In Washington, D.C. Saturday night, an armed man ran into the best-protected hotel in the country and made it about 50 feet before being subdued. One floor away, the White House press corps watched as Secret Service removed the President from the room. Subsequent coverage is full of their agonizing brush with danger.

One floor away from a violent man, and protected by hundreds of armed security personnel, media figures hid under their banquet tables. Several later took to the air waves to talk about their proximity to tragedy, and to share this moment of bonding with President Trump.

I get that it was frightening. But seriously, if you are going to cover the White House, get to know America.

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According to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, there were 25 U.S. shooting incidents in the U.S. Saturday, resulting in five victims and two suspects killed.

Local news and police reports corroborate several of the fatal incidents:

• A Chicago police officer was killed and another critically wounded at Swedish Hospital, according to ABC7 Chicago.

• A 61-year-old man was killed in a shooting at a Costco in Strongsville, Ohio, according to News 5 Cleveland.

• A man died after an early-morning shooting in Muskegon, Michigan, according to WWMT.

• Fayetteville police reported a fatal shooting on the 600 block of Berwick Drive.

• Hope Mills police were investigating the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old girl on Fox Ridge Road, according to WRAL.

• In Nashville, police said a DoorDash driver was wounded and returned fire, killing an attempted carjacking suspect, according to NewsChannel 5.

• In Los Lunas, New Mexico State Police said a suspect was killed in an officer-involved shooting and no officers were hurt, according to KOB.

Every single day, schoolchildren enter classrooms where they have been trained to hide from active shooters. Those children don’t have the layers of protection everyone in that ballroom enjoyed last night.

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America is many wonderful things, but it is also a place of violence. Here is what the journalist Max Frankel wrote in his introduction to Rights in Conflict about the violent confrontation of demonstrators and police in the parks and streets of Chicago during the week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968:

We are known for our violence, we Americans. The creative violence with which we haul down the good for what we fancy as better. The cruel violence with which we have treated red men, and black. The intoxicating violence of our music and art. The absurd violence of our comics and cartoons. The organized violence of our athletic and corporate games. The course violence of our speech, even our jokes.

And now we have come violently to disagree about the nature of our violence in Vietnam or Dallas or Watts or Hiroshima. We seek the primitive within ourselves and bemoan the failure of affluence to civilize. Our young deplore the violence of the old and are tempted to use violence against them. The old deplore the ferocity of the young and are tempted to use violence to suppress them.

Thus we came, already maimed to 1968.

Nearly 60 years later, we carry different baggage, but similar animosity. Our democracy has suffered multiple shocks. The 2008 financial meltdown, where 861,664 families lost their homes and the banks got bailed out, bred distrust and anger.

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Beginning in 2019, the COVID pandemic would go on to take more than million American lives and allowed politicians to weaponize distrust and cash in on anger. The subsequent ransacking of our Capitol shocked the whole world. Then President Trump pardoned those looters while deploying the U.S. military on our streets in the name of protecting us from protestors exercising their first amendment rights.

In 1968, we struggled to understand what to do when the right of dissent and the right of cities to protect their people and property came into conflict. In 2026, we have a president who seems determined to create exactly that conflict and use it not to heal and unite, but to further divide and rule.

Mr. Trump’s rhetoric invites and incites violence. On immigrants he said, “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans. They’re animals.” He followed those words by sending his overarmed, undertrained masked thugs into our cities. In Minneapolis, they shot and killed two Americans.

Trump’s government lionizes violence in a way no other has. Pete Hegseth champions lethality not as the most important but as the only virtue of our military. Mr. Trump has used that military to kill fisherman at sea, and to launch world re-arranging wars with full confidence that violence itself- without any strategy for its use- will accomplish his goals.

All of this is far more dangerous than when Frankel described America in the 1960s. We now live in an armed nation. The Supreme Court obliterated common sense and the plain reading of the Second Amendment to allow nearly unchecked access to weapons. We now live in a country with more guns than people. In response, police forces across the country have armed and trained like soldiers of war.

The attempted violence in Washington last night is not unusual or out of place or unexpected in contemporary America. What is uncommon is the protection afforded to everyone in the hotel where the suspect was taken down. The security team did its job. The President and everyone in that room were secure in their safety, despite the armed man upstairs.

In vain, I hope to hear from officials in Washington and the press corps that cover them, honest attempts to calm our nervous nation. In vain, I imagine our government covered by a press corps that understands the everyday experience of our people.

For an extended period, many of the 3,000 journalists, government officials and their guests attending Saturday’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner struggled to learn what had happened to cause President Trump, the Vice President and others in the line of succession to be evacuated from the room.

Even though they witnessed the dignitaries’ swift exit, most participants were in the dark as to the shots fired and the man in custody on a higher level of the Washington Hilton Hotel. Ironically, the picture was clearer for those watching from home who were privy to images, videos, and eyewitness reports of what seemingly transpired.

Yet notably, for many of those viewers, the problem wasn’t a lack of visibility, it was a lack of trust.

In the coming days we may understand more about the alleged gunman, the venue security concerns, and Trump’s continued response. Though moving forward, what we also need to understand more about is why and how so many Americans, on both sides of the political aisle – to the degree social media is even a partial indicator, instantly concluded that this incident was “staged” or “fake.”

I’d submit that while there has long been deeply distrustful language emanating from influential figures in both parties, the leader most responsible for engendering disbelief is the person who appears to have been the target of Saturday night’s violence: Donald J. Trump.

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And I know just, know just, know just, know just, know just what you want

Poetic justice, put it in a song, alright

— Kendrick Lamar wrote that as a love song in 2012. He had no idea he was also writing the caption for a night in Washington when a press secretary predicted shots would be fired and the universe decided to take her literally.

I was mid-sentence.

Sitting here building what was supposed to be a straightforward analytical follow-up to my March piece about the most dangerous media consolidation in a generation — the $111 billion Paramount purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery — when Ben Meiselas broke the news on MeidasTouch and my iPad started doing exactly what the evening was about to do — interrupt everything with something nobody saw coming. Shots fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump evacuated. A Secret Service agent down. The suspect in custody at the Washington Hilton — the same hotel where John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981. The Hinckley Hilton. Because Washington, D.C. has a sense of humor that nobody asked for.

My first thought wasn’t shock.

It was recognition.

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Because I had spent the better part of this Saturday documenting exactly how we arrived at a place where something like this could feel — in the most sick and twisted way imaginable — not just possible but almost inevitable. So I didn’t put the merger story down. I folded the two together. Because they belong together. Because on Saturday, April 25th, American democracy didn’t just hand me a metaphor. It handed me the whole damn thesis gift-wrapped in chaos and burrata salad.

