This article is so classic Trump, that it will be greeted with either ho-hum or outrage that it even was published, depending on which side of sanity you vote.

Here is just the tip of it. Read the whole thing for the full context. It gets better (i.e. worse) the more you read.

Trump Has a Tate Problem;

The Manosphere Titans Are Tearing MAGA in Two, Michael Fanone and Peter Rothpletz July 28

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are sitting in a federal detention center in Florida, fighting extradition to the United Kingdom, where they face 59 criminal charges between them.

The Trump administration isn’t driving this, exactly. British prosecutors brought the charges and requested the brothers’ extradition; U.S. Marshals arrested the brothers in Miami on July 18, and last Thursday the White House said only that it would not intervene. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it, there was “no role for us to play at this moment or maybe ever.”

Even that much passivity is causing discord within MAGA, because they’ve loved these fucking freaks for years.

In May 2023, Donald Trump Jr. called the Romanian detention of Andrew Tate “absolute insanity,” and in June 2024 he joined a livestream with Tate, telling him: “you’ve got people attacking you as far as I’m concerned.”

Elon Musk endorsed Tate’s takes on British politics in a January 2025 post.

And Barron Trump cultivated a relationship with Andrew Tate, a connection the New York Times documented in December 2025.

Justin Waller, a Tate associate, says he arranged and sat in on a video call between the two men. Barron admired Tate, Waller claims, and spoke with him over Zoom once in 2024, while Barron was being fitted for a suit. The three discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates.

Tate, Waller claims, became a “big brother” to Barron.

Here was a self-described misogynist facing serious charges involving human trafficking, a man Romanian prosecutors accused of forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women. And the MAGA movement treated him as one of its own.

Then, at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February 2025, Romania’s foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, pulled Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell aside in a hallway for a brief conversation that touched on the Tates, who’d been banned from traveling.

The Financial Times reported that US officials had already raised the case on an earlier phone call, and that a request had been made to return the brothers’ passports and let them travel before their case concluded.

Isn’t it normal for accused criminals, especially when accused of sex crimes, to treated as brothers by the oh, so, very religious right?

Meanwhile, much to the delight of the MAGAs, we lock up and deport undocumented men, women and children, who have NO CRIMINAL BACKGROUND.

This has made America great, again.

Grenell told the FT he had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu, though he did not deny discussing the brothers, and added that he supports them “as evident by my publicly available tweets.”

Hurezeanu, for his part, said the exchange was cordial, informal and brief, and that he didn’t feel pressured.

Within days, the Romanian travel ban was lifted. Shocker…

Read the rest of the article here, and please let me know whether you find ANY of it hard to believe.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Trump is so obviously incompetent and so blatantly evil that there remain only two types of people who support him: The truly ignorant and the wildly malevolent.

Trump doesn’t even bother to hide his shortcomings. He knows his followers have lost any capacity for honest evaluation, and now simply float along with him, in a foggy daze of acceptance.

Whatever stupidity, whatever incompetence, whatever failure, whatever crime he commits, the ignorant and malevolent simply shrug and say, “That’ s just Trump being Trump.”

And in that, they are correct. Incompetence and criminality are exactly “Trump being Trump.”

Today, we bring you an excellent post from the generally excellent economist Paul Krugman.

He explains how loser Trump and his band of losers lost the war, don’t understand or admit that they lost the war, don’t even care that they lost the war, and in losing, will forever claim they won.

Hmmm . . . sounds something like the 2020 election, doesn’t it?

============================

The Putinization of the American Military

When poseurs and yes-men run a war

Paul Krugman Jul 28

 

Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable.

The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul, are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.

But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.

Granted, U.S. forces haven’t suffered any conventional defeats at Iranian hands either.

But all indications are that the main reason the Trump administration is again calling off major operations against Iran is that America is running critically short of ammunition.

So Trump isn’t backing down because his war of choice is extremely unpopular, although it is. Nor is he backing down because the economic costs of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are too great, or because the fiscal cost of the war is skyrocketing, while the country faces enormous deficits and rising long-term interest rates.

Trump says he doesn’t care about any of that. And in a way I believe him — because even a fully reopened Strait won’t recoup his standing with voters fast enough to salvage the midterm elections for Republicans.

No, most reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened.

Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases.

For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the US has expended more than half of the Patriot missiles it had before the war, and that it will take until 2029 to replace them:

The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that;

· Munitions aren’t depleted

· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail

· It’s Joe Biden’s fault

Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.

How could this happen? How could the best-equipped, most sophisticated military in the world have allowed itself to be humiliated by a third-rate power?

First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win.

Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.

