The New York Times. What was happening here? The man was once desperate and insecure enough to label himself a “very stable genius”; that was pathetic enough, but that was eight long years ago. Where is he now? The day between those two posts brought the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll, which saw Trump surrounded by children and regaling them with the story of … the Easter Bunny? The Last Supper? Christ’s Resurrection? Try again. Joe Biden’s autopen. To a bunch of six-year-olds.

Oh, and speaking of Christ … that moment on April 12, when Trump reposted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, on the same day he was picking a fight with the pope, was a little much even for his admirers. He took it down and, laughably, tried to say it was an image of him as a doctor. That very night and into the next morning, Democratic commentator Harry Sisson monitored Trump’s social media activity:

9:49pm AI Jesus photo
9:50pm Trump tower on moon
10:10pm dumb meme
10:32pm news clip
10:53pm news clip
12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade
2:35am article about Biden
2:36am article on naval blockade
2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell
2:37am posted the same article about Biden again
2:38am article on his ballroom
4:10am article on Iran

Yes, he’s always been like this. But many people think it’s worse now. Is it age? He turns 80 in June; there are millions of compos mentis octogenarians out there, but it’s fair to ask whether age is slowing Trump down, especially given the way that he and his backers carried on relentlessly about Biden. Does he have dementia? Or are we seeing more glaring manifestations of his legendary arrogance, which is rooted in his profound insecurity? Or is it merely the stupidity of a man who not only never reads a book but reportedly can’t even read one-page briefing papers?

Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is sobering: The person with the power to sic the Justice Department on perceived political foes; to send masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained troops out among the populace; and to order a nuclear attack is slipping. Maybe fast. And the chance that his Cabinet or his party will do anything about it is zero, which means we’re going to have to survive two and a half more years of this.

1. Age

“We Barely Talk About It”

In 2025, as he began his second term, Trump was the oldest person ever to be sworn into the presidency. But Trump’s oldness does not exist in a vacuum. He is the successor to Joe Biden, a president who was forced to give up his reelection bid because of a disastrous debate performance that led to his supporters deciding he was, at 81, too old to run for president again.

Trump is less than four years younger than Biden. During Biden’s presidency, Trump and MAGA writ large were laser-focused on Biden’s age. Even the mainstream media reported endlessly about Biden’s use of the back stairs in Air Force One, his bicycle tumble, his fall onstage at the Air Force Academy graduation in 2023, his name mix-ups (he once called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi the “president of Mexico”). The mainstream media was so obsessed with Biden’s age that, according to Media Matters for America, The Wall Street Journal published 41 articles in the first six months of 2024 on the topic. There was even a book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper that alleged that there was a cover-up about Biden’s age-related decline (which, essentially, there was). Even Trump’s nonsensical musings about the autopen are in fact callbacks to Biden’s term, when he was accused of being so addled that he couldn’t do the work of the presidency, even including simply affixing his signature to documents. In mid-April, Trump signed his name to a document and remarked, “Oh, that’s a good one. Look at that, Joe. Do you think Biden can do that?”

Donald Trump is not a normal president; he is the most powerful president in modern American history, or maybe all of our history, because of how he has used unitary executive theory and surrounded himself with a Cabinet filled with billionaire sycophants who largely got their jobs because of their willingness to sign off on anything he wanted. Imagine a Cabinet of Mike Johnsons but somehow richer and dumber. While Trump 1.0 featured the president being held back by guardrails, Trump 2.0 feels like it’s lacking a working frontal lobe: Ideas pop into Trump’s head, and he just executes them. He went from bragging about being a peacemaker to stampeding Venezuela and starting an impulsive, dumb, and possibly disastrous war with Iran. Take away that FIFA peace prize.

We would be remiss not to mention Trump’s mystery hand bruise, which seems to appear monthly and is coated in orange makeup that, like all the makeup Trump wears, does not even come close to matching his skin tone. The White House’s explanation is that he bruises easily because he pops aspirin like they’re Tic Tacs, and because he shakes so many hands. And then there are the pictures of Trump’s drooping lip, which sparked a flurry of speculation after a speech he gave in Miami last November.

Maybe it’s all nothing. But this is a guy who ran on being healthier and spryer than the guy before him. He told us that Joe Biden was too old and too sick to be president, but that he would be able to do the job because he had accomplished certain feats: “The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” he wrote in January on Truth Social.

Trump shows his age the most in the apparently diminished functioning of his frontal cortex—the thin layer of gray matter that helps the brain make decisions and regulate itself, the part of the brain that prevents you from saying the unkind or insane thing. Trump appears unable to hold himself back. He called a reporter “piggy.” He called another a “fresh person.” He confuses Greenland (which he wanted to invade) with Iceland.

Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the digital magazine Air Mail, has been tracking Trump closely (and mocking him mercilessly) since his halcyon days at Spy magazine in the 1980s. Carter said the Donald Trump of now is not the same man who went down that escalator 11 years ago. “He has gone from being the chatty, handsy salesman at the office happy hour to the crazed, opinionated antiquity shuffling the mail cart from cubicle to cubicle,” Carter said. His old Spy colleague Kurt Andersen agreed: “When he became a recurring character in Spy, Trump was an angry, needy ignoramus, liar, bully, and braggart more desperate for attention than anyone I’d ever encountered. And a vulgarian with short fingers. He’s the same—except in his forties he had impulse control in public, didn’t ramble and forget and repeat himself or show other signs of mental illness.”

Trump will turn 80 this June. He will be 82 when he leaves office, assuming he does, so we will see what the future holds. He compares favorably to Biden in one respect. Biden aged visibly before our eyes in ways that most of us associate with watching our parents pass through that portal from their seventies, when they can mostly still drive and golf and play tennis, into their eighties, when those things start to be out of reach. Biden’s voice quieted. He held his mouth agape in that old-man way. He hunched over just a little. Trump has none of those issues, for now.

Vin Gupta, the public health physician and MS NOW medical analyst, said he thought Biden was a pretty healthy 80-year-old. “The guy bikes 30 miles in Rehoboth Beach every weekend,” Gupta said. “From a cardiovascular standpoint, [Biden] was way more robust than Trump,” who famously never exercises, unless you count getting in and out of a golf cart. Yet Biden got run out of the race, “and with Trump, we barely talk about it,” Gupta said.

That’s largely because of the right-wing media. Do they even discuss his age on Fox News? Sometimes—like when one Fox host cheerily picked up Trump’s claim that he’s “aging in reverse.” Trump will literally have to be drooling and forgetting his own name before Fox and others will acknowledge his age as an issue. And the same goes, of course, for Republicans in Congress. That wall of denial will prevent Trump’s age from being an issue until some point when it’s utterly impossible to deny.

2. Dementia

Disinhibition and Digression

In early April, Mary Trump—who, in addition to considering her uncle to be a danger to the country and the world is, remember, a clinical psychologist—took note in two interviews of what she called “concerning changes” in her uncle’s behavior. “Sometimes it does not seem like he’s oriented to time and place,” she told New York magazine. “And on occasion, I do see that deer-in-the-headlights look.” Donald’s father, Fred, she said, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but not till well into his eighties.

No one can say, of course, whether Trump has dementia, an umbrella term for a range of mental conditions, among which Alzheimer’s is the most notable. The common visible symptoms, according to the website of the Alzheimer’s Association, include difficulty performing a number of tasks Trump hasn’t had to perform in years or perhaps ever: paying bills, preparing meals, remembering appointments. The symptoms listed on the Mayo Clinic website are, for present purposes, more on point: problems communicating or finding words; issues with reasoning or problem-solving; confusion and disorientation.

So: Is the president demented? Harry Segal is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University and a former co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump. (His co-host was psychologist John Gartner, who in 2017 started an organization of mental health professionals, Duty to Warn, that sought to caution Americans about Trump’s unfitness for office.) Shrinking Trump ran for 70 episodes, from May 2024 until October 2025, when it was stopped out of fear of being sued by the president. In an interview, Segal was quick to note that he is not offering a clinical diagnosis of Trump. That, he said, would be unethical. But it’s not unethical to comment on “behaviors so striking that you would recommend an assessment for someone in your family who demonstrated” them.

What has he seen? Three concerning things. One: “He began to have odd quirks of speech where he would begin a word or a phrase and seemingly lose his place, slur, and end up with some kind of compromise word,” Segal said. This is called phonemic paraphasia. It’s a possible sign of dementia (though it could have other sources), and Trump has been doing it for a long time: He coined the “word” “infantroopen,” for example, back in 2019. The same year, he referred twice to the need to look into the “oranges” of the Robert Mueller investigation. He finally carefully enunciated “origins” on the third go.

Second, Segal “began to notice the tangential digressions.” After the mainstream media picked up on how aggressively random and disjointed his stump speeches had become, Trump gave it a name, “The Weave,” and said it was all intentional. But the claim was nonsense. The pattern has continued into his second term—recently, for example, in a late-March Cabinet meeting about the war, when he got lost in a five-minute digression on how much money he’d saved by using Sharpies to sign legislation and executive orders.

The third thing that caught Segal’s ear was that, on certain occasions, Trump said or posted something really shocking even for him: “The outlandish things he’s been saying when people died, right? Like Robert Mueller, I am glad he’s dead, or Rob Reiner.” Maybe that’s just an older man losing patience with decorum, Segal said; but “this feels a little bit more like dysregulation. Like, ‘I have a wildly aggressive thought, I am just going to say it.’”

After Trump’s crazed post on Easter Sunday, Vin Gupta made national headlines by posting on X: “Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”

In an interview, Gupta kept returning to the word “impulsivity.” Speaking the week after Easter, he said: “I think his impulsivity and his erratic behavior, as we’ve all seen just in the last two weeks, seems like it’s getting worse. Like he just has less of a filter. Even at baseline, he had no filter. But it seems like the disinhibition is worse. And when you think about the family history, I think reasonable people can ask reasonable questions.”

Those reasonable questions include, for example: Why does Trump so frequently boast about acing cognitive tests? In January, Trump bragged that he’d nailed his third cognitive test, adding that the tests were “something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take.” That’s one way of putting it. Another way of thinking about it, Gupta said, is that people are administered these tests on a repeat basis only when concern about possible mental impairment exists. Said Gupta: “He’s using it as a sort of a talking point to say, ‘Look how fit I am,’ and in reality, that should tip off anybody.”

Finally, these questions extend to Trump’s physical health, and the White House’s opacity about it. Last fall, Trump went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for an examination. The White House said it was for an MRI. Trump later revealed it was a CT scan. Maybe not a big deal, but why the confusion? Over Easter weekend, rumors flew across social media that Trump had been admitted to Walter Reed. There’s been no confirmation of that, but the cartoonish White House denials when such rumors swirl aren’t credible either. That weekend, spokesman Steven Cheung posted about the president who doesn’t read briefing papers, is known to pass his days watching hours of cable news, and has been caught napping in meetings and at events: “There has never been a president who has worked harder for the American people than President Trump. On this Easter weekend, he has been working nonstop in the White House and Oval Office.”

3. Arrogance

Too Much and Never Enough

One thing we know for sure Trump suffers from is his endless, embarrassing, proud, and loud arrogance. It was an unforgettable and, at the time, shocking moment in March 2016 when he was asked on Morning Joe whom he was speaking to on foreign policy: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things.”

That turned out to be a little amuse-bouche that gave us all a small, early taste of what life with Trump would be like. The constant and utterly unquenchable need to be the center of attention. The ceaseless preening and boasting about very average accomplishments. (How many times has he used the phrase “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it”?) The confidence that long, long ago boiled over into auto-infallibility.

It would be one thing if this were just some tic of his that was dismissible. But it has policy implications, which is to say, it affects all of us. Michael Patrick Lynch is a humanities professor at the University of Connecticut whose 2019 book, The Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture, was more a critique of our social media outrage culture than of Trump per se; nevertheless, Lynch said, Trump very much suits the age of toxic argument, arrogance, and certainty. If you’re certain you’re right, Lynch said, you have nothing to learn from anyone else, and you don’t need to pay attention to evidence. “If you ignore evidence, if you ignore other people’s experience, if you don’t think you have anything to learn, then you are going to end up ignoring reality,” Lynch said. “And we know that’s a central feature of Trump’s universe.”

The thing about arrogance, or at least Trump’s version of it, is that it needs constant feeding, a steady stream of new targets to dominate and conquer. At first, he ran for president just as a vanity project, not expecting or even really wanting to win. Then he won. Then, once he actually became president, he needed to be the greatest ever, in his mind. “This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” he said in a December 2022 video introducing his “digital trading cards.” In his first term, he needed to dominate his enemies, but as many have observed, there were still some guardrails around him. In the second, with the guardrails gone, he’s extended his reach from the hated deep state to universities and law firms.

He started to run out of domestic enemies, so it was only a matter of time before he turned his gaze outward to the world. This is the precise reason why a person had to be gullible in the extreme to believe him when he said he wouldn’t be starting any wars. He had to start wars. His insatiable arrogance, his grandiosity, made it inevitable. At some point, conquering the United States would not be enough.

“What I really believe is that Trump is struggling with a mix of grandiosity, desperation, and old age,” said Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987) and has been doing penance ever since. “Nothing he’s ever accomplished has been sufficient to overcome his lifelong experience of emptiness and fraudulence. Now, in his final turn, he’s trying to take over the world. It’s only about making himself feel more worthy. He couldn’t care less about the suffering and destruction it causes.”

The problem, though, is this. Once you’re the emperor of the world, at least in your mind; once you’ve “toppled” the Iranian regime and “brought peace” to the Middle East and brokered at least eight other peace deals—what’s next?

This is the really dark and twisted side of Trump’s arrogance. He needs to be right about everything because deep down, he knows that he knows nothing—about history or economic policy or health care. He needs to dominate because deep down, he’s massively insecure. He is contemptuous of everyone—his enemies, of course, and “Sleepy Joe,” and radical left lunatics; but also of a lot of his groveling supporters. (Do you think he has an ounce of respect for, say, Pam Bondi or Ted Cruz?)

But in the end, Schwartz believes, “There is nobody he’s more contemptuous of than himself.” The arrogance and grandiosity are a mask. That’s what makes the title of Mary Trump’s 2020 book about her uncle so brilliant: Too Much and Never Enough. He always needs too much, and yet, it’s never enough for him. And while this personality trait has always been there, and it stands separate in many ways from his age or his possible mental deterioration, it’s implicated in those things, too. The more vulnerable he feels, the more arrogant he’ll become—the more likely he’ll be to post about, oh, destroying an entire civilization. He backed down from doing that. But remember—he has two and a half years left.

4. Stupidity

Every Accusation Is a Confession

In November 2025, Trump berated a reporter for asking him why he blamed Biden over an Afghan national who had shot two National Guard members near the White House. “Because they let him in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came in on a plane, along with thousands of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”

This was far from the only time Trump has called a reporter stupid, and it won’t be the last. Trump is very much a known name-caller, and “stupid” is one of his favorite insults, though he also enjoys the use of the phrase “low IQ.” The put-down is pretty rich because Trump has to be one of the least intellectually curious people ever to occupy the Oval Office. But despite this, the state of being stupid seems to be an obsession of Trump’s. It’s the thing Trump calls people when he’s done with them. In April, Trump posted that people who had been crucial to him (Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones) were “stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record.”

Here’s why this is telling. For Trump, every accusation is a confession, and no accusation of Trump’s seems more of a projection than this one. In 2019, his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen testified before a House committee: “I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.” Certainly, grades aren’t the sole measure of intelligence, but Trump’s obsession with hiding them speaks to a deep insecurity about his own intelligence. A lot of famous people are more than comfortable being honest about their own poor grades.

One of Trump’s best tricks is his ability to obfuscate his gaffes. With the sheer volume of things he’s said, he’s created a wall of sound, an endless stream of noise that comes at us like a firehorse, one mistake drowned out by the mistake that follows like a Möbius strip of misstatements and lies. But there have been moments when Trump’s stupidity has broken through. One classic came during his first term, in April 2020, when he gave a mind-blowing press conference that broke through the noise. At the time, he was giving nightly press conferences with Covid-related updates. And he said: “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light.” He turned to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and said, “I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting.”

Even Trump’s staunchest defenders seemed flummoxed. After that presser, Trump took to X to say it was “not worth the time & effort” to do the Covid pressers. It was one of those moments when Trump’s own stupidity eclipsed the sun.

One of the ways Trump tries to buttress his own intelligence is by bragging about an uncle, John Trump, who taught at MIT. Trump claims that John was the “longest-serving professor” at MIT. This is of course not true, but it’s closer to the truth than a lot of the things Trump cooks up. Trump’s own insecurity betrays his anxiety about his own intellect, which is certainly merited.

Aside from age, possible mental deterioration, and unfathomable and unstable arrogance, we must deal for another two and a half years with the fact that the president of the United States just isn’t a smart man. The specific question that concerns us here is: Which of his many bad decisions are explained mostly by his stupidity?

The answer? It’s not reassuring. It’s not, for example, his decision to start a war with Iran. That’s explained mostly by his arrogance/insecurity: His need to erase from the historical record anything positive Barack Obama did, in this case the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Iran was evidently abiding by until Trump unilaterally pulled out of the deal in 2018. That deal stands as the most striking example of something Trump had to destroy simply because Obama did it. So that was about his arrogance and insecurity.

No—the answer to the stupidity question, quite unfortunately for the American people, concerns the one issue that most directly impacts most Americans: the economy. Most notably, his commitment to tariffs.

Just stop and ponder this: Trump sincerely appears to believe that tariffs can eliminate the income tax. He has said this arguably more than he’s said anything else in his second term, with respect to actual policy. It’s a deranged fantasy. Before Trump, tariffs brought in about $80 billion in revenue. He has raised that to $264 billion—so, yes, it’s tripled! However, since the Supreme Court ruled against Trump on tariffs, the U.S. government has to return at least $160 billion of that money. And income taxes bring in—ready?—about $2.7 trillion. It’s possible he knows this and chooses to ignore it. But from the way he talks, it just seems like he doesn’t know it and doesn’t care to know it. That’s not age or dementia or arrogance. It’s just stupidity. And it isn’t going to change.

Conclusion

Two and a Half More Years of This?

There’s been a lot of talk over the spring about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment option—removal of a sitting president, due to incapacity, by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet. But let’s be real. This Cabinet of fatuous fawners is unlikely to do that. Trump would have to do something we can’t imagine today—take his clothes off at a press conference, bomb a U.S. city—for that to happen. Nobody is going to take advantage of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

The Democrats are still favored to take back the House of Representatives, and they will presumably impeach him over something. (It’s not like there aren’t a lot of choices; as of late April, https://www.impeachtrumpagain.org/ suggests 27 different reasons.) The Senate, however, won’t convict. Even if the Democrats take narrow control of that body, 15 or so Republicans would have to join them to convict Trump of the House charges. Not happening. Said the Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens: “No one will stop him. The only people who can stop Trump are Republicans. They’re not going to stop him. They’re going to let him keep crashing and killing and destroying.”

So in all likelihood, we’re stuck with him. What’s he got up his sleeve that he hasn’t unleashed on the nation and the world yet? God only knows. ICE is still hiring like crazy. He’s still building immigrant detention camps. His acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, reindicted James Comey days into the new role; Letitia James can’t be far behind. FBI Director Kash Patel says arrests are coming relating to the 2020 election. He wants to take over Cuba. He still wants Greenland. He hasn’t played the Insurrection Act card. He’s looking at ways to crack down on “domestic terrorists,” a catchall phrase if ever there was one. Said Miles Taylor, the first-term Trump administration official who quit and joined the opposition and now runs https://www.defiance.org : “The machine is going to spit out a bunch of fucking prosecutions against these people. That is going to happen, hands down, no doubt about it. There will be nonprofit groups and individuals that are just protesters that are deemed domestic terrorists.”

And there will be outbursts, and Truth Social posts, and accusations, and God knows what else. Two years ago, a nervous nation watched a president who was no longer up to performing the job. That president just couldn’t adequately fill the office. Today, that nation is watching a president who may well destroy it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 6:38 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Wall Street Journal BOOKSHELF | By Barton Swaim | June 15, 2026 4:05 pm ET

‘Communion’ Review: The Veep’s Progress

JD Vance recounts his conversion to Catholicism and explains what he calls a ‘Christian approach to economics.’

Harper, 304 pages, $35

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/communion-review-the-veeps-prog
ress-358f0ac2

JD Vance’s intellectual evolution continues apace. In “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) he lamented the social pathologies he witnessed as a child in small-town Kentucky and Ohio—drug addiction, domestic violence, idleness and dependency—but concluded that “these problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” As a political figure, first as U.S. senator and currently as vice president, Mr. Vance now holds that governments and corporations did create them, namely by free trade and offshoring. As for the state’s role in welfare dependency, Mr. Vance no longer has much to say about it.

These changes of mind more or less tracked his altered views on Donald Trump, which went from scathing in 2016, when Mr. Vance had a book to sell, to laudatory in 2022, when he needed the former president’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race.

Mr. Vance’s second memoir, “Communion,” chronicles the evolution of his religious views: from the Evangelical-Pentecostal faith of his early years, through the halfhearted atheism of his 20s, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019 at age 35. The book is part religious memoir, part campaign book. Roughly the latter half articulates Mr. Vance’s updated thoughts on foreign policy and economics, with Christianity making appearances at opportune moments; readers familiar with books by ambitious politicians will assume the author of this one has an eye on 2028.

Mr. Vance has no ill words for the unlearned fundamentalism in which his grandmother raised him. He credits the small-town nondenominational congregants of his early years with living out the kind of communitarian values the rest of the world professes to value but mostly doesn’t. You soon get the feeling, however, that the Bible-carrying countryfolk of Mr. Vance’s early years serve mainly as a foil for the educated elites he so detests. “From the professional pipeline I encountered in law school to the social media mob of the 2016 election,” he writes, “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”

More than once Mr. Vance scorns elite “strivers” and purports to feel shame that he once tried hard to gain admittance to their circles. “I wanted to win the race because other people wanted to win the race,” he recalls of his feverish attempt to attend an elite law school. “In a sense, I won that race and was admitted to Yale Law School.” But it all came at a price. “Without realizing it, I had become addicted to winning the competitions other people set for me.” On the next page, Mr. Vance uses the term “humblebrag,” but about other people, not himself.

You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He equates the free-market outlook with amoral indifference to anything apart from abstract economic-growth numbers. Reciting stories of people trampling one another to buy new tech products on Black Friday, Mr. Vance observes that “from the view of classical economics, they’re doing something far more ‘productive’ than reading a book or spending time with their children.”

Having several years ago read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum novarum,” in which the pope sought to enunciate an economic outlook that avoided both socialism and capitalism, Mr. Vance attempts to express his own “Christian approach to economics,” which amounts to little more than the prescription that economic actors should exercise kindness, mercy and generosity. Employers, Mr. Vance accordingly thinks, should pay workers a fair or living wage. He doesn’t say who would define “fair” and “living”—Labor Department bureaucrats?

In one passage of egregious sloppiness, Mr. Vance quotes a paper by Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, in which she explains the perverse effects of mandatory parental-leave benefits. “A review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women,” Ms. Calder writes. “This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing, which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies.” Mr. Vance fulminates: “Never have I read a purer distillation of our worship at the altar of commerce.” If he had read the paper more carefully, or even the next sentence, he would have noticed Ms. Calder’s argument: that mandated parental-leave laws discourage companies from hiring women at all, and that a host of other reforms would give them the freedom to start families without encouraging firms to penalize them.

Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes. If he wins the presidency, one hopes he can take his own counsel to practice humility in the face of difficult questions. But by then, he may have a different set of views.

Mr. Swaim writes the Journal's Unruly Republic column.

Download JD Vance’s books for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Vance,%20J.D. or https://z-lib.sk/book/45vmxEveqa/communion-finding-my-way-back-to-fait
h.html for this particular book.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 7:24 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


If Trump signs, he will have formalized his surrender to Iran. But he is known for breaking treaties, so his signature isn't final.

Read the 14-Point Draft Memorandum Between the US and Iran

(Bloomberg) -- The US and Iran are expected to formally sign a memorandum of understanding on June 19 in Switzerland, paving the way for 60 days of talks aimed at ending their war for good and putting strict new limits on Iran's nuclear program.

Below is the text of the 14-point draft memorandum, as seen by Bloomberg News.

By Jonathan Tirone, Daniel Flatley and Josh Wingrove

Tue, June 16, 2026 at 5:09 PM CDT

1. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. The final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article and the remaining Articles.

2. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other's internal affairs.

3. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to negotiate and reach a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent.

4. Immediately upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the United States Lift the naval blockade and prevent any interference or obstruction against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and restore traffic within a maximum of 30 days to its full capacity; the traffic of ships shall be proportional to the pre-war volume of traffic on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States also undertakes to withdraw its forces from the surrounding areas within 30 days after the final agreement.

5. Upon signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take steps to ensure that the movement of merchant ships from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of ??Oman and vice versa is resumed within 30 days to the pre-war volume, taking into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralization of mines by Iran.

6. The United States undertakes, together with its regional partners, to create a comprehensive plan agreed upon by both parties for the rehabilitation and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, While ensuring financing of at least $300 billion. The implementation mechanism of this plan, as part of the final agreement, will be formulated within 60 days.

7. The United States commits to ending, on a schedule to be agreed upon as part of the final agreement, all types of sanctions currently facing the Islamic Republic of Iran, including resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, both primary and secondary.

8. The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have agreed that the fate of enriched material and the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues, including Iran's nuclear needs, will be adequately addressed in a final agreement; the final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article.

9. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that, pending a final agreement, they will maintain the status quo: Iran will maintain the status quo on its nuclear program, and the United States will not impose new sanctions on Iran or strengthen its forces in the region.

10. The United States undertakes that immediately after the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and until the date of the lifting of sanctions, the United States Treasury Department will issue waivers for exports of Iranian crude oil, petrochemical products and their derivatives, and all related services, including banking, insurance, transportation, and the like.

11. The United States undertakes that, in light of the progress of negotiations towards a final agreement, frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be released and made fully available. These funds, whether held in the master account or transferred, will be used for any final beneficiary payment determined by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran and will be fully available for use. The United States undertakes to issue all necessary permits and licenses on this basis.

12. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that an implementation mechanism will be established to oversee the successful implementation of and future commitment to the Final Agreement.

13. Following the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and upon receipt of assurances regarding the commencement of implementation of Articles 4, 5, 10, and 11 of this Memorandum of Understanding, and the continued implementation of these steps, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States will enter into negotiations for a Final Agreement solely with respect to the remaining Articles.

14. The final agreement will be approved through a binding resolution of the UN Security Council.

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/read-the-14-point-dr
aft-memorandum-between-the-us-and-iran-220917023.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 9:00 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost

The president’s comments at the G7 summit revealed that he doesn’t understand the war he started—or the words that come out of his own mouth.

By Tom Nichols | June 16, 2026, 6:42 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/trump-g7-comments-misu
nderstsand-middle-east/687569/

Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.

The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? “I never cared about regime change,” he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.

Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.”

“They were strong people, smart people,” he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: “They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

This definitely not-radicalized group that Trump seems to like includes the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei (whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. strikes), and the still-standing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom have shown no compunction about lashing out in any direction during Trump’s “cease-fire,” the make-believe pause in the war during which no one actually ceased firing.

Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people. (He has done the same over the years with dictators and autocrats in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other countries.) This is his way of assuring the public that he did not get taken to the cleaners—because, of course, his affable partners would never do that.

Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.

Until today.

“I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?” Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran? Well, maybe.

“The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it,” Trump said. “You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ ’cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”

The United States and Israel ostensibly went to war with Iran last summer over the prospect of the Tehran regime developing a bomb, and that same threat has supposedly been at the center of America’s largest military operation in decades—but now the highly enriched uranium isn’t very valuable? The president wants it for “psychological” reasons? (This is reminiscent of his comment that America should seize Greenland because it was “psychologically” important to him.) Does the commander in chief understand what he’s saying? More important, will Iran keep tons of highly enriched uranium under this new deal or not?

“The biggest thing,” Trump said today, is that “Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” That’s fine, except that it didn’t have one before, either, and now it has an even greater incentive to get one. But nuclear issues are very complex and technical, so let’s move on to Trump’s comments about something less complicated: Middle Eastern politics.

Once again, the president seemed unable to comprehend either the situation or his own words. No one outside of the Trump administration has yet seen the final memorandum of understanding that Trump and the Iranians have signed, least of all, according to some reports, the Israelis. If the outlines of the deal are in line with the administration’s own talking points, it’s bound to cause serious agita in Jerusalem: The terms reportedly require a cessation of Israeli hostilities with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a tricky condition considering that Israel was not a party to the negotiations. This is probably why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yesterday that Israel would maintain its presence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria for “as long as necessary.”

Trump, in other words, is trying to deal away Israel’s right to defend itself, treating it less as a sovereign country and more as a kind of 51st U.S. state run by an annoying governor who needs to get with the program. But what if Iran’s proxy Hezbollah attacks Israel? According to the president, the Israelis need to calm down, and he minimized Hezbollah as “a little pinprick out there that constantly rears its head.”

Besides, Trump has an answer for the problem of Hezbollah: Outsource its elimination to the Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa. Trump said that he suggested to Israel to “let Syria take care of Hezbollah, ’cause to be honest with you, I think they do a better job of doing it.”

It’s true that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the organization now in power in Syria, has plenty of experience fighting against Hezbollah. But Syria, a regime still trying to get its legs under it, is not going to march next door and pacify Lebanon—especially not with Israel occupying parts of Syria.

Trump has never shown very much concern about the conduct of Israeli military operations anywhere (including the war in Gaza, which he viewed primarily as a public-relations problem). But now that he needs to rein in Jerusalem at Tehran’s behest, he has taken the position that the Israelis are causing too much damage in Lebanon. And in a stunning reminder that alliances for Trump are only expedients, he pivoted to praising al-Sharaa and criticizing Israel, saying that if Israel “can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job.”

This kind of flip-flop illustrates Trump’s view of global politics: States are just a bunch of playing cards that he can rearrange at will, which makes watching him talk about foreign policy this way like watching someone cheating at solitaire. Even now, after many years as president, he is constantly frustrated to find out how little leverage he has when other nations refuse to abandon their own interests and do as he commands.

Trump’s comments about the Middle East may not make any sense, but one thing that has emerged in 4K clarity is that the only world leader who got pantsed worse than Trump in all of this was Netanyahu. No one should pity Israel’s prime minister: He brought this situation upon himself and his nation. Netanyahu, along with the Iran-war hawks in the United States, somehow thought that he could be smart or flattering or persuasive enough to avoid the inevitable burn that comes from trusting Donald Trump. Netanyahu refused to see that Trump, when it comes to self-interest, is as predictable as a sunrise: When something he’s involved with goes bad, he walks away and lets others suffer the chaos he’s created.

In the past, Trump has tried to conjure new circumstances by speaking them aloud and attempting to wish them into existence. His tired garble in France, however, is something different. It suggests that Trump, more than ever, is unable to fathom what’s happening in the world around him and has been reduced to turning all of his previous statements upside down:

1. A regime that was once the epitome of evil is now a reasonable partner;

2. nuclear material that once represented an existential threat to America might now sit in Iran forever;

3. Syria and Iran and Israel and Lebanon will now do things that they would never do, just because he wants them to.

None of this makes any sense, except as desperate rationalizations from a man who cannot face facts and admit defeat. Trump has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth, but evidence is mounting that on the most important questions of war and peace, the president of the United States seems to be losing his grip on reality itself.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 12:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.

Look at Trump. The great unifier.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 2:27 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.

Look at Trump. The great unifier.
When the bills are finally paid, Trump will have made the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer, but accomplished none of his goals for the Iran war. Did it ever occur to you that either Trump should not have gone to war, or he should have won it? But he did neither. Instead, he squandered vast amounts of time and money. As a bonus, he made the US military look both incompetent and wasteful with ammunition while killing school children in Iran.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 2:43 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump in Defeat [Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today, too?]

The president went to war triumphant and will likely leave greatly weakened.

By Jonathan Lemire | 11:05 a.m. ET on June 17, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/06/trump-defeat-ira
n-war/687566/

President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker—diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally.

The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. Despite that, the president was so desperate for the war to end that he repeatedly backed off his threats—allowing Iran to call his bluff—and upbraided his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for responding to attacks in the region in a manner that jeopardized the negotiations.

Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me. Trump, they said, has privately denounced Iran hawks, some of whom are among his closest allies in the Republican Party, for questioning the strength of the agreement. Within the administration, there is a divide on the deal, but Trump sided with those advocating for the war to wind down, no matter the terms, as fears mount about the economic toll on Americans and the political costs for Republicans in the midterms.

Trump’s own anger masks a desperate desire to find an off-ramp from a conflict that did not go the way he had planned, an outcome that has threatened to leave the United States—and Trump—reduced in the eyes of the world. For a decade, Trump has dominated the global stage and wielded extraordinary executive power. But now he is saddled with low poll numbers and unhappy Republicans, and he may soon have to contend with a Democratic Congress. His evolution into a lame duck is accelerating, and the political world is poised to soon look beyond him and focus on the 2028 contenders hoping to succeed him. World leaders, who were once cowed, have begun to defy him. Trump’s defeat in Iran, and the way he lost, may hasten his irrelevance.

It’s not usually a vote of confidence for your deal when you won’t let anyone else read it. But Trump and his team have threatened to not release the Iran agreement until after it is signed in Geneva on Friday. Officials have said that the deal will extend the cease-fire over the next 60 days and that Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, allowing the U.S. to drop its naval blockade and oil to flow from the region again. Although Iran has agreed to not collect fees on the strait for the next 60 days, it has (according to Iranian state media) left open the door to doing so afterward—and the deal delays addressing Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, despite Trump having cast it as his urgent motivation for war. The president’s lead negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have supported the agreement, as has Vice President Vance, who has been promoting it during preplanned TV appearances to sell his new book. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and others have expressed quiet reservations with how the deal will be implemented, according to four outside advisers and senior White House officials who, like others, spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The deal has also alarmed the GOP’s Iran hawks. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host who championed the case for war, posted on social media his disbelief that Trump had rebuked Netanyahu and that the agreement remained shrouded in secrecy: “I have asked for days, why can’t we, the people, see the damn MOU?’” Senator Lindsey Graham has also made his reservations known, although he has carefully avoided blaming Trump and tried to pin responsibility on Vance, who was the lead American negotiator in the early stages of the talks. Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator, went so far as to declare that “Trump has surrendered to Iran.” And Marc Thiessen, a former President George W. Bush aide with whom the White House consulted during the war, has been one of many conservative voices warning that Trump’s emerging framework looks a lot like the Obama deal.

That notion has infuriated the president. A longtime Trump confidant told me that Trump “was incensed by the dissent”—particularly the Obama comparison—from once-loyal Republicans. Trump has reflexively tried to tear up anything associated with the former president. He mocked the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which aimed to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, during his first presidential campaign and withdrew from it in his first term. But that decision allowed Iran to work on its enrichment program. That, in turn, prompted Trump, one year ago next week, to authorize a massive bombing campaign that leveled uranium-enrichment facilities. Despite Trump’s claim at the time that Iran’s nuclear stockpiles were obliterated, negotiations resumed early this year over the fate of Tehran’s program—until they were scuttled when the United States and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran in late February.

In the first days, the strikes, which were pushed by Netanyahu, killed Iran’s supreme leader and inflicted extraordinary damage on its military and artillery. But Iran proved resilient, attacking its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, and plunging the world into an energy crisis. The price of gas skyrocketed globally, including in the United States. Trump’s poll numbers, already teetering, fell further, and he began looking for a way out. He tried to intimidate Iran into taking a deal, at one point vowing to destroy its “whole civilization,” but walked away from each threat, leaving him open to mockery from Tehran.

As the war dragged on, it became clear that Trump’s goals for the conflict were going unfulfilled. The Iranian navy was damaged, but Tehran’s ballistic-missile capability survived, as did its ties to militia proxy groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthis. The hard-line regime in Tehran appears poised to sell oil again and receive up to $300 billion in funding from Gulf states that it could use to rebuild. Iran has tightened its grip on the Strait of Hormuz and demonstrated that it can close the waterway at will. Although Tehran has promised not to build a nuclear weapon, no enforcement mechanism has been established. And to the shock of some Iran hawks, Trump yesterday seemed to back off his previous pledge to seize the uranium, saying, “You could make the case, ‘Why are you even bothering?’ Because it’s not really valuable.”

Iran has seemingly come out of the conflict with an ability to check Israel’s freedom to strike Lebanon and potentially elsewhere; in recent days, Trump has blasted Netanyahu for endangering the cease-fire and demanded that he call off an attack on Beirut. Trump’s broadsides, including calling the prime minister “a very difficult guy,” threaten to widen a rift between the U.S. and its longtime ally in the Middle East. Despite Trump’s reprimands, Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will continue to authorize attacks that it deems necessary for self-defense.

“The president has made the decision that this is over,” one of the senior administration officials told me. “That’s all that matters now. And Netanyahu will have to listen, period.”

The White House, in defending the deal, has stressed that any financial relief to the Iranians is performance-based, that Tehran will see the funding only if it keeps the strait open and maintains its pledge to not develop a nuclear weapon. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement that “what the President has achieved on the battlefield and at the negotiating table is nothing short of remarkable and will strengthen American security for many years to come.”

The war has cost Trump. It has rattled the nation’s economy. The Pentagon estimated that it had spent roughly $29 billion on the conflict by mid-May, but independent experts believe that it has spent tens of billions more. The U.S. military’s munitions supply has been depleted, putting at risk its ability to defend its interests in Asia and Europe. The United States’ failure, despite its overwhelming military might, to bring Iran to its knees could encourage China, Russia, or North Korea to take aggressive action. In the eyes of many, Washington has hurt its moral standing around the globe; promises to help the Iranian people rise up went unfulfilled, and more than 170 people, mostly children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a girls’ school in the war’s first hours. Overall, more than 3,000 people in Iran were killed in the conflict, according to Iranian officials. Thirteen U.S. service members were also killed.

The war’s outcome may usher in a new phase of Trump’s presidency. He is unlikely to abandon his adventurism on the world stage, and aides told me that he is eager to pivot to Cuba soon—looking for regime change, likely through economic pressure, but not ruling out military force—and he may revisit a bid for Greenland. This week at the G7 summit, he also resurfaced his ambition to help end the Russia-Ukraine war. His triumph in Venezuela feels like a distant memory. Leaders in Europe are now standing up to him. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has not given him the trade deal he wants.

Back home, Trump is still the most powerful figure in politics. But those small acts of Republican defiance are adding up. He has had a series of losses in the courts, including in his efforts to remake the nation’s capital in his own image. Democrats are favored to capture at least one house of Congress this November, which would give them the ability to slow Trump’s agenda and open investigations into his administration. Once the midterms conclude, the race to replace Trump will begin. Although that will further diminish Trump, it is unlikely that he will go out with a whimper.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 2:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.

Look at Trump. The great unifier.
When the bills are finally paid, Trump will have made the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer, but accomplished none of his goals for the Iran war. Did it ever occur to you that either Trump should not have gone to war, or he should have won it? But he did neither. Instead, he squandered vast amounts of time and money. As a bonus, he made the US military look both incompetent and wasteful with ammunition while killing school children in Iran.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Joe Biden* made our country trillions of dollars poorer and you didn't say shit about it.

No. That's not true. Any time that blame was placed where it belonged, you defended Joe Biden* by saying that nothing that was happening was his fault and he had no power over any of it. (Which actually WAS true, but only because he was a fucking vegetable and not for any of the reasons you were claiming).


So nobody is interested in hearing any of your bitching about billions in 2026.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 2:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


And really...

At the end of the day, why are you so confident the "war" with Iran is over?

You've never believed a single word that's come out of Trump's mouth so far.

Why start now?



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 4:35 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The US has signed up to a deal which puts it in a far worse strategic position than it was in on February 27, 2026 (the day before the bombing started). It is not returning to the status quo ante: it is creating an entirely new, and much weaker, status quo (for the USA).

The USA is pledging to respect the Iranian regime, immediately restore some funding to it, immediately allow the Iranian regime to start trading oil freely, and not to interfere with its present nuclear capabilities. Moreover, the USA is tacitly recognizing that Iran will control shipping in the Strait (with Oman) going forward and has not ruled out the ability of Iran and Oman to charge tolls after 60 days.

In the near future, the US is pledging to help organize a massive reparations program for Iran, to pull back American forces from the vicinity of Iran, to end all sanctions on Iran, and to pledge its commitment to all of this with a UN Security Council Resolution.

And what has the US gotten in return?

Well, it has gotten a temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz (under significantly worse conditions than existed on February 27, 2026) and a restatement of a nuclear pledge that Iran has made for years and years.

It is hard to grasp just how humiliating this is for the USA (and Israel). They chose to start this war after great preparation, they used their most advanced technology, and they used up massive military stocks in bombing Iran for six weeks.

And they are in a much worse situation.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-15-the-mou-is-ou
t

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 4:37 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Key MOU Clauses And Commentary

1 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.

Commentary: The key thing here is that the US has made it perfectly clear that it expects Israel to end its war in Lebanon, and therefore that the US wants attacks on Hezbollah to stop. This was a major Iranian goal and they have achieved it. It is important to see that ending the fighting in Lebanon as a US commitment is made twice here.

2 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.

Commentary: Regime change is now permanently out as a US policy. The US is now pledged to respect the internal power of the IRGC. Remember, when the bombing started, regime change was a key victory condition for Trump.

4 — Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and will fully end the naval blockade within 30 days. During this period, the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.

Commentary: The last sentence is extraordinary. This seems to pledge the USA to remove its forces from near Iran after the deal. “Proximity” is not defined, but that would have to take in a number of close US partners in the Gulf. The US is now allowing Iran to have a major say in where US forces can be deployed.

5 — Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.

Commentary: Iran pledges not to “charge” shipping in the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days (though it is worth noting that Iran said yesterday that they might still levy “fees”. The important thing is that Iran is clearly saying that with Oman it can determine the future of traffic in the strait and Iran has in no way given up its ability to change tolls. This represents a major Iranian increase in authority.

6 — The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of a final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.

Commentary: Do you know what this is? It is the US promising to “undertake” organizing a plan for reparations to pay back Iran for all the damage that US bombing caused. The US is not committing to give a definite amount itself, but the US is also not ruling out the possibility that a great deal of US money will go to Iran.

7 — The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral US sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue above mentioned, and expressed their intentions to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

Commentary: Pretty self-explanatory. The US is pledging to end “ALL TYPES” of sanctions on Iran and they mean it. Iran obviously wanted this point emphasized and included the second part which simply restates the commitment.

8 — The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven, with the minimum methodology to be down blended on site under the supervision of the IAEA. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned. They express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

Commentary: This is the key political point for Trump. He gets Iran to say what it has been saying for decades: that it does not want to get nuclear weapons. It will be spun as some Iranian concession, but it is hard to see how that is. There is nothing concrete here about Iran agreeing to hand over anything to the USA, merely sentences that will postpone action. The US is clearly accepting the fact that Iran will have some kind of nuclear program going forward as it pledges to discuss enrichment.

9 — Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.

Commentary: Just to reinforce the point: Iran can keep its present nuclear program as is. It is an notable indication of Iran digging in its heels on this after clause 8.

10 — The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MOU and until the termination of sanctions, US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.

Commentary: A massive win for Iran. As soon as the MOU is signed the US is basically suspending all sanctions that have been hampering Iran from selling oil for years and years. Iran can now trade freely without any threat from the US when it comes to its oil and financial infrastructure. A clear sign that all sanctions will be over soon.

11 — The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during negotiations. Such funds, whether retained in the original account or transferred, shall be made fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America undertakes to issue all necessary licenses and authorizations accordingly.

Commentary: The interesting word here is “implementation”. It is not entirely clear what that means—it might mean immediately upon signing or it might not. If it means upon signing, the USA is handing back to Iran all the frozen assets under its control. This is a tricky thing to calculate. There are somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion of frozen Iranian assets in different holdings, but the US does not definitively control most of this. Some stories are saying that $12 billion of this will be handed over immediately. Long story short—Iran will get billions very soon.

14 — The final deal will be endorsed by a binding UNSC resolution.

Commentary: The Iranians are basically trying to go to the UN Security Council to get endorsement for all this. Remember that their allies, Russia and China, have veto power. It will be to try and compel the USA not to return to using military power against them in the future.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-15-the-mou-is-ou
t

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 7:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland (11,175 words)

“We want Greenland,” Trump said. Four men sprang into action to make fantasy a reality.

By Ben Taub | June 15, 2026

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/22/inside-the-ludicrous-dea
dly-serious-plan-to-take-over-greenland

“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything comes to an end,” the Danish Prime Minister said.

On a Saturday afternoon in Nuuk, Greenland, last March, a thousand people walked down toward the harbor, to a small red cabin that bore the Great Seal of the United States—an eagle grasping an olive branch in one foot and thirteen arrows in the other. The air was freezing, and the town was bathed in the crisp Arctic light of a late-winter sun. After almost seven decades with no diplomatic presence in Greenland, the U.S. had opened a tiny consulate in 2020, during the pandemic; now, less than two months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, it was the site of the largest demonstration in Greenlandic history.

Even before Trump retook office, he had made clear his intent to annex Greenland. But, from the moment that he was sworn in, his fantasies and provocations became American foreign policy. “One way or another, we’re gonna get it,” he told a joint session of Congress. So five per cent of Nuuk’s residents stood before the consulate, beating traditional drums and chanting their country’s Inuit name: Kalaallit Nunaat. “Enough is enough,” they shouted. But no one from the State Department drew the blinds. It wasn’t clear that anyone was even there.

Across town, in the commercial center, a lone American handed out flyers. He wore a cowhide jacket and pants, mirrored sunglasses, and a black leather vest with a patch that read “Bikers for Trump.” He was tall and fit, with gray curls and a short mustache, and presented himself as a kind of unofficial ambassador—not of the U.S. government but of its President, whose cellphone number he claimed to have. “My name is Chris Cox. I’m from the United States, and I have come here to try to make some friends,” he said to an elderly Inuit man. “We are not looking at you like a tiger looks at a gazelle.”

Cox had founded Bikers for Trump in 2015, and the group had provided security at campaign rallies and at Trump’s first Inauguration—“a wall of meat,” as he put it, between protesters and the unlikely candidate who became President. When Trump lost the 2020 election, Cox spoke at a rally to call for overturning the result. “I, for one, will take the first bullet,” he said. “If there’s anybody out there from Antifa or Black Lives Matter, spend your first fuckin’ bullet in my chest.” But in Nuuk he struck a more conciliatory tone. “We are not biting at the chomps,” he said. “I just plan on doing the best we can to have an influence here.”

