John Casey

I was stumped.

On Wednesday, I watched Trump’s Cabinet meeting. I’m not only a glutton for punishment, but I will not be handing out compliments for a very long time.

Stunned, I have been mulling over what to write about that beyond-cringe meeting, trying to figure out what prompts middle-to-older-aged, white adults - educated, although… - suck up to a man like this.

I’ve been around and followed politics long enough to know that sycophancy is as old as licking George Washington’s revolutionary boots. I worked on Capitol Hill in the 1980s and 1990s, and believe me, members of Congress lived in self-constructed bubbles where staffers, lobbyists and hangers-on told them exactly what they wanted to hear.

But there is not a gross enough word that can even begin to describe what happened in the White House Cabinet Room on Wednesday, an over-the-top lesson in leeching that made your skin crawl, your mouth gape, your stomach churn, your ears melt, your eyes cross.

The sensation of watching it was a full-body blow of epic adulating proportions. And if you think I’m exaggerating, try and watch the whole thing as I did. But don’t watch it more than once.

Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler looked Donald Trump dead in the eyes and said, “Mr. President, you have made us a nation of builders again. You’re leading us to the greatest economy that the world has ever known… I hear it everywhere I go: ‘Please thank the president for putting us back on track. Thank you.’ They love you.”

They love you. Bleck!.Yuck! That is now part of the historical record. And I don’t know whether my eyes were crossed and I wasn’t seeing straight, but she looked like someone AI-generated not only her, but her words.

Speaking of bleck and yuck, there was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. When he opens his “manly” moronic motor-mouth, it’s akin to watching a blue whale dump 50 gallons of excrement on your head. His words are that abhorrent and that disgusting, and so hard to wash off.

He defecated praise on Trump’s renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, describing the maintenance efforts as "a great segue" and linked it to the Iran war.

What?

But then again, maybe Hegseth knows of what he speaks. Because Trump said that the reflecting pool was a “disgusting place,” and that crews had to pull "more than 10 dumpsters" of accumulated garbage and waste from it.

The reflecting pool sounds an awful lot like Hegseth.

Hours before the meeting, as if they knew the tragedy that was about to transpire, the New York Times ran an analysis article titled, “Trump is the Only Person Who Can Save America, According to His Cabinet.” If you haven’t read this, read it now.

It found that at least one in six sentences spoken by Cabinet members contains praise for Trump, attributes every administration success to him personally, or attacks Democrats. One in six sentences. Watch yesterday’s Cabinet meeting and you will see that come to life.

Six sentences go by fast, so your head will start to spin once your brain starts catching on. It’s almost like each Cabinet member goes five sentences, and then Trump pushes an electrical shock button, and that sixth sentence of praise is jolted out.

When you are watching, you have to keep reminding yourself that these are the people running the most powerful government on earth. And they spend a sixth of their time essentially writing pseudo-Hallmark cards to a man who eats McDonald’s everyday and calls people “piggy,” “dummy” and “scum” on social media.

This is a man who reportedly emits a bad odor. And if you believe the viral videos from yesterday — and other instances — did Trump have an accident in front of the White House after returning from his medical check-up?

Here’s what these people need to understand. You are making absolute fools of yourself and you're wasting your time and your careers tripping over yourselves and fighting each other in order to get a quick lick in on this man’s odorous derriere.

History is littered with the political corpses of people who kissed Donald Trump’s ring and got nothing but humiliation in return. Pam Bondi spent years fawning over this man. Gone. Chris Christie practically built a shrine to Trump after 2016. Trump mocked his weight publicly and called him a loser.

Even John Cornyn, a senator in his 70s who should have known better, genuflected before Trump and still got crushed in his primary by Ken Paxton, a man with one of the most scandal-ridden records in history.

Where do these people go when Trump is done with them? They end up as guests on NewsNation. They write books nobody reads. They show up on panels where the other panelists are also people Trump fired or humiliated.

Do they then try and kiss up to Sean Hannity, thinking that’s their way back into Toady Trumpland?

Earlier this year, The Bulwark writers Sam Stein and Andrew Eggers did what I did and watched an entire Cabinet meeting. They posed a straightforward question this week: “Do we think the Cabinet members have a side contest with each other over who can be the most over the top and obsequious in their praise of Trump at these meetings?”

In April, even conservative commentator Ann Coulter called out the “Kim Jong Il-style tributes” on display.

These North Korea-like meetings consist of a room full of 50 and 60-year-old adults, ostensibly educated, experienced, powerful people, performing like children competing for a gold star from a teacher who is more stupid than they are.

And now I’m going to take a shower and say the rosary to fumigate the pathetic, ego-stroking residue left by those spineless sycophants who ruined a perfectly good afternoon.

Donald Trump loves the words sleazebag and scumball, so much so that he’s surrounded himself with the very definition of those two offensive terms. And it’s hard to be more offensive than Texas GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton, unless you’re Donald Trump, of course.

Last night, Paxton, impeached, indicted, accused of bribery, and credibly alleged to have used the Texas Attorney General’s office to benefit a donor who was simultaneously employing the woman he was having an affair with, won the Republican Senate primary in Texas by a landslide.

He is now the face of the Republican Party’s 2026 midterm campaign. And if you want to understand just how far the GOP has fallen, just how morally and ethically hollowed out it has become, look at Ken Paxton.

Well, again, look at Trump first, because the GOP has now come full circle, putting up a guy who is as big a scumbag and sleazeball as Trump.

This is a man whose career reads like a mafioso rap sheet.

The scandal-plagued career of Paxton reads like someone dared crime writer John Grisham to pen fiction about every possible form of corruption into a single Southern Gothic crime lord. Bribery. Abuse of office. An extramarital affair. A wealthy donor allegedly employing his mistress as a favor.

That same donor allegedly bankrolled renovations on Paxton’s home while Paxton’s office did him favors in return. His own conservative staffers, Republicans, people who worked for him, were so alarmed they went to the FBI. Not Democrats. Not liberal activists. His own people. Four of them later sued him, and Paxton ended up apologizing and cutting a $3.3 million check.

Did I mention he did that with taxpayer money to make it go away? Paxton’s story reads less like a Grisham novel than a Stephen King horror tome.

And still, somehow, there was more. The Republican-controlled Texas House, again, his own party, his own state, had seen enough. They drew up 20 articles of impeachment and made him only the third officeholder in Texas’ nearly 200-year history to be impeached. Twenty articles.

The list of offenses was so long it needed its own table of contents. If we’re going to compare, I suppose Paxton’s list was short, given that Trump’s would entail volumes, like an encyclopedia set, if anyone knows what that is anymore.

Just like if anyone in the GOP knows what moral and ethical values are.

Paxton was ultimately acquitted by the Texas Senate, though that had absolutely nothing to do with his innocence and more to do with his chummy colleagues saving him.

And after all of it, Donald Trump looked at this man and called him a “true MAGA Warrior” worthy of the United States Senate.

This is what the bottom of the barrel looks like, and in light of slush funds, ballrooms, gas prices, the Iran war, Trump has now taken the GOP, and his “true MAGA Warriors,” about as far down as you can go.

The GOP has come full circle. The party that once screamed moral outrage about Bill Clinton over a lie about an affair has now enthusiastically nominated a man whose corruption scandals make Clinton’s look like … how do I put this … child’s play, and no pun intended whatsoever.

The party that used to run on “character counts” has now made Paxton the poster child of the new GOP candidate. The Republican Party in 2026 has decided that corruption, scandal, and ethical rot aren’t disqualifying. No, they’re practically credentials to be included in campaign ads, because Paxton’s scandals are the only thing he’s ever accomplished in public office.

Paxton isn’t an aberration. He is a reflection. He mirrors Donald Trump almost perfectly: the indictments brushed aside as political persecution, the abuse of office recast as fighting the establishment, the personal moral failures ignored by a base that has decided winning is the only virtue that matters.

The sanctimonious heathens that are Southern Christian conservatives view Paxton as a steadfast champion of religious liberty, the pro-life movement, and traditional family values, which means anti-LGBTQ+. Like Trump, Christians give Paxton a pass.

If you take this theory at face value, the only thing Paxton hasn’t done is kill anyone — well, women in Texas did die trying to get life-saving abortions, but then again, that’s okay for the religious right, so he gets another pass. It never ends.

Emulating Trump, Paxton watched all of this, took careful notes, and ran as a mini-me Trump in Texas and won. Why wouldn’t he? The party and its base taught him that none of it matters.

And — said with glee — Paxton’s ascension is devastating for Republicans in the general election. While Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024, Democrats believe they have a shot this year as his approval rating has dropped.

They have a candidate in James Talarico, who raised $27 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the largest-ever haul for a Senate candidate in any state in the first quarter of an election year.