Karoline Leavitt — nine months pregnant, apparently planning to have a lovely evening watching her boss roast his political enemies like it was open mic night at the authoritarian comedy club — told reporters before the dinner began that Trump’s speech would be “classic Donald J. Trump” and that there would be “some shots fired tonight.” She was talking about jokes. Tasteless, mean-spirited, grievance-soaked jokes about whoever had the misfortune of being on Trump’s enemy list this particular Saturday. She had no idea how literal she was about to be. Famous last words, Karoline. Famous. Last. Words.

This is what poetic justice looks like in 2026. Not clean. Not satisfying. Just this — a press secretary waddling into the Hinckley Hilton expecting a comedy show and ending up in a security evacuation while 2,600 journalists abandoned their burrata and dove under tables at a dinner ostensibly celebrating the First Amendment. The same First Amendment that the guy they were celebrating has spent his entire second non-consecutive term treating like a suggestion.

Kendrick asked us to make it make sense. I’m going to try.

Let me start with David Ellison, because nothing that happened on Saturday night makes sense without him.

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So Tucker Carlson is sorry. So, so sorry.

Last week on The Tucker Carlson Show, the former Fox powerhouse-turned-streamer populist jackanape sat across from his brother, Buckley (who, lest we forget, wrote speeches for Donald Trump) and delivered what is apparently meant to pass for a reckoning. “I’ll be tormented by it for a long time,” he said, his voice heavy with the weight of a man who just discovered consequences. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional.”

Not intentional, my ass.

The man who campaigned for Trump. Who used the largest cable news platform in the country to nuke his audience with MAGA propaganda night after night after night. Who told millions of viewers that Trump’s critics were hysterical elitists. Who mainstreamed the Great Replacement Theory as a gateway drug for white nationalism. (I’ll leave aside his foray into testicle tanning.)

Not intentional.

Okay, Tucker. Sure.

Here’s the thing. Some corners of the internet are treating this like a homecoming, like the prodigal son has finally seen the light, and maybe we should kill the fatted calf and welcome him back to the table of Reasonable People. The Never Trump crowd should make room, the thinking goes. He’s one of us now.

No. He is not.

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And not because people can’t change. People can. Lord knows, many of us in the former-Republican space have taken our hits for what we did in the past. Contrition is real, and it matters. It has for me.

But Tucker Carlson’s support for Donald Trump was never the disease. It was a symptom. One of many. And if you think dumping Trump is enough to earn a seat at the adults’ table, you haven’t been paying attention to the last two decades of Tucker Carlson’s career.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

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It’s not enough for the broligarchy to have untold wealth. They also wanted political power. Now they have that. And they want to be esteemed as philosopher kings, while simultaneously shielded from criticism. Well, that’s a taller order.

When they roll out their political manifestos, we should take them seriously, if not literally. Public statements by these actors, while often couched in statesmanlike or visionary terms, offer insights into a growing power elite: what they like, what they hate, their enemies, what they felt are entitled to.

These manifestos are relevant for governance, given Silicon Valley’s power via financial resources and platform control, and their embeddedness into government service delivery via grants, tax subsidies and contracts. They are no longer simply contractors, or one more donor class, but a powerful political class onto itself.

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For example, when DOGE was announced, your best bet for understanding its purpose and impact was to pay attention to Elon Musk’s anti-government conspiracy ramblings on X, which fueled the elimination of entire agencies. Or Marc Andreessen’s manifesto, which predicted an attack on government services. These manifestos are, of course, riddled with unfounded claims, contradictions and blind spots. Andreessen bemoaned regulatory capture, while embarking on exactly such a program. But even, and perhaps especially, the blind spots are telling.

Some in the broligarchy see themselves as heroic historical figures, the kind of men (its always men) who are on a heroes journey that involves quashing some foes along the way. What if you are the foe? At some point this becomes a sovereignty problem, when the people empowered to manage your government have their own distinct values they are pursuing using the guise of public power and virtue.

How Palantir’s Guardrails Failed

And so we get to Palantir, a tech company that provides support for US government intelligence, immigration, policing, defense, tax preparation, health, revenue collection and logistical functions. Given that range of competencies, they are at the heart of concerns about tech surveillance under an increasingly authoritarian government.

A senior person in the Biden administration assured me that Palantir were seen competent deliverer of contracts. They got stuff done, including with pandemic-era logistics in health care. The company grew under Democratic and Republican administrations, but the billion-dollar contracts and eye-popping stock valuations did not start to arrive until the second Trump administration. They benefited from a fertile combination of massive increases in immigration and military spending, the rise of AI, and the downsizing of the federal government.

The way in which Palantir grew caused unease within its own ranks. A year ago, some former Palantir employees wrote an open letter about the violation of the company’s prior ethical guardrails.

A Code of Conduct was crafted to uphold democracy, preserve the spirit of free scientific inquiry, and ensure responsible AI development. Guardrails were set to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuses of power. These principles have now been violated, and are rapidly being dismantled at Palantir Technologies and across Silicon Valley

The company’s leader Alex Karp released a manifesto, which is actually just excerpts of the “The Technological Republic” written by Karp with help from Nicholas W. Zamiska. I’m not going to go through every point of the manifesto (some of which I am sympathetic to), but do want to focus on a couple of big points

Can an Anti-Fascist become a Techno-Fascist?

A takeaway point is that on the whole, the manifesto’s vision of Palantir is that of a U.S. government and its tech allies as dominant players, unconstrained by accountability. This has caused alarm bells to go off. For example, in a series of posts on Bluesky, Cas Mudde, one of the leading scholars of authoritarianism, was blunt:

The Palentir statement on its desired “Technological Republic” is one of the scariest things I have seen in a while. It is a call for a world dominated by an authoritarian U.S., generated by AI (both the statement and the world), run by tech-surveillance companies. Technofascism pure! Clearly, this disqualifies Palentir as a business partner for any other country than the U.S., not just in defense and security related sector but ANY sector — as information is power. European countries should not just start new collaboration with Palentir, they should divest it ASAP! Democrats should develop an actionable agenda of democratic reform in case they return to power. This cannot be limited to institutional refoms, but must include reigning in the power and wealth of technofascist companies and individuals.

Is it possible that the underlying book, with more room to caveat and explain, is less objectionable. Not so, according to John Ganz, who slogged through the whole thing:

The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public “oversight for me, surveillance for thee.” I contend it’s a work of reactionary modernism.