“He wasn’t really breaking any laws,” a senior Greenlandic police official told me later. But Cox’s interactions were inherently provocative. “Without knowing it, a lot of the Greenlanders are living in the Stone Age,” he told an Italian TV channel.

“I’m receiving a lot of death threats as a result of my work here in Greenland,” Cox noted, a few days into his trip. “People are looking at me like I’m a Russian with a machine gun right now, when they see the Trump patch.” By that point, Greenlanders had started wearing red caps with white text that read “Make America Go Away.” Nevertheless, Cox considered his mission to be fruitful. “I’ve got some suggestions for how we can clean this up,” he said, in a phone call from Nuuk to the Washington Times. “We need to change the hearts of some of these Greenlanders.”

Cox left Nuuk for Washington, D.C., where he claims to have briefed the White House and Republican lawmakers on his findings. He also did a prime-time interview with One America News Network, portraying Denmark, whose realm includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands, as an illegitimate colonial power that is committing “atrocities” against Greenlanders and “weaponizing” anti-Trump propaganda to turn people against the U.S. “Unfortunately, the natives, the Inuits and the Greenlanders, in my opinion, are suffering something we call, here in America, Stockholm syndrome,” he said.

According to Denmark’s national broadcaster, while Cox was in Nuuk, he made lists of Greenlanders who seemed open to annexation, and of those who obviously were not. He also solicited information on points of tension between Greenland and Denmark—examples of historical injustices that could be exploited for propaganda—and sought to recruit Greenlanders for a separatist movement, to tear apart the Kingdom of Denmark. Three months later, Trump appointed him to an advisory council at the Department of Homeland Security.

In recent months, the United States has kidnapped the President of Venezuela, launched a war with Iran, threatened Colombia, and started to move against Cuba. Trump’s obsession with Greenland has mostly slipped from the news. But Greenlanders worry that the war in Iran is only serving as a temporary reprieve; influence operations are ongoing, at Trump’s direction, and every so often he blurts out the stakes. During a rant about America’s European allies, Trump emphasized that his antipathy toward NATO“all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us, and I said, ‘Bye-bye!’ ”

The transatlantic alliance reflected a world that was designed and largely enforced by American power. Now, as American primacy fades, the U.S. government has embraced the predatory world view of its traditional opponents. Firepower matters more than values or alliances, and everything is in play. In December, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service noted that the U.S. has transformed into a nation that “uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.” Weeks later, Danish soldiers prepared to blow up Greenlandic runways, in case of a U.S. invasion.

“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything comes to an end—including NATO and, with it, the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War,” Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, warned. She later added, “The world order as we know it—that we have been fighting for, for eighty years—is over, and I don’t think it will return.”

Around that time, Trump texted the Prime Minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre; since he had not received the Nobel Peace Prize, he wrote, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” He then pivoted to Denmark’s claim to Greenland, which predates the founding of the U.S.: “Why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.” The message concluded, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

During Trump’s first term, “Make America Great Again” primarily meant that the U.S. would withdraw from the world and shield against what he and his supporters perceived as external threats. But in his second term, Trump has looked outward. In his Inaugural Address, he pledged to expand U.S. territory and to carry “our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” It is harder to remake what is already America into Trump’s vision of “greatness” than it is to make America merely bigger.

Greenland is the largest island in the world, but it has fewer than fifty-seven thousand residents, who are mostly scattered among settlements and towns along its western coast. Although it belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, it lies to the west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is part of North America. The latest articulation of the U.S.’s National Security Strategy, published in November, frames Trump’s imperial ambitions as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, the assertion by President James Monroe, in 1823, that any attempt by European powers to further colonize the Americas would be treated as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” Under Trump’s leadership, the N.S.S. says, “we will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”

But the elevated language of the N.S.S. obscures the fact that Trump’s pursuit of Greenland has always been in the hands of a few ideologues and opportunists. Along with Cox, the Danish government has identified two other Americans as running private “influence operations” in Greenland: a former venture capitalist and pecan farmer named Tom Dans and a former Army Special Forces commander named Drew Horn, who has sought to dominate Greenland’s rare-earth-mining sector. Both men served in Trump’s first Administration—Dans at the Treasury, Horn in the Office of the Vice-President, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Departments of Energy and Defense. But the Danish and Greenlandic governments were unaware that, during Trump’s first term, they had also represented their respective agencies on a secret National Security Council task force whose focus was the acquisition of Greenland.

A fourth man, Jørgen Boassen, is one of the very few Greenlanders who loudly support Trump; he spent much of the past year in self-imposed exile, floating between far-right American and European political gatherings, his travel and living expenses covered by American benefactors whom he refuses to identify. And then there is Trump himself, whose stated reasons for coveting Greenland do not stand up to scrutiny—except that he considers it “psychologically important,” as he recently put it to the New York Times, to own the territory rather than merely have military access to it, as the U.S. has had continuously, under a treaty with Denmark, since 1951.

European officials have been perplexed and outraged in recent months, unsure when or whether Trump will order the U.S. military to annex Greenland. But the reality is that the United States is now a country in which matters of war and peace are decided not among diplomatic or military experts, in the interests of the state, but through informal channels, by people whose personal proximity to the President—through family, business, donations, or flattery—is their principal qualification.

In January, the Times asked Trump if there were any limits to his global powers. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

The first time Trump is known to have expressed an interest in Greenland was in late 2018, when he was seventy-two years old. He summoned his national-security adviser, John Bolton, to the Oval Office, and confided that his longtime friend Ronald Lauder had suggested that he buy the island. “He asked, What did I think of it?” Bolton recalled. “I said, ‘Well, we do have some security issues in the Arctic.’ And then I went through them and said, ‘There are probably a lot of ways to handle it. Let me do some research, and I’ll come back to you.’ ”

What followed “was all done in a slightly clandestine, cloak-and-dagger way,” Fiona Hill, who was serving as the senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council, told me. Bolton summoned her to his office, but he wouldn’t say why. When she arrived, she found him ashen-faced, sitting next to a Coast Guard admiral who was serving as the White House’s homeland-security adviser. “Bolton said to us, ‘Look, Ron Lauder has told Trump he needs to buy Greenland, and we’ve got to head this off before he announces he’s buying Greenland to everybody,’ ” Hill said. “He didn’t want us to let anybody else know, not even within our directorates.” Bolton asked her to discreetly prepare a memo that presented more reasonable alternatives.

As Bolton saw it, the United States and its allies had been neglecting security in the Arctic region since the end of the Cold War. Although the U.S. had constructed seventeen military bases in Greenland during the Second World War, it started decommissioning them in the early fifties. Now the polar ice cap was melting, opening up potential Arctic sea lanes. Vladimir Putin had revived the Russian Navy, and had access to a large fleet of icebreakers. China was beginning to carry out state-funded scientific missions in the region, which could be useful for its commercial and military ambitions. The government in Beijing was also beginning to refer to China as a “near-Arctic state,” a designation that it invented and partly attributed to the fact that it borders an Arctic state. (The northernmost part of China is more than nine hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.) One Chinese state-run entity even offered financing for three new runways and airports in Greenland.

The financing had come at Greenland’s request; after failing to persuade the Danish government to pay for the new airports, Greenland’s premier travelled to Beijing in 2017 and solicited more than half a billion dollars in funds. When U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis heard about the arrangement, he warned the Danish defense minister that China must not be allowed to gain a foothold on the North American side of the Arctic—especially with infrastructure projects that could be of use to the Chinese military. Denmark stepped in to block the Chinese loans, and pulled together the funds to finance the airports directly. Still, the incident rattled analysts in the White House and the Pentagon. Greenland had achieved self-rule in 2009, and appeared to be on a path toward independence. What would happen when Denmark—which maintained authority over Greenlandic security—could no longer intervene?

But Hill’s research proved reassuring to Bolton. She and an Arctic specialist at the State Department named Markus Thomi found that the United States, under the 1951 treaty with Denmark, already had de-facto military control of Greenland. The U.S. had taken over the defense of Greenland during the Second World War, and had preserved its military access through negotiations that allowed Denmark to become a founding member of NATO. Although the U.S. now maintained only a single base, in the far north, called Pituffik Space Base, for detecting and tracking incoming ballistic missiles from Russia, it could expand its presence in Greenland whenever—and pretty much however—it wanted to. All it had to do was ask.

Hill and Thomi put together a memo, laying out various options that were already available under the treaty. The idea, Hill said, was “to try to throw Trump off the scent and focus on putting together a broader U.S. Arctic approach.” Bolton told me much the same. “I read the treaty, and it seemed to me that it solved the problem, at least on the military side,” he said. “In terms of buying it, one thing that became apparent was that, you know, this is not the nineteenth century anymore. There are fifty-seven thousand people in Greenland. They have this feeling that they ought to have a say in their future.”

But, as more people in the Administration got wind of Trump’s ambitions, “it took off in a direction that Bolton feared it would,” Hill recalled. “It was like vultures circling a corpse—people going, ‘Oh, look at this! Maybe there’s a scrap here that I can do something with, for my own interest.’ ” Hill, who had previously worked as the U.S. intelligence community’s lead analyst on Russia and Eurasia, was struck by a horrifying sense of déjà vu. “I was taken aback—although perhaps I shouldn’t have been—by how much this paralleled things I saw in Russia over and over again: people hitching their wagon to a money-making or prestige opportunity, getting some swanky title, to pursue things that were obviously not to anybody’s benefit. I’d seen that in Chechnya, across the Caucasus, and in Donbas and Crimea,” she said. “I kept thinking, We’re even more like the Kremlin than I could have imagined, in terms of hangers-on, because there’s no discipline. It’s top-down, and nobody has power unless it’s derived from Trump.”

After completing the Greenland memo, Hill and Thomi met with the Danish Ambassador and several other Danish officials. As the conversation shifted to the North Atlantic, she recalled “trying to give them a heads-up by making strange eye movements, body-language signals that something was going to happen.” But the Danes didn’t pick up on it.

In mid-July, 2019, Hill ended her tenure. She felt that there was no way to continue serving in the Administration without becoming part of the problem. “It is what it looks like—Trump is a king, and he’s thinking about his empire,” she told me. “It’s all about acquiring things—staking your claim, and then covering it in bling.”

Around the time that Hill left the White House, a phone rang at the Danish foreign ministry, in Copenhagen. It was the middle of a summer holiday, in 2019, and the sun was streaming into mostly empty offices. The caller was from the American Embassy, relaying a request from Washington: the President and the First Lady of the United States would like to visit Denmark in a little more than a month, and would appreciate a formal invitation from the Queen. (According to Bolton, White House staffers had heard that Melania wanted to see Copenhagen and thought it might be a nice stop for her and Trump on the way home from a state visit to Poland.)

“Danish diplomats, politicians, and defense officials cut short their summer vacations and threw themselves into the preparations,” the Danish journalist Martin Breum reported. “There was no room for negotiation on the dates.” On July 31st, the Danish royal family announced that Donald and Melania Trump would pay a state visit “at the invitation of Her Majesty the Queen.” Although Trump was reviled in Copenhagen, Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister, made clear the urgency of a warm reception. “The USA is Denmark’s most important and strongest ally in NATO,” her office wrote. “Our soldiers stand shoulder to shoulder in the world’s hotspots and in the defense of Europe’s security.”

Two weeks later, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Trump had, “with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest” in purchasing Greenland. The story came as a shock to the Danes—and to Bolton, who had spent the preceding weeks trying to figure out how to quietly warn the Danes himself. “I couldn’t imagine it leaked from the National Security Council, because we were holding it very close,” he told me. “I found out subsequently that, at various occasions down at Mar-a-Lago, Trump would be sitting around his dinner table, saying to the guests, ‘What would you think if we bought Greenland?’ And the guests would say, ‘Oh, well, that’s a good idea.’ ”

Trump later clarified to reporters that he saw the potential purchase as a real-estate deal for an island with a strategic location and rare-earth minerals. “Why don’t we have that?” he asked. “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ ” (Because Greenland is so far north, it appears more than ten times larger on a Mercator projection than it does on a globe.)

The news of Trump’s territorial ambitions did not land well in Copenhagen or in Nuuk. “Are parts of the US for sale? Alaska?” Rasmus Jarlov, who has served as the chair of the Danish parliament’s defense committee, wrote on Twitter. Frederiksen took a more diplomatic line. “Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over,” she said. “Greenland belongs to Greenland. I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously.” The prospect of a sale, Frederiksen said, was “absurd.”

Trump fixated on Frederiksen’s comment. “I thought that the Prime Minister’s statement that it was absurd—that it was an absurd idea—was nasty,” he said. “You don’t talk to the United States that way.” Later that day, while he was in a private meeting with Bolton, Melania called. Trump answered the phone on speaker, and Bolton overheard the exchange. “I don’t know why people keep saying I want to go to Denmark,” Melania said. “If you want to go, I’ll go with you.”

Trump hung up the phone, then took to Twitter to cancel the trip, blaming it on Frederiksen.

Bolton says that he resigned three weeks later. Trump announced the departure on Twitter, by claiming to have fired him.

In the following months, Trump was impeached by the House for withholding military aid from Ukraine while pressuring its President to open an investigation into the Biden family. During that period, the “Greenland question,” as a senior State Department official referred to it during the impeachment inquiry, appeared dormant. In fact, the discussion had simply moved to secure rooms in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where, according to the official, it “took up a lot of energy” among Trump’s national-security staff. “Not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico,” Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, later said. “Could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland? Because, in his words, Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.”

The Senate acquitted Trump in February, 2020, and his acolytes set about purging the White House and the civil service of career officials and replacing them with loyalists. Among the leaders of this effort was a lawyer named Paul Dans. Around that time, Dans’s twin brother, Tom, the former venture capitalist, who was now running a pecan farm in South Texas, got a call, asking if he’d like to be the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasia.

Tom Dans had first come into contact with Trump in the early nineties; as a junior investment banker, Dans was part of a small team that was brokering the sale of Madison Square Garden, a deal that included not only the arena and various New York sports teams but also the Miss Universe pageant. As Dans remembers it, Trump and his representatives would call his office once a week and ask if he could purchase Miss Universe separately from the rest of the deal. “We were, like, ‘No, you gotta buy the whole enchilada,’ ” Dans told me. Trump would “hang up, wait a week, and try again.”

In Washington, Dans learned that there was a task force being run out of the National Security Council in which staffers representing each of the relevant U.S. government agencies were deliberating options for the future of Greenland. “Let me get involved, because I’ve got a family connection,” Dans recalled telling his boss. Although Dans had never been to Greenland, his grandfather had served there as a merchant mariner during the Second World War, and had later helped construct Pituffik Space Base. Dans was appointed to the Greenland Policy Coordination Committee.

Much of the work of the Greenland P.C.C. was retroactively classified, but it centered on what the group’s members and their superiors regarded as both the threat and the opportunity of Greenlandic independence. “I want to say it’s an opportunity as long as we are willing and able to position ourselves to have a robust security and economic relationship with an independent Greenland,” Alexander Gray, who was serving as the chief of staff of the National Security Council at the time, told me. But Gray worried that Greenlandic independence would throw into question the security arrangements that were already in place: “Why would a Greenlandic independent government honor a treaty that their colonial masters signed with the United States decades ago?”

Gray had spent the preceding years observing and seeking ways to counter Chinese influence operations in sparsely populated island nations. “I had the portfolio dealing with the Pacific islands in the N.S.C., and we were dealing with this every day,” he told me. State-owned Chinese entities offered loans to such nations for infrastructure projects; if the nations defaulted, the Chinese could take control. A security agreement between China and the Solomon Islands enabled the deployment of Chinese paramilitary forces. “Watching that in real time prompted a lot of people to really have concerns about where an independent Greenland would ultimately end up,” Gray said.

To temper the perceived risks posed by Greenlandic independence, the Trump Administration set about trying to accelerate it in ways that would bring about a greater reliance on the U.S. “There’s nothing secret about the contours of the thing—if you study Greenland at all, you quickly arrive at the point that, you know, they’re asset rich and cash poor,” Dans told me. A major obstacle to Greenlandic independence is the absence of a self-sufficient economy; each year, Denmark doles out a block grant of around six hundred million dollars. “So, like, this is not a toughie, if you come from an investment-banking or dealmaking background, to solve,” Dans continued. “I hate to sound glib about it, but, when we’re shovelling trillions of dollars out of the Treasury for COVID relief—boom, boom, boom—and you’re looking at a number which is a couple hundred million, it’s, like, ‘Guys, let’s get serious here. What’s going on? This is not a difficult thing.’ ”

The U.S. set out on a “charm offensive,” as Greenland’s only private national newspaper, Sermitsiaq, put it at the time. Trump’s Ambassador to Denmark made numerous trips to Greenland, and courted Greenlandic politicians with promises of American business investment, educational opportunities, and development aid. The U.S. reopened its consulate in Nuuk, which had been shuttered since 1953. During the fall of 2019, a delegation of American diplomats and national-security officials arrived in Nuuk to discuss Greenland’s mineral resources, with a particular focus on mining strategic rare-earth minerals. Left undisclosed was the fact that among them were members of the National Security Council who were working to subvert the Kingdom of Denmark; they belonged to the Greenland P.C.C.

According to Drew Horn, the senior Administration official who was co-leading the Greenland P.C.C., the group routinely discussed the potential for friction with Denmark, and took “deliberate efforts meant to appease Danish concerns.” The intention, Horn said, “was never to vilify Denmark. It was always to do this as a win for everybody.” (Denmark’s win, as he saw it, was that it could cut loose a financial burden, even as it lost ninety-eight per cent of its territory and its relevance to Arctic geopolitics.) But the Danes were neither informed about the existence of the Greenland P.C.C. nor aware of its plans.

For the final two years of Trump’s first term, the work of the U.S. government in Greenland amounted to overt diplomacy and outreach paired with covert, winking assurances to Greenlandic officials that the U.S. would financially support their pursuit of independence in exchange for total military sovereignty over the island. The concept was hardly different from what Gray had cast as the Chinese approach—only the U.S. was now doing it first.

Still, military annexation was not on the table. The United States military continued to regard its allies and the “rules-based order” as the cornerstone of its Arctic strategy. On the sidelines of the NATO Leaders’ Meeting that winter, Bolton’s replacement, Robert O’Brien, urged his Danish counterparts to make a show of their commitment to Greenland’s security. O’Brien advised them to build a large, permanent air-force base, and to keep frigates on rotation in the Nuuk harbor, as a deterrent to the Russian and Chinese navies. The Danes “wanted to talk about plans and white papers, and that sort of thing,” he told me. “Whereas I’m the kind of guy who—well, I’d just take over a hotel in Nuuk and send a hundred Danish special operators there.”

To the Danes, it was as if the Americans had lost track of their own fantasy. The American argument, O’Brien said, was that “guys with dogsleds aren’t going to stop a naval infantry regiment of the Chinese or the Russians coming on board from an icebreaker.” But neither country had ever threatened Greenland, and the prospect of an imminent invasion made no strategic or tactical sense. After Denmark stepped in to finance the three Greenlandic airports, Chinese investment ground to a halt. Besides, Greenland was NATO territory; any attack would, at least in principle, invoke the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.

“I think the Danes had gotten used to business as usual,” O’Brien told me. “They liked it much better when the U.S. provided all their security, and it didn’t cost them anything, and they could spend their money on social programs and worker programs.” He continued, “In other words, we were supposed to defend it but not have any say in the governance of Greenland, and potentially even have how we defended it questioned by the Danes.”

I asked whether he felt that the Danes had grasped the depth of Trump’s desire to take over the island.

“No, I don’t think they took it seriously,” O’Brien said. “They did when he came back.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Tom Dans went back to pecan farming. “We did have a period of exile,” he told me, of the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection. (He was unaware of the attack in real time; he’d spent much of the day inside a secure facility, working with members of the Greenland P.C.C.) But, in the lead-up to Trump’s third run for office, Dans visited Washington as a non-resident fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where his brother, Paul, was leading the effort to draft a blitz of executive actions and policies that became known as Project 2025. As the election approached, Dans spoke with the Greenlandic diplomatic representative in Washington, who mentioned that he knew of a Greenlander who supported Trump: a bricklayer named Jørgen Boassen.

Boassen had been a Trump fan since 2016. “I was so tired of the élites, and of politically correct politicians,” he told me. By reading the news on social media, he had come to believe that Europe was sleepwalking into civil war, owing to the influx of Muslim migrants from Africa and the Middle East. “Denmark cannot even protect Denmark,” he said. “How can they protect us?”

In the fall of 2024, Dans wrote to Boassen on Facebook, and invited him to the U.S. They spent a week campaigning for Trump door to door in Pittsburgh, then travelled to West Palm Beach for Election Night, where Boassen shook hands with senators, billionaires, and several MAGA luminaries. “I also met Don, Jr., there, and I told him, ‘If you want to come to Greenland, just contact me,’ ” he recalled.

After the election, Boassen returned to Nuuk; Dans spent the following weeks pushing his Greenland agenda, in conversations with people he knew on Trump’s transition team, until it became one of Trump’s central fixations. “You have to get meetings with people, you have to coach an idea, and you have to work it and sell it and help people understand why it makes sense,” Dans told me. “Ultimately, it has to become their idea, not yours. There’s no end to what you can accomplish in D.C. if you are willing to give other people the credit.”

In early January, 2025, the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk texted Boassen and asked for help arranging a visit to Nuuk, for himself and Don, Jr. A few days later, the Trump family’s Boeing 757 landed on Nuuk’s new runway. Boassen was there to receive them. “That’s the great irony here,” Dans said, laughing. “The Chinese were the ones who, ten years ago, came and said, ‘Let us build your airports and walk into your mineral deposits.’ And then they got read the riot act by the U.S. side, and the Danes stepped up and found the money and built the airport—and that allowed the 757 to land and get the visuals.”

An advance team came to Nuuk with a stack of MAGA hats. Boassen assembled a small group of people to cheer Don, Jr.,’s arrival, and to join him for lunch at Nuuk’s most expensive hotel. It was only after the plane left, that evening, that local journalists discovered the supporters included homeless people who had been recruited with the promise of a free meal.

“They told us that they would welcome us as part of the United States,” a high-school student named Malik Dollerup-Scheibel, who ran into Don, Jr., and Kirk at a pool bar called Daddy’s, told me. “And we were just, like, ‘Yeah, well, it would be really strange to say that we’re not welcome, since you just came here.’ ” He was handed a MAGA hat and photographed with Kirk and Don, Jr. “But what we didn’t know was that, at the same time as we were being photographed, Donald Trump, Sr., was saying that he would take Greenland by force,” Dollerup-Scheibel said. “So we were kind of manipulated. When they posted the pictures, it looked like there were so many people who liked him. But we were just friendly, and people got free beer.”

Back in the U.S., Charlie Kirk went to his broadcast studio and gave an account of his few hours in Greenland. “There’s polar bears that walk around Nuuk,” he said. (There are no polar bears walking around Nuuk.) He recounted a tale of a young boy coming to him and telling him about rubies the size of baseballs. “And he says, ‘The Danes don’t let us mine our rubies, our gold, our lithium, or our gas,’ ” Kirk claimed. (Greenland has total autonomy and ownership over its natural resources.) “He said, ‘It’s time for a rebellion against the Danes.’ The younger people of Nuuk, the younger people of Greenland—they want to be rich, and, oh, my goodness, do they have wealth in Greenland. Incomprehensible amounts of wealth. We are talking that Greenland could be the new Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Permian Basin, Marcellus Shale, and the Balkan, all mixed into one. America should want those resources for our country, and Greenland should want them for their country. We’d be far more willing and able to develop them than Denmark and the socialist Greta Thunberg environmentalists from Copenhagen.”

