In a 1989 CNN interview with Larry King, Donald J. Trump, who would be sworn into the presidency of the United States less than two decades later, said he told a reporter: "Of course I hate these people … maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."

He was referring specifically to the five young black and Latino kids who would become known as the Central Park Five, who were falsely accused and convicted of attacking a woman jogger in Central Park.

Hate is what we need, he said. He spent around $85,000 on full-page ads in the major NYC papers with the headline “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The ad didn’t specifically reference these boys, but it was clearly aimed at them and at anyone who might look like them.

The five boys were exonerated in 2002 via DNA and a confession from the actual attacker.

Donald J. Trump is a Loser.

Donald J. Trump, Loser

He’s the Big Boss King Loser of all time. I don’t usually write about him here because it’s obvious he’s the King Loser.

But last Monday night, he attended NBA Finals game three at Madison Square Garden in his home city, the city where he believes hate is what we need.

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Before I unleash this week’s Loser on you, I have to plug Six Questions with Steven Beshcloss (and a couple other things).

It’s a new podcast we’ve launched (you probably heard about it last week). We premiered last week with the incredible , and we’ve got New York congressional candidate on with this week. It’s a smart, sharp show that comes in a tight little package. The framing — six questions — is meant to pack a punch without packing for an overnight stay.

At a time when content comes at you from a million different places, it’s kind of revelatory to get guests like these to cover so much ground in so little time — the premiere ran about 27 minutes. In and out.

But this show is the tip of the spear of another project I’m very excited about: lots of our content is — or will soon be — available as podcasts. Shows like Behind the Numbers, Strategy Session, First Draft, Unholy Ground, The Two Joes, On The Ground with Joe Trippi and lots more will soon be found on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your pods, so that you can listen on your car ride (or, like me, catch up on your favorite pods while you mow the lawn on Saturdays).

Even if you don’t do podcasts (our loyal Substackers out there, unite!), we’d love for you to click on the link below and follow Six Questions. Another great thing about this show: it’s not seat-of-your-pants breaking news. If you hold onto it for a few days, it’ll still be relevant, unlike so much streaming content these days.

Let us know what you think!

Okay. Where was I? Oh yes, Losers.

Last week, on June 2nd, a sort of Freaky Friday thing happened with two men who are essentially opposites. One, who is patently unqualified to do a specific job, was hired to do that job. The other, who has 51 Emmys for doing his job, was fired from it.

This column could be called “Failing Upward,” or “Lifestyles of the Rich and Fraudulent.” Every week there is another example of men or women being elevated to jobs they simply are not qualified for because they are willing to do bad things for the boss.

This is another one of them. But this is much, much bigger than a fraud being hired to do a big job. It’s a threat to our civilization.

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Bill Pulte, Loser

Bill Pulte is the grandson of William J. Pulte, founder of PulteGroup, one of the largest U.S. homebuilders. He’s worth about $200 million, he claims.

He is the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the Chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

As of last Tuesday, he’s ALSO the acting Director of National Intelligence (he will continue to do the other jobs, too, because of course he will).

On Truth Social, Trump said that Pulte has “deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America … over $10 trillion at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac.”

Trump said he’s “a very talented guy.”

The second before he was elevated to DNI, he had exactly zero minutes of experience in national intelligence, although he is reportedly a Trump donor.

I’m not going to linger on the intrigue surrounding his elevation to this role. Lots has been written about it already. But before we move on, let’s talk about the role itself.

The Director of National Intelligence is the highest-ranking intelligence official in the United States government and the President’s principal intelligence officer. They oversee and coordinate the 18 agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community, including the CIA and the NSA.

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Last week was particularly dumb. By the end of the day on Friday, though, more and more news was breaking that Trump was losing in the courts. The slush fund was stopped (for now); his name has to be taken off the Kennedy Center and it has to be reopened (for now).

When stories like these break, my first reaction is joy. Or maybe hope. Sometimes we win! There is still good in the world!

Yay.

But then I remember how stupid all of this is. I’d rather see the output of all this energy result in single-payer healthcare, or an actionable and inspiring roadmap for solving the climate crisis. Instead, our victories involve putty knives scraping a gold-plated name off a closed-down building. Yippee.

My Loser this week embodies all of that stupidity … and more! And my Winner embodies the opposite.

Let’s go.

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Markwayne Mullin, Loser

Last week, Markwayne, which is a name that makes me stupider every time I say it, told Hannity (another such name) that "radical-left Democrats aren't allowing us to do our jobs," so "we shouldn't be processing international flights into their cities either."

