A young woman in Manchester pays her rent through OnlyFans. She is twenty-four, has a degree in English from a respectable university, and earns more in a quiet month than her father did as a deputy headmaster. She finds the work tedious rather than traumatic, which is, in its own way, the worst part.

A young man in Bolton has not left his bedroom, except for cigarettes and the occasional GP appointment, in fourteen months. He plays a game on his phone in which he opens digital boxes that may or may not contain rare digital cards. He spent £340 on this game last month. He does not consider himself a gambler.

A thirty-one-year-old software engineer in Zürich, on a salary that would have bought his parents a four-bedroom house, lives in a shared flat with two strangers and takes a small amount of cocaine on Friday evenings. He is saving, in theory, for a deposit. He has been saving, in theory, for a deposit for eight years. The deposit required has, over the same period, risen faster than his savings.

A woman in Tokyo, thirty-seven, single, working as a department-store cosmetics consultant, has chosen (the word is doing some work here) not to marry and not to have children. She lives with her mother. Her mother lives with her mother. None of the three women own the flat they share.

A man in Shenzhen has decided to lie down. Tang ping, they call it. He works the minimum hours required to feed himself, refuses promotions, refuses to date, refuses to acquire anything. The state has identified him, and the several million who think as he does, as a threat to social harmony. He has identified the state as a threat to his time.

A teenager in Ohio has lost $11,000 on sports betting in eight months. He is nineteen. He has not yet lost more than this because he has not yet had more than this. He will, soon enough, have more, and then he will lose more. He believes, with the unfalsifiable conviction of the truly devout, that his system is almost working.

You have noticed these people. Everyone has noticed these people. They are the texture of contemporary life. They have, collectively, become the favorite subject of a particular kind of newspaper column, the kind that asks, in a tone of bewildered sorrow, or studied outrage, or sometimes both at once: what has happened to us?

The author’s argument is that all these social pathologies are products of individually rational responses to a rigged social and economic game:

In the Ponzi stage (call it now), wages do not cover even the running costs of the life that previous generations defined as normal. The deposit is unreachable; the family is unaffordable; the retirement is fictional; the career path that was supposed to deliver these things has been replaced by a sequence of contracts. The only way to access the reference standard of living is to acquire assets that rise faster than wages, which means either inheriting them, marrying them, or speculating into them. Productive labor, in the Ponzi stage, is a losing strategy by construction. You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.

What does a rational agent do in the Ponzi stage?

She does not work harder at the losing strategy. That would be irrational. She pivots to strategies with the property that their upside actually reaches the reference threshold, even if their expected value is poor. She buys lottery tickets, metaphorical and literal. She speculates on crypto. She gambles on football. She starts an OnlyFans. She day-trades. She marries for money. She sells her eggs. She joins a multi-level marketing scheme. She bets her redundancy on a single hand at the roulette wheel of life because the steady strategy has a known terminal value below the threshold she needs to clear.

Or she does the opposite. She lies flat. She withdraws. She refuses to play a game she has correctly identified as unwinnable. She becomes a hikikomori in Tokyo, a tang ping refusenik in Shenzhen, a NEET in Manchester, a deaths-of-despair statistic in Ohio. Both responses, the manic and the depressive, the gambling and the giving up, are rational responses to the same underlying condition. They are the two ways a rational agent expresses the recognition that the productive game no longer pays.

This is the Ponzi stage of being alive. It is what your aunt calls degeneracy. It is what the framework calls mathematics.

The whole thing has a sort of Decline of the West Spenglerian flavor, again in the context of a familiar look at the economic base not the ideological superstructure argument.

We come now to the most important part of the argument, which is also the most uncomfortable, because it implicates the reader (implicates, perhaps, the writer) in a structure of complicity that is easier to ignore than to confront.

Every late rentier society in history has responded to the behaviors of Conspicuous Despair in the same way: by locating their cause in the character of the despairing, rather than the structure that despairs them. This is not a coincidence. It is, structurally, the only available move for the propertied class, because the alternative explanations implicate the propertied class itself.

Readers will notice parallels here with Piketty’s argument of how in the long run the growth of capital value outstrips that of wage labor, which, to put it mildly, is an enormous economic and social problem.

It’s an interesting argument, especially as the author buttresses it with many cross-cultural examples:

I want to end with the observation that the people doing the behaviors I have described are not stupid. They are not depraved. They are not lazy. They are not, in any meaningful sense, worse than their grandparents were.