The manifesto makes a straightforward case that government and Silicon Valley power must be fused in order to defend a peaceful and prosperous way of life for Americans. If we pause with AI we are merely allowing our adversaries gain an upper hand:

The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

The manifesto argues Silicon Valley has invested its efforts in frivolities rather than American military capacity — unlike Palantir! Western values, which are superior to others, must be defended with power:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures … have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

“Defending the West” is part of Palantir’s DNA. It was never a company that sought to please consumers, but viewed itself as aligning with U.S. military interests. It also works with Israeli military, extending “the West” to a political rather than geographical concept.

Since “The Technological Republic” was published, Karp has gone from being a partial critic of Trump, to a defender. He once declared his “biggest fear is fascism” and that “I always thought if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.” So how is he now a Trump donor? How did an anti-fascist become someone seen as authoring a techno-fasicst manifesto?

One of Trump’s extraordinary skills is to recognize and recruit those whose greed and vanity outstrip their principles, and who are happy to shout righteously for a cause they once abhorred. Deregulation, praise and massive contracts are a powerful cocktail to help you forget your commitments, especially when your supposed allies in liberalism are now critical of you. “Being unpopular pays the bills” Karp told a biographer in response to liberal outrage.

Some speculators think Palantir is wildly overvalued due to a Trump bubble where earnings are way out of proportion with stock price, and have tried to short it. Trump praised Palantir when its stock tumbled recently. Right now, the company’s prospects, or at leasts its stock price and leader’s personal wealth, feel increasingly dependent on MAGA’s vision of the world.

But it is uncomfortable to label yourself a sellout, and so a billionaire anti-fascist write a manifesto about how, yes, they are still defending democracy, and no, they are not working for a fascist. In a thoughtful column, Michelle Goldberg noted that the German politician who was the primary subject of Karp’s dissertation went from being a fascist in the dissertation to a speaker of forbidden truths in “The Technological Republic.” Trump seems to have made the same transition for Karp.

As Palantir becomes engaged in domestic surveillance and immigration enforcement for a government that has repeatedly violated the law, “defending the West” starts to look indistinguishable from bog-standard, right-wing ethnonationalism. As part of a somewhat bizarre critique of his one-time mentor Jurgen Habermas, Karp argued that the structure of public discourse cannot be rational but “must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional — and indeed national and cultural — source.”

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His biographer said that Karp’s views on the West have changed:

Judging by his own words … he does not see multiracial, pluralistic democracy as the thing about the west that should be defended ... he sees it much more as just a collection of countries bound by a shared Judeo-Christian heritage, and, to varying degrees, by an attachment to free enterprise. That’s kind of where he is, I think. And it can lead you down some pretty dark paths.

Goldberg’s profile of Karp notes that at one point his reputation as a Democrat, avowed anti-fascist, and biracial student activist worked well to dampen Democratic hostility to Palantir when they were in power. Now they are not, Karp has more reason to embrace a different version of his identity. Goldberg concludes: “I was left suspecting that the best explanation for Karp’s journey — as for most of his right-wing billionaire compatriots — is the vulgar materialist one.”

Two Types of Public Servants

One striking element of the manifesto is its incoherence. At turns it is assertive and dominant, and at other points wheedling in its pleas for grace and tolerance. But if you make some simple assumptions about who the manifesto is talking about, it becomes clearer.

Let’s take the following points together since they touch on public service:

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

Again, this is incoherent until you realize that Karp is presenting you with two types of public servants. Civil servants purged under Trump, and the tech elites who venture into government. The former deserve your scorn. The latter — the Alex Karps of the world, the Silicon Valley contractor class — merit your understanding and praise.

Few groups in American public life have suffered more material or reputational damage in the past year than federal civil servants. More than 400,000 employees have left the federal government. For many, they left a dream job, pushed out by people who knew less than they did. They worked under a government where the President declared them to be the deep state, government leaders promised to put them “in trauma” and the President’s supporters often exposed them to harassment campaigns. They were demeaned by bosses who opposed the mission of their organization.

Karp does not have much grace or understanding for this group of public servants. They are overpaid priests. The echo of “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” may not be intended, but its there. As for the claim that government employees are overpaid, generally, white collar government workers are not overcompensated compared to the public sector, and in some cases forego a significant wage premium. We also spend much more money on contractors than employees, so if you wanted to save money ...

Another way to look at this is that billionaires have joined a war on professional administrative class of public servants precisely because of their proximity to formal mechanisms of accountability. Civil servants are sworn to uphold the constitution, report wrongdoing to officials, follow the rules. They are in most respects more accountable than our politicians to ethical and legal requirements, and more difficult to buy off. This makes government slower and more irritating for sure, and puts those officials at odds with the Musks, Andreessens, and Karps of the world, whose vision and interests benefits from reduced oversight and accountability.

I do have some sympathy for the point that procurement processes are unwieldy and political appointees are generally held to a very high standard of scrutiny that often discourages them from participating in government. But frankly, its Democrats who impose those standards, which Trump has abandoned. The Biden administration struggled to get tech elites to join government because of stringent ethical and conflict of interest barriers. The Trump administration has none. Elon Musk made clear that for the chosen few, conflicts of interest no longer exist. New tech hires can stay with their current companies that work with the government.

So the plea for grace for those who enter the public square is not about rules or formal constraints here, but public criticism of power. It has never been easier or potentially more lucrative from the Silicon Valley set to jump into government. The only penalty they face is a social one. While Karp is angry that certain cultures have not been harshly enough criticized, criticism of the consolidation of financial, technological and political power happening in America is off the table.

Public criticism offers one form of accountability. If people violate our laws and norms, should they held accountable? The manifesto’s answers is “yes…for some, not us.” Violent criminals? Yes. Civil servants? Yes. White collar criminals? Well, lets not be hasty? Tech billionaires working for government? That would be “corrosive” for the country.

I’m reminded of the Simpsons character Artie Ziff, Marge’s prom date who later becomes a billionaire. When he asks that Marge not share with others his unwelcome prom night groping, he puts his request for silence in the most virtuous terms possible:

We need to be nicer to the broligarchy …. or risk damaging the entire country.

More seriously, how will future Democratic administrations respond to an organization that might have genuinely valuable capacities, but who is not shy about pursuing a hostile ideological agenda and bristles at the slightest accountability.

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National Military Service

Until relatively recently, Palantir was seen as secretive, criticized more for its connections to founder Peter Thiel than anything Karp said. However, the manifesto is presented as that of Palantir, hosted on their website, promoted by their social media. There is no meaningful distinction between the leader, Karp, and the company’s policies, which is an odd thing for a publicly-traded company.

Generally its healthy to separate our sometimes weird personal opinions from the organizations we work for. There is a reason that contractors give money to both party and try to limit their ideological stances. They don’t want their values to chase off business. Once those values go beyond internal guidance for employees, and instead become political manifestos, they demand allegiance or opposition.

For example, should a tech company have opinions on military and foreign policy? The manifesto talks about the need to rearm Germany and Japan. Why? Some at the company surely have opinions on this. Others might different opinions. Thats fine. But why should we care about what Palantir thinks?

Similarly, Palantir calls for national military service. This is a common and unfortunate affliction of middle-aged and older men, akin to an interest in the Roman Empire or World War II. Its simply not something you see many men in their 20s promote for obvious “I-would-prefer-not-to-die” reasons. Charitably, it reflects a sense of a desire for creating shared meaning among the young that the elderly perceive is lacking, or to coerce the elite into sharing the cost of military conflict. Uncharitably, it is the old telling the young how to live and risk their lives.

It is easy to mock Palantir on this. How many of them completed their military service? The may sincerely believe that they are part of the greater military effort via their defense work. Indeed, the Trump administration made some of their executives officers in the Army Reserve. But all of that is beside the point. Why should Palantir have an opinion on this and why should anyone take it seriously?

There are other examples:

The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

As a statement about foreign power, this seems pretty misguided. The U.S. has dissipated its soft power to an extraordinary degree in a rapid period of time. Are we better off for it? We are, as we speak, engaged in a period of hard power and the public does not seem to like its elements — needless wars and tariffs — or its outcomes — higher prices, weakening alliances.

The problem with the manifesto is that Palantir’s worldview and business model are impossible to separate. A world where soft power has real and lasting impact is simply less profitable for a company like Palantir relative to a world where we blow a lot of stuff up. A world featuring an AI arms race is more profitable than a world with AI regulation. A world where Silicon Valley polices domestic crime is more profitable than a world that constrains surveillance on the public. A world with fewer meddlesome government employees is a world where Palantir takes on the administrative reins of the state.

In each of these cases, Palantir takes a stand that is bravely consistent with its bottom line. In an interview with Wired, Karp says that Palantir has put principles before profits, by refusing to work with China and Russia. But I’m skeptical: how exactly can a tech security firm win contracts from the U.S. government while also working with its primary adversaries? When Palantir gets into a fight with the U.S. government akin to Anthropic’s current battle about the use of Claude for violent or unconstitutional ends, they will deserve them more credit.

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When the Subtext Defeats the Text

The subtext of the manifesto here is so overwhelming that the text can barely stand up for itself. For example, when Karp says:

The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

A purely textual interpretation might be that he is commenting on the most powerful man in the world attacking the most visible religious figure in the world. Thats in the news, right? Trump attacks the Pope! A pretty big deal!

But of course, no-one believes that is the intent. Palantir is operating on a series of shared assumptions: that religious intolerance is only a project of the left, despite increasingly open attacks on non-Christian religions from the right; that motivated erosion of individual rights, such as abortions, are not a form of intolerance worth commenting on.

A student who once engaged in Black campus politics now argues that wokeness is a “pagan religion view” inculcated by campuses: “a new religion with sacrifices. Who’s the sacrifice? Me, I’m the sacrifice.” Again, this mix of the powerful preening as victims while blaming woke campuses is bog-standard right-wing fare.

I don’t want to be too critical. Here is a piece of solid advice:

The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

Yes. Yes! YES!

Small problem. Its hard to think of any segment of society that has been more guilty of engaging in this than the techbros. Elon Musk cooked his brain online. Marc Andreessen and others seemingly struggled with being in virtual spaces where their ideas and status were challenged, and rewired their political beliefs as a form of cope.

The Palantir manifesto reflects the worldview not of deep philosophical consideration but of a rotten information environment, one where pluralism and accountability are bad, and coercive power is the necessary and profitable price of freedom.

To what degree should our government endorse and support this worldview?

Donald Trump is functionally finished as a political force in American life. These past twelve years were the Trump years, but the Iran war signaled the dawn of a new era. The polling makes this clear: we have entered new territory. At no point in recent memory have Americans wholesale rejected Trump — until now.

Polling shows nationwide disgust at the corruption and chaos emanating from the Oval Office. To be sure, there are still many who support him. The Boomer core of MAGA is holding on for dear life, desperate to avoid any conversation about gas prices. Long-term, the diehards were never enough to sustain a lasting movement, but today they are its unshakeable core. Like Trump himself, the MAGA constituency — and older Americans in general — is finally losing its grasp on power.

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There is no coming back from here. Americans blame Trump for the pain they feel at the pump and at the grocery store. Per a recent AP-NORC poll, just 33% approve of his overall job performance. On Iran, Trump would have reversed course by now if he had any real control of the situation. But voters are no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt. As the Epstein saga has exploded, the President’s distractions and excuses have ceased to have their intended effect.

Throughout the spring, polls showed voters believe Trump is focused on the wrong issues. The Arch de Epstein is the perfect example — and perfectly illustrative of the national mood. Trump is daily shouting victory while Americans are feeling defeated. Voters are increasingly saying he does not have the mental capacity to serve as president. The boasting rings hollow and the Truths are terrifying.

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I’m not used to feeling disgust when I file my taxes. Most years, even though it hurts, I’m proud to support our government. I want money going to scientific research that makes us the most advanced and innovative nation on earth. I am truly grateful that we have funded medical research. Some of that is directly responsible for treatments that have literally given new life to people I love. I support spending on education and social security. I am more than willing to pay for our national defense. I prefer roads and bridges and airports that aren’t falling apart. And, I have come to know how important working independent courts are.

Of course, the government is never as efficient as I’d like. I don’t like everything it does. But in the aggregate, it does what Americans, through their members of Congress, agree it should do.

This year is different. This year you and I are being robbed by the lying thief in the White House. It is disgusting.

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As the rest of us filed our taxes last week, Trump and his family were “negotiating” with the Justice Department to settle his $10 billion-dollar suit against the us. That suit stems from a contractor’s release of a portion of Trump’s tax return five years ago.

Never mind that Trump promised dozens of times to release those returns himself. Never mind that the statute of limitations ran out before he filed the suit. Never mind that even if he went to court and prevailed — something every lawyer tells me would be nearly impossible — the remedy would be something quite small.

Trump doesn’t have to go trial because he is on both sides of the suit. The taxpayers have no defender. Instead, the Department of Justice and the lawyers bringing Trump’s case both have the same client. It isn’t us.

