Trump is allegedly meeting with aides right now to decide whether to agree to the latest cease fire deal with Iran. The catch is that it’s not clear to me if Iran has agreed to it. Al Jazeera reported earlier today that Iran hadn’t agreed to anything. Want to take bets that Trump will decide the “deal” isn’t good enough yet?

Also as I was typing, a judge temporarily halted the closing of the Kennedy Center and ordered that Trump’s name must be removed from the building. The judge said “the board’s decision to add President Donald Trump’s name to the center was unlawful and ordered that it be removed from the building and its website.”

This morning a judge temporarily blocked the creation of the $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that Trump plans to use to reward his minions.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia paused any action on the fund while the case proceeds on an expedited briefing schedule that she issued simultaneously. She set a June 12 hearing for arguments on issuing an injunction in the case brought by a group that includes a former Jan. 6 prosecutor, Common Cause, and the National Abortion Federation.

In pressing pause, Brinkema delineated in her order exactly what she doesn’t want happening between now and next month’s hearing. She barred the administration “from taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund.”

I think it’s likely the court will kill this beast. But then it will go to the Supreme Court.

I haven’t written nearly enough about all the grift and self-dealing going on in the Maladministration. But Jen Psaki gave a good update on what’s going on last night, so here’s a video.

Perhaps there is no harsher gauge of the sorry state of Trump’s presidency than this: Yesterday the White House released names of the featured artists scheduled to perform at Trump’s 4th of July festival on the National Mall. Among those artists was (were?) Milli Vanilli. I’m serious. I’m not sure this is the original Milli Vanilli, but that’s the name on the program. (Update: Only one of the pair is still alive, and he’s assembled a band with the same name, but it’s not the same act.)

And today Milli Vanilli and several other people on the program announced they won’t be performing. Most of them said they had no idea that this was a White House event when they agreed to it, and they bailed because they won’t be associated with Trump. Most of these artists I didn’t recognize, but I’m reading a lot of them were big in the 1990s. The only performers whose names I recognized who haven’t dropped out are Vanilla Ice and Garth Brooks.

Yesterday Josh Marshal posted Trump’s Weakness Is Becoming the Political Story of the Moment.  In brief, Trump’s calculated stunts and tough guy act are losing their effectiveness.

We’re seeing this now because the evidence in front of us has become so overwhelming. On another level, though, his political weakness has taken the juice out of his constant razzmatazz of political domination — the stunts, the takedowns, the cartoonish public choreography, the ritual slayings of former allies. Trump has always used these spectacles of power to keep alive the idea that he always has the last say, that he’s always the strongest, toughest guy in the room. He punishes; others endure, as sure as gravity pulls objects down rather than up. But the scale of the unpopularity and political weakness is just too great. They’ve reached a critical mass where the whole carnival of power isn’t resonating in the same way, or maybe not at all. The change is both being driven by and driving his deteriorating hold on Capitol Hill. These stunts and antics are a kind of ideational gerrymandering, aimed at holding perceptions of Trump’s power — and thus to a real degree the reality of his power — in place. But like an electoral gerrymander, in the face of sufficient unpopularity they become brittle and can break suddenly. And that’s what appears to be happening.

Trump is unpopular, and popular culture can be cruel. The hard-core base is still with him, but a whole lot of other people who voted for him in 2024 now consider him to be a bad joke. And Trump lacks the self-awareness to turn that around.

Allegedly we’re getting close to a peace deal again.

U.S. officials are closing in on an agreement with Iran that could extend the cease-fire, lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and set the table for more substantive talks, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions.

The “memorandum of understanding” still needs approval from President Trump and Iran has not yet confirmed any commitments. Details of it emerged on Thursday after the fragile cease-fire between the United States and Iran was shaken by military skirmishes this week, and after Mr. Trump asserted that he felt no political pressure to quickly achieve a peace deal.

This sounds like what was predicted — the deal would involve the U.S. backing off and the strait being opened, but there would be only continued talks involving Iran’s nuclear fuel. But Trump seems to be trying hard to not appear to be to eager. But see The TACO Equilibrium by Rogé Karma at The Atlantic.

For the past three months, the global oil market seems to have been operating under the assumption that, before too long, the Strait of Hormuz will reopen and oil will start flowing again.

That assumption is rooted in a deeper underlying belief: that Trump will inevitably back down once the economic pain gets high enough. This is the so-called TACO theory of Trump’s decision making, as in “Trump Always Chickens Out.” “The market has correctly realized there’s an audience of one who will determine the outcome of this, and that’s Trump,” Arnab Datta, a managing director at the think tank Employ America who specializes in energy markets, told me. “Among traders, the assumption is that the pain can only get so high before Trump retreats.”

That logic turns out to be dangerously circular. Prices are low because investors expect Trump to end the war before prices get too high; but because prices are low, Trump faces less pressure to end the war. In fact, the president seems to have figured out that he can calm the oil markets simply by gesturing at the prospect of a peace deal every so often. Of course, a peace deal or a new cease-fire could still be announced at any moment. But the dynamic between Trump and the markets—call it the TACO equilibrium—is what has kept the war going longer than almost anyone expected.

