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Trump Celebrates While America Capitulates In Defeat

Many predicted that the Felon would surrender to Iran in all but outward admission to end his ill-conceived war with Iran and then try to somehow dress up the defeat as a victory.  While many details remain undisclosed - and Iran has yet to actually sign anything - what is known is anything but a victory.  None of the Felon's announced objectives of the war have been achieved and while battered, Iran is being left in a stronger position that before the war commenced.  Indeed, Iran now knows that control of the Strait of Hormuz gives it blackmail power against the global economy and gasoline prices in the USA. Moreover, as a piece in the New York Times notes, the misguided war has likely changed energy markets permanently and handed a huge win to China, particularly since the Felon has set the USA back on green and renewable energy sources:

As a result, the energy market is changing, the energy mix is changing and the energy players are changing.

The profound vulnerability of countries throughout Asia, Europe and elsewhere that depend on imported energy is supercharging the hunt for alternatives. In some places, like South Korea and Japan, that has led to an increased use of dirtier fuels like coal.  But over the longer term, this energy shock — the second in just four years — is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.

The push to build out and diversify energy networks is going to continue long after the war ends. And China is poised to benefit most from the expected boon in renewables. It is leagues ahead of the rest of the world in producing wind turbines, high-voltage cables, transformers, solar panels, batteries, software to manage energy flows and more. . . . “China looks to be an out-and-out winner,” analysts from Wood Mackenzie, a global energy consulting firm, concluded.

Much of this was predictable and combined with a de facto military defeat leaves America weaker than when the war was foolishly started by the Felon against all warnings of what could happen. True, the Felon will try to claim "victory" but many will see this as just another of his endless lies.  Adding to the mix is the prediction by some that gasoline prices will remain higher helping to drive up other consumer prices.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's defeat and Iran's victory.  Here are article highlights:

President Trump has announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war. “Congratulations to all!” he said in a posting on his Truth Social site this evening. He then headed off to oversee the garish public spectacle he’d arranged for his birthday on the South Lawn of the White House. The United States, however, has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary.

The details of the agreement remain unconfirmed, but the president, of course, is eager to spin the outcome as a victory. (Trump was in a hurry to sign the deal on his birthday; the Iranians, who now seem to be in charge of this whole business, instead said they will send someone to a meeting in Switzerland on Friday.) But even before we have the details, it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.

If defeat seems a strong word, consider what we do know about how this war will end. Iran has suffered significant damage from U.S. and Israeli military action. But as I and others warned at the outset, killing people and bombing things do not by themselves produce victory. The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks; Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks; the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror; and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran. In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own.

Indeed, the United States has perhaps done worse than gaining nothing. Iran, while temporarily weakened, is now an even more powerful political actor: The regime in Tehran stood up to a massive U.S. onslaught, survived, and then inflicted pain on various states in the Gulf as punishment for going along with Trump’s war.

The Israelis, for their part, have been left out in the cold. It is difficult to shed any tears for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who unwisely encouraged Trump to attack Iran, but he, too, is feeling the sting of humiliation. The Iranians cagily linked Netanyahu’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon to Trump’s war in the Gulf, and Trump is now angry at Netanyahu for making it harder for the United States to get out of the conflict.

Reportedly, the upcoming agreement requires a cessation of hostilities in the region, including in Lebanon—and Trump is negotiating as if he can deliver on that demand while leaving Jerusalem out of it. Today, the Israelis said that Hezbollah had launched weapons into Israel. Rather than calling on the Iranians to restrain their proxy, Trump took to social media to tell the Israelis to calm down, noting that the attack “was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process.”

The Trump administration will claim that it achieved a victory because it got an Iran without nuclear weapons. But this claim is both silly and redundant. Tehran had already pledged 10 years ago in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action not to seek nuclear weapons. No one should trust the Iranians, but before Trump unilaterally canceled the agreement in his first term, the JCPOA seemed to be working. More to the point, at the time Trump chose to go to war, Iran was nowhere near getting a bomb, and certainly not within weeks of a weapon, as Trump asserted. The effort to claim that this war has defeated Iran’s nuclear ambitions is merely an effort to distract from the administration’s failure to achieve regime change, which was always its main goal.

