Hey patriots! Max Burns here.

It’s nearly the end of the week, and as a treat for sticking with me we’re rounding out today’s episode of Electionmaxxing with Max Burns with the one issue Republicans really want to avoid — the economy. We’re diving deep into everything from voter sentiment to all the crazy ways MAGA blames everyone but Trump for his disastrous policies.

Suffering Americans want real solutions from Republicans. But at Wednesday night’s midterm Republican convention in Dallas, Donald Trump offered them something very different: the promise of a $5,000 bribe in exchange for their vote! This isn’t the first time Trump has tried to buy the support of voters. Remember last year’s bogus $2,000 “tariff dividend”? After getting burned so many times, even GOP voters know they can’t trust Trump’s big promises.

Trump’s big midterm convention also looks to be a bust, as The Mirror snapped some humiliating photos of a bunch of empty seats at what Trump claimed was a sold-out event. So much for MAGAmentum!

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Donald’s Disastrous Economy

If you ventured out of the house this past Labor Day weekend, you probably realized things are getting eye-wateringly expensive. Good luck getting any Republicans to own up to an affordability crisis they created!

But now that more Republicans than Democrats feel the economy is heading south, the iceberg of GOP silence is melting fast. Of course, Trump’s dopiest cronies are going to blame everything on Ukraine, Joe Biden, and Gavin Newsom. Just wait and see what confusing slop MAGA Rep. Dan Meuser has to say about it all.

You might also be wondering: with the White House renovations and the plans for the Arc de Trump, the crony political appointments going to underqualified folks, and the lavish MAGA parties – are the only people getting rich just stroking Trump’s ego? Yep! In other words, don’t expect anything to change as long as Republicans are in charge.

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Today’s episode is a study in opposites. Trump promised a lot of grand things to his voters and not only has he not delivered, he’s made things worse for almost every American who isn’t a member of Mar-a-Lago. That can’t be a good look for Republicans … especially when a growing number of Trump loyalists are finally calling for change.

You don’t want to miss it, so check out the full episode of Electionmaxxing with Max Burns! And as always, leave your feedback in the comments to let me know what we should be covering next.

Stay safe out there!

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Hey patriots! Max Burns here.

If you’ve followed any of my work as host of It’s the End … of the Week! here on Lincoln Square, you know I love analyzing a good poll. Maybe that’s because I’m a nerd with nothing better to do, but let my social deficiency be your profit as we spend Wednesday’s episode of Electionmaxxing with Max Burns mining some of the latest polls for hidden gems of insight about how the midterm election cycle is shifting.

There’s a lot of good news out there, but make no mistake: Democrats have their work cut out for them, especially when their opponent is one of the most corrupt political operations in American history.

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Poll Position Wednesdays

Every Wednesday on Electionmaxxing, I’ll take the bulk of the show to cut through the noise of the political polling industry to bring you the data that really matters, whether that’s good news for Democrats or not. I’ll put the numbers in context to show you how voter sentiment is shaping key races across the country, and how smart campaigns are listening to the polls to shape their messaging.

You might have been enjoying a cookout over the long Labor Day weekend, but the polling industry was hard at work pushing out a bunch of new surveys that have Republicans quaking in their boots. That’s because the big issue mobilizing voters this week was … Donald Trump’s insane tariffs against Canadian goods. From maple syrup to furniture to toilet paper, everything is about to get even more expensive as our neighbors to the north slap back at Trump with trade restrictions of their own.

I also take a look at a few key races including Rob Sand’s surging gubernatorial campaign in Iowa and the GOP’s growing headaches in New York to better understand how Canadian tariffs are shaking things up from the Midwest to Niagara Falls. It turns out that once Americans start to view buying toilet paper as a luxury purchase, even Republicans start deserting their candidates in favor of whoever promises to make things affordable again. Who would’ve thought? Oh yeah — Democrats.

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Today’s episode of Electionmaxxing is a love note to Republican incompetence, and we’ve pulled together some of the best examples of GOP officials trying to defend Trump’s indefensible tariff policies. Most Americans may have no idea how trade works, but they tend to get pretty unhappy when toilet paper becomes something only the rich can afford.

That’s … probably not great for Republicans’ reelection hopes.

