More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Orban: He Was Trump Before Trump and He's In Trouble

Since returning to the White House, the Felon has been working to implement his own version of the corrupt system that Victor Orban has constructed in Hungary. This effort has included seeking to silence political rivals and critics, granting special sweetheart deals to friends and family members, attacking liberal universities and pushing anti-LGBT culture wars, and generally being a pain in the side of western European democracies and cozying up to Vladimir Putin. Some aspects of Hungary under Orban, including undermining the European Union parallel aspects of Hungary's history which includes undermining the Austrian imperial government and war efforts to benefit Hungary at the expense of the rest of the empire during WWI as described in the book, "Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in WWI." Now, facing a re-election campaign after 16 years of policies benefiting the few at the expense of the many - sound familiar? - Orban could face defeat in tomorrow's voting.  Should Orban be defeated, it will be a defeat for far right movements, including MAGA that has previously regarded Orban's regime as the blueprint for a far right America.  Indeed, the Felon even dispatched JD Vance to campaign for Orban in Hungary. A long piece in the New York Times looks at Orban's potential defeat and what it could to weaken ill-liberal regimes elsewhere. Here are highlights:

The Danube Institute, located in a refurbished villa in Budapest’s wealthy castle district, is one of several government-supported think tanks and foundations in Hungary that cater to foreign conservatives. At a panel discussion on Thursday evening, three days before Hungary’s elections, the mood was grim. The speakers, a mix of Americans and Europeans, hadn’t abandoned hope that Prime Minister Viktor Orban might eke out a victory, but all agreed that his party, Fidesz, was facing the most serious challenge to its rule in the 16 years since Orban returned to power.

“Here’s the problem,” said John Fund, a writer for National Review. “You have to have some kind of positive campaign.”

Orban, seeking a fifth term amid an economy widely seen as terrible — with high unemployment, virtually no growth and threadbare social services — is running on fear. Much of his pitch revolves around the fantastical claim that his center-right opponent, Peter Magyar, is going to drag Hungary to war in Ukraine.

Hungary’s capital, Budapest, is blanketed with posters of side-by-side mug-shot-style photos of Magyar and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with the words “They Are Dangerous! Stop Them!” In the past, Orban has succeeded by positioning himself against demonized opponents — he pioneered many of the right-wing conspiracy theories about George Soros — but this time, it doesn’t seem to be working.

Heading into the election, most polls show Magyar’s Tisza Party well ahead, and some indicate it’s on track for a landslide. As the speakers at the Danube Institute understood, an Orban defeat would have serious implications for the conservative movement worldwide.

Under Fidesz, Budapest has become a sort of Disneyland for reactionaries disenchanted with their own governments. American and British conservatives are constantly passing through the city on Danube Institute fellowships. As The Atlantic recently reported, Orban has made Gladden Pappin, a MAGA influencer close to JD Vance who doesn’t speak Hungarian, head of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, which does the same sort of work as the policy planning staff at the State Department.

Crucially, it’s not just material support that Orban provides to the international right. Orban has long held out the system he created in Hungary, which he calls “illiberal democracy,” as a workable Christian nationalist alternative to Western liberalism, and its example has proved enormously influential. In 2022, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” More than any other politician, Orban showed conservatives worldwide how to use government power to wage the culture wars. He crushed a prominent liberal university, banned “homosexual propaganda” in schools — a forerunner of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law — and engineered the takeover of major media outlets by his allies. Steve Bannon once described Orban as “Trump before Trump.”

Now Orban faces a possible rebuke from his own citizenry. And in a poetic coincidence, he’s faltering at the same moment that the intellectual vanguard of the MAGA movement is cracking up under the weight of Trump’s destructive, humiliating war in Iran. For at least the past decade, right-wing enemies of liberalism around the world have seemed to have momentum and energy on their side. They were daring and transgressive, while the old center-left parties that tried to stand in their way appeared exhausted and a little stunned. But today, both Orban, the progenitor of the modern populist right, and Trump, its apotheosis, are flailing.

