Saturday, July 04, 2026
Trump’s 250th Is a Festival of Slop History
As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America: The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you don’t have to.
Hall opens by dismissing the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.” Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during this video. . . . . he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians would assume their natural right to rule the country.
Hall starts with the claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in order to make the point that, as he wrote, “it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.
Hall then dwells on comparatively minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural, miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating “diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote in an 1813 letter to John Adams.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a handful of individuals.”
The narrative reaches a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored principally by George Mason, . . . . Mason himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on “reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious nationalist messaging.
[O]ther action items include expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money and for conservative religious people to practice discrimination themselves if they have a faith-based excuse.
Like the rest of the MAGA movement, Hall pretends to be standing on the side of the people against the tyranny of those liberal educational institutions that dare to report the truth about America’s Enlightenment Founders. But Hall is a professor at Regent University, itself an educational institution aligned with a partisan movement that is bankrolled by a sector of the ultrawealthy.
Maybe the defining feature of the video—as well as the commission, and the MAGA movement in general—is its divisiveness. America’s 250th anniversary might have been an opportunity to celebrate the unity that, in spite of our many setbacks and challenges, Americans have managed to achieve over the centuries in the face of so much natural diversity. The animating spirit of “e pluribus unum” might have been nice to hear at a time like this. Even at the time of America’s founding, as serious historians have long noted, America was exceptionally diverse in its forms of religious expression. What the White House has offered now, in propaganda videos just as in its daily cycle of corruption and self-dealing, is the opportunity for an aggrieved minority to hate those people it imagines to have strayed from a supposedly pure, original version of an America that has never in fact existed.
The Paradox of Surging Gay Literature/Films
In early June, Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican firebrand from Tennessee, did something he often does: Post a message on X that was sure to shock. “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.”
But unlike some of his other recent virulent posts — for example, about Muslim Americans — this one drew condemnation from many members of his own party, including Mike Johnson, the House speaker.
The post’s brief life spoke to the divisions within the Republican Party on same-sex marriage. Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision protecting gay marriage, turns 11 this year, and there is little indication that establishment Republicans are questioning it. At the same time, Christian conservatives, like Mr. Ogles, now a crucial part of Mr. Trump’s coalition, are pursuing that goal with renewed energy and ambition, often using the push for trans rights as a new front in the debate.
Support for gay marriage is now declining, reversing a yearslong trend. Earlier this month, Gallup released a poll showing that Republican support for gay marriage now stood at 37 percent, a decline of 18 percentage points from a high in 2022. Support among independents declined, too.
And a few Republican lawmakers are also pushing resolutions against gay marriage. . . . . Republican states have even started to rebrand Pride Month, the June commemoration of the Stonewall uprising and the signature moment for the gay liberation movement, calling it Fidelity Month or Nuclear Family Month.
Despite the arguments being made by Christian conservatives, and the findings of the Gallup polling, Gavin Smith, a gay Republican town councilman in Lexington, S.C., said he has not seen any evidence of rising opposition to gay couples among voters.
Like Mr. Smith, the husband and I have not experienced any hostility among yacht club and country club members we interact with and from Republican clients. Yet, the growing attacks from evangelicals and their political prostitutes within the GOP remain unnerving and can undermine one's sense of safety and security. Meanwhile and in direct contradiction to the movement within the GOP, as noted at the outset of this post, gay themed literature and films are seemingly surging and being embraced. One of David Beckham's sons is making his acting debut in a gay romance film and Amazon will be releasing a sequel to "Red White and Royal Blue" - one of Amazon's top streaming films - as filming prepares to start for season two of "Heated Rivalry" which seemingly has a cult following among straight women. A second piece in the New York Times looks at this surge in acceptance:
Just over 10 years ago, I opened a small bookstore a few hours northwest of New York City. The shelves are arranged by affinity: Notable people choose their 10 favorite books; elsewhere, titles gather around more whimsical themes. Early this year, I found myself creating a shelf I could not have imagined when I started: queer sports romances.
