Sure, Vlad, old buddy. I inherited a great economy and screwed it up with tariffs; I made inflation worse. I fired government workers who provide service to the public; I’ve deported millions of hard-working, honest families; I fired our generals and hired an incompetent TV boob to run the military; I’ve got ICE running roughshod over people’s rights; I have an idiot running healthcare; A wrestling idiot runs education; I insult all our allies so no one will help us when we need it; American kids are dying because I started a stupid war and now the Houthis are making it worse. And frankly, I have no idea what the hell am doing except I personally am stealing billions. But I’ll get around all that by claiming the other guys are Communists.”
“Don, old pal, that’s a great ide . . . hey, wait a minute. Communists?
The Trump White House has decided to ramp up its international aggression, threatening a ground war in Iran and announcing yet another wave of tariffs (particularly at Canada). Once again, these international developments could potentially overwhelm whatever domestic economic trends are in place.
Oil prices have been reacting to the latest deterioration of the situation and the limited flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, but it remains to be seen whether the market can continue to brush off what appears to be a severe supply restriction. It also is unclear for how long countries will be willing to draw down strategic reserves given that diplomatic progress appears to be non-existent.
The problem with American diplomatic efforts is that none of the decisionmakers appear to have any understanding how targeted foreigners think, or their motivations. The focus is entirely on what the United States is doing, with the assumption that foreigners will give way to American demands if they are presented aggressively enough.
The days of imperialist aggression are over. Trump got away with it in Venezuela because that economy was on the verge of collapse anyway from both internal failures and external sanctions that had gone on for over a decade in multiple American administrations AND he just happened to have a Venezuelan V.P. who thought it was better to make a deal fro her people than to try to maintain a failed state and be subject to destruction and death – probably her own too.
That doesn’t work in a theocratic state that is driven by religious mandate to kill all Jews, eliminate big and little Satans – America and Israel respectively. That’s too deep to change and the people were slaughtered by the same regime Trump wanted to change. So, slaughtering the people more meant nothing (except an express road to Paradise to them). He can’t conceive of anyone who doesn’t do anything for money or power either; he’s too much of a narcissist to understand anything else.
Worse, the Pentagon has been broken like everything else and its core competency is gone or smothered by the most incompetent Dept. of Defense, er, War, in history. Deserving officers are not promoted or even fired because of the color of their skin or their sex (Hegseth doesn’t believe in gender being different from sex either). Stupid emphasis on muscle over brains means American soldiers will get slaughtered in any ground invasion too, much like the Russian soldiers are that Trump admires so much. He wants to be a dictator like Putin.
Iran, for its part, realizes they have no reliable partner with which to make a deal and that Trump breaks every deal ever made, including his own. They’ve hired 4 psychologists to advise them because they believe Trump is literally mentally ill, correctly. Trump posts AI slop. Iran gets under his skin with Lego movies. It’s such madness that if a novelist wrote such a story, no publisher would believe it could happen. Yet, here we are.
We may be headed for a oil-shock depression, especially since about the only thing holding up the economy now is AI and that bubble is already deflating. High oil prices and severe scarcity once the reserve finally runs out will mean 1970s style gas lines, exacerbated by Trump’s killing of ever green energy initiative. Like our military, Trump is living in the last century, maybe even the 19th century with his love of coal and of imperialism (BTW, Putin suggested to Trump that he should treat the Western hemisphere, minus Europe, as his to conquer, while Russia does the same in the Eastern hemisphere, plus Europe. And Putin is one of Trump’s most trusted advisors. Putin is a master KGB-trained manipulator that Trump can’t even see coming).
We may still be on the path to WWIII. At the very least, we have no more allies at all. They won’t bother attacking the U.S. There’s nothing our former allies want here anyway and they are too weakened besides, and busy fighting off Russian and Chinese threats that Trump has enabled with his non-support of NATO. I hope we can survive this Administration, but the odds are getting longer against it every day. Trump keeps slipping nuclear options into his public and private talk, even trying to force a general to give him the nuclear codes for Iran. Of course, if he nukes Iran, Russia will feel free to nuke Ukraine and then it’s off we go…
And this tells you all you need to know about the MAGAs who still would vote for him (assuming they have time to stop by a voting booth on the way to the gas chambers).