In 2022, the conservative populist Sohrab Ahmari was an author of a fulsome endorsement of Trump arguing that he alone offered Americans “a chance to confront and chasten their failed elites.” After less than two years of unbridled Trumpian governance, Ahmari misses those elites desperately.

Fidesz’s rule hasn’t been as ruinous as Trump’s — Hungary didn’t have nearly as far to fall — but it’s been a failure on its own terms. Hungary is now one of the poorest countries in the European Union, and according to Transparency International, tied with Bulgaria for most corrupt. Orban’s government spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on benefits for families, with the aim of increasing fertility, but in 2025, the birthrate fell to 1.31 children per woman. “Depopulation is now progressing at its fastest rate to date,” according to a 2025 report from the Center for Eastern Studies.

Of course, the victory of Magyar, Tisza’s leader, isn’t assured. In the past, polls have undercounted support for Fidesz; the last time I was in Hungary, for the election four years ago, surveys showed a competitive race, but Orban’s party won in a landslide. Hungary’s electoral districts are deeply gerrymandered, so he could win a majority of seats in Parliament even without a majority of votes. . . . No one knows what other dirty tricks the election’s final days might bring.

But Tisza’s lead looks as if it could be robust enough to overcome both Fidesz’s structural advantages and its potential cheating. As Fund acknowledged, Orban’s campaign feels enervated and uninspired. Two weeks ago, he was heckled at one of his own rallies, a scene some compared to the pivotal moment when Romanians booed the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who tried to flee the country the next day.

Even if that happens, Hungary will likely remain a conservative country, because Magyar, a former Fidesz official, is no progressive. Until two years ago, he was a regime insider, the ex-husband of the former Fidesz justice minister Judit Varga. He left the party in a rather spectacular fashion. That February, Orban’s government was shaken by a major scandal when it was revealed that the country’s president, Katalin Novak, had pardoned a man imprisoned for covering up the sexual abuse of minors at a children’s home. . . . The Hungarian political analyst Peter Kreko compared the impact of the episode to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, demonstrating the “moral collapse of a moralizing government.”

After the story broke, amid widespread speculation that others in the government were implicated in the pardon, Magyar took to Facebook to condemn the regime. He expanded his denunciations on the independent YouTube show Partizan, saying, “When you feel that half the country is already in the hands of a few families, then I think, what are you waiting for?” Orban’s allies aren’t known for breaking ranks, and the effect of his interview was electric; he was heralded as a truth-telling dissident.

He has centered his campaign on one thing: opposition to the Orban regime’s epic corruption, which has made Orban’s allies spectacularly rich even as social services are so frayed that people have to bring their own toilet paper when they go to the hospital. “The only policy he’s talking about is that there needs to be a systemic challenge to what has become a kleptocracy that is undermining Hungary and Hungarianness,” said David Pressman, who served as President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Hungary.

Neither Trump nor Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, wants to see this challenge to kleptocracy succeed, and both are trying hard to shore up Orban. In addition to being an inspiration to the American right, Orban is a stalking horse for Russian interests in Europe: Under his leadership, Hungary has blocked European Union sanctions on Russia and aid to Ukraine.

Russian intelligence suggested staging an assassination attempt on Orban to get Hungarians to rally around him. That hasn’t happened . . . . Just after this ostensible plot came to light, Vance arrived in Budapest to campaign for Orban, echoing Orban’s accusations of Ukrainian interference. This convergence of Russian and American interests is particularly perverse given that, until Tuesday, the United States was at war with Iran, which was, U.S. officials have said, getting targeting help from Russia. But ordinary American geopolitical interests appear to pale in comparison to Orban’s symbolic importance to the American right.

The fact that Trump is working to help a Putin-aligned autocrat demonstrates just how thoroughly he’s inverted American foreign policy. But it also shows why an Orban loss would be so seismic. The most powerful autocrats in the world want Orban to win; in addition to Putin and Trump, he has the endorsement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the likely support of China, since Orban has embraced the Belt and Road initiative, China’s investment in global infrastructure.

