More Monday Male Beauty

 

Is The Felon's Regime Beginning To Unravel

As the Felon's war of choice drags on in Iran with no discernable exit strategy and oil prices remain over $110/barrel and the ripple effect is pushing consumer prices upward, just maybe we are at a point where Americans will be forced wake up to the reality of the incompetence and cruelty of the Felon's regime. True, some of the core MAGA base will always cling to and support the Felon largely because he gives them permission to be their worse bigoted and prejudiced selves.  But with poll numbers showing close to two-thirds of Americans disapproving the Felon's performance in office - he's even underwater on immigration - objective reality may at last be forcing itself onto lukewarm Republicans and moderates who voted to return the Felon to the White House in 2024. Indeed, even Alex Jones is call out the Felon's increasing dementia and Ann Coulter is accusing the Felon of committing war crimes in Iran. Meanwhile,  over the weekend Dr. Vin Gupta  said Donald Trump is exhibiting signs consistent with dementia:  including being “erratic,” “often confused,” having an “illogical train of thought,” and “word finding difficulties,” adding the condition appears to be “developing and worsening over time.” How much worse will things get? A piece in the New Republic looks at where we find ourselves:

The presidency of [the Felon] Donald Trump is now officially in collapse. His war is … not exactly a disaster, but it sure isn’t the cakewalk he envisioned when he sprang it on the American people and the world with no notice on February 28. His firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi because she wasn’t sycophantic enough indicates a man who is utterly incapable of understanding anything about how democracy is supposed to work. His economy is a wreck and may well get worse. His proposed budget, especially the half-trillion-dollar increase to the Pentagon, is wildly out of whack with the priorities of the public.

I could go on—and on. But on top of all that, Trump’s purchase on reality, tenuous at the best of times, is slipping fast. Think about what it takes for the “leader of the free world” (a phrase we are now obliged to tuck inside irony quotes) to wake up on Easter morning—the day of the resurrection of the same Jesus Christ in whose name “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth says we are killing Iranians—and post this unhinged and inflammatory comment on social media: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

And that wasn’t even his low point of the past week. His speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday was an embarrassment, rife with conspiracies, self-pitying grievance riffs, tasteless “jokes,” and bile spewed at the usual targets—again, on a venerated day on the Christian calendar, Maundy Thursday, the last full day of Jesus Christs’s mortal life. Trump rendered a supposedly solemn occasion profane in the way only he can do.

A rickety house often stands longer than we imagine it will. The support structures are surprisingly sturdy. But finally one day, something comes along—a hard rain, a mighty wind—against which the beams and foundation are no match.

Trump has survived as long as he has in politics—indeed, he succeeded in the first place—because his support structures were unusually durable. The percentage of people in this country who not only were fine with nativist, authoritarian politics but openly embraced it shot Trump to the top of the GOP polls in late 2015 and has remained basically steady all these years. . . . . The right-wing propaganda networks for whom he can do no wrong are still out there, marveling over his infallibility as fulsomely as ever. And of course the Republicans in Congress, with just a few exceptions, still praise him to the heavens.

These were and are Trump’s four pillars (there is considerable overlap between the first two groups, but they’re somewhat different). They have sustained him in and out of power for more than a decade, and they’ve proven stronger than the two things that in theory have the power to bring Trump down: the political opposition, and plain reality.

But take a good, contemplative whiff of the zeitgeist right about now, and you’ll smell change in the air. The opposition is stronger. And I don’t mean chiefly the Democrats in Congress. We all know that some of them are effective, others not so much, but even those who do speak to the anger so many Americans feel don’t have much institutional power to do anything about it.

No—the opposition arose not in Washington, but in Chicago and Minneapolis, and in the thousands of No Kings Day marches that brought eight million Americans out into the streets. And as Trump is not a normal American politician, this is not a normal political opposition. These millions of Americans aren’t merely against his policies, although they surely are that. They’re against his hatred and lawlessness and corruption, and the moral rot he’s spreading over this country like blight over trees.

And second, we may finally be reaching the point where even Trump’s blind supporters and his vast propaganda network can’t defeat the facts on the ground. They’re almost relentlessly grim. There was a good jobs report last Friday, but otherwise, not only is the news uniformly bad, but it exposes him as a charlatan who claimed powers for himself that he doesn’t have.

I never understood, in 2024, how all these people convinced themselves that Trump could lower the price of a gallon of gas and a pound of ground chuck. He has raised the price of gas through his war on Iran. The price of beef is at an all-time high, and while that’s not really his fault—it’s mainly because cattle inventories are at a 75-year low due to drought and other factors—the increase makes the crucial point that there are many price inputs over which a president has no control.

