The midterms are less than two months away. Republicans are so reviled, the currently very unpopular Democrats have somehow opened a TEN-POINT lead in party identification, the largest lead in a decade. Trump is the single most hated president in American history. Gas prices are rising. Diesel has hit an all-time high. Inflation is up. People are furious about the Iran War quagmire. No one wants a trade war with Canada. ICE is still murdering people. Everything is shitty and getting worse, and literally everyone knows Trump and his party are to blame.

So starting on Wednesday, Trump and his party are holding a two-day convention celebrating…Trump.

There’s tone-deaf, and there’s tone-deaf, and then there’s whatever the fuck this is.

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On the one hand, I get it. Trump is the center of the MAGA universe. He’s the most beloved Republican to ever exist. He has millions of adoring fans who will crawl over broken glass to bask in his glory. Why, without Trump on the ballot, Republicans couldn’t possibly win a single election ever again! There IS no Republican Party without Trump!

That’s the story Trump has been telling himself for years. It’s the story Fox News tells him every night. It’s what dear sweet Natalie, who doesn’t look AT ALL like Ivanka, goddamit!, tells Trump while she tucks him into bed after changing his diaper. Everyone knows it’s true! This is the reality inside the propaganda bubble that is the right.

But out here in the real world, Trump is despised. His 2024 coalition is gone. Latinos have abandoned him. The manosphere thinks he’s a joke. Evangelicals are still clinging to their savior the same way they cling to their guns and bibles and meth and incest porn, but everyone else has turned away. Trump promised them cheap groceries and no more foreign wars. What did they actually get? Another forever war and crushing food bills. Oh, and your groceries will probably kill you, too. Funsies!

Over the last couple of weeks, there were…signs that this “Trump-a-palooza” was going to be a huge embarrassment. Putting aside the fact that Trump was literally forcing his own people to pay exorbitant amounts of money for the “privilege” of attending,1 a whooooole lot of Republicans said, “Aw geez, I can’t make it. I’m washing my hair or I stubbed my toe or my grandmother died, so sorry, gotta go now BYE! click”

When the leader of your party orders you to appear and lick his boots and your response is, “Nah, I’m busy,” that is a sign your party leader is less an ironfisted tyrant and more of a lame-duck loser.

That is the risk Trump is running with this moronic “Me Me Me” convention. If it’s anything like his last couple of dozen rallies, it’s going to be Trump drooling and slurring and shouting at a mostly empty arena. Those are the visuals of a failed presidency and exactly the single worst image Trump can project this close to the midterms.

So…how did Wednesday night go?

This was AFTER Republicans had to give out free tickets and begged people to show up. Remember, the theory of the case here was that Trump is still so goodamn popular, they would fill the arena to capacity and have to beat people back with a stick. The ratings would be so huge, it would dwarf the first night of football season.

Trump says it totally did. We all know it fucking well did not. Not one network bothered to carry it. Why would they? No one cares. Trump and MAGA are so played out, MAGA merch stores are going out of business all over the country.

Tonight, Thursday, will be the second glorious day of Trump’s triumphant blablabla, what the fuck ever. Friday’s headlines will be the same: Empty seats. No one paid attention. The whole thing was stupid and humiliating.

But this close to the midterms, there is a very real chance this will have the exact opposite effect that Trump was planning. This was supposed to be a power move on his part. He would strut out on stage and show everyone that he was still The Man. That it was still all about Trump. He promised he would pay everyone $5000 if they voted for him! Vote Trump because Trump is so cool and awesome!

Instead, Trump is showing everyone, including his own base, how small and pathetic and weak he is. He was literally trying to bribe people to vote for him. That is not strength. That is a sad loser trying to pay people to like him. Ask Elon Musk how well that works.

Trump is out there, showing his whole (diapered) ass to the world. Right as people are about to start voting.