The White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner will be held tonight (after being cut short in April by a gunman). Once again, Trump will be on the dais, and his speech will be the main event.
But the highlight of the evening will be the award for “the most fair, impartial, objective news reporting” by a member of the White House press corps, which will be going to TheNew York Times’ Tyler Pager.
Pager is one of the Times journalists subpoenaed by Trump’s FBI to force the paperto reveal confidential sources behind its story about Trump’s Qatari-donated jumbo replacement for Air Force One. (A district judge has delayed enforcing the subpoenas.)
The backstory is that since returning to the White House, Trump has complained about the “look” of Air Force One. He was upset that other countries have newer planes that are “bigger and sleeker and sharper,” he told Fox News. “It doesn’t look right.” Of course, Trump wants the biggest, sleekest, and sharpest.
So in May of 2025 he accepted Qatar’s “gift” of a Boeing 747-8 jetliner, reportedly worth some $400 million. Trump described it as a gift to the United States (the Constitution prohibits gifts from foreign powers to presidents), but that’s rubbish. Trump says he intends to keep it for his presidential library (it’s hard to imagine a giant jumbo jet in a library or as a library) and post-presidential plaything.
The Qatari jumbo jet is intimately tied to Trump’s jumbo ego. Trump boasts that it will be “a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before,” adding, “Now when we land at airports in London and Germany and different places, nobody tops this one.”
He’s emphasized that it won’t cost taxpayers a dime, and would be easy to “bring it up to the presidential standards, meaning security wise.”
But the actual cost to taxpayers of retrofitting it to “presidential standards” has been between $400 million and $1 billion so far — more than the jet was worth in the first place. And it’s still not there, “security wise.”
Which brings us to the Times report, which drove Trump nuts. It said he had to fly out of Turkey (where the NATO summit was held) on the old Air Force One instead of his new Qatari-donated jumbo jet because the Qatari jet still didn’t have sufficient security, including antimissile capabilities.
According to CNN, Trump was “fuming,” “embarrassed and angry” by the Times story. It made him look bad, even stupid. What kind of a businessman would describe a $400 million jet as “free” and then charge taxpayers more than $400 million to have it ready to fly? Even now, it’s not ready.
Trying to make the story appear as a threat to national security, Trump instructed FBI director Kash Patel and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to oversee a leak investigation. These are his top guns. Patel was even summoned to the White House and reportedly worked on it for eight hours.
Trump is paranoid that someone with knowledge that could embarrass him would be so disloyal as to leak it.
Subpoenas were sent to the homes of Times journalists who reported the story —including Tyler Pager. Other subpoenas went to the journalists’ phone service providers, seeking phone and text-messaging records for the journalists and their spouses. Rarely in history has the White House and FBI been mobilized like this.
But the threat here has nothing whatever to do with national security. Trump has even publicly admitted that the jet still has to be “maxed” for security.
No, the threat here is to Trump’s giant ego. His humongous ego is why he always has to fly in the biggest and the best plane — such as the Qatari jumbo jet. His ego is also why he hates to be the brunt of jokes by late night comedians, who’ve had a field day with Trump and his not-quite-ready Qatari jet.
And his paranoid ego is why Trump can’t stand the possibility that anyone in the White House, Pentagon, or Secret Service might have revealed to journalists his utter stupidity.
Speaking of Trump’s idiot who is running healthcare:
The CDC announced today that 2026 has been the worst year for measles since it was declared eliminated, the second record year in a row.
The latest count puts confirmed U.S. measles cases at 2,318 on the year, passing last year’s full-year total of 2,289 with more than five months still to go.
HHS says it has mounted an aggressive outbreak response, citing more than $8.5 million sent to state and local partners and CDC staff surged to the hardest-hit areas. But MMR vaccination among kindergartners has slipped under the 95 percent needed for community immunity, leaving roughly 286,000 kindergartners unprotected.