In other words, the Homeland Security Secretary is threatening to functionally shut down international travel — both in and out of the country — in airports that service blue cities (or, more specifically, “sanctuary” cities).

Fortunately, there aren’t many major international airports in blue cit …. wait a second. Crap. They’re all in blue cities.

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

Today I’m launching a new cost analysis project which looks at the total increase in healthcare spending that the ~19 million or so ACA marketplace enrollees who managed to cling to their coverage are facing…

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You can’t kick a football in Washington without hitting a great candidate for Loser of the Week. Winners are somewhat harder to come by, but they exist!

This week’s Loser is one I’ve really been wanting to write about for a while, but he’s one of those Losers who’s always kind of lurking in the background, talking nonsense but never really doing much or accomplishing anything.

Now we know why: he sucks.

Let’s dig in.

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Seb Gorka, Loser

Earlier this month, the White House released its Counterterrorism Strategy. It was produced by the White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, who is a Loser.

Is that mean-spirited? Well. Maybe. But it’s also possible that he is objectively a Loser. I shall do my best to prove it.

Let’s start with the Counterterrorism Strategy. This document is the product of a 40-year tradition, rooted in Reagan, formalized after 9/11, carried by every president of both parties — including Trump in 2018. It historically produced sober documents that named real threats and assessed real capabilities, and matched those threats and those capabilities to offer a realistic, clear-eyed strategy for mitigating the danger to Americans.

It was, in other words, a strategy. Strategies are built around concrete steps one might take to solve a particular problem, right?

The Gorka strategy does not do that. It names a problem, yes, although it’s not the problem you think it is (more on that in a minute), but it offers no concrete solutions to the problem it names or to any problem, really. This is a culture war document, and not a very good one.

In fact, the very first thing you see here is a signed forward by Trump. He wants you to know, dear reader, that he has ended “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the last administration.”

As usual, he skips a bunch of rhetorical steps. He doesn’t define weakness, failure, surrender, or humiliation, which means we sort of have to take his word for it. Were we humiliated? Who knows? His base will take his word for it and agree without evidence.

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

The last edition included the second half of my deep, wonky dive into the final, official 2026 ACA Open Enrollment Period data, along with some initial effectuated data updates for California, Colorado, Geor…

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Last week, a Dutch-flagged Antarctic expedition cruise ship carrying 146 passengers from 23 countries (including 17 Americans), parked itself off Cape Verde because Spain’s Canary Islands president refused to let it dock in Tenerife.

You’ve probably heard of this story. Also aboard this ship: a potential outbreak of the Andes virus, the only known strain of the hantavirus that spreads human to human.

The story starts back in mid-April. On April 11, a 70-year-old Dutchman succumbed to intense symptoms of headache, fever, and diarrhea that rapidly progressed to respiratory distress. There was no testing done to figure out what the hell killed him, but the captain of the ship told everyone aboard that the ship was not infectious.

It took nearly two weeks for the body to be removed from the ship in Saint Helena. Thirty other passengers disembarked at that time and spread like the wind.

A close contact of the man who died flew from Saint Helena to Johannesburg. She had been feeling ill, and her condition deteriorated on the flight home. She was rushed to the ER upon arrival in Joburg where she was pronounced dead.

This story is pretty triggering, coming in so hot after the global trauma of COVID. It’s worth noting that while the disease is super deadly, it’s also vanishingly rare, and the CDC has classified this as a Level 3 emergency, its lowest tier.

So why am I beginning this week’s Winners & Losers with this story?

RFK Jr. Loser

Because RFK Jr. is a fucking Loser. But hark! I’m not going to talk about how he sacked the team of inspectors dealing with cruise-ship sanitation.

And I’m not going to try to scare you about the potential for another global pandemic (this one worse than the last). This week I’m talking about anti-depressants and science, two things our Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn’t believe in.

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Great stories have great characters. And great characters are built out of flesh and blood. A good hero isn’t flawless. They aren’t always good. They make mistakes, and sometimes their flaws verge on fatal. The greater the flaw, the greater the exuberance we all feel when they overcome it to succeed in the end.

A great villain wants something beyond the literal object of their villainy. Yes, they are going to destroy the city. But they also want to show their mom how great they are!

