King Trump Rules the World!

He's got the gold; he's got the girls; he's got the power, and he exacts vengeance on all of his enemies. He carries the cross like a scepter, sells his own Bible and coins his own national currency.

Washington DC is being turned into something of a police state today with Trump federalizing the city’s own police and authorizing the National Guard to use their full power to do what needs to be done. It is, of course, the federal government’s right to control Washington, since it is not like any other US city, being a federal “district.” However, D.C. has operated under its own rule for a long time.

That said, as Trump points out, D.C. has not operated all that well under its own rule, as citizens have to be afraid to travel in some parts of it. Crime is high, the slums are wide, and Trump rightly believes this all represents our nation poorly. Still, it’s a big change, hammered down from on high by the Don’s edict because the Dem’s have botched up government of D.C. so badly for decades. It is also the kind of martial law conservatives once loathed.

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he was placing the D.C. police under direct federal control and will deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington to fight crime, an extraordinary flex of federal power that stripped city leadership of its ability to make law enforcement decisions and could expose residents of the nation’s capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically deployed military force.

Big changes. The kind Trump likes to make. Changes to muscle crime to the ground. But also big and intrusive federal government—the kind Republicans used to hate … like this:

The administration has already mobilized FBI agents in recent days in overnight shifts to help local law enforcement prevent carjackings and violent crime, officials said. Because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has unusually sweeping powers to intervene over the objections of its residents and leaders, giving the president an opportunity to use it as a laboratory for a militarized approach to urban crime-fighting.

Imagine if Obama did that in Dallas! This is a test of presidential police-state powers over which the Right used to criticize Obama, saying he’d impose martial law to lock away US citizens, just as those who are not citizens are now being locked up in alligator dungeons for not having proper paperwork, even many nice people who are not criminals, just desperate workers doing what they ought not. Their alligator-meriting crimes? They seized economic opportunity that was not theirs to take.

While sending them home right away without “due process” is merited—given no process is due when they arrive at the borders without papers and are merely turned back—Alligator Alcatraz seems a little extreme for a young mom working the tomato fields and her kids. (I’m fine with all the rapist immigrants going to AA, if we really know they are rapists.)

Seizing more and more control …

It is not hard to imagine there may be a little Trumpian comeuppance in all of this due to January 6th in this D.C. move to martial law, in addition to Trump’s desire to make the city better for all of America and for our national reputation—not that Trump has anything to get even with DC for, as it is not even clear if the Metro Police were doing their job or standing by and not doing it that day. Some were videoed practically escorting people inside the Capitol.

So, maybe it is more of a “this time I’ll make sure all law enforcement in the town is fully under my executive control” kind of move. Question is, does Trump have the right to just assume control of D.C., or is control of the district governed by congress, which is the body that chose long ago to put D.C. under self-rule, rather than congressional or presidential rule.

Under the city’s Home Rule Act, the president can take over the D.C. police for a period of up to 30 days by declaring “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.” After that time, the police would revert to local control unless Congress passes a law to allow a longer period of federal control.

Trump now declares everything is in a state of emergency in order to gain full power over it all. Oh, well, such trivial questions about the separation of powers hardly even matter anymore now that we’re getting so used to all of this. Even the Democrats barely raise a word compared to how they came apart in outrage throughout Trump 1.0. (Maybe their intended strategy this time, having gotten nowhere with impeachments last time, is to give him enough rope to hang himself and all his followers with him???)

That still leaves the question, though, as to whether Trump will relinquish all this power in thirty days or just declare a new emergency every thirty days to hold on to it indefinitely. After, all Trump has stacked up nearly as many emergency declarations in order to aggregate power to himself in his first seven months as former champions of the new rule-by-edict presidential modus operandi accomplished during a full term:

The Weekly Dish

The only presidents who ever beat Trump’s current edict count over the course of a full term were himself, during 1.0, and Biden by a hair on his ancient, balding head; yet, it took Biden a lot longer to achieve the level of executive orders we are at now under the chaotic rocket ride of Trump 2.0. So, who knows how high the emergency acquisitions of special executive powers will stack by the time Trump finishes 2.0.

