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The Felon Can’t Handle Reality And the Truth

The Felon has always lied - over 30,000 lies during his first regime - and his narcissism will not allow him to ever be wrong or currently face the reality that he is highly unpopular. To listen to him, the USA is winning the war against Iran and controls the Strait of Hormuz (it does not) and it's only a matter of time before Iran surrenders. Indeed, there are increasing reasons to question whether he can recognize objective reality as opposed to the delusions in his mind and his own lies. Seemingly, no one at the White House appears willing to present objective facts to the Felon or do anything to trigger his anger. The emperor has no clothes but no one wants to tell him.  Hence more untrue boasts about the Iran war, the US economy, the price of gasoline and diesel dropping imminently, and his own popularity despite polls showing he is highly toxic outside of the Kool-Aid drinking MAGA base and older Republicans who live in a fantasy world where they think the GOP is still the party of Reagan. Watching the Felon's shit show of lies that evidence his lack of being tethered to reality is upsetting and frightening given the damage being done to the nation which is now weaker, more isolated, and disliked than any time since the end of WWII. A column in the New York Times looks at where we find ourselves:

Can [the Felon] President Trump distinguish truth from fiction? Does he know what is real and what is the product of a computer program? One wants to believe that the president of the United States, cloaked in immense power, would understand the difference between reality and fantasy. One would hope, given the terrible stakes of his decision-making, that he had the capacity to understand and internalize objective reality, even if he did not like it.

But then consider the past week of presidential activity. Last Friday, the president announced a “historic” deal with the interim government of Venezuela to give the United States direct control over a huge portion of the nation’s proven oil reserves.

“At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” the president wrote on Truth Social. [The Felon] Trump contends that this will lead immediately to low gas prices. Except, of course, that it won’t.

Behind the boast lies a murky arrangement that leaves us with a host of unanswered questions. Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is in disrepair — who will restore the nation’s actual capacity to extract and refine oil? Who will pay for it? And given the current instability of Venezuelan politics, including the uncertain role of the United States as imperial caretaker after it deposed President Nicolás Maduro, what are the odds that this deal lasts beyond Trump’s time in office? Will American companies risk billions on the hope that this arrangement will outlast his administration? And perhaps most relevant to the president’s political standing, when, if ever, will this deal lower the price at the pump?

These are basic concerns. There is no indication they have ever reached Trump’s mind. And even if someone did raise these issues, his effusive and ebullient announcement suggests that he paid little attention to those concerns. He wants the deal to be great, and so it is . . .

Even more unsettling, on the question of the [Felon's] president’s interest in objective reality, is his use of artificial intelligence. On Sunday, the president posted an A.I.-generated video of the destruction of Kharg Island, an Iranian stronghold. “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!!,” he wrote. The post came shortly after the United States military resumed its attacks on Iranian forces. We also know that [the Felon] Trump does not like to receive traditional briefings about American operations in the region. Instead, he is shown a brief highlight reel of destruction, what one official described as “stuff blowing up.” For the record, the most recent Kharg Island bombing was in April.

One would like to assume that Trump can distinguish between footage of actual combat and A.I.-generated propaganda. But can he? For his part, Trump shared the Kharg Island video as if it were real. . . . For six months now, he has said the same thing: that the Iranian military has been destroyed, that the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz, that Iran’s surrender is just over the horizon and that both peace and American victory are imminent.

Are these lies, or does he believe them the same way he believed that the crowd at his first inauguration was larger than the one in 2009? Or is he, again, trying to change reality through the power of positive thinking?

There is one other recent set of moves that raises similar questions about the president’s ability to grasp objective reality: his strategy for the upcoming midterm elections. By any measure, Trump is brutally unpopular. His average approval rating has sunk to the mid-to-low 30s, he is underwater on virtually every issue . . . and the public disapproves of most of his schemes and stunts, such as his pathetic move to rename Lake Ontario to spite Canadian leaders. He has dragged down Republicans in the House, who are projected to lose their majority, and is dragging them down in the Senate as well, where a once favorable map has turned sideways,

In these circumstances, the typical president would keep his distance from his co-partisans in the legislature, mindful of the way his presence might harm their odds. Not Donald Trump. He is practically forcing them to stand by his side at a “midterm convention,” where they will defend him and his record to the country at large. This is pure political malpractice. But Trump can’t see it. . . . . he is behaving as if he is on the brink of a landslide victory granted to his party by voters grateful for a productive and successful administration.

His White House ballroom, now rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court, and his proposed monuments — even his commemorative coin — all reflect the same belief: that he is the greatest and most popular person to ever serve as president, maybe the most popular person to ever live. (It is not hard to imagine Trump telling the world that he is “more popular than Jesus.” He’s practically said as much.) He even shared an image ranking himself above George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, among others, as the greatest president of all time.

Trump exists in a world where he can do no wrong. Where he is loved by the people and feared by his enemies. His deals never fail, his wars are overwhelming victories and his party is on the march to another majority.

The problem is that this relentless — almost religious — positivity leaves you ill-prepared to deal with crisis. And the presidency is a job defined by crisis, either sudden or of your own making. Trump’s unusual relationship to the objective world leaves him dangerously unable to pivot, shift gears or change course. It is not that he thinks he can steer around the iceberg, it’s that he doesn’t believe it is there in the first place, even when it is staring him in the face.

Taken all together, it adds up to a mounting political disaster for the president and his allies — and an actual, material disaster for the rest of us.

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The Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored

The so-called "Right" - comprised of Christofascists, Republicans prostituting themselves to them, and countless ideologues and conspiracy theorists - have several favored myths (lies, in reality) that they love to push.  One is that Christians are being persecuted when in reality the claimed persecution is merely restraints on their ability to persecute others. Another is the lie that tax cuts "pay for themselves" and that trickle down economics works as evidenced by the ballooning national debt and the ever growing wealth disparities. A third is the myth/lie that the federal government, colleges and universities and research organizations all censor the speech of "conservatives and conservative "Christians," something Fox News promotes. Of course, there is no evidence to support the claim and in the Felon's regime's quest to stamp out delusion driven imagined censorship real damage is being done to both organizations, research projects, and even American foreign policy (to the extent the Felon hasn't already destroyed it). The take away is that the political and social right seemingly have a need feel under imagined attacks even as they do to others what they decry if done to them.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this third myth and the damage being done.

For nearly a year and a half, the Trump administration prepared its case. Political appointees inside the State Department combed through old files and databases. Civil servants received notice that their personal emails would be examined. Darren Beattie—the founder of a far-right conspiracist website, then the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy—sent out a request for files on anyone who had communicated with or written about the Global Engagement Center, a now-dissolved agency that once worked to expose propaganda campaigns by Russia, China, Iran, and other countries around the world.

The request, seen last year by the MIT Technology Review, was far-reaching. Beattie was seeking information on Bill Gates; the commentator Bill Kristol; Chris Krebs, a former U.S. cybersecurity official; a German government minister; the analyst Renée DiResta, formerly at Stanford University, as well as others associated with a research project called the Election Integrity Partnership; and, as it happens, me.

This unprecedented investigation was meant to expose the Biden administration’s “censorship–industrial complex,” a shadowy network allegedly dedicated to the mass suppression of American free speech. Since 2020, internet trolls have accused Biden-administration officials, social-media companies, and university researchers of weaving a nefarious plot to censor conservatives. Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.

And yet for the past year and half, neither Beattie nor anyone else has actually managed to prove that the plot ever existed. Like a soap bubble that vanishes with the touch of a hand, the “censorship–industrial complex” belongs to that mystical category of things that disappear when you examine them too closely.

The failure to produce evidence is not for lack of trying. During the Biden administration, MAGA allies and politicians filed multiple lawsuits with the goal of exposing alleged censorship. None has done so. One of them, brought by the Missouri attorney general, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before justices asked for underlying evidence that the government had censored anyone. The answer was no. Another, brought against the Stanford research project by America First Legal—Stephen Miller’s team—failed in July, when a judge found the suit had no standing, no jurisdiction, and, after a discovery process requested by the plaintiffs, no evidence. . . . . Other cases against the Biden administration were simply settled by President Trump’s Department of Justice without finding any evidence of “censorship” either.

Now the Trump administration’s most dedicated ideologues have also failed, spectacularly, to prove the existence of a “censorship–industrial complex” inside the State Department. After months of searching, Beattie’s successor as undersecretary for public diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, recently decided to publicize the unimpressive results of the inquiry into the Global Engagement Center. But instead of writing a report admitting that the documents that surfaced contained nothing of interest, she leaked them, selectively, to an internet troll known as DataRepublican.

“DataRepublican” is the X pseudonym of Jennica Pounds, who has a history of misreading data and connecting dots to describe nonexistent conspiracies. But the plan went wrong: Upon receipt of raw documents from Rogers, including screenshots without context, Pounds decided that Rogers was a “Deep State” operative and refused to release them. Subsequently, it emerged that Pounds herself has been secretly employed by the Pentagon, which presumably makes her a deep-state operative too. But that’s another story.

Because Pounds would not publish the documents, Rogers did so herself, . . . As she must have known, they contained no evidence of conspiracy, no proof that anyone in the Biden administration censored millions or even dozens of social-media posts. Instead, Rogers, who is theoretically responsible for promoting good relations with people in foreign countries, went after a series of U.S. citizens.

Rogers also criticized another very public, not remotely secret report, written jointly by the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Slovakia, and the European Union, investigating “gendered disinformation,” a subject that sounds very “woke” until you realize that deepfake porn videos and orchestrated misogyny are tactics regularly used against female politicians such as Annalena Baerbock, a former German foreign minister, or Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister. The Iranian regime uses them to harass female dissidents around the world.

In the normal course of things the saga of the GEC documents would be, and should be, dismissed as a storm in a teapot. But unfortunately, the administration’s pursuit of a nonexistent censorship–industrial complex has already had real consequences for real people. In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was closing the Global Engagement Center because it had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” This was untrue, and even at the time there was no evidence for such an extraordinary statement. On the contrary, the GEC was the only institution in the U.S. government that was publicly tracking hostile international information operations, including by exposing websites in Africa or Latin America that appeared local but were in fact run by Moscow or Beijing. Rubio’s statement maligned the people who worked on these reports. Will the secretary of state now apologize to them? Compensate them? Rehire them?

The closing of the center also means that no one is now doing that work. Thanks to Rogers, Beattie, and a handful of others, the U.S. decided to blind itself to the reality that Russia, China, and Iran, with its viral animated Lego videos, all run deceptive campaigns that reach millions of people around the world. And now Americans do nothing to halt, explain, or counter them.

As if this same conspiracy theory had not done enough damage, Rogers and others at the State Department are also putting the nonexistent censorship–industrial complex at the center of American foreign policy toward Europe now too. At a conference at the Hudson Institute last spring, Rogers said that a “censorship class” had already “scuttled to Europe” to pursue a supposed vendetta against Americans from across the ocean. At the same event, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri . . . declared that “we are witnessing a deeply troubling assault on free speech” in Europe.

These views, all of which derive from the same set of false stories, are actively shaping American policy in Europe. Late last month, the State Department put forth plans to spend $4 million to support right-wing media in Europe, including a consortium of “independent journalists” who would support the Trump administration’s view of the world.

Belatedly, even some part of the Trump administration appears to have quietly concluded that all of this has gone too far and that maybe, in fact, it would be useful for the U.S. government to understand how hostile governments seek to manipulate the internet. In May, the State Department put out a tender for software developers who could help analyze “foreign adversarial propaganda” and thus replicate the work once done by the Global Engagement Center.

As DiResta wrote this week, “they’re hiring people to do the very job they just spent 16 months claiming was a conspiracy.” So much time, energy, and money was wasted pursuing a fiction. Now more time, energy, and money will need to be spent to clean up the damage.

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Iran: The Logistics Nightmare Facing U.S. Warships

One of the hallmarks of the Felon's war of choice against Iran has been the lack of planning for an extended war being conducted on the opposite side of the world. The Felon and his sycophants believed the war would last a few days or a few weeks at most and seemingly little was considered in terms of a more extended conflict and the difficulties of supplying troops and U.S. warships in the war zone. The U.S. Navy's main supply base is in Bahrain on the west side of the Persian Gulf reachable only via the Strait of Hormuz. On the first day of the war, Iran struck back and largely destroyed the Navy's logistics base leaving the only real resupply facilities thousands of miles away.  This has created a logistics nightmare for resupply operations and has lead to issues with both food supplies and refueling for aircraft fuel and fuel for non-atomic powered vessels.  Any planning with an ounce of foresight would have contemplated this potential mess, but such seeming was not the case with the Felon and his incompetent Secretary of Defense.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the Navy's difficult situation and resupply issues that will not be going away.  Here are highlights:

On a typical U.S. aircraft carrier, 5,000 crew members work around the clock and require up to four meals a day. Although the ships are nuclear-powered, the planes and helicopters flying off them use millions of gallons of fuel each week.

Carriers don’t travel alone. They are protected by destroyers armed with antiaircraft and cruise missiles, together forming what is called a carrier strike group. Those ships also need to be resupplied with food and fuel.

There are currently two carriers and 12 destroyers in the Middle East helping to enforce a blockade of Iranian ports. . . . . The Navy has about 20 ships in the Middle East, carrying roughly 20,000 sailors and Marines. The logistical challenges are immense: The ships need enough food for more than 420,000 meals and about eight million gallons of fuel each week.

The Navy has operated there for decades and built supply depots throughout the region.

But Iran destroyed a critical Navy logistics base in Bahrain on Feb. 28, the first day of the war, and other ports in the region that can accommodate an aircraft carrier or a supply ship are also within range of Iranian missiles and drones, making them inaccessible.

Navy supply ships in the region now have to travel 2,200 miles to a tiny island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia to bring food, fuel and other goods to the warships in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.

The next option is to go to Singapore, 3,700 miles away — which requires the ships to pass through the Strait of Malacca, a busy commercial corridor.

Because the war has cut off access to nearby bases in the Middle East, the only option is to undertake resupply missions at sea every five or six days. This process is potentially hazardous, exposing both the receiving ship and the supply ship to risk. During these missions, both ships need to travel together, keeping precisely the same course and speed. With waves, winds and current, it’s a challenge to keep the ships safely within about 150 feet of each other for hours.

At the same time, helicopters ferry supplies between the ships, carrying pallets of food, spare parts and mail in nets slung underneath.

The deployments for these warships are open-ended — they only go home once the president and the defense secretary decide so. However, this is not sustainable.

The Navy has only 11 aircraft carriers in total, and has sent four of them to the Middle East for the war. Some of the remaining carriers are undergoing lengthy repairs in shipyards and will not be able to deploy again for years. 

One carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, spent most of its nine months at sea with no port calls. Under normal conditions, a Navy carrier would visit port about once a month to give its crew a brief rest.  On Aug. 20, the Lincoln was relieved by the U.S.S. George Washington and began making its way back home. The Lincoln was expected to make a stop on Wednesday in Thailand for a few days before continuing across the Pacific to its home base in San Diego.

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