Prediction markets now show Democrats with a 47% chance of winning the seat, up from 30% just a few months ago.

But honestly, whether Talarico turns Texas blue should be the least of Republicans’ concerns right now. Their bigger problem is that they just told every independent voter, every suburban woman, every soft Republican in the state of Texas that this is who they are.

Good for them! They deserve to be swallowed-up by the blue tsunami coming.

Ken Paxton is now a feature player in the GOP. He is what happens when a party follows Donald Trump and abandons every ethical standard imaginable. Paxton is the culmination of a decade-long race to the bottom.

The GOP made its bed. Now it gets to lie in it, right next to Ken Paxton. And I think I should stop there because that’s a dangerous and disgusting place to be.

The unofficial start to summer in the Northeast was a washout, cold, damp, murky, and gray. It was, in retrospect, the perfect meteorological metaphor for what Donald Trump is doing to nuclear negotiations with Iran: a drenching, dispiriting mess with no sun in sight.

While millions of Americans were dodging raindrops this Memorial Day weekend, Trump was being dodgy on Truth Social, contradicting himself over and over again, lurching between triumphant exaltations and terrorizing threats, showing his desperation and stupidity to a world that is watching, and not laughing.

Saturday: a peace deal was largely negotiated. Sunday: slow down, don’t rush. Monday: Iran will be in “great danger” if talks collapse. Three days, three completely incompatible postures.

What blew my mind apart on Saturday were the “breaking news” alerts exploding across my phone as the gullible media tripped over itself to declare that a peace deal was “imminent.” “Are you kidding me with this?” I said to no one in particular.

They based their reporting on one of Trump’s flimsy, historically lie-ridden Truth Social posts. I honestly didn’t know who was stupider, Trump or the media outlets breathlessly announcing that a deal was coming.

The media seemed as desperate for holiday weekend clicks as Trump is for a peace deal. This is a man drowning and flailing for anything within reach, and the media treated every erratic outburst as cause to interrupt a holiday weekend.

Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Iran has Trump in a vise, and it knows it. Since the astonishingly reckless decision to launch military operations against Iran on February 27, Trump has handed Tehran virtually everything it wanted without extracting anything of lasting value in return.

If Hollywood made a movie about what has happened since then, no one would believe it. It reminded me of a very serious and realistic friend who reluctantly agreed years ago to see the film Dumb and Dumber with me. He hated it. “People just aren’t that stupid,” he remarked.

I’ve been thinking about what he said all those years ago, so I texted him on Monday, reminding him, and asking what he thought about the Iran war.

“I was wrong,” he replied succinctly.

Trump’s utter stupidity never considered the following: the Iranian regime has survived. It has depleted American weapons stockpiles worth billions. It has forced the U.S. government to spend tens of billions of dollars. It has retained its uranium. It has preserved the bulk of its military arsenal. And it has discovered, with almost gleeful efficiency, that launching cheap drones while threatening to choke off the Strait of Hormuz is enough to send the world economy into a tailspin and Donald Trump into a tailspin of a panic attack.

Iran has not been defeated. Iran has been empowered. It has emerged from this conflict with arguably greater regional leverage than it had before. That is horrifying on every level. And Trump’s stupidity owns every line of it.

When I asked him for advice on a career dilemma I was having, my grandfather once told me that the most pathetic people in the world are those who are both stupid and desperate. It was as sage a piece of advice as I’ve ever received.

I’ve thought about that a lot this weekend too. Because right now, Donald Trump is the living embodiment of that description, and the stakes are infinitely higher than my little work snafu ever was. This isn’t a job situation gone sideways. This is war. And war is a lethal, dead-serious business.

What makes the current conflict even more alarming is the combination of the players at the negotiating table. You have undoubtedly the most untrustworthy man in American political history negotiating with one of the most untrustworthy regimes on earth. Put in terms Trump might understand: a scumbag dealing with sleazeballs.

The Iranian government has violated nearly every agreement it has entered into since seizing power in 1979. And Trump’s “deal-making” has proved that his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, is the biggest piece of fictionalized mythology ever written.

How will these two devious players ever reach a genuine agreement? The U.S. wants Iran to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Iran wants frozen assets released, sanctions lifted, and 30 to 60 days to “finalize details.” Right, and Rome was built in a day. More applicable, it took 20 months of intensive negotiations to finalize the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Obama/Iran nuclear agreement reached in July 2015.

Iran is simply running out the clock on a desperate president. And even Trump’s most hawkish Republican allies know it.

Senator Roger Wicker called the rumored 60-day ceasefire framework a “disaster” that would render everything achieved by Operation Epic Fury meaningless. Ted Cruz warned that allowing Iran to retain enrichment capabilities while halting military pressure would be a “catastrophic mistake.”

Lindsey Graham — stupid and desperate when it comes to anything related to Trump — said any deal that doesn’t permanently secure the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian aggression isn’t worth making. Senator Thom Tillis went on CNN and asked the obvious question no one in the administration wants to answer: if Iran’s defenses were truly “obliterated,” why are we letting them keep nuclear material?

Trump’s response to these critics? He called them “losers” on Truth Social.

There will never be a real deal between Trump and Iran. Mark these words. Iran will never surrender its nuclear program. It will never relinquish its newfound stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, not after realizing the leverage it now holds over the world economy.

Iran would rather burn the world down than watch itself slide back into irrelevance.

And Trump, desperate and stupid, lacks the patience and intellect to force meaningful concessions from a regime thrilled to have an ignorant American president exactly where it wants him.

What that means for the next two years is a world on tenterhooks: ships uncertain of safe passage, oil markets subject to Iranian whim, a nuclear program advancing behind a worthless ceasefire, and a president calling his critics un-American while overseeing one of the most genuinely un-American foreign policy catastrophes ever.

That is why treating Donald Trump as a credible source for breaking news about peace negotiations is stupid and desperate, and how a man so desperate and this stupid is not someone the world should trust to deliver peace.

I think Mike Johnson is one of the most loathsome human beings on the planet, and I have license to say anything I want about him. That’s because, as a gay man, Johnson has attacked me in more ways than I can count.

But this isn’t about my dislike of Johnson. Putting personal feelings aside, I can state that Johnson will go down as the worst Speaker of the House in American history for the damage he’s done to this country. Guaranteed.

And, given the way the tide is turning in Congress, Johnson may be history soon enough.

From the moment Johnson grabbed the gavel, he made a choice, and that choice was Donald Trump, every single time, without hesitation, dignity or the Christian spine he endlessly claims to possess.

What Johnson delivered was far from leadership. It was a masterclass in submission. His boot-licking devotion to Donald Trump became institutionalized, so complete and abject it strains belief that this man once took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States.

And now it’s coming back to bite him. Hard.

The war powers vote the House had to cancel before the Memorial Day break. The White House ballroom $1 billion boondoggle stalling out like a dilapidated Chevy on the House floor. And perhaps most grotesquely, Trump’s DOJ slush fund - $1.776 billion earmarked to compensate people Trump’s administration deemed wronged under Biden, including January 6 insurrectionists - is beginning to stink even to Republicans.

That’s because people like Michael Lindell of MyPillow infamy, Rudy Giuliani, and others who spent years lying through courtrooms and losing defamation judgments are ostensibly eligible for taxpayer dollars.

All while the rest of America struggles to fill up their tanks.

Mike Johnson is now the point man trying to force the war powers, ballroom and slush fund legislation through the House against a growing tide. Ever Trump’s loyal toady, he fled town in a hurry to avoid the embarrassing defeat of the war bill for starters.

If you recall, Johnson has disappeared before. He deliberately kept the chamber out of session to avoid seating newly elected Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva in order to block her from becoming the crucial 218th signature on the Epstein discharge petition.

So to bottom-line this, Johnson wants Trump to retain authority to wipe out a civilization without oversight while shielding him from scrutiny over Epstein.

This is what the self-proclaimed man of God chooses to champion.

Johnson is now trapped in a conundrum of his own making. As more Republicans begin pushing back, he must either address his caucus’s concerns or once again kowtow to Trump.

Either way, Johnson loses. Some pointed to the fact that Johnson skipped a White House meeting this week as a sign of defiance on his part. Maybe, but I doubt it because Trump removed Johnson’s spine two years ago. Was it a signal to placate the growing resentment in his caucus? Perhaps, but he always finds a way back to Donald.

Some House Republicans are waking up, embarrassingly late, to the reality that they surrendered Congress as a co-equal branch of government on January 20, 2025, and the country has been paying for it ever since.

And they did it with Johnson leading the way.

This change of heart, if you can call it that since the GOP has no heart, is driven less by principle than by panic. These members are looking at purple, swing and even red-district polling and freaking out. Trump’s poll numbers are sinking fast.