Whether the administration would want to extend the takeover beyond 30 days is unclear. In previous actions, including sending the National Guard to Los Angeles, Trump made high-profile declarations, then allowed the federal deployments to fade out over time. A longer period of federal accountability for local D.C. crime could raise the political risk for Trump….

“They fight back until you knock the hell out of them, because it’s the only language they understand,” Trump told reporters at a White House news conference. “It’s a disgusting thing.”

“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness, and we’re getting rid of the slums, too,” Trump added. “I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we’re getting rid of the slums where they live.”

Sounds like much more than a thirty-day enforcement problem. Crime wars usually last a lot longer than that; and Trump is now gunning for crime wars. Attacking crime fiercely is needed, of course, so I respect the intention; but we’ve often seen crime wars tend to drag out violently for years or even decades.

The DC mayor retorts, as she acquiesces to powers greater than her own …

“We’re at a 30-year violent-crime low. We’re not satisfied. We haven’t taken our foot off the gas, and we continue to look for ways to make our city safer,” she said. “While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that — given some of the rhetoric of the past — that we’re totally surprised….”

The members of the D.C. Council, however, issued a joint statement denouncing Trump’s orders.

“This is a manufactured intrusion on local authority. Violent crime in the District is at the lowest rates we’ve seen in 30 years. Federalizing the D.C. police is unwarranted because there is no Federal emergency,” the statement said.

… and even more military control in other nations

Another emergency for Trump is the fentanyl problem in the US, and there he has seized the power to outright declare war today. Declaring war has been done by many US presidents, of course, because congress has abrogated that constitutional role to presidents for decades now in dereliction of its own duties, which has resulted in a lot of wars. Usually, however, any given president du jour pretends he is not declaring war, but just following out previous terrorist enactments by congress. However, those acts were over terrorists from the Middle East due to 9/11. Under Trump, we’re going on this very day over to an entirely different hemisphere to fight wars we already lost.

The man who is again being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in today’s headlines due to his commendable work in negotiating peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia, is declaring he will take the US military into any Central American or South American Country where he sees fit in order to dig out drug lords, but especially into oil-rich, Russia-centric Venezuela. (And who cannot but marvel at how the peace treaty announcement today makes a timely offset to today’s twin announcements of a DC police state and a new global war?)

President Donald Trump has quietly authorized the use of U.S. military force against Latin American drug cartels that his administration has officially classified as foreign terrorist organizations, according to reports by The New York Times and New York Post. The move represents the most aggressive escalation yet in Trump’s long-running campaign to dismantle transnational narcotics networks flooding the United States with fentanyl and other illicit drugs.

According to senior administration officials, the directive empowers U.S. forces to engage cartel operations overseas, with a specific focus on dismantling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “Cartel de Los Soles” and allied criminal syndicates. “The president is determined not just to dismantle – but completely destroy – Maduro’s cartel and obliterate their operations in the Western Hemisphere,” a source close to the White House told the New York Post.

Might that work in the western theater of the new war on terror to ultimately result in the US CIA fostering a good, old-fashioned internal coup against the Venezuelan president or end as a direct US regime-change war with a little shock-and-awe around Maduro’s capital? We seem to do a lot of both here in the US.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to Fox News Digital: “President Trump’s top priority is protecting the homeland, which is why he took the bold step to designate several cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.” The effort involves coordination between the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Treasury Department.

Sounds pretty warlike to me, and such terrorist designations are required just as emergency designations are in order to acquire these special powers, which are otherwise kept in a nice little box, locked by the congress who created many of them, an arm’s length from the president. It is all so exactly reminiscent of how the US War on Drugs in Nicaragua started back in President Reagan’s time:

“Drugs are bad, and we’re going after them,” Ronald Reagan declared during his first term as president. “We’ve taken down the surrender flag and run up the battle flag. And we’re going to win the war on drugs.” He wasn’t referring only to highly addictive drugs like heroin and cocaine, but also to marijuana, which he deemed “a dangerous threat to an entire generation.”