Kirk framed the question of annexation as a matter of dignity. “They want to be part of a country that respects them, that gives them human rights,” he said. “It is the return of Manifest Destiny. Gulf of America. We’re taking back the Panama Canal, and we’re gonna do whatever it takes to have Greenland be part of the United States of America.”

In the next week or so, several Trump-friendly influencers began arriving in Nuuk. Nick Shirley asked Greenlanders what they thought about annexation on camera; the Nelk Boys handed out hundred-dollar bills to children, prompting locals to call the police. When Chris Cox showed up, Boassen served as his fixer.

Most of the propaganda wasn’t aimed at persuading Greenlanders to call for closer ties with the United States—it was focussed on convincing conservative Americans that the Greenlanders would welcome U.S. forces as liberators. An organization called Patriot Polling reported that fifty-seven per cent of Greenlanders supported joining the United States; Kirk shared the poll on X. But a Danish-Greenlandic poll found that the figure was around six per cent.

“Charlie Kirk said that there were a hundred people waiting for him at the airport with MAGA hats on,” Dollerup-Scheibel recalled. “I have seen pictures from the airport. There were three.”

Trump’s territorial ambitions emboldened those of America’s adversaries. Days after Don, Jr., returned from Greenland, a Russian lawmaker and former senior military officer argued on state television that, for defensive reasons, Russia should now annex Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where it has maintained two coal-mining settlements for almost a century. “A war has begun in the Arctic,” he said. “Trump is declaring his claims to Greenland. Why shouldn’t we look at Greenland? We need Greenland! This is not a joke. We absolutely need it!” But it was impossible to tell whether he was serious, trolling, or just revelling in the end of the rules-based international order. There was no point in dealing with the Greenlandic or Danish authorities, he said; the best way forward was to “reach an agreement with Trump, and divide Greenland into a couple of parts.”

Some Greenlandic politicians also saw the MAGA incursion as an opportunity for leverage. “People are beginning to understand that independence is not a question of the block grant,” Pele Broberg, the chairman of the hard-line-nationalist Naleraq Party, said. “It is only a question of whether we want independence.” He brushed off Trump’s annexation rhetoric as a negotiating tactic. “They are showing good will by saying, ‘Forget the economic side. We will figure that out,’ ” he said.

A young Greenlandic parliamentarian named Kuno Fencker announced his openness to entering into a defense pact with the United States, cutting Denmark out of the picture. He had read about the concept in an essay published shortly before the 2024 U.S. election, unaware that two of its authors—Tom Dans and Alexander Gray—had previously worked on covert plans for Greenland at the National Security Council. Dans seized upon Fencker’s interest, and invited him to Trump’s Inauguration. Kirk arranged tickets for Fencker and Boassen to attend the Turning Point USA Inauguration ball.

“We met many people there—Kid Rock, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Trump’s lawyer,” Boassen recalled. By then, Boassen had started introducing himself as “Trump’s Greenlandic son.” Fencker met with White House lawyers and other Administration officials, and candidly discussed his grievances with Denmark and possible paths forward for Greenland and the United States. Although he was travelling as a private citizen, he was apparently received and treated as a representative of the Greenlandic legislature. “It’s easy to meet people in the government or State Department or whatever,” he told me. “I met with almost three hundred people.”

In the days before the Inauguration, a group of Republican lawmakers had introduced a bill to authorize the acquisition of Greenland. “We are, quite frankly, the dominant predator,” its lead author, Representative Andy Ogles, of Tennessee, said on Fox News. Dans arranged for Fencker and Boassen to join Ogles for an interview on his social-media channels. The two Greenlanders sat in silence on either side of Ogles as he rejoiced in the prospect of more deportations and fewer rights for transgender people. “The liberal crazies are crying, and the righteous Republicans are rejoicing,” Ogles said. Then he turned to the Greenlanders and cited the dubious poll that said a majority of their compatriots supported their country being acquired by the United States.

“Our philosophy here is very American. We want to be independent,” Fencker said. But Ogles framed the affiliation with the U.S. as a foregone conclusion, and his guests did not disagree. Once Greenland joined the U.S., Ogles said, they could expect “a new tourism industry from Americans who suddenly see this as part of their homeland, as part of our territory.” Fencker shifted uncomfortably. When I met him in his office, in Nuuk, last fall, he defended his appearance as an act of unofficial diplomacy. “If you listen closely to what I say and try to have a legal hat on, you will realize that I am saying that Greenland wants to be a sovereign country,” he told me. “But we are on a diplomatic mission. How do you think that attacking the greatest power on earth, military-wise, and having a bad relationship with them—how would that go down?”

Before leaving Washington, Fencker posed for photographs with Dans and Boassen on the White House grounds. I asked him whether he was using Trump’s desire for Greenland as a cudgel against Denmark, to extract more concessions. “Of course,” he said. He added that he doesn’t necessarily want Greenland to fully break from the Kingdom of Denmark—only to be an equal partner in shaping all aspects of its future. “My visit to the White House was just a stunt. It was just to make Denmark afraid,” he said. “I was just there as a visitor, sitting in the West Wing to get a picture.”

Shortly after Fencker and Boassen left, a congressman from Georgia introduced a bill to change Greenland’s name on all federal documents and maps to “Red, White, and Blueland.” Alexander Gray, meanwhile, made it clear in a congressional hearing titled “Nuuk and Cranny” that he had no interest in Greenlandic self-determination on its own terms. “The security stakes are simply too high to allow Greenland to obtain independence without a plan in place for the U.S. to insure our core strategic interests are assured,” he said.

Drew Horn—the former Special Forces commander who had co-led the Greenland P.C.C.—set out to become a conduit between American financing and struggling Greenlandic businesses. He had left the public sector in early 2021, after Trump failed to overturn the election, and had formed a strategic-minerals advisory firm with the intermittent backing and guidance of former senior defense and intelligence officials, as well as from Trump’s former head of security and one of Trump’s lawyers. Horn announced that he would travel to Greenland on behalf of his investors, and that he planned to “support the country’s pursuit of independence.” “If Greenland wants independence and inclusion in North America, the private funding exists to make it a reality,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

In Nuuk, Horn dined multiple times with Pele Broberg, the head of the Naleraq Party. Horn—whose résumé notes his training and expertise in “Unconventional Warfare”—insisted that he was just acting as a businessman. But his background aroused suspicion in Nuuk, though Danish and Greenlandic officials were still unaware of the Greenland P.C.C.’s existence, and of his role as its leader. “We call him Rambo,” a senior Greenlandic official told me. In 2024, a documentary about a botched mercenary coup in Venezuela revealed that, while serving in Trump’s first Administration, Horn had dined with the leader of the operation—a fellow former U.S. Special Forces soldier—and remained abreast of its progress. In messages with the lead mercenary, Horn repeatedly claimed to be engaging U.S. government departments on the man’s behalf. The coup ended with the slaughter or imprisonment of most of its participants. (Horn declined to comment about this.)

In Nuuk, Horn appeared to be positioning himself to profit in the event of an American annexation. “He is trying to make himself the center of whatever happens,” the senior Greenlandic official told me. “Everybody is trying to find out what he is doing, what he is saying. And then he just changes the subject.”

In March, 2025, as Greenlanders prepared to vote in their parliamentary elections, Horn’s firm put out a press release for “stakeholders” that laid out a path to Greenlandic independence. “The majority of the Greenlandic Parliament today is controlled by pro-independence parties,” the press release noted. Horn anticipated a landslide for those parties, followed by a rapid break from Denmark, with an initial referendum triggered within a month. Trump assured Greenlanders that, if they became independent, his government stood “ready to INVEST BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to create new jobs and MAKE YOU RICH.”

Horn’s assessment wasn’t unreasonable; it was based on recent statements by Greenlandic politicians. But he had misjudged the effects of Trump’s rhetoric, and perhaps of his own. When Greenlanders went to the polls, a plurality of the votes went to a center-right party that had never previously won a Greenlandic election and, in light of ongoing threats, favored the status quo. In the following weeks, it formed a coalition government whose organizing principle was its opposition to American aggression. Only Naleraq, whose leadership wanted to initiate the independence process immediately, was excluded from the coalition. “We shall choose our partners ourselves,” the coalition agreement read. “It is we who dictate the pace.”

In MAGA circles, the elections were falsely framed as a victory for Trump. “The pro-Denmark party got first, but the pro-United States party got its best-ever result,” Charlie Kirk said on his broadcast, the following day. “This election shows that the pro-American forces are ascendant in Greenland, and it should be partnered with America, not the Old World,” Kirk added. “This would be nothing but upside for the great people of Greenland.” Like Trump, he focussed on money: “You will be wealthier. You will be richer. You will have the U.S. dollar. You will have more purchasing power.”

Each spring, Greenland’s dogsledding association hosts a national race. “This is somewhere between Nascar’s Daytona 500 and Super Bowl Sunday,” Tom Dans told me. “It’s a massive logistical undertaking. You’ve got three hundred-plus dogs, you’ve got mushers, and you’ve got their support people coming in from nineteen remote locations in northern Greenland, all in the dead of winter. So we thought, Why don’t we make a little Arctic exercise out of this, and get some Chinooks, and help them bring the dogs in?”

Dans pitched his idea to the White House and the Pentagon: part influence operation, part military exercise. “Nobody was saying no,” he told me. The plan was to deploy Chinook helicopters from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the top airborne unit for high-risk Special Operations Forces raids. The use of the Night Stalkers, as the unit is known, to shuttle dogsleds around Greenland would demonstrate, as Dans put it, “the capability that the U.S. had to really help this, in a kind of exciting, peacetime format.” Dans suggested that the dogsledding association invite the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to the race. But to Mikkel Jeremiassen, the head of the association, the invitation seemed like a condition that would “grant us access,” as he later put it, to helicopter support from the Night Stalkers. Jeremiassen drafted a letter to Hegseth, and sought assistance from the Greenlandic ministry of culture in getting it to Hegseth through official channels. But the ministry declined the request on technical grounds, since the island’s political parties had not yet formed their coalition.

Instead, the White House announced that Usha Vance, Vice-President J. D. Vance’s wife, would attend the dogsled race with one of her sons, and visit Nuuk as a tourist. “She’s a very nice woman, and she loves the concept of Greenland, so she is going there,” Trump said. Two U.S. military-transport planes delivered an advance security team, which drove around Nuuk in armored black S.U.V.s, and Denmark deployed around seventy police officers to maintain public order. But the Second Lady’s visit was abruptly cancelled. “American representatives have been walking around, practically knocking on one door after another in the past few days, to ask if people might be interested in a visit from the Vice-President’s wife,” a Danish TV correspondent in Nuuk reported. “Everywhere, the answer was the same: ‘No, thanks.’ ”

The Administration framed it differently. “There was so much excitement around Usha’s visit to Greenland this Friday that I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself,” J. D. Vance said, in a video announcing the change of plans. He added that he and Usha would visit Pituffik Space Base, alongside Trump’s national-security adviser and the U.S. Energy Secretary. (Usha’s touristic visits were cancelled.) “A lot of other countries have threatened Greenland, have threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada, and, of course, to threaten the people of Greenland, so we’re going to check out how things are going there,” Vance said.

By then, European leaders were losing faith in the transatlantic alliance. No other countries were threatening to take over Greenland—only the United States. Jarlov, who was serving as the head of the Danish parliament’s defense committee, raised concerns about Europe’s reliance on U.S.-manufactured weapons systems and fighter jets. “I don’t know if there is a kill switch in the F35’s or not,” he wrote on X, in response to the Pentagon’s claim that there was no such thing. “We obviously can not take your word for it. As one of the decision makers behind Denmark’s purchase of F35’s, I regret it.” He added, “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse.”

On March 28, 2025, Vance landed at Pituffik Space Base, where he repeated the fantasy that Russia and China were attempting “a lot of very aggressive incursions” in Greenland. He also berated Denmark. “The President said we have to have Greenland,” he said. “We can’t just ignore the President’s desires!”

Spring turned to summer. The White House appeared to focus on other matters, and the ice began to melt. But, for a former senior Danish defense-intelligence officer named Jacob Kaarsbo, the good weather carried with it a deeper concern: the easiest time to annex Greenland would be in the summer.

In May, 2025, I met Kaarsbo for a walk along a pier near Copenhagen. A few days earlier, the Wall Street Journal had reported that Trump’s director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had tasked America’s spy agencies—including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency—with identifying people in Greenland and Denmark who supported Trump’s aims. The staff of Sermitsiaq had taken to leaving their phones outside editorial meetings, for fear of eavesdropping by the United States. A recent survey by the Center for Public Health in Greenland noted a more than fourfold increase, in the past year, in the percentage of Greenlanders who show symptoms of psychological distress. Eighty-two per cent of respondents reported that Trump’s annexation rhetoric negatively affects their everyday lives. One in four said that they have difficulty sleeping.

Most Danish and Greenlandic contacts I met with were reluctant to speak publicly. Some asked me to leave my phone at my hotel. A prominent Danish historian told me his thoughts, then asked me to not report them, lest he be perceived as speaking for Greenlanders. One of his Greenlandic colleagues offered his own thoughts, then similarly retracted, lest his assertions affect Greenland’s new position of leverage.

Kaarsbo—who had spent fifteen years working alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan—was not too concerned about professional spies. Most Greenlandic political discourse takes place on Facebook, among small groups of people who write in Greenlandic and know one another by family and name; when, in the spring of 2025, a new Facebook account appeared and started polling Greenlanders on their opinions about the United States, it was instantly identified by locals as a likely influence operation. “The Administration may put pressure on the rank and file, but I would assume that a lot of them will try to do their job to a bare minimum,” Kaarsbo told me. “And some of them will just quit. The problem is that they will be able to find some idiots who will do anything to get ahead.” Although the U.S. diplomatic mission in Nuuk operated out of the small red cabin that served as the consulate, the American government was preparing to move it to a thirty-thousand-square-foot office space in one of Nuuk’s largest buildings, right in the center of town. “The new consulate could hold three hundred” staffers, Kaarsbo said. “What the fuck is that all about? In a community of fifty-seven thousand people, there should be a maximum of ten.”

Last spring, Hegseth was asked in a congressional hearing whether the Department of Defense had a plan “to take Greenland and Panama by force, if necessary.”

“Our job at the Defense Department is to have plans for any particular contingency,” Hegseth replied.

“Including the contingency of basically invading Denmark?”

“Any contingency you need, we’ve got it.”

To Kaarsbo, the absurdity was partly reassuring. “People just think, Oh, they’ll take it over, there’s nothing we can do,” he said. “But I think it’s unlikely that the Trump Administration could carry out a large plan for an amphibious assault without it getting leaked,” and thus becoming a catastrophic political scandal in the United States before the first ships reached Nuuk. Instead, Kaarsbo worried about a “quick-and-dirty takeover,” as he put it—“the 2 A.M. version, where a couple of planes with a flight plan that says ‘Pituffik’ suddenly veer toward Nuuk. A couple of hundred Special Forces take over the capital, take over the airport, take over parliament, and so on.” But such a scenario is not impossible to deter. “If we get a small European force up there under the pretext of military exercises—and say to Trump, ‘You’re right, we should take Arctic security very seriously, and so we’ve decided to start these exercises to deter China and Russia’—then, suddenly, the quick-and-dirty annexation is not so easy.”

It was against this backdrop that Drew Horn returned to Nuuk to visit a mining prospect in southern Greenland called Tanbreez. “As the only shovel ready rare earth project in Greenland, Tanbreez represents a game-changing opportunity for both the Greenlandic economy and the critical minerals supply chain in North America and Europe,” he said, in a press release. But the story didn’t quite add up. Horn named Naaja Nathanielsen, then Greenland’s mining minister, as one of his recent points of contact—but she insists that they have never spoken.

“Drew Horn came into our office and said that he was representing the Tanbreez mine,” the senior Greenlandic official told me. But, since Horn’s name wasn’t on the license, the official called the mine’s owner at the time, an Australian named Greg Barnes. “And Greg Barnes said, ‘No, he’s got nothing to do with us,’ ” the official recalled.

Horn has visited Greenland four times since Trump’s second Inauguration. In some ways, he appears highly connected; his former business partner and chief geologist is now the director of the U.S. Geological Survey. But in Nuuk his self-presentation frequently collided with reality. “He said that he was representing all kinds of people and organizations,” the senior Greenlandic official told me. “We called the U.S. State Department and said, ‘We’ve had this guy fooling around here in Greenland, saying this and that,’ and they said that they had nothing to do with him.”

Horn told Markus Valentin, a Danish reporter at the Greenlandic public broadcaster, that he and his colleagues in the private sector wanted to invest ten billion dollars in Greenlandic businesses “as soon as possible.” Reuters recently reported that, while pitching a prominent Greenlandic businessman on investment, Horn repeatedly paused “to respond to e-mails he said were from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Commerce Secretary Lutnick.” Horn denies this, though it’s unclear whether he was inflating his connections to impress the Greenlandic businessman or is now downplaying them to protect senior White House officials. He told me and other journalists that, after each trip, he briefed members of the Administration on what he’d found.

Greenlandic mining concessions are open to international investment; there is no need to annex the island to pursue its natural resources. The problem is that the costs of logistics, infrastructure, poor weather, and bureaucracy, in this remote Arctic environment, exceed the value of whatever can be pulled from the ground. “We have looked at Greenland—we have been exploring it for fifteen years,” a mining executive told CNBC last year. “We have never been able to come up with a profitable project.”

I asked Horn whether the Trump Administration sees Greenland’s rare-earth sites like the Russians see their two coal-mining towns in Svalbard: something to maintain at a perpetual loss—the cost of strategic presence. Each unprofitable Greenlandic mining concession that is bought up by an American entity is one that is no longer susceptible to such an investment by the Chinese. “No, they’re looking to turn a profit,” Horn said. But, in a recent podcast interview, he acknowledged that the United States has more rare-earth minerals than it could ever need. “We’ve just tied our hands to permitting,” he said. If the United States simply extracted and processed the contents of its own deposits, he added, “we could be, like, a net exporter for forever.”

At around 1 A.M. on January 3, 2026, Chinook helicopters and pilots from the Special Operations aviation regiment that Tom Dans had tried to deploy to Greenland flew Delta Force soldiers into Caracas and kidnapped the Venezuelan President. “He got bum-rushed so fast,” Trump, who’d watched the raid from Mar-a-Lago, said. He added that the U.S. would now “run the country” and take its oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” he said. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” Hours after the strike, Katie Miller—a former White House official who is married to Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland-security adviser—posted to X a map of Greenland overlaid with the American flag, with a one-word caption: “SOON.”

“We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Trump said the next day. He and his acolytes were practically giddy from the success of the Caracas raid, and started listing other places they’d like to invade: Cuba, Colombia, Iran. “By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?” Stephen Miller asked on CNN. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”

In the following days, Denmark and seven other European nations deployed troops to Greenland. The Danes carried live ammunition and explosives, and prepared to blow up Greenland’s runways to slow any possible invasion. They also carried fresh blood packs, in case of casualties, and were operating under standing orders to shoot at any invading forces. There was no concrete evidence of a planned U.S. attack, or any expectation that Denmark and its allies could fend one off for very long. The idea, as one European source involved with the planning told me, was merely “to raise the cost.”

Greenlanders were terrified; some have since moved to Denmark. The Greenlandic government scrambled to reassure locals, informing them that Danish and other European troops would now be a permanent fixture on the island. “If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark, here and now, we choose Denmark,” the Greenlandic Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said. “We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the E.U.”

Later that day, Trump was asked about Nielsen’s remarks. “I don’t know who he is,” Trump said. “Don’t know anything about him. But that’s going to be a big problem for him.”

Trump understood the message of force, however. He announced that every European nation that had deployed troops to Greenland would face new ten-per-cent tariffs—and that the tariffs would rise to twenty-five per cent on June 1st if the United States had not reached a deal “for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland” by that date. “It is time for Denmark to give back,” he posted on Truth Social. “World Peace is at stake!”

Four days later, at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, Mark Rutte, a Dutch politician who serves as the secretary-general of NATO, spoke to Trump and defused the situation. Trump claimed that they had reached a “framework of a future deal.” Greenlandic and Danish politicians noted that Rutte has no authority to negotiate on their behalf. But, whatever Rutte said to Trump, the President dropped the tariffs and the threatening rhetoric, for the time being, and then tied up the U.S. military by going to war with Iran.

“Greenland is behind us,” Senator Lindsey Graham said, at the Munich Security Conference, in mid-February. “Who gives a shit who owns Greenland? I don’t. So, the point is, Greenland is going to be more fortified, because Donald Trump—once he feels like it’s his brand, or he has some buy-in—is going to go big.” The next day, in a bizarre closed-door meeting with the Danish and Greenlandic premiers, Graham addressed Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s Prime Minister, as “little lady,” and loudly yawned in Nielsen’s face.

Chris Cox, the founder of Bikers for Trump, has not returned to Greenland since his visit last March. But he has made a couple of appearances as a Greenland expert on One America News Network, where he spews inaccurate anti-Danish propaganda and has been falsely presented to viewers as having lived in Nuuk for most of last year.

Drew Horn returned to Greenland in February—just after the talk of invasion died down. He appears to have shelved his interest in mining there, and is now hoping to build a large data center in the sparsely populated settlement of Kangerlussuaq, where there is a Danish military station and the longest commercial runway in Greenland.

Tom Dans was appointed by Trump as the chair of the United States Arctic Research Commission in December. When I met him for lunch in Washington, earlier this year, he declined to speak further on the record, except to articulate a narrow, symbiotic vision for the future: “My view is that the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce, and cut out the middleman, and keep it from China—and you could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster.”

Jørgen Boassen joined us a few minutes later. He had left Greenland for the U.S. last fall, his life style funded by anonymous American benefactors. When I was in Nuuk, I was told by several people that Boassen was known for groping women and getting into drunken fights. (Boassen denies any such acts.) He has been banned from several venues, including a swimming pool, a martial-arts club, and the hotel where he’d brought Don, Jr. “I am the last revolutionary fighter,” Boassen told me. While Danish troops were preparing to defend Greenland, he attended a gathering at the Kennedy Center, at which Andy Ogles and other Republican lawmakers sliced into a Greenland-shaped cake.

In Washington, the Danish and Greenlandic governments are quietly engaged in a process of negotiation with the White House. The U.S. plans to reopen some of its long-abandoned bases in Greenland—an outcome that would have been welcomed by both Greenland and Denmark until recently, and that could have been achieved under the existing 1951 treaty. But there are new points of contention. According to the Times, the Americans want veto power over foreign investment interest in Greenland. Another disagreement appears to be over the matter of territorial sovereignty. “We can’t be constrained by notions of leasing bases and that sort of thing,” Robert O’Brien, the former national-security adviser, told me. “We can’t have a situation like we’ve seen during this Iran operation, where certain governments aren’t giving permission to use bases. We can’t have that in Greenland. It’s just too essential to the defense of the homeland.”

I pointed out that no one in Greenland owns land: individuals merely apply for permission to build homes and businesses. If the United States took sovereignty over its bases, its military would be the only entity that owns land in the country, a matter that Jens-Frederik Nielsen has called a red line. “To give up territory, to give up self-determination, to give up the right to one’s own land—whether it is only the size of a postage stamp or more—we cannot do that,” Nielsen said. “We will not do that.”

But O’Brien, like his former boss, was unconcerned by the opinions of the people who live in Greenland. “They may understand the cycle of life better,” he told me. “But the lawyers will work out how the territory gets titled.”