I can’t even imagine what is going on in Trump’s head here, other than he  wants to avoid looking like a loser. Meanwhile, one of his most recent projects is spending taxpayer dollars to cover some bronze statues in D.C. with gold leaf. Like I said, he has no self-awareness.

Do see Paul Krugman, The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities. He addresses the phenomenon of Trump worship; the hard core base who even now can’t see what a loser Trump is.

Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6 extremistsRepublicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.

The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this?

The comment was followed by a photo of Bush looking studly in a flight suit. I’ll spare you. Krugman continues, “And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.”

During the Watergate scandal there was a lot of wagon-circling around Richard Nixon, as I recall, but nothing like the adoration offered to Reagan or the deification of Trump. So I’m going to postulate that this need to find a heroic figure who will save us from [fill in the blank — scary minorities? libtards? vegetarians who do yoga?] is something coming from the U.S. Right that I don’t think was around so intensely in earlier times. McCarthyism came pretty close, though.

The social psychologists tell us that conservatives value party loyalty more than liberals do, and that’s a factor, but what’s going on with Trump is not just loyalty. It really is a cult of personality with no basis in objective reality.

And then beyond the base we have the elected officials and Supreme Court judges who bend the Constitution and sometimes their own prior opinions to give Trump more power and more protection from the consequences of his incompetence. Whether they do this because they are in the cult, or because they are afraid of the cult, or because John Roberts’ head lives in an alternative universe, I do not know.

The recent pushback from some Republicans against the slush fund and tax money for the ballroom gives me hope that a few are beginning to break away. And today the South Carolina Senate killed the redistricting attempt that would have eliminated Rep. James Clyburn’s seat. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend.

Krugman concludes,

The point is that the dire state we’re in — the leader of the free world has turned against freedom, the greatest power the world has ever known is self-immolating before our eyes — isn’t just a matter of Donald Trump’s personal failings. It’s the culmination of decades of right-wing sabotage of everything that made American great.

That much is certainly true, and IMO this has roots in the “pseudo conservatives” Richard Hofstadter used to write about. I’m not sure what to do about it, though.

Other good stuff to read – see Tax Me If You Can by Jeffrey Winters at Mother Jones, about the growing oligarchy in the U.S. and Paul Waldman at The Cross Section, Trump is Haunted by Barack Obama. I especially recommend The Hard Truth My Party Needs to Face by Sen. Chris Van Hollen at the New York Times. the Hard Truth is that “The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” And this has to stop.

I’m not seeing anything new about Iran since this morning’s performative strikes by Trump. The word for the day, boys and girls, is quagmire.

For the past three or four days Trump has been teasing a new “deal” that would end the Iran War he started. Since there was silence from Tehran I wasn’t taking it seriously. Today Iran is saying no deal is ‘imminent,’ which I take to mean Tehran has no interest in making any concessions.

Instead of an arc de triomphe, Trump should be building an arche de la défaite. (I do want to talk to whoever is in charge of French as to why “defeat” is a feminine noun but “triumph” is masculine.)

Last week  Robert Kagan published a piece in The Atlantic headlined Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender. It begins:

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”

And then a it later he writes,

Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.

For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.

Kagan goes on to say that Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz is already becoming “normalized,” and several nations are negotiating with Iran about how they can get their ships safely through the strait. And I’d already read this before Trump started teasing that there was about to be a deal, so I was more interested in what Tehran did. And it’s no deal. They are telling Trump those are our terms, take it or leave it.

A couple of days ago Trump was posting that “An Agreement has been largely negotiated.” Just hours later he said he would not “rush into a deal.” Obviously, there was no deal. And today we know there’s no Agreement, capitalized or not. Marco Rubio said a deal is still possible. Trump is threatening fire and brimstone if a deal doesn’t happen soon. I take it Tehran didn’t give him something he could call a “win.”  Talks are continuing, however,but it may be the only “win” Trump can get is an agreement to keep talks about Iran’s nuclear capabilities open a bit longer. No agreement, mind, just talking.

Yesterday David Sanger and Tyler Pager wrote in the New York Times,

The temporary agreement that the Trump administration announced with Iran this weekend isn’t a peace deal. It isn’t a nuclear deal. It isn’t a missile deal.

Those may yet come — perhaps in a few months, though a senior United States official said there was no agreed time limit for nuclear talks, or perhaps far longer if the history of negotiations with Iran holds. But for now, Mr. Trump has described an arrangement that could extend a cease-fire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, relieving the greatest energy disruption in modern times.

And it’s being said Bibi Netanyahu’s hair is on fire at the thought the U.S. might withdraw. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we’re quite there yet.

There are some in the Republican party and among Trump supporters (example) who still think Trump can “win” if he drops more bombs, or something. And he’s getting an earful from some of those people now. Tom Nichols, one of my favorites at The Atlantic, writes Trump’s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat. He describes what the war hawks are saying.