They are reading the odds.

The OnlyFans worker in Manchester has correctly identified that her degree, in the labor market she actually faces, is worth less than her capacity to sell access to herself online. The teenage gambler in Ohio has correctly identified that the expected value of his wage labor, compounded across his working life, will not deliver the standard of living his parents had, and that only a sequence of high-variance bets has any chance, however slim, of closing the gap. The lying-flat refusenik in Shenzhen has correctly identified that the marginal hour of additional labor, given the rate at which Shenzhen property prices outpace Shenzhen wages, has a negative expected return on his happiness, his time, and his future. The hikikomori in Tokyo has correctly identified that the social roles available to him are not worth the price of admission.

These are not moral failures. These are not character defects. These are correct calculations, performed by ordinary people, about the structure of incentives they actually face. The fact that the calculations produce behaviors their grandparents find appalling is not evidence that the calculators are appalling. It is evidence that the structure has changed.

Your grandparents lived in a hedge-financed world. They could afford to be virtuous, in the conventional sense, because virtue paid. The young live in a Ponzi-financed world. They cannot afford to be virtuous in the conventional sense, because virtue does not pay, and the only strategies that have any chance of clearing the threshold their grandparents took for granted are strategies their grandparents would not recognize as strategies at all.

THE U.S. HAS LOST THE WAR IN IRAN.  WHAT IS WORSE, WE HAVE LOST THE TRUST OF THE REST OF THE WORLD, AS WELL, WE HAVE LOST ANY INFLUENCE WE MAY HAVE HAD IN THE MIDEAST, EUROPE, AND – WELL – ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD.

Trump is universally recognized and treated by other world leaders as the ignorant, incompetent buffoon that he is.  And if you support him, that makes you . . . well, you know.

Here is the one and only accomplishment (singular) of Trump’s war with Iran:

1. It took the spotlight off Epstein.
   

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And now for a few of the failures of Trump’s Iran war:

1. Iran is now relevant in the world. Iran took on the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE and won.
2. Trump gave Iran regime change — the new regime is more radical than the old one.
3. Iran now controls which ships get to pass through Hormuz – the ones that get passage will pay fees. And — Trump will get none of the fees.
4. Here is a big one – Iran’s proxies are going to grow and gain new recruits – Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, Hamas, Houthis, are all going to increase in size and power. Trump’s war made the Mideast more dangerous, especially for the countries that took on Iran.
5. The US is going to abandon the majority of its military bases in the Mideast. Countries in the ME now realize that the US presence can’t protect them, instead, a US presence makes them a target, so, most Mideast countries will no longer want our military there.
6. China and Russia will make certain that Iran keeps its status in the Mideast. China will supply Iran with weapons and Russia will supply Iran with intelligence. Iran will supply China with oil and supply Russia with drones.

IRAN WON THE WAR.  Trump and his MAGAts are not even smart enough to recognize the fact.

 

One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.

But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.

His recent targets include an Olympic canoeist accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a rushed and botched renovation project, and journalists who reported about the security deficiencies of Trump’s new Air Force One. In the first matter, he pushed for a prosecution after an arrest was made; in the other, he ordered a criminal investigation. (The case against the canoeist and other alleged vandals fell apart, and the subpoenas of the journalists have been dropped, at least for the moment.)

For months now, Trump has been on the receiving end of another humiliation: He has been repeatedly mocked and ignored by the hard-line leaders in Iran. Once more this week, the president reacted with rage when Iran again contradicted his claims about negotiations to bring the war to a close. How will he lash out this time?

Trump really, really does not want to be forgotten, and he cares deeply about leaving his physical mark on Washington. He is a developer at heart who spent decades obsessing over the details of his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach while also overseeing the design of luxury golf courses around the world. He mostly kept that impulse in check during his first term, but now, facing his political mortality, he has decisively shifted his focus to his legacy, whether that be trying to claim territory for the United States or reshaping the nation’s capital. You know the list: the East Wing, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the municipal golf courses, a helipad on the White House South Lawn, and so on. Trump has long prized symbols—particularly when the symbols can project his power—and seized upon America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to further beautify Washington, his backdrop as he presided over the grandiose celebrations. His attention was particularly drawn to the Reflecting Pool.