Ninety-three percent of this year’s cases are tied to outbreaks, most among people who were unvaccinated or whose status was unknown.
In November a Pan American Health Organization panel will decide whether the United States can still claim measles elimination status, a review the administration asked to move from April until after the midterms.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreTrump Aggression Returns
Brian Romanchuk
Jul 24
The Trump White House has decided to ramp up its international aggression, threatening a ground war in Iran and announcing yet another wave of tariffs (particularly at Canada). Once again, these international developments could potentially overwhelm whatever domestic economic trends are in place.
Oil prices have been reacting to the latest deterioration of the situation and the limited flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, but it remains to be seen whether the market can continue to brush off what appears to be a severe supply restriction. It also is unclear for how long countries will be willing to draw down strategic reserves given that diplomatic progress appears to be non-existent.
The problem with American diplomatic efforts is that none of the decisionmakers appear to have any understanding how targeted foreigners think, or their motivations. The focus is entirely on what the United States is doing, with the assumption that foreigners will give way to American demands if they are presented aggressively enough.
LikeLike
The days of imperialist aggression are over. Trump got away with it in Venezuela because that economy was on the verge of collapse anyway from both internal failures and external sanctions that had gone on for over a decade in multiple American administrations AND he just happened to have a Venezuelan V.P. who thought it was better to make a deal fro her people than to try to maintain a failed state and be subject to destruction and death – probably her own too.
That doesn’t work in a theocratic state that is driven by religious mandate to kill all Jews, eliminate big and little Satans – America and Israel respectively. That’s too deep to change and the people were slaughtered by the same regime Trump wanted to change. So, slaughtering the people more meant nothing (except an express road to Paradise to them). He can’t conceive of anyone who doesn’t do anything for money or power either; he’s too much of a narcissist to understand anything else.
Worse, the Pentagon has been broken like everything else and its core competency is gone or smothered by the most incompetent Dept. of Defense, er, War, in history. Deserving officers are not promoted or even fired because of the color of their skin or their sex (Hegseth doesn’t believe in gender being different from sex either). Stupid emphasis on muscle over brains means American soldiers will get slaughtered in any ground invasion too, much like the Russian soldiers are that Trump admires so much. He wants to be a dictator like Putin.
Iran, for its part, realizes they have no reliable partner with which to make a deal and that Trump breaks every deal ever made, including his own. They’ve hired 4 psychologists to advise them because they believe Trump is literally mentally ill, correctly. Trump posts AI slop. Iran gets under his skin with Lego movies. It’s such madness that if a novelist wrote such a story, no publisher would believe it could happen. Yet, here we are.
We may be headed for a oil-shock depression, especially since about the only thing holding up the economy now is AI and that bubble is already deflating. High oil prices and severe scarcity once the reserve finally runs out will mean 1970s style gas lines, exacerbated by Trump’s killing of ever green energy initiative. Like our military, Trump is living in the last century, maybe even the 19th century with his love of coal and of imperialism (BTW, Putin suggested to Trump that he should treat the Western hemisphere, minus Europe, as his to conquer, while Russia does the same in the Eastern hemisphere, plus Europe. And Putin is one of Trump’s most trusted advisors. Putin is a master KGB-trained manipulator that Trump can’t even see coming).
We may still be on the path to WWIII. At the very least, we have no more allies at all. They won’t bother attacking the U.S. There’s nothing our former allies want here anyway and they are too weakened besides, and busy fighting off Russian and Chinese threats that Trump has enabled with his non-support of NATO. I hope we can survive this Administration, but the odds are getting longer against it every day. Trump keeps slipping nuclear options into his public and private talk, even trying to force a general to give him the nuclear codes for Iran. Of course, if he nukes Iran, Russia will feel free to nuke Ukraine and then it’s off we go…
LikeLike
And this tells you all you need to know about the MAGAs who still would vote for him (assuming they have time to stop by a voting booth on the way to the gas chambers).
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Real Reason Trump Subpoenaed The New York Times It has nothing to do with national security
Robert Reich
Jul 24
Friends,
The White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner will be held tonight (after being cut short in April by a gunman). Once again, Trump will be on the dais, and his speech will be the main event.