In February, Boassen travelled to Louisiana, where he was hosted by the governor, Jeff Landry, whom Trump had recently named on Truth Social as his special envoy to Greenland. (Landry’s appointment came as a surprise to Denmark, Greenland, and the State Department, and circumvented congressional confirmation requirements.) At dinner, Boassen complained to Landry about the state of the Greenlandic health-care system. “It is a death sentence to get sick in Greenland,” he said.

In the following days, Landry dined with Trump, who took to Truth Social to announce that he was sending “a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.” The post was accompanied by an illustration of a U.S. Navy hospital ship, the Mercy. “It’s on the way!!!”

Danish and Greenlandic officials quickly rejected the offer. “We have a public health-care system where treatment is free for citizens,” Nielsen said. “Please talk to us instead of just making more or less random statements on social media.”

Landry was incensed. “Shame on Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen!” he wrote on X. “President @realDonaldTrump and America care.” But the Navy didn’t deploy the Mercy; the ship was undergoing scheduled maintenance, alongside the Navy’s only other hospital ship, at an Alabama shipyard.

Last month, Landry showed up at a business conference in Nuuk. Upon his arrival, he shared with reporters his instructions from the President: “He said, ‘Go over there and make a bunch of friends—as many friends as we can.’ ” He also brought along a doctor who claimed to have come to “assess the medical needs” in Greenland—though this doctor had not reached out to the health ministry.

For the next three days, Landry wandered around Nuuk, with Boassen as his fixer, and tried to hand out MAGA hats. “If you come to Louisiana and you come to the governor’s mansion? All the chocolate-chip cookies you could eat,” he told a group of boys. Another boy apparently asked if Landry was famous.

“I don’t know if he’s famous, but he’s the governor of Louisiana,” Landry’s wife, Sharon, said.

“Do you want to take a picture?” Landry asked.

“No,” the boy replied.

Landry abandoned the business conference within half an hour of its start. “We have our red lines,” Nielsen, who looked exhausted, told the Danish national broadcaster. “No matter how many chocolate cookies we get, we are not going to change them.”

The day after Landry left Greenland, the new U.S. consulate opened in the center of Nuuk. American officials and businessmen ate musk-ox hot dogs and discussed their ambitions for Greenland’s future. Hundreds of Greenlanders protested outside.

Rasmus Jarlov, whose term in parliament had just ended, called for the consulate to be shut down immediately. “It is utterly insane that we allow their presence,” he wrote on X. “The new, very large American consulate in Nuuk has one clear mission and task, and that is to pave the way for an American takeover.” The policy of treating the United States as the ally it once was has merely paved the way for more subversion. “The only thing that has worked,” Jarlov emphasized, “was when we, along with our allies, made it clear that we would rather go to war with the United States than let them have Greenland.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 10:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


What Did You Expect?

Perhaps this was always how Trump’s ill-conceived war was destined to end.

By Daniel B. Shapiro | June 17, 2026, 6:59 PM ET

Daniel B. Shapiro served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-iran-war-reversals/687
590/

The whiplash is jarring.

President Trump exulted over every bomb that dropped on Iran, every naval interdiction, and every joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Before that, he spent years preaching a policy of “maximum pressure” sanctions on the Islamic Republic. And before that, he harshly disparaged the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal reached by Barack Obama, from which Trump withdrew the United States in 2018.

And now? With a misguided war going poorly, with global economic chaos spreading, with Iran handed maximum leverage by its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, in an instant, Trump has upended every pillar of his approach to a still-dangerous Iran.

Let’s count the ways.

Nuclear: A core goal of the war was to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program could never produce a nuclear weapon. Israeli and U.S. strikes in June 2025 advanced that goal by destroying key nuclear facilities and burying Iran’s enriched uranium, setting back the program significantly.

But little had changed in the nuclear program by the time this war was launched this past February, and little has changed since. Now, in exchange for an oft-repeated pinky promise that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon, Trump has agreed to delay negotiations on the key goals of removing Iran’s enriched uranium and banning further enrichment, and the verification measures needed to guarantee that those commitments are upheld. These talks are punted to a second phase that may never arrive or never end.

Sanctions: Trump long advocated maximum-pressure sanctions, and beat his chest during the war about the cost to Iran of the U.S. naval blockade.

But now we will pay for reopening the Strait of Hormuz—simply, at best, restoring the prewar status quo—by approving the release of tens of billions of dollars of Iranian foreign assets and waiving sanctions to permit Iranian oil sales. More goodies are in store for the regime, in the form of fees paid by ships transiting the strait and a shockingly large $300 billion reconstruction fund. (The latter, supposedly to be funded by Gulf states, recalls the worst of former Secretary of State John Kerry’s post-JCPOA diplomacy, when he sought to drum up investment in the corrupt economy of a still-adversarial regime.)

With no change in the regime’s character or ideological outlook, it is being rewarded with a shift from maximum pressure to maximum windfall. There is no reason to think that the money will flow to schools and hospitals or provide any benefit to the Iranian people that the regime still suppresses. It will, instead, almost certainly fund more missiles, drones, and support for terrorists at home and abroad—threats about which the memorandum of understanding is silent.

Lebanon and Hezbollah: The war, misguided though it was, represented the zenith of U.S.-Israeli military cooperation, with unprecedented combined operations and ample praise by Trump for the partnership. Trump voiced recognition of the genuine threats Iran posed to Israel, not least from its network of terrorist proxies.

But Israelis have been aghast at the speed of Trump’s turnabout. Israeli officials were excluded from negotiations on the MOU, and were not even given the opportunity to review the text. Meanwhile, as U.S. and Israeli interests diverged, Trump barked expletives at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and adopted the Iranian demand to impose restrictions on Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon—even as the militia continues to attack northern Israeli communities—as part and parcel of the broader cease-fire.

Regime: Trump also long correctly identified the Iranian regime as uniquely dangerous and evil, with the blood of many Americans, Israelis, Arabs, and its own citizens on its hands. Israel’s decapitation strike enabled by Trump on the war’s opening day gave clear expression to that understanding. One did not need to endorse this war—I opposed it—to recognize the imperative of containing and weakening the regime of the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps until such time as the Iranian people could overthrow it.

But in a flash, Trump and his weirdly credulous vice president have discovered the putative moderation, reasonableness, and, dare we say, decency of what is, if anything, an even more hard-line crop of Iranian leaders. Most states in the region, and soon in Europe, see which way the wind is blowing and are moving to improve their relations with Iran. Regime leaders must be chortling over their surprising and unearned new international legitimacy.

To those at home and abroad whose necks are snapping and whose heads are spinning, I have to ask an obvious but uncomfortable question: What did you expect?

This debacle is, at the end of the day, classic Donald Trump.

In multiple ways, we are seeing Trump’s essential characteristics playing out on a national-security matter of the highest stakes.

First, he is utterly assured that he can do anything, that he can will any reality into being, despite all evidence and expertise to the contrary. Seduced by the overnight success of the removal of President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, he convinced himself that he could bring about the rapid collapse of the Iranian regime. His own intelligence experts and Cabinet officials counseled otherwise. Yet he pressed ahead.

Second, he deepened his self-deception through his childish belief in the invincibility of U.S. military power. A testosterone-infused operation name—Epic Fury—and a daily video diet of buildings going boom reinforced his delusion. The members of the United States military are fearsome and highly professional, and they carried out their assigned tasks with precision and effectiveness, degrading various Iranian capabilities. But Trump was incapable of aligning those operations with achievable strategic objectives. His mind doesn’t work that way.

Third, when the going got tough, Trump started to flail. One day he threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, the next (and the next and the next) he promised that a deal was just around the corner. Never a detail man (for policy, anyway; he goes deep on architectural trimmings), he confessed to being bored with the war. And as when his business ventures veered toward bankruptcy, with better off-ramps in the rearview mirror, he grasped for any way out, damn the costs to U.S. credibility, alliances, and influence.

Fourth, he was susceptible to flattery, especially from strongmen. Remember his fruitless exchange of love letters with Kim Jong Un? They produced no breakthrough in nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. Somehow, without even an 80th-birthday card from Iran, Trump flattered himself into believing that he was the leader who could recognize, and cultivate, a new spirit of cooperation coming from the “very rational” and “not radicalized” leaders now in charge in Tehran.

Fifth, as always, Trump is out for Trump. He stumbled by entering a war that Americans broadly opposed, and their opposition increased as they felt it in their pocketbooks at the pump and the grocery store. But it soon became clear, with a midterm-election disaster looming, that Trump would pull the plug. Again, ending the war was necessary; giving away the store while doing so was panic-induced self-preservation.

Finally, Trump swaggered into the war, and will skulk out of it, with total confidence in the slavish support of his political base. His faith will probably be justified. Remember their discovery of the absolutely essential national-security imperative that we grab Greenland? (Wait for it: Cuba is next.) The hurrahs for Trump the conqueror will soon transform into oohs and aahs toasting Donald the diplomat. A few lonely, honest critics of the JCPOA—a flawed but workable deal that verifiably set back Iran’s nuclear program—will resist the demand to tie themselves into pretzels, and instead acknowledge that Trump’s deal makes the JCPOA look ironclad.

No doubt, Trump’s visibly advancing age has also played a role. As with all of us, time intensifies his most fundamental personality traits: ego, vanity, self-delusion, impatience, panic under pressure.

And so here we are. A war that should not have been fought. An enemy that was hit hard but remains unrelentingly hostile and is now reaping unexpected strategic gains. The credibility of the U.S. in tatters and its military readiness compromised. Alliances and partnerships under stress. The global economy in tumult, inflicting financial pain on American citizens that will linger even as oil prices decline. A fine and avoidable mess all around.

Indeed, what did anyone expect?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 2:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You people have a really warped sense of reality.

Your world sucks. No wonder you're all so miserable all the time.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 10:50 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Whatever we’re paying RFK Jr, it’s too much

Joel Eissenberg | June 12, 2026 5:07 am

https://angrybearblog.com/2026/06/whatever-were-paying-him-its-too-muc
h

The NYT published an article reporting that RFK Jr has abandoned most of his responsibilities:

“Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues,” Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the article. “Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.“

Not exactly news. Kennedy’s rebuttal?

“All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove,” Kennedy wrote.”

LOL! His “accomplishments” are

(a) the firings and resignations of health research experts at the CDC, FDA and NIH

(b) sowing distrust in scientific expertise while replacing sound science with magical thinking.

Whatever we’re paying him, it’s way too much. Unless the job, like in the rest of the Trump administration, is just to create chaos.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 11:07 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck your angry bear and his stupid blog.

Anything that you care about? Nobody else gives a single shit about.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy

His humiliating defeat in Iran has sealed the deal

Paul Krugman
Jun 19, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-champion-of-renewable

On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects. The administration has also tried to stop offshore wind farms already under development — moves that have been blocked by the courts — while the Pentagon has been refusing to grant routine permits for onshore wind projects.

Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to data centers and high gasoline prices.

Yet here’s the irony: Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.. Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.

Why do Trump and his gang hate green energy so much? The roots of their hatred range from the power of fossil fuel interests, to Trump’s petulant whine that wind turbines ruined the view from his Scottish golf course, to a general sense among right-wingers that clean energy threatens their masculinity.

What’s best for Americans has nothing to do with it. Thus, Trump lackeys justifying their hostility to renewables consistently make arguments even they must know are stupid. Consider, for example, an exchange last month between Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior, and Rep. Jared Huffman of Nevada:

Burgum: All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.

Huffman: Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery.

Indeed. To get a clearer understanding of far battery technology has progressed in enabling the transition to renewables, let’s look at how the state of California sourced its electricity this past Wednesday. The chart below shows megawatts supplied at 15-minute intervals over the course of the day. The area shaded yellow represents daylight hours. The light blue line at the top is electricity generated by renewables, mainly solar power (with some wind and hydro as well). In addition to supplying energy for current consumption, renewables supply energy to batteries for nighttime consumption. The black line at the bottom is net electricity supply from batteries — which is negative when batteries are charging, positive when they’re being drawn down:


California — which would be the world’s 4th largest economy if it were a country — gets more than half of its electricity from renewables. It is rapidly becoming a state largely powered by the sun during daylight hours and powered by batteries during the night.

Burgum’s suggestion that solar is an unproven or unreliable technology is completely at odds with reality.

Nor is California the only economy that now makes substantial use of renewable energy. Burgum’s home state of North Dakota gets more than a third of its electricity from wind power (don’t tell Trump). In South Dakota wind supplies 57 percent of the electricity. And renewables generate a large share of electricity in many countries, including most big European economies. (France is the outlier, not because it relies on fossil fuels, but because it has large nuclear capacity.) Spain, for example, now relies heavily on a solar-plus-batteries system similar to that in California.

And when Trump went to war with Iran, nations that had already shifted toward renewable energy were very glad they had made the move.

To the extent that there’s a competition for the future of electricity generation, it’s between renewable energy and natural gas. Whatever Trump may want to believe, burning coal — even ignoring the environmental damage — is a costly, obsolete technology, which nobody wants to invest in. But new gas-turbine power facilities are still being built (although many places are, like California, rapidly shifting away from natural gas). Trump officials envision a world largely powered by US liquefied natural gas (LNG).

However, countries that relied heavily on natural gas were hit hard by Trump’s gratuitous war with Iran. LNG supplies from the Persian Gulf were blocked and couldn’t be fully replaced by U.S. exports because shipping capacity was limited. Countries that had invested heavily in renewables, like Spain, were largely unscathed. A report from the think tank Ember found that since the war began Spanish electricity prices — unlike prices in some other European countries — were essentially decoupled from the soaring price of natural gas.

Assuming that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened after Trump’s abject surrender to the Iranian regime, natural gas prices should subside. Yet the world has learned a hard lesson about the riskiness of relying on fossil fuels for electricity generation.

And let’s be clear about the nature of that lesson. It’s not the fact that much of the world’s supply of hydrocarbons comes from a politically volatile region: We’ve known that all too well since the 1970s. What’s new is the recognition of American weakness and unreliability.

In this new era of drone warfare America cannot guarantee reliable access to imported fossil fuels through critical sea lanes. And is America itself a reliable supplier? Can nations that allow themselves to be dependent on U.S. gas and oil be sure that Trump or a future Trump-like president won’t weaponize that dependence, cutting off or threatening to cut off supplies in some future dispute? The obvious answer is no.

The whole world now knows that relying on imported fossil fuels is a major economic and security risk. By contrast, the sun will shine and the wind blow whatever may be happening overseas. Renewables were already rapidly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. Now it’s clear that they are also far safer.

Thus Donald Trump has in practice become the world’s green energy champion.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 6:18 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Most Surprising Miscalculation of Trump’s Second Term - POLITICO

He has underestimated the power of patriotic sentiment in countries besides the United States.

By Alexander Burns | June 19, 2026 05:00 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/06/19/trump-mistake-nation
alism-brexit-column-00963265

OTTAWA — When Donald Trump won a new term in the White House, Danielle Smith joined the parade of foreign leaders visiting Mar-a-Lago to honor the president-elect. The populist premier of Alberta, Smith enjoyed lively relationships across the American right, even hosting Tucker Carlson in Western Canada in 2024.

Yet when I asked Smith last fall, at a policy summit in Toronto, how she’d feel about Trump potentially intervening in Alberta’s fragile politics, her MAGA stripes vanished.

“I don’t want any foreign influence in our politics here,” Smith told me.

Admiring Trump from afar is one thing. But sovereignty is sovereignty, and borders are borders.

Trump used to understand that.

A decade ago, Trump waged his first-ever political campaign as a nationalist crusader, demanding harder borders and more muscular American sovereignty. When the United Kingdom held its 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union — the 10-year anniversary is in a few days — Trump cheered it on and crowned himself “Mr. Brexit.”

In his second term, Trump’s grasp of nationalist politics has slipped. He has underestimated the power of patriotism and national pride in countries other than his own.

This serial miscalculation has undermined Trump’s trade wars and military adventures, aggravated the cost-of-living crisis, weakened the Republican Party and battered Trump’s bonds with the global right.

It began even before Trump’s inauguration in 2025, with his campaign of bullying against Canada.

The belittling taunts and tariff threats he aimed at Justin Trudeau that winter did not scare America’s neighbor into prostration. They inspired a patriotic backlash and created a new prime minister, Mark Carney, who preaches middle-power resistance to American economic domination.

In Ukraine, Trump’s bid to push the country into a flimsy peace deal — while dressing down Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and grabbing for a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth — was such an insult to Ukrainian sovereignty that Zelenskyy, even at a political low ebb, faced no consequences for rejecting the terms.

Attempts to meddle with judicial decisions in Brazil, commandeer British and Spanish airfields and dictate military strategy to Israel have gone no better. Dispatching Vice President JD Vance to campaign in Hungary’s election did not save Viktor Orbán from a landslide defeat.

Perhaps most damaging to Trump, his expectation that he could decapitate Iran’s leadership, blast the country into submission and install a compliant proxy — all without using ground troops — led to a monthslong stalemate that spiked energy prices and sapped the global economy.

It should not surprise any nationalist leader that Iran’s generals and clerics preferred months of American bombing over quick subjugation.

So why does Trump seem lost in these political currents?

Somewhere between railing against OPEC in the 1980s, applauding Brexit in 2016 and winning the presidency in 2024, Trump started blurring the difference between a right-wing politics that insists on putting national identity above international institutions, and a purely American variant that wants to replace resolutions from the United Nations with edicts from Truth Social.

His sometime admirers have noticed. In a thoroughly revealing interview with POLITICO’s Marion Soletty, Jordan Bardella, the likely presidential nominee for France’s far-right National Rally, lamented that second-term Trump was very different from the first-term version.

These days, he said, the United States was acting more like an “empire.” Trump himself was “extremely unsteady and constantly shifting,” Bardella said.

Bardella disavowed interest in Trump’s endorsement in Danielle Smith-like terms: “We don’t need to accept or open the door to any form of interference.”

Trump’s rough strong-arming has worked well enough in a handful of countries. He endorsed the winning candidate for Poland’s presidency last year. In Latin America, Trump and members of his administration have helped anoint election winners in Argentina and Honduras — politically unstable, economically distressed countries that rely on U.S. assistance. His decapitation strategy succeeded in Venezuela.

Meanwhile Trump has continued to toy freely with European Union and NATO leaders. He all but ignores the UN and pays no political price for it.

To understand why, let’s return to Canada.

In the winter of 2025, as Trump was menacing Canada’s independence and calling it the “51st State,” the former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper — no friend to his country’s ruling Liberal Party — made a rare appearance in frontline politics. At an event here in Ottawa, he declared it would be worth taking “any level of damage” to protect Canada’s freedom.

“If I was still prime minister, I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we’re facing,” Harper said then.

How many leaders — or voters — would say anything similar about preserving the regulatory authority of the European Commission or the treaty commitments of NATO?

Trump’s appreciation for the special force of national pride and patriotic sentiment used to be one of his political superpowers. It remains one of the few things holding the Republican Party together.

After all this imperial thrashing-around, Trump may never recover the clarity of purpose of his “Mr. Brexit” era. He has left a political space for someone else to fill.

And so Americans will soon look to Trump’s potential successors in both parties for a new version of U.S. nationalism. The world has only grown more confusing and dangerous since 2016, and voters still want to take back control.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 22, 2026 6:25 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump, 80, Unravels Over Botched Vanity Project in Morning Meltdown

BREAKDOWN MODE

The president made unhinged claims that his disastrous $14 million pool renovation was targeted by vandals.

By Sarah Ewall-Wice | Updated Jun. 22 2026 2:25PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-80-unravels-over-botched-vanity-pr
oject-in-morning-meltdown/

President Donald Trump spent Monday morning freaking out about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after his renovations turned into a debacle with algae and peeling paint ahead of July 4 celebrations.

The president took to Truth Social to post unhinged threats and accusations after the massive pool on the National Mall has become a mess following his repeated bragging about how good he was at fixing pools.

“Of the MANY Statues and Fountains that we rebuilt, renovated, cleaned, and fixed, the only one that was Vandalized was the Reflecting Pool, which is being taken care of, ASAP!” Trump wrote.

Trump claimed it had been “given a 300 foot long gash, chemicals have been illegally placed in the water, and the beautiful new grass field has been destroyed with a gigantic 86 47 chemically carved into it (Probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey!).”

“The Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things—Which will be fully enforced!” Trump wrote.

Members of the National Guard patrol the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, after recent renovations following a directive from U.S. President Donald Trump to paint it blue ahead of the 250th anniversary of U.S. Independence, in Washington, D.C.

Just days after the $14 million renovations were completed and the pool refilled, massive blooms of algae turned the 2,000-foot-long pool bright green, in sharp contrast with the “American flag blue” it had been painted.

Crews with the National Park Service could be spotted furiously pouring in hydrogen peroxide in the pool and vacuuming up dead algae in a desperate attempt to remedy the situation.

Throughout the renovation project, the president had bragged constantly in public and on social media about how he was fixing the Reflecting Pool and would accomplish what previous administrations had failed to do since the pool was first built in the 1920s.

Instead, large pieces of the “American Flag Blue” paint began peeling off the bottom of the pool after the hydrogen peroxide was poured in and could be spotted floating in it.

Donald Trump with a duck in the reflecting pool algae

On Sunday, a dead duckling was found floating in it. It was unclear what killed it, but it happened just days after the Interior Department insisted that the hydrogen peroxide was not harmful to wildlife.

Trump has claimed the pool had been vandalized and attacked “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE!” for it. His top officials vowed to prosecute anyone who vandalizes it. Trump also said that the work to fix it would begin immediately.

“What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly,” Trump rambled in a Saturday post. “We met with contractors today, will probably be forced to release and drain much of the water in order to do the necessary repairs, but will have them done as quickly as possible.”

Trump’s allegation that the mysterious “8647” message that appeared on the grass on the National Mall nearly two weeks ago was inspired by the former FBI director was unsubstantiated. However, the numbers are at the heart of the criminal case against Comey.

The investigation into the message on the National Mall is underway, but Comey was indicted in April after the Justice Department claimed he had threatened Trump’s life by posting a photo on Instagram of seashells arranged in the message “8647? last year.

Comey almost immediately deleted the post and said afterward that he was not aware that it would be interpreted as a call for violence.

The term “86 it” is lingo for a restaurant item that has run out and needs to be taken off the menu in the service industry. Trump critics have used “86? in calling for the president to be removed from office.

Comey has said he is innocent on all charges and accused the Trump administration of a vindictive prosecution.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 25, 2026 11:39 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Strongmen Can Fail if We Act with Joyce Vance Timothy Snyder

Jun 23, 2026

Tim joined Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney during the Obama Administration, to discuss what he sees as the central challenge facing American democracy: the danger of treating authoritarianism as something that will simply pass on its own.

Tim started off by talking about how “sugarcoating” political realities can become a form of collaboration, because it delays the public response necessary to defend democratic institutions. Tim also rejected the idea that democracy inevitably self-corrects, warning that there is no political “pendulum” that guarantees a return to normalcy. Tim stressed that democracies survive. only when citizens actively participate in shaping their future.

The rest of the discussion explored everything from the aftermath of the Iran war to threats against democratic norms at home, including debates over executive power, habeas corpus, voting rights, and the Supreme Court. Tim emphasized, regarding Iran, that authoritarian movements are often fueled by the illusion that force can solve complex problems, while history repeatedly shows that violence creates consequences its architects cannot control.