Trump was not wrong in thinking it could use a little love. The Reflecting Pool, which stretches east from the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall, toward the Washington Monument, has long leaked and showed its age, bedeviling administrations for decades. In April, Trump announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner that would be, in his words, American-flag blue. To complete the project before the July 4 festivities, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. Instead, the algae flourished, the pool turned green, fences went up, and mitigation efforts failed. The Reflecting Pool undeniably looked worse. More than $16 million was wasted, and the national symbol was closed on the nation’s birthday.

Trump was furious. One of his signature projects had fallen apart—and he needed a scapegoat. He settled on an unexpected one: an Olympic canoer. David Hearn, 67, says he had just finished up a bike ride when he swung by the Reflecting Pool to see the failing sealant and reached down to touch the green water. He was arrested and detained for hours. The case, on its surface, seemed ridiculous. But it gained traction when Trump, reeling from the renovation’s failures, began going on Truth Social to blame so-called vandals for destroying the pool and accuse them of cutting an (improbable) 250-foot gash down the middle. Media outlets promptly debunked the claim with a series of fact-checks, but Trump was undeterred, relentlessly claiming that the pool had been vandalized.

Even some of his closest allies, two of them told me, privately rolled their eyes at the president’s obsession and scoffed at his refusal to admit a mistake. One Republican lawmaker, speaking to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid Trump’s wrath, deemed it “the dumbest controversy of his term” but added, with a rueful chuckle, that “it’s better than talking about how badly everything else is going.” But the episode had real-world consequences: Hearn told my colleague Matt Viser that it was “unsettling to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.” He had to hire lawyers and attend court dates, and he had his phone seized. The legal process itself functioned as a form of punishment.

The Reflecting Pool was an unlikely cause célèbre this summer, but it seemed likely to end with a whimper at the end of last week. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who once touted her office’s ability to prosecute the case, executed a textbook Friday news dump when her office asked to dismiss the cases against Hearn and the handful of others accused of vandalism because evidence had emerged that suggested the damage was the the result of a botched installation, not vandalism. The farce seemed, mercifully, over.

Nope! Trump went on social media this past weekend to eviscerate Pirro, who has been one of his most loyal allies. Throwing the facts out the window, Trump declared that “to me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM” and that he would “disagree 100%” with the U.S. attorney in D.C. Accustomed to complete fealty, he raged to allies. In the Oval Office on Monday, he declared that the former Fox News host had “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.” Pirro was then summoned to the Oval Office; she was later seen walking out of the West Wing, wheeling a box full of materials from the case that she had brought to show the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency has oversight of the Reflecting Pool (Trump did not appear to be mollified by the meeting and continued to criticize his longtime ally last night). A White House official told me that Pirro still had her job. The official added that may not be the case for long.

Trump has complained about Air Force One for nearly a decade. When he took office after his 2016 election, the president—who had grown accustomed to flying around in his luxury private jet—was dismayed by the antiquated state of the two VC-25 aircraft that usually bear the call sign, which had been in use since the early ’90s. He pushed for a new plane with a more Trumpian color scheme, but a series of setbacks and delays pushed the arrival of the modern replacement jet until 2028. This was not something, most people understood, that could be rushed: Air Force One needed to be outfitted with top-of-the-line (and often classified) communications and security features that allow it to serve as a White House in the sky, especially in case of an emergency.

But Trump grew impatient. So when Qatar’s royal family offered to give him a $400 million “palace in the sky,” Trump immediately demanded that the luxury liner become his interim aircraft until Boeing completed delivery. It would, Trump said, be a gift to the Department of Defense, and it would go to his presidential library once he left office. This, of course, prompted all sorts of pushback. Permitting a foreign government to supply the signature American aircraft struck many people as not just unpatriotic, but also an outrageous security risk. It was also yet another example of Trump displaying a disregard for norms and for traditional legal and political guardrails—and this time at a truly gargantuan scale.

Trump didn’t care. Nor did he seem bothered that it would cost up to $1 billion to retrofit the jet to make it acceptable for an American president to use. He set the same aggressive timeline as with the Reflecting Pool: He wanted the interim plane ready for use on the nation’s birthday. And there it was, soaring above Mount Rushmore on July 3 and then off to a NATO summit in Turkey a week later. But then, suddenly, Trump was back aboard the old baby-blue-and-gold Air Force One when he left Ankara. He claimed that the new jet had gone ahead of him to England to give troops stationed there a chance to tour it and that he was taking the original “for old time’s sake.”

