I remember way back in 2016 wondering how Trump did it. If you went to Wikipedia and typed “Trump’s rallies,” what popped up on your screen was incredible. It was a seemingly never-ending list of cities, some of them thousands of miles apart, and the dates of the rallies, one after another. As it got closer to election day in October of 2016, Trump started to have two rallies in a day. He would be in the Middle West, and he would hold a rally in Detroit around noon, then he would get on his 757 Trump jet and fly to Columbus, Ohio, and hold a rally in the evening.

I looked at the number of rallies and thought, how does he do rally speech after rally speech, one after another? Doesn’t he get tired of it?

Even though Trump had been in the public eye for decades, we didn’t know him then the way we know him now. He loved it – the adoring crowds, playing “YMCA” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” his ridiculous dance moves to the music. And he wasn’t giving a “speech.” Even then, when he got before a crowd, he was uttering free-form grievance packed with lies, and he could do it by the hour.

But the thing that really perplexed me was all that flying. How did he stand it? He had his own plane, but even with a bedroom and whatever luxury Trump’s private 757 afforded, he still had to get on the thing and sit down and fly from place to place.

And then it came to me. He loves flying the way pilots do. Trump never bothered to learn to fly planes and get a pilot’s license, but he didn’t have to. He always had pilots to do the actual work of getting an aircraft in the air and flying it from one place to another and getting it back on the ground. The way he looked at it, Trump was the pilot, because he was giving the orders, and it was his plane.

Trump is addicted to being in the air. You have to fly to be in the air, so I guess you could say he’s addicted to flying, and that would explain the way pilots I have known love flying. But with Trump, I think it’s just being up there in the air that grabs him. The plane takes off, and suddenly, you’re above it all. Everyone else, everything else, is down on earth, and you’re up in the limitless sky. Pilots have the necessary job of running the thing that got you up there, the plane, and that is the part of being up there they love the most. But Trump, he just loves the idea, the experience, the thing of being in the air, and the planes he flies in, including his 757, have every creature comfort.

When he first took office in 2017, he started flying on Air Force One to Mar a Lago every weekend. Not every other weekend, but every weekend. He went down there to play golf, and we would learn that he loved to sit at his special table on the patio of the Mar a Lago restaurant or club dining room or whatever the hell it is, and he would accept the plaudits of his club members. I’m sure he just loved sitting there being the center of attention, being stared at, admired, envied, posing for selfies, even loved by all the suckers who actually paid him money in membership dues for the privilege.

But I came to think that what he really loved about being president was that he had Air Force One, and he could fly down there and fly back every weekend, and now he did it at taxpayer expense. It may not have been the primary thing he loved about his weekends – he does appear to enjoy playing golf – but flying on Air Force One was one of the big things he loved.

It took a while, but then we started to hear his complaints about Air Force One. The planes – there are more than one of them – were dated. Where are the new Air Force Ones? Why aren’t they finished? The complaints got louder. It was Democrat Barack Obama’s fault that they’re behind schedule and over budget. Then, after he was beaten in 2020 and had to leave office for four years, it was Biden’s fault that the new Air Force Ones weren’t finished yet.

When he took office in 2025, the complaints about the unfinished new presidential aircraft continued, as did his trips to Mar a Lago on the old ones, of course. And then in May of 2025, it was announced that the Persian Gulf country of Qatar, which Trump had endeared himself to during his first term by settling some kind of dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, was “giving” Trump a luxury 747 jet that had been used by the ruling family of Qatar since 2012. The jet was by then 13 years old, but it was already described as a “flying palace,” complete with gold fixtures in the plane’s bathrooms and everywhere else.

The Qatari jet also had a bedroom, a very fancy one at that, which was a plus but not a big deal, because Trump’s private 757 and the old Air Force One both had bedrooms. The thing was, Trump apparently didn’t sleep when he flew. Reporters as far back as 2015 and 2016 described Trump wandering around his 757 at all hours. The reporters might be trying to sleep, but Trump wasn’t. These days, we have been treated to blizzards of insane Truth Social posts Trump cranks out while he’s flying on Air Force One. Trump doesn’t sleep on his planes. He’s too busy loving flying, loving the whole thing of being up there, in charge of a gigantic aircraft that is flying for one reason and one reason alone – to carry him wherever and whenever he wants to go, through the air, above the earth.