A smart politician, understanding how unpopular he was, would have done everything to minimize his footprint on the midterms. He would have allowed his party to distance itself. He would have stayed quiet and tried to take himself off the ballot as much as possible to negate the drag his unpopularity represents. But Trump lives in a bubble of delusion and self-inflicted disinformation. HE’S not unpopular. Republicans are unpopular, and Trump is beloved by all. Without him on the ballot, November will be a bloodbath! He has to get out there and get the voters excited to vote for HIM!

This “Trump-a-palooza” is going to be a disaster. The Mad King is fucking around, and now he’s going to find out just how stupid an idea this was. Except, of course, Trump won’t find anything out. He’ll still be protected in his bubble by dear sweet Ivanka Natalie. That means Trump will still insist on going out and campaigning because only Trump can save the midterms for his party! Trump will ride to rescue, and everyone will love him!

But Republicans will be dreading every second of Trump’s ego trip. This train wreck of a convention will be followed by weeks of Trump slouching about the country, calling attention to himself at the worst possible time. He’ll be out there, reminding everyone why they hate him so much. He’ll be reminding his own base that they’re stuck in a war they didn’t want. That gas is expensive, and their godking will be telling them to suck it up, buttercup. Trump will mock them over complaints about affordability while lying to them about $5000 checks even the dimmest of MAGA know will be coming just as soon as their DOGE and tariff dividend checks show up.

This will do wonders for Republican morale. It will also infuriate Democratic voters and motivate them to come out in even larger numbers. It’s almost like Trump WANTS his party to be smashed into dust in November.

If I were a Democrat, especially one in a tight race, I would be sending a fruit basket and a thank-you card to the White House. If I were a Republican, I’d start day drinking and not stop until it was all over.

I write to help you cope with the fear and anger threatening to overwhelm you every day. If this newsletter gets you through these dark times, please consider becoming a contributing supporter for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

Not a fan of long-term subscriptions? That’s OK! I’ll be your one-night stand with a one-time donation through PayPal or Venmo! I’m easy like that! Just don’t tell Mrs. Ogre! 😜

There are only 53 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

Trump just keeps escalating. There were more attacks by the U.S. on Iranian tankers today, one off Kharg Island and the others in the Gulf of Oman, according to news reports. The Pentagon said the attacks came after Iran had attempted to hit two U.S. Naval vessels near the Strait of Hormuz.

Late today, Iran said it had launched “a heavy missile strike” at a U.S. base in Jordan and had fired on two more U.S. destroyers, according to the New York Times. Iran also warned oil tankers near Kuwait and Bahrain to disembark their crews, saying they would be targeted in retaliation for U.S. strikes on Iranian oil tankers.

This is, of course, pure and simple insanity. It costs the United States tens of millions of dollars a day to maintain our naval presence outside the Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere in the area of the Middle East. Every time we shoot a missile at an Iranian tanker, that missile has to be replaced. The replacement missile must come from munitions stocks in the U.S., because we don’t maintain stockpiles of offensive or defensive missiles in the area of the Strait of Hormuz.

The same is not true of Iran. They can shoot missiles at our ground forces in Jordan – they are the only U.S. forces left in the Middle East – and they can do it all day, every day, because their missile stocks are right there in Iran. They also manufacture their missiles in Iran, in underground facilities that were not destroyed when the U.S. and Israel started our war with Iran in February.

The war between the U.S. and Iran is now official again, since Trump used the word “war” over the weekend. It has devolved into a very old sort of war, one in which the U.S. fires missiles from ships in the region, and Iran shoots back at our ships from missile installations dug into mountains along Iran’s coast on the Strait of Hormuz.

In past wars, these were called coastal batteries – reinforced concrete bunkers where coastal artillery pieces were installed to shoot at the ships of invaders. We had coastal batteries along the Eastern seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, and the West Coast. You can still see some of the old coastal batteries at the Presidio in San Francisco, and across the Golden Gate bridge in the coastal highlands of Marin County. Out in Montauk on Long Island, you can visit old World War I and II coastal defense batteries. You can visit others along the Gulf Coast at Battery Pensacola and Battery Worth at Fort Pickens. In the northwest, there are old coastal battery fortifications at Fort Flagler and Fort Worden guarding the entrance to Puget Sound. Even West Point was the site of batteries that defended the Hudson River from naval invasion by the British during the Revolutionary War.