The agreement—if it actually gets signed on Friday—will then initiate a two-month period of further negotiations, and Trump could argue that he’ll get more in that process. But how?

Trump has for weeks talked about getting rid of Iran’s “Nuclear Dust”—his odd term for the uranium now lying under the rubble produced by U.S. bombings—and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed this morning that the United States has multiple plans for removing this material. The Iranians, however, are busily planting booby traps around the uranium to ensure that it stays where it is, and despite Hegseth’s blustering, America is not going to march into Iran and dig it out without Tehran’s consent. If anything, the Iranians now have every incentive to sprint to a bomb, and can do so with far less transparency than they had to endure under the JCPOA.

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz will “open,” but it was already open, at least to those the Iranians allowed to pass. In his celebratory message, Trump said: “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” That’s terrific, but such a statement has about as much effect as I or my wife or my cat declaring the strait open; only Iran can make that decision. Trump also declared that the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports is over, something that is indeed within his power, but that only means America will withdraw while Iran remains.

Meanwhile—and again, these are the terms that so far have been leaked to the press, mostly from the Iranians—Iran claims that it will not only get some $12 billion up front, but get another $12 billion within 60 days. Down the line, the Iranians are claiming that they will get a $300 billion fund for reconstruction.  . . . . The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker, with important stocks of weapons depleted, and with its consumers paying the price for the war at the gas pump.

Trump today also claimed that he is perfectly willing to restart hostilities if the Iranians don’t cooperate. Tehran, however, can be forgiven for smirking at the idea that Trump is going to tie down U.S. forces and then ignite a second conflict just weeks from the midterm elections, especially because the American people—and, perhaps more important from Trump’s perspective, the international markets—have soured on the conflict.

Trump began this war by promising the Iranian people that they would be able to seize their government from the theocratic tyrants who oppress them, and he repeatedly said he would settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender.” Had Trump toppled the regime in Tehran, he would have had the thanks of most of the world—and congratulations from even his most dedicated critics. Instead, the United States has been defeated, and this evening found Trump out on the lawn waiting for the rain to clear so he could begin his party.

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Wages Are Falling. Wealth Is Surging.

For decades now the Republican Party has strived to recreate the Gilded Age while slashing programs that help support the working and middle classes. Despicable House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled that next year the GOP seeks to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare claiming budget constraints as requiring cuts while ignoring the trillions of dollars of lost tax revenues as a result of huge GOP tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy (think the Felon's "big beautiful bill").  In some ways the GOP effort has exceeded the party's wildest dreams as wealth disparities now exceed those that existed during the actual Gilded Age, albeit with less efforts by the super rich to fund charities, libraries and other things that added to the larger public good.  The Felon promised in the 2024 campaign that he would lower prices on "day one". That, of course has not happened and instead consumer prices have surged and increased energy costs thanks in part to the Felon's war of choice have wiped out incomes for many, many Americans.  Now, returning from France where the husband and I saw royal palaces and incredible chateaux, it's as if the GOP and the billionaire set are as blind as the French aristocracy was to the plight of the many on the eve of the French Revolution.   A  column in the New York Times looks at the struggles of most Americans while the few enjoy obscene levels of wealth:

Two events from the past week help crystallize this strange, contradictory moment for the U.S. economy.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the surge in energy prices had wiped out a year and a half of wage gains for the average American worker. On Friday, the public-markets debut of SpaceX made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

That stark juxtaposition helps explain why many Americans, in survey after survey, say they no longer believe the U.S. economy is working for them. A few people are getting fabulously, unimaginably wealthy at the same time that entire generations of families worry they will never be able to afford to buy a house, raise children or enjoy a comfortable retirement.

Inequality is hardly a new feature in America. But the explosion of wealth at the very top is without precedent in U.S. history. At the height of the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, the richest handful of Americans had a net worth equivalent to about 3 percent of the country’s annual economic output, according to data compiled by the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez. Today, the fortunes of the same 0.00001 percent — about 20 individuals — make up roughly four times as large a share, equivalent to 12 percent of annual output.

Other economists, using different methodologies, come up with somewhat different numbers. But hardly anyone disputes the basic fact that the wealthiest few have made extraordinary gains in recent years.