Now, the idea that being manly and anti-woke makes an army strong was the reason that many on the American right admired Vladimir Putin before he invaded Ukraine. You might think that 1.4 million Russian casualties — 450,000 of them dead — and the spectacle of burning Russian oil refineries and factories would have disabused them of this notion. But no.

And the fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians would close the Straits of Hormuz.

The conduct of the Iran war has also been highly Putinesque.

There have been many reports that Russia’s disaster in Ukraine partly reflects the fact that Russian generals are afraid to tell Putin how the war is really going. Sure enough, the British newspaper The Telegraph reports on rumors that “the Pentagon” — presumably meaning Hegseth — has until recently been hiding the extent of the munitions shortfall from the White House. 

And it quotes insiders saying that Hegseth himself may not know what’s happening, because his policy of purging officers he doesn’t like has created a “culture of silence” in which people are “very loath to bring bad news to Pete.”

Indeed, a New York Times report recounts how Hegseth fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti as head of the Navy, replacing her with Daryl Caudle, who was not on the short list of officers recommended by senior Navy officials. But Caudle had the qualifications that Hegseth wanted: he signaled his lack of integrity and unfitness for command by supporting Hegseth’s attack on highly qualified female officers and hiring a MAGA insider.

I should add that Hegseth has been an equal-opportunity destroyer of the best and brightest in the U.S. military. In April he shocked and disgusted the military brass by summarily firing General Randy George, who was at the forefront of modernizing the military and learning from Ukraine’s brilliant use of inexpensive drones.

Simply put, we defeated ourselves.

I’ll interrupt to say that there is no “We” in these defeats. “Americans” did no lose. American soldiers did not lose. Unamericans lost. Traitors lost. The ignorant and the malevolent among us lost. Sadly, we who did not lose, now will bear the cost and shame of their loss.

The draft dodger loser with the fake heel spurs lost as he has lost so often in his life, and this time he doesn’t have his daddy to save him from himself.

True, this war was never winnable, and perhaps we should be thankful that U.S. defeat became obvious before Trump committed ground troops and needlessly sacrificed thousands of American lives.

But we should also consider that this defeat shows how deeply and pervasively Trump and Hegseth have crippled the U.S. military.

Their incompetence, corruption and irresponsibility have weakened us with incredible speed. And it will take many years for America to recover, if it ever does.

And now I leave the rebuttal to the MAGA ignorant and malevolent, who:

1. Will refuse to read Krugman’s comments or
2. Will read them and not understand them or
3. Will understand them, but will not care and
4. Will claim victory, and while so claiming, also will claim the loss was because of Democrats
5. Will continue to claim the pool was damaged by vandals, Trump won the 2020 election, and he hardly knows the woman.

As Trump famously said, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. Even he is aware of the depths of the MAGA ignorance and malevolence. In fact, he counts on it.

Today, Vladimir Putin is smiling. He always has supported Trump, and you can see why.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Have you heard the great news? Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services is personally supervising Trump’s health care.

History is filled with massacres that became infamous because of their scale, brutality, or historical impact. Here are some of the best-known.

Keep in mind that all the following were committed by otherwise “normal” human beings, many of whom were nice, honest, church-going, just like your friends, neighbors, and relatives. They weren’t brought up as monsters but became monsters as their leadership ordered.

In short, there is some bad in most of us, or at least many of us, waiting to be uncorked by an evil leader.

• Nanjing Massacre (1937)– Often called the “Rape of Nanking.” During the Imperial Japanese Army occupation of the Chinese capital, an estimated 100,000–300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were killed. Widespread rape and torture accompanied the killings.
• Katyn Forest (1940) – The Soviet NKVD executed about 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectuals. The Soviet government denied responsibility for decades.
• Babi Yar (1941) – Over two days, Nazi Einsatzgruppen, aided by collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews outside Kyiv. Tens of thousands more were later killed at the same site.
• Oradour-sur-Glane (1944) – German SS troops killed 643 villagers, including women and children, and burned the village. The ruins remain preserved.
• Lidice (1942) – After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis destroyed the village of Lidice, executing the men, deporting the women, and killing or dispersing the children.
• My Lai (1968) – U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. It became one of the defining atrocities of the Vietnam War.
• Srebrenica (1995) – Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. International courts later ruled it a genocide.
• Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) – U.S. Army troops killed an estimated 250–300 Lakota, many of them women and children.
• Sand Creek Massacre (1864) – Colorado militia attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment, killing about 150–200 people, mostly women, children, and the elderly.
• Kigali Genocide  (1994) – During the Rwandan genocide, about 800,000 people, primarily Tutsi, were murdered in roughly 100 days.
• Auschwitz II-Birkenau – The Holocaust involved the murder of about six million Jews, along with millions of other victims, across occupied Europe.
• Choeung Ek Genocide – Under the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979), approximately 1.5–2 million Cambodians died through execution, starvation, and forced labor.