To me, the most striking part of the conversation centered on what comes next. Tim urged Democrats and democracy advocates to think beyond simply winning the next election. Success, Tim said, requires a broad coalition, a compelling vision of the future, and a willingness to pursue ambitious democratic reforms—from voting rights and anti-corruption measures to structural changes that strengthen democratic institutions.

Throughout the conversation, both Tim and Joyce returned to a common theme: history is not a script. The future remains unwritten. Whether America emerges stronger from this moment depends not on inevitability, but on the choices citizens make now.

As Tim and Joyce put it in their closing messages, the answer is always action.



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 26, 2026 7:46 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Meltdown

One day that captures how Trump has gone from unpredictable to chaotic

By Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman | June 25, 2026, 7:34 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump-congress-iran-midte
rms/687704/

A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.

And that was just yesterday.

For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.

At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.

This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies have told us there are also quiet, behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the president’s goals were achieved. Iran could close the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away from some of his stated objections. He has taken to Truth Social repeatedly this week to defend the deal and once again seethe about comparisons with the agreement that Obama struck more than a decade ago. Trump continued to waffle as to what could come next—even suggesting a resumption of the bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat that few take seriously. His attempts at unpredictably were quite predictable, and Iran has proved itself to be anything but cowed.

Still, many in Trump’s orbit tell us that they believe the war won’t have much political staying power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the long-term ramifications on the Middle East or America’s international relationships, but rather the political moment ahead of the midterms. They hope that the war will be soon forgotten—that the strait will reopen, that the price of gas will fall, that bombs will not need to fall again. Aides pointed us to a number of major events, including a series of Supreme Court decisions and even the World Cup, that could eclipse the war in the national consciousness. “The midterms are months away,” one official told us. “We’ll have lots of plot twists by then.”

But so far, Trump’s efforts aren’t working. And when his frustrations exploded yesterday, he lashed out against senators who have faithfully served him—and whose support he can’t afford to lose.

Tensions between Trump and Senate Republicans have been building for months. The president irked party leaders by endorsing a primary opponent to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his bid for a third term. Trump then infuriated them by snubbing Senator John Cornyn of Texas in favor of his scandal-plagued primary challenger, state Attorney General Ken Paxton—a move that appeared to seal Cornyn’s doom in last month’s primary runoff. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had strongly backed Cornyn, a former member of the Senate GOP leadership, and the party’s campaign arm had spent millions of dollars to boost his candidacy before Trump undercut them.

Senate Republicans gave Trump much of what he wanted last year, but he now faces some resistance as the GOP’s prospects in this year’s midterms worsen. Egged on by loyalists such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Trump has tried to jawbone Republicans into scrapping or circumventing the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to pass legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. (It would also, in some versions, significantly curtail voting by mail.) Republicans have never had a majority that supports eliminating the filibuster, and Trump’s refusal to accept that reality has frustrated senators.

On top of all that, Trump’s efforts to force members of his own party into retirement have created what’s become known as the “YOLO Caucus” in the Senate, as Republicans such as Cassidy, Cornyn, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (who announced his retirement immediately after declaring his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year) have felt liberated to oppose and criticize the president in ways they would not have if they faced reelection. Tillis, in particular, has trashed some of Trump’s ideas and appointees with a newfound zeal—he called Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, “an incompetent sycophant.” And Cassidy decried the administration’s deal with Iran as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

The intraparty feud came to a head yesterday, when Trump abruptly canceled a ceremony to sign a major housing bill—a rare example of significant bipartisan legislation—and demanded that Republicans first pass the partisan SAVE America Act if they wanted his approval. Things devolved from there. During a meeting with Senate Republicans in the Capitol, Trump berated them for allowing (through a combination of defections and absences) the passage of a resolution seeking to constrain his ability to wage war on Iran. Cassidy confronted him over the deal he had struck, and the two got into a loud argument in which Trump at one point reportedly told the senator to sit down. “I make no apologies for standing up to the president,” Cassidy told reporters afterward. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”

Naturally, Trump proclaimed the whole thing a success anyway. “We had a really great meeting,” he told reporters. “We like our leader. We like our party. We like, really, everybody in the room—I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay.” The president was flanked by three of his loyalists: Senators Rick Scott of Florida, John Barrasso of Wyoming, and Lee, all of whom wore a Trump-style red tie. Thune stood to the side, his blue tie appearing—intentionally or not—like a small declaration of independence. By nightfall, the friction between Trump and Senate Republicans seemed to ease a bit—at least for the moment. The chamber took a symbolic revote of the war-powers resolution and defeated it. Two Republicans flipped their votes; one of them was Cassidy. White House officials pointed to that as a sign of Trump’s continued hold on the GOP.

When we reached out to the White House for comment, the spokesperson Taylor Rogers responded with a list of the president’s accomplishments and added: “President Trump is the leader of the free world, and thanks to his bold leadership, the United States of America has never been stronger.”

In the face of these struggles, Trump has continued to try to create his own reality. He returned to the White House from the Hill for a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Yet even as Rutte lavished him with praise, Trump took the moment to attack some of NATO’s key members for not helping with the Iran war, and he unleashed particular bile on Italy as part of a diplomatic spat that began when the president claimed that its prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit last week. Meloni denied that, which infuriated Trump.

But Trump was far angrier about something closer to home. As part of his expansive effort to remake Washington in his own image, he took on a project to fix up the Reflecting Pool. What he got instead was an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of his presidency: a no-bid contract to a crony that went over budget, ended in failure, and resulted in the pool being policed by federal troops. The pool’s liner has come apart, and the water has turned a brilliant, stubborn green—far from the “American-flag blue” that Trump intended. But rather than take responsibility, Trump has veered into conspiracy theories.

He has, predictably, turned America’s birthday into a commemoration of himself. Plans for a concert on the National Mall to kick off the festivities turned into a pro-Trump rally, and most of the music acts backed out once they realized how partisan the event had become. Trump went ahead anyway, making himself last night’s centerpiece with a few C-listers as his opening acts. But his heart didn’t seem in it as he delivered a short speech that included some nods to the republic’s founding and plenty of grievances. He spoke from behind bulletproof glass, and the crowd was small by Trump’s standards. Social-media footage showed many people leaving while he was still speaking.

Trump, ever attuned to what is trending, posted on social media today that he had a massive crowd and that “everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech.” He did not weigh in on the day’s breaking news from the Middle East: Despite the cease-fire agreement, Iran fired upon a vessel trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which underscored the challenges that lay ahead in negotiations. Try as he might, Trump can’t change the subject.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 26, 2026 6:05 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump’s plan to run a bank

What’s next for the Trump family crypto company? More ways to turn a profit.

By Dustin DeSoto and Sean Rameswaram | June 26, 2026, 6:00 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/493284/trump-witkoff-crypto-bank-world-li
berty-financial-uae

In the almost year and a half since returning to the presidency, Donald Trump has found plenty of ways to enrich himself and his family and friends. But one scheme in particular, a cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial, is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Trump, along with his real-estate-buddy-turned-diplomat Steve Witkoff and both his and Witkoff’s sons, launched World Liberty a few months before the 2024 election.

Then, earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family had acquired a 49 percent stake in the company just days before Trump was inaugurated, netting the Trump family at least $187 million.

Now, World Liberty is on the verge of being approved for a national trust bank charter, NOTUS reported last week. If it goes through, the company would be able to issue its USD1 “stablecoin” — a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar — more freely, without having to go through a cryptocurrency exchange. And, of course, the Trump family would receive a cut through transaction fees.

In addition to the straightforward potential for presidential self-enrichment, critics argue that the charter application itself is a conflict of interest; the application is being reviewed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, whose leadership is appointed by the president. (Trump has said he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, while Witkoff has divested outright.)

It’s all fairly complex — so to sort through what we know about Trump’s crypto enterprise and where it could be headed next, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Zach Everson of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. Everson is research director of the group’s Trump Accountability Project.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Zach, you’ve followed the Trump crypto business. What is happening here?

What we’re seeing here is making what happened in [Trump’s] first term look ethical. There are essentially three steps: First, in September 2024, shortly before the election, the Trumps and the Witkoffs launched World Liberty Financial. Second, they came out with two products for World Liberty Financial: a “stablecoin” and a crypto token.

Now what they need is the banking authority so that they can cut down on the fees that they have to pay outside sources, they can increase the fees that they make, and they can also centralize all regulation under the federal government.

What is the Trump stablecoin and who has invested in it?

USD1 is a stablecoin, which is crypto. It means it is backed one-to-one by reserves. Think of it as a bank loan, only going the opposite way. You are giving money to World Liberty Financial. You’re giving US dollars and they’re giving you this virtual currency. And the whole time that they’re sitting on your US dollars, they’re investing them in Treasuries and they are keeping the interest.

In spring of 2025 it was announced that an investment firm backed by the national security adviser of the UAE had purchased $2 billion of these magic beans using US dollars and was investing them in [the crypto exchange] Binance. It went from nothing to all of a sudden being one of the most popular stablecoins out there, by way of the UAE national security adviser directing this money towards them.

That’s a lot of what this banking trust license would allow them to do. Right now, the reserves have to be held someplace else — they can’t hold their own reserves. Similarly, they can’t issue their own [crypto] coin in the United States. It has to be done elsewhere. If this trust gets approved, which we believe it’s going to be soon, that would allow them to essentially collect more fees in direct transactions and take out some middlemen in transactions they already have going on.

Donald Trump has World Liberty Financial, this token, and he’s got this stablecoin. How would this transition into becoming more of a traditional bank?

Public Citizen and other groups have long been concerned about regulatory capture. That’s when the lobbyist or the business interests come into government and they take control of the agency that oversees their former employer.

This is regulatory capture to the extreme, where they’re applying for a banking license from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And that is part of the Treasury, which is under Donald Trump’s administration. So here you have World Liberty Financial to be regulated by an agency of the US government that is under Donald Trump’s control.

And someone who answers to the president of the United States will decide whether his financial firm, World Liberty Financial, gets to have these banking privileges.

Exactly. And another benefit of this that ties into the administration is if this does get approved for this license, it will fall under federal regulators, not state regulators. This puts his World Liberty Financial in the purview of a federal agency, which appears that it would make it a lot harder for states to try to get in there and push back on this.

What are the potential conflicts of interest here?

Everything. Everything. You’ve got an issue where we have a foreign government investing in this. Another firm backed by the UAE’s national security adviser also owns 49 percent of World Liberty Financial, something the American people didn’t find out about until a year after it took place. We heard a lot in the first term about foreign emoluments. There were all sorts of concerns about foreign governments buying rooms and drinks at his hotel holding banquets.

Here, you’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars going to Donald Trump and his business partners right before he became president. So if you have concerns, as the Constitution does, about the United States president accepting payments from foreign powers, this one seems to be a massive one.

Is there something to “Trump has this long history of grift,” where people just look the other way at this massive grift?

When he first came in and had that DC hotel and the golf clubs, I thought people were like, well, it’s Donald Trump. Of course he’s going to do this sort of stuff. I think that’s the advantage that Donald Trump has long had is that people have known him for decades. And he’s always been like this. So what are you expecting?

According to Forbes, Eric Trump’s net worth has shot up from $40 million before his dad was elected to $400 million. Donald Trump, Jr. went from $50 million to $300 million. Barron Trump? College student? He’s doing all right. He’s worth about $150 million. These are massive amounts of money. And a lot of that has come through World Liberty Financial.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 26, 2026 6:31 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


and just then she found her 'concerns' the same MSNBC Host who laughed at Republicans attacked, Laughs as She Reports Trump Headed To Jail, mocked Trump getting shot, laughed at violence from the Left on the Rightwings, Schmidt has been inside the machine works for MSNBC and NBC News as a national security contributor, Nicole Wallace a Socialist propagandist and a self-described LGBT fanatic and "Fauci groupie".

she Hates Trump but is concerned about Buttigieg


,




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Friday, June 26, 2026 6:33 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


the divide will continue...media says you must pick your fanatical political teams

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Saturday, June 27, 2026 12:33 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The 13 Steps of a Trump Fiasco

The Reflecting Pool drama says everything about how the administration operates.

By Charlie Warzel | June 26, 2026, 3:31 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/reflecting-pool-america
-250-trump/687716/

If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it’s like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom’s Met Office.

Or, closer to home for Americans: Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America’s 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation’s capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.

This is the kind of stuff that AI might spit out if you offered a chatbot a lazy prompt for political satire. The shambolic spectacle has captivated the nation, despite the fact that the Obama administration spent $34 million and 18 months renovating the pool with mixed results. The fallout has reached New York Times push-alert status and become grist for the meme and culture-war mills online. Moreover, Poolgate seems to be bothering Trump more than past fiascoes, which is notable given that he’s particularly embattled at the moment and staring down a defeat in Iran, low poll numbers, and a poor outlook for the midterms. He can’t stop posting about the ordeal on Truth Social, accusing unnamed saboteurs of vandalism. At the White House’s Great American State Fair on Wednesday night, part of the Freedom 250 celebrations, he ranted about the pool.

Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle is, by definition, a national embarrassment. But America is no stranger to self-inflicted humiliation these days. (See: Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Qatar’s gift of a luxury jet to Trump.) Why, then, is Trump crashing out so hard about the Reflecting Pool? Why does it stand out as the enduring metaphor for an incompetent administration that can’t stop providing enduring metaphors of its own incompetence?

Some reasons are obvious. As my colleague Jonathan Chait notes, uncontrolled algae blooms at the Lincoln Memorial are lower stakes and, frankly, much funnier than, say, a war, a self-dealing cryptocurrency scheme, or the destruction of a wing of the White House. (One photo in particular gets me: Four men in camo waders are in the pool. Water, the color of fresh Mountain Dew, laps at their thighs as they dredge the bottom with poles like cranberry farmers on a faraway radioactive planet.) Lately, the saga has taken a more serious turn: The National Park Service alleges that the liner of the pool was cut with a sharp knife or razor earlier this month, causing damage to the pool’s foam sealant. Trump has claimed that at least six people have been arrested and seven people have been cited for damaging the pool, and a spokesperson from the Interior Department reiterated to me today that “there have been seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed.” According to a report yesterday by MS Now, public records show that only David Hearn, a former Olympic canoer, was arrested. (Hearn has said he was touching a floating piece of paint that had peeled off the pool.)

The spectacle has also been straightforwardly ridiculous, such as when Park Service workers were photographed dumping gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide into the pool one at a time to quell the algae. But Poolgate is something more—a textbook example of how the Trump administration operates. It’s a way that one can explore the anatomy of Trump debacles, which tend to unfold in a (roughly) 13-step process. The Reflecting Pool drama is not all the way through this process yet, but I’d bet good money we’ll get there. It goes as follows:

1. Devise unnecessary spectacle.

The Reflecting Pool—one of the National Mall’s best-known landmarks—is a big, obvious American symbol, and Donald Trump loves big, obvious symbols. Politics and policy are hard. Wars are even harder. But symbols are a layup. Drain that pool, slap some paint on it—be sure to give it a symbolic name: American-flag blue—and boom, you’ve made America great yet again. Extra points if President Obama made a similar move before you and you can claim you’ll do it cheaper, faster, and better. On paper, it looks perfect.

2. Disregard expertise.

According to CNN, in March, the administration reached out to Sika Corporation, the group that provided the concrete and sealing products for the 2010 renovation. The administration stipulated an intense timeline to make the 250th anniversary and that the pool had to be painted blue. Sika said the project was “unfeasible.”

3. Bypass normal procedures.

As The New York Times reported, Trump “handpicked” Atlantic Industrial Coatings for the renovation, giving the company what eventually became a $14.7 million no-bid contract by invoking an exemption “meant for urgent situations.” Trump later alleged he did not know the firm. An Interior Department spokesperson told me, “The contracts and pricing reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project—more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”

4. Declare victory too early (bonus if done by AI-slop post).

On May 1, Trump posted an image on Truth Social of himself and other Cabinet members shirtless and swimming in the Reflecting Pool.

5. Spend way more than estimated.

“I have a guy who is unbelievable doing swimming pools up the road,” Trump said at the outset of the project. His initial estimate for the price tag was $1.5 million, which he revised the next day to $2 million. He estimated the renovation would last “30, 40, 50 years.” So far the project has cost an estimated $16.4 million.

6. Ignore the haters.

On June 3, as the project was coming in over budget, Trump invited press to the Oval Office to display a piece of poster board that extolled the pool’s size. The caption read, Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.

7. Realize it is not going well.

Algae bloom. Send in the hydrogen-peroxide brigade.

8. Bypass normal procedures once again.

As The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold reported, “The National Park Service bypassed the competitive-bidding process that is typically required” and instead gave a no-bid contract to Greenwater Services to install a filtration system to help with the algae. During construction Trump instructed the presidential motorcade to drive through the drained pool, shortly after the coating was applied, which has raised questions about whether the drive might have damaged the pool.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told me over email that the Greenwater contract, “was awarded by the Department of Interior” and that “the White House did not play any role in the selection process.” She called the notion that the motorcade affected the pool “dumb and unfounded.” (In all my dealings with the current administration, never before have its spokespeople been as responsive to or seemingly concerned about my impending article.)

9. Allege conspiracy and sabotage.

On Monday, Trump met with reporters and alleged that vandals put fertilizer in the water of the pool as well as cut the seal: “I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up.”

10. Re-declare victory.

Trump said on Wednesday that the pool “looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” Rogers told me that the pool is now “crystal clear and reflecting perfectly.” The pool is currently cordoned off by fences and protected by the National Guard.

These recurrent steps extend beyond Trump into the broader MAGA coalition. Recently, Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, an organization that tracks online extremism, used a generative-AI research tool to spot patterns in posts about the Reflecting Pool by right-wing accounts on a selection of right-wing social-media platforms such as Truth Social. The tool broke down more than 2,500 posts into three buckets:

Phase 1: Triumph and Restoration

Phase 2: Defending the Project

Phase 3: Sabotage and Culture War

“For the MAGA faithful, Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool was supposed to be a shining example of his efforts to restore America from its decaying state,” Holt told me. “When it became clear the renovation had been a disaster, MAGA influencers shifted their talking points to instead portray the situation as being emblematic of their critics’ depravity and derangement.” The pattern, Holt noted, is similar to how the MAGA media system responded to the ICE killings in Minnesota earlier this year, or how it has tried to spin the war in Iran. “The primary function of this media ecosystem is to hype up and pacify Trump’s base. And these days, as public support for the administration craters, it’s doing a lot more of the latter.”

This leaves three steps to come in the future. If patterns hold, we should expect

11. More blaming (one contractor told Politico the repairs to the lining will take weeks), followed by

12. Losing interest. And then, of course, the most important one of all. The foundation upon which every Trump debacle is built. The perpetual-motion device of a petulant president:

13. Pretend it never happened, and move on to the next thing.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 27, 2026 12:45 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Keep talking about the Reflecting Pool, loser.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=67619

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
CN-Fucking-N: Takeaways: Supreme Court hands Trump massive wins on immigration agenda

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/takeaways-supreme-court-hands-tru
mp-massive-wins-on-immigration-agenda/ar-AA26xZqV

You hear that? Straight from CNN.... MASSIVE.

And that is now SET IN STONE, BABY!


How long have I been predicting all of this now, losers? I know it was probably after the 2024 Election, but I can't be sure about that.

Stay Tuned.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY more incoming.





You lose again. You will always lose. You are losers.



Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... Hey... That reminds me...


Haven't really been keeping up on politics for 2 or 3 days, and I was just wondering if we ever got that whole Reflecting Pool thing sorted out yet, or what?

That Trump is a big fucking idiot, huh losers?




Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... And enjoy your Democratic Socialist picks that are going to destroy the city and state of New York.

You were warned.

Now suffer the consequences.


--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 30, 2026 9:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Keep talking about the Reflecting Pool, loser.
Trump knows his Trumptards can't remember the previous scandals. There is a new one every week, forcing the older scandals out of memory.

A Watergate Every Week

J. D. Vance contends that the scandal would be “a 12-hour news story” today. He’s probably correct, but the lesson isn’t what he claims.

By David A. Graham | June 29, 2026, 7:01 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/vance-watergate-news-c
ycle-comments/687742/

Back in 2016, before he converted to the MAGA cause, J. D. Vance was deeply wary of Donald Trump. He wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

For most people, “cynical asshole” would seem pejorative, but perhaps Vance meant it as something to aspire to. Late last week, the vice president visited the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, California, and quipped, “Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like J.D. Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

Vance went on to suggest that the scandal that toppled Nixon was no big deal, and that the 37th president was a victim of nefarious forces. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

Vance is correct about how Watergate would’ve landed today, but the lesson is not what he claims. Since 1974, Americans have become pessimistic about their leaders, deeply polarized in their partisanship, and distrustful of the media—all of which means that Watergate very well might pass quickly in today’s environment. The best evidence is that the Trump administration weathers scandals on the Watergate level routinely. As Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote of Vance’s remark, “‘We do a Watergate twice a day’ is a crazy way to confess your own corruption.”

Vance, who has previously admitted to making up stories for political purposes, also offered a bogus history of what happened in Watergate: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.” (As the journalist Ed Kilgore notes, the same revisionism has been peddled by the Vance-allied propagandist Christopher Rufo.)

Once again, Vance is right to draw a comparison but takes the wrong lesson. Trump’s first impeachment, for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine in the 2020 election, and Nixon’s downfall share two important things: First, both men did what they were accused of, though both insisted that their actions had been fine. (Trump: “a perfect conversation.” Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”) Second, the most damning evidence against both of them came not from “deep state” bureaucrats but from their own appointed political aides. The question of accountability is where the stories start to differ: Nixon was forced to resign by Republicans dismayed by his behavior; today, lockstep partisanship means that many GOP members of Congress pulled their punches in Trump’s two impeachment trials. Now Trump, like Nixon before him, is using the muscle of the federal government to bully and persecute his political adversaries.

More than one year ago, my colleague Anne Applebaum described the Trump administration as the most corrupt in American history, and the headlines routinely provide attestation. Over the weekend, for example, The New York Times reported on how Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick struck a deal with the Kazakh government to give an American company access to Kazakh tungsten deposits, and to provide $1.6 billion in financing; the sons of both Trump and Lutnick now stand to profit from business arrangements based on the deal. A week before this, the Times reported that the administration killed an investigation into how a convicted fraudster had obtained clemency from the president—only one of many cases of what look like pay-to-play commutations and pardons.

The Wall Street Journal recently delved into how the billionaire Larry Ellison’s roughly $45 million donation to a Trump-supporting nonprofit in the 2024 election helped facilitate his son David’s acquisition of Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, which he has moved to make a media ally of the White House, and pending acquisition of CNN. (A Paramount spokesperson told the Journal that the company had made no commitments to any government body about coverage.) The Washington Post reported earlier this month that more than half of the publicly identified donors to Trump’s intended White House ballroom have won new or larger federal contracts in recent months—totaling more than $50 billion. The president is aiming to host a major international conference at his own property—a step scandalous enough that he was forced to back down by Republicans when he tried it during his first term. No wonder the FBI has dissolved its public-corruption unit.

This is not an exhaustive list, even for the past few weeks, which is part of the point: Watergate shocked the conscience because it was so rare to have such a fetid scandal break into view. But by following Steve Bannon’s maxim to “flood the zone with shit,” Trump has avoided the monthslong drip-drip of Watergate revelations, overwhelmed the press, and desensitized the public. Hardly anyone can maintain a mental list of all the improprieties.