In Europe, entrenched concrete Nazi coastal defense batteries can still be visited at Normandy and elsewhere along the continent’s coast in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway.

So, not much has changed, has it? The Iranians have their missiles dug in along their coast, defending their country, missiles being the modern equivalent of the artillery used in World War II and earlier wars. Our naval vessels no longer have the big 16-inch guns that fired 2,000-pound warheads from battleships. Modern destroyers have offensive weapons such as Tomahawk cruise missiles, and aircraft carriers launch combat jets carrying guided missiles and highly-accurate guided bombs such as the JADAM and Paveway series of bombs that use GPS and laser systems to guide the bombs to their targets.

All these modern weapons cost millions and millions of dollars and are called “standoff” munitions, meaning they can be fired at targets a great distance away, either from the ground or from jet aircraft or from ships. That’s what the war is in Iran right now – a standoff war. We fire at Iran’s tankers from the relative safety of our ships in the Gulf of Oman or the Indian Ocean, and Iran fires at our ships or ground installations in Jordan from the relative safety of heavily reinforced coastal missile batteries along their coast on the Persian Gulf, or to the south, Iran’s coast on the Gulf of Oman.

The U.S. is said to still have as many as 50,000 ground troops in the region. Many of them used to be stationed in Kuwait and Bahrain and Oman and other Gulf states friendly to the U.S., but Iran has driven our ground forces out of the Gulf to a few installations that we maintain further away in Jordan. The extra distance doesn’t matter to Iran, however. Iran has developed new ballistic missiles with “electro-optical seekers,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The new missiles are better able to hit moving targets such as U.S. warships, because the missiles can maneuver from the normal parabolic path of ballistic missiles. Iran also has missiles and drones that can maneuver at the last minute as they near their targets, making them more difficult to shoot down with Patriot anti-missile missiles, or anti-drone weapons that are radar guided.

So, the U.S. is back on its heels, having to resupply ships in the area of the Persian Gulf from a borrowed British base on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean more than 2,000 miles away from our forces near the Strait of Hormuz. And who knows where are the 50,000 ground troops we are supposed to have “in the region,” as reports have it. Some are no doubt in Jordan. Some may be on Diego Garcia. Some Marines are aboard Navy vessels afloat near the Strait of Hormuz.

The question is, what are the 50,000 U.S. troops even doing there? They are not going to be used in ground combat. All they’re doing is costing even more hundreds of millions of dollars to keep them there for no apparent reason. We’re fighting Trump’s kind of war – an incredibly stupid tit-for-tat show-war that he thinks makes us look tough, while all we’re doing is shooting at Iranian tankers so Iran can shoot back at our navy ships and at whatever military targets are still located in the Arab states across the Persian Gulf and in Jordan. What sense does that make? Precisely none militarily, and none economically, as high gas prices and prices for everything proves beyond a shadow of a doubt. Meanwhile, Trump has started yet another trade war that is also costing consumers and taxpayers more money.

Trump’s war with Iran will go nowhere that is advantageous to the United States. We haven’t got enough missiles to take out all the Iranian missile batteries along the Strait of Hormuz, of which there are likely hundreds. Iran knows this. If Trump thinks he’s fighting a war of attrition, and will wear Iran down, he is grossly mistaken. The attrition is on the other foot. Iran is reducing our weapons stockpiles, both offensive and defensive, day by day, one attack at a time.

Trump and the idiots he put in place to run his war, mainly the idiot who is obsessed with our soldiers’ testosterone levels, Pete “I’ve got a big one too” Hegseth, have no clue about how to fight an enemy such as Iran, which has been defending itself against invaders for several thousand years. Trump keeps saying, “We hit them very hard.” What the hell does that mean? He doesn’t know. He wouldn’t know a hard hit from a peck on the cheek, he is so ignorant about the military and how to fight a war.