You won’t want to miss it, so check out the full episode of Electionmaxxing with Max Burns! And as always, leave your feedback in the comments to let me know what we should be covering next.

Stay safe out there!

Give to Lincoln Square

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Hey patriots! Max Burns here.

I’m thrilled to be kicking off this newsletter on an exciting day for me, for America, and maybe — just maybe — the world. Today, Lincoln Square kicked off our new program, Electionmaxxing with Max Burns, where I have the pleasure of guiding you through the craziest and most important midterm election cycle in American history.

Here’s a little roundup of our inaugural show, along with some of the big stories burning up your world.

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Trump’s War Chest

Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. and his allied Super PACs are sitting on over $400 million in campaign cash, yet the Donald hasn’t spent a dime to boost his party’s endangered House and Senate candidates. Instead, Trump has authorized just $1 million in spending for a TV ad about … how strong he is. And no, I’m not kidding: the latest ad from the group Securing American Greatness is called Toughest Guy, and it doesn’t mention a single Republican except for Trump.

While Trump hoards his gold like Smaug, Republicans are sweating that his unwillingness to part with his war chest could spell sweeping defeats for GOP candidates across the country — including Texas, where all-time creeper Ken Paxton is trailing Democrat James Talarico in a barnburner of a race. We broke down Paxton’s breakdown on today’s episode of Electionmaxxing, complete with Republican strategist Karl Rove’s freakout on Fox News about how Trump’s greed is dooming Paxton’s dud of a campaign.

And if you guessed that Trump might be guarding that money so he can spend it on lavish parties for himself after the 2026 midterm cycle wraps up, congratulations! You’re a better political strategist than any of the Republicans who let America’s most famous grifter control the RNC bank account.

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We’ve got plenty of surprises and new segments in the works as Electionmaxxing rolls out in its full glory, so be sure to check out the full episode. And subscribe to Lincoln Square on YouTube and Substack for a bunch of other great articles and videos from voices you trust. I don’t want to give away too much, but Vice President JD Vance definitely makes a surprise appearance on the show to receive a very special award.

You won’t want to miss it. And as always, leave your feedback in the comments to let me know what we should be covering next.

Stay safe out there!

Give to Lincoln Square

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Sometimes Winners lose, and Losers win. That was the premise that led me to write this column each week. It might merely sound like a clever turn of phrase, but our entire timeline is based on that premise.

All the chaos. All the catastrophe. All the pain and suffering. The potential collapse of our empire, really, is baked into that very simple construction.

Look at it another way. Replace Winners with Heroes, and Losers with Villains, and you have the basic building block of virtually every movie ever made. The Hero is flawed. Always. It’s their flaw that is in tension with their unique ability to overcome the obstacle in front of them. The broad objective isn’t necessarily to vanquish the Villain. In fact, the Villain is simply a force standing in the way of the Hero’s ultimate objective.

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You have to defeat the dragon to save the princess.

Defeating Trump cannot be our ultimate objective. But to achieve our ultimate objective, we must defeat Trump.

Our ultimate objectives are complex, of course, but they include words like freedom and equity, peace and justice. How these vague, shiny words apply to our daily lives, well, we should be able to decide. Maybe that itself is the ultimate objective — the ability to determine the path of our own lives.

The Losers I write about in this column are sometimes grifters, sometimes they’re frauds. They are fools and cowards and fascists and white Christian nationalists. Whatever they are, whatever their personal objective, they are standing in the way of where we need to go.

This will be the last Winners & Losers. Maybe forever. Maybe for a while. I love writing this column, but, honestly, I want to write less about the Villains blocking our path forward, and more about where that incredible path might lead.

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You have chosen a winning Loser! And it wasn’t even close. I’ll reveal your choice in a second. But first, let’s set the table.

Donald Trump is actively working to disrupt the midterms because he knows MAGA candidates are going to get trounced (generally speaking). Since January 2025, Donald Trump has demolished American soft power abroad by cutting aid…

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Last week, you took to the polls to select your Loser of the Quarter-Millennium in a blistering ranked-choice voting system. Two Losers have emerged, which can only mean one thing: it’s time for a runoff!

The voting was pretty remarkable. I write about a lot of Losers in this column. There are the MAHAs, the frauds, the cheats, the hucksters, the idiots,…

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We are officially a quarter-millennium into this thing, and it couldn’t be going better. Really. Everything’s fine. We’re great.