A few days later, The New York Times reported what many had suspected: When hostilities ignited again in nearby Iran, the Secret Service determined that there were security concerns with the new aircraft flying near a danger zone. It was missing some key defense modifications, the paper reported, in a story that ran only after the president had safely returned to the United States. Trump, once more, was furious and embarrassed, and summoned FBI Director Kash Patel to the White House. In an extraordinary escalation of the administration’s pressure on independent news organizations, subpoenas were issued to several Times reporters, some delivered at their homes. The government requested the reporters’ phone records and demanded that they provide grand-jury testimony as part of a leak investigation to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information to the newspaper about a national-security matter.

The Times defended its reporters, while press organizations and Democrats issued statements about overreach and intimidation. Trump, once again, took to social media to blast his hometown paper and its journalists, sometimes in ugly, personal ways. It didn’t matter, it seemed, that the White House later admitted that the new plane would need upgrades, and that the president himself said it would be “maxxed out,” which all but confirmed the newspaper’s reporting. Trump was “incensed,” one adviser told me, and “wanted a head on a pike.” But, again, the legal process intervened, this time in the shape of a federal judge who grilled Department of Justice lawyers late last month over the handling of the subpoenas. DOJ then withdrew them. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement, “The President and the Administration remain committed to holding individuals who recklessly and illegally leak classified information to the media accountable.”

There was a reason Trump reacted so strongly to those two humbling moments, some people close to him told me. And that’s because they came against the backdrop of the near-daily humiliation that the president has been suffering at the hands of Iran. The war is not going well. A conflict that Trump thought might take a few weeks at most has now stretched into its sixth month, and, try as he might, he can’t get out of it. He has declared victory many times and threatened to wipe Iran off the map nearly as often. Neither has happened. At this point, his unfulfilled threats—with Iran calling his bluff—have almost become a dark running gag.

The past few days, in a way, have been a microcosm of the whole conflict: Over the weekend, Trump came close to ordering a new wave of attacks, but walked them back after calls from regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, and fears of how Iran might respond. Instead, Trump said he would give diplomacy another chance, claiming that good progress was being made and that the Strait of Hormuz would soon be open. But Tehran denied that any negotiations were happening. And then another ship was attacked in the strait. Trump reacted in fury, posting that the Iranian regime was “unbelievably duplicitous,” when decades of history would suggest that Tehran was, in fact, very knowably duplicitous.

But how Trump will respond next to this ongoing embarrassment remains unknown. He’s made the war deeply personal. Will he now bail on the stalled war entirely, leaving Iran more empowered in the region? Will he follow through on his threats to dramatically escalate the conflict, perhaps even to strike civilian infrastructure and energy sites? Or will he channel his rage against Americans who point out his mistakes?

He is a moron!!!!

Youngkin — who wakes up each morning, looks in his mirror, and sees the next President of the US — was on Fox with rightwing looney tune Hugh Hewitt and this is the river of drivel and bullshit that Youngkin vomited up:

“There’s been this rise in socialism that has really come from a lot of educational institutions that are teaching this basic philosophy that’s wrong. And then it’s compounded by the fact that…establishment Democrats have evacuated their principles and run left. I mean, in Virginia last year, we watched Abigail Spanberger run for governor as a moderate, and on the very first day of office, she picked up her stuff and ran left. And Virginians hate this. I mean, she is the lowest rated governor in Virginia modern day history because people don’t want crazy. And and the vast majority of Americans view what’s happening in the far-left Democratic party as crazy. Everybody understands that we have to fund law enforcement. We have to fund the military. We’ve got to stand for law and order. The three branches of government have established America as the most stable democratic or at least republic in the history of mankind. I mean, this is foundational to the United States of America. And what they’re selling is the antithesis of that. And that’s why I do believe this election in Michigan and this election in Wisconsin are going to be key…I’m going to be helping candidates and we’re going to help candidates in Virginia. Listen, we’ve got five great congressional representatives and we’ve got to help them win again. We just fought back this redistricting effort by the by the far-left Democrats here and now we got to go win these races. But I also going to help folks around the country. I believe that that governor’s races have to shine a bright light on many many issues. One of which, of course, is school choice. And if your governor candidate is against opting in to the federal education tax credit scholarships, then that says they don’t care about your kids. And if your candidate is all about opting in and supporting these scholarships, I think for so many uh Americans and particularly those with kids, it’s a critical issue…”

 

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COMMENT

Is Glenn Youngkin a MORON or what? Definitely smarmy. Definitely dishonest. Definitely a nutjob, the way he’s ranting here about “socialism,” “communism,” the “Democrat [sic] Party,” etc, etc. And THIS is the guy the “mainstream” political media relentlessly, and falsely, kept whitewashing as some sort of “moderate,” “normal Republican” ???