That’s where you now find “Heated Rivalry” beside “Thirty Love” and “Futbolista” — closeted hockey players, closeted tennis players, closeted college soccer players. The covers promise muscle, yearning and secrecy. Though the protagonists tend to be men, many of the genre’s writers and readers are women. At first, I saw these books as a playful little subgenre, a narrow tributary of romance publishing. Lately, I’ve come to see them as evidence of a much larger shift: Queer literature has become one of the growth engines of the publishing industry.
L.G.B.T.Q. fiction has never been more visible, more varied or better promoted. . . . It is not a stretch to call the past few years the richest period for queer fiction since 1978, when Andrew Holleran published “Dancer From the Dance,” Larry Kramer published “Faggots” and Edmund White published “Nocturnes for the King of Naples.” That post-Stonewall flowering was followed by AIDS, which robbed queer literature of many of its writers and a substantial portion of its audience. Publishers retreated. To be labeled a gay or queer writer was a constraint.
The old assumption was that queerness should be downplayed to get a wider readership. In 2007, when Rakesh Satyal’s “Blue Boy,” a gay Indian American coming-of-age novel, was being shopped around, he thought its intersection of South Asian and queer experience might broaden its appeal. Publishers saw the opposite. “It was seen as a reduction of the audience,” he told me.
Today, the opposite looks true. Queerness sells. . . . . This is not simply a story of representation getting its due. The audience for literary fiction has long skewed toward women and gay men. What has changed is the industry’s willingness to acknowledge that and the many straight women who are willing to read about gay characters.
According to data compiled from BookScan, sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction (excluding digital sales) were roughly $8 million in 2015, the year Hanya Yanagihara published “A Little Life,” heralded by Garth Greenwell as a great gay novel. By 2025, annual sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction had reached more than $80 million, a tenfold increase over a decade in which fiction more broadly has struggled.
The very qualities that once made queer fiction seem too risky now make it useful. Queer books also come with organic systems of circulation: book clubs, queer bookstores, online fan communities and events that double as gatherings of friends. . . . For publishers, that is increasingly valuable. Queer books don’t simply find individual readers; they find communities.
The boom has created incentives for publishers to package gayness and for straight writers to borrow it. André Aciman, who is not gay, wrote one of the defining gay love stories of the past 20 years in “Call Me by Your Name.”
“I am writing outside my own experience to an extent,” he said, “but I’ve experienced desire, and I understand desire, and I can understand the desire between these two people on a human level. I hope that it felt true because it felt true when I was writing it, and I think that’s the important thing.”
One can only hope that the explosion of gay literature and movies/series will help usher in a renewed acceptance of LGBT people and demonstrate that our lives and loves are legitimate and have true value.
Friday, July 03, 2026
Like the Felon, Putin Is Slipping Into Delusion
When things get dicey in Moscow, Vladimir Putin tends to drop out of sight for a while, retreating to one of his residences and canceling public events. Only his closest aides know how he spends his time during these absences, which can go on for days even in the middle of a national crisis. The Kremlin does its best to fill the vacant airtime on state TV with pretaped footage of the president, waiting for him to reemerge and declare that everything remains under his control.
Since the end of last year, when Ukraine intensified its campaign of drone and missile strikes on Russian cities, Putin has taken a few of these breaks. Two of them lasted for more than a week. He has mostly avoided talking about the Ukrainian strikes, even as they caused fuel shortages across Russia, destroyed infrastructure, and shattered the sense of stability that Putin offers his people in exchange for their loyalty. His first detailed response to the threat came on Monday, and he did his best to seem unmoved.
In a carefully scripted interview on state TV, Putin looked bored with the details of governing Russia and managing the frustrations of his citizens, but he did not appear tired of his war in Ukraine. He spent most of the 19-minute conversation with a Russian news anchor dissecting the minutiae of the fighting . . . . The performance seemed designed to suggest that, away from the cameras, the Russian leader spends his time hunched over maps of the battlefield.