So are theirs, through guilt by association. That’s what happens to members of Congress who rubber-stamp Trump’s abhorrent legislation.

The midterms are coming, the biennial march toward self-preservation.

What does this mean for the wimpy Johnson? It means the votes he bent over backwards to deliver for Trump are now at risk of collapse. And when these measures fail on the House floor, because they will, Trump will need someone to blame.

And Johnson, having turned himself into a political Depends for Trump’s excesses while surrendering every shred of independence, has no leverage, and no base of his own. He is the perfect scapegoat, compliant enough to enable everything, weak enough to take the fall for it.

Trump will tear him apart just like he did the East Wing of the White House.

Johnson’s phony Christian faith won’t save him from the demonic Trump.

Johnson championed legislation that hurt vulnerable people, stripped protections from the poor and rewarded the powerful. He never once found the courage to say publicly and without equivocation that these things were wrong.

When our children and grandchildren read about this period in history, they’ll notice two recurring names. They will learn how America slid toward autocracy, how its global credibility eroded, how its institutions were destroyed by one man’s ego and the servility of those supposed to check him.

When that history is written, Mike Johnson’s name will be glued to Trump’s.

He will be remembered as a small man, small in so many ways, who had every opportunity to stand up and chose instead to kneel at Trump’s swollen legs.

Kissing up to Donald Trump has never ended well. The list of those tossed overboard is too long to recount here. Mike Johnson’s name will soon join the ranks of the meek and mindless.

The only remaining question is whether Johnson leaves on his own terms in January 2027 or gets shown the door sooner, by Trump losing patience, House Republicans finally reaching their limit, or voters in November 2026 who have had enough.

Either way, Mike Johnson will be relegated to the trash bin of history, where hollow sermons and moral cowardice decompose together.

I met David Letterman twice. Once when he first began his show, walking up 53rd Street. Such an approachable guy. And once again, after he’d left, at a Starbucks in my apartment building.

He said he remembered meeting me 30 years ago. Of course, he was kidding.

I love Dave, and was sad to see him go, and let out a meh when Stephen Colbert was named to replace him. But Colbert grew on me, and I find myself not only sad about his exit, but angry about it too.

CBS will tell you it was a business decision. Paramount will parrot that. The numbers, they’ll say. The shrinking late-night audience. The economics of a changing media landscape. Don’t believe a word of it.

I spent 30 years in corporate PR, and when they lay it on thick about all the reasons Colbert was cancelled, and The Late Show franchise with it, they are lying through their teeth. They cover one falsity with another, desperate to bury the truth.

Stephen Colbert didn’t lose his show because of the bogus claims by CBS. Donald Trump took it away from him, and away from us.

In doing so, Trump continues his systematic destruction of the one thing Americans have always used to survive their darkest political moments: the joke.

It really doesn’t need to be said, but Donald Trump is not funny. Not in any way that matters. He thinks he’s funny, like he thinks he’s always right, like he’s the greatest president, like he won in a landslide, like the Iran war will be over soon. If Trump thinks he’s funny, that’s a lie too.

Every president in modern memory has understood that self-deprecating humor is a form of leadership. It signals humanity, from the Irish wit of Reagan and Biden to the humor of every president in between.

My grandfather, the funniest person I ever met, said having a sense of humor was a sign of intelligence.

He was right. Trump’s lack of wit only validates his dim-wittedness.

Trump does not make fun of himself. Ever. His humor is a weapon aimed at people he despises. Reporters are “dummies” and “piggies.” His enemies are vermin, scumbags, or simply scum. Everything he does is not a setup for a punchline, but an actual punch in the face.

Think about the past few months. ICE raids tearing apart communities. January 6 insurrectionists eligible to be compensated from Justice Department funds. Death and destruction involving Iran and Venezuela. Casual talk of “wiping out” civilizations and bombing places back to the Stone Age.

Trump doesn’t calm fears. He eggs them on and feeds off them. Trump is constitutionally — pun intended — incapable of that.

So into that void step the late-night hosts. And now one of the best of them is gone.

Colbert was never just doing jokes. In my view, he was performing a public service, taking the daily avalanche of outrage and turning it into something bearable through laughter.

Late-night television used to be a war, with networks circling each other and hosts competing. Since Colbert’s exit was announced, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon have come together, recognizing the ironic seriousness of the moment.

And speaking of irony, we lost Barney Frank this week too. I keep coming back to that.

Frank was perennially the funniest person on Capitol Hill. He was brilliantly, bitingly funny. Arguably, his sense of humor helped make his coming out in the late 1980s more palatable and accepted.

I observed that from experience. I was always the class clown, the funniest guy in the room. I knew I was gay underneath, and when I came out, it was my humor people cited first. “You’re the funniest person I know,” was the standard response.

I say that with undiluted humility.

That’s why, as someone with humor, I’m unusually sad for another reason. There are no funny politicians anymore. Nobody in Washington is laughing. Everyone is pointing, accusing, outraged, and that includes Democrats, who have caught enough of Trump’s disease to forget how to be warm, how to invite people in.

Even Obama recently said Democrats need to stop being so easily offended over accidental slights and remember that people ultimately want to enjoy their lives.

As he put it, they need to stop being a “buzzkill.”

Trump has made the atmosphere of American political life airless, joyless, and mean.

Colbert’s exit isn’t about television. It’s about a president who has made it professionally dangerous to mock him. That’s why a mentalist was chosen to perform at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump didn’t want anyone telling jokes about him.

Because he is ridiculous, and he knows it, and he cannot bear for anyone else to know it too.

We used to be able to laugh at our leaders, but not in the way we laugh at Trump, because there is no humor around him. We laugh at a buffoon who is subversively crushing our sense of humor.

This week Barney Frank, who knew wit was a form of wisdom, left us. And Stephen Colbert, who knew the monologue was a form of resistance, was pushed out the door.

The mood is heavy. It starts at the top, with a killjoy of a man who has never once laughed at himself, and who would rather America be full of fear than full of laughter.

Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, a provocateur libertarian and professional pain-in-the-butt to House leadership and Donald Trump, lost his primary yesterday. That was a foregone conclusion given how Trump’s endorsements have won primaries almost across the board.

Those endorsements are going to come back and haunt the GOP in November, but that’s another story for another time.

Back to Massie. He is now a lame duck. And with 36 Republican House members and seven Republican senators already choosing not to seek reelection, there is a growing class of Republicans in Congress with nothing left to lose.

So here’s my question for all of them: What the hell are you waiting for? Grow some and turn your cloakroom whispers about Trump into loud screams to remove him from office. Finally!

Call them the Massies and Cassidys, the GOP members who are done, departing, or already in the crosshairs of a MAGA primary. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his primary last week, just voted with Democrats on a resolution to end Trump’s war on Iran, a disastrous military engagement launched without congressional authorization — which is to say illegally.

Massie has been a lonely voice of dissent for years. These are men who clearly see what’s happening. Massie knows what’s in the hearts of some of these departing members. They just won’t say it out loud, not loudly enough, not together, and not in a way that actually matters.

Massie in the House and Cassidy in the Senate can help change that now, before it’s too late.

Trump is quickly going off the rails and barreling toward autocracy at the speed of light. Let’s tick through what this president has done in recent weeks, because the pace of brazen lawbreaking has become staggering.

Start with the nearly $1.8 billion slush fund, money being made available to Trump’s friends, donors, and yes, January 6 insurrectionists. This is an illegal and stunning grift conducted in broad daylight, a corrupt reward system so far-fetched it would embarrass a banana republic dictator.

And just as unbelievable, the Department of Justice's move to permanently shield Donald Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS audits essentially means they don’t pay taxes. How can GOP members sleep at night knowing something like this?

Just for these, Trump could be impeached.

Then there are the outrageous stock trades. Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter. That’s more than some financial firms make in a quarter. It is breathtakingly corrupt.

These trades total tens of millions of dollars and involve major companies with dealings before his administration and companies he’s overtly endorsed from the Oval Office. Wall Street insiders were stunned. Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, called it “an insane amount of trades,” adding that it looked more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” than a personal account.

Trump scooped up shares of AI software maker Palantir weeks before he lauded the stock by name on Truth Social. He purchased Nvidia stock just a week before Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and bought AMD stock just before the Commerce Department approved AMD chip sales to China.

Just for this, Trump could be impeached.

Then there’s the war with Iran, launched singularly and illegally by Trump without congressional authorization, in violation of the War Powers Act. Cassidy saw it. He voted to push back. Where are the rest of the dozens of Republicans who are on their way out the door?

Just for this, Trump could be impeached.

And let’s not forget the construction of the White House ballroom, which could cost taxpayers close to a billion dollars. That too is illegal, at least in my view and in the view of many others, including a federal judge who ruled the project likely requires congressional approval.