Ironically, Watergate paved the way for this. It was not the first instance of awful behavior by a president, but it led to a new era of close scrutiny of politicians, which turned up many scandals. This in turn numbed the public to any individual example, even as it deepened their dim impression of politicians as a whole. If it’s true that Watergate wouldn’t make a dent today, that is a reason to lament the fallen state of politics, not to conclude that Watergate was just fine.

This would be a powerful argument coming from the vice president, who has worried about what he sees as insufficient morality in American society and has said that his role is “to try to apply moral principles in ways that get the best outcomes.” Instead, Vance has concluded that his best chance at political advancement is to hitch himself to the corrupt and unethical Trump. Such cynicism would do Nixon proud.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 30, 2026 2:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Supreme Court just came one vote away from a constitutional catastrophe

The 5-4 vote in the birthright citizenship case is a warning that all of US law is in terrible danger.

By Ian Millhiser | Jun 30, 2026, 12:00 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/culture/493694/supreme-court-birthright-citizenshi
p-trump-barbara

No question in US law is clearly or more firmly settled than the question of whether people born in the United States are citizens of this country. The Fourteenth Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

“All persons” means all persons. And, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed on Tuesday, the amendment’s limited exception for people not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States refers only to the small subset of people, like the children of ambassadors, who are not bound by US law at all.

And yet, the decision upholding birthright citizenship, known as Trump v. Barbara, was only 5 to 4, a shocking near-miss that leaves the door open to further challenges if future appointees pull the Supreme Court further to the right.

While Justice Brett Kavanaugh made the extraordinary claim that the Constitution’s meaning has changed because “significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868,” he ultimately concluded that a federal statute prevents Trump from canceling people’s citizenship. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf

Still, that’s four votes against reading the Constitution according to its unambiguous text. And it’s four votes for overruling a Supreme Court opinion that’s been on the books since the 19th century.

Barbara is the most alarming decision that the Court has handed down since it declared that Trump is allowed to commit crimes in 2024. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

And, if not for the Trump immunity decision, the dissenting justices’ opinions in Barbara would be the gravest judicial attack on the rule of law since the Court upheld Japanese internment in Korematsu v. United States (1944). https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/323us214

And that means that, if Donald Trump gets to replace just one member of the Barbara majority, the United States enters a very dark place.

The majority opinion in Barbara is a straightforward application of existing law

When Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who was the first judge to block President Donald Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship from many Americans born in this country, announced that decision, he said that he’s “been on the bench for over four decades” and he “can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”

It’s not just that the Constitution is clear. The Supreme Court also held more than a century ago, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), that the Constitution means what it says. The question in Barbara, which was whether Trump can simply cancel the citizenship of people born in the US, may be the easiest question that has reached the justices in anyone’s lifetime.

The majority opinion in Barbara was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all three of his Democratic colleagues, plus Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is fairly short, clocking in at 26 pages, and it faithfully recites this orthodox view of the Fourteenth Amendment and its history.

As Roberts explains, early US citizenship rules derived from the English common law, which held that children born within the King’s “dominions” were “natural-born subject[s]” of that King and thus were citizens. This rule prevailed in the United States until the Supreme Court’s “odious decision” in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) held that “all those descended from slaves” were not citizens.

The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in large part to overrule Dred Scott and to restore the English rule. And what of the amendment’s exception for persons not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Roberts explains that this means that any “child born on American soil and subject to American law was made an American citizen.”

All of this merely summarizes the same conclusion the Court reached nearly 130 years ago in Wong Kim Ark, which held that a man born to Chinese citizens on US soil was a citizen of the United States. Wong Kim Ark also laid out the modern understanding of the words “subject to the jurisdiction.”

In modern America, this category includes children of foreign diplomats who enjoy diplomatic immunity from US law, as well as the children of soldiers in invading armies. When Wong Kim Ark was decided, it also included many Native Americans — on the theory that these individuals were citizens of their tribal nation and thus a degree removed from US law — although a 1924 law established that tribal citizens are also US citizens.

So that’s what the law has been since the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and it’s how the Supreme Court has understood the law since at least 1898. And, despite Kavanaugh’s claim that an uptick in immigration has changed the meaning of the Constitution, nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment has changed since then.

So how did this case wind up with a dissent?

While Kavanaugh makes the idiosyncratic claim that the Constitution’s meaning can change depending on how many people immigrate to US soil, the primary dissent, which is authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, relies largely on a theory first advanced by (and later abandoned by) white supremacists in the years prior to Wong Kim Ark.

Briefly, Thomas claims that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship provision applies only to the children of people who are “domiciled” in the US and not to the children of “temporary visitors.” This theory has no basis in the text of the Constitution, which, again, refers to “jurisdiction” and not domicile.

Notably, however, this claim that domicile — a legal term which refers to the intention to remain indefinitely in a particular place — controls citizenship does have an historical pedigree. It is also featured heavily in Trump’s briefs attempting to justify his attempt to cancel people’s citizenship. (Justice Neil Gorsuch, for what it’s worth, joins Thomas’s opinion but also suggests that “children born in this country to parents who make their permanent home here” are citizens, which could include children of undocumented immigrants. That attempt to carve out just these children also has no basis in the Constitution’s text.)

In an 1881 book that Trump’s lawyers quote in their brief, the white supremacist lawyer Alexander Porter Morse — the same lawyer who would go on to successfully argue in favor of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) — claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment should be read to deny citizenship to “children of foreigners transiently within the United States.”

Interestingly, Morse appears to have abandoned this theory of the Fourteenth Amendment in a speech he gave to the American Bar Association just three years after the publication of his 1881 treatise. In the three intervening years, courts largely rejected Morse’s reading of the amendment, so Morse moved on to other arguments that were more likely to persuade judges. (Those new arguments, of course, did not persuade the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark.)

So here we are today, with several justices arguing that the Constitution has been misinterpreted for the last 130 years and that the correct reading is one that white supremacists briefly embraced in the 1880s and then abandoned once they proved unpersuasive to 19th century judges.

A justice who would prefer the discarded views of a long-dead white supremacist is one hell of a chaos agent to add to the Supreme Court. But now we have several of them, plus Kavanaugh, who apparently believes that constitutional rights can simply disappear if too many immigrants show up.

The one silver lining in all of this is that, for now, there is a five justice majority for the proposition that the Constitution means what it says. But, if Trump gets to replace just one member of that majority, every provision of the Constitution is potentially in danger.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 30, 2026 5:49 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Trump Vibe Shift Was Just a Mirage

The Vibe Has Shifted Back

By David Wallace-Wells | June 29, 2026

Remember the vibe shift? In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.

A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.

It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country.

The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.

But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.

Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.

Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading.

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2026/06/29/the-maga-vibe-shift-was-co
njured-up-by-self-aggrandizing-republicans-and-self-lacerating-liberals/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 1, 2026 3:01 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Your life is so pathetic.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, July 2, 2026 5:46 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Why Are US Weather Forecasts So Inaccurate Lately?

Because Trump and Elon Musk fired the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

By Ellyn Lapointe | June 30, 2026, 11:30 am ET

https://gizmodo.com/heres-why-weather-forecasts-have-seemed-so-inaccur
ate-lately-2000779436

Weather forecasting is woke according to Musk.

Besides, the fired employees at NOAA were incompetent scientists, since they had accumulated data showing climate change is real, which most Trumptards know is fake news and a Chinese hoax.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 2, 2026 7:01 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The true cost of Donald Trump's $2.2 billion year | Fortune

Diane Brady | July 2, 2026

https://fortune.com/2026/07/02/donald-trump-billionaire-2-2-billion-we
alth-brand/

Good morning. I sat in Donald Trump’s office years ago, watching him cover a table with paper after paper on various buildings bearing his name. Trump wanted to prove that he was a billionaire, contrary to the allegations of writer Tim O’Brien, whom he was suing for suggesting otherwise. (The suit was ultimately dismissed.) He pointed to the stack of papers, the number of products bearing his name, the pink Italian marble in the lobby, the finer details of his office. He even showed me his watch. Thousands paid to hear him speak at The Learning Annex, he told me, because they want to be a billionaire like Donald Trump. Being rich wasn’t just part of his brand. It was his brand. This was a leader who largely measured success by a single metric.

Now, nobody can dispute that Trump is rich. He made more money last year as president than he ever did in a year as CEO. https://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/News+Releases/B8B9EA45F5EB86EC85258E26
00701B77?opendocument

We don’t know how much tax he will pay on the $2.2 billion in earnings, as he is the first U.S. president to refuse to release his tax returns and secured an unprecedented tax immunity deal in exchange for dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump’s sons run the business, control the trust containing his assets, and have launched lucrative new ventures using his name. (His sons and the White House have repeatedly stated there is no conflict of interest.) Trump’s latest 927-page disclosure gives fascinating insights into how the president is getting rich, through crypto ventures and active stock trading, as well as a $77,808 pension from the Screen Actors Guild and a $250,000 sculpture from a longtime CEO supporter.

But everything has a cost. Take the Qatari-gifted Air Force One, which took its inaugural flight yesterday. Trump took the $400 million jet as a gift to taxpayers and then spent at least that much in taxpayer dollars to make it “the world’s most luxurious plane.” Although the gift was deemed legal, multiple polls show voters felt it raised ethical concerns and several prominent Republicans in Congress spoke out against it.

The president’s personal gains cause even more concern. Trump’s investment managers bought and sold company stocks an average of 58 times a day in the first quarter. Some say that’s normal for high-volume, tax-optimized trading. Others are suspicious. The recent disclosure showed 327 individual stock purchases a day before Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, for example, which caused a market rally that he took credit for.

I meet plenty of CEOs who like the Trump administration’s approach to technology, innovation, regulation, taxation, and the overall ethos of making America great. Behind closed doors, though, many say they don’t trust him. Conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly called the family “grifty” in a Sky News interview. Trust in the federal government is at a two-decade low, and that’s according to a Fox News poll. The Pew Research Center did a 36-country survey that found the rest of the world has negative views of Trump and doesn’t think America is a reliable partner.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Lester Crown Professor of Leadership Practice at the Yale School of Management and founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, says the president’s willingness to get rich on the job is undermining his credibility and popularity with his base. The irony is that Trump doesn’t seem to get much joy from his money. “He doesn’t cruise on his yacht. Other than the golf course, there’s no luxury in that man’s life,” says Sonnenfeld. “What he cares about is losing pride and being ridiculed.” For someone who seems to equate being rich with getting respect, money can feel like a familiar friend. As he faces pushback—from Republican colleagues voting to limit executive authority to consumer boycotts—the president isn’t recalibrating but rather doubling down on what he knows. As he told reporters yesterday, “I’m profiting. We’re all profiting. Thank you President Trump!”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, July 4, 2026 7:22 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Bicentennial Memories
It was 50 years ago today

Paul Krugman
Jul 04, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bicentennial-memories

Today is the nation’s 250th anniversary. And it should be a day of celebration.

But it won’t be. America’s 250th birthday will be a grim, glum affair. As far as I can tell, even MAGA enthusiasts are feeling depressed. They certainly aren’t turning out to visit Donald Trump’s sad, shabby state fair.

It’s a huge difference from the bicentennial, which I celebrated in an unusual but deeply memorable way.

You see, I spent the summer of 1976 in Portugal, which had had its own revolution (the Carnation Revolution) just two years earlier. That revolution overthrew the nation’s fascist dictatorship and created what has proved an enduring democracy.

I was there as part of a group of MIT graduate students working at the Banco de Portugal — the country’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve. And I spent the 4th at a picnic in a Lisbon park, thrown by the U.S. embassy.

It was a small affair. These days Lisbon is overrun with American tourists and expats, but back then there were very few of us around. Even the U.S. government had relatively few people there, because it was trying to keep a low profile in the face of widespread anti-Americanism: Many Portuguese at the time were still talking about how the U.S. had helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Chile three years earlier. There were graffiti around Lisbon saying “Morte à CIA” — although some of these had had “e ao KGB” added in fresher paint.

So the embassy filled out the picnic by inviting Americans it knew were in Lisbon along with staff from other friendly embassies. I remember chatting with a number of West Germans.

The picnic was a charming affair. We stood around munching hot dogs — God knows how they managed that in the land of salt cod and grilled sardines — and listened as the ambassador read a patriotic message from Gerald Ford. And I remember feeling very good about America.

Furthermore, I wasn’t the only American feeling cheerful at the bicentennial, which was somehow an uplifting occasion.

This sunniness may seem odd, given that the U.S. was troubled in many ways. We had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Our cities were a mess: New York had 1600 murders in 1976, more than 5 times the rate last year, and Times Square was an eyesore of drug addicts and porn shops. Oh, and the city had recently gone bankrupt.

Yet somehow Americans managed to have fun at the bicentennial festivities, and there was a surprising amount of optimism in the air.

One source of optimism was surely the end of the Vietnam War. Yes, it ended in defeat. But it did end, which meant that young Americans and their families no longer had to worry about the draft, and that the nightly news didn’t keep reporting on body counts.

Another source of optimism — something people like JD Vance will never understand — was the fall of Richard Nixon. Satisfaction about how Watergate brought Nixon down wasn’t mainly about partisanship. Instead, the Watergate saga felt like an affirmation of the American spirit. Reporters were heroes and the media did its job. So did Congress. Nobody would call Gerald Ford a great president, but he was clearly a decent human being. The powerful were held accountable. America, it seemed, still retained its soul.

Who would say that now?

On the eve of America’s 250th birthday we had confirmation of presidential corruption on a scale Nixon could never have imagined. That’s bad in itself. What’s worse is that nobody believes that there will be any consequences for Trump, his cronies, and their henchmen. In 1974 Republicans joined with Democrats to hold Nixon accountable. This time around they’re fully invested in magnifying Trump’s power and his cult of personality, despite knowing perfectly well who he is and what he is doing.

I am not giving up hope. America is not irretrievably lost. But now, much more than 50 years ago, we are a nation in desperate need of redemption.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, July 6, 2026 7:23 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Pump and Dump and Trump
It's much bigger than the memecoin
Paul Krugman
Jul 06, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/pump-and-dump-and-trump

Donald Trump has distinguished himself in many ways. One of them is that he is our first pump and dump president.

Hi, Paul Krugman here. A podcast today rather than a full-on piece: I’m a little exhausted from number-crunching over the weekend. So I thought I’d talk briefly about the really extraordinary financial picture that we’re seeing under the current administration.

Obviously no president has enriched himself from office the way that Trump has. That’s common knowledge. One of the things that is really amazing about it, however, is the way in which he enriched himself — a lot of which has to do with crypto.

So the New York Times had a report just the other day on Trumpcoin, the memecoin issued on Trump’s behalf which got a lot of buyers, a lot of money came flowing into it.

It should have been obvious from the beginning that the coin was inherently worthless, and at this point it essentially is worthless. It has lost 97 percent of its value. But a lot of people did buy in at the high prices.

What was special about the New York Times story was two things. First, they put a number on how much money naive investors have lost on the coin, which is 3.8 billion dollars. And even more surprising is the number of people who were in effect suckers here — almost a million.

That’s really amazing. I mean, I was completely cynical but I didn’t think there were that many suckers out there. But it turns out there were really a lot. A few people made money off the coin — basically insiders who got to buy it early and then were able to cash in before the broader retail market realized that this was a worthless token. There’s another token, the World Liberty Financial coin — which has also crashed, although the Times had difficulty in tracking down how many people have lost how much money. There’s the Melania coin.

Okay, all of this is amazing. As Trump would say, it’s like nothing anybody’s ever seen before. I think we should say, however, that this is a bigger story than just the Trump coin, and it’s a bigger story than just Trump himself.

What we’re witnessing is or has been a really enormous pump and dump scheme, I would argue, involving more or less all of crypto.

So if you don’t know the background, Trump used to be highly critical of cryptocurrency, saying it was worthless and a scam, which was true. But then when it became clear that there was money in it for him, he reversed course. And during the 2024 election, crypto interests contributed a lot of money to Trump. They then after the election poured a lot of money into his own enrichment, into his own projects. And the administration came in with a very pro crypto stance: deregulation encouraging uses of crypto, at least talk about a national bitcoin reserve, all of that. And the price of bitcoin doubled after the election; the valuation, the market cap of cryptocurrency in general went from a little over two trillion to more than four trillion.

And then starting last fall it all came crashing down. Not all the way to zero — the price of Bitcoin right now as I record this is about what it was on the eve of the 2024 election; it’s about half what it was at its peak. That’s also true, roughly speaking for the market cap. So we’ve seen about two trillion dollars of market valuation wiped out.

Why is this a pump and dump story? Well what is cryptocurrency good for? As you know, I’ve been on this for a long time. Bitcoin was introduced in 2009 — this is a seventeen year old idea which has yet to find any legitimate use cases. Illegitimate use cases, yes. There was also a report in the Wall Street Journal about the extent to which Iran and North Korea have been making use of cryptocurrency to evade U.S. sanctions, so there is that. But it’s still not enough to justify a multi-trillion dollar asset.

Anyway, it was trendy, it was exciting, it was fashionable and particularly after November 2024 it was pushed with the encouragement of the Trump Administration. It was just a heavy marketing campaign that had the advantage of also having the authority or whatever, the credibility — such as it was but among some people real —of Donald Trump behind it. They all evaporated.

I think we can say that to some extent what happened was that Trump kind of moved on to other things. There also is some distracted boyfriend meme: the guy looking over his shoulder. A lot of the excitable, fear of missing out, latest thing money has probably moved from crypto to AI. So that might have happened even without Trump. But the basic story is that Trump guided, pushed people into a whole asset class, crypto, of which a large part is Bitcoin, but other stuff as well.

We don’t know how much, or I don’t know, how much crypto was bought during this period, but it has to be substantial. And then it crashed. And at this point, essentially anybody who bought crypto during this era, since the 2024 election, has lost money.

It’s a lot of money; we know that on paper — it’s not really paper, but anyway — in principle two trillion dollars has been lost in crypto. Now a lot of that is probably money just given back, imaginary gains that took place during the run-up. But a substantial amount of additional money was from people who did buy in during this whole episode. So this has to be many times the size of the losses on the Trump coin. And it is, I would say, at a functional level another pump and dump scheme.

In this case the beneficiaries were people who were already in crypto. Clearly some of the crypto interests that bought themselves a president probably stayed fully invested. But others must have cashed out, and a lot of innocents — well a lot of a lot of suckers, let’s not mince words here — a lot of suckers clearly lost a lot of money.

It’s an extraordinary thing. There have been pump and dump schemes forever, probably going back to the Phoenicians or something. But this is on a scale we’ve never seen, and with the president of the United States in the center of it. Which I guess given everything else comes as no surprise.

Happy 250th birthday, America.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, July 6, 2026 12:19 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


BREAKING: DOGE has officially been shut down after failing to accomplish its goal. Analysts have found that DOGE actually increased the deficit.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has officially reached its termination date as set out in its original executive order. While it was chartered to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, reports from groups like the Partnership for Public Service estimate that the initiative left an $11 billion gap in the budget and cost taxpayers more than $100 billion in lost productivity, litigation, and rehiring. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/doge-website-deactivates-after-re
aching-self-termination-deadline-come-end

Details regarding the shutdown and its financial impacts include:

• Official Closure: The temporary DOGE organization self-deleted on July 4, 2026, marking the end of its 18-month charter. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/04/doge-july-4-white-house-end-0
0983651

• Fiscal Deficit: Analysts point out that DOGE's cuts to agencies—such as the Internal Revenue Service—resulted in a loss of federal revenue that exceeded the savings achieved by terminating contracts or firing personnel. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-didn-t-doge-staffer-202924948.html

• Exaggerated Savings: An investigation by CBS News estimated that DOGE's reported savings were sometimes exaggerated by up to 97%, with some cuts actually costing the government more due to efficiency losses, paid leave, and rehire cycles.



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, July 6, 2026 12:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


What a fucking loser.

You posted these two stupid articles in the tags, in my "Today in the Tags" thread, and here.

Go fuck yourself, second. You goddamned good for nothing little prick.

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, July 6, 2026 2:04 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


‘I’m Now Broke’: Meet The Investors Who Lost Billions Buying Trump Stocks And Crypto

Even though Trump-tied investments have crumbled in the public markets, the first family is still doing quite well. There's plenty more they can salvage, too.

By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor.
Dan Alexander covers Trump’s business.

Jul 06, 2026, 06:30am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2026/07/06/im-now-broke-meet
-the-investors-who-lost-billions-buying-trump-stocks-and-crypto/

Desperate to rebuild his fortune, Donald Trump asked his political supporters to become his business partners. Those who trusted him most got hurt the worst.

Vadim Fistikan started working at 17 and built the kind of savings that usually takes years of overtime, delayed purchases and adult restraint: more than $100,000 by the time he hit his late twenties. In 2021, the Washington State truck driver eyed a house near family in Florida, with a pool and a waterway that led to a river, and then the ocean. “We were thinking about pulling the trigger,” he says. “Then I saw this whole Trump thing going on.”

This Trump thing was the Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. In October 2021, the president unveiled the business, promising a censorship-free platform and giving supporters a chance to invest via a special purpose acquisition company. Shares of the SPAC jumped 1,650% in two days, then fell about 30% by the start of the third. To Fistikan, that looked less like a warning than a discount. “I’m like, ‘I’m getting in,’” says the three-time Trump voter who added to his bet until it hit $205,000.

That investment is now worth $30,000.

Fistikan logged onto Truth Social last fall to voice his frustrations. “I’m like, ‘Hey, this is a scam,’” he says. “And a lot of people were like, ‘No, you’re just a Trump hater.’ I’m like, ‘No. I was on board since day one. … I’m now broke.”

He’s not alone. Katherine Chiles, the SPAC’s former chief financial officer, now uses her Truth Social account to promote a song accusing the president of selling out his supporters—“Donald Trump is a b----.” Chad Nedohin, a worship leader who once moonlighted as the unofficial captain of Trump Media’s retail shareholders, now describes the company as a vehicle for enriching the president and his inner circle. “We’re just poor cattle to them,” Nedohin says. “He doesn’t care about anyone.”

Throughout the president’s life, his most remarkable creations—whether casinos in Atlantic City, public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange or political movements across America—all relied on one thing: believers. In 2021, Trump left the White House with an abundance of them—and quickly got to work monetizing. To do so, he followed a process with three distinct stages. First, the invention: come up with a business concept, invest almost nothing, take a big chunk of equity. Second, the sale: stir up a frenzy among the faithful, cash out what you can. Third, the mess: watch the assets collapse, salvage the scraps. From 2021 to 2025, five Trump-family ventures reached public investors: Trump Media, World Liberty Financial, Trump’s memecoin, Melania Trump’s memecoin and American Bitcoin.

Now, they are all hitting the messy stage. Trump Media shares are down 89% from their peak. World Liberty tokens have fallen 82%. The president’s memecoin is off 98%. Melania’s version has dropped 99%. Shares of American Bitcoin are down 95%. The Trumps, after cashing out $1.9 billion, are still up $3.1 billion overall, according to Forbes calculations. Their supporters are down an estimated $7 billion.

Representatives of the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did spokespeople for Trump Media, which sued Forbes and other publications over allegedly inaccurate reporting about losses during the company’s first year of operation. The White House ignored questions about the president’s moneymaking ventures, issuing a statement on his policies instead. “President Trump cares deeply about the patriotic Americans who elected him to office and fights for them daily,” said deputy press secretary Anna Kelly.

The human cost of all this lies in accounts like Fistikan’s. He didn’t just buy a stock. He bought a story, that Trump views his supporters as partners rather than tools. “Pretty much my whole life savings [was] in this one stock,” says Fistikan. “This is the greatest theft, con job he has ever done.”