Trump loves the new Qatari jet the way he loves his new Oval Office. It’s plastered with ridiculously expensive and ridiculously garish “luxury” just the way Trump likes it. No president has ever had a properly luxurious Oval Office, Trump believes. And now no president has ever had a properly luxurious Air Force One like he has.

When the “gift” of the Qatari jet was announced, the arrangement was denounced from all the usual corners. It was a “bribe” to Trump from a Gulf potentate who was currying favor with him and his family. So, various phony ways were found around the foreign emoluments clause, which was written into the Constitution by the founders to outlaw just this sort of thing. Having just fought a war of independence from Great Britain, a country ruled by a royal family, the founders were very much aware of how future presidents could come under the influence of foreign powers seeking to buy favors from the United States by giving presidents bribes.

So, it was announced that the “gift” of the $400 million jet from the Qatar royal family would go to the Department of Defense – which was still the DOD back then – and a “memorandum of understanding” was signed, stating that the plane would be an “interim” Air Force One until Boeing could complete work on the aircrafts that were overdue and over budget. The office of the White House counsel then came up with another scammy statement saying that the Qatar jet would, upon Trump completing his term in office, be “transferred” to Trump’s presidential library.

Now, that sounded so full of shit that I, and many others, speculated that it was just a ruse. Trump would take the Qatari jet with him when he left office and continue to use it. But the “library” lie somehow stayed alive all the way through the refitting of the jet at a facility in Texas, that cost as much as the jet itself was worth. The cost to the taxpayers was hidden in the corners of the nation’s top secret nuclear budget that supposedly was paying for the upgrading of our nuclear weapons arsenal. So, we don’t know how much was spent to turn the Qatari royal jet into the Trump royal jet.

But we do know that whatever it cost, it wasn’t enough, because Trump couldn’t fly his “interim” Air Force One – now painted in the red, white, and blue color scheme designed by Trump himself – back home from the NATO summit in Turkey because of security concerns that he and the jet would be targeted by Iran, which Trump had started bombing again while the summit was happening.

Off the flying palace went, back to Texas, to be further retro-fitted with the kinds of anti-aircraft and anti-missile technology that the regular Air Force One has. This will cost even more hundreds of millions – we will never learn the total – before the Qatari bribe jet returns to service as Trump’s private Air Force One luxury aircraft.

And now comes today, and we learn, courtesy of Trump’s single-digit son Eric, who is involved with the establishment of Trump’s presidential library, that the Qatari jet will not be transferred to the Miami library when he leaves office. Instead, an old Air Force One, similar to the one that is on display in Simi Valley, California, at the Reagan library, will be displayed at the Trump library in Miami.

Nothing was said today about what will happen to the flying palace, but I think we know the answer already. Trump plans to take the Qatari royal jet with him in January of 2029, with all its upgrades that have been paid for with our tax dollars, so he can continue to fly in the proverbial lap of luxury as a private citizen.

The question immediately arises: how will he pay the considerable costs of flying such a monstrous aircraft? Right now, it costs something on the order of $200,000 per hour to fly one of the regular Air Force Ones. God only knows how much flying the Qatari flying palace costs. Besides, the $200,000 per hour cost is doubtlessly a lowball figure. It probably costs much more than that, because all the salaries paid to fly and maintain the jet are federal salaries at government employee level. Civilian pilots and ground crews and maintenance personnel cost way more than the Air Force people who are doing the work that amounts to the $200,000 per hour figure. Just maintaining the engines alone, which must be torn down and gone through periodically to maintain their airworthiness certification, costs millions, and will cost even more millions when the people doing the work on the Qatari jet are civilians after Trump leaves office.

Unless…

And here it comes, folks. Republicans pass a new law that pays for the travel of presidents after they leave office. There is already an old law, the Former Presidents Act, that partially pays for the travel of former presidents and up to two staff members. That law caps the payments at $1 million per year, which would not cover getting the Qatari jet off the ground, into the air, and back on the ground again even once.

So, unless Democrats take back the House and the Senate in November, you can be sure Republicans will try to pass a law paying every single dollar Trump will spend traveling on the flying palace once he leaves office.

If we didn’t already need a reason to win back the House and the Senate in November, now we’ve got one. Keeping the Qatari jet in the possession of the federal government and limiting Donald Trump to $1 million a year travel expenses should become one of the rallying cries of every Democrat running for election in November. No kings! No royal jets! Ground him!

As a treat, I just thought I’d let you see what I’ve been looking at as I wrote this column, our newest member, the 12-year-old neighborhood feral cat we took in on Christmas night, Little. That’s her bowl. She eats her meals on my desk.