If Magyar beats him anyway, it will be an inspiration to small-d democrats around the world, proving that even in a country where the government has captured most major institutions and tilted the electoral playing field, a popular movement can prevail.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Melania: Desperate to Distance Herself From Epstein

For months the Felon has been trying desperately to change the news coverage and political conversations from the Epstein files.  Back in February he said it was "time to move on" to other topics.  Indeed cynics would argue that every time coverage trended back to the topic of Epstein, the Felon would invoke new tariffs or do other things to distract the media and change the narrative.  Thus, many were surprised, if not totally stunned, that yesterday Melania Trump did a press conference and sought to distance herself from both Epstein and his accomplice, Maxwell, and called for congressional hearings for the victims of Epstein and his wealthy friends. Shockingly - and probably disingenuously - when asked about Melania's press conference he at first said he knew nothing about it. Meanwhile, many are wondering if another shoe is about to drop and whether Melania was seeking to get ahead of whatever story could be coming.  A piece at the New Republic noted as follows:

On Thursday, Melania Trump tried to deny having any connections to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, but the internet quickly produced receipts. . . . .  Why would Melania Trump say all of this now, out of the blue? Some on social media are speculating that she is trying to get ahead of a major upcoming revelation connecting her to Epstein. . . . .Melania’s remarks will likely draw more attention to the Epstein files, which had been pushed out of the news cycle thanks to the war with Iran. One wonders what the president thinks about her remarks, and whether they are by design.

Perhaps the Felon has tired of hearing that we have witnessed another TACO incident with the supposed Iran  ceasefire, but it's hard to think of a topic he'd rather keep out of public attention more than the Epstein files. A piece in the New York Times reports on the surprising press conference:

Melania Trump summoned reporters to the White House Thursday afternoon to give a surprise statement about Jeffrey Epstein, saying she had no relationship with him, was not a victim of his and had no knowledge of his crimes.

In remarks that lasted just under six minutes, she said she wanted to clear “my good name.” She addressed rumors about the origin story of how she met her husband, the president of the United States. And she called on Congress to give a hearing to victims of Mr. Epstein’s crimes.

“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” Mrs. Trump said. She talked about “numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me” that “have been percolating on social media for years now.”

It was not clear why she chose to speak out now, or to what reports she was referring.

A spokesperson for Mrs. Trump said the president knew that the first lady planned to make a statement, but later said it was not clear if Mr. Trump was aware of the topic of her remarks. In a phone call with an MS Now reporter, Mr. Trump said he had no prior knowledge of what she had planned to say.

The first lady’s statement is sure to supercharge a narrative that the Trump administration has been struggling to make go away since last summer, when chunks of the MAGA base broke into open revolt against Mr. Trump over his handling of the Epstein investigation.

The scandal has burbled all year, the president’s supporters refusing to move on from it no matter how many times he instructs them to. Just last week, Pam Bondi lost her job as attorney general in part over her failure to contain the furor. She is still tangled up in it.

What Mrs. Trump said on Thursday may have been designed to clear her own name, but it certainly won’t help the West Wing escape its Epstein troubles.

The hydra-headed Epstein scandal has ensnared so many people who’ve walked the halls of the White House that the first lady seemed intent on setting herself apart.

“I was never on Epstein’s plane,” she insisted, “and never visited his private island.”

The same cannot be said for her husband, whose name appeared on the flight logs for Mr. Epstein’s plane several times, or for the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who acknowledged in a Senate hearing earlier this year that he’d traveled to Mr. Epstein’s island.

And so there the first lady stood on Thursday, trying to distance herself from all things Epstein. She slammed those who would peddle “false smears” against her . . . .In recent months, Mr. Trump has tried to dismiss the Epstein controversy. He told the country it’s time to “move on” and snapped at a reporter who asked him what his message would be to Mr. Epstein’s victims.

On Thursday, his wife struck a different tone: “Every woman should have her day to tell her story in public, if she wishes.”

And then she turned on her stiletto heels and stalked out as the dazed reporters started shouting after her: “Why now!? Why now!?”

