Tuesday, June 23, 2026
The Felon Can’t Spin His Way Out of His Messes
[The Felon]
President Trumpspent the weekend trying to calm the waters in Washington and roil them in the Persian Gulf.Let’s begin with the less serious of these two self-inflicted crises. This spring, Trump for some reason became fixated on the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which had not previously been a topic of national discussion, but which he believes should vibrate with a deep Technicolor blue. The administration awarded no-bid contracts for both a color coating and a new water-purification system, with the latter going to a company tied to a Trump-campaign donor previously convicted of conspiracy to bribe. Surprising no one, both parts of the project have been a disaster.
Now Trump says water will likely have to be removed from the pool to do “necessary repairs”—in other words, $16.4 million in taxpayer money will go down the drain. . . . . He also blamed vandals for the issues, though the White House has offered no evidence to suggest that’s true. Visitors who approached the pool this weekend were shooed away by National Guard members, and at least one who touched the pool’s broken liner was arrested . . .
Meanwhile, Trump nearly upended peace negotiations between Vice President Vance and Iranian leaders in Switzerland. Over the weekend, Iran claimed it had once more blocked the Strait of Hormuz because of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which appears to violate the fragile cease-fire in place. Whether the strait is actually closed is not entirely clear . . . On Truth Social, he said that if Iran didn’t rein in Hezbollah, he would “hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Threatening to kill interlocutors in the middle of a peace negotiation is generally seen as uncouth, in addition to counterproductive. Today, Vance was left to tell the Iranians that, in essence, they should just write off his threats as bluster: “What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us Millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record.”
Like Trump’s repeated blaming of vandals for damaging the pool, Trump is talking, but no one’s really paying much attention. Iran seems to have already concluded that it doesn’t need to take Trump seriously, which is a mixed blessing: good because it meant the Iranians didn’t quit the negotiations, but bad for the prospects of the U.S. reaching a favorable deal.
The Iran war and the Reflecting Pool, though very different in scale and importance, share some illuminating parallels. In both cases, Trump embarked on a project while blaming the Obama administration, his persistent bugbear, for an alleged problem: Iranian aggression or an insufficiently azure pool. In both cases, he charged forward without a fleshed-out plan, preferring to fly by the seat of his pants, and ignored the experts who warned of exactly the problems that resulted—algal blooms, a blocked strait.
What sets Iran and the Reflecting Pool apart from some previous cases is that he has been unable to deny reality. In the past, Trump has spun setbacks as victories, lying prodigiously to do so. In the case of his bogus claim of a stolen 2020 election, for example, he has relied on generalized public distrust of institutions, robust conservative media, and the arcana of election procedure to help create at least some doubt.
But no one can deny that the Reflecting Pool is, in fact, currently green. Nor can Trump spin the war in Iran—not when Americans spent weeks filling up their cars with gas that spiked well above $4 a gallon, and not when ships are visibly bottled up in the strait. These failures are plain in a way that exceeds even Trump’s capacity to get his supporters to believe him over their own eyes.
Now Trump’s only recourse is trying again, almost certainly with worse results. Vance is celebrating a tentative agreement to merely restore nuclear inspections—a safeguard present in Obama’s hated deal with Iran—even as the U.S. makes concessions such as allowing Iran to sell more oil. Trump badly wants the Reflecting Pool fixed by July 4, but it’s unclear if that is possible; if it is, doing so will almost certainly cost millions more in taxpayer money. The president chose two unnecessary battles and lost them both, and the American people will pay.
Monday, June 22, 2026
Parallels: Brexit and MAGA
Ten years ago this week, Britain threw away its geopolitical compass and voted to quit the club of European nations it had been a part of for more than 40 years.
Leaving the European Union was supposed to allow Britain to “take back control” of its destiny. The word that really mattered in that campaign slogan was “back” — the trick was to look backward to reimagine the future. (Not for nothing has Donald Trump’s promise of the past decade been to “Make America Great Again.”)
Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European Union came to be known, was supposed to be the vessel in which Britain could return to the decades after World War II, when Winston Churchill could pretend, just about, that Britain still counted as a global power.
Boris Johnson, the most prominent face of the campaign to leave and later the prime minister who would negotiate the terms of Brexit, declared that breaking with Brussels would once more open the door to a dynamic, cosmopolitan and global Britain. All Britain had to do was walk through it.
A decade later, the cost of that freedom — of the return, as Mr. Johnson repeatedly put it, of precious national sovereignty — is blindingly apparent. The vote to leave the European Union was a real cry of pain from a large section of the electorate that thought itself left behind by economic progress. The desperation remains. The “sunlit meadows” were a mirage.