Reagan’s sense of moral certainty and his tendency to view the world in black and white manifested in the way his administration waged the drug war both at home and abroad. Embracing an overly simplistic notion of the problem, he targeted Latin American countries that were producing these drugs with crop eradication, and admonished Americans to “just say no,” enacting exceedingly harsh penalties for those who failed to comply. It has now been over three decades since Reagan pledged to win the drug war, and yet the trafficking of heroin and cocaine continues to be a monumentally profitable and violent criminal enterprise that wreaks havoc on some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

(“The Enduring Legacy of Reagan’s Drug War in Latin America”)

That evolved into a war by proxy to take down the regime of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and then it spread from there to other Latin-American nations:

Congress voted countless times on [Reagan’s] policy of undermining Nicaragua’s Cuban- and Soviet-backed government by arming insurgents known as the Contra. White House officials said the stakes were tremendous: “Central America,” top diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick declared, was “the most important place in the world.” For their part, the left-wing revolutionaries who ruled Nicaragua—the Comandantes of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)—became icons of the Cold War. In March 1986, TIME ran a cover story featuring Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega: the headline read “The Man Who Makes Reagan See Red….”

Aggressive action to confront Nicaragua’s leftist government was therefore necessary. “Nicaragua,” Reagan told lawmakers, “is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington.” Similar logic justified U.S. involvement across Central America, including military support for the Salvadoran government’s war against left-wing rebels….

Nicaragua provided American hawks with an opportunity to exorcise the ghost of defeat in Vietnam. The United States showed remarkable hostility toward Nicaragua’s government, through its assistance to anti-Sandinista “Contra” rebels, as well as economic sanctions and direct acts of sabotage….

While the U.S. Congress, worried by the prospect of a Vietnam-like quagmire, put limits on aid to the Contra, the Reagan administration circumvented [sound familiar?] these in spectacular fashion. At one point, U.S. officials secretly sold weapons to Iran (in violation of an embargo) and used some of the proceeds to finance the insurgents in Nicaragua. The ensuing Iran-Contra scandal rocked Washington.

Nicaragua fell off the U.S. political radar in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending. Following a war that claimed tens of thousands of lives, Nicaraguans voted the FSLN out in free elections that year. The Revolution was over. Outgoing president Daniel Ortega ditched his olive green fatigues and started fresh as a civilian politician.

That war against the Ortega government was fought by the US through proxies (the Contras) … along with a little standard US election interference; but guess who is still president long after Reagan is dead? Daniel Ortega! He’s a rich, old man now. All the same drugs that made him rich are still there, too … and here in the US. Trump’s new drug war will be fought more directly with our own military (who were, of course, involved behind the scenes throughout Reagan’s drug war). No messing with proxies this time. It will be more powerful and more efficient and more closely under the president’s control that way.

Ortega staged a political comeback after the US faded the unsuccessful war. In the end …

Ortega took "full control of all four branches of government, state institutions, the military, and police", and in the process dismantled "Nicaragua's institutional democracy".[

Sounds vaguely familiar, too.

Ortega suggested that he would like to change the constitution to allow him to run again for president.

Again, vaguely familiar.

In an example of how Cold War-era ideological frameworks have mutated since then, Ortega and Murillo eschew the socialist economic policies of yesteryear and espouse Christian-conservative social values.

Hmm. Also familiar. Using religion (as opposed to living it) dresses things up nicely and brings more of the masses in to support you. But then …

When Nicaraguans finally launched protests to demand democratic freedoms in the spring of 2018, Ortega and Murillo launched a crackdown of historic proportions. That year police and paramilitary [sort of like the National Guard] repression killed over 300 people and injured and displaced many more. By 2023, the regime had jailed or exiled virtually every voice of dissent, including many Sandinistas who helped lead the 1979 revolution. A United Nations inquiry last year accused the regime of having committed “crimes against humanity.” Stunned by the scale of repression, the study’s authors saw fit to compare Ortega’s Nicaragua to Germany under the Nazis.

Hmm. Still vaguely familiar for a leader who has been accused by his generals of praising Hitler because he was large-and-in-charge with military leaders who were very loyal to him.

An article by [The Atlantic’s] editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg alleg[ed] that while serving as president, Donald Trump once said: "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders…."