Some nations initially denied these horrors existed, but later recanted and apologized, though apologies do not save the victims.

America likes to portray itself as the “shining city on a hill,” a beacon of compassion and morality. We even have it engraved on our Statue of Liberty:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

——————————/////——————————-

There are those who heard about “The Rape of Nanking,” and shrugged. “Just a bunch of Chinese.” And the killing of Polish people was ” just a bunch of Poles.” The Jews were “just Jews.” The Indians were “just Indians.” The Cambodians were “just Cambodians.” The Vietnamese were “just Vietnamese.”

And now, the destroyed lives are “just immigrants,” and illegal immigrants at that. Not criminals. Just immigrants.

Frankly, I shrugged at a couple of those, too. Cambodians? I’d seldom heard about Cambodia, much less knowing any Cambodians.

But what’s now happening in America is too close to home for me to shrug. This is my country that is committing such horror upon real families, a couple of whom I know.

David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, analyzed nonpublic data from ICE leaked to Cato, and he found that among those with criminal convictions detained by ICE, only 8% were convicted of violent or property crimes (about 5% were violent criminal convictions).

“And that includes very minor assaults. I mean, not like rape and murder,” Bier said in a radio interview with KPFA on Jan. 22. “These are someone had an altercation at a bar or things like that, not serious violent criminals who committed murder and rape.”

Contrary to administration rhetoric about targeting the worst of the worst, Bier described the arrests under Trump as “indiscriminate.”

“They have removed the prioritization that was in place under the Biden administration to go after those violent criminals that they’re highlighting,” Bier said. “They got rid of that policy and replaced it on Day One with a policy of arresting people who are the most convenient to arrest.”

Cato’s findings were corroborated by a New York Times analysis of ICE data obtained through the Deportation Data Project. Between the period of Jan. 20 and Oct. 15, the Times found that nationwide, 37% of those arrested in ICE operations had any past criminal conviction. Just 7% had a violent conviction. Another 30% had pending criminal charges, and 33% had no criminal charges.

The disparity was even wider in cities and states that have been targeted for enhanced immigration enforcement. In the four areas analyzed — Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Massachusetts and Illinois, the majority of those swept up by ICE had no criminal record (convictions or even pending charges). 

The New York Times analysis noted that while only a fraction of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime, “The most common non-violent convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.”

Hundreds of thousands of good, valuable, honest families have been destroyed for the “crime” of wanting to work for a better life for themselves and their families.

They generally were not looking for a handout. In fact, they didn’t even qualify for Social Security or Medicare, although they paid the taxes for these programs. 

You may know some of these people. They sweat in the fields picking your vegetables; they clean your house and your office; they bus your table and empty your trash. They taxi you. Some of them have lived here for many years, building good lives. Some even started businesses that might have hired you or someone you know.

And now their lives are broken, their children have lost futures. We have lost good people. And we shrug and turn away, or worse. “Serves them right for being illegal,” as though it were even possible for a poor brown-skinned or black-skinned or Muslim to gain citizenship in this new America of hatred.

We turn away because Trump, the convicted sexual abuser, claims they are “rapists.” We turn away because a hatemonger has aroused in us the latent hatred of those who are different from us, whether they be not Christian, not white, not rich, or not born here. (By the slimmest of a Supreme Court’s decision, Trump failed to punish those born here.)

We lost the compassion and decency that made us so proud to say, “I am an American.”

Those who submit to hatemongering (which really is fearmongering) are the morally weakest among us, who defend their lack of integrity with a veneer of church attendance and biblical preaching.

Hatemongers come and go, along with their weak-minded followers. Then the silent moral may begin to make their voices heard, and our nation might return to civilization. 

Trump may go. MAGAs may go. They may deny “really” believing anything Trump has said. They even may deny voting for him or speaking for him, though I know some who will retain the anger they felt at me because I spoke against Trump.

I have lost friends for reminding them about the truths they wish to deny and/or forget. But I simply couldn’t shrug. I just couldn’t.

And history will be written and rewritten. We vaguely may remember My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII, the mass deportation of immigrants or the murders of Americans by I.C.E. and the Republican Party.

But will we ever regain our compassion, our honor, our common sense, our decency, our own morals and our moral standing in the world? 

It’s hard to say what a people will do after they have supported a low-intelligence, indecent, compulsively lying, psychopathic, often convicted felon, who has led them into hell. I can’t predict.

Trump himself has said he could shoot someone in the street and not lose any followers. Is he right?

The next few weeks will begin to tell us who America and we Americans really are.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell