The president is suing himself and compensating other people for legal claims that have not been identified from people that we don’t know. We just haven’t seen anything like that.
This week's featured post is "Has Trump finally pushed Republicans too far?"
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. The fund to reward January 6 rioters for their crimes essentially makes Congress and the courts irrelevant. So bad as it is in itself, the precedent it sets is much worse.
- Climate change. See the closing for a creative response to climate-change-related flooding in West London.
- Iran war. Trump is always saying that he's close to an agreement with Iran, so I ignore those claims. But this weekend, some other sources were saying the same thing and laying out some sketchy details.
- Ukraine. This week, Phillips O'Brien's update describes how Ukraine's medium-range strike ability is shutting down the main supply road for Russia's forces, while it's long-range strikes are targeting Russia's oil refineries.
This week's developments
This week everybody was reacting to Trump's "thug fund"
I talk about the political implications of this for Republicans in the featured post. But it's important to take a step back and just see it on its own terms. Trump has found a way to get the US Treasury to pay for his private army of brownshirts.
The striking thing about this "settlement" is that nobody who isn't answerable to Trump has anything to do with it. Trump's Justice Department negotiated the agreement with Trump's IRS, and avoided letting any judge oversee the result. The five commissioners who run the fund will be appointed by Trump, and can be removed by him at will. The fund has no obligation to reveal who it has given the money to.
So the upshot is that Trump, on his own, is removing $1.8 billion from the Treasury and doing whatever he wants with it.
and rumors of a deal with Iran
Maybe it's real this time, maybe not. The devil is in the details. One thing that seems clear: The terms are nothing close to the "unconditional surrender" Trump said he was aiming for. Axios reports:
The agreement the U.S. and Iran are close to signing involves a 60-day ceasefire extension during which the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened, Iran would be able to freely sell oil, and negotiations would be held on curbing Iran's nuclear program, according to a U.S. official.
The thing to watch for is whether Trump just gets back to the pre-war situation, if he falls short of that, or if he makes some gain. That will tell you who won the war. The Strait was open before the war started, and we were already negotiating about Iran's nuclear program. So if that's the deal, what did the war accomplish, beyond spending a lot of money, raising gas prices, and depleting our stock of weapons?
If this deal holds, there will be no question that Trump’s war amounted to a major strategic failure. Maybe we get an agreement similar to the JCPOA, which would have been in place had Trump not exited the deal. (Getting back in war something you already had is nothing to cheer about.) The agreement would leave the regime (perhaps more radical than ever) in place, deny Israel any permanent end to the Iranian threat, reveal the limits of U.S. influence and power in the region, and, by default, afford China (as evidenced by Trump’s pathetic showing at the summit) increased stature and confidence. Preventing a restart of a war no one wanted and an end to the energy shock Trump provoked can hardly been called “wins.”
But anyway, wait for real details before getting too excited one way or the other.
I have to laugh at the Republican senators warning that we can't trust Iran to negotiate in good faith. Why would anyone trust Trump to negotiate in good faith? The air attacks that killed most of Iran's ruling council happened while negotiations were underway in Geneva.
and the Democratic "autopsy"
It's common for a political party that loses an election to fund some kind of study about why it lost, in hopes that something can change before the next election.
The Democrats funded such a report after 2024, but then didn't release the results. Recently a partial report surfaced. It's 192 pages and I admit I have only skimmed small parts of it. It has drawn a lot of commentary, almost entirely negative. The main criticism repeated many times is that the report avoids a lot of significant issues:
- Biden should have dropped out soon enough for there to be a real nomination process, rather than just a coronation of Harris.
- The Israel/Gaza situation demoralized a lot of progressive voters.
- Harris needed a response to the anti-trans message that Trump focused on in the closing weeks.
All the same, I'm not sure I would have focused on any of that if I had written a report, because it's not likely to matter as much in 2028. I mean, Biden isn't going to try to run again, we will have a nomination process, and the winning candidate will probably have a different message about Israel or trans rights (not that I know what it will be).
A lot of what is in the report sounds like platitudes: court rural votes better, for example. Or build up the state and local party operations. Great. Tell me how.
An interesting counterpoint to most of the chatter about the report comes from the Strength In Numbers blog, which focuses on data.
When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost — and the reason I am going to explore here, at this website, it being a data-driven website — is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome.
The author puts together a model for predicting how an incumbent party should do based on approval of the current president and public optimism/pessimism about the economy. That model predicts Harris should have done slightly worse than she actually did.
So maybe Harris wasn't such a bad candidate and didn't run such a bad campaign. Maybe all our 2024 autopsies are trying to analyze factors that made no difference.
and you also might be interested in ...
The Ebola outbreak in the Congo comes at a bad time. The Trump regime has cut way back on programs to track and mitigate diseases in Africa.
The only refugees the Trump regime is taking in any numbers are the white South Africans who feel oppressed by the Black-majority government. This week they announced plans for 10,000 more.
But racism is over in this country. John Roberts says so.
Wish I'd said that: Tom Tillis commented on Ken Paxton, who will probably be the Republican nominee for a senate seat in Texas now that he has Trump's endorsement:
To call Paxton 'ethically challenged' is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.
RIP Barney Frank. I was in the same room with Frank once, at a fund-raiser for another congressman. He predicted 2020 would be a 1964-scale Democratic landslide, which didn't happen. Biden's win was convincing, but not LBJ-like.
Trump missed Don Jr.'s wedding in the Bahamas Saturday. I just note the fact and refuse to speculate about the reason.
Tulsi Gabbard will resign as Director of National Intelligence at the end of June. Her stated reason is to support her husband, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. The rumor mill says that she's out because she can't get behind Trump's foreign wars.
It's tempting to be happy she's leaving, because she never should have had this position to begin with. But she's likely to be replaced with someone just as unqualified and less independent.
In a recent CNBC interview, Jeff Bezos said that Trump is "more mature, more disciplined" in his second term.
I have a theory about what has happened to Bezos lately: His first wife was his conscience. And now she's gone, so he's just another rich asshole. Meanwhile, she's using her divorce settlement to do all kinds of good.
and let's close with something creative
As the climate changes, London's famous fog and drizzle is more often turning into serious rain. So West London had a flooding problems that it could try to solve with expensive public works projects. Instead, it has brought in beavers, who had been virtually extinct in Britain.
In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek's flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.
"They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding," explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it's located.