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Last week, pop star Ariana Grande released the music video for her single “Petal” and set the internet on fire. For several years now, fans and casual observers have worried about Grande’s shrinking size. And in this video, she is painfully gaunt — clearly starving.

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Saying that, though — that this woman is clearly very ill, and very clearly starving herself — is somehow controversial. Grande’s defenders are rolling out body positivity cliches not to argue that Grande is healthy — that seems impossible — but to shut down discussion about her. Grande, too, has taken on a kind of teenage obstinance, declaring her life none of anyone else’s business.

In this discourse, commenting on Grande’s thinness is “body shaming.” Expressing concern is inappropriately diagnosing her when we don’t know her life or medical history. Saying that maybe ultra-thinness is not a healthy model for girls and young women is “thin shaming” and a “witch hunt.” Noticing her significant weight loss is prurient “scrutiny,” not genuine concern, because genuine concern apparently can’t be about a person’s body at all.

Sorry, but people have lost their damn minds.

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The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market.

Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else.

We read aloud in our household. A lot.

We always have.

When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my horror that we were so absorbed that it was her bed time and we (OK, responsible adult here, I) had forgotten we also needed to cook and eat dinner.

We scrambled through the Snow Queen incident but didn’t ever stop reading aloud. We read all the Harry Potters (yeah, yeah I know, don’t @ me – but they were great to read aloud) multiple times. If we drove somewhere, or were on holidays, one member of the family – and taking turns is important – would read. Vacation campfires were kept aflame by reading aloud. Stories, Poetry. Non-fiction.

My daughter’s been out of home for several years but my beloved and I do the same, still. We read Carlyle’s French Revolution aloud, until it got boring and we switched to Hilary Mantel’s version. We’ve read EP Thompson’s ‘Moral Economy of the English Crowd’ and Kindleberger’s Financial History of Western Europe aloud. And many, many more.

Recently, somehow not aware that a major film was in the offing, we’ve been reading Homer’s Odyssey – the Emily Wilson translation, obviously. It is fucking great. When you hit the Cyclops, the iambic pentameter really takes off and it has energy. Wondrous.

I saw the film the day it was released, approximately 24 hours after learning it existed – I loved it, don’t @ me – and have coerced my beloved (who hates going to the movies) into coming with me again. Yes, six hours of my one precious life at the movies watching the same film. Totally worthwhile.

As we were reading Book 10 the Odyssey about Circe tonight I was struck by what precious time reading is. And – like you, I expect – it is so hard to ever have enough of it. I know most people think Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey had multiple authors, but their coherence to me suggests a singularity of vision, at least. This will matter in a minute.

Reading time is scarcer than I wish. I honestly can’t keep up with everything written by friends and in my field(s), let alone pleasurable reading. I subscribe variously (as much as I can afford…so the profile changes a bit) to New Left Review, Jacobin, Solidarity, Overland, Griffith Review, LRB and a bunch of academic journals especially Labor, Economic History Review and Labour History. Getting through these plus everything people send me and the articles in the journal I co-edit, Australian Historical Studies. Well, frankly, it is a fuck load of reading.

And that doesn’t even include the reading I need to do to prepare for writing the book I want to write, or to do the paid work I do. And it definitely doesn’t include the dozens of other substacks, nor the FT, nor the ABC’s markets blog that I follow religiously.

I’m sure you feel this too.

So. I’ve been beyond puzzled to see people getting chatty (or other AI) to write their stuff.

I totally get the pressure to produce. Academics have been long turned into content churners. ‘Publish or perish’ in some regions and institutions meant how much could you produce in how little a time. As a postgraduate student I attended a workshop where a senior professor describes turning the same conference paper into five publications FIVE!? Who do they think was going to read all this samey shit?

Later, ‘publish or perish’ meant ‘quality’, which some senior professors could claim also meant producing less (the rest of us were not typically afforded such luxuries). Quality ofc was measured by some juvenile fucking rankings of outlets in which you published, not – as was implied by the word quality – how good was the work.

And then quality went out of favour, and ‘impact’ came in. Show us your ‘impact’ they said. My first book in 2014 was quoted in the Federal parliament. Recently both my books were cited in a submission to the NSW parliament. Which is fucking IMPACT, right? Well, actually it just means I said exactly what the Shadow Minister Kim Carr needed. It didn’t actually change anything. Still. ‘Impact’ was really only meant to be performative, because uni bosses saw them as metrics, not real things.