"He commented more than once that, 'You know, Hitler did some good things, too,'" Kelly told The New York Times.

The Trump administration denies all of that, and it has been somewhat debunked on the basis that it simply can’t be verified beyond the words of Trump’s fired and, therefore, disgruntled generals; but, then, people were only saying such things about Ortega, too. So, there is still a whiff of familiarity.

Reagan’s War on Drugs faded into a long list or American regime-change fails. Yet, off we go again to war on drugs anywhere in Latin America where Trump sees fit … and this time without any vote by congress. Who needs them if you can rule more efficiently by edict? They just get in the way as they did with the Reagan administration’s funding of the Contras.

Venezuela’s “Cartel de los Soles” was also designated [as a terrorist organization], with U.S. officials alleging it is controlled by Maduro and senior members of his regime. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday doubled the reward for information leading to Maduro’s capture to $50 million, accusing him of using cartels to “bring deadly violence to our country” and calling him “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world.”

Ah, so there we go once again: regime change.

Pentagon officials are reportedly drafting operational plans for potential actions against the cartels. However, legal experts warn that overseas military strikes, especially those resulting in the deaths of suspected traffickers who pose no immediate threat, could raise serious domestic and international legal concerns.

Such concerns are trivial to Team Trump:

Trump allies, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, argue the designations open new options. “We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug-dealing organizations,” Rubio said Thursday. “That means using the full power of the United States, including military capabilities, when necessary.”

Thus, We have a Nobel Peace President nominee and a Man of War and a new regime-change operation all on the same day!

Whether Trump’s newly signed authorization will lead to direct U.S. military operations in Latin America remains uncertain. Still, the order signals that the administration is willing to take unprecedented steps — and considerable risks….

The Epstain mess

And, therein, lies the greater concern because the president is showing quite a pattern of stacking up emergencies more quickly than anyone, including himself, to take unprecedented steps in stretching the law as far as he can. Some would even say many are fake emergencies, just like the federal court just called his effort to release the Ghislaine Maxwell Grand Jury testimonies a “diversion” and “an illusion” of disclosure:

The judge also suggested that the Justice Department’s request was more about public relations than about having previously unknown information about Epstein and Maxwell unsealed for the first time.

“The Court’s review confirmed that unsealing the grand jury materials would not reveal new information of any consequence,” Engelmayer wrote.

“A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he wrote.

And you would do well to hold such reservations: The request did manifest perfectly in time to ease a little tension off the president over his refusal to release ALL of the Epstein Files. Undoubtedly, with as many potential inside sources as the president has, he knew there was nothing new revealed in the limited portion of the Maxwell case that was taken to a Grand Jury before being presented in trial. His sudden call to release it all gave the pretense of being transparent and revealing while safely disclosing only stuff that was already disclosed in trial that didn’t mention Trump because he was not the issue; nor would it present a list of names to be brought to trial, as only Maxwell was on trial. So, it was a safe distraction that would make it look to his supporters like he was trying.

“Contrary to the Government’s depiction, the Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest,” Engelmayer wrote. “Far from it. It consists of garden-variety summary testimony by two law enforcement agents.”

Ignore the smoke screen, Folks. Nothing to see in this Epstein stuff.

With some interest, I note that Maxwell has suddenly been moved into a more cushy prison right after talking for hours with Trump’s lawyer about what she would be inclined to say if she were asked to testify before congress about “all” she new. You know, things like how all-inclusive might the “all” have to be? Trump also teased her with the offering of a possible pardon as soon as congress came up with the idea of interviewing her. I presume it was implicitly clear to her (even if not spelled out by that Trump’s attorney) that the pardon would depend on what she says. One can see where law enforcement might offer immunity to a lesser criminal in order to capture a much greater criminal, but immunity to the greater criminal? Who are you going to bag who is more at fault in the whole Epstain mess than Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, themselves. Why a pardon for a convicted sexual predator who obtained girls for Epstein & Friends?

Well, I guess we’ll have to see how all of that turns out, but it smells like a diversion and a cover-up at the same time to me, just like the judge ruled!