I also never understood why anyone believed that he wouldn’t start dumb wars if the circumstances, in his mind, warranted doing so. The one fundamental fact about Donald Trump is, as my late friend and great Trump chronicler Wayne Barrett famously put it, he’ll say whatever he needs to say to wriggle through the next 10 minutes. He said what he said about wars to get elected. Period. Anyone who believed otherwise was, frankly, an idiot. And so now here we are, with Trump mocking Allah and likely this week to commit acts defined as war crimes under the Geneva Convention.

A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up. It’s finally happening. I’d say we should celebrate. But there now arises the question of how he’ll react as reality closes in on him. I fear we haven’t begun to see the worst.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

The Felon and Hegseth’s Warped Vision of the Iran War

The oil markets continue to be roiled by the Iran war and oil is hovering around $112/barrel. Meanwhile, the malignant narcissist in the White House makes more threats against Iran that likely will not intimidate the Iranian regime and will only serve to further disrupt the oil markets. Adding to the toxic mix is the Felon's Secretary of Defense who in addition to be the poster boy for toxic masculinity who seemingly has contempt for rules that limit attacks on civilians and views the war as some sort of real life video game.  This ugly duo - encouraged by sycophants, both foreign and domestic - launched a war of choice with no real plan and most certainly no exit plan. The whole disastrous situation is part of a larger mindset where the strongest can do as they wish, long standing alliances mean nothing, and there is empathy for no one.  America finds itself in yet another messy foreign war and the Felon's response is to propose a huge increase in military spending while slashing domestic programs that serve the less affluent, including Many in the MAGA base. I hope MAGA voters are waking up to the harm their votes for the Felon have wrought on the nation and themselves. A piece in The New Yorker looks at the mess:

There is no good way to call off a war that you started but which hasn’t achieved what you’d hoped. On Wednesday night, Donald Trump, in his address to the nation on the Iran war, sought to counter reality with hyperbole. “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran,” the President said. “Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks.” Of course, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard retains control not just of the country but of the Strait of Hormuz, and therefore of an alarmingly constricted global oil supply. A month of air strikes had killed many leaders but had not changed the regime. Even so, Trump suggested that the mission was “nearing completion,” and that the U.S. military would soon be pulling back.

Big talk. But the announcement also sounded like a concession, since two to three weeks probably isn’t enough time for Trump to follow through on some of his prior threats: an armed invasion of the oil ports of Kharg Island, or an even more ambitious raid to extract uranium likely stored in tunnels near nuclear facilities. The morning of Trump’s address, media reports had suggested that he was considering withdrawing the United States from NATO. Instead, the President taunted America’s allies, some of whom had been pleading for a settlement over Hormuz.

It has been a central conviction of Trump’s second term that the nations of the world now operate on self-interest and brute force, rather than on principle or alliance, and the White House has been eager to spread the news. The mockery that the Administration directed at its own, less warlike allies this week . . . . recalled its jeering of Volodymyr Zelensky in February, 2025. “You’re buried there,” Trump told the Ukrainian President about his nation’s battlefield prospects.

This penchant for what Saul Bellow called reality instruction—the cynical delight taken in explaining to idealists how the rough-and-tumble world really works—extends from Trump throughout the Administration. But perhaps the most eager reality instructor has been Hegseth, one of the Administration’s more politically fragile figures, who, when he’d been picked to join Trump’s Cabinet, was a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.” Hegseth is so committed to a vision of the world defined by winners and losers that he once wrote that Joan of Arc was a “loser” because her last battle “ended disastrously and eventually with her execution.”

Hegseth came out of his own service, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the seeming conviction that what had stood in the way of a fuller victory in those wars had been the restraints supposedly placed on how soldiers could kill. . . . . Hegseth told a large gathering of senior military officials, whom he had summoned to Quantico, in September. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement . . . just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters,” he said. “You kill people and break things for a living.”

On Iran, Hegseth has led the Administration’s periodic press briefings, at which he has called on Americans to pray to Jesus Christ for the military’s success; his slogan has been “maximum lethality.” But even in the first hours of the war it was clear that this approach could backfire. The initial strikes, which began on February 28th, killed the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but were so indiscriminate that, as President Trump noted, they also killed many of the political figures who the White House had hoped would form a new, more amenable cadre of leaders.

One of the [Felon's] President’s stated aims has been to inspire a popular uprising among those Iranian citizens sick of the repression and the autocracy enforced by the Revolutionary Guard. Yet that requires taking care to distinguish between the regime and its civilians, and to avoid collateral damage. But, according to a preliminary investigation, on the same day that U.S. forces assassinated Khamenei, they also dropped a bomb in the wrong place, inadvertently killing nearly two hundred people in an elementary school.