Not content with stealing our money to pay himself because of the tax return leak, he is also suing because the government had the temerity to ask for its top-secret property back when he hid it in his Mar-a-Lago loo. We taxpayers are going to write him a check for that, too.

Trump’s ugly, bruised hand is in our pockets. With a useless GOP Congress, the U.S. Treasury is his personal property. Like I said, it is disgusting.

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The greedy thieves haven’t just weaponized the Justice Department to hunt down their adversaries. They have turned every bit of our government into their personal cash station.

War in Iran? Don Trump Jr. is a major defense contractor. Our lead negotiator, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, is on the payroll of gulf countries. Many credible reports make clear that someone is using the war to manipulate markets and line their pockets. Again, that’s not you or me.

Our hard-earned money is going into their pockets. Information about the deployment of our young men and women in arms is being used, at least in part, to rig markets to further line their pockets.

And, instead of using the government to make our lives better, they are using it to make their rich friends richer.

Do you remember when advertisers fled the X platform because they didn’t want their brands marketed right next to neo-Nazi recruitment videos and other right-wing trash? Musk sued the advertisers saying that they were engaged in an illegal boycott. The advertisers said they were just protecting their brands. Musk lost the case.

But then Trump’s FTC stepped in. They changed the rules to ban advertisers from refusing to place content next to certain “covered bases.” And they go on to define “covered bases” as politically or ideologically contested facts, journalistic or ethical standards, or anything to do with DEI. They also banned ad companies from rating, ranking, or evaluating publishers on these bases. The ad companies caved. Because Trump’s FTC intervened, money will now flow back to X and to Musk. And you will see ads for clothing and cars and movies next to content that promotes hate.

We pay taxes. They steal our money and they use the government we pay for to make their rich friends richer.

Trump doesn’t care what Congress says about taxes and spending. Never mind that the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Trump’s tariffs were illegal. His impoundment of Congressionally mandated spending is illegal. His outlay of our money for purposes that Congress did not authorize or appropriate funds for- that’s illegal too.

Last week, Democrats on the House Science Committee released a report documenting the administration’s contempt for Congressional budgets. “[NASA] violated the basic separation-of-powers framework set forth in the Constitution. NASA’s actions derailed critical projects, demoralized its employees, and broke its trust with the scientific community and the private sector. NASA repeatedly denied what it was doing, but the facts prove otherwise. This staff report provides an overview of the evidence my team has gathered and highlights the damage NASA inflicted upon itself by yielding to pressure from OMB instead of following the law.”

It should be repulsive to every taxpayer that the President spends our money on himself, on his friends, and as he wishes without so much as a nod from Congress.

He can be stopped. But that requires a Congress that actually does it’s job- cue the exit door for that useless piece of gum on the bottom of Trump’s shoe — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Trump’s monarchical contempt is destroying our great country.

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He led us into a war against the counsel of his advisors, a war with a target list but without a strategy, a war that has strengthened Iran as an adversary and a regional power. Yesterday Trump announced that the Strait of Hormuz was open and the war essentially over. This morning Iran announced the Strait was closed. And we are left wondering if he’s completely at sea, or whether he is lying to manipulate markets.

The contempt is everywhere. How else are we to understand Pete Hegseth, the warmongering Secretary of Defense, who led a prayer meeting and asked everyone to bow their heads while he read a Quentin Tarantino movie script that he thought was scripture.

Our Congress didn’t hold a debate about going to war. Just as our Congress hasn’t held hearings about impoundment or illegal spending.

It’s April. We are paying taxes, Trump is stealing from the Treasury, and Congress is useless.

Americans will not tolerate a King, and we will not forgive his court. The reckoning is coming.

There’s a moment in every Trump-era career arc, and I mean every one, where the walls close in, the flop sweat starts, and the doomed apparatchik begins thrashing around like a catfish on a hot dock.

For FBI Director Kash Patel, that moment arrived this weekend with a sickening thud.

The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick dropped a devastating report on Friday night detailing what more than two dozen sources describe as a pattern of heavy drinking, chronic absenteeism, and behavior so erratic that his own security detail once had to deploy breaching equipment … the kind of gear SWAT teams use to knock down doors … just to wake him up.

Let that sink in. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was so incapacitated, so deep in his cups that the people sworn to protect him had to treat his residence like they were on a meth lab raid just to rouse him from his boozy stupor.

Patel is reported to get sloppy on weekends in private Vegas club called the Poodle Room.

Dude. Come on. The jokes write themselves.

His meetings for his day job as FBI director are apparently often pushed to later in the day because the nation’s top law enforcement officer is a liver-pickled booze sponge, reeking of hooch who has to sleep off the night before. The man entrusted with protecting the homeland from terrorism, espionage, and organized crime was, according to these sources, a national security vulnerability all by himself.

If I may use the technical term: duh.

And then came the detail that tells you everything about Kash Patel’s fragile psyche and his tenuous grip on reality: On April 10th, unable to log into his FBI computer, Patel had what sources described as a “freak-out,” convinced Trump had fired him.

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This week, we learned that the Department of Justice had subpoenaed several witnesses to appear before a grand jury investigating former CIA DirectorJohn Brennan. A federal grand jury investigation into a former head of the CIA would be big news on its own.

Yet, the attempts to pin some criminality to Brennan’s conduct, related to his congressional testimony about Russian interference with the 2016 election, is just another pathetic part of a continuing — and thus far failing — effort by Trump and his lackeys to punish any official who dared to speak or pursue a truth that Trump didn’t want to hear.

Monday also brought further confirmation that Trump’s Department of Justice is doubling down on its efforts with an announcement that former prosecutor Joseph diGenova, 81, a MAGA minion, will serve as Counselor to the Attorney General to act as a kind of ringmaster over the myriad cases aimed at proving there was a grand conspiracy in the intelligence community against Trump.

DiGenova will reportedly spend his time between Miami, where the U.S. Attorney has been dutifully but unsuccessfully investigating Trump’s perceived enemies, and in Fort Pierce, Florida, where a related grand jury is overseen by a federal judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who repeatedly ruled in Trump’s favor, infamously vaporized the Jack Smith special counsel charges against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, and barred release of Smith’s final report.

Cannon is the only federal judge currently sitting in Fort Pierce, which virtually guarantees that the unorthodox practice of “judge shopping” will likely work in Trump’s favor.

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I was in Berlin with a film crew when the wall came down. A Congressman running for the Senate had family ties in East Germany, and we thought it could make for some powerful scenes reuniting with family members.

Less than a thousand days earlier, Ronald Reagan demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Eight hundred and eighty-eight days was all it took for Reagan’s moral challenge to be answered by history.