How stupid – disconnected from any reality – are the metrics under the logic of managerialism? But we all internalised them. And when academics do it, how can we be surprised when students do, too?

Of course, this is all a symptom of what Pete Chalmers in this excellent essay in the magazine Arena has called the ‘thru-put model’ of higher education:

By around 2012, Australian universities had embraced the ‘thru-put’ model: big-box, drive-thru, on-demand, in the cloud, flexible. As a system, it is designed to smoothly pump through as many students as possible, not to provide a better education to a greater number, but because it is both profitable and scalable….

Inside the field generated by the thru-put model, bot lecturers and bots who do your homework for you pop up as an appealing step-change in efficiency, led and controlled by the universities supplying it.…

The thru-put model is not about knowledge, learning or pedagogy, but rather is a wealth transfer racket, and it works because it’s so scalable while labour costs are trivially low. Learning may or may not happen, and sometimes good learning still does. But it’s a racket because even if it doesn’t work, students are indebted, while the core beneficiaries are always the most handsomely paid, regardless of performance.

Writing is learning. It is thinking. It is problem solving. It is collaboration. Writing is the path by which we find stuff out, critically, analytically.

We are all looking on in horror as students trade learning for robot outputs. Understandable in an environment where AI seems the only reasonable path to a decent grade and decent grades may help secure a future in a seriously volatile world. This (they reason) will get them what the metrics require. But in fact we’ve largely been complying with the logic that made this happen well before the tech automated it and cut out the middle man (human brains) that seemed superfluous if the essay as output, not the learning that came with it, was the point.

The same has applied to professionals. Several of the writers I follow have semi-regularly said that this was a newsletter written by AI. It was the author’s prompts, sure. But the robot’s words.

I get it. But geez, I have fucking enough to read, let alone reading work by a robot I didn’t choose to follow, no matter who is prompting it.

Friends and colleagues slump visibly as they describe grading hundreds of assessments written by robots.

My last semester teaching was the first we had to grapple with this. At the time I thought there should be a stream of university life where if you want the robot to write your essay then a robot will grade it (I know this is happening too). Hard to see the point of this, surely. On the other hand, if you actually want to learn how to do and be a historian, let’s spend real time together – and not waste my effort grading robots.

If you can’t be bothered writing it, I can’t be bothered reading it.

However. This raises some troubling questions.

Authorship is a bit shit, but it is better than not having it.

Way, way back when I was writing a PhD thesis about knowledge and power and universities I spent a whole lot of time trying to think about authorship and stuff like that.

Authorship is a bit shit, what with how it implicitly claims that one fucking person came up with stuff as if they went into a cone of silence all by themselves and magically produced something that came out of their Very Special and Unique Mind. Y’know, like ‘You’re a wizard, Harry’.

This kind of thing valorised authorship claimed power and authority in ways that produced hierarchies by valuing some knowledge and marginalising others.*

But the threat right now seeks to turn a modest insight that authorship is not all it has been cracked up to be into a gigantic farce. Like how Elon wants to do a special Odyssey for Racist People with AI. But. Who wants to read Gro(n)k’s Odyssey? Or Chatty’s Iliad?

For all that the author is a bit shit, we still want them.** Just for authors to be a bit more modest.

The outputs are not the point. The people are.

One of the things that mass education kept fucking up was that the purpose of an education – well, an Arts education at least, but in the spirit of the great Australian scientist Ian Clunies Ross, I think everything else too – was to produce a uniquely skilled person, not a set of plug and play competencies.

Sure, if you just need some generic and weirdly upbeat dot points that summarise what you can find on the internet. Well then. Chatty is definitely great at that.

But if you want to be a person, a whole human whose disposition, skills, talents, loves, ethics positions us to both write and be. WELL THEN.

The same applies to reading. I’ve been on vacation a bit lately and using that precious time to do some reading. In that time I didn’t (for instance) read Sven Beckert’s new doorstop Capitalism because I needed to know some information. I read it because I wanted to know what his take is, his argument, his narrative.