In fact, one of the great strengths of Trump is his seemingly endless well of badness. If he were a movie villain, he’d need some workshopping. It’s human nature for us to wait around for redemption, for the qualities that will make him a whole-cloth member of the human race to spring forth. We tend to give people — even villains — the benefit of the doubt. Or, at least, we wonder what trauma in their lives led to their villainy.

But Trump is irredeemable, fully. He steals money from everyone. Literally everyone. He would sell his own children if it benefited him. He sells the men and women who devote their love to him shitty swag — watches and coins and NFTs and pennants and wallets and piles upon piles of overpriced giftshop slop. They believe buying his garbage makes him love them. And he lets them believe that. He’s destroying the country because, well, that’s all he’s got.

And, of course, there are those allegations that he abused children.

His actions are unforgivable. His villainhood is so cartoonish as to be shockingly one-dimensional, and that’s why it works. I still want him to reveal something that feels authentically good. Or, maybe even just authentically okay. Or at least find some deep well of trauma that led him to this awful conclusion to explain why he’s doing this to us. But nothing like that is coming.

Watching the world shatter around us is like sinking into an endless Netflix binge of the dumbest, most engrossing, high-stakes, good-vs.-evil series of all time. Partly because for so much of it, most of us have the awful feeling of being bystanders. While the actions of the administration and its proxies have enormous impacts on our day-to-day lives, sometimes it feels like all we can do is sit back and watch it happen, like we’re watching it on TV.

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

I had to skip last week as I was out of town picking up my kid from college for the summer, so there’s actually three weeks of healthcare policy insanity to catch up with …

The last edition included the first…

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Remember when Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis?” That was awesome.

At the time, I felt kind of uncomfortable at the positive feelings I had for that statement. All social media is built to keep you angry and agitated. If you accidentally land on the X “For You” feed (God help you), you’ll find yourself face-to-face with street fights, videos of muggings, men punching women, shootings, plane crashes, dash-cam footage of car crashes, wild animals mauling tourists.

I could go on. That list is actually the tamest of the bunch (please, please, please take my word for it).

In this political moment, it’s incredibly important — at least in my opinion — to be rational. You have to save your outrage for the truly outrageous, or else it loses all meaning. When the entire internet is conspiring toward making you as mad as possible, this is a real task.

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You only have to look at the anger of the right to know what I’m talking about. They’re pissed as hell that women are playing men’s sports (or is it the other way around?) They were outraged over a bullshit conspiracy theory that teachers were providing litter boxes for children who identified as cats. And have you heard of this guy, Hunter Biden? Don’t even get them started. Also, Benghazi and emails and Obama, and, and, and …!

Anger, anxiety, hatred — these are like viruses looking for a host. I always imagine that bad feelings like anxiety begin not with an object, but with the emotion itself, and then attach to an object to sustain themselves. Nothing made Republicans mad. They are just…mad. Do you believe that if MAGA was shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that children weren’t using litter boxes in schools that their anger would disappear? No. They are angry and they will find a reason for it … somewhere. Anywhere.

On the other hand, anger is a real emotion, and it’s valid. You are allowed to be angry. It’s even better when your anger is well-placed.

The Jacob Frey thing, for me at least, represented the moment when my sadness at the second Trump term turned to righteous anger. I remembered that anger is real, and nobody has to give me permission to feel it. And the anger I felt was good and powerful.

Last week was stupid. It was the dumbest week of the dumbest year of the dumbest decade. You can claim that there were dumber weeks, and I probably won’t disagree. I don’t really care which is the dumbest week. But last week is at least in the running.

It’s gone — to me, at least — from absurd and stupid and you-just-gotta-laugh-because-you’d-cry-otherwise, to fuck these people. I’m so sick of it.

This week’s Loser is a total clown who has failed upward and I’m going to make fun of him, but make no mistake, I feel anger toward this guy. Our Winner is not so much a person as it is an expression of our collective anger in action.

Sadness is lingering and isolating. Anger, my friends, can be productive.

Hung Cao, Loser

Welcome to MAGA Loser Whack-a-Mole. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, a Vietnamese-American who is also a Christian nationalist becomes our acting Secretary of the Navy.

Let me back up.

It turns out we are the middle of conducting one of the most substantial Naval blockades in decades and a hot war in the Middle East, in which our Navy is acting as the tip of the spear. So, of course, last week the Secretary of the Navy was fired.

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It’s time again for your weekly checklist of Losers and Winners, and a reminder that all of the chaos, tumult, awfulness, and catastrophe you are experiencing is caused by people.