It is embarrassing when a country with an economy that is a small fraction of that of the United States is holding its own against “the most powerful military in the world” as Trump and his minions put it. The way to end this war is to start the engines and go home. Donald Trump can’t give that order, because it will make him look like a “loser.” For Hegseth, he’ll look like he’s got “low-T.” How horrible for him.

All the hired Pentagon influencers and right-wing pundits in the world aren’t going to dig these two stooges out of the mess they’ve got themselves into.

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I’ll admit, I was not always a huge proponent of the “eat the rich” mindset. Not because I ever imagined I, myself, would be rich1 or because I idolized the wealthy or because I was friends with any really rich people (or imagined I ever would be).

Mostly, I didn’t think about the rich because I thought they didn’t think about me, so who cares? They live their lives, and I live mine.

But that’s not true, is it? It never was. The rich, especially the grotesquely, obscenely rich, cannot stop thinking about me. And you. And all of us “NPCs” who exist in a world the billionaires consider their personal property. I used to be able to go entire months or years without thinking about people like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. They cannot go five fucking minutes without obsessing over the minutiae of my daily existence.

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Who do I love? What am I reading? What am I watching? What am I thinking? The billionaires have taken it upon themselves to control everything because if they don’t, the peasants, again, you and I, might live our lives in a way the billionaires do not approve of. And that is just unacceptable!

We might love a person of the same sex. Or a different race. Or the “wrong” religion. Or, oh my fucking god!, all three at the same time! We might have children we teach to accept differences. Differences the billionaires find abhorrent. We may live in a way that repulses the billionaires. What if, god forbid!, we don’t worship power and money?

Who knows where that could lead?!

Why, if left to our devices too long, we filthy common folk might start to demand things like clean air and water. Safe food and medicine. Fair pay and vacation and sick time and work/life balance. What the fuck?! How does that benefit the billionaires? How is that fair?! Why do the little nobodies get to have a say in anything at all?! They weren’t born rich. They don’t have the superior genes and innate intelligence of the billionaires. Why do they get to set any of the rules about anything?!

So, yeah, even though most people do not spend much time at all thinking about the billionaire class, they never stop thinking about us and the threat we pose.

This is why the obscenely rich have been waging a war against us for longer than we’ve all been alive. The Civil War. The Business Plot. Nazi sympathizers. The Southern Strategy. The Reagan Revolution. Project 2025. These are just the same people over and over again. Rich (mostly) white men working to end democracy so they can impose their will on us without recourse.

The only solution is to end the billionaire class. Without his unlimited resources, Elon Musk is just another Ketamine junkie with a Nazi fetish. Without his billions, Peter Thiel is just a weird, sweaty creep trying to build a cult. Take away their money, and the damage the fascist billionaires can do dwindles to local domestic terrorism instead of a literal global cabal of pedophiles funding far-right militias and political parties to undermine democracies across the world.

Nothing I’m saying here is new or even remotely radical, honestly. “Radical Thought of the Week” is more tongue-in-cheek than a serious descriptor. Getting rid of billionaires is no more radical than saying, “No one should go hungry in the richest country in the world.” The only people who clutch their pearls at such a statement are the people least qualified, morally and intellectually, to give their opinion. The people who look at hungry children without an ounce of compassion and tell their friends you can’t feed strays because they’ll just have more babies.

But I am going to give you a reason to dispose of billionaires that you have not considered. A reason they are not just a fascist threat to democracy and human decency and progress, but an existential threat to life on this planet.

If you’ve been following me for a while, or reading the far more authoritative or , you should be aware that a not-insignificant chunk of the billionaire class is obsessed with immortality. They have decided that they must live forever because they are SO fucking incredible and indispensable to the future of humanity; all will be lost if they cannot become everlasting deities to rule over us for all time. No, I am not exaggerating about this in the tiniest bit.