But the highlight of the evening will be the award for “the most fair, impartial, objective news reporting” by a member of the White House press corps, which will be going to The New York Times’ Tyler Pager.
Pager is one of the Times journalists subpoenaed by Trump’s FBI to force the paperto reveal confidential sources behind its story about Trump’s Qatari-donated jumbo replacement for Air Force One. (A district judge has delayed enforcing the subpoenas.)
The backstory is that since returning to the White House, Trump has complained about the “look” of Air Force One. He was upset that other countries have newer planes that are “bigger and sleeker and sharper,” he told Fox News. “It doesn’t look right.” Of course, Trump wants the biggest, sleekest, and sharpest.
So in May of 2025 he accepted Qatar’s “gift” of a Boeing 747-8 jetliner, reportedly worth some $400 million. Trump described it as a gift to the United States (the Constitution prohibits gifts from foreign powers to presidents), but that’s rubbish. Trump says he intends to keep it for his presidential library (it’s hard to imagine a giant jumbo jet in a library or as a library) and post-presidential plaything.
The Qatari jumbo jet is intimately tied to Trump’s jumbo ego. Trump boasts that it will be “a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before,” adding, “Now when we land at airports in London and Germany and different places, nobody tops this one.”
He’s emphasized that it won’t cost taxpayers a dime, and would be easy to “bring it up to the presidential standards, meaning security wise.”
But the actual cost to taxpayers of retrofitting it to “presidential standards” has been between $400 million and $1 billion so far — more than the jet was worth in the first place. And it’s still not there, “security wise.”
Which brings us to the Times report, which drove Trump nuts. It said he had to fly out of Turkey (where the NATO summit was held) on the old Air Force One instead of his new Qatari-donated jumbo jet because the Qatari jet still didn’t have sufficient security, including antimissile capabilities.
According to CNN, Trump was “fuming,” “embarrassed and angry” by the Times story. It made him look bad, even stupid. What kind of a businessman would describe a $400 million jet as “free” and then charge taxpayers more than $400 million to have it ready to fly? Even now, it’s not ready.
Trying to make the story appear as a threat to national security, Trump instructed FBI director Kash Patel and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to oversee a leak investigation. These are his top guns. Patel was even summoned to the White House and reportedly worked on it for eight hours.
Trump is paranoid that someone with knowledge that could embarrass him would be so disloyal as to leak it.
Subpoenas were sent to the homes of Times journalists who reported the story —including Tyler Pager. Other subpoenas went to the journalists’ phone service providers, seeking phone and text-messaging records for the journalists and their spouses. Rarely in history has the White House and FBI been mobilized like this.
But the threat here has nothing whatever to do with national security. Trump has even publicly admitted that the jet still has to be “maxed” for security.
No, the threat here is to Trump’s giant ego. His humongous ego is why he always has to fly in the biggest and the best plane — such as the Qatari jumbo jet. His ego is also why he hates to be the brunt of jokes by late night comedians, who’ve had a field day with Trump and his not-quite-ready Qatari jet.
And his paranoid ego is why Trump can’t stand the possibility that anyone in the White House, Pentagon, or Secret Service might have revealed to journalists his utter stupidity.
LikeLike
Speaking of Trump’s idiot who is running healthcare:
The CDC announced today that 2026 has been the worst year for measles since it was declared eliminated, the second record year in a row.
The latest count puts confirmed U.S. measles cases at 2,318 on the year, passing last year’s full-year total of 2,289 with more than five months still to go.
HHS says it has mounted an aggressive outbreak response, citing more than $8.5 million sent to state and local partners and CDC staff surged to the hardest-hit areas. But MMR vaccination among kindergartners has slipped under the 95 percent needed for community immunity, leaving roughly 286,000 kindergartners unprotected.
Ninety-three percent of this year’s cases are tied to outbreaks, most among people who were unvaccinated or whose status was unknown.
In November a Pan American Health Organization panel will decide whether the United States can still claim measles elimination status, a review the administration asked to move from April until after the midterms.
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