My candidate was a Republican, of course, because I only worked for Republicans. Political consulting is like that. You pick a side and stick with it. If not, neither side will trust you.

We were there hoping that the pixie dust of freedom would fall on my candidate. He was what would have been called an “establishment” Republican, which was the sort I tended to work for. I’d like to say that was driven by a deep ideological commitment, but the truth is, those were the kinds of Republican candidates who won most frequently. I learned very quickly that the key to a successful political consulting career was to work for people who were going to win anyway and not screw it up. I was good at that.

At the time, there was more ideological diversity in the Republican Party. More than half the Republican governors were pro-choice in varying degrees. When President Reagan vetoed the 1987 Civil Rights Restoration Act, twenty-seven Republicans voted to overturn his veto. This was a party that included Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, who received a mind-boggling 90% approval from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, and Senator Jessie Helms of North Carolina, who won reelection in 1990 with the infamous “white hands” ad that was an openly racist racist attack on affirmative action.

But across the party, there was an assumption that the Republican Party was united in opposing the tyranny of the Soviet Union. To challenge that fundamental truth would have been like arguing that gravity was a regional phenomenon. Since World War II, the most consistent opponent to the Soviet Union and an expansive Russian Federation has been the Republican Party.

Now that Party is the beating heart of the pro-Putin movement in American politics.

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Something new is happening in America. Something entirely new in the world. Again.

European historians and philosophers since Plato have argued that democracies progress into tyrannies. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, first published on the eve of World War I and finalized in 1922, went further, arguing that whole cultures are like living organisms with life cycles — and that they all die. In his formulation, cultures pass through phases. There is the creative, inward, religious, and artistic phase.

Then there is a phase characterized by technical mastery, outward focus, and urban life. In this latter phase, the political forms created earlier become corrupted. Spengler described Western civilization, that thing J.D. Vance is always talking about, as Faustian. He meant that it is a culture of striving. He saw the invention of perspective in painting, the creation of calculus, the discoveries of physics, and the technological advances that gave humans vastly more power as all pointing to a soul that would not be contained. And yet he expected that spirit to be crushed by its own materialism. In his view, money and mass entertainment come to determine national direction; political forms become meaningless.

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In this final era of a culture’s life, people would no longer see any point in elections — or in whatever system their culture had adopted to determine political power. Instead, their popular will thwarted, they would turn to leaders grounded in myth and force. Spengler calls this Caesarism. In that last phase, the leader harnesses those with money and media. It is where cultures go to die. And about 20th-century Europe, he was correct.

Many see a similar pattern here in the United States. Instead of leading to collapse, however, the pattern points to revival. In Donald Trump and MAGA, we see the Spenglerian turn from civilization to Caesarism at work. Its main narrative is that America has been betrayed and humiliated by cosmopolitan elites, immigrants, and globalism. It claims the primacy of decision-making over law and of force over procedure. It uses lies that everyone knows are lies to create a myth of overcoming. We see, as Spengler predicted, those with money and control over media harnessed by the myth-making strongman. And yet, at the very moment when America faces a decisive cultural breakdown, its people have posed a constructive counter force.

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Péter Magyar, Hungary’s prime minister-elect, said he would halt any use of state money to finance the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest and called for an inquiry into what he described as improper government spending, according to remarks reported by Mediaite. The report, echoed by other outlets, reflects translated versions of his public statements.

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The comments come after an election that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year tenure and have raised questions about whether public funds were used to support recurring political events in Budapest. English-language accounts rely on translation from Hungarian. No full official transcript tied specifically to the CPAC allegation has been released. He did not present documentary evidence to support the claim.

A transcript of Mr. Magyar’s broader post-election press conference shows him outlining wider concerns about government transparency during the transition. He alleged that documents were being destroyed within ministries and said the incoming leadership lacked access to key state records. Those statements, delivered in Hungarian and reflected in available transcripts, underscore his broader framing of institutional opacity, though the CPAC-specific allegation is not contained in the excerpt reviewed.

The Conservative Political Action Conference has been held multiple times in Budapest, including a fifth gathering announced in 2026, according to the Hungarian outlet Telex. The event has featured Mr. Orbán alongside conservative political figures from Europe and the United States and has become a recurring fixture in Hungary’s political landscape.

Independent investigative reporting by the Hungarian outlet Átlátszó has found that earlier CPAC events in Budapest were financed through government-linked institutions, with estimated costs reaching into the millions of euros. Those findings were not cited as evidence in Mr. Magyar’s remarks but provide context for how the events may have been financed.

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Every few years, the right produces a moment so egregious that even its own architects briefly pretend to have a conscience — and every few years, some people watch that performance and mistake it for character.

This is one of those moments. Tucker Carlson is calling Trump a potential antichrist. Megyn Kelly says she is sick of this. Marjorie Taylor Greene is invoking the 25th Amendment. Alex Jones is asking how they can remove the president he spent a decade building. And somewhere, some people on the left are nodding along like they just found new allies. They have not.

Let me be precise about something before we go any further. The Iran war is wrong. Trump threatening to wipe out a civilization is wrong. The 25th Amendment conversation is legitimate. None of that is in dispute here. What is in dispute is the idea that any of these four people arriving at those conclusions means something has changed about who they are, what they want, or where they are going. A broken clock is right twice a day. That does not make it a watch. This article is not about arguing with the time. It is about reminding you what the clock is made of and who built it.

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The four subjects of this piece — Carlson, Kelly, Greene, and Jones — have between them built the ideological infrastructure of the most destructive political movement in recent American history. They are white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and conspiracy merchants who have spent years spreading disinformation, enabling authoritarianism, harassing private citizens, and defending the indefensible with the cheerful enthusiasm of people who understood exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. Opposing one war has not changed any of that. Calling for the 25th Amendment while your white nationalist infrastructure remains fully intact is not a moral awakening. It is a schedule adjustment. And if you cannot tell the difference between a changed mind and a changed calculation, these people are counting on that.

To understand what Tucker Carlson actually is, it helps to go back to October 15, 2004, when Jon Stewart sat down on CNN’s Crossfire and told Carlson and co-host Paul Begala to stop hurting America. The clip has been so thoroughly lionized that most people remember Stewart’s lines and forget Carlson’s. They should not. Because Carlson made a point that day that was genuinely correct, and I want to give him credit for it — and I need you to understand how much it pains me to type that sentence, because Tucker Carlson is a pompous dork and I want that on the record before we proceed. But a pompous dork can be right, and on this particular point, he was. I am not giving him a character reference. I am giving him a receipt. The argument matters, and watching what he did with it afterward is the whole story.