Again, just for this, Trump could be impeached.

Or consider the collapse of alliances with democratic partners across Europe and Asia, systematically torched by a president who openly coddles thugs like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin while treating NATO allies like garbage.

For traditional Republican members of Congress, who value a strong diplomacy-driven foreign policy, this has to be something they want to rectify immediately. Every day is a lost opportunity to mend fences.

Trump’s behavior is accelerating, and as he approaches 80, questions about his mental acuity, his stability, and his grip on reality grow with every passing day.

His overall health is openly discussed by people around him.

Republicans in Congress have been whispering about all of this. In private. Off the record. Never on camera, never on the House and Senate floors. The country deserves to know how members really feel.

Yes, the conventional Beltway wisdom says wait for the midterms, wait for Democrats to take back the House and Senate, then impeach. And maybe that’s how it goes. But given the speed at which Trump is becoming a king, why not now?

Seven Republican senators are walking out the door. If even a fraction of them found their nerve, found each other, and found Democratic partners willing to move, impeachment proceedings could begin now.

Republican congressional leadership has spent years rolling over, playing dead, and handing Trump everything he’s demanded. It would be the biggest middle finger to this ongoing spineless accommodation that Washington has seen in a generation.

And if they want to be selfish about it, they can dump Trump now in an effort to save their party’s candidates around the country who will face the wrath of moderate Republicans and independent voters.

The call of history is on the side of the Massies and Cassidys. They have nothing left to lose politically. They have everything to gain morally. And the country, whatever is left of its democratic institutions, is running out of time.

Step up. Speak out. Do the right thing while you still can.

Donald Trump flew to Beijing last week and bent his wobbly knee to Xi Jinping, a man who runs a surveillance state, disappears dissidents, and has made no secret of his desire to absorb Taiwan by force.

Trump came home with nothing. No agreements. No concessions. No trade framework. Not a single thing to show for the trip except a declaration that it was an “honor” to be Xi Jinping’s friend.

Xi played Trump for the fool he is. And Putin, arriving in Beijing this week, will raise a glass right alongside Xi, a celebratory toast to Greenland and a galoot.

To think about what these two men say about Trump behind closed doors? Well, to say you'd love to be a fly on the wall when that happens would be an understatement.

The two most dangerous autocrats on the planet have undoubtedly and assuredly reached a conclusion, and they’ve reached it with considerable authority, that the American president is a useful idiot. Not an adversary. Not even a detour.

He is a gift from heaven that keeps on giving, and for the next two years, that should terrify the hell out of everyone who is paying attention.

Xi wants Taiwan. In a weekend interview that received nowhere near enough attention, Trump essentially shrugged at the island’s fate, breaking with decades of bipartisan American commitment to its defense. There is no question that Trump now most likely considers it ok if Xi invades Taiwan.

And Xi heard that loud and clear. The question was never whether China had the ambition to take Taiwan. The question was always whether the cost would be too high. Trump just answered it. And Taiwanese are no doubt alarmed at Trump’s capitulation.

Putin wants Eastern Europe. Trump pulled U.S. troops out of Poland and Germany, the very bulwark that has kept Russian tanks from rolling west since the Cold War ended. Putin is salivating. That’s too understated. He’s foaming at the mouth. He’s been running his Ukraine war with reckless abandon, and Trump just told him don’t let the U.S. stand in your way.

Last week, Russia launched the largest drone attack on Kyiv since the war started.

Ukraine is the test case, and it tells you everything. Analysts largely agree that Ukraine has been punching well above its weight, degrading Russian military capability at relatively low cost to the West. But Trump has convinced himself, and is working detestably hard to convince the rest of us, that Ukraine is losing and should simply accept Putin’s terms.

He is parroting Putin’s framing of the war, and he always has been. Trump doesn’t assess through analysis. He assesses through admiration.

And now Xi is getting that same admiration over Taiwan.

Unlike the doofus and shortsighted Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin think in terms of decades and spheres of influence. They are students of history, and they are watching American power abdicate, putting a gleam in their eyes.

Trump isn’t just giving them an opening, he’s alarmingly laying out a welcome mat and asking them to fire away at what remains of the post-World War II order. It’s hard to fathom that one singularly stupid person can demolish what took decades to accomplish

Meanwhile, Trump is laser-focused on Greenland. On Monday, as the U.S. envoy arrived in the country, the administration began demanding a major operational role in running the island. Trump genuinely believes a continent-sized Arctic landmass, or as he calls it “a piece of ice,” is the geopolitical prize of the century.

Xi and Putin are doubling over with laughter. Trump covets ice, and they crawl over their borders.

In Trump’s deluded thinking, he’s playing the same game these men are playing. He thinks he can invade just like they do — read Iran. He thinks flattery is diplomacy — that will be the second, gleeful toast by Xi and Putin, i.e. what a schmuck.

He thinks calling Xi his “friend” and Putin a strong leader earns him their respect, restraint, and a favorable deal somewhere down the road. Those are Xi and Putin’s third, fourth and fifth toasts. It will be a long night.

Xi and Putin are giggling over their U.S. counterpart who genuinely believes strongmen can be his friends. They will high-five over how pliable their 79-year old American “partner” is. They will sketch out what’s now possible in a world where the United States president publicly shrugs at Taiwan and pulls troops from NATO’s eastern flank in the same month he threatens to annex an ally’s territory.

The Cold War ended because the West held together to stop expansionism. What Trump is doing, with stunning speed and imbecility, is making broken borders the new reality. The predictive bet of Xi moving on Taiwan and Putin pushing into Eastern Europe has shifted dramatically in the past four months.

Safe to say, that in the coming months, the world will be less safer than it is right now.

While Xi and Putin are marching toward domination. Trump is obsessing over Greenland. And world order is on the brink of catastrophe.

If you’ve ever been to Pearl Harbor, you know that the area around the USS Arizona is revered. It is not a recreational dive site. It’s not some playground for pampered, spoiled, and pompous buffoons.

It is a military cemetery. Hundreds of American sailors and Marines are entombed beneath its rusted hull at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, where they have rested since Japan bombed and sank the battleship on December 7, 1941.

The wreck is accessible only by boat. Recreational diving is generally prohibited. Rare exceptions are made for marine archaeologists, National Park Service survey crews, and a ceremonial diver interring the remains of an Arizona survivor who wanted to spend eternity beside his shipmates.

And then there is America’s most despised frat-boy, Kash Patel.

The miserable excuse for an FBI director, already loathed for joy-riding on government jets and crashing the Olympic hockey locker room, thought he could brazenly slip beneath the waters of the USS Arizona Memorial last August for an exclusive underwater tour of the sunken battleship.

Government emails obtained by the Associated Press through a public records request show that military officials coordinated logistics and personnel for what they internally called a “VIP snorkel.”

Marine veteran Hack Albertson, who dives the Arizona annually with the Paralyzed Veterans of America, put it plainly: “It’s like having a bachelor party at a church. It’s hallowed ground. It needs to be treated with the solemnity it deserves.”

Imagine being family members of Pearl Harbor survivors, loved ones who have never been permitted to swim at the site where their fathers died, and learning this week that the arrogant, spoiled Patel got a curated underwater tourism experience above their loved ones’ corpses.

Who does Patel think he is? If I were one of those family members, I’d be calling for his bulbous head.

While his behavior is vulgar and disgusting, his latest offense should come as no surprise. Just a week ago, we learned about Patel’s personally branded liquor bottles. He’s the FBI director, for God’s sake. The last thing he should be doing is handing out booze.

Then came word that the FBI had launched a criminal leak investigation targeting the journalist at The Atlantic who wrote a well-sourced article about his drinking.

That account alleged that Patel’s security staff, unable to reach him after an evening of drinking, had to breach a door to find him, and that his meetings were regularly being rescheduled later in the day because he was pathetically hungover.

Patel called it all lies and filed a $250 million defamation suit. Then he showed up to a Senate hearing this week and proved every word of the characterization true through his sheer fool behavior alone.

When Sen. Chris Van Hollen pressed him on the Atlantic report, Patel declared he would “not be tarnished by baseless allegations,” then accused Van Hollen of being “the only individual drinking on the taxpayer’s dime.”

The utter contempt and disdain the director of the FBI showed for a United States senator is the same contempt he showed for our World War II veterans.

But Patel’s sacrilegious snorkeling is just par for the course when it comes to Trump officials disrespecting the military. Pete Hegseth, again a miserable excuse for a defense secretary, is running a celebrity concierge service at the Pentagon.

Kid Rock, yet again, a miserable excuse for a musician, kicked off his latest concert tour on May 1 in Dallas with a promo video showing him leaving a private jet and entering an Army helicopter. An AH-64 Apache attack helicopter costs roughly $7,000 per hour to fly.