Tariffs, my friends, do not exist in nature. They are constructed. Bombing a civilization into the Stone Age is a choice made by a (not very smart or moral) human. A fair society is built on a foundation of accountability. Minh Ly, the author of Answering to Us: Why Democracy Demands Accountability, gave me an incredible analogy a few months ago. It’s possible you’ve read about it in this column before, but here we go again:

Imagine you live in a small village. You hire a sheriff and give him the only gun in the region. Without any mechanism for accountability, this sheriff may or may not become a king-like figure, able to kill or coerce anyone on his own whims. The gun — or any power we bestow upon our leaders — needs to be in service to a civic purpose, not in service to calcifying control in the hands of the person who wields it.

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It sounds pretty obvious. The sheriff in this analogy must understand that if he uses the gun for his own purposes, he will face consequences. The more power we bestow on our leaders, the more severe the consequences ought to be for its misuse.

Obvious, maybe, but not inherent. We have failed to hold Trump accountable for anything. We have failed to even make him fear accountability. His shit polling is great as a headline, but a terrible poll is just, well, a piece of paper that predicts the future. Trump doesn’t fear paper, and he doesn’t fear the future.

The election of Biden in 2020 was at least a measure of accountability. It was a relief, sure, but look what happened. Trump did not accept that measure of accountability (he still doesn’t believe he lost!), and nobody on our side or any side went the extra step to enact durable, real accountability commensurate with his crimes.

And here we are. Kinda fucked.

But not totally fucked! This week’s Winners & Losers is about the possibility of real accountability, and the incredibly difficult work ahead of us.

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JD Vance, Loser

What a repugnant piece of shit. I hate to write that because it’s more, like, ad hominem than I like to go. Maybe more puerile. But I’m just so sick of this guy.

Turns out, most Americans are, too. In a recent YouGov poll, the most positive takeaway for Vance is that 96% of respondents had heard of him. That’s where the positives stop, because to know him is to hate him.

Since January, most polls have his favorability plunging into the mid- to low-30s. To be fair, what’s not not to love? This guy sucks.

But the last two weeks have been especially bad for our Vice President. Let’s review.

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I go into every week with the hope that I will be able to highlight good things that are happening for working class Americans. I want to write about how women have gained rights for them and their daughters, not how they have to be more fearful. And I want to provide an outlook for the future that we can be proud of …

But that simply isn’t the reality we live in. So I sit here on a Friday morning writing about men resigning from Congress in shame. I write about 62 million visits to an online rape academy. And I try to bend a monopolistic merger into some sort of consumer value for people who can’t afford to travel.

One day we might get there, the midterms are coming up quick, but right now – we endure the chaos and try to make sense of another week under the Trump regime. It can be difficult, but if there is one thing I have learned over the past year of this second Trump term, it’s that the sheer will of the American people is unmatched.

They will not defeat us and we will keep on fighting.

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Monday, 4/13 – Swalwell & Gonzales Get the Message

Under threat of expulsion, Representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales resigned from Congress this week.

They both escaped the almost certain national and political embarrassment of investigations and expulsion votes for their respective scandals, but are still waiting to see what other consequences may arise.

In Swalwell’s case, the pressure had been building for weeks. Reports of inappropriate relationships with staffers – paired with questions about judgement, power dynamics, and internal office expenditures – triggered a House Ethics Committee review that was not going away quietly. What started as whispers online turned into documented complaints, and once leadership realized the votes were there to move forward, the writing was on the wall for Swalwell. Resigning now lets him avoid the spectacle of a formal congressional rebuke, but it doesn’t erase the paper trail or whatever comes out of the investigations announced by the Manhattan DA and authorities in Los Angeles.

Gonzales’ situation played out differently, but ended in the same place. Allegations tied to misuse of campaign funds along with a personal relationship with a staffer that reportedly ended with her setting herself on fire opened the door for both ethics scrutiny and potential legal exposure. Once details started to harden and his Republican colleagues began to distance themselves, his refusal to resign became a liability. Staying meant risking not just his seat, but a very public unraveling of everything tied to his name.

That’s what matters here. This wasn’t personal accountability – not really. It was timing. It was two members that read the room and understood that the system was finally about to move. They just chose the exit before they were forced out of it.

Because in Congress, resignation isn’t the punishment – it’s just the escape hatch.

Source: CNN

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One of the reasons Americans are so fed up right now is that the average person has been priced out of entertainment. The tradeoff is always what people are willing to put up with from the government and how affordable their lives are, and that bargain has been broken. These days, I wonder if the Costco hot dog and soda combo is the last good deal we have.