They talk about this constantly. And it’s not just the Silicon Valley tech fucks. The old and dying oligarchs are also obsessed with it.

So here’s the thing, and I touched on this last year when I first started writing about the billionaire immortality psychosis: it’s not going to happen. They’re not going to develop a miracle elixir to stop aging. Injecting the blood of a younger person will not work. At least one billionaire is trying that, which is exactly the kind of vampire shit QAnon used to scream about. Funny how they stopped caring when we discovered it was one of their own doing it…

Anyway! None of that will work, including the Silicon Valley plans to create a godlike AI that will instantly invent a way to upload humans to the internet and make us immortal digital beings. Or maybe put us in immortal robot bodies or some other thing that will do an end run around biological death forever.

Most of these billionaires are in their 50s. In 20 years, they’ll be in their 70s and not far from death. Or old enough to know that they are not going to be immortal. That realization will break their already fragile, drug-addled minds.

These are people who have lived their entire lives in a bubble where they never hear the word “No.” Their every whim is fulfilled. They are the Epstein Class. They rampaged across the world, raping children. Not because they were attracted to children necessarily, but because it was forbidden, and no one tells the billionaires what they can or cannot do. When you have access to anything and everything, you get bored and look to take the things you should not have. The things society says you MUST not have. That is the underlying story of Jeffrey Epstein.

But all the money in the world will not stop death from claiming the billionaires. They are spending literally trillions in pursuit of immortality. They are destroying the climate. They are spreading fascism like a virus. They are destabilizing global peace and edging us closer to a World War, simply so they can solidify their own power. No democracies to oppose them means the work towards immortality can proceed without interruption.

At the end of all their scheming and murder and horror, though, they will still be dying old men facing the void that terrifies them so. How will they react? The same way entitled white men always react when they do not get what they want. Poorly.

The most dangerous place to stand in the world is between an entitled white man and what he thinks he is owed.

Women are murdered every day because they told a man they could not have their phone number or they would not go on a date with them. Minorities have been murdered for generations because they got a job or dated a woman a white man believed belonged to him. So it has ever been.

When the dying billionaires understand they will not live to rule the world forever, their reaction will not be one of acceptance. It will be one of absolute rage. They will see a world of nobodies, of peasants, of NPCS, that will continue to exist without them, the main character, and they will be furious. They will seethe with resentment that anyone dares to go on without their all-important wisdom and benevolence. Worse, they will not be remembered fondly as heroes and saviors; they will be condemned as monsters and villains.

Well, if that’s the case, why not burn it all to the ground? If they can’t have it, no one should, especially not the ungrateful NPCs! With unlimited resources, the billionaires have already unleashed war and violence just in their quest to overthrow democracy and replace it with fascism. How easy would it be to skip the fascism part and just unleash chaos for the sake of chaos and toppling order with no regard for what comes next?

If that sounds far fetched, please recall that the Silicon Valley scumbags have literally thrown in with fascism because A. the left started to ask for accountability as their social media platforms severely damaged, deliberately, an entire generation of our children, and B. they went all in on their immortality delusion. These are insane people with tiny, fragile egos, many of them strung out on drugs. When death starts knocking at their door, they’re going to lose what’s left of their fucking minds and lash out in rage and despair.

If we have not stripped them of their unlimited resources long before that happens, the billionaires will be a doomsday weapon waiting to go off. A weapon fueled by cult-like insanity and infinite malice. I don’t know about you, but I have no particular wish to see what that will look like; the 2026 preview is bad enough. The final act of these junkie nihilists will be cataclysmic, and they need to be stripped of their ability to wreak havoc on a global scale long before we get to that point.

It’s us or them and, frankly, nothing will be lost when they’re gone. Eat the rich.