Nick Pinto was sitting inside Champions, the wood-heavy, leather-laden restaurant at Trump’s Miami golf resort, in January 2025 when a Robinhood notification lit up his phone: Trump had launched a memecoin.

Pinto, 26, makes most of his money creating videos for social-media platforms. His due diligence consisted of Googling around and hopping on X. “I was like, ‘Oh, let me buy some of this—never know what’s going to happen.” He initially invested $7,000.

Pinto was part of a frenzy that delivered the first family an extraordinary windfall as Trump returned to the White House. The roots of it lay in World Liberty Financial, the crypto project the president had launched the previous September. Billionaire Justin Sun, facing allegations from the Securities and Exchanges Commission, invested $45 million in its token after Trump won the election, then put another $100 million into the president’s memecoin. Melania Trump added a coin of her own. The three tokens traded furiously as Trump ascended to the throne, throwing off hundreds of millions in cash.

Then the president added a perk: dinner at his Virginia club for the top 220 memecoin investors.

“I went crazy,” says Pinto, who upped his bet to $480,000, allocating about 60% of his entire investment portfolio to the memecoin. That was enough to get him into the dinner, a scene both surreal and shoddy. Pinto says it felt like a wedding, with mediocre food and poor service. “They didn’t even give me soda—all I had was water.”

Another attendee remembers offering a cigarette to former NBA player Lamar Odom, who took a FaceTime call while they were standing outside. “I’m with these crypto kids!” Odom told his caller, Khloe Kardashian.

The memecoin slid downward after the event and never really recovered, losing two-thirds of its value by the end of the year. It was around that time that one of Pinto’s friends, who had also attended the dinner, convinced him to turn on the coin.

“This is something that the Trump family kind of came up with out of the blue,” Pinto says his friend told him, “and there’s not really a way for us to predict the future of the coin or what their plans for it are.”

Convinced, Pinto ditched 75% of his position, locking in roughly $250,000 in losses. He held onto the rest in case something wild happened.

Something did. In April, Trump hosted another event, this one at Mar-a-Lago. Attendees received goodie bags with Trump trading cards, statuettes of the president filled with cologne and Trump watches. “I almost didn’t get one because people kept stealing mine,” says Pinto, who recalls one attendee slipping out with six bags. “Mine got swiped, and then I saw a chair that was empty, so I swiped one, too.”

Memecoin Merch

The president hosted two events for his memecoin holders, one at his golf course in Virginia and another at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. Attendees walked away with bags full of Trump-branded tchotchkes.

"I'm trying to convince the president to do this every six months," Trump business partner Bill Zanker said during an event for memecoin holders at Mar-a-Lago in April.

Smells Like Victory

Among the goodies: bottles of cologne, packaged in golden statuettes of Donald Trump that retail for $249 online. “I haven’t used it yet,” says two-time memecoin event attendee Nick Pinto. “I have it for decoration.”

Watch Your Back

Red-faced watches became hot items at the Mar-a-Lago event. Online, the president sold other varieties, including one with pieces of the tie and suit he wore in his mugshot photo at the Fulton County Jail after he was indicted on racketeering and other charges in 2023.

Face Value

Trump trading cards featured words the president shouted after a bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight, Fight, Fight.”

Blackout

Red MAGA hats are old news. Memecoin diners received black caps featuring the president, his signature and the name of his token, $TRUMP.

Some attendees wanted more than trumpery. Before the initial dinner, Huma Finance cofounder Erbil Karaman upped his investment, knowing the White House was considering legislation related to stablecoins, dollar-tracking cryptocurrencies that his company uses to help people move money overseas. Karaman says he did not do any lobbying at the event. Two months later, he accepted an invitation to the White House for a bill signing.

The people who did best with Trump’s memecoin tended to be the ones who cared least about it. Morten Christensen, founder of the crypto site airdropalert.com, bought the coin right after it launched, then ditched it when the hype started to fade a few days later. He says he made about 30 times his money on the trade. To attend Trump’s dinner, he bought and shorted the coin simultaneously, securing a seat for the first event for about $1,200 in fees and a spot at the second for $500.

“The MAGA people, they really believe,” Christensen says. “I'm just here for the profit. I'm in some group chats with believers, and they are really good at ignoring facts or data. … I kind of feel sorry for them.”

Even Justin Sun no longer pretends Trump’s crypto offerings are good investments. In a lawsuit filed in April, he alleged World Liberty pushed him to increase his investment, then froze his assets after he balked. Sun accused World Liberty of defrauding and extorting him. World Liberty said it had the right to freeze Sun’s tokens and countersued for defamation. Sun also alleges that, after World Liberty sent so much money to Trump and other insiders, the venture began taking on risky loans. The man who, more than anyone not named Trump, sold the project to the masses now describes it as “on the verge of collapse.”

How A Capitol Uprising Led To Capital Raising

January 6, 2021

Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol building. Twitter boots Trump, giving him a story to sell. Amazon drops web hosting for Parler, a right-wing social-media network, creating a void in the market.

January 27, 2021

One week after leaving office, Trump meets with two former Apprentice contestants at Mar-a-Lago to discuss creating a media and technology empire.

October 20, 2021

The president reveals the Trump Media and Technology Group, a social-media company that aims to create a Trump-friendly ecosystem online, starting with a Twitter clone named Truth Social.

October 22, 2021

Shares of Digital World, the special-purpose acquisition company planning to take Trump Media public, hit an all-time high of $175, implying that Trump’s barely-in-existence venture is worth more than $25 billion.

March 25, 2024

After years of holdups, Trump Media finally merges with Digital World, becoming a publicly traded company. Shares jump 59% the next day.

September 30, 2024

In the final stretch of his presidential campaign, Trump delivers an announcement: “I promised to Make America Great Again, this time with crypto,” he writes on Truth Social. “#WorldLibertyFi is planning to help make America the crypto capital of the world!” The project struggles to gain traction.

November 5, 2024

Trump defeats Kamala Harris, becoming the first president to win nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892.

November 25, 2024

Crypto billionaire Justin Sun, contending with charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission, purchases $30 million of World Liberty tokens, energizing the project, which eventually delivers more than $800 million to Trump.

January 17, 2025

Three days before his inauguration, Trump launches a memecoin. The fine print warns buyers that it is not intended to be an investment. The president’s supporters pile in anyway, sparking a trading frenzy that ultimately provides more than $600 million to the president.

January 19, 2025

Melania Trump announces a memecoin of her own, part of a broader effort to enhance her personal balance sheet. A financial disclosure suggests the token, which has fallen 99% from its high, supplies $6 million to the first lady.

May 12, 2025

American Bitcoin reveals plans to merge with a SPAC. Investors gobble up shares, boosting the price 448%. It has since dropped 96%.

As believers become skeptics, the Trumps are shifting assets in telling ways.

World Liberty, which pitched itself as a vehicle to upend traditional finance, delivered about $850 million to Trump, who has since loaded up on the least exotic asset in finance, municipal bonds. Trump Media, meanwhile, has become less a social-media company than a hoard of bitcoin. It raised $2.4 billion through equity and debt when shares were riding high, then put the proceeds into the cryptocurrency near its peak.

That erased about $1 billion of shareholder capital. It also gave the company an asset that appears to be more enduring than Truth Social, the “free-speech” platform that recently suspended a Forbes reporter who used it to contact shareholders. For a company that promises to give people a voice, Trump Media seems to have a rather narrow view of who should use one.

First sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who manage their fathers’ holdings on a day-to-day basis while he serves as president, have adopted the old man’s playbook for themselves. In March 2025, they struck a deal with a data-center company for 20% of its bitcoin-mining machines, then rebranded the business as American Bitcoin.

What did the data-center company receive in return? A crowd of investors wrapped up in a Trump-tied hype cycle, into which it could dump enough shares to more than make up for the 20% of forfeited equity. The companies announced a deal to go public via SPAC on May 12, 2025, and shares of the SPAC jumped 448%.

Ryan Kenney, a 41-year-old military spouse who studied architecture but now spends much of his time raising two kids, thought he was getting into American Bitcoin early and cheap when he invested $60,000 after prices pulled back the next week. The stock’s value was in its buzz, not the fundamentals. That made the standard meme-stock rallying cries—“Buy the dip!” “Average down!”—especially dangerous. Kenney kept buying, ultimately upping his investment to $98,000. It’s now worth $9,000.

Lately, he has been thinking about others in a similar predicament. And the scale of their losses. “Maybe people didn’t lose as much as I did,” he says, “but that might be hundreds of thousands of Americans all losing five grand.”

Then there is Fistikan, still dreaming of that Florida house. With his savings wiped out, he settled for an overgrown, $18,000 lot, figuring he could build on it. Someday. The Iran war drove diesel prices above $6 in the Pacific Northwest, where he hauls loads, cutting into his earnings.

“I would make the same amount of money if I was flipping burgers,” he says.

Recently, short on cash, Fistikan had to sell something. He could have liquidated his Trump Media shares, which still appear overheated as the company bleeds hundreds of millions of dollars a year while maintaining a market cap more than triple the value of its underlying bitcoin holdings. But Trump-tied investments are not moved chiefly by discounted cash flow. It’s more loyalty and the hope that another rally is just one frenzy away.

So Fistikan sold his F-150 pickup.

That’s the Trump trade in miniature. The dream was a house in Florida near the water. The outcome, for now, is an overgrown lot, a clobbered investment account and just enough cash to stay afloat.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, July 6, 2026 2:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
‘I’m Now Broke’: Meet The Investors Who Lost Billions Buying Trump Stocks And Crypto

Even though Trump-tied investments have crumbled in the public markets, the first family is still doing quite well. There's plenty more they can salvage, too.

By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor.
Dan Alexander covers Trump’s business.

Jul 06, 2026, 06:30am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2026/07/06/im-now-broke-meet
-the-investors-who-lost-billions-buying-trump-stocks-and-crypto/

Desperate to rebuild his fortune, Donald Trump asked his political supporters to become his business partners. Those who trusted him most got hurt the worst.

Vadim Fistikan started working at 17 and built the kind of savings that usually takes years of overtime, delayed purchases and adult restraint: more than $100,000 by the time he hit his late twenties. In 2021, the Washington State truck driver eyed a house near family in Florida, with a pool and a waterway that led to a river, and then the ocean. “We were thinking about pulling the trigger,” he says. “Then I saw this whole Trump thing going on.”

This Trump thing was the Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. In October 2021, the president unveiled the business, promising a censorship-free platform and giving supporters a chance to invest via a special purpose acquisition company. Shares of the SPAC jumped 1,650% in two days, then fell about 30% by the start of the third. To Fistikan, that looked less like a warning than a discount. “I’m like, ‘I’m getting in,’” says the three-time Trump voter who added to his bet until it hit $205,000.

That investment is now worth $30,000.

Fistikan logged onto Truth Social last fall to voice his frustrations. “I’m like, ‘Hey, this is a scam,’” he says. “And a lot of people were like, ‘No, you’re just a Trump hater.’ I’m like, ‘No. I was on board since day one. … I’m now broke.”

He’s not alone. Katherine Chiles, the SPAC’s former chief financial officer, now uses her Truth Social account to promote a song accusing the president of selling out his supporters—“Donald Trump is a b----.” Chad Nedohin, a worship leader who once moonlighted as the unofficial captain of Trump Media’s retail shareholders, now describes the company as a vehicle for enriching the president and his inner circle. “We’re just poor cattle to them,” Nedohin says. “He doesn’t care about anyone.”

Throughout the president’s life, his most remarkable creations—whether casinos in Atlantic City, public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange or political movements across America—all relied on one thing: believers. In 2021, Trump left the White House with an abundance of them—and quickly got to work monetizing. To do so, he followed a process with three distinct stages. First, the invention: come up with a business concept, invest almost nothing, take a big chunk of equity. Second, the sale: stir up a frenzy among the faithful, cash out what you can. Third, the mess: watch the assets collapse, salvage the scraps. From 2021 to 2025, five Trump-family ventures reached public investors: Trump Media, World Liberty Financial, Trump’s memecoin, Melania Trump’s memecoin and American Bitcoin.

Now, they are all hitting the messy stage. Trump Media shares are down 89% from their peak. World Liberty tokens have fallen 82%. The president’s memecoin is off 98%. Melania’s version has dropped 99%. Shares of American Bitcoin are down 95%. The Trumps, after cashing out $1.9 billion, are still up $3.1 billion overall, according to Forbes calculations. Their supporters are down an estimated $7 billion.

Representatives of the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did spokespeople for Trump Media, which sued Forbes and other publications over allegedly inaccurate reporting about losses during the company’s first year of operation. The White House ignored questions about the president’s moneymaking ventures, issuing a statement on his policies instead. “President Trump cares deeply about the patriotic Americans who elected him to office and fights for them daily,” said deputy press secretary Anna Kelly.

The human cost of all this lies in accounts like Fistikan’s. He didn’t just buy a stock. He bought a story, that Trump views his supporters as partners rather than tools. “Pretty much my whole life savings [was] in this one stock,” says Fistikan. “This is the greatest theft, con job he has ever done.”

Nick Pinto was sitting inside Champions, the wood-heavy, leather-laden restaurant at Trump’s Miami golf resort, in January 2025 when a Robinhood notification lit up his phone: Trump had launched a memecoin.

Pinto, 26, makes most of his money creating videos for social-media platforms. His due diligence consisted of Googling around and hopping on X. “I was like, ‘Oh, let me buy some of this—never know what’s going to happen.” He initially invested $7,000.

Pinto was part of a frenzy that delivered the first family an extraordinary windfall as Trump returned to the White House. The roots of it lay in World Liberty Financial, the crypto project the president had launched the previous September. Billionaire Justin Sun, facing allegations from the Securities and Exchanges Commission, invested $45 million in its token after Trump won the election, then put another $100 million into the president’s memecoin. Melania Trump added a coin of her own. The three tokens traded furiously as Trump ascended to the throne, throwing off hundreds of millions in cash.

Then the president added a perk: dinner at his Virginia club for the top 220 memecoin investors.

“I went crazy,” says Pinto, who upped his bet to $480,000, allocating about 60% of his entire investment portfolio to the memecoin. That was enough to get him into the dinner, a scene both surreal and shoddy. Pinto says it felt like a wedding, with mediocre food and poor service. “They didn’t even give me soda—all I had was water.”

Another attendee remembers offering a cigarette to former NBA player Lamar Odom, who took a FaceTime call while they were standing outside. “I’m with these crypto kids!” Odom told his caller, Khloe Kardashian.

The memecoin slid downward after the event and never really recovered, losing two-thirds of its value by the end of the year. It was around that time that one of Pinto’s friends, who had also attended the dinner, convinced him to turn on the coin.

“This is something that the Trump family kind of came up with out of the blue,” Pinto says his friend told him, “and there’s not really a way for us to predict the future of the coin or what their plans for it are.”

Convinced, Pinto ditched 75% of his position, locking in roughly $250,000 in losses. He held onto the rest in case something wild happened.

Something did. In April, Trump hosted another event, this one at Mar-a-Lago. Attendees received goodie bags with Trump trading cards, statuettes of the president filled with cologne and Trump watches. “I almost didn’t get one because people kept stealing mine,” says Pinto, who recalls one attendee slipping out with six bags. “Mine got swiped, and then I saw a chair that was empty, so I swiped one, too.”

Memecoin Merch

The president hosted two events for his memecoin holders, one at his golf course in Virginia and another at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. Attendees walked away with bags full of Trump-branded tchotchkes.

"I'm trying to convince the president to do this every six months," Trump business partner Bill Zanker said during an event for memecoin holders at Mar-a-Lago in April.

Smells Like Victory

Among the goodies: bottles of cologne, packaged in golden statuettes of Donald Trump that retail for $249 online. “I haven’t used it yet,” says two-time memecoin event attendee Nick Pinto. “I have it for decoration.”

Watch Your Back

Red-faced watches became hot items at the Mar-a-Lago event. Online, the president sold other varieties, including one with pieces of the tie and suit he wore in his mugshot photo at the Fulton County Jail after he was indicted on racketeering and other charges in 2023.

Face Value

Trump trading cards featured words the president shouted after a bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight, Fight, Fight.”

Blackout

Red MAGA hats are old news. Memecoin diners received black caps featuring the president, his signature and the name of his token, $TRUMP.

Some attendees wanted more than trumpery. Before the initial dinner, Huma Finance cofounder Erbil Karaman upped his investment, knowing the White House was considering legislation related to stablecoins, dollar-tracking cryptocurrencies that his company uses to help people move money overseas. Karaman says he did not do any lobbying at the event. Two months later, he accepted an invitation to the White House for a bill signing.

The people who did best with Trump’s memecoin tended to be the ones who cared least about it. Morten Christensen, founder of the crypto site airdropalert.com, bought the coin right after it launched, then ditched it when the hype started to fade a few days later. He says he made about 30 times his money on the trade. To attend Trump’s dinner, he bought and shorted the coin simultaneously, securing a seat for the first event for about $1,200 in fees and a spot at the second for $500.

“The MAGA people, they really believe,” Christensen says. “I'm just here for the profit. I'm in some group chats with believers, and they are really good at ignoring facts or data. … I kind of feel sorry for them.”

Even Justin Sun no longer pretends Trump’s crypto offerings are good investments. In a lawsuit filed in April, he alleged World Liberty pushed him to increase his investment, then froze his assets after he balked. Sun accused World Liberty of defrauding and extorting him. World Liberty said it had the right to freeze Sun’s tokens and countersued for defamation. Sun also alleges that, after World Liberty sent so much money to Trump and other insiders, the venture began taking on risky loans. The man who, more than anyone not named Trump, sold the project to the masses now describes it as “on the verge of collapse.”

How A Capitol Uprising Led To Capital Raising

January 6, 2021

Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol building. Twitter boots Trump, giving him a story to sell. Amazon drops web hosting for Parler, a right-wing social-media network, creating a void in the market.

January 27, 2021

One week after leaving office, Trump meets with two former Apprentice contestants at Mar-a-Lago to discuss creating a media and technology empire.

October 20, 2021

The president reveals the Trump Media and Technology Group, a social-media company that aims to create a Trump-friendly ecosystem online, starting with a Twitter clone named Truth Social.

October 22, 2021

Shares of Digital World, the special-purpose acquisition company planning to take Trump Media public, hit an all-time high of $175, implying that Trump’s barely-in-existence venture is worth more than $25 billion.

March 25, 2024

After years of holdups, Trump Media finally merges with Digital World, becoming a publicly traded company. Shares jump 59% the next day.

September 30, 2024

In the final stretch of his presidential campaign, Trump delivers an announcement: “I promised to Make America Great Again, this time with crypto,” he writes on Truth Social. “#WorldLibertyFi is planning to help make America the crypto capital of the world!” The project struggles to gain traction.

November 5, 2024

Trump defeats Kamala Harris, becoming the first president to win nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892.

November 25, 2024

Crypto billionaire Justin Sun, contending with charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission, purchases $30 million of World Liberty tokens, energizing the project, which eventually delivers more than $800 million to Trump.

January 17, 2025

Three days before his inauguration, Trump launches a memecoin. The fine print warns buyers that it is not intended to be an investment. The president’s supporters pile in anyway, sparking a trading frenzy that ultimately provides more than $600 million to the president.

January 19, 2025

Melania Trump announces a memecoin of her own, part of a broader effort to enhance her personal balance sheet. A financial disclosure suggests the token, which has fallen 99% from its high, supplies $6 million to the first lady.

May 12, 2025

American Bitcoin reveals plans to merge with a SPAC. Investors gobble up shares, boosting the price 448%. It has since dropped 96%.

As believers become skeptics, the Trumps are shifting assets in telling ways.

World Liberty, which pitched itself as a vehicle to upend traditional finance, delivered about $850 million to Trump, who has since loaded up on the least exotic asset in finance, municipal bonds. Trump Media, meanwhile, has become less a social-media company than a hoard of bitcoin. It raised $2.4 billion through equity and debt when shares were riding high, then put the proceeds into the cryptocurrency near its peak.

That erased about $1 billion of shareholder capital. It also gave the company an asset that appears to be more enduring than Truth Social, the “free-speech” platform that recently suspended a Forbes reporter who used it to contact shareholders. For a company that promises to give people a voice, Trump Media seems to have a rather narrow view of who should use one.

First sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who manage their fathers’ holdings on a day-to-day basis while he serves as president, have adopted the old man’s playbook for themselves. In March 2025, they struck a deal with a data-center company for 20% of its bitcoin-mining machines, then rebranded the business as American Bitcoin.

What did the data-center company receive in return? A crowd of investors wrapped up in a Trump-tied hype cycle, into which it could dump enough shares to more than make up for the 20% of forfeited equity. The companies announced a deal to go public via SPAC on May 12, 2025, and shares of the SPAC jumped 448%.

Ryan Kenney, a 41-year-old military spouse who studied architecture but now spends much of his time raising two kids, thought he was getting into American Bitcoin early and cheap when he invested $60,000 after prices pulled back the next week. The stock’s value was in its buzz, not the fundamentals. That made the standard meme-stock rallying cries—“Buy the dip!” “Average down!”—especially dangerous. Kenney kept buying, ultimately upping his investment to $98,000. It’s now worth $9,000.

Lately, he has been thinking about others in a similar predicament. And the scale of their losses. “Maybe people didn’t lose as much as I did,” he says, “but that might be hundreds of thousands of Americans all losing five grand.”

Then there is Fistikan, still dreaming of that Florida house. With his savings wiped out, he settled for an overgrown, $18,000 lot, figuring he could build on it. Someday. The Iran war drove diesel prices above $6 in the Pacific Northwest, where he hauls loads, cutting into his earnings.

“I would make the same amount of money if I was flipping burgers,” he says.

Recently, short on cash, Fistikan had to sell something. He could have liquidated his Trump Media shares, which still appear overheated as the company bleeds hundreds of millions of dollars a year while maintaining a market cap more than triple the value of its underlying bitcoin holdings. But Trump-tied investments are not moved chiefly by discounted cash flow. It’s more loyalty and the hope that another rally is just one frenzy away.

So Fistikan sold his F-150 pickup.

That’s the Trump trade in miniature. The dream was a house in Florida near the water. The outcome, for now, is an overgrown lot, a clobbered investment account and just enough cash to stay afloat.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two



That's a heartwarming story.

Fucking idiot.

Sounds like he was doing alright up through his late 20's. We were rocking just about the same amount of cash at that time in our lives.

One guy decided to never gamble or play the stock market again, and the other guy blew all of his money on stupid shit because he's a simple-minded retard.

Enjoy your empty lot, dummy. Your poor wife and kids.




Ah... Here it is...

Quote:
The human cost of all this lies in accounts like Fistikan’s. He didn’t just buy a stock. He bought a story, that Trump views his supporters as partners rather than tools. “Pretty much my whole life savings [was] in this one stock,” says Fistikan.



Why don't we teach kids anything worthwhile in school? So they can be FUCKED hard like this ignorant idiot. That's why.

Even if you're not market savvy and you don't know any of those rules, maybe you would be sitting in that nice house today that you were going to buy if you had read Don Quixote.

Never, EVER put all your eggs in one basket, bitch.



Quote:
"This is the greatest theft, con job he has ever done.”


I would assume one would imagine that any theft done against them was the greatest "ever done". That statement is PURE Drug Addict reasoning and blame dumping.

This "poor" guy wants you to believe that his own naivety and stupidity and gambling addiction aren't entirely responsible for his lot in life today.

Fuck you dude. Better luck next life.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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