An afternoon at the ballpark used to feel like that sort of bargain. You could attend a game, sit in the bleachers, and eat hot dogs and popcorn for a reasonable price. It was an easy way to enjoy being around other people, some entertainment in the game, and a day outside. For my birthday recently, I went to a Colorado Rockies game. It was the home opener, I expected the tickets would be a little more, but $86 (per ticket) to sit in left field for one of the worst teams in the league felt unreasonable.

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The entire experience was the bare minimum. From the food, to the crowd control, to vendor placement and employee interactions. It just felt off and lackadaisical. That just seems to be par for the course in America these days: the working class pays a premium to escape the chaos, and still gets the bare minimum in return.

We’re paying more than ever for things that are supposed to give us a break from all of this, and it still feels hollow. We aren’t really asking for luxury, just a fair shake at quality of life.

Yet, here we are.

While Trump fights with the Pope, we try to enjoy Rory McIlroy’s win at The Masters. The scandalous news with a Super Bowl coach and a sideline reporter grabs our attention, and the Democratic base holding one of their own accountable might feel like a moment of civic pride–even as we sit on the brink of resuming war with Iran.

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There are times when it’s difficult to differentiate normal emotions from the chaos that we witness on a daily basis living under a madman. I was in therapy yesterday attempting to explain this and found myself in a sort of brain fog for the duration of the appointment, only to land on the conclusion I was grasping at the entire time. That’s sort of how life feels lately – like we’re slow walking through a dark fog and then suddenly finding ourselves on the other side of it. We get so enveloped in the day to day that it just sits on us, like the dense clouds on a coastal California morning.

And then, just as quickly, it burns off.

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One minute, we’re being told that nuclear annihilation is on the table – that entire regions could be wiped off the map, that escalation is imminent, that the United States is ready to unleash hell – and the next, it’s “productive negotiations,” a “ceasefire,” a “great conversation” with the same people we were on the brink of sending to the afterlife. This week alone, we watched Donald Trump flirt with language that hinted at catastrophic escalation, only to quietly extend deadlines, soften his posture, go apeshit on social media, and send intermediaries scrambling to sell it as a win.

That’s the fog.

It’s not just the chaos, it’s the whiplash we experience. The constant shifting between existential threat and sudden de-escalation, between performative strength and his thirst for a win. It’s exhausting and we’re left trying to process whether what we just heard was real and the danger has actually passed, or whether it was just another cycle in the mind of a madman trying to keep everyone disoriented.

By the time it clears, by the time you feel like you can see straight again, the next wave is already rolling toward you in the form of a surprise press conference reintroducing the Epstein files.

Monday, 4/6 – 3-Year-Old Allegedly Suffers Sexual Abuse in ICE Custody

This is just horrifying, and almost worse that it hasn’t been a huge story in mainstream media. Despite Kristi Noem’s firing, DHS continues to terrorize both undocumented immigrants and American citizens alike.

In this instance, a 3-year-old girl spent five months in federal custody after being separated from her mother at the border. By the time her father finally got her back, it wasn’t just a delayed reunion, it was a nightmare he didn’t even know had happened.

According to court filings, the girl was allegedly sexually abused multiple times by an older child while placed in foster care by immigration officials in Texas. Her father wasn’t told the truth at the time and was told there had been an “accident.”

“She was so long in there,” he said. “I just think that if they would have moved faster, nothing like that would have happened.”

The delay was federal policy. Under new Trump administration rules, the process to release children to their families has slowed dramatically. The average time in custody has jumped from about 37 days to nearly 200. In this case, the father spent months trying to complete basic steps such as fingerprinting, only to be stalled again and again.

It wasn’t until attorneys filed an emergency habeas petition that the government moved, and his daughter was released within two days.

By then, the damage was done.

Her father says she now has nightmares, gets easily upset, and said, “she was never like that before.”

This is what happens when a system designed to protect children starts treating them like they don’t matter. Because for a 3-year-old, five months isn’t a delay – it’s everything.

Source: PBS

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

In the last edition, I regaled you with the long, stupid saga of a lawsuit which sought to undermine one of the ACA’s most critical provisions, how the Trump Regime and RFK Jr. attempted to co-opt that provi…

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It baffles me that the women who attach themselves to the MAGA movement think they are any different from the ones Donald Trump has already assaulted or double-crossed.

Pam Bondi thought she was one of the exceptions and after her disastrous testimony before Congress, she was on thin ice. Trump pulled the plug, reportedly on April Fools’ Day, and the media firestorm followed.