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Republicans Worry Iran May Cost Them The Mid-Terms

This morning the so-called cease fire in Iran is on the brink of collapsing, the Strait of Hormuz is closed and oil prices have crept up $20/barrel from yesterday's low.  Meanwhile, high diesel and jet fuel prices are driving up many consumer prices to further exacerbate voters' displeasure with the Felon's handling of the economy.  Affordability has been a winning issue for Democrats and as things stand, the Iran war and high gasoline are only making matters worse for Republicans. True, some in the GOP insist on wearing rose tinted glasses, but others believe the Felon's war of choice will take them to defeat come the November elections. Indeed, some believe Republicans may lose control of the Texas statehouse, a new poll shows a majority of Americans want Congress to impeach the Felon, and it has now come out that the Pentagon threatened Pope Leo because he spoke out against the Felon's horrible treatment of undocumented immigrants.  A piece at Politico looks at where the GOP finds itself thanks to the Felon's policies and the war against Iran.  Should the cease fire fall apart and oil prices soar again, the situation will only be that much worse. Here are highlights:  

Republicans are relieved over Trump’s steps toward reconciliation in Iran — but they worry the measures are too little, too late to save them from a brutal midterm election cycle.

Behind the public celebration by many Republicans of the temporary two-week ceasefire announcement, longtime party operatives continue to warn of a bleak political reality as the cost-of-living concerns around the war including spiking gas prices that are likely to continue for weeks if not longer even if the fragile ceasefire holds.

A person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, put it bluntly. “This war in Iran almost cements the fact that we lose the midterms in November — the Senate and House,” the person said.

The concerns are compounded by Republicans’ underperformances in a spate of recent elections, fueling fears that voters, concerned about pocketbook issues, are eager for change. The war, even if it ends now, will likely have lingering effects on gas and other commodity prices that Republicans will be forced to defend on the trail, as much as they might try to talk about tax cuts or border security.

“We will not turn on the proverbial dime to right this course,” said Barrett Marson, a longtime GOP strategist in Arizona. “Time is not on the president’s side when it comes to the November election.”

Trump and his top advisers have spent much of the last few months arguing that the country was on the verge of an economic turnaround — one that would become evident as policies from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill started to fully take effect.

Instead, the Iran war has put the president and his allies on the defensive, overshadowing their economic messaging while worsening many voters’ actual economic realities. Iran has used the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of global oil flows, as leverage over the U.S. in the war, sending gas prices spiking across the country.

Republicans’ more dismal outlook also comes as the party has continued to underperform Trump by wide margins in all manner of elections.

On Tuesday, that trend accelerated. Georgia Democrat Shawn Harris lost a special election for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old House seat by 12 points, but he slashed into Trump’s massive 37 point win in the district in 2024. And in Wisconsin, the Democratic-aligned state Supreme Court nominee won in a blowout, and did so by carrying GOP strongholds in the state.

Democrats have continued to hammer Trump for the war, and they’ve seized on the high gas prices it’s caused to elevate what was already their core campaign focus: affordability. Polling from the Democratic firm Navigator Research released Wednesday found that 65 percent of voters do not agree with how Trump is handling gas prices, which have jumped to over $4 per gallon on average; while 71 percent believed the war in Iran led to the increased prices.

Republicans acknowledge that Democrats’ affordability argument is landing. One Georgia Republican strategist pointed to the fact that the war — which has also split the MAGA base over foreign intervention broadly — “is also an affordability issue.” “Trump’s going to own that,” said the strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

“I don’t think any Georgia Republican who understands the Georgia general electorate would want Trump coming here,” they said. “Particularly if [Trump’s favorability is] in the high 30s or mid 30s, if he’s in the mid 30s it’d be a fucking blood bath. Holy fuck.”

Still, some GOP strategists are optimistic that the president has time to turn the economy — and their election prospects — around. After Trump’s Tuesday night announcement, U.S. oil fell to about $94 dollars a barrel, down from a high of nearly $113, but still far higher than pre-war levels.

Another Georgia Republican operative said the midterms were always going to be tough even before Iran. The special election results have “only confirmed what Republicans already know, and that is we’re going to have to fight more than we’ve ever fought before.”

“I do think my Democratic friends and colleagues are probably reading too much into this,” they said. Plus, they added, “We lost special elections before we invaded Iran, right? So it’s just really hard to tell.”