Though we might acknowledge some unfairness about the kind of power authorship produces and seek systems of education that could allow more democratic and anti-colonial impulses – including learning and reflecting and integrating (say) First Nations knowledges that were traditionally excluded by the authorities hierarchies of authorship engendered – we should also acknowledge that generic outputs without an author are a dystopian prospect. We want to know the author’s views, writing style and method of argumentation. Not what chatty said in response to their prompts.***

So, I can’t unsee the value of the authorship of the people I read. Nor forget the individual student becoming that I watched as a teacher. I wasn’t watching an accumulation of a generic set of specifiable skills and knowledges.**** But of the historian, thinker, teacher – human – that only they can ever be. What a privilege it was to be their teacher, not so there would be a uniform drone army of history graduates in the world, but for the remarkable individuals they would be, at work and elsewhere

I see lots of uses for the robots – I quite like some help checking on the consistency of my language, for instance; or checking my maths, which is even worse than words for the ways meanings can get mixed up in the process of editing and re-editing – though I refuse to join the painful pontification of the self-declared AI experts that are somehow in every room these days.

I love you, the author. And if you can’t be bothered writing it. Well. I’m busy enough.

And so are we all as readers – readers grading student essays, as well as those of us just wanting to read for learning, pleasure and work.

In this excellent blog post Chris Newfield looks at the sorts of transformations needed to teaching as AI poses new threats not just to the integrity of work and student learning, but to the whole ‘market’ for education.

If AI does anything really good for us at all it might be that in undermining the current business/learning model universities will have to undo the thru-put system, have smaller classes, where real-life teachers engage more closely with students.*****

Those of us who write need to also model slower, more engaged and high quality discovery and writing ourselves. For if we think about our writing as something we must produce at speed, we are also the thru-put model.

• I know we want to protect expertise in this post-fact, anti-vax, climate-denying world crashing in on us. But we can’t just forget these insights in the process; forgetting inconvenient things we know is not a good way to recognise the value of intellectual life.

** I’m of the generation that as an 18-21 year old spent many an angsty party sipping red wine (for foreign readers, 18 is drinking age here) in the corner of a run down terrace house in Chippendale debating the ‘death of author’. Shortly we hoped that the internet might make for a more democratic read-write interaction between writing and reading that would undermine hierarchies and…HAHAHAHA. Ooops.

*** Which all reminds me of an argument that Foucault made, that authorship emerged not only to make money for authors who were being ripped off by booksellers (also true), but so there was a name to discipline as writers began to claim authority from the church. Imagine it in Trumpland: if an un-authored encyclopaedia said climate change was real, who would you punish? Authors are needed for discipline and control of ideas, not just as their originators but to control who can have them.

We can surely feel this sense of discipline in the present moment. Censorship of course materials, books and what it is possible to write is the fruit of authoritarianism – often enough perversely deployed under the banner of ‘free speech’, which for Muskism means confining the AI’s diet to racist, sexist stuff so it doesn’t get infected by the ‘virus’ of ideas Musk doesn’t like.

So, for all that Foucault wanted the right as reader to (for instance) mis-interpret Marx in order to explore his question, we also needed him as an author to challenge the authority of the structures of knowledge that controlled ideas about (say) sexuality. And we still do.

**** I’m also not denying that lists of skills we need for a job can be valuable – in history ofc this includes gathering evidence, synthesising, analysing, developing a narrative that speaks against or into other narratives you have learned about. Right now two carpenters are working to re-build the bones underpinning what will be my new roof. The specific skills they developed at technical college are very important – it matters to know what they can do. But I’ve been watching them problem-solve our old, tricky house and their disposition as carpenters, including their adaptability, creativity and critical stance towards what they know is also crucial to making sure the thing stays up and doesn’t leak.

***** There is just no way the current lot of managers will be prepared to do that. They need to get out of the way.

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Most days, I wake up, find out I was right about some terrible thing I saw coming a mile away, shake my fist at the ceiling, and curse. A lot. It is not fun pointing at the coming Bad Thing and having most people tell you you’re overreacting or simply ignore you because you’re making them uncomfortable.

But other days? I wake up, and the terrible thing I saw coming is happening to people who absolutely fucking deserve it. People I hate with every fiber of my being. On those days? I don’t shake my fist at the ceiling and curse. I watch the fire and smoke and turn into the goddamn Joker.

Saturday was such a day. While I was at Otakon, a truly massive anime convention in Washington DC, I came across this Politico article in a moment of downtime:

The grownups are worried. In group chats and at happy hours, some GOP veterans fret about the rising generation of young staffers in their party. The recurring complaint: The pipeline that feeds young conservative talent into government jobs is defective — if not broken.