So, we have new global wars in the offing, presidentially declared, along with newly designated terrorists—a designation necessary just like declaring emergencies in order to fully access those special presidential powers. One writer today calls all of that a “permanent stain” just as I do the Epstain. Hopefully, the Teflon Don doesn’t once again manage to brush it all off of his suit without opening the files and prosecuting statutory rapists.

…a recent Mark Helprin piece jogged my amygdala nonetheless. He described the president as someone who “behaves like a wild boar crashing through a field of well-tended crops. (Look carefully at the eyes, and you see it.)”….

Yes, you do. Helprin is as far from being a leftist as one might imagine — which, of course, is precisely why he sees the feral glint in Trump’s eyes the way he does. Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology. In that sense, Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.

It does keep looking more and more that way as Trump aggregates more and more emergency powers day after day, doing almost everything by edict. He is now even controlling US businesses by telling them (as another story goes today about Nvidea) they must give 20% of certain computer-chip revenue to the US government via export tariffs. So, tariff world is expanding to US exports now.

Trump certainly appears to be covering for all the sins of his billionaire cronies by pretending there is no Epstain for his administration to clean up. He fires people who won’t lie for him by publishing favorable economic statistics, sues news publishers that write negatively about him, even if the article was the truth, on the sole basis that the publisher showed bias, which has certainly never been illegal until now; and now he declares another global war on drugs and even puts a bounty on the head of Venezuela’s president in order to change the regime. And that’s all just in the past month!

This very Greek tragedy—conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more—is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted….

It’s getting harder and harder to avoid that kind of conclusion as Trump keeps stacking up power with almost no opposition. The kind of conservatism I still believe in always said “character counts” above almost anything else. It didn’t allow leaders to cover for scummy rich guys, guilty of child rape. (We don’t know which ones are guilty, but we certainly know by Maxwell’s conviction and twenty-year sentence there are many. So out with them!) It didn’t pretend like politicians’ many rank personal behaviors in cheating on their multiple wives and defaulting on business loans, declaring bankruptcy several times over as “a form of finance,” provided no indication about the kind of character that matters. It didn’t completely excuse and ignore, as is happening flagrantly right now (listed in another story today), tens, if not hundreds, of major financial conflicts of interest whereby a politician overtly sells access to his power for personal profit. (Trump is even creating family crypto currencies and turning them into the national coin by giving them a presidential blessing and using the presidency to get millionaires and billionaires to buy in … for access of course.) It didn’t choose to believe and find ways to excuse every lie told as if each one is the gospel truth or doesn’t matter. It didn’t ignore pride and boasting at a level I’ve never seen before as a sign of poor character. It didn’t support trillion-dollar deficits while spending US treasure on gold-gilded ballrooms for the White House. It didn’t act like NONE of that matters just because we have to defeat the Left. And the kind of conservatism I believe in doesn’t excuse all of that in a Republican when it knows darn well it would tar and feather any Democrat for acting out in all those ways! The kind of conservatism I still believe in held tight to the constitution in every respect and put all of it above any leader.

Sadly, Trump has even netted many of my Christian brothers and sisters into helping him cover for these things, even inside the White House, corrupting the character of people who probably set out to be good people before they joined his team.

The tyrant’s first textbook tactic, of course, is declaring an emergency to justify the seizure of arbitrary power. Trump has now done so over 30 times in various executive orders and directives in his first seven months. Previous presidents have moved the dial of executive power, as a polarized, deadlocked Congress has surrendered more and more authority, but even [Bush’s torture attorney] John “Signing Statements” Yoo — who once argued that a US president has the right to crush the testicles of a child if he so wishes — now acknowledges that Trump has “elevated it to another level….”

America is one-man rule. Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.

Quite an array of articles today delve into all of these strongman power moves that keep building one upon another—so many I could hardly choose to not cover this theme in an editorial, as much as I would have preferred to avoid doing so because it will undoubtedly cost me readers; however, as things keep lining up to goose-step in the same autocratic direction, I fear I would not feel good about myself down the road if I didn’t cover all that I see happening. If things keep moving so quickly and consistently in this direction, I night even find myself in the position of those Germans after World War II who were asked how they could have stood by quietly and let all of that happen.