Trump and Hegseth might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the Iran war has shown that this isn’t true. . . . . The fact that the President is now signalling a messy retreat has nothing to do with insufficient lethality and everything to do with politics—in particular, the alarm in the global oil markets and the American public’s widespread opposition to the war. One tragedy of Trump’s war is that, in January, the Iranian regime was under extreme pressure from protests, which it quelled by murdering thousands. The right kind of coördinated push might have toppled it. Instead, the White House offered frequently shifting rationales for its war and little outreach to the Iranian resistance. It treated the military operation as something to brag about to its political base—a way to show exactly how unrestrained it was willing to be.

The day before the President’s address, Hegseth gave a press conference in which he recounted a recent visit he’d made to bases in the region. “It was the American warrior, unleashed,” he said. He seemed to view the trip as a parable. “As the sun was going down and a chill was setting on the tarmac,” he encountered an airwoman and asked her what the troops needed: “She simply looked at me with a sly smile on her face and said, ‘More bombs, sir. And bigger bombs.’ ” That might have been what the airwoman asked for. But what Trump and Hegseth really owed her, the nation they lead, and the Iranians whose country they bombed was a plan—a real solution to the disaster that they have created. 

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Iran: No Plan. No Allies. No End in Sight.

Per Bloomberg, oil is around $112/barrel, Asia is experiencing scarcity of oil and gas, the Dow Jones is down almost 5,000 points from its high, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and under Iranian control, and American forces are racing to find a downed American fighter pilot before the Iranians can find the pilot first. Meanwhile, the Felon and his sycophants - including Pete Hegseth who is unfit and far in over his head and firing generals based on either their skin color or perhaps their unwillingness to endanger more American servicemembers - have no end game/exit strategy from the Iran war that the Felon launched as a matter of choice.  The Felon's prime time address earlier in the week did little to instill confidence and his proposal to increase defense spending by 40% while slashing domestic programs, including Medicaid and Medicare will only further harm struggling Americans and large swaths of the MAGA base.  The overall take away is that there was no thought through plan for the war, warnings about the impact on oil prices were ignored, and long time allies have been insulted and alienated and, not surprisingly, are not rushing to save the Felon's very large ass from the mess of his own creation.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the mess now facing the nation - and by extension, the world. Here are highlights:

[The Felon] President Trump stood at a lectern on Wednesday night, in his first prime-time address to the nation since the war in Iran began, and declared the monthlong air campaign to be a success.

“We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly — very shortly,” he said. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

For all his tough triumphalism, however, the {Felon] president failed to provide any evidence of a plan to resolve the two crises that now define the war and that have the potential to reshape the balance of power in the Middle East and the world economy for years to come.

The first crisis is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed before Iran’s military choked it off last month. The second is the lurking threat of Iran’s estimated 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, believed to be buried at one or two sites in the country.

Walking away from these problems would leave the world a much more volatile place than it was on Feb. 28, when Mr. Trump joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in attacking Iran. If the  [Felon]president does have a plan to resolve them, he didn’t reveal it. If he doesn’t, he’s leaving to chance their impact on America.

It has been just over a month since [the Felon] Mr. Trump authorized the largest American aerial bombardment mission in a generation. He did so seemingly without preparation for what to do if Tehran blocked off the strait, a danger that advisers have warned presidents about for years. He apparently made little or no attempt to build an international coalition. Our Gulf allies have spent the last month defending against incoming missiles while scrambling to stabilize a spiraling energy market and stave off a humanitarian catastrophe. The fighting has killed thousands of civilians across Iran, Lebanon and the Gulf and displaced millions more across the region.

Oil prices shot up and stock markets tumbled on Thursday after Mr. Trump did not offer any end in sight to the conflict, nor any plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.  . . . . Iran has now demonstrated de facto control over much of the global economy. Its Parliament is considering whether to formalize the charging of fees for passage, and on Wednesday, an Iranian official warned on social media that the United States would not regain access to the strait.

The other major problem is the nuclear question. After ripping up the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, [the Felon] Mr. Trump has tried but failed to reach another solution to address the country’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the key component for a nuclear weapon. That prompted the president to join Israel in a complex attack on the program in June. The stockpile of uranium — which Mr. Trump called “nuclear dust” in his speech, but is in gaseous form in real life — has been enriched to 60 percent purity, one small step from the 90 percent needed for the most powerful warheads.