Either Youngkin actually believes this crap, in which case he’s off the deep end, or he does NOT believe it but is spewing it because he wants to pander to the MAGA/far-right base, as he’s still hoping to have a future in the Trump/MAGA Republican Party…maybe even as president. I know, I know – Glenn Who?

This is disgusting.  In fact, it is worse than disgusting.  This is the product of a demented mind.

 

Trump arrested an individual and charged him and others with “vandalism” because the incompetent paint job Trump applied to the Reflecting Pool is a complete mess, forcing the Pool to be closed and fenced off.

Four people were charged with vandalism.  There was ZERO EVIDENCE OF VANDALISM, but a mountain of evidence that Trump’s contractor was paid $15 million for the botched job. All charges against these people were dropped and now Trump is angry.

When asked about the charges being dropped, Trump responded.  This is his response – these are the words of an insane, feeble, ignorant, moron.  If a Democratic President had said this, Republicans would be losing their minds demanding he be impeached.   Here are Trump’s exact words.

 

“Jeanine Pirro made a mistake. It was vandalism. I just told you we did, I think, 78. One of the things was to reflecting pool, hasn’t worked since 1922, because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1922. You know, it’s the largest longest pool ever, all that. The concept is beautiful, but it always leaked because of the size, because of maintenance, whatever. But it was built in 1922, and from the day it was built, it like, Biden spent $58 million. Barack Hussein Obama spent much more than that. He said, “I have an idea. Let’s take the river from, let’s take the water from the Potomac.” So they took the water from the Potomac, and it was putrid. It was putrid. It was a disaster. Biden was a disaster. I said, “I’m going to get that face.” Along with Doug Burgum, Department of Interior, and we worked harder than that. Now we worked harder in all ’70s. It’s actually, I think, ’81 now. You saw the new horses that just opened by the bridge with the gold. That was the way they were many years ago. Now they looked better than they did many years ago. But these monuments looked better than they did when they were originally built. Not just a little fix up. We made them the way they were plus, and everyone’s so proud. The biggest, one of the bigger jobs was not really the biggest, believe it or not, but one of the biggest was the reflecting pool. And we did a great job. We sandblasted the stonehouse at his granite, so it has a long life. We did a great job. We got very expensive material to put on top of the surface that always leaked, because it was stone. It was a stone, sir. Always leaked. And we put it on, and it was beautiful. Now we have photographs of tapes, like moving cameras, right? We have them where people are on the side, cutting it with a box knife. So now I’m not saying I was 100% thrilled with the contractor, but the contractor was rushing. We wanted to get it open for July 4th. And we got it done. But in addition, there was vandalism. Number one, look at the grass, where the grass was all knocked out with a very powerful ingredient. We know very well what it is. But like I say, the name, because people get ideas. But they put a terrible phrase, I won’t say that either, but a terrible phrase, on a massive piece of grass that we had just replaced. Kill the grass. We had to replace the grass. A lot of grass. In addition, they took knives or cutters, and they cut the material. And they put their hands and they pulled it. And there was also some maintenance things that we would have routinely fixed. But we had that up, and it was perfect. And then you had the bubblers, which get rid of what forms in the water. And that works great, but they turned it up because of the fight. Because it competed a little bit of noise during the fight. They turned it off, and it grows very rapidly in the water. But that actually works very well. And that’s all. So now we’re just about set to reopen it. And we had to replace cut areas where they cut it and ripped it. But there’s a tape. And Jesse Wooders, by the way, did a whole big thing on it. There’s a tape that’s out there that I posted on truth. Where you have people leaning over the side, the weakest part, because of the flexibility. You know it moves. It’s very complicated. It moves. And the softest part has to be flexible. And that’s the stuff you can cut. And these guys knew what they were doing. And they cut all the way along the base, cut, cut, cut. Now, when you need to look at it, it was a day after the 4th of July, with the largest fireworks display in the world.”