The now-former attorney general, as Rick Wilson pointed out, is going to need a high-priced, white-shoe law firm to take up her cause. Depositions, testimony, and potential charges are all likely coming. She’ll most likely toe the line to make sure she lands somewhere safe after this, and a pardon is still on the table. But the writing is on the wall, Bondi clearly obstructed justice and lied in her testimony before Congress.

Give to Lincoln Square

Just across the Potomac at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has restricted press access and a judge wants to know why. Not only that, Hegseth reportedly asked for the resignation of the Army Chief of Staff in the midst of a war with Iran – outstanding idea, Pete.

Frankly, the entire cabinet is a shitstorm that is actively degrading the functions of our government while Trump clings to life and power. His speech on Iran was completely incoherent.

Over at DHS, not much has changed since Kristi Noem’s firing.

(By the way, did you see her husband’s pictures that leaked? Listen, I’m not one to kink-shame or judge, but you don’t get the benefit of the doubt when your entire political ideology is built around harassing and stripping rights from the LGBTQ+ community. At that point it stops being personal and is just flat-out hypocrisy. There’s no way Kristi didn’t know, and it raises questions about how much Cricket knew.)

In DHS custody, a Mexican immigrant named Jose Guadalupe Ramos died in a California detention center, one of at least 14 deaths already this year.

The cruelty has always been the point; it’s just that lately it feels less hidden. The people around Trump are getting exactly what they want while he sundowns through the second year of his second term.

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Monday, 3/30 – Judge Questions Pentagon on Press Restrictions

Before news broke that Pete Hegseth had asked for the resignation of the Army’s top general in the middle of a war with Iran, the Secretary of Defense was making other questionable decisions – like restricting press access at the Pentagon. And a federal judge wants to know why.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman openly questioned whether the Pentagon had defied his own order protecting journalists’ access to the building. After reviewing a declaration from The New York Times describing how difficult it had become for reporters to do their jobs, Friedman put it bluntly: “Is this Kafka? What’s going on here?”

That didn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier this month, Friedman ruled that the Pentagon’s policy targeting journalists violated constitutional protections tied to news gathering and due process. Reporters were supposed to have their credentials restored immediately. Instead, the Pentagon rolled out what it called an “interim” policy.

Functionally, it was the same thing.

Journalists can’t move freely throughout the building without an escort. There are restrictions on how they handle anonymous sources, and reporters can still lose their credentials if they’re accused of pushing officials to share information the government considers unauthorized – even if it’s declassified.

Out of 56 outlets that make up the Pentagon Press Association, only one agreed to sign onto the policy, while everyone else refused or gave up access.

Lawyers for the Times say the Defense Department didn’t comply with the court’s order and even worked around it. At Monday’s hearing, attorney Ted Boutrouts described it as a “mad scramble” to avoid following the ruling.

The Pentagon, backed by the Department of Justice, argued the new policy is “materially different” and should be allowed to stand. Government lawyer Sarah Welch asked for more time to defend it.

This is more of the same from the Trump administration, they ignore court rulings and rely on the defense of, “Your Honor, this is a witch hunt!” while simultaneously delaying the process and carrying on about their business. Donald Trump made an entire career of it before politics and it seems like every department he now commands, is doing the same.

Source: Reuters

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Last weekend’s No Kings protests were a success, with news outlets reporting an upwards of 8 million people showed up across the country to speak out against the Trump regime. People are sick and tired of paying outrageous prices at the pump and the checkout line while being ruled by accused child traffickers willing to risk the lives of thousands of service members in the mountains of Iran. It’s pure hell for the psyche, and it’s starting to feel like the system doesn’t give a shit who gets caught in the middle.

Because it doesn’t. Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, just laid off over a thousand employees, including people dealing with serious health issues as a reminder that even when you’re fighting for your life, you’re still part of the bottom line. In the middle of all that, there’s a former White House staffer that was just arrested under suspicious circumstances after killing his girlfriend in their apartment. Nothing about American life feels stable right now, like everything is beginning to boil over.

Then there’s Tiger Woods, checking the box on another car crash that resulted in him in handcuffs for DUI. Woods is dating a Trump (Don Jr.’s ex-wife, Vanessa), so at this point, there’s probably a Kalshi market somewhere on whether he gets a pardon. That’s where we’re at – mass protests, economic anxiety, people dying in avoidable ways, and the wealthy taking no consideration for others.