I write to help you cope with the fear and anger threatening to overwhelm you every day. If this newsletter gets you through these dark times, please consider becoming a contributing supporter for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

Not a fan of long-term subscriptions? That’s OK! I’ll be your one-night stand with a one-time donation through PayPal or Venmo! I’m easy like that! Just don’t tell Mrs. Ogre! 😜

At EdWeek, Larry Ferlazzo ran a guest post by Rene Grimes that focused on the "science of math" and the programs that are supposed to be based on it. Between the EdWeek part and the "math" part, some folks may have missed the really good set of questions that Grimes proposes at the end of the piece:

*What question did the original research actually investigate?
*Which students, settings, and outcomes were studied?
*Does the evidence directly support this recommendation, or is the recommendation partly an interpretation?
*What limitations or unanswered questions should shape its use?
*What evidence will show whether this approach is working for our students?

What a great batch of questions.

Imagine, for instance, if anyone backing Common Core had tried to answer these questions. Blanks all around.

What question did the original research actually investigate?

So much education "research" asks only one question-- if we do this thing, will students get a higher score on the Big Standardized Test this year? Lots of folks really want to use that as a proxy for asking questions like "Will students have a higher level of reading comprehension" or "Will students be able to have an increased ability to solve complex problems." But those aren't the same question at all. Sloppy and inexact questions lead to sloppy conclusions.

Which students, settings, and outcomes were studied?

I remember the days when it seemed like every time you peeled back a piece of education research that said "this is how students learn" you found a "study" performed on a dozen college sophomores at a private university. This has always been a problem for education because educators are correctly reluctant to use students as guinea pigs. 

Some private and charter schools make claims about their effectiveness, but these are once again bits of research done on a very select group of students. That research isn't nothing, but it doesn't apply to a general student population.

Does the evidence support this sales pitch recommendation, or is the recommendation partly an interpretation?    

Boy is this one an issue. Every single piece of evidence based on Big Standardized Test scores involves interpreting those test scores to mean all sorts of things that they don't necessarily mean.

What limitations or unanswered questions should shape its use?

It is always a red flag when neither limitations nor unanswered questions are even mentioned. One of the Common Core red flags was that there was no mechanism at all in place for talking about limitations or questions arising from classroom deployment. 

There is no bit of legitimate science or evidence-gathering that declares "This question is now definitively solved and we don't need to look at it or question it ever again." And yet how rare is it that a new program is launched in a school and the Powers That Be say, "Now, here are some issues we want you to keep an eye on, and some questions that we are still looking to answer." In education, it's far more likely that every great new program is meant to be the end of the conversation, and uppity teachers who want to ask questions get a big round of administrative stinkeye.

What evidence will show that this is working for our students?

Again, the all-too-common default is that evidence will not be collected because it might not provide the evidence the Powers That Be want to find. No administrator wants to hear, "We've been trying your new program for a year and we have no evidence that it is working for our students." Should any teacher make that comment to admin, or any educator make that comment to a policy maker who mandated the Great New Thing, and they will get that old familiar refrain-- "You're implementing it wrong."

I love these five questions, and I hope more educators will use them more often-- including for every damned AI doodad that comes down the pike.  

I guess we’re fairly inured to Trump’s daily bellowing at this point. Practically every day presents us with another Oval Office press-thingee, with Trump surrounded by fawning corporate executives or suckupalicious cabinet members or utterly confused schoolchildren who have been assembled to show that vaccinations aren’t necessary because measles doesn’t exist anymore, or boys and girls shouldn’t play on the same sports teams, which they already don’t. Every third day, Trump will post on Truth Social that we have destroyed Iran’s military for the 11^th time, or maybe it’s the 22^nd – it’s hard to keep count.

Today’s screech, however, was a doozy. Trump hit Truth Social this morning with a threat that if the Federal Reserve doesn’t lower interest rates at their next meeting, he will “STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT.” I was unaware that Trump himself or anyone on his staff was aware how to use “with which” in a sentence, so the post has that going for it. But the threat itself is, to put it gently, something of a head-scratcher.