Carlson pressed Stewart on his interview with John Kerry. Kerry would not come on Crossfire, Carlson noted, but he would come on The Daily Show. And when he did, Stewart asked him things like, “How are you holding up?” Carlson called it a suck-up and asked why Stewart did not use the opportunity to ask real questions. Stewart’s defense was famous and the crowd loved it: “You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?” I sat there and thought: that is a dodge. A funny dodge. A dodge that won the moment. Still a dodge.

Over the course of his career, Stewart sat across from people like Desmond Tutu, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton — major figures in American and world political life who came to his show precisely because the environment was comfortable. The fact that those conversations aired on Comedy Central between puppet crank calls did not change what was happening on screen. And here is the argument Carlson was actually right about: when you are interviewing people like that, with an audience of millions paying attention, the responsibility does not go away because of the channel it airs on. It does not matter whether we are talking about Bill Maher, Chris Rock, Brian Williams, or Wolf Blitzer — a comedian with that kind of access and that kind of reach carries the same journalistic obligation as anyone else in that chair. The platform does not determine the responsibility. The reach and the influence do. Stewart’s answer was funny. It was also wrong.

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I am not the only one who has made that argument. Alex Haley made it with his entire career. Haley became Playboy’s first interviewer in 1962 — the first time an African-American journalist had been featured so prominently in the mainstream press — and proceeded to conduct what are now considered some of the most important long-form interviews in American journalism. Malcolm X in 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, in what became the longest interview King ever granted to any publication. Muhammad Ali. Miles Davis. Quincy Jones. George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, who kept a handgun on the table throughout the entire interview and agreed to speak with Haley only after receiving assurance that the writer was not Jewish. Haley remained professional. Nobody looks at that body of work and says it does not count because it ran next to a centerfold. The platform was irrelevant. The seriousness of the work was not.

It is worth noting, in the interest of intellectual honesty, that Haley’s record is not without blemish. In 2023, scholars unearthed the unedited transcripts of his 1965 Playboy interview with King and found that King’s famous criticism of Malcolm X — a quote that had shaped the historical narrative of a rift between the two men for decades — did not appear anywhere in the original recording. Scholars called it journalistic malpractice. And that is precisely the point. Haley’s failure mattered enough to investigate sixty years later because the standard he held himself to was real. Stewart’s answer was that he did not have to hold himself to any standard because puppets. That is a different kind of failure — and one that Megyn Kelly has been running on a loop for years, which we will get to shortly.

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Through the “male loneliness epidemic,” current social discourse, modern reality shows, and the shift toward streaming over mainstream content, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the stereotypes:

“Women hate men these days.”

“Women just don’t like us.”

“They’re all out to get us.”

Or insert whatever lazy take you’ve heard from single…

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“Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society” according to Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. But the billions of hours and hundreds of…

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If you don’t follow the NBA, here is the short version of what happened last week: a 24-year-old basketball player got cut from the Chicago Bulls—and by the next morning, Riley Gaines had compared him to Jesus Christ.

The longer version is sadder, messier, and considerably more revealing about how the modern right-wing media machine operates. But let’s start with the basketball, because you need the basketball to understand why the rest of this is so absurd.

Jaden Ivey was the fifth overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft. For those keeping score at home, that means he was considered one of the five most promising young basketball players in the entire country. He went to the Detroit Pistons, showed flashes of real ability in his first two seasons, and then his body began filing formal complaints. He missed time with a broken fibula. He had knee surgery. He was traded to the Chicago Bulls at the February deadline as part of a low-stakes roster shuffle, and in a little over a month with Chicago he played exactly four games before his knee sidelined him again for the rest of the season. Four games. He wasn’t anchoring a franchise. He was a project with an expiring contract and a medical file that reads like a grad school reading list: long, concerning, and full of things you wish you hadn’t seen.

So: injured player, no guaranteed future, not yet under contract for next year, sitting at home with nothing to do. And somewhere in that particular combination of factors, Jaden Ivey discovered Instagram Live.

What followed was … a lot.

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Over the course of several days, Ivey conducted a series of livestreams that sometimes ran nearly an hour each, covering a range of topics that included: the sinfulness of Pride Month, the spiritual inadequacy of Stephen Curry, the spiritual inadequacy of LeBron James, the spiritual inadequacy of Michael Jordan, the false doctrine of Catholicism, the wickedness of 50 Cent’s music, abortion, and—in what I can only describe as a scheduling choice—the fact that his wife wasn’t texting him back.

He called out the NBA for celebrating Pride Night as a promotion of “unrighteousness.” He said Steph Curry—arguably the most openly Christian active player in the league, a man who writes Bible verses on his shoes and has a Bible study group—was “not surrendered” and probably not a real Christian. He said LeBron’s rings won’t matter on judgment day. He said the same about Jordan’s six. He called Catholicism a false religion. He did all of this on a platform connected to his real name, with his employer’s logo still on his profile.

The Bulls waived him the same day the Pride Night comments dropped.

And look—the Bulls are not exactly a model franchise. They haven’t been relevant since Michael Jordan was doing most of the work and Dennis Rodman was doing all of the chaos. But even the Chicago Bulls, an organization that has made some genuinely impressive front-office errors over the years, knew that a player racking up theological enemies from an Instagram Live during his paid rehabilitation was not a situation they needed to be in.

The official reason was “conduct detrimental to the team.”

Which brings us to the real story.

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On Sunday, we learned that over 20 hours of in-person negotiations between the highest-ranking Iranian and U.S. officials to ever meet broke down over the Trump administration’s single-most important issue – nuclear weapons.

On Fox News, Trump explained, “It was a good meeting yesterday, really, a good meeting, except for one problem — and it’s 95 percent, they want to have nuclear weapons. It’s not going to happen.” The president went on to threaten attacks on electricity plants, missile production facilities, bridges and desalination plants if Iran did not relinquish its nuclear program.

Trump has repeatedly insisted, in fact 74 times according to the White House, that the world’s most notorious state sponsor of terrorism can never possess a nuclear weapon. The concept makes sense, yet the devil is in the details – particularly if it becomes a hazy, ill-defined rationale for a prolonged war devoid of a plan that preempts Iran’s nuclear intentions.

Reportedly, the negotiators in Islamabad discussed the estimated 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium (HEU) held by Iran. Since that HEU potentially represents a future nuclear weapon, it arguably gives Iran as much or more bargaining power than their control over the Strait of Hormuz. That’s why the Iranian regime is so reticent to give it up, even if it means reigniting more death and destruction.