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1st & 10: Epic Games’ Casual Cruelty

Epic Games laid off more than 1,000 employees last week, and buried inside of that is a story that tells you everything you need to know about how broken our capitalist system is for working Americans. It’s not just Epic, layoffs are going up across the country with hundreds of thousands of jobs cut over the past year and tens of thousands already gone in 2026. Especially in tech because people are the easiest thing to cut.

Mike Prinke is what that looks like when it hits real people. A technical writer who had been with Epic Games since 2019, was let go while battling terminal brain cancer. Now his wife isn’t just trying to take care of her dying husband, she’s trying to maintain a home, protect their son, and figure out how to afford a funeral and a life after her husband is gone. All of this while losing access to life insurance he can’t replace because his condition is now considered preexisting. This isn’t some unfortunate oversight in HR; it’s exactly how the system works.

Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney said they would “solve the insurance” and pointed to severance and extended healthcare, but that doesn’t change the reality of abandoning someone at the end of a terminal illness while they’re trying to prepare their family for life after them. This is a system where human lives are numbers on a spreadsheet and bottom lines to be tinkered with. A system where someone fighting for their life can be reduced to a cost-cutting decision without anyone stopping to ask what happens to the people they leave behind.

Mike Prinke isn’t just a number – he’s a father, a husband, and a reminder that when companies say “it’s just business,” what they really mean is that people are expendable, even when they’re dying.

Source: TheGamer.com

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The lack of expertise in the Trump administration — in case it hasn’t dawned on you yet — is a feature, not a bug. Experts annoyingly approach problems with, ahem, expertise. Facts. Data. Experience. Humility.

So if you are the kind of person who believes that tariffs will raise a ton of money from China and make us all rich beyond our wildest dreams, you might want to avoid experts. Or if you feel in your heart of hearts that a war in Iran is a master stroke and will definitely not make you look like an idiot, surround yourself with people like Pete Hegseth and you can go on believin’!

The challenge that experts provide, in most administrations, is a welcome kind of abrasiveness. Surely, nobody likes to be told they’re wrong. Also, clearly, anyone who believes they are deserving of the Presidency is a special kind of narcissist. But it’s that same narcissism that should lead one to rationally want to be proven wrong when one is, in fact, wrong, and when the stakes are global.

An expert can stop you from making a jackass of yourself in front of the entire planet or from blowing up the world.

Trump is different. Watch his Cabinet meetings. The validation he craves is so immediate and immense that he prefers a gushing compliment now than sound advice for later.

The first administration was full (relatively speaking) of people who would say what they needed to say to him and then do the work that needed to get done. They managed to eat the hamburger today AND pay for it on Tuesday. Some of his orders and directives famously just accidentally sat on someone’s desk until he forgot about them. A gushing round of Great ideas! You’re a genius! was often followed by inaction or corrective action.

As destructive as that administration was, it was staffed, generally speaking, by some serious people (*some). Plus, there were whistleblowers, and those who simply refused to be a part of the administration when they realized what was happening.

This time is different. The lesson the true believers learned from Trump 1 was that nobody listened to Trump enough. Trump’s 2’s motto could be Let him cook.

This administration is a sideshow of hucksters, showmen, clowns, and entitled billionaires smelling their own farts. To many of them, Trump has all the expertise anyone needs.

This week’s Loser is a huckster, a showman, and a clown, who aspires to be a fart-sniffing billionaire.

And my Winner is going to elicit a backlash of comments below. I apologize in advance.

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Sean Duffy, Loser

Sean Duffy is a world-champion lumberjack.

I could end this part here. But I’ll go on.

He was a cast member on MTV’s The Real World: Boston, in 1997; Road Rules: All Stars in 1998; and Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons in 2002.

He went on to become the co-host of The Bottom Line on Fox Business.

He is now the Transportation Secretary and was the acting administrator of NASA for some reason.

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There’s an old adage that politics ain’t beanbag. Tough talk and underhanded tactics from politicians shouldn’t send you to the fainting couch, unless it comes from the other side (and you can convince media outlets that some egregious sin has been committed — or in more concrete terms, some law has been broken).

As he’s done in every aspect of his life, Trump has exploited this cynical societal construct and completely shattered boundaries that seemingly used to exist. But he couldn’t do so without pliant partners in the corporate media who have allowed him to operate under completely different rules than other politicians — especially Democrats.