That wasn’t the only time the washed-up crooner took advantage of the U.S. military. In March, the U.S. Army investigated a low-altitude flyoverow-altitude flyover by two Apaches over Kid Rock’s Tennessee home, which he bragged about on social media. He said it wasn’t the first time that happened.

Again, the incident was an expensive misuse of military resources, and the star-struck Hegseth — who gets star-struck by Kid Rock? —quickly intervened to halt the investigation and overturn the aircrew’s suspension.

Patel and Hegseth’s shenanigans involving the military also include the White House’s response to the Iran war. Shockingly, Trump’s comms lackeys mixed real strike footage with clips from Grand Theft Auto, Wii Sports, and Call of Duty.

Since the war in Iran began, the official White House account has spliced real military footage with clips from Iron Man, Top Gun, and video games, including Wii Sports and Call of Duty.

All of this amounts to moral obscenity, framing the risking of human lives and deaths as something to brag about, toy with, and swim around.

Robert Ritchie, Kid Rock’s real name, is the son of a wealthy Michigan auto dealer and he never wore a uniform. Neither has Patel. And Hegseth, who did serve, should know better than to diminish the stature of the troops.

The fans scraping together nearly $5 a gallon for gas while driving home from Kid Rock’s show include military families. The families who cannot swim to their grandfathers’ graves have to watch a conceited moron desecrate those graves.

And the barely-adult 22-year-old soldier in Iran, who is being asked to possibly take a real bullet, gets reduced to a character in a video game.

Our military, which is nobly serving us, is being ill-served — and disrespected — by its leaders.

The White House is bizarrely floating the idea of Donald Trump pardoning 250 people on June 14th, a number sinisterly tied to America’s 250th anniversary, a date that also happens to fall on Flag Day.

And what a stunning coincidence that June 14th is also the day Donald J. Trump turns 80 years old.

The idea that this is supposedly to celebrate America’s birthday is foolish. This is about Trump’s birthday, and his absolute, all-consuming terror of it. Terror at turning 80, becoming an octogenarian, and terrorized by the thought that it will become a media obsession.

So Trump has devised a distraction, like he does with everything else. When bad news closes in, Trump not only tries to pivot, he also detonates metaphorical Tomahawk missiles. He floods the zone with something so audacious, so jaw-dropping, so impossible to look away from, that the original story drowns in the chaos.

We all know the pattern by now of late-night social media tirades, wacky AI-generated images of himself, bizarre foreign policy lurches. He manufactures something so ridiculous it drowns out whatever inconvenient truth the media might fixate on.

Most notably, perhaps, Trump has gone nuts trying to change the subject of the Epstein files, using aggressive social media boloney, media attacks, and deflection to distract from damaging headlines.

And to hide Epstein, the Iran war quagmire and rising gas prices, Trump had the Department of Defense release UFO files. It was indicative of how Trump does things so outlandish to change the subject from negative news.

So what better way to bury all of it — especially the news most personally offensive to Trump, his 80th birthday — than 250 pardons dropped like a bomb on the national conversation?

Think about how far he would go to make that happen. Who are the 250? Could it be Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of FTX, serving a 25-year prison sentence for stealing over $8 billion from customers? Or, Jho Low, the alleged mastermind of the $1MDB fraud, one of the largest financial crimes in modern history, sentenced in absentia to 10 years by a Kuwaiti court and facing charges in the U.S., and still at large?

While we’re at it, and more furiously, why not Sean Combs? Or Ghislaine Maxwell? The sheer audacity alone would consume every cable news hour on June 14. And that, of course, is entirely the point.

You might say, “Oh, he’d never pardon Combs or Maxwell.” Wanna make a bet? On his first day back in office, he pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists, people convicted of violent assaults on law enforcement and on the democratic process itself.

Those massive J6 pardons were a harbinger. He went on to pardon scores of fraudsters, those convicted of public corruption, political allies, and gallingly, people like the reality show stars the Chrisleys.

He has reportedly discussed pardons for his own staff before leaving office. Trump could even pardon his sons Eric and Donald Jr. who have been busier than a one-armed paperhanger grifting through overt financial dealings, and cashing in on their dad’s presidency.

If Trump is capable of pardoning the people who attacked the Capitol on his behalf, there is no logical limit to what he might do on his 80th birthday when the entire press corps is watching. Pre-pardoning Eric and Don would cause outrage, and Trump would explain it away by saying, “Biden did it,” referring to the pardon of Hunter Biden.

Trump is acutely aware that 80 is looming because, very recently, he has been desperately trying to convince America, and perhaps himself, that he is not old.

Trump went to The Villages in Florida, the world’s largest retirement community, and stood in front of a crowd of senior citizens just two weeks ago and told them, “I don’t happen to be a senior. I’m much younger than you. I’m a much younger man than you. Look at you old guys. Wouldn’t you like to be my age? Young, vital, vibrant.”

Then came the fitness event on May 5th in the Oval Office, when RFK Jr. was rattling off cabinet members he considered thoroughbreds capable of a 50-mile hike before Trump interrupted him.

“What about me? You didn’t mention my name. I could do it,” the pathetic old man Trump sniffed.

Kennedy, ever the obedient sycophant, scrambled to include his boss, saying, “This guy walks nine miles a day on a golf course every weekend, so he could do it in a breeze.”

Trump’s response was revealing: “When I’m not using a cart.”

And at a maternal healthcare event in the Oval Office on Monday, when the subject of aging came up, Trump offered this gem: “I feel the same as I did 50 years ago. It’s crazy.” He then added: “Maybe junk food is good and the other food is no good.”

So, in the span of two weeks, Trump has bragged about feeling 29, exercising from a golf cart, and crediting McDonald’s for his vitality.

Mmm, the old man doth protest too much, methinks, about the implications of turning 80.

Because turning 80 is the one thing Trump cannot spin, pardon, or post his way out of. He can put his face on Mount Rushmore in an AI image. He can rage-post at 3 a.m. He can call himself “young, vital, vibrant” to a crowd of retirees who can see perfectly well what’s in front of them, like the rest of America.

But on June 14, 2026, Donald John Trump will be 80 years old, and there isn’t a distraction unhinged enough to make America forget that.

Well, except perhaps 250 pardons.

Imagine the uproar. Imagine the wall-to-wall coverage of who made the list and who didn’t. Imagine the debates among the punditry, the outrage, the speculation about Maxwell, about Combs, about the Trump boys or anyone else who’s on that list and shouldn’t be.

Now imagine how much of that day’s coverage barely mentions that Trump turns 80.

Donald Trump prepared for his summit meeting in Beijing by catching up on his sleep on Monday behind the Resolute Desk, since he spends his nights frantically posting on Truth Social.

And while many Americans have become numb to Trump’s online behavior, what must China’s President Xi Jinping think as he watches the president of the United States spiral publicly in real time?

Between 10:14 p.m. Monday and just after 1:12 a.m. Tuesday morning, Trump posted 55 times, roughly once every three minutes, in a frenzy that included accusing Barack Obama of plotting a coup, calling him “the most DEMONIC force in American politics,” and sharing calls for the arrest of Obama, Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, and special prosecutor Jack Smith.

Xi has also undoubtedly studied all of Trump’s previous overnight posting binges, including that horrific AI-generated image portraying Trump as Jesus Christ. It bears repeating, what must the intellectual and shrewd Xi think about that depiction?

The pattern is impossible to miss. A Daily Beast analysis found that during a recent month marked by tensions with Iran and rising gas prices, Trump managed at least eight hours of sleep on only five nights.

Meanwhile, Xi sleeps soundly. He does not personally use social media. He has no X account. His communications are filtered through state media and tightly controlled government messaging.

If you want to understand the difference between Trump and Xi, and why Beijing believes the balance of power is shifting, start there.

That contrast explains nearly everything about the summit this week. Trump arrived badly needing a foreign policy victory while facing domestic dissatisfaction over inflation, rising energy costs, and an increasingly unpopular conflict with Iran.

He also badly needs a good night’s sleep. He is no doubt jet lagged. And Xi will surely do his best to wear Trump down.

Trump brought a delegation of billionaire CEOs, including Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, and Kelly Ortberg, as though corporate sycophants can compensate for Trump’s weaknesses.

Xi is not impressed by Trump’s entourage, because Xi has his own billionaire set. He is only impressed by how much leverage he has over Trump.

Since the leaders’ last meeting, the center of gravity in U.S.-China relations has shifted away from tariffs toward something far more consequential: China’s almost total control over rare earth minerals and magnet supply chains essential to modern military and industrial production.

When Beijing threatened to restrict those exports last year, Trump backed down. Xi won. Again.