That’s also why it’s essential for us to understand the options – good, bad, and ugly, available to the Trump administration beyond the belligerent bluster of Truth Social posts.

We weren’t inside the room where the latest negotiations took place, but from past and present reporting and analysis, we can surmise what the U.S. side may have offered, threatened, and kept in their pocket regarding Iran’s uranium. Those options range from desirable to potentially disastrous.

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By the time Viktor Orbán shuffled to a microphone on Sunday night to concede, his face bloated and the gray of Soviet-era apartment building, his voice doing that wounded-strongman quaver, the autopsy was already written.

Hungarian voters had just ousted the long-serving prime minister after 16 years in power, handing a landslide victory to a pro-European challenger, Péter Magyar, in a bombshell with global repercussions.

With 97 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s Tisza party had taken 138 of 199 seats on 53.6 percent of the vote, while Fidesz collapsed to 55 seats and 37.8 percent. Turnout cracked 77 percent, a record in post-Communist Hungary. That’s not just a win. That’s a blowout for the ages, a beatdown beyond the eager spin of Moscow and the Trump Administration. (But I repeat myself.)

Read that again. A populist autocrat who had gerrymandered the maps, captured the courts, swallowed the media, and bent the constitution into a pretzel got blown out by ten points in a country he had spent sixteen years rigging in his own favor. What he accomplushed are the things Trump, Bannon, and their fellow travelers only dreamed of in the United States.

How? One word, friends. Corruption.

Corruption is the killer app of anti-authoritarian politics. It always has been. Voters will tolerate a lot of culture-war chum and a lot of flag-humping bombast, but they will not, in the end, tolerate watching the Dear Leader’s plumber buddy buy his fourth yacht while the village clinic runs out of gauze.

Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who knew exactly where the bodies were buried, built his entire insurgency on this one searing accusation: they are stealing from you, and they think you’re too stupid to notice. He campaigned on potholes and waiting lists and the price of eggs. He toured up to six towns a day. He let Orbán’s regime indict itself.

And what an indictment. Orbán’s officially declared net worth is, on paper, the modest stash of a country lawyer. In reality, his childhood friend Lőrinc Mészáros, a former plumber from Orbán’s home village, has become the richest man in Hungary, worth $4.8 billion according to Forbes, atop an empire of construction, energy, banking, and media firms feasting on public contracts. Who do you think really controls those assets?

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This might be old news by now, but it shouldn’t be.

Last Tuesday, President Trump sent bombers on their way to Iran and let everyone know that he was about to destroy an entire “civilization.” As with everything Trump, we all maybe had a hunch it wasn’t going to happen, that it was a bluff. The Iranians certainly knew it was a bluff. If Trump had been a civilization unto himself, he would have been destroyed by their online trolling.

Whether or not he was bluffing (he was, as we know now), threatening to destroy a civilization is an inhuman, disgusting, mindless, soulless gesture of abject stupidity. You don’t do that. You just don’t. The entire world was disgusted, and it seems we all remain so.

It wasn’t a bluff; in fact, it was an admission that he’d lost the war. It is not the move you make when you sit from a position of power. And it’s telling that Iran’s response was mockery. They clearly understood the power dynamics at play.

Let’s game it out a little bit. On one hand, had Trump carried out a civilization-ending attack, his presidency would be finished, and the United States would be a pariah. Let’s say he didn’t go that far, but he attacked critical infrastructure, such as desalination plants and power stations. Let’s say he left the country thirsty and powerless.

What then? Would that have forced Iran’s hand? Forced them to do what? Stop attacking ships in the Strait? Certainly not.

So last week hinged on the events that took place Tuesday night. We can analyze the events all we want, but Trump lost. Iran won. Nothing was resolved. Here we sit.

His entire life should be defined by the fact that he was willing to at least entertain the mass murder of an entire people.

I’m heartsick that most of us have already moved on from last Tuesday. Moving on means ensuring a repeat.

But it’s fair to have moved on a little bit, because the rest of the week got really, really weird. It would be easy to hand this week’s Loser trophy to Trump and call it a day, but there were other stories and other characters that we should talk about.

I mean it. Last week was weird, even beyond the world almost ending.

Let’s get into it.

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Melania Trump, Loser

This is a developing story.

Last week, Melania Trump released a short, pre-taped statement from the Grand Foyer of the White House, claiming that she didn’t have a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. She opened with: "Good afternoon. The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today …”

Mmmkay.

You’ve already heard the statement. You’ve read the coverage. You probably have your own theories. I’m writing this on Sunday, April 12, so there’s a good chance by the time you read this, we’ll all have a ton more information on this weird and disturbing story.

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There’s a longstanding debate in politics whether it’s better to be feared than loved. In the viper’s nest known as the Trump administration, most of Dear Leader’s lackeys long to be feared — Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, just to name a few.

But for Trump, being feared has always been secondary to what he’s clearly always wanted from Americans. It’s what he craved from his cold, calculating parents. At his core, Donald Trump wants to be universally loved. It’s why he’s obsessed with awards, polls, Electoral College votes — while pathologically lying about his feats.

When he won reelection in 2024 — only a few short years after the insurrection and his full-on assault on our democracy — he saw it as the ultimate vindication. It was his Sally Field Oscar moment (widely paraphrased as, “You like me. You really like me!”)

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In reality, Americans were scarred by COVID, irate with inflation, and sick of the status quo. And the election was still close.

Yet much of the corporate media read the results as a sweeping political realignment with MAGA ascendent, further fueling Trump’s megalomania as he sought to establish a personalist regime in the mold of his idols, Putin and Orbán.

He thought he could do whatever he wanted. The Constitution was his to shred. He could break the federal government, letting DOGE run wild and unleashing the longest government shutdown in history. He could neuter Congress, knowing GOP leaders would relinquish constitutional powers controlling the public purse and declaring war. He could tell the courts to shove it when he disagreed with rulings on his deportation agenda or trumped-up cases against his many, many political enemies.

The president decided he could violate the Epstein Files Transparency Act, slap Americans with boneheaded tariffs, and invade whatever country he just discovered how to locate on a map.

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He didn’t just believe the public would go along with his agenda — he truly thought we would worship him for it. He imagined people would thank him with tears in their eyes and call him “sir,” just like in his cock-and-bull stories at his red-hat rallies.

It hasn’t happened. The American public isn’t playing along. Trump’s approval ratings are at a record low (although he is more popular than cockroaches).

The No Kings protests have functioned as a cruel reality check for our would-be ruler. Each rally has been the biggest in U.S. history, one right after the other.

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