This isn’t just the standard middle-aged lament that the kids aren’t all right. It’s a criticism aimed at institutions like the Heritage Foundation that purport to identify and train the party’s future governing class. To conservative critics in and out of government, many of whom ascribe to more traditional, pre-MAGA Republican beliefs, some such institutions have spent the last decade selecting for rigid conformity to Trumpist ideology over more typical markers of expertise.

With my amazing power of “paying attention,” I saw this coming years ago. Three years ago, actually. I wrote about this exact problem when I was still over at The Banter. See if you can spot any similarities between what Politico says the problem is:

But these critics fear a decline of merit and skill, along with a tolerance for darker ideologies that could cripple the party’s ability to govern in the long run.

And what I said back in May of 2023:

The more level-headed among Republicans have to understand what it means to produce an entire crop of rabid lunatics who don’t give the slightest damn about the Republican project. A decade from now, it will be all but impossible for the party to accomplish anything at the federal level and this rot will start trickling down to the state level.

It’s so nice the professional journalists have caught up to me, the stay-at-home schmuck sitting at a keyboard in his living room.

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Anyway! Being as Politico is a right-wing rag I wouldn’t wipe my ass with, I couldn’t help but notice that they used the word “Groyper” to describe the GOP’s problem. Technically, it’s accurate, I guess? A lot of these little fuckstick Republican-spawnlings have huge crushes on Nick Fuentes. But “Groyper” is just an idiot euphemism for “neo-Nazi.” At the absolute least, they're hardcore white nationalists, but generally, if you’re a groyper, you have a strong affinity for fascism, genocide, and you despise Jews. No, you’re not just “critical of Israel.” You despise Jews. All Jews everywhere.

But Politico would really REALLY prefer not to get into that. Talking about Nazis and how the GOP is being consumed by them is just so fucking gauche! Nick Fuentes is a huge fan of Hitler and Nazism. He’s literally called himself a Nazi on occasion. There is a huge prevalence of Nazi imagery among younger Republicans, especially the professional class of younger Republicans Politico is fretting about.

And yet, the word “Nazi” appears exactly twice in Politico’s roughly 2500-word piece. Shiteating cowards and collaborators. “Darker ideologies?” Fuuuuuck you. The Republican Party is rapidly becoming the party of literal Nazis. Can’t say THAT, though. God forbid. Politico, like so many in the legacy press, want the old GOP back. Just a little light fascism and old-school racism without all the swastikas and goosestepping. But that’s not what’s going to happen. I saw this coming last year, too. The Nazis are absolutely going to win because, like Politico, the rest of the legacy press refuses to talk about what is right in front of them:

It’s too embarrassing for the Republican Party, you see. Oh, the press will rage for months over Democratic Socialism and the Democratic Party. Any chance to print endless “DEMS IN DISARRAY!” headlines is more than welcome. But “Nazism Consumes The GOP?” Well…that’s such an indelicate matter. Best to gloss over that with cutesy little phrases like “Groyper.”

I, of course, am not constrained by such mundane considerations as “giving a shit about the feelings of Republicans” or “not making Nazis angry.” I’ve been pretty fucking clear about the GOP’s Nazi problem all year long and then some:

Republicans have killed their own party. It wasn’t Trump. It wasn’t Musk. It wasn’t the Tea Party or billionaire donors or Fox News. They gave themselves a lethal dose of racism and fascism generations ago, and they never kicked the addiction they developed.

Now it’s too late. Every moment of clarity they had, every time they had an opportunity to go clean and take a different path, they chose to double and triple down on hate and fear and racism and fascism. It was easier, you see, than trying to compete on a level electoral field to sell their bankrupt ideology of venerating the rich.

I’m afraid the prognosis is terminal. Even if Republicans wanted to course correct, they’ve already hit the iceberg of congealed fat and used diapers known as Donald Trump. Even if Republicans decided tomorrow to put in every ounce of effort they have, and all of their billionaire donors poured all of their stolen money into keeping the GOP from being swallowed whole by fascism and stupidity, it would be like bailing the Titanic out with a teaspoon.

They spent decades and unlimited money on training their voters to be rage junkies. There is no reclaiming them from the filth-covered political crackhouses they voluntarily live in now. They built a media machine that thrives on hate and cruelty that no longer depends on the billionaires for money or guidance. It cannot be controlled and will only devolve into more extremism. They taught three generations of Republicans, bordering on four now,1 that conservatism is about self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement at all costs. The party of “Greed Is Good” libertarianism has reached its apotheosis and discovered, to its horror, that the perfection of selfishness leads to perfect ruin.