Just take his comments on Truth Social last week. In the midst of his desperate attempt to find an off-ramp for his disastrous war of choice in Iran — it’s not going well; he’s declared victory dozens of times, but can’t stop bragging about continuing to bomb Tehran to hell — Trump reminded us that there’s another evil to fight.

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That’s right. The president declared that there’s an enemy that rivals that of the Iranians who his so-called Secretary of War has sworn to obliterate: the Democratic Party. Did you happen to miss that story? I don’t blame you. It was hardly a blip on the legacy media’s radar.

It also came just one day after Trump posted about the former FBI Director who investigated his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

It’s worth contemplating: What do Trump’s words mean, exactly? After all, he is the president armed with enormous power.

Well, he’s literally put boots on the ground in Democratic cities, dispatching the National Guard to Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and more. And we’ve all seen how ICE, which functions as his praetorian guard, has brutally occupied cities like Minneapolis, resulting in border agents killing two U.S. citizens.

Trump has declared war on those who didn’t vote for him in myriad other ways, including withholding Medicaid funds and disaster relief from blue states. These moves are being challenged in court, but the justice system moves far slower than a lawless president — yet another normative weakness Trump has exploited.

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Sometimes I think Donald Trump was never punched in the mouth, or not enough.

When I was in school, bullying was everywhere. It was the early social media era which meant it didn’t stop when you got home. I’ve seen all of it: fake AOL Instant Messenger accounts catfishing someone about a crush, coordinated harassment, entire friend groups turning on one person overnight. It was constant. A nonstop mix of insecurity, dick measuring, and social ladder climbing. And it stuck with you.

By the time I graduated, the country finally started to reckon with it. Campaigns popped up at the federal, state, and local levels with websites, assemblies, and “be kind” messaging. All of it was an attempt to rein in a culture that had gone too far.

Trump feels like the guy who missed out on those assemblies.

Everyone else got the memo: grow up, cut the shit, or you’re going to get left behind. There was a social agreement that things had gone too far and we all needed to learn how to exist around others, to learn where the line was.

He never did.

Give to Lincoln Square

There’s the story from Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough where her father dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on his head at a family dinner. Apparently, it’s his least favorite story, which shows just how effective those moments can be. And something that should’ve happened more often.

Because what we’re dealing with now isn’t complicated. It’s a guy who still operates like a middle school bully who never got checked. Still obsessed with dominance, still measuring himself against everyone in the room, and still convinced that the world exists for him to win inside of it.

He’s stealing lunch money on a global scale. He’s humiliating people for sport, testing boundaries just to see who won’t push back, and escalating every situation because no one has ever made him stop.

And now he’s running the world like the playground – where he sets the rules.

Somewhere along the way, most people learn that behavior like that comes with social, personal, and sometimes physical consequences. You get corrected, learn to adjust, and grow the fuck up.

He never did, and until someone steps up to punch him in the mouth … we’ll be dealing with it.

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Monday, 3/23 – The Mullin Era Begins at DHS

Can you imagine being named “Markwayne?” I understand that there are heehaw historical ones that are handed down through generations of Appalachia like “Jethro,” but good god. It has to explain a lot, because there has never been a man more brazen in his “tough guy” image who grew so scared in times of crisis – we all remember the photo of him on January 6th.

This week, Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as the Secretary of Homeland Security, taking over after Kristi Noem was fired. Mullin isn’t coming into the role as a technocrat or institutional operator. He’s built his reputation during his time in Congress as a blue-collar conservative who leans into conflict, whether it is on cable news, the senate floor, or a near physical altercation in a committee hearing. That style might play politically and get the attention of Dear Leader, but DHS isn’t a campaign stage.

This is one of the most complex agencies in the federal government. It oversees border security, immigration enforcement, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, disaster response, and intelligence coordination from multiple sub-agencies. It’s already stretched thin with Trump using the department as his personal Gestapo force whenever a problem arises, and has been operating under pressure from both parties.

Mullin is stepping into the role at a time when immigration remains one of the most volatile issues in American politics, with ongoing fights over enforcement, asylum policy, and federal authority. At the same time, DHS has to manage evolving threats abroad and at home, from cyber attacks to domestic extremism and possible threats tied to Trump starting the war in Iran – Mullin has to do all of this while managing the day-to-day realities of FEMA responses and border operations.

The question isn’t whether Mullin can command attention, it’s whether he can manage an agency that requires precision, coordination, and restraint. And we aren’t holding our breath for the college dropout from Oklahoma who wants to show off his MMA skills on the Senate floor.

Source: NPR

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