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Democrats Make Big Gains in Key Battlegrounds

To everyone's short term relief the Felon - in another TACO episode - agreed to a two week cease fire with Iran shortly before his own announced deadline was to expire.  Where this ill-thought through war goes next is anyone's guess given that the Iranian regime is perhaps more extreme than the one before the war and the Felon's regime is demanding things that Iran would likely never accept.  Again, it's obvious that the Felon launched his war of choice with no real plan and most certainly no exit strategy. Even if the Strait of Hormuz is temporarily open during the cease fire,  Iran can easily close it again and the Felon may be right back where he found himself when he threated war crimes against Iranian civilians.  Meanwhile on the home front, several special elections yesterday showed Democrats significantly over performing (including expanding the liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court) and sending a message that ought to have Republicans worried about the 2026 mid-terms despite their attempts at naysaying.  Yes, the Republican won the seat formerly held by Marjorie Taylor Green, but the margin of the Republican win was only one-third of the Felon's margin in 2024.  A piece at Politico looks at yesterday's election results:

Democrats just had one of their best election nights since [the Felon] President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Again.

In Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, the Democratic-backed candidate sailed to a nearly 20-point landslide victory Tuesday in a battleground Trump carried less than two years ago. Meanwhile, a Georgia Democrat slashed Trump’s margin of victory by two thirds in the state’s reddest district despite losing the election — the most significant overperformance the party has seen across all seven House special elections so far this cycle.

The results in the battleground states — home to key Senate, gubernatorial and House races — are the latest repudiation from voters of Trump and his agenda and flashing warning signs for the GOP heading into November.

“It’s a wow moment in Wisconsin politics,” said former Republican strategist Brandon Scholz, who left the party in 2021. “Republicans ought to be sitting down tonight and going, ‘Okay, we just screwed up another race. What are we going to do in November?’”

Chris Taylor, a liberal Wisconsin judge, led by 20 points with 90 percent of votes counted — nearly double the already-large margin another liberal candidate won by in 2025 — and she did it by making cuts into GOP strongholds.

In Georgia, Democrat Shawn Harris lost to Republican Clay Fuller, but the margin was only 12 points with nearly all votes counted, roughly one-third the 37-point margin Trump won by in 2024.

While Tuesday’s results are not a perfect parallel to November, the consistent Democratic overperformances in races large and small since Trump returned to the White House suggest the base is motivated to turn out for all manner of contests.

Democrats were elated with the results.  “Election after election continues to show what we have been saying over the last year and a half,” said CJ Warnke, the spokesperson for House Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC aligned with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “Americans are fed up with broken promises on no new wars and lower prices on day one from Trump and Republicans.”

Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said on X that Harris’ overperformance was evidence that “enthusiasm for Democrats is growing everywhere.”

There were other signs of Democratic momentum, too: Taylor was leading in Ozaukee County, one of Wisconsin’s most reliably red areas. Her strong performance statewide also helped down ballot, where a Democrat won the Waukesha mayoral contest, which was open after an independent — who left the GOP and endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024 — opted not to run for reelection.

Heather Williams, who leads Democrats’ legislative-focused campaign arm, called Taylor’s win in Wisconsin a “decisive victory” that “marks changing tides.”

Many Republicans were quick to dismiss the results in both contests. . . . One longtime Wisconsin Republican strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, cast the blame on Maria Lazar, the GOP-backed state Supreme Court candidate who was massively outspent in the race.

Republicans in Georgia similarly said the margins in their state’s special election were nothing to worry about, pointing to Harris’ strong fundraising and name ID in the district after running against former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2024.