What do Federal Reserve interest rates have to do with foreign trade? Nothing whatsoever, so far as I am aware. Taken at face value, Trump appears to be threatening to stop foreign trade altogether, since we have a trade deficit with practically every country around the globe, other than perhaps Venezuela, which is allegedly preparing to ship us billions of barrels of crude oil for free, which would put that country in the positive trade column, since we would not be paying for the oil, at least according to the Thief in Chief.

Markets showed little if any reaction to today’s Trump eruption, “with no visible impact on rate-hike probabilities, yields, stocks or the dollar,” according to MarketWatch. Stocks on the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq were all down between a third and a half percent, but that could be attributable to anything from the weather to today being the first day of a three-day weekend.

Analysts were saying that today’s jobs numbers – 162,000 jobs were added to the economy in August – indicate that interest rates are more likely to stay the same or even be raised, since the economy appears to be heating up while wage growth continues to remain behind the rate of inflation. But all that is economics talk. Inflation could go up, jobs could go down, who knows what’s going to happen.

What is certain, as usual, is the uncertainty that continues to be produced by Trump’s insane moves on trade, most recently imposing 50 percent tariffs on our closest and one of our largest trading partners, Canada, because Donald Trump got up on the wrong side of the bed, or Natalie Harp failed to provide him with enough right-wing fluff pieces that day.

Trump has been obsessed with interest rates since he took office. He regularly screamed at the previous Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell, even going so far as to threaten him with prosecution for the Fed going over budget in the construction of its new headquarters in Washington. Powell got out in May, replaced by Trump’s hand-picked money-maiden Kevin Warsh, who took office just in time to ride an inflation upswing because two months previously, Trump had decided to go to war with Iran, which produced a global disruption in oil markets that in turn produced increased costs of gasoline, diesel fuel, fertilizer, computer chips and everything else, because when it comes to trade and manufacturing, the world still depends on oil, and oil prices have gone up and stayed up since Iran decided it would respond to Trump’s war by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump is running out of time and he’s running out of threats. The midterm elections are just two months away, and Trump’s polling is just plain awful. Charlie Cook, of The Cook Report, one of the most steady and reliable non-partisan election prognosticators, just reported on a “nightmare scenario” for Republicans in the upcoming election. “Republicans should brace themselves,” Cook wrote on his Substack. “The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible.” The most likely outcome, Cook wrote, is the “really bad” one. Republicans are likely to lose between 26 and 35 House seats and four or five seats in the Senate, Cook predicts.

Trump wants interest rates down before November, and as of today, that is not going to happen. He’s threatening to stop all trade with most of the countries in the world. How would that even happen? He can’t impose arbitrary tariffs. The Supreme Court took off the table. He can’t impose economic sanctions without Congressional approval. What’s he going to do? Refuse entry to cargo ships into U.S. ports? Stop overseas cargo planes from landing at U.S. airports? Close border crossings with Mexico and Canada and use Customs and Immigration to block entry to persons who state their reason for requesting a U.S. visa is “business?”

If he pulls the trigger on his threat to stop foreign trade with most of the world altogether, it’s going to create a shock wave through world supply chains that will send prices up across the board. He’s already got people pissed off every time they go to the gas station to fill up their cars, especially if they’re filling up gas-guzzling pickup trucks. He’ll be looking at five percent inflation if he shuts down trade with foreign countries and stops the importation of everything from Christmas toys to Walmart underwear and humongous flat-screen TV’s. He’s already looking at a shortage of toilet paper, Christmas trees and wreaths with his crazed Canada tariffs.

Trump’s toddler attitude of I-want-it-when-I-want-it hit a new level today when it was announced that he plans to fly his Qatari plane-palace on his upcoming visit to Ireland. He apparently cares less and less what happens to his fellow Republicans in November. Now he is showing evidence of not caring what happens to himself. It’s either that, or he really does think of himself as the kind of superhero he generates with AI and posts on Truth Social at three in the morning. Missiles will bounce off his bulging muscles and his high testosterone will defeat drone swarms aimed at his golden Air Force One.