The picture for the other 99 percent of Americans is more nuanced. More than half of U.S. households own stocks, either directly or through retirement accounts, meaning they have benefited at least somewhat from the record-setting run-up in share prices. Wealth has risen more slowly for middle-class families than for the rich over the past decade, Federal Reserve data shows, but it has still risen.

For most Americans, however, “wealth” is a somewhat abstract concept, tied up in the house where they live and the retirement accounts they hope to leave untouched for as long as possible. What matters more, day to day, is their income. And the share of national income going to workers has been trending down for decades. It hit a record low in the first quarter of the year, according to data from the Commerce Department.

Now, rising costs are again taking a bite out of workers’ paychecks. The recent jump in energy prices — a result of the war with Iran — pushed the annual inflation rate to a three-year high in May. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have fallen for three months in a row, erasing all the gains made during President Trump’s first year in office. Measures of consumer sentiment have plummeted as gas prices have risen.

But relief at the pump is not likely to end Americans’ anxiety after years of one economic shock after another. First, the Covid-19 pandemic shut down large parts of the economy and put tens of millions of people out of work, at least temporarily. Then inflation soared to the highest level in four decades. Since then, Americans have endured high interest rates, tariffs and repeated recession scares. . . . . ‘How am I supposed to plan for the future?’” said Elizabeth Wilkins, president of the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

Ms. Stantcheva, the Harvard economist, has found that bouts of high inflation take a long-term toll on consumers’ economic attitudes. That is not only because of the strain on their budgets but also because it seems unfair — the wealthy are able to absorb higher prices relatively easily, while lower-income households struggle. . . . “It goes hand in hand with a big sense of inequity and injustice,” she said.

Now Americans face a new threat in the form of artificial intelligence, which tech industry leaders warn could eliminate whole categories of white-collar work. Many economists are skeptical of those predictions, but polls show that many workers are worried about what the technology will mean for their careers. Voters across the country have also rebelled against plans to build A.I. data centers in their communities, citing their impact on electricity bills, water supplies and air quality.

Given those concerns, it is hardly surprising that the public is uncomfortable with the surge in wealth that has accompanied the A.I. boom. . . . “Many of the tech moguls who are the current superrich have not helped themselves in the conversation by saying, ‘My innovation is going to obliterate your life,’” said Glenn Hubbard, an economist at Columbia Business School who served as a top adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s not too crazy to imagine a backlash.”

Mr. Hubbard said he did not necessarily see a problem with the existence of billionaires or even trillionaires, as long as people were getting rich through entrepreneurship and innovation rather than through corruption or cronyism. But he said policymakers should take the public attitudes seriously. Congress should consider ways to tax billionaires more effectively, he said, and to ensure that the wealthy don’t exert undue influence on the political system.

Many progressive economists, however, argue that enormous fortunes like Mr. Musk’s inherently distort both the economic and the political systems, giving the superrich too many ways to avoid regulation, taxation and oversight. . . . . No wonder so many Americans feel that the economy is rigged against them, said Heather Boushey, who served as an adviser in the Biden administration and has written a book about the economic impact of inequality.

“Clearly our economy is designed to create a handful of billionaires and a trillionaire,” Ms Boushey said. “It is no longer about creating opportunity and stability for the majority.”

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Not-So-Secret Impulse Behind The Felon's Vulgar Birthday Party

The Felon seems to have three main motivations: (i) ever enriching himself, (ii) bolstering his insecure masculinity and appearing "tough", and (iii) satiating his narcistic vanity.  All three, of course inter-relate. His vulgar and unseemly birthday celebration schedule tomorrow which includes a UFC fight match in forecast 94 degree temperatures with forecasts of possible severe thunderstorms likely plays to all three, but particularly his insecure and toxic Masculinity.  Only 16% of Americans support the gladiatorial like event with the Felon playing the role of a modern day Nero or Caligula - which means event a good chunk of the MAGA base finds the event repellant. Meanwhile, for the 39th time the Felon is claiming a deal with Iran is "close" although details are fuzzy and his deal with likely make the one Barack Obama brokered look absolutely amazingly good in comparison. In some ways garishness and unseemliness of the costly event is appropriate for the 80 year old convicted felon who views himself I suspect as America's Caesar even as much of the world loathes and laughs at him. Perhaps the only one truly grinning is Vladimir Putin as he surveys the immense damage the Felon has done to American power and prestige as well as the American economy.  A piece in the New Republic looks at the vulgar event, Here are excerpts:

The president turns 80 on Sunday, and, as with everything pertaining to Donald Trump, his need to place himself at the center of our attention is pathological. He could not just have a dinner at the White House, or a party at Mar-a-Lago. No; he had to build a massive arena on real estate that belongs to the people of the United States to host a vulgar, garish event that is one of the most violent forms of spectacle available to the human race today. Trump will be sitting there like some Roman emperor at the Colosseum watching enslaved men try to stave off lions. The man who wanted law enforcement to shoot protesters “in the knees” is probably bummed he couldn’t just replicate that.

But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. . . . I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline.

But guess what’s strikingly, the event is overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent.

Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of course spend the entire weekend equating men beating each other to a pulpy mass on hallowed civic ground with “real” patriotism.

It’s sickening. Oh—and it’s also, as we’ve come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor—surprise, surprise!—is Crypto.com.

Out in the real world, Trump is being reduced to impotence by a bunch of dictators who are even more reactionary than he is. He’s about to cut a “deal” with Iran that sounds like it will be little more than an extended ceasefire. It will, many experts fear, compare unfavorably to Barack Obama’s 2015 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018. Trump may achieve what Obama achieved, in terms of getting Iran to agree not to enrich uranium at anywhere close to weapons-grade levels. But as I’ve noted several times, the thing to watch is how much money Trump agrees to transfer to Iran. Which in a sense is fine; it’s Iran’s frozen money. But when Obama agreed to give Iran $1.7 billion, right-wingers screamed that it was capitulation and even treasonous. Iran now wants up to $24 billion. We’ll see how Mr. Art of the Deal fares.

But even if he does strike a decent deal, he’s already done enormous damage to the U.S. economy, the global economy, and American prestige and power projection. To sane observers in the United States and across the world, he looks like exactly what he is: a weak and hollow and insecure man who started a needless and counterproductive war out of nowhere because it looked “tough.”

But inside his little MAGA cocoon on Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man, presiding over watching other manly men spill each other’s blood for the leader’s greater glory. It’s the most undemocratic pageant one could imagine, a fact that—given that scant 16 percent support—the people know in their bones. In fact, this is exactly what fascism is: grotesque, violent spectacle that repulses most of the population but drives the fervent worshippers to a frenzied state and tries to bully its way into being synonymous with what it means to be a real American.

It’s all made worse by the fact that Dear Leader will be embarking upon his ninth decade of life that night, and that six in 10 Americans believe he lacks the mental sharpness to serve as president. So that’s the not-so-secret meaning of this event.

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Republicans Thought They Owned "Values." Not Anymore

For years the Republican Party and the "Christian Right" - which is neither truly Christian or morally right - have claimed to be the protectors of "family values" and "values" in general.  Other than pushing a hate-filled, racist and anti-LGBT Christian nationalist agenda now fully embodied in Project 2025, these claims were never true given the way the GOP constantly pushes a reverse Robin Hood agenda that takes from the poor and gives to the obscenely wealthy as self-styled "Christians" aligned with the GOP utterly ignoring Christ's social gospel message and resembling the Pharisees Christ condemned in the gospels.  Now, with the GOP little more than a cult of the Felon - a man who is the embodiment of virtually everything a true Christian should find disgusting and reject - the claims of supporting "values" are even more empty and filled with hypocrisy.  True, the Christian nationalists and their minions in the GOP continue their same old tired attacks on gays - they are labeling Pride month as "Family and Morality month" implying gays are immoral - blacks and a host of others, given the abject moral bankruptcy of the Felon, Ken Paxton, and much of the every greed driven billionaire class (think Elon Musk), the messaging is hollow and has provided Democrats with an opening to crusade as the true defenders of families, the working class and those who do believe in Christ's social gospel message.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reversal who are the protectors of family and moral values. Here are highlights:

The values voter became a hot political commodity some two decades ago. A catchy rebranding of the religious right, the label was inspired by a controversial exit poll question in the 2004 presidential election finding that 22 percent of voters cast their ballots on the basis of “moral values” and 80 percent of them supported George W. Bush. The assumption took hold that Americans who cared about values were conservatives animated by opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

The 2026 campaign is reminding us that this narrow view of how voters think about values is out of step with a long American tradition that gave rise to moral appeals for improving society as a whole, particularly at times of great economic and technological change. We are witnessing the return of a politics of morality organized around the injustices of the economic system and an array of related problems: the costs of technological change, the unraveling of community, civil rights, and financial and work-balance issues confronting families.