“And the stuff was laying all over the pool, the fireworks. Because they used the pool as one of them. And it was all over the pool as a day after, very shortly thereafter. But that was working beautifully. And it was vandalized. And if you look at the tape, now the tape isn’t a great tape in the sense that it’s a little hard to say who it exactly was. But it was people cutting this very expensive material, what a proofing material. Anyway, it looked beautiful. And then they cut it. And they vandalized. And we weren’t necessarily thrilled with the contractor. But they did a job. And they were fixing any problems. But then it got carried away because the judge was extremely unfriendly. Did you mean, and frankly, I think she choked. Because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her. And went after her department. And I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened. You reconsidering her role. I don’t know what– you don’t– you fake news. Don’t ever talk again. You fake news. One of the worst in the business. Fortunately, nobody watches you. But something happened. There was vandalism there. And there was some– I think from the contractor, which we would fix. But it’s almost complete. And when it opens, it’s incredible. It’s really incredible. But remember this, it leaked from 1922– it opened in 1922. They never solved the leak problem because it was stone. And the cracks with the stone– it’s not– stone is really not a waterproofing material. We essentially use a very high grade swimming pool type material, which was my idea. It was very proud of that idea. By the way, I didn’t know the contractor. We would have said the contractor. I didn’t know the contractor. But when it was completed, it was perfect. But then somebody went in and cut it. Just like they did the grass. Nobody talks about the grass. The grass have helicopter pictures of what they did. Was it ’87? Do you know what they did, right? Did you see what they did? Did you see what they wrote? Was it ’87 or ’86? ’87? That’s right. ’86, ’47. ’86. So it’s ’86, ’47. They didn’t do ’45, at least they left ’45 now. And massive letters on the grass, ’86, ’47. And nobody talked about that. That was vandalism, too. We had to replace all that grass. It was a tremendous amount of grass. Because when you hit it with this poison, it’s acid. It kills the grass no matter how you can’t even play it. Even if you got there right after, it’s very powerful. So I know it well. So people did great damage to this thing, because they’re sick people. You know, as representing the man, is a man from crew, a sleaze bag, who’s been suing me for my whole political– hasn’t won, he’s lost all the time. But crew, do you know what crew is? It’s a third-rate operation. That’s supposed to be a charity, but it’s not they used it for political reasons. So we should be proud of our monuments, and we should be proud of our city. And that was open before they did the damage. It was open. It never looked more beautiful. It looked like a mirror. And that’s what it was supposed to be. It was a very dark color. Because otherwise, you don’t see it as a reflecting pool. And it looked beautiful. Well, it looked just as beautiful. It’ll be fixed and open over the next week and a half two weeks.”

2:51 PM · Aug 3, 2026

Sec. of Education Linda McMahon Issues National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards

 These are the bullet points:

Secretary McMahon called on every postsecondary institution to publish, by the end of 2026, a clear public statement outlining its commitment to implementing reforms that will help restore public trust in higher education.

1. Transparency and Merit in Admissions: How will your institution ensure that admissions criteria are transparent and wholly described to prospective applicants? And how will your institution ensure admissions decisions are based on merit, achievement, and your university’s educational purpose?

2. Free Speech and Open Inquiry: How will your institution protect the free exchange of ideas, wide-ranging debate, and openminded campus discourse? And how will you guarantee that unruly and violent protestors do not harass students or disrupt classes, research, public lectures, and campus operations?

3. Intellectual Pluralism and Academic Vitality: How will your institution encourage intellectual pluralism in all its academic units? How will your faculty hiring and evaluation practices support academic vitality and ensure that all relevant perspectives are taken seriously? And how will your institution ensure the research enterprise is dedicated to advancing knowledge, deepening understanding, and serving the American people who fund it?

4. Affordability, Value, and Student Outcomes: How will your institution ensure that families can access affordable, high-return, degrees? And what will your institution do to contain costs, improve pricing transparency, and ensure that every academic program equips students to repay their loans?

5. Academic Standards and Rigor in the Age of AI: How will your institution incentivize rigor in the age of AI, combat grade inflation, and prioritize excellence in teaching and learning?

6..Safeguarding Research Integrity from Malign Foreign Influence: How will your institutions protect academic programs from foreign influence, and safeguard the integrity of the research enterprise?

7. Prioritizing American Interests: How will your institution answer this national call to action? How can your campus and faculty advance American security interests, deliver academic programs that meet urgent workforce needs, and contribute materially to the Nation’s prosperity?

WHAT THIS REALLY MEANS

1. How will you ensure that white students, especially males, are admitted before all others?
2. How will you force professors to teach Republican propaganda and deny free speech rights to liberals?
3. What is your commitment to hiring right-wing professors over serious intellectuals?
4. What will you do to ensure that white Republican students get financial aid and when will you discontinue humanities and other majors that provide low-paying jobs?
5. How will you use AI to automate teaching and cut costs?
6. What is your commitment to rejecting any foreign students, and how will you bring research into alignment with right-wing philosophy that excludes any research that benefits minorities or women?
7. How will you change curriculum to focus on white history and the building of this great country by white men who are super patriotic and never criticize policies that harm citizens?

 

Remember – Secretary of Education McMahon got her job because she and her husband own World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) that brought the phony “professional wrestling” to Trump’s attention.

 

HOW COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES WILL RESPOND

Yawn.  Now let’s get back to serious business.

Never Forget
Dec. 31, 2019. China alerts the W.H.O. to a new virus.
Early Jan., 2020. Trump, at an intelligence briefing, is warned of the danger.
Jan. 21. U.S. confirms first case of Covid-19 in Washington State.
Jan. 22. “Situation is totally under control”, says Trump.
Jan. 23. City of Wuhan is locked down.
***JANUARY 24th, I get covid, from a friend FROM China, they don’t know yet what it is, AND THEY SAID I SHOULD BE DEAD.
Jan. 30. W.H.O. declares an emergency of international concern.
Jan. 30. Trump says “We think it’s going to have a very good ending for us.”
Feb. 1. Trump plays golf.
Feb. 5. Trump administration does not use the successful German test protocol, preferring to create its own. U.S. testing kits are sent to 100 American public health laboratories, but the test is faulty, and the U.S. falls behind other countries in testing.
Feb. 6. First American dies of Covid-19.
Feb. 15. Trump plays golf.
Feb. 16. First death in Europe.
Feb. 23. Italy places towns under quarantine.
Feb. 24. Trump tweets “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the U.S.A. the stock market is starting to look very good to me.”
Feb. 25. The U.S. stock market plunges.
Feb. 27. Australia designates Covid-19 as a pandemic.
Feb. 28. At a rally in South Carolina, Trump described the Coronavirus as “the Democrats’ New Hoax.”
Mar. 5. Greece closes schools, as does Italy and Iran.
Mar. 6. Trump announces “anybody that needs a test gets a test.” Hundreds of emergency rooms are flooded with test requests, but because the U.S. was behind in getting accurate kits made, they can’t get tests.
Mar. 7. Trump plays golf.
Mar. 8. Trump plays golf.
Mar. 8. South Korea tests 189,000 people; the United States tests just 1,700 people.
Mar. 10. Trump says “We’re doing a great job with it, and it will go away.”
Mar. 11. W.H.O. declares a pandemic.
Mar. 13. France closes all schools, as does Ireland and Germany.
Mar. 13. Trump takes no responsibilities for testing failures.
Mar. 13. When asked by a reporter why the Trump Administration abolished a White House pandemic response team in 2018, Trump replies “I just think it’s a nasty question… I don’t know anything about it.:
Mar. 14. Spain goes into lockdown.
Mar. 16. Canada goes into lockdown.
Mar. 16. Trump admits that he dismanatled the pandemic response team in 2018.
Mar. 16. Trump rates his response to the outbreak as a “10.”
Mar. 17. France goes into lockdown.
Mar. 19. Trump admits to Bob Woodward that he knew Covid-19 was a threat to Americans, but decided to mislead them, saying “I always wanted to play it down.”
Mar. 19. China announces zero new cases of Covid-19.
Mar. 19. California issues a stay-at-home order.
Mar. 19. At a press briefing, Trump stated “Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this before.”
Mar. 20. When asked by a reporter “What do you say to Americans watching right now who are scared?”, Trump replied “I say you are a terrible reporter, that’s what I say. I think that’s a very nasty question.”
Mar. 23. The U.K. goes into lockdown.
Mar. 24. A doctor at Elmhurst Center in NY describes the situation at the wards as “apocalyptic.”
Mar. 26. U.S. death toll reaches 1,000.
Mar. 26. NY emergency dispatchers receive over 7,000 calls in one day.
Mar. 28. U.S. death toll reaches 2,000.
Mar. 29. Trump suggests that shortages of respirator masks are due to nurses stealing them.
Apr. 6. N.Y. hospitals are at the breaking point as the U.S. death toll reaches 10,000.
Apr. 6. Trump declares “We have to open our country up!”
Apr. 15. U.S. death toll reaches 25.000.
Apr. 16. Trump issues guidance to Governors saying they can start re-opening their states in two weeks.
Apr. 23. Trump suggests scientists investigate injecting disinfectants into Coronavirus patients.
Apr. 24. Official U.S. death toll reaches 50,000.
Apr. 28. Trump states that “The virus will go away.”
Apr. 29. Dozens of decomposing bodies are found in u-Haul trucks at a funeral parlor. The funeral director said he used the trucks because he ran out of space in the chapel. “Bodies are coming out of our ears.”
May 8. Trump says “The U.S. is the world leader in responding to Covid-19.
May 8. A huge Disaster Morgue opens in New York, with over fifty refrigerated trucks parked on Brooklyn’s 39th street pier.
May 23. Trump plays golf.
May 24. Trump plays golf.
May 27. U.S. death toll reaches 100,000.
June 21. Trump plays golf.
June 24. Trump’s insistence on reopening results in a surge of infections across Southern and Western states.
June 27. Trump plays golf.
June 28. Trump plays golf.
July 3. Trump plays golf.
July 5. Trump plays golf.
July 11. Trump plays golf.
July 12. The state of Florida registers over 15,000 new infections in a single day; a record.
July 16. The U.S. records a total of 75,000 new cases in a single day. The virus is surging across the country -It is not going away.
July 18. Trump plays golf.
July 19. Commenting on the surging death toll, Trump tells Fox News “It is what it is.”
July 25. Trump plays golf.
Aug. 1. U.S. death toll reaches 150,000.
Aug. 2. Trump plays golf.
Aug. 7. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 156,000 dead]
Aug. 15. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 160,000 dead]
Aug. 22. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 164,000 dead]
Aug. 23. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 168,000 dead]
Aug. 30. Trump plays golf [toll roughtly 171,000 dead]
Sept. 5. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 175,000 dead]
Sept. 6. Trump plays golf. [toll roughly 180,000 dead]
Sept. 20. Trump plays golf [toll roughly 184,000 dead]
Sept. 21. Trump at a rally states “It affects virtually nobody” – death toll 197,000.
Sept. 22. U.S. official death toll reaches 200,000 people. One in every 1,600 Americans is dead.
Even adjusted for population, America’s death toll is twice as high as Canada’s, five times as high as Germany, eighteen times higher than Australia, and eighty times higher than South Korea.
America’s Covid death toll is the highest in the world.
Oct. 2. President Trump and First Lady test positive for Covid.

Capital One Financial hit back on Friday against a lawsuit over its ⁠decision to close the Trump ⁠Organization’s bank accounts ​years ago, stating that it did so after a review by anti-money-laundering experts.

The disclosure marks the first time a bank has formally tied money-laundering concerns to Donald Trump’s family business. Capital One is seeking to dismiss the case by casting doubt on claims of illegally debanking – or denying services on religious or political grounds – the Trump Organization.

The Trump Organization and ⁠Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Capital One has never accused the Trump Organization of money laundering. ​But Friday’s filing argues that “documents and Plaintiffs’ own ‌allegations make clear that Capital One closed ‌Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (‘AML’) reasons.

“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by ‌Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”

Capital One gave notice of its plans to close more than 300 Trump-affiliated bank accounts in March 2021.

The Trump Organization and Eric Trump, the president’s son, filed a lawsuit in March 2025 in a Florida federal court, alleging the accounts were closed because of Capital One’s “woke” beliefs and its desire to benefit from the political mood after the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Capital One said in Friday’s filing that the Trump Organization’s allegations of political pretext were “misguided” and “based on cherry-picked quotations unsupported by the full context” of documents submitted to the court.

“The transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance,” the filing said.

Since the start ⁠of Trump’s second term, his administration has put pressure on some large banks, echoing conservative complaints ​that the institutions are deliberately targeting ​the political right. Trump signed an executive order in ​August 2025 barring discriminatory debanking.

In January, Trump filed a suit against JPMorgan Chase on the same ​grounds, underscoring the fraught policy ‌environment Wall Street is ​navigating during the president’s second ​term. In 2019, during his first term, Trump sued Capital One and Deutsche Bank in an attempt to prevent them from sharing financial records with Congress as part of a probe led by Democratic lawmakers.

Anti-money-laundering professionals at Deutsche Bank reportedly flagged a set of transactions, but executives ignored them; Deutsche Bank denied the report at the time.