Trump’s roller coaster is about to jump the tracks, and we’re going to be there to see it.

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… but that won’t change any minds

It’s now six months since the US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to rely on naval power to coerce the Iranian regime into submission.

Early in February 2026, Trump deployed a carrier strike group (CSG) to the region, with a second arriving shortly afterwards. This show of force was described (with a striking lack of historical awareness) as an “armada”. The lead ship of that group, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is now limping home after what is generally admitted to have been a disastrous tour of duty.

As many people have pointed out to me over the years, I’m not a naval expert. But I can count. So, when the armada arrived, I checked the numbers and concluded that the threat was a hollow one.

The escorts are critical. They provide missile defence using AEGIS and Sea Sparrow systems, and once their interceptor stocks fall to low levels they must withdraw to be replaced or rearmed.

This creates an arithmetic problem. A Hobart-class destroyer has 48 blocks, each capable of carrying one AEGIS-controlled SM-2 or SM-6 interceptor. Alternatively, each block can carry four Sea Sparrows, but these are less capable.

Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that’s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200–250 in total. No one knows how many missiles Iran has available, but typical estimates suggest at least 3000, of which 1000 or more could be used in an anti-ship capacity. Even assuming successful air attacks on launch sites, use of aircraft against missiles, etc., hundreds of missiles will pose a threat, and at least some of them will cause enough damage to force escorts to withdraw.

A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn’t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group’s defences and requiring the USN to “declare victory and go home”.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who could count. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (a hawkish and generally navalist think tank) looked at the numbers and concluded that the available force could do some damage but not enough to produce regime change. And, pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home.

Like CSIS, I didn’t expect a massive air campaign beginning with the killing of the top Iranian leadership. But once the full-scale war began, the vast majority of the attacks were made by land-based aircraft. The carrier-based air arm fired most of its Tomahawks from a safe distance, with only modest effects. Iran responded by attacking land bases with a level of success that could have produced a catastrophe if it had been focused on the navy.

The role of the USN was reduced to its long-stated mission of keeping vital sea lanes open. When that failed, it shifted to the secondary task of imposing a blockade on Iran. Unsurprisingly, this has not produced a surrender — no naval blockade in recorded history has forced an adversary nation to surrender without the deployment of land forces.

Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy’s budget. A Navy official, quoted in the Guardian, says:

The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn’t been spent. They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck.

More succinctly, a former official said:

They’re fucked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money.

The 2020s haven’t been a great decade for navies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began with the destruction or capture of almost the entire Ukrainian navy. Then, despite having no navy of their own, the Ukrainians wiped out much of the mighty Black Sea Fleet, with the remnants sheltering in a Russian port as far away from Ukraine as they can get.

The Iranian war began similarly. The destruction of the Iranian Navy was rapid and complete. The most notable feature was the perfidious sinking of a ship returning from a training exercise in India, with the survivors of the initial attack being left to drown, even though their rescue would have posed no risk.

The US Navy suffered nothing more than the failures described above, but that was bad enough. Following the earlier failure to dislodge the Houthis, who now control access to the Red Sea, it is clear that naval forces cannot reliably keep trade lanes open or defeat even a low-level land-based opponent.

But having been through many rounds of this debate, I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets. Pirates, grey zones, reconnaissance, diplomatic visits, disaster relief and tiger-repelling rocks will all be wheeled out. Still, for any government in serious fiscal trouble (and aren’t they all), reducing the navy* to a coast guard would save a heap of money that would otherwise be wasted.

Anticipating this, I won’t reply to any comments restating points of this kind. If you have something actually new to say, go ahead.

* I haven’t talked about submarines here. The doomsday machines waiting to unleash nuclear Armageddon from the deep ocean floor are too much for me to think about. The ordinary kind, designed to sink ships from concealment, now seem like an expensive way of doing the job of a low-cost missile or drone, and even their invisibility is a depreciating asset.