These themes are powerful in the campaigns of Democrats this year across the party’s philosophical spectrum — and it’s about time. . . . Georgetown professor Michael Kazin argues that “the most fruitful strategy for Democrats over time” has involved criticizing the failures of the status quo in the name of an alternative “moral capitalism.”

Moral engagement with the economy, social justice and technological revolution has deep American roots, both secular and religious. At the high tide of the Progressive Era, Walter Rauschenbusch, a Protestant pastor and theologian, gave voice to the social gospel movement in his 1907 book, “Christianity and the Social Crisis.” The civil rights movement of the middle of the 20th century, like the abolitionist movement before it, highlighted the moral urgency of equal rights and linked their defense to religious values.

In 2026 the resurgence of a Christian left is most explicit in James Talarico’s Senate campaign in Texas. Mr. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, speaks often about his faith and regularly invokes Scripture. He is inspired by Jesus’ overturning of the money changers’ tables outside the temple, described in all four Gospels. The top of his campaign website features Mr. Talarico’s signature line, “It’s time to start flipping tables.”

His campaign against the Republican nominee, Ken Paxton, will provide the starkest contest between the old values debate and the new one. Mr. Paxton has denounced Mr. Talarico’s theology and issued familiar attacks from the religious right, notably around trans issues. The scandalous personal baggage weighing down Mr. Paxton will complicate his talk about morality.

The list of possible 2028 presidential contenders who make religiously inflected arguments for social change is long. It includes both of Georgia’s senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock (Mr. Warnock is a Baptist minister); the former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg; Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania; and, increasingly, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. In September, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky will publish a book about faith, “Go and Do Likewise,” with a title and message inspired by the parable of the good Samaritan.

Mr. Trump’s corruption and self-dealing have provided a new foundation for arguments inflected by appeals to values. The president’s close (and often remunerative) ties to some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals and interests lead naturally to a broader assault on oligarchy — a word popularized from the left by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but now in common use across the party.

The closest thing to a manifesto for the Democrats’ new values offensive is Senator Chris Murphy’s book published last month, “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.”

Defeating Mr. Trump is necessary, Mr. Murphy argues, but the president’s rise is also a symptom: “A deeper rot festers in the American soul.” Its elements, he writes, include “a callousness toward our neighbors” and “a me-first selfishness,” along with what he sees as the worship of “false cults,” among them “profit at any cost, consumerism instead of citizenship” and “a blind faith in technology.”

The Democrats’ new moral language suggests an understanding that the backward-looking “again” in Mr. Trump’s MAGA slogan was about more than a return to reactionary approaches to race and immigration. It also spoke to many who yearned for, as Mr. Murphy put it, “a time when Americans felt more connected to community and neighbor.”

Former Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat running for a Senate seat in North Carolina, is one candidate who has translated these larger ideas into the shorthand of the political spot, narrating an ad about his childhood on a family farm. . . . “I grew up working on this farm,” Mr. Cooper says. “Mom was a teacher. Dad, a small-town lawyer and farmer. Fridays were football. Sunday was church. I’m Roy Cooper. Life felt easier back then. I’m running for the Senate to make life easier today, to go after insurance companies ripping you off, to make sure you can retire with dignity and to build an economy that finally values working people.”

Mr. Ossoff, who is the only Democratic senator up for re-election in a state Mr. Trump carried in 2024, called down the judgment of the prophet Amos as Mr. Ossoff addressed “the political and moral crisis that we face in our nation” at Elizabeth Baptist Church in Atlanta last month. “Amos attacked the moral corruption of his time,” he declared, adding that “the people struggled to survive while the wealthy and the powerful lived in luxury and opulence.”

Americans have quarreled over Prohibition, birth control, abortion, sexuality and other aspects of individual behavior. But we have also confronted the corruption of political and economic systems and our responsibilities to put things right.

We are in a transition in how we talk about values because now is a moment to tend to the demands of our common life — and our obligations to one another.