I, for one, will weep many tears for the Republican Party for sticking a bazooka in its mouth and pulling the trigger. Sure, they’ll be tears of uncontrollable laughter, but hey, they’re still tears, right?

How the fuck else am I going to get my popcorn the exact level of saltiness I need to enjoy watching the worst people in the world destroy themselves?

Here is how to fight a war against a determined enemy, according to Donald Trump.

One, tell the enemy what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. At his cabinet meeting yesterday, Trump said for the 23^rd time, or maybe it was the 32^nd, that “we’ll be hitting them very hard,” referring to a planned bombing campaign for this weekend that will be joined by Israel for the first time in months. According to CBS News, Trump intends the bombing campaign to hit “energy infrastructure including power plants and refineries.” That little nugget of planning will enable Iran to double or even triple its defenses around such facilities, ensuring that it will be more difficult for the U.S. to carry out strikes on those targets.

Two, don’t bother with strategy, just blather. During the cabinet meeting, Trump was asked by a reporter about the chances for diplomacy. He answered, “I think we just want to win.” Aren’t we all glad he made that clear? Until now, I thought we had an entire naval fleet that has included five aircraft carriers and countless destroyers, as well as a force of 50,000 soldiers, cruising around the Indian Ocean because we had scheduled a game of beanbag toss with Iran. Now, however, Iran knows we mean business.

Three, tell the enemy for about the 11^th time that nothing less than “surrender” will bring the air attacks to a halt. That makes all the sense in the world, because it will strengthen the resolve of the Iranian regime, which has announced that under no condition will it surrender to the aggressor, which is us.

Four, put your faith in the former weekend host on Fox News you picked to run your military, because he has tattoos and he knows what it takes to win a war. At yesterday’s cabinet meeting, Hegseth told Trump that he relies on “great Americans here and all around the country and all around the world who are the core of what, uh, keep us safe. But in order to do that, you have to have a leader that’s willing to put them in a position to do it and that’s my takeaway, Mr. President, is, um, sort of three points. One, it takes courage; two, it takes restoring a spirit, which you have done; and third, it takes investment, and not just an investment, but a generational investment. And I think people miss that.” Now, that is just pure military genius. I mean, the man puts Stimson and Eisenhower and Marshall and Bradley to shame. They were pikers compared to Pete Hegseth, who knows that the way you win a war is to fire all the generals and admirals you had running the Army and Navy and Air Force and Marines and replace them with yes-men who are willing to do whatever you tell them. And, oh, make sure you fire all the inspector generals and the Judge Advocate Generals, so there won’t be anyone looking over your shoulder as you bomb the shit out of Iranian girls’ schools and people’s houses, killing, most recently, a father, mother, and toddler child with a 2,000 pound JDAM bomb dropped from an F-18 fighter jet on Qeshm Island off the coast of Iran.

Trump has been screaming his head off about “forever wars” and Joe Biden and George Bush and Barack Obama and the nuclear treaty with Iran he tore up during his first administration because…well, because it had been negotiated and put into effect by Democrats.

Now, the man who promised no new wars has stumbled his way into one that he cannot win because he has appointed the most incompetent defense secretary in the history of the United States, and he’s put a simpering toady in hilariously oversized Florsheim shoes in charge of the Department of State, which under normal administrations, would be in charge of negotiating a peace with an enemy that you cannot defeat.

Unsurprising is the word that comes to mind on a daily basis. What is that old aphorism, you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect to get a different result? Trump has turned the Strait of Hormuz into another Reflecting Pool project. Hire incompetents, give them a trillion dollars and hold your nose is Trump’s idea of how to fight a war.

Oh, I almost forgot the last thing you can’t forget if you’re going to bomb the enemy on a schedule you’ve given him in advance. Make sure you stop the bombing by the time Wall Street opens on Monday morning so the markets, and your own bottom line, don’t take too bad of a hit.

Can you imagine what the Iranian Republican Guard leadership thinks when they read that on CNN? That Trump pays more attention to his own trading account than he does to the war he started five months ago? If you listen closely, you can hear Iran’s generals cheering Trump’s every move. He’s handing them power over a major waterway that they had never before controlled. He’s tying them even closer to our enemy Russia and our economic rival, China. And he’s guaranteeing that Iran will dominate the Persian Gulf and international trade in oil and precious metals and gases such as helium for at least a generation, if not more.

If you’re Donald Trump, that’s how you fight a war: with your eyes closed and your head lolling and your hand forever in the till raking in the bucks.