Mr. Trump apparently intends to leave Iran in control of enough enriched uranium to make around 10 bombs. It was an astonishing demonstration of indifference that having conducted bombing campaigns against Iran twice primarily to crush its nuclear ambitions, the president is now prepared simply to walk away. Mr. Trump said again on Wednesday that he “will never allow” the regime in Tehran to get the bomb, but the world cannot have confidence in that assurance unless that material is seized, destroyed or made subject to international inspection.

Whatever quick fix Mr. Trump sought when he launched this conflict alongside Israel, he’s now facing the potential to inflict strategic consequences not only on the United States’ economy and its national security but also on its allies. He has publicly voiced displeasure over Europe’s unwillingness to send warships and attack planes to help free up the strait. That scorn for NATO allies wasn’t explicit during the address, but he alluded to it when he urged unnamed countries to “build up some delayed courage” to resolve the energy crisis. “Go to the strait and just take it,” he said, as if it were so easy.

America’s European allies have thus far determined that it’s not worth the financial and personnel risk to get deeply involved. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to watch an American president, the leader of broad military coalitions since World War II, go it alone. Perhaps the allies’ reaction would have been different if Mr. Trump hadn’t continually upbraided them over their military spending, or repeatedly threatened to take Greenland, or recklessly authorized a sweeping air campaign without alerting them.

“[The Felon] President Trump has done everything he can to isolate the United States from the rest of the world,” said Chuck Hagel, a former defense secretary and Republican senator from Nebraska who is a Vietnam War veteran. “Choosing to go into this conflict alone was self-destructive. He’s about to learn that wars have consequences.”

The conflict also caught many Gulf allies by surprise, placing them in the middle of a war they didn’t choose. The nations hosting U.S. forces — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Bahrain — have all been targeted by Iranian drones and missiles. They’re now forced to question their reliance on the United States and the partnership they formed with Washington in hopes of bringing peace to the region.

The question of whether to go to war with the regime in Tehran has been weighed for over a half-century by eight presidents. . . . . Two key things prompted previous commanders in chief to opt for diplomacy over war: the bloody violence that they were advised was certain to follow and the stranglehold Iran has on the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has spent decades developing weapons and military capabilities aimed at halting commercial traffic in the strait in the time of crisis.

[F]or now the core issues — Iranian control over the strait and its sizable stockpile of nuclear material — remain unresolved.

It’s not hard to understand why the president is tempted to walk away from these intractable problems: There aren’t easy answers to them. As the war enters its second month, it’s becoming increasingly apparent why Mr. Trump didn’t try to get buy-in ahead of time from allies, Congress or the American people for his war in Iran. He sold an unsellable war by not selling it at all — and now he’s belatedly looking for help footing the bill

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Trump Is Silencing Warning Signals of an Economic Crash

Oil and gas prices continue to rise - late yesterday on the spot market hit $141.00/barrel - due to the Felon's war of choice in Iran and mortgage rates along with over consumer prices are rising. Poll after poll show that the majority of Americans give the Felon a strongly failing grade his handling of the economy and the only ones benefiting from the Felon's/GOP's policies are the billionaire set and large corporations pushing for more and more deregulation, including deregulation of the the financial industries.  Think back to the 2008 financial meltdown and what could possibly go wrong economically? With most Americans realizing that the economy is headed south for them, one of the solutions of the  Felon's regime is to gut governmental agencies tasked with warning of economic problems and protecting consumers from unscrupulous and voracious lenders and others.  At some point, the situation may become so bad that we see a reprise of the 2008 disaster. A piece in the New Republic that looks at the efforts to remove financial guardrails at a time when they may be needed the most, especially with there being no signs of falling oil prices anytime soon.  Here are article excerpts:

If the United States economy is headed off a cliff, better that we receive no warning in advance. That may not be the stated goal of the Trump administration, but, to borrow a term from the late MIT economist Paul Samuelson, that’s its “revealed preference.” The preference in this case is revealed by Russell “Project 2025” Vought’s determined efforts, as director of the White House budget office, to shut down two agencies created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Financial Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Dodd-Frank was Congress’s attempt to head off another catastrophe like the 2008 financial crisis. It was the first major financial overhaul since the Great Depression, and despite commentators’ general feeling that it never went far enough, bankers hated it. Now those same bankers want President Trump to gut two significant parts of it, and he’s obliging—at the very moment that the economy is teetering like a spring breaker at Panama City Beach.