From Beijing’s perspective, Trump has been a gift. His decisions have handed China advantages it could scarcely have imagined a decade ago.

As is well known by now, Trump scrapped Biden-era clean energy subsidies, allowing China to widen its technological lead. He imposed tariffs on U.S. allies, including Vietnam and India, pushing them closer to Beijing.

He repeatedly bashes NATO while lavishing praise toward Russia and China. Vladimir Putin and Xi must have quite a time laughing and trading stories about Trump’s stupidity.

And now with this quagmire in Iran, which risks draining American military resources for years, Xi is fully aware of yet another American vulnerability.

Xi has spent years telling Communist Party officials that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” Trump’s presidency has only reinforced that belief.

Now add the image of an American president visibly struggling to stay awake in public while repeatedly flinging nonsense onTruth Social in the middle of the night.

Xi sees a sleep-deprived president posting conspiracy theories late into the night, then struggling to stay alert during daytime events right before he boarded Air Force One Tuesday for the meeting with Xi.

Do you think this is how Xi prepared for his summit with Trump?

Chinese intelligence services do not ignore these details. They catalogue them. And instead of one-page memos that Trump only reads, officials provide Xi with all the details because he’s smart enough to digest the dirt on Donald.

Xi’s goal at this summit is not necessarily to strike a historic agreement. It is to reinforce Beijing’s narrative that China represents stability while the United States projects chaos. Trump will no doubt be busy posting about the “love” between him and Xi.

As for Xi, he will roll his eyes while plotting how to keep rolling over Trump.

That contrast will only gain traction worldwide. It will strengthen Xi’s reputation as a disciplined statesman standing opposite an erratic America.

Beijing’s strategy is simple: avoid major concessions, preserve stability, and buy time to strengthen China’s economy and supply chains while reducing dependence on the United States.

Back home, most Americans are focused on inflation, immigration raids, political warfare, redistricting, gas prices, and the midterm election.

But while America looks inward, the larger strategic contest shaping the global order is unfolding in Beijing between a Chinese leader who thinks in decades and an American president eager to wail about his supposed triumphs on Truth Social.

Chinese officials increasingly describe the United States as an exhausted superpower weakened by debt, polarization, fractured alliances, and endless military entanglements.

Xi will smile for the cameras and offer symbolic agreements while carefully observing the man seated, predictably on the edge of his seat, across from him.

When the summit ends, Xi will return to the long-term project he has pursued for years, positioning China to replace the United States as the world’s dominant power.

And Trump will go back to sleepless nights and erratic outbursts on Truth Social.

Anyone who was a fan of the Real World series on MTV remembers Sean Duffy in the Boston house. And you also remember the whole premise of the show was watching young strangers stop being polite and start getting real.

Decades later, as Transportation Secretary, he’s back in front of the reality cameras, this time as a dad. In a five-part YouTube docuseries, he’s crisscrossing America with his wife and nine children in what amounts to a corporate-sponsored family road trip.

You know, that’s what all of us do. When we can’t find the money to go on vacation because of high gas prices, we reach out to corporate sponsors.

For the Duffy family vacation, Boeing, Shell, United Airlines, and Toyota kicked in to pay for it. All of them are regulated by Duffy’s own department.

It just proves that the seediness in the Trump administration goes far beyond the Oval Office.

The stunning conflict of interest is mind-boggling enough on its own. But what makes it truly insulting is the backdrop for the launch of the series. Americans are canceling vacations, rationing their groceries, and trying to overcome the soaring cost of a tank of gas.

And no one on the Fortune 500 list is jumping at the chance to help them.

Sean Duffy, meanwhile, is burning through jet fuel courtesy of an airline his department is supposed to police. And he’s joyously filling up his tank and sliding in a card that doesn’t have his name on it.

And, to add insult to injury, he was on this family soiree while TSA agents went without paychecks and the airline industry unraveled around him.

Meanwhile, major problems still confront the airlines while Duffy plugs his documentary series. Spirit Airlines collapsed, wiping out 17,000 jobs. A United jet shed a wheel onto a bakery truck. A Frontier plane killed a man on a Denver runway. Air traffic controllers are stretched thin.

But in the vanity-obsessed environment of the Trump administration, Duffy isn’t an outlier. He is one of the gang. Team Trump has transformed self-promotion into a full-time occupation and treated actual jobs as a side hustle.

We all know how former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem set the trend. She burned through $220 million in taxpayer funds on an ad campaign that featured her riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore.

This was happening while the government was shutting down and federal workers weren’t being paid.

The production budget included $20,000 for the horse and nearly $4,000 for hair and makeup. What exactly Noem’s wind-blown hair had to do with protecting the homeland was never explained.

Throughout her “starring” role at DHS, Noem took great pains to do her best impression of Miss Kitty Russell from the longtime CBS series Gunsmoke. Only those of us of a certain age will remember the hard-edged Miss Kitty.

And right behind her, though not on a horse but on a fan bike, is RFK Jr., who filmed a 90-second shirtless workout video with Kid Rock — that alone makes your stomach churn. Kennedy was clad in those inappropriate-for-the-gym jeans, with the video ending in a hot tub while they gulped glasses of whole milk. Just typing that made me gag.

Any actual fitness professional watching that clip would have laughed, and anyone who is a fitness freak couldn’t figure out what the point of the bizarre video was.

But that’s beside the point, because while this video was apparently meant to convey something about American health, measles was spreading across the country and vaccines were being canceled at Kennedy’s direct instruction.

The hot tub session had nothing to do with public health, unless you were trying to get someone to intentionally vomit.

And the hits keep coming. FBI Director Kash Patel has been handing out personalized bottles of bourbon engraved with “Ka$h Patel FBI Director” — the dollar sign is apparently intentional. Meanwhile, The Atlantic has reported that his drinking has become a genuine security concern inside the bureau, affecting departmental operations.

His response to those reports? Ordering polygraph tests on FBI agents to identify whoever is leaking news of his drinking to the press. For Patel, it’s intoxication over investigation, and interrogation while imbibing.

The worst part about all of this is that Patel gives priority to partying as he arguably holds the most sober job in government. How those two coexist is mystifying.

Another job requiring complete seriousness is Secretary of Defense. Pete Hegseth, who oversees the most powerful military on earth, seems incapable of getting out of the picture frame when he’s in a gym.

It’s all conceited workout videos that include bench-pressing with his son, pull-up challenges with the always-jeans-clad RFK Jr., and pumping weights with new recruits half his age. His job is to run the Pentagon.

He’s not a trainer at Equinox. He’s the Secretary of Defense.

What unites all of them — the horse shoots, the hot tubs, the bourbon bottles, the YouTube docuseries, and the barbells — is downright contempt for the jobs they were hired to do and the people those jobs are supposed to serve. That would be us, of course, the American taxpayer.

These are not jobs that deserve more than cameo appearances. These are Cabinet secretaries and, in Patel’s case, an intelligence leader running critical federal agencies during a period of economic stress and war.

Real Americans are making real sacrifices while the people responsible for their welfare are ready for their close-ups.

The original Real World tagline asked what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. What a question for Trump and his advisers! They’ve never gotten real, and they’re by no means being polite to the American taxpayer.

When you hire reality stars, podcasters, and conspiracy theorists to run the government, you get exactly what you pay for: a government that treats itself as stars on video and treats we the people as an audience.

Donald Trump has a problem with the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. For over 150 years, its French Second Empire granite has stood elegantly next to the White House. I’ve been in that building numerous times. To me and many others, it’s an architectural marvel.

But Trump looks at that historic stone and sees a flaw. He wants it painted white, which is his wish for everything else to make America great again.

At a projected taxpayer cost of more than $7.5 million, Trump is attempting to literally whitewash one of the preeminent buildings in our nation’s capital. Architects and preservationists warn that painting granite is a death sentence for the stone since it traps moisture, accelerates decay, and locks taxpayers into an endless cycle of repainting. A lawsuit has already been filed citing “irreparable harm.”

But this paint job is more than just something that’s on the surface. It’s emblematic and metaphoric of something much deeper — Trump’s continued pattern of whitewashing America.

In March of last year, Trump signed an executive order chillingly titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” targeting the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of African American History and Culture for promoting what he called “divisive race-centered ideology.”

The administration’s official position is that the documented history of Black Americans, slavery, segregation, the long struggle for civil rights, is an “ideology” that needs correction. Yes, correction by a man with a history littered with racism.

And that man makes no attempt to hide his bigotry. Trump has characterized the Smithsonian's portrayal of slavery and the "downtrodden" as overly negative and "horrible." In August 2025, he criticized the Institution for being "OUT OF CONTROL," claiming it focuses too much on "how bad Slavery was."