The Russian people, by contrast, have run out of patience with the war their leader seems so eager to continue. A survey released on the same day as Putin’s interview found that 81 percent of Russians want the war to end “as early as tomorrow.” The number of respondents who want the fighting to continue until Russia’s victory, no matter how long it takes, dropped in the survey to 9 percent, the lowest level ever recorded by the Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia
Its most recent survey matched up with the images and complaints that have flooded Russian social networks in the past few weeks, showing long lines at gas stations in Moscow and trucks stalled without fuel on the roadside. “There’s no gasoline in the city,” one man posted from a suburb of Moscow. “And the TV is silent about it.”
If Putin cares about such problems, he has done a decent job of hiding it. “Everything is working stably and with a big reserve of strength,” he said in Monday’s interview, referring to the fuel shortages spreading through Russia.
M]ore than four years into his invasion of Ukraine, this element of Putin’s character seems only to have hardened. He treats the war as his calling, the purest expression of the power he has hoarded for a quarter century. The incalculable pain and suffering it has caused, with more than a million casualties overall, do not evoke for Putin anywhere near the level of emotion he displays when talking about the war’s mechanics. . . . . The Russian president’s obsession with the details of the fighting appears to have crossed the line into delusion.
Does that mania for war make him any more likely to cut his losses and accept a negotiated peace? Probably not. His interview on Monday illustrated what many in Ukraine and Europe have long concluded about Putin’s state of mind. He has convinced himself that the attritional math of the war favors Russia, and he will continue to press the numerical advantage of his forces regardless of how long the lines for gasoline in Moscow might get.
In the end, Russia could still face defeat, and the recent dynamics of the fighting have made that outcome look more likely than ever. Russia now loses an average of at least 30,000 troops a month, killed or gravely wounded. The Russian military struggles to replace those losses despite offering bonuses to new recruits worth up to $80,000—enough to buy an apartment in many Russian cities. For those sent to the front, the average life expectancy stands at around two or three weeks, according to one Russian military blogger who follows the fighting closely.
Mobilizing more troops would be among Putin’s more obvious options for continuing the war for a long time to come. In September 2022, during another low point for him in this war, Putin called up 300,000 soldiers in the first military draft in Russia since the Second World War. Doing that again would devastate the Russian economy and risk a surge of popular unrest. But many close observers of the war in Russia have concluded that Putin has no other choice. “This fall, there will either be peace or mobilization,” another military blogger wrote a few weeks ago, setting off a debate on Russian social networks about whether men should pack their bags for basic training.
In his interview, Putin did not mention any plans to mobilize more forces. He also didn’t point to any viable path to peace. He only repeated his aim to conquer all of Novorossiya, or New Russia, a vague term that, in his mind, seems to encompass most of southern and eastern Ukraine. At their current rate of advance, Russian forces would need several more years of fighting to stand a realistic chance of achieving that goal. They would also need to be prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But that appears to be Putin’s intent, regardless of how his people might feel about it.
Thursday, July 02, 2026
The Felon's Regime: Non-Stop Grifting and Watergate Every Week
The day before President Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, sending markets exploding higher, his investment accounts quietly purchased hundreds of stocks near the market low, trades that were not publicly disclosed until more than a year later despite federal disclosure requirements.
The purchases, finally disclosed in a 927-page annual financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics on Monday, reveal a churn of transactions that was quietly playing out all last year: Trump’s accounts were actively trading stocks throughout 2025 while he was making policy decisions that moved markets, and the public had no idea.
On April 8, 2025, the day before Trump announced the tariff pause, the disclosure shows 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million, one of the largest single-day stock buying sprees disclosed in the filing. . . . . The S&P 500 jumped nearly 10% the following day when Trump announced the pause, one of the largest single-day gains in the index’s history.
Again, the insider trading is just the tip of the ice berg. The New York Post editorial board writes:
Insider deals, finders’ fees and backdoor introductions to family members are business-as-usual in Third World banana republics, but these slimy practices have now been normalized in the White House, to the shame of the nation.