 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

The Felon Lashes Out As He Becomes More Desperate

This morning the price of oil is hovering around $114/barrel, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to non-Iranian shipping, and the regime in Tehran shows no signs that it is willing to capitulate despite the Felon's threats to commit war crimes against Iranian civilians. Frustrated that his war of choice is hitting a stalemate of sorts and has disturbed oil markets - just as predicted by those the Felon chose to ignore - the Felon seemingly has painted himself into a corner.  High oil and gasoline prices (perhaps for an extended period) are a disturbing prospect for the Republican Party as the 2026 mid-term elections approach, particularly given the unpopularity of the Iran war and the Felon's desire to vastly increase military spending while slashing programs that aid millions of Americans including many in the MAGA base who decry "socialism" but rely on government programs to survive. More and more the reality is that America has a elderly malignant narcissist in the White House  who is showing increasing signs of dementia and a willingness to harm Iranian civilians while sinking in popularity on the home front. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the unhinged situation we now face. Here are excerpts:

In an earlier, somewhat more innocent era of Donald Trump’s social-media posting, one could still chuckle darkly at his 2017 declaration that his approach “is not Presidential - it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.” But as the war in Iran bogs down, his communication has far surpassed the merely bizarre and become entirely unhinged. When Trump feels cornered, I have written, he lashes out most fiercely—which might explain the wild statements and actions emanating from the White House over the past few days.

The nadir (for now) was an Easter-morning Truth Social missive in which Trump threatened that “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.”

Trump reiterated the threat during a press conference this afternoon, saying, “The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” Targeting civilian infrastructure such as power plants and bridges is likely illegal. Trump would not be the first U.S. president to flout international law, but he would be the first to advertise it ahead of time on a social-media site he owns. The threat is also strategically dubious. Installing a more pro-American regime in Tehran would require the existence of some authority that is both able to govern and willing to work with Washington; these sorts of strikes, or even threats, make that less likely.

Topping that post will be hard, but this morning the president tried. In a vague and threatening new post, he shared a short clip of a crowd of shoppers—most of whom were people of color, some of whom wore hijab. They were minding their own business and indulging in the quintessentially modern, capitalist American pastime of hanging out at what appears to be Minnesota’s Mall of America, soundtracked with Gary Jules’s rendition of “Mad World” from the Donnie Darko soundtrack.

These outbursts come as the administration finds that military might alone is not enough to win a war. Trump is now threatening to attack civilian infrastructure, because nothing else has forced the Iranian government to buckle. At the start of the war, he seemed to be feeling smug, emboldened by his quick success in Venezuela, but any sense of joy has evaporated fast. Last week, the president delivered a White House address in which he could have attempted to either deescalate the war or else define what victory would look like. Instead, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote, Trump did neither.

American wars in the Middle East have backfired before, but the negative effects of this one have become apparent at record speed. American and Israeli strikes have killed many top Iranian figures, but the regime remains ensconced—and its control of the Strait of Hormuz suggests that Iran may actually be in a strategically stronger position than at the start of the war. . . . . The U.S. military is burning through ammunition reserves. The likely next step, Thomas Wright argued in The Atlantic last week, is a ground war.

A frantic search for an airman shot down in an F-15E inside Iran ended happily yesterday, with a rescue. But the operation resulted in the destruction of two MC-130J transport planes and some MH-6 helicopters, in addition to an A-10 shot down separately—an expensive tab, especially given that the Trump administration claimed to have destroyed Iran’s air defenses.

These setbacks might have instilled humility in other presidents, but they have instead led Trump to lash out. His frustration may even be leading him to imagine things. Last month, he claimed that a former president had privately expressed regret about not striking Iran. This seems unlikely. . . . This makes Trump’s claim reminiscent of a different former president: Richard Nixon, who had paranoid conversations with portraits on the White House walls as his presidency collapsed.

The frenzy is seeping into other areas of the administration too. Embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army chief of staff and top chaplain (among others) in the midst of an active war. Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi last week, just after attending a Supreme Court argument in which justices whom he appointed expressed skepticism about the outré claims that Bondi’s Justice Department lawyers were forced to make in defense of Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.

The president’s behavior usually calms down slightly when he no longer feels cornered. Predicting when that might happen is challenging. Trump has shown he has no good answer for exiting the conflict with Iran, and even if he does, he may find—with apologies to Trotsky—that although he may no longer be interested in war, war remains interested in him. The American and global economies appear shaky. Each week brings new polling that suggests a poor result for Republicans in the midterm elections. Trump may be in for a long stretch in the corner, which means a rough ride for everyone else.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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.