Trump thinks that our nation’s history should be all about white success — like the fabricated success he had as a spoiled, billionaire who thinks racists are “very fine people.”

Under the order, eight Washington-based Smithsonian museums were placed under White House review, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of American History, and the National Museum of the American Indian.

Their offense? Telling the truth about the country.

The purge has already produced results. The Smithsonian’s diversity office was shuttered. Historical material disappeared from government websites. The Air Force briefly removed educational content about the Tuskegee Airmen. They are the men who flew combat missions for a country that still segregated them. Apparently even that history was considered too “divisive” to teach.

The symbolism kept coming. The National Park Service removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from its list of free-admission days for 2026 while adding Flag Day, which happens to coincide with Trump’s birthday.

It’s utterly disgusting what Trump has been doing to purge Black history from U.S. history. But Trump has another white supremacist accomplice helping to fulfill his “whites only” dram.

And that is the U.S. Supreme Court, which added to its own monochromic wish in a 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC. That decision overturned decades of precedent allowing universities to consider race in admissions.

The conservative and supremacist supermajority declared that “colorblindness” required the country to make believe that centuries of racial inequity no longer mattered.

It was appalling, catastrophic and a harbinger.

The results were immediate and entirely predictable. Princeton’s Black student enrollment fell to levels not seen since the 1960s. Harvard’s Black freshman enrollment dropped from 18 percent to 14 percent in a single year. At UNC, Black enrollment fell from 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent.

Now, after the court dispensed with Blacks in colleges, they’re coming for them at the ballot box..

Late last month, the Court issued its 6-3 opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, dramatically weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. If we thought the college admissions ruling was bad, things just got so much worse.

In a provocative and spot-on recent column, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie summed up the consequence of the Court’s actions in a visceral way. He argues that Roberts' voting rights rulings, specifically regarding Louisiana v. Callais, substitute the "blunt instrument of the white robe and hood" with the "polite, clinical language of judicial neutrality".

The KKK-wanna-be Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion rewrote the legal framework courts have used for four decades to evaluate racial vote dilution claims, making it significantly harder for voters of color to prevail.

Justice Elena Kagan warned bluntly in dissent that the ruling leaves Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” She was right.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry announced the day after the ruling that he was suspending the state’s May 16 primary so lawmakers could redraw congressional maps, despite mail ballots already having been sent to overseas and early voters.

Then the Court went nuclear, burning the proverbial wooden cross. The conservative majority bypassed its own standard waiting period and finalized the ruling just days after issuing it.

Now, red states are clamoring to undo majority-Black legislative districts.

The fallout is barbaric, because it will reshape congressional representation nationwide before the 2026 midterms. If these redistricting plans pass, it will disenfranchise Black voters to a degree not seen since 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

This country is being white washed to an almost unprecedented degree.

The racism that exists subtly behind the EEOB paint job, and more overtly with the Smithsonian purge, the affirmative action ban, and the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is fundamentally the same. The layered, multiracial diversity of America is being treated as a scourge that needs to be erased and painted over.

For six decades, the Voting Rights Act was the backbone of federal protection against racial discrimination in elections. The Court has now painted over that.

And while the country is being symbolically whitewashed, its history sanitized, its campuses resegregated, its districts redrawn, a literal coat of white paint might be rolled across the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

That symmetry is not accidental And the consequences are extraordinarily damaging.

I went for a run earlier this week under a wind advisory. The gusts were brutal, the kind that make you question the lengths you will go to avoid the treadmill.

At one point I passed a construction site, and hovering around it was a thick, low-hanging cloud of dirt. When a gust hit, it didn’t drift, it exploded. It rained all over me. It got up in my face. It stung my eyes. It crackled in my ears. It caked on my wet shirt like paste.

By the time I got home, I regretted my disdain for running inside on the treadmill.

And after I showered and sat down, I couldn’t stop thinking: this is exactly what Donald Trump is like.

He’s dirty. Comprehensively, constitutionally, irreversibly dirty. He has a dirty mouth. A dirty mind and hands, “grab ’em by ...” he told Billy Bush in 2005. They were words a jury would later consider a kind of personal confession when they found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll.

And according to Carroll, he doesn’t “smell good” just like dirt.

He has a dirty name. It’s one he’s now smeared across the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace, federal buildings up and down the capital, American currency, national park passes, and, soon on United States passports.

In fact, his name was so dirty in New York City that they took it off buildings.

He has a dirty face, plastered with dirty orange cosmetics. He has dirty hands used for the grabbing, and now also because they are covered with another cosmetic meant to hide bruises. He gets no sympathy from me for that.

His whole persona works exactly like that construction-site dirt in a wind advisory. He gets in your face. The image of him stings your eyes. He crackles incessantly in your ears, from Truth Social, from behind the Resolute Desk, from the tarmac, from every rally.

He coats everything he touches and doesn’t wash out easily.

And on Thursday, he showed up at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for what was supposed to be a photo op for his so-called “beautification” project, painting the pool an “American flag blue,” and proceeded to do what he always does: make everything dirtier just by being there.

When ABC News senior White House correspondent Rachel Scott asked him the entirely reasonable question of why he was focused on renovation projects while a war in Iran raged and gas prices were soaring, Trump did not answer her. He aimed a dirty insult at her.

“You probably don’t see dirt, but I do,” he told her. Then, more pointedly: “You can understand dirt, maybe better than I can, baby, but I don’t allow it.”

Just typing those words makes me feel filthy.

A racially charged, condescending gut punch to Scott, certainly, although she is as resilient as they come, but also to anyone listening to his mudslinging. As he walked away, a hot mic caught him apparently calling her a vulgar misogynistic slur and dismissing her as “a horror show.”

Trump was right that someone at that reflecting pool on Thursday night understood dirt intimately. It was him.

Trump’s first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape during their 1990 divorce proceedings, and at least two dozen women have accused him of sexual assault, harassment, or misconduct dating back to the 1970s.

But his treatment of Black journalists, especially women, is uniquely sickening and reflects exactly what a dirty, disgusting pig Trump is.

He called CNN’s Abby Phillip’s questions “stupid.” He viciously labeled veteran White House correspondent April Ryan a “loser” and “very nasty.” He accused PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor of asking a “racist question” when she pressed him on white nationalism. He called Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television.” He had already labeled Scott “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place” back in December.

Thursday was simply the latest example of Trump using Black women as targets for his mudslinging.

He’s also slinging mud all over Washington, defacing the Kennedy Center and national park passes, replacing images of the very nature those parks were created to protect. And the ways he has dirtied the White House are too numerous to mention, but the dirt where the East Wing once stood is a reminder of the ruinous effects of the dirt that is Trump.

Starting in July, his soiled visage will appear in U.S. passports. His grimy signature, which was reportedly used to represent pubic hair in a Jeffrey Epstein birthday note, will smudge paper currency.

That filthy face is on commemorative $1 coins. His name is on the Institute of Peace. His banners hang from the Departments of Labor, Justice, and Agriculture. He even named a class of battleships after himself.

Everywhere Trump goes, he leaves a film of himself on everything. Just like dirt.

When he looked at Rachel Scott, who is a truly brilliant, fearless reporter who asks him every uncomfortable question she needs to ask without skipping a beat, and told her she understood dirt better than he did, he might have been telling the truth.

Here’s why: she has been covering Trump consistently since the 2020 presidential campaign. Her job involves reporting on a man who is dirt. She goes to work every day, asks her questions, and gets pelted with mud for it, from the dirt-in-chief.

She and her White House press colleagues have the dirtiest job in Washington, even dirtier than the construction workers ripping up the East Wing.

Scott knows what it’s like to have dirt sting your eyes and crackle in your ears and cake onto you.

Only one person standing at that reflecting pool on Thursday night had spent a lifetime generating, spreading, and wallowing in dirt. Only one of them woke up the next morning still filthy.

And it wasn’t Rachel Scott.

I have newlywed friends in their 20s who recently bought a small house and then added spacious dining and family rooms. When I jokingly asked how they could afford such lavish renovations, the husband was quick to reply, “Her dad paid. When it comes to his baby girl, he spares no expense.”

When I heard the news yesterday that Senate Republicans proposed a $1 billion, taxpayer-funded, plan to “secure” Trump’s ballroom, I thought of my happy, well-housed friends. Because when it comes to their baby girl, the GOP Congress gives Trump everything desired.

Republican lawmakers have largely abandoned their constitutional role as a check on the executive branch, effectively granting baby girl Trump a mandate to govern by fiat. That doesn’t mean buying their baby girl an actual Fiat, but instead granting permission to illegally accept the world’s most luxurious jet from Qatar, and recently described as “notably opulent” and valued at approximately $400 million.