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There is shrunken Trump seated between Rubio and Hegseth looking like a couple of unwilling pallbearers called at the last minute to serve at his funeral. The whole cabinet of losers, liars, and suck-ups was there Friday afternoon. Trump dragged them all the way out to Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin mountains, saddling the lot of them with the usual requirement to root around in their office drawers to come up with something ass-licky to say about the Fart-meister in Chief. It was pathetic. RFK Jr. bragged that he had been to Camp David before with his father and his uncle, who both “loved the place,” before taking a shot at Eisenhower for naming it after his grandson. President Kennedy, he contended, would have renamed it “Shangri-La” had he survived. Then he heaped praise on Trump for bringing down the cost of drugs at the end of the week that Trump imposed tariffs on foreign-made generics that will raise their prices 100 percent in 2028 and 200 percent a year later.

But who said facts are anywhere to be found at a Trump cabinet meeting? Certainly not the medically-certified genius who has lost count of the number of dementia tests he’s passed. Secretary Suck-aholic Hegseth got things off to a rip-roaring start. He had spent his week manipulating casualty figures to make it look like Trump was winning the war he kept bragging had “obliterated” Iran’s military – the same Iranian military that somehow keeps lobbing missiles and flying drones into U.S. bases all over the Middle East, so Hegseth couldn’t talk about that. Instead, Hegseth praised Trump, the showman, who he said had presided over “parades, 250 flyovers, the American people seeing and feeling their military in ways they have not in the past.” Hegseth took a breath, nearly popping the buttons on his cheap suit. “That’s spirit,” said the buffoon who is being taken to the cleaners by Iran’s Republican Guard.

But enough with the usual praise and puffery. Trump was eager to whine. Nothing is going right for him. He’s down in the polls. He’s losing in nearly every court he’s in – he lost E. Jean’s defamation case and had to pony up $5.8 mil. D.C. U.S. Attorney Box Wine had to pull her indictment of the guy they arrested and charged with felony destruction of government property for touching a sliver of loose bottom paint in the Reflecting Pool. In a court filing, she had to explain that it was the fault of the “botched” paint job, not vandals, that was responsible for the multi-million dollar clusterfuck that used to be one of the biggest tourist attractions on the Mall.

What’s really gotten under Trump’s loose jowly skin is how his attempt at immunity from tax audits and a terrorist slush fund has been stalled by his appointment of his chief-errand-boy and pimp-handler, Todd Blanche, to run Retribution Inc., which used to be called the Department of Justice. This week Trump announced that if Cornyn and Tillis, the two Republican senators he personally ran out of their jobs, continue to oppose Blanche’s nomination, he’ll just keep him on as Acting Attorney General until the next session of Congress when the two Republican hold-outs won’t be around to withhold their votes. “Todd Blanche is a very, very good man,” and Cornyn “has become a very angry person,” Trump explained.

He’s losing his grip. Judges in about half the states have ruled against the Department of Homeland Security for ICE excesses, phony prosecutions of protesters, individual immigrants Trump has personally taken an interest in deporting, grant funding for education, the environment, transportation projects – you name it. When Blanche’s U.S. Attorneys aren’t losing in court outright, they’re being sanctioned for court filings that are tardy, filled with misspelled words, and in one case, written with the help of an AI program that invented citations of court cases that didn’t exist.

Now he has gone back to the Supreme Court against E. Jean Carroll, this time to get them to either reverse the loss he was dealt by a New York jury that awarded her nearly $100 million in damages for his defamation and lies about her, or overturn the huge award against him. It’s hard to know what the Supreme Court will do – Trump is trying to use his freshly-awarded presidential immunity this time. But there are four women on the Supreme Court, including one appointed by Trump himself, who just might recognize Trump’s court maneuvers for what they are. He raped E. Jean the first time in a dressing room, and now he’s attempting to rape her in court filing after court filing.

Look at that photograph of Trump at his cabinet meeting at Camp David. He’s old. He’s frail. His weakness is showing up in a photograph, and it’s showing up in practically everything he tries to do. Democrat Roy Cooper is ahead by nine points in the race for Senate in North Carolina. James Talarico leads Paxton in Texas by five points in a recent poll. Trump is deeply underwater in polling on every issue from the economy to the war to inflation, even immigration.

He’s a sick man. It’s on his face. It’s in his garbled syntax. It’s in his gait. It was on display at gold-leafless Camp David.

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