The New York Times reports that Eric and Donald Trump Jr., sons of President Donald Trump, and Kyle and Brandon Lutnick, sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, are tied to a billion-dollar tungsten-mining deal that the US government is financing in Kazakhstan. The prez himself actually called into a meeting between Howard Lutnick and Kazakhstan’s president as the deal was being finalized.
The Trump sons, meanwhile, are part-owners or investors in companies neck-deep in a key defense contract to mine tungsten reserves in Central Asia. It stinks to high heaven.
Meanwhile, JD Vance shrugs off the shocking corruption and even said Watergate would barely be a blip in the newsfeeds now adays, ignoring the reality that what Richard Nixon did was child's play compared to the Felon's non-stop improper behavior. A piece at The Atlantic looks at Vance's pathetic and disingenuous remarks:
He [JD Vance] wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Vance went on to suggest that the scandal that toppled Nixon was no big deal, and that the 37th president was a victim of nefarious forces. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Vance is correct about how Watergate would’ve landed today, but the lesson is not what he claims. Since 1974, Americans have become pessimistic about their leaders, deeply polarized in their partisanship, and distrustful of the media—all of which means that Watergate very well might pass quickly in today’s environment. The best evidence is that the Trump administration weathers scandals on the Watergate level routinely. As Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote of Vance’s remark, “‘We do a Watergate twice a day’ is a crazy way to confess your own corruption.”
Vance, who has previously admitted to making up stories for political purposes, also offered a bogus history of what happened in Watergate: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
Trump’s first impeachment, for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine in the 2020 election, and Nixon’s downfall share two important things: First, both men did what they were accused of, though both insisted that their actions had been fine. (Trump: “a perfect conversation.” Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”) Second, the most damning evidence against both of them came not from “deep state” bureaucrats but from their own appointed political aides. The question of accountability is where the stories start to differ: Nixon was forced to resign by Republicans dismayed by his behavior; today, lockstep partisanship means that many GOP members of Congress pulled their punches in Trump’s two impeachment trials. Now Trump, like Nixon before him, is using the muscle of the federal government to bully and persecute his political adversaries.
More than one year ago, my colleague Anne Applebaum described the Trump administration as the most corrupt in American history, and the headlines routinely provide attestation. Over the weekend, for example, The New York Times reported on how Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick struck a deal with the Kazakh government to give an American company access to Kazakh tungsten deposits, and to provide $1.6 billion in financing; the sons of both Trump and Lutnick now stand to profit from business arrangements based on the deal. A week before this, the Times reported that the administration killed an investigation into how a convicted fraudster had obtained clemency from the president—only one of many cases of what look like pay-to-play commutations and pardons.
The Wall Street Journal recently delved into how the billionaire Larry Ellison’s roughly $45 million donation to a Trump-supporting nonprofit in the 2024 election helped facilitate his son David’s acquisition of Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, which he has moved to make a media ally of the White House, and pending acquisition of CNN. (A Paramount spokesperson told the Journal that the company had made no commitments to any government body about coverage.)
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that more than half of the publicly identified donors to Trump’s intended White House ballroom have won new or larger federal contracts in recent months—totaling more than $50 billion. The president is aiming to host a major international conference at his own property—a step scandalous enough that he was forced to back down by Republicans when he tried it during his first term. No wonder the FBI has dissolved its public-corruption unit.
This is not an exhaustive list, even for the past few weeks, which is part of the point: Watergate shocked the conscience because it was so rare to have such a fetid scandal break into view. But by following Steve Bannon’s maxim to “flood the zone with shit,” Trump has avoided the monthslong drip-drip of Watergate revelations, overwhelmed the press, and desensitized the public. Hardly anyone can maintain a mental list of all the improprieties..
This would be a powerful argument coming from the vice president, who has worried about what he sees as insufficient morality in American society and has said that his role is “to try to apply moral principles in ways that get the best outcomes.” Instead, Vance has concluded that his best chance at political advancement is to hitch himself to the corrupt and unethical Trump. Such cynicism would do Nixon proud.
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