For a moment in the summer of 2016, the Brexiteers persuaded a small majority — the vote was 52 percent to 48 percent — that Britain could throw out the austerity that had followed the 2008 global financial crash, reverse the hollowing out of well-paid manufacturing jobs and trade freely and profitably on international markets. Immigrants who had flocked to Britain from Eastern and Central Europe would be sent home. Europe merely held Britain back, and to choose to leave was to believe, as Britons had before, that the nation was meant for more.
There was a reluctance to admit that Britain was becoming a regional rather than global power. As a Conservative foreign secretary in the early 1950s, Anthony Eden had spoken for the political establishment when he said that “Britain’s story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe.” Europe was simply too small an arena for British engagement.
The 21st century’s Brexiteers were every bit as insouciant in their rhetorical disregard of Britain’s relative decline. Nearly four years after the vote to leave, Mr. Johnson, by then prime minister, chose the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, once a hub of the British Empire’s maritime power, to mark the conclusion of negotiations on the terms of Brexit. That 2020 speech, “Unleashing Britain’s Potential,” sought to again conjure an earlier age of swashbuckling adventurism. . . . . Britain was on the threshold of a new golden age.
It was, of course, a fantasy. Mr. Johnson got Brexit through, but as the Conservative pro-European Michael Heseltine has often put it, this is the sovereignty of the man in the desert. The economy has stalled and trade has shrunk. Britain is poorer than it might have been. Its gross domestic product is at least 4 percent — but could be as much as 8 percent — lower, according to independent calculations, while business investment is more than 10 percent lower. It added new frictions to the lives of Britons: new border checks when traveling to E.U. countries, stricter residency rules for living in Europe, fewer opportunities for students to study abroad.
There have been other costs, one of them a weakening of the glue between the nations of the United Kingdom itself. The referendum result was more a statement of English than of British nationalism — majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain.
Rather than a newly independent Britain cutting a swath on the international stage, economic realities forced cuts in spending on foreign aid and diplomacy. The hopes among Brexiteers for a new Anglosphere, adding the English-speaking Commonwealth nations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand to Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States, turned to dust, and Britain’s privileged place in Washington was lost to Mr. Trump’s disdain for traditional alliances.
John Major, who as a Conservative prime minister in the 1990s fought off his party’s anti-Europeans, has been blunt in his conclusion. Brexit has left Britain poorer, weaker and locked out of the richest free trade market in history. “The U.K. once reveled in being a leading member of an E.U. with half a billion citizens and the undoubted first ally of the United States — the world’s most eminent superpower,” Mr. Major said in a speech last year. “Today, we know we are neither — and so does the world.”
When President Vladimir Putin of Russia launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was a salutary reminder of the lesson of several centuries of European history. An island Britain may be, but it cannot escape the facts of its geography. Its security is inextricably bound to that of its neighbors.
Since becoming prime minister in 2024, Mr. Starmer has scrambled to rebuild bridges with Britain’s erstwhile European Union partners. He has made some progress. . . . Together with European partners, Mr. Starmer has also acted as a brake on the White House’s attempts to insist on a peace deal that would, in effect, hand Mr. Putin victory.
On the economic front, the prime minister is negotiating with Brussels to strip away some of the more nonsensical obstacles thrown up by Brexit to free trade, student exchanges and energy cooperation. He is also seeking to participate in the E.U.’s burgeoning program for collective defense procurement.
There is an irony here. Many in the Brexit camp saw Britain’s close relationship with the United States as an alternative to its European connections. But Mr. Trump has turned away from all of his trans-Atlantic partners, Britain included.
In any case, there is no certainty of an easy route back in. Opinion polls point to a majority of Britons believing Brexit was a mistake but do not yet point to a public clamor to overturn the result. Leaving the European Union took four years of intense, often acrimonious, negotiation. Rejoining could well take longer — particularly since, after the unwanted upheaval of Brexit, Britain’s former partners would have their own conditions for resuming the relationship.
The Brexiteers found an opportunity in 2016 in significant part because of the failure of successive governments to address the fundamental economic and social issues that lay at the heart of popular discontent or to tell the hard truths about the inevitable, and difficult, political trade-offs that would be necessary to restore a vibrant economy and begin the rebuilding of decaying public services.
Those who said leaving the European Union was the answer were peddling a nostalgic delusion, but for those who considered themselves left behind, it was an attractive one. A reversal would force the profound psychological shift that Britain has tried so resolutely to avoid since the dissolution of its empire: that Britain can still count itself a great nation, but it is no longer a great power.
History’s dismal verdict on Brexit has been written: Untrammeled sovereignty can end up looking like lonely isolation.
A few months after the Brexit referendum, when the United States selected Mr. Trump as its president and read the rites over Pax Americana, America chose exceptionalism, too.
As different as the circumstances and characters on either side of the Atlantic were, there was a shared story in these epochal statements of national independence. Both were populist revolts against ruling elites. Stop the world, voters declared, we want to get off.