Even Trump’s own Truth chatbot has started to outright contradict the Prez’s own posts. I’m sure the Truthbot will be fired as quickly as any government workers who’s mathematical statistics fail to praise the king (who pulled another TACO today with China, too, as I suggested in my last Deeper Dive might well be likely).

Trump’s aggregation of power and rule by decree exceed anything we’ve ever seen in a US president, aided by the complicity of a fawning and frightened congress that has become almost non-existent on both sides of the aisle, as nearly everyone on his own side craves Trump’s support and fears his wrath; and it keeps expanding relentlessly. Even the Democrats are strangely more quiet than they were in the past. Like a black hole, Trump sucks the light and gravity of those around him into himself everyday, pulling even relatively good people into his darkness.

If some readers leave me after this—again—I understand; but, if in a year things have devolved further down this path to the point where even they are sick of it all, I hope they’ll come back in deep appreciation of the person who simply reminded them how this isn’t what a true conservative would do, and it sure doesn’t look like what Jesus would do!

In 2017, I wrote that I suspected Trump was a Trojan horse for conservatives, cultivated by the Deep State to take them in and take them down, most likely without Trump even know he’d be playing that role. I said back then that he would not drain the swamp but would suck it all into the White House until the swamp swamped him … as it did. The Hard Right argued back with me that I was a fool because he was playing 4-D chess. He wasn’t playing 4-D chess then, and he isn’t now. He’s playing Trump cards for his own gains.

See the boldface stories that follow in order to capture the breadth of all his moves in just one day’s news.

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Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

Corporate America's Recession Fears Plummet Despite the Highest Average Tariff Rate Since 1910

Here’s what U.S. automakers are saying about Trump’s changing EV policies

Real-Estate Rubble (housing, commercial & global real-estate bubble trouble)

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway predicts major mortgage rate changes for 2026

Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)

Trump to nominate Stephen Miran to Fed board. What to Know about his Policy Views

Alert! The Government Initiates an Emergency Debt Auction. (Running out of Cash) Fires facts and hires hacks.

TooGood Gold Adds to High-Grade Newfoundland Land Position

GDX Record-High Watch

Inflation Factors (from too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

GOP Congressman on Trump Tariffs: ‘Steel Prices Are Up’ but It’s ‘For the Good of the Country’

25 Percent Of U.S. Households Are Skipping Meals So They Will Have Enough Money To Pay Their Bills

Wars & Rumors of War, Revolts, Hacks & Cyberattacks + AI threats

Trump Authorizes Military Force Against Latin American Cartels Designated as Terrorist Organizations

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Trump orders federal moves on D.C. crime, takes over D.C. police

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Israel Approves Gaza City Takeover Plan, Setting Stage for Major Military Offensive

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AI Is Talking Behind Our Backs About Glue-Eating and Killing Us All

Profit-Driven AI Jesus Chatbots Prey On Prayer-Driven Christians

Trump Trade Wars & Turf Wars

Now Trump is tariffing American companies, too

Trump extends China tariff deadline by 90 days

China Defies US Tariff Threats Over Russian Oil Imports Amid Intensifying Economic Pressure

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

Trump’s legal retribution weaponizes the government

The Permanent Stain

Judge rejects unsealing Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury transcripts. Calls request a “diversion” and “an illusion” of disclosure.

Trump 'Truth' Chatbot Keeps Contradicting Him

The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism with American Characteristics

How much is Trump pocketing off the Presidency?

The path to bankruptcy and financial chaos is well signposted and well-trod.

Bonner: A New Golden Age?

Armenia and Azerbaijan Sign Historic Peace Deal in the White House

A Pox Upon Us (the plagues, pandemics & health police of the 2020s)

RFK Cancels Some mRNA Research

Off-the-Beat News & Just Plain Offbeat News

James Webb Telescope Just Detected an Impossible Object in Deep Space

No sex please we’re celibate: why Gen Z have ditched hook-up culture

Doomer Humor

Take a crash course in political humor on both sides of the aisle at Counterpoint.