The first of the two offending agencies is the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research, or OFR. This is a small office—it’s never employed much more than 200 people—dedicated to furnishing policymakers with the kind of detailed information they lacked during the late aughts about mostly-unregulated “shadow banks” such as mortgage companies, private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and the repurchase agreement market, or “repo.” This last provides overnight short-term loans to manage corporate cashflow. The Washington Monthly has called OFR “The Most Important Agency You’ve Never Heard Of.” Here’s a detailed summary of OFR’s accomplishments.

Every year OFR sends an annual report to Congress that’s written in a typically cheerful tone that downplays financial risks. Still, the necessary information is there if you look for it.  The latest report, covering the fiscal year that ended on September 30, noted that student loan defaults rose to 9 percent; that, at a time when private credit is stumbling, about 7 percent of the regulated banking system’s assets consist of loans to shadow banks; that hedge funds’ dependence on repo increased by 154 percent; and that growth in private repo (the Fed also has a repo operation) is off the charts. . . . . “If large lenders suddenly decide not to roll over repo,” the report says, “borrowers, many of which are securities dealers, must quickly find other sources of financing or sell assets, which may transmit repo market stress to other markets.”

The financial world doesn’t appreciate seeing the federal government advertise its vulnerabilities, even sotto voce, and Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who between 2019 and 2024 collected nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the securities and investment sector, introduced during that same time period three successive bills to abolish OFR, which he called “useless and unaccountable.” Last year’s “One Big Beautiful” reconciliation bill initially zeroed out OFR’s budget, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled against that. So Vought took matters into his own hands. Having already halved OFR’s staff from 196 employees to 100, Treasury officials informed staff last month that 64 percent of the remainder will be laid off . . .

“As risks emerge in the financial system and cracks in the credit markets spread,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told Government Executive, “the Trump administration is gutting the office designed to evaluate financial risks in a giveaway to Wall Street. This is just the latest move by President Trump and his financial regulators to undermine financial stability and pave the way for another crash.”

The other Dodd-Frank agency Vought is trying to shut off is the better-known  Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB. CFPB’s function is not merely informational but regulatory; it polices abuse of consumers by financial institutions, which is epidemic. Already Vought has reduced CFPB to what E. Tammy Kim, writing last month in The New Yorker, called“The Zombie Regulator.” . . . . Now Vought, who since firing CFPB director Rohit Chopra has been the agency’s acting director, proposes to cut what’s left of the staff in half, from about 1200 employees to 556 employees. The agency had 1750 workers at the start of Trump’s administration.

The CFPB’s primary purpose is to protect consumers, but when financial institutions get busy trying to lure retail customers in over their heads, that’s often a sign that the economy is headed for trouble. In 2008 mortgage companies, ravenous for home loans to package into securities, sold subprime mortgages to customers who quite obviously couldn’t afford them. The result was the worst recession since the Great Depression. At the moment the financial industries perhaps most desperate to find new customers are private equity and crypto. Rather than examine how they got into this fix and take steps to prevent it from happening again, the Trump administration moved this week to “democratize” finance by proposing that 401(k)s be opened to investment in private equity and cryptocurrecies. The only democratization here is that of risk. If the rule is finalized, private equity and crypto will promise unimaginably high returns to non-wealthy investors who can’t weather a sharp downturn. When they go down, as I observed last September, the whole economy will go down with them.

Mike Pierce, a former deputy assistant director at the CFPB who’s now executive director of the nonprofit Protect Borrowers, told me Thursday that he thinks the next financial crisis will stem from private credit, which is different from private equity but often practiced at the same firms. Private credit is in the middle right now of a sort of slow-motion bank run due partly to its exposure to software companies. With household debt right now at $18.8 trillion, or well over half of GDP, consumers are taking out “increasingly risky” loans, Pierce said, with companies “increasingly intertwined … with private credit.”

The administration doesn’t publicize efforts to shut down OFR and CFPB because these agencies serve the interests of non-elites. If MAGA voters knew about OFR and CFPB they might actually like them! Another reason to be silent is that you can’t sell these cuts as fiscally conservative. Closing these two agencies would have zero effect on the budget deficit because neither agency is funded by taxpayers; instead, OFR is funded by assessments on banks and CFPB is funded by the Fed (which in turn is funded by assessments on banks and by interest on securities). The only reason to shutter these agencies is because they get on the financial industry’s nerves.

“The president is very focused on keeping the pieces of his coalition that are still willing to return his phone calls inside the tent,” Pierce told me. “These people have a line directly into the senior staff of the White House. They ask for the world and more often than not they get it.” What they want in this instance is to shut off any warning lights that might dare blink red about the economy. It’s bad for business, and if a bust is coming they’d prefer we suckers don’t know in advance. We may get crushed but the big players will get bailed out, like always.