Right?

Right?!

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The Reflecting Pool. The East Wing. The huge-wonderful-fair-that’s-too-hot-and-nobody-showed-up-for. Our broken healthcare system. Exploding personal debt. Environmental calamity. ICE terror in American cities.

Th…

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

We’ve agreed to shift The Waiting Room to a monthly format in order to give me more time to put together a more cohesive post instead of a simple “here’s some healthcare stuff which happened the past couple…

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This week, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation, and there couldn’t be less enthusiasm.

But there should be. We’re in a rough spot right now. There’s no getting around that. But no matter what happens to the United States, time will continue its march forward, nature will run through its endless incredible cycles, and the universe will continue to speed into oblivion.

Rather than a birthday, this year feels like a wake. Of course, we mourn the loss of things and people we love. That would be an apt way to describe the way most of us feel heading into this American holiday: mourning.

But it’s not exactly right. Like the universe and nature and time itself, we will continue. We might be changed. But we will go on.

I watch my kids growing up, little by little and sometimes all at once, and I understand just how we’ll go on. America is not dying. We’re not mourning the loss of something. If anything, we’re mourning the loss of what might have been.

But that’s also wrong. We don’t know what might have been, and now we have an opportunity — I’d say a responsibility — to build something better.

These past weeks I’ve been focusing less on what we’ve gotten wrong, and more on what America has done right. The Winners these past weeks have been a little more historical than usual. This week is no different.

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I was born at the end of the Bicentennial year. Old photographs from that summer show my sun-soaked older brothers and sisters riding their bikes down the street, covered in stars and stripes. Pure American childhood. Ice cream-covered chins. Missing front teeth. Tussled hair. Waving little flags in the grass on the little front lawn. A modest flag waving over the steps where my pregnant mom sits, tanned and glowing and smiling despite having her hands full with all these little kids running around.

The America of that year and that decade was full of challenges. I’ve heard. By the time the decade ended, I had just turned three. But back in ‘76, my father had only been back from Vietnam for 7 or 8 years. Nixon resigned in disgrace only a few years before. Stagflation was turning the screws on families like mine. High inflation plus slow growth and relatively high unemployment meant rising prices at the grocery store and job anxiety across the board.

The OPEC oil embargo had resulted in gas lines and price spikes, and by the Bicentennial, Americans could probably see that the era of cheap, endless energy was coming to an abrupt end.

The Church Committee investigations had pulled the curtains back on abuses by the CIA and FBI. Combine that with the fall of Saigon in ‘75 and Nixon’s humiliation, and trust in our government and institutions tanked.

Black Americans were still facing housing discrimination, police brutality, and the reality of being shut out of the larger economy, even after civil rights victories only a decade earlier. Material equality had not been a result of legal equality.

What was the point of our government? What was the point of any of it?

Fifty years later, the parallels are striking. Our economic turmoil is driven by needless humiliation abroad and a crisis in the Middle East. The racism that kept black Americans from buying homes and making real gains never went away. People like Pete Hegseth are dismissing and demoting soldiers because they aren’t white men. Oil and gas prices are wreaking havoc on the day-to-day lives of most of us.

Once again we wonder: what is the point of our government?

But there is a difference between the bicentennial and this Semiquincentennial.

In those yellowed pictures my mom still keeps in white and red and blue albums lining her bookshelves, the faces of her and my dad and their neighbors and the kids running through the yard and the candid folks in the background who didn’t even know they were being photographed — everyone’s face held an emotion that was so deep and earnest and obvious that it seems frivolous.

It was hope.

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It’s possible — maybe even likely — that I’m tracing my own nostalgia along the outlines of their happy faces and seeing something that wasn’t there. But I don’t think so. The flags. The red-striped, star-spangled jammies. It was America, and it was wounded, but it would continue to exist, striving to be better.

I wonder about a child born this year, looking back over pictures of her own pregnant mother, fifty years from now. Will she see hope in the faces staring back at her through the decades? Maybe. But more likely she’ll see doubt. She’ll see tension and anxiety.

It’s devastating, this anniversary of our country, because it’s so difficult to find joy, to find hope, to imagine a way into the next 250 years that doesn’t involve some incredibly difficult times.

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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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