Coincidentally, the jet carries roughly the same price tag as Trump’s “privately” funded ballroom, which clearly is no longer the case. Don’t be fooled by the term “security.” That money is going toward construction, guaranteed

So what becomes of the $400 million in private donations for the ballroom? Trump’s private bank account will continue to bulge at the seams.

The GOP’s surrender to baby girl Trump is most evident in the Senate’s rubber-stamping of controversial and highly, highly unqualified Cabinet secretaries (Way too many to list here), along with the use of the “nuclear option” to bypass traditional rules and confirm over 100 executive branch nominees as a single bloc. All of them are surely unqualified as well.

By allowing the administration to bypass oversight and dismantle federal agencies without resistance, leadership like Speaker Mike Johnson has explicitly signaled that the legislative role is now one of capitulation rather than deliberation, prioritizing baby girl loyalty over doing what’s right and abiding by the law.

Congressional GOP members are sparing no expense or rule to give baby girl everything desired.

The most dangerous example, of course, is the GOP’s refusal to enforce the War Powers Act as the 60-day deadline for military action in Iran passed on May 1, 2026. The safety and security of U.S. troops come second to pleasing baby girl.

Despite the conflict resulting in American casualties and billions in costs, Republican leaders like Senate Majority Leader John Thune have deferred to the White House’s legally dubious claim that a temporary ceasefire “terminated” the war, thus resetting the clock on congressional approval.

This pattern of capitulation also extends to massive tax cuts through the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which only benefits the spoiled and rich friends of baby girl Trump.

And, yesterday. Just wow. The goings on in the Oval Office also showed how baby girl Trump is not only spoiled in wealth and finery, but in adulation and praise. In one of the most laughable moments in recent memory, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another grotesque gift to baby girl, spoke about reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test (that is a whole other story), praising the physical stamina of the cabinet and stating many could complete a 50-mile hike.

When RFK Jr. did not immediately mention baby girl Trump, the interruption came quickly: “What about me? You didn’t mention my name.” RFK Jr. responded pathetically, claiming Trump could complete the hike because “this guy walks nine miles a day…on the golf course every weekend.”

I’m sorry, but there are no images of Trump walking a course. That is too strenuous for baby girl, who is always, always pictured in a golf cart wearing frumpy clothing.

Yesterday’s photo-op announcement looked like one of Trump’s Cabinet meetings that devolve into televised displays of sycophancy, where high-ranking officials humiliate themselves with flattery for their petulant, sleepy, baby girl.

Whether it is Attorney General Pam Bondi’s hyperbolic claim that the president saved the lives of 75% of the population, or Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer marveling at a banner of Trump’s “big, beautiful face” - baby girl is a pretty girl - outside the Labor Department, the pattern of adulation is sickeningly unmistakable.

But alas, baby girl Trump is prickly. Despite the coddling from Bondi and Chavez-DeRemer, baby girl grew fussy and asked them to leave the gilded castle. That means they won’t be attending the ribbon-cutting for the lavish, $1 billion taxpayer-financed ballroom. Their flattery was for naught.

And baby girl was particularly naughty yesterday, showing off a potty mouth in front of schoolchildren surrounding baby girl’s playpen, or what used to be called the resolute desk.

In a jarring display of repulsiveness, baby girl Trump was potty-mouthed, turning a fitness ceremony into a venue for R-rated language, lecturing a room of children on the “sick” realities of nuclear war and railing against transgender athletes and “mutilation” in a rambling that felt like a scene from an offensive Quentin Tarantino movie, and not suitable for an actual baby girl.

Thankfully, my friend whose father paid for home renovations isn’t a spoiled brat. But many children who are excessively indulged grow into insufferable adults. Clearly, Trump’s parents, the loathsome Fred and Mary, were overindulgent with luxuries for their baby girl son.

Baby girl is turning 80 next month and remains as peevish, irritable, and pampered as ever. There has been little change since the days of the bone-spur boo-boo.

So for those who weren’t treated like a baby girl as children, or as adults, and who understand the value of humility and hard work, it’s time to add another expense to already stretched budgets strained by escalating gas and grocery prices.

We will have to make room to pay for baby girl Trump’s new ballroom, while cutting back everywhere else.

Based on the latest dreadful poll numbers for Donald Trump, it appears that his once-diehard MAGA base might be splitting at the seams like Trump’s cankle-filled socks.

Trump is hanging by a thread as the untouchable golden idol of the red-hatted MAGA devotees, but that gold aura now only exists in his gauche Oval Office. He has spent much of the second year of his second term reneging on his “Make America Great Again” agenda.

He is in the throes of betraying the promises that got him elected. No new wars that go on forever? There’s one in Iran that shows no signs of stopping. Gas prices under control? Tell that to the guy filling up his F-150 pickup truck that now costs an astonishing $160.

The Epstein files? Trump’s pushing all kinds of craziness on Truth Social so those files get buried. Bringing down inflation? Ha. The joke’s on you, MAGA, and they’re beginning to realize it.

Trump’s poll numbers are slipping fast. He has alienated parts of his own coalition. Democrats are overperforming in special elections by margins not seen in years. A majority of Americans, including a notable share of Republicans, now say he’s not mentally fit to serve.

And yet he keeps escalating, seemingly indifferent to the damage he’s leaving behind, and detached from what comes after him.

If that’s the case, there needs to be a serious reckoning about the survivability of MAGA, because the signs point to ruin.

Look at what’s happening to Turning Point USA, the youth army that Charlie Kirk built into one of conservatism’s most powerful organizing machines. After Kirk’s assassination last September, the organization has struggled to hold itself together. When Vice President JD Vance headlined a recent event in Athens, Georgia, in a venue built for thousands, the crowd was a fraction of capacity.

Erika Kirk, who took over as CEO after her husband’s death, has overseen sweeping layoffs, with more than 60 staffers cut in what insiders described as a purge. Turning Point may be a canary in the coal mine for institutions built to sustain MAGA that are now showing signs of fracture.

That may be a preview of what’s coming to MAGA itself.

The question is whether this discontent can coalesce into something meaningful before 2028. And when you look at the roster of potential successors, the answer should worry Republican strategists.

JD Vance? The base has never fully embraced him. He feels more like an imposter when it comes to speaking the language of MAGA. He shares one quality with Trump, egomania. But to the base, Trump’s is playful, while Vance’s is irritating.

Marco Rubio? To the America First crowd, he remains tied to the establishment they spent a decade trying to tear down. If Vance is an imposter, Rubio is an affront. Even slurping up Trump’s Kool-Aid isn’t enough to quench MAGA’s thirst.

So who’s left?

Right now, there’s only one person who embodies Trump’s lunacy while espousing his original MAGA ethos, and that’s Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Greene began her congressional career as a fiercely loyal Trump ally. But tension emerged when Trump tried to sideline her, reportedly dismissing her chances of winning higher office.

She responded by doing something almost no one in Trump world would dare, she fought back. Greene escalated her criticism of his focus on foreign policy over domestic priorities and questioned his reluctance to release the Epstein documents.

She has openly suggested that she, not Trump, might better represent the “America First” agenda.

That was evident in her speech at the Ron Paul Institute over the weekend. She declared “MAGA is dead” and a “lie,” accused Trump of initiating an “unprovoked” war in Iran, and called his actions “evil.” She also alleged that Trump threatened her family after she pushed for the release of Epstein files and accused his administration of serving foreign interests.

Greene is positioning herself as someone willing to say what others won’t, channeling the same anti-elite anger that fueled Trump’s rise.

While Trump deflects or obfuscates on issues like Epstein or gas prices, Greene tears into them. She frames herself as aligned with the attitudes many in the movement feel. She is, in effect, out-MAGAing Trump.

Granted, her current political standing is weak. She has resigned from Congress. Her poll numbers in Georgia are poor, and in a traditional general election she would be a risky candidate at best.

But those numbers reflect the present moment, not necessarily the movement’s future. And the future may belong to whoever can still speak its emotionally anger-charged language. And given her history, no one does that more viscerally than Greene, especially when she feels wronged.

In that way, Greene, impulsive, combustible, unfiltered, still emulates Trump. Rubio and Vance could never do what Trump and Greene do and survive politically. Every wild outburst reinforces her image as someone unafraid of the system MAGA voters distrust.

If the next two years bring gridlock, investigations, or electoral setbacks, including the possibility of Democrats retaking Congress, that turmoil will only strengthen Greene. Every hearing, every subpoena, every stalled working-class initiative becomes evidence for her argument that the system is broken and only confrontation works.

And when the movement finally moves beyond Trump, it won’t choose the safest option. It will choose the figure who most convincingly channels its anger and affinity for the bizarre.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a literal and figurative wild-card for 2028, and she clearly isn’t the most reasonable choice for Republicans.

However, right now? Well, she’s the obvious one.