Sunday, June 21, 2026
The GOP Plan to Kill Off Medicare and Social Security
One of the least remarked-upon chapters in the Republicans’ ghastly Project 2025 document dealt with their plan to cut Social Security and Medicare, ostensibly to fix the impending trust fund shortfall and eliminate the national deficit all at once. The reason hardly anyone talked about it is that if there’s one thing we know about Republicans, from the so-called moderates to the most extreme MAGA true believers, it’s that they want to do away with those commie pinko programs once and for all.
But there’s a problem: Nearly all Americans depend on those commie pinko programs to some extent, including many Republican voters. So the ideologues are always forced to couch their desire to slash federal spending to the bone in some version of “We have to kill the programs in order to save them.” Nobody buys it, and the world moves on.
Indeed, in all three of his presidential campaigns Donald Trump ran on promises to protect those programs, and under his leadership, other Republicans have mostly kept their plans on the down low. . . . .when Project 2025 was unveiled, it was all there. Among other things, they proposed to raise the retirement age to 69 or 70, alter the benefit schedule and cut disability payments. They wanted to move toward privatizing Medicare entirely by making its already-privatized side program, Medicare Advantage, the default choice for everybody so insurance companies can more easily deny care and reap even bigger profits.
But that was just the latest attack in a long history. The Heritage Foundation has been putting out these policy blueprints for decades, and every single one of them features some harebrained scheme to degrade or eliminate the retirement programs.
Never once, oddly enough, have they suggested raising the cap on the maximum earnings subject to Social Security taxes. Asking wealthier people to pay payroll taxes on wages above $185,000 would fund the system long into the future. But of course, that’s the last thing Republicans want. The whole point of their years of endeavor is to end it once and for all.
We might have thought that Trump’s promises would at least have kept the jackals at bay until he’s off the stage. But it’s pretty clear that our president has checked out and only cares about revenge, monuments, prizes and grift at this point. If the extremists around him can get him to believe that he’s building his legacy as the greatest president in history by “saving” the programs with some new privatization scheme akin to his “Trump baby bonds,” he’ll do it in a heartbeat. . . . So the GOP is overdue for another run at this.
Well, it looks like they’re gearing up for it. House Speaker Mike Johnson said this to a conservative radio host this week: The largest spending items, the reason we’re in trouble, are because over 74 percent of federal spending is on autopilot — mandatory spending, that is, your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and things like Social Security — they have to be adjusted and fixed.
Maybe we could think about reversing some of those tax cuts for billionaires Johnson and Trump love so much. Or we could put a stop to Trump’s foreign adventures, which are costing the taxpayers untold billions. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted to approve Trump’s $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget last week, and Congress has appropriated $518 billion over the last year for the Department of Homeland Security to deport working people who are paying into Social Security with no prospect of ever collecting benefits. Maybe they could think about dialing back some of this reckless spending on wars and police actions that nobody wants and are making everyone poorer and less secure.
If the times are desperate, Mr. Speaker, it’s because the country is being run by people like you and Donald Trump, who seem determined to ruin it.
One might suspect Johnson knows that he’s not likely to be speaker next year, so there will be no legislation aimed at cutting the safety net programs. Their plan at this point is to maximally demagogue around the latest Social Security report, which says an impending shortfall of the Social Security “trust fund” — which is an accounting gimmick — will hit in 2032 or 2034.
That would effectively trigger a political crisis that endangers the program’s solvency, because that “trust fund” is what allows the government to pay out Social Security benefits every year without a specific appropriation from Congress. If there’s a shortfall, as now predicted, Congress will have to make up the money. What are the odds Democrats will be able to do that, whether or not they hold a majority, without the draconian cuts Republicans are certain to demand? Imagine the government-shutdown scenarios that include older people not getting their checks. Given the extremist majority that now dominates the GOP, that’s a real possibility.
Economist Paul Krugman explains in his newsletter that the shortfall is actually quite modest and easily accounted for — if the government exercises some common sense. This problem is actually temporary because members of the the massive baby boom generation are now largely retired, and their numbers will gradually diminish in the years ahead. As mentioned above, we could rethink this crusade to deport many the workers who’ve been propping up the system for years, we could tax rich people on more of their income, and we could decide to do something about America’s outrageous income inequality, which is distorting everything.
Maybe we’ll do all of that this time around. But I’m not betting on it.
There’s a certain “boy who cried wolf” quality to the perennial alarms about the GOP’s lust to get rid of these big federal programs that go back to FDR’s New Deal (Social Security) and LBJ’s Great Society (Medicare). But make no mistake: The minute they actually get the chance to take them down, they will. There is no article of faith more fundamental to the American conservative creed than the premise that Social Security and Medicare are socialist programs that must be privatized or eliminated altogether. Even the fact that these are universal government programs, available to every American, goes against everything they believe in.
Saturday, June 20, 2026
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