Many of those most alarmed about what Trump might end up accepting to get out of this dead-end conflict in Iran are not his critics, but his supporters. Trump’s enablers may not have access to the details of an agreement, but they’re clearly worried: Senators Lindsey Graham, Roger Wicker, and Ted Cruz were all posting expressions of shock and dismay on social media. Graham said that any deal that caves to Iran “makes one wonder why the war started to begin with”; Wicker said that a possible 60-day cease-fire would be a “disaster.” Cruz gently suggested that the tsar does not know what his devious boyars are up to, describing the deal as “being pushed by some voices in the administration.”

Even Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, posted a long screed warning Trump not to make a deal. “I know you want to get out of this mess,” he said. He then counseled the president to “give it some thought.” Trump’s former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo weighed in as well, comparing the possible outline of a deal to the kind of thing Barack Obama’s team might have come up when designing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and warning that it could mean that America would end up paying “the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world.” 

So Trump is being pulled in two different directions now. But there’s more. There’s so much more. There are “Trump Loses War” commentaries bursting out all over the Web. See, for example, Phillips O’Brien, There Is Only One Remaining Question–How Badly Has The USA Lost This War?

How did we get here? Well, other than giving in to Iran, Trump’s only options were, first, to either wait a long time for the US blockade to do so much damage to the Iranian economy that the Iranian government would soften its demands or, second, to escalate dramatically by returning to the direct use of military force.

The problem is that neither of these options were likely to achieve anything better. The Iranian government seemed more than set to outlast the blockade, knowing that upcoming US elections were going to force Trump’s hand and as for the military option—that had already failed had revealed how desperate Trump was not to use ground troops.

The bottom line is that Trump has no viable options to force Tehran to give him anything. He never did. My only question now is — does he get that yet? David Frum, in Why Trump Lost, points mostly to Trump’s many character and other flaws — his arrogance, his recklessness, his gullibility. Paul Krugman is not a military guy, but in Donald Trump’s Ego-Driven “Excursion” Has Crashed Into Reality he makes much the same case. It was an unwinnable war. What career military are left in the Pentagon knew that, but Trump and his people didn’t believe them. “And it’s reasonable to infer that any officers who tried to warn of the dangers were treated as defeatists and silenced,” Krugman writes. Arrogance, recklessness, etc. Krugman continues,

Finally, success in modern war depends crucially on out-thinking one’s enemies. But MAGA is all about deprecating hard thinking and valorizing belligerent ignorance.

On Saturday Hegseth addressed the graduating class at West Point. In war, he declared, “you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.” He congratulated the cadets on being “fit, not fat.” Despite humiliating failure, Hegseth still has his job — and is still asserting that eliminating DEI wins wars and that bulging biceps can beat drones.

Somebody should put posters up at the Pentagon saying THINK FIRST. FLEX LATER.

There may be a few more twists and turns in this plot before we get to the dénouement — maybe we can erect an arch for that — but at this point IMO a big humiliation for Trump is inevitable. I’ll let David Frum have the last word.

Trump’s vision of the presidency is authoritarian and kleptocratic: Issue orders, grab money, luxuriate in flattery, erect monuments to oneself. That’s no way to lead a nation through the hazards and difficulties of war. Now the war is ending on disadvantageous terms for the United States. Trump’s old methods will be turned to a new task: trying to deceive the American people and the world into believing that the war he lost was really a big win, the biggest ever, so big you cannot believe it. He’s likely to discover that, indeed, nobody does believe it.

Tuesday update: As Robert Kagan predicted (see above), Trump has initiated some performative strikes in Iran to try to shake the regime loose from its position. It won’t work.

Democrats are in widespread agreement about something — that the DNC “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential election released yesterday is a mess. It’s full of typos and doesn’t explain anything. I tried skimming through the thing and decided it wasn’t worth it, since it seemed more interested in reviewing the last 20 years of politics than looking hard at 2024. It’s so bad some people are calling for DNC Chair Ken Martin to resign.

According to Politico, the only people who liked it are the bleeping centrists.

Prominent centrist groups that argue the party has drifted too far to the left found validation in the report.

“Ken Martin’s autopsy of the autopsy was excellent!” said Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist WelcomePAC. “After spending a decade accepting all edits from every progressive interest group, better to just delete all DNC strategy docs and admit we need to start from scratch. Admitting incompetence is much better than denial.”

Jonathan Cowan, president of center-left group Third Way, suggested the report was shelved because it would anger progressives. “I think it’s very clear why this report was buried, because as it says in the opening, it calls for Democrats to return to the vital center,” Cowan said. “Now I understand why a lot of very Twitter-friendly, super liberal DNC staff didn’t want this to come out.”

Naturally, this makes me hate the report I haven’t read even more.

As soon as the autopsy was released (or possibly leaked; it doesn’t seem to have been finished) I started seeing alerts that the word “Gaza” doesn’t appear in it anywhere. It also leaves out any mention of Joe Biden’s decision to run again, which led to the last-minute switch to Kamala Harris as the front runner.

Then the “Strength in Numbers” guy, G. Elliott Morris, wrote a post headlined The real reason Democrats lost in 2024 that is worth reading. After dismissing the autopsy as “a lot of pundit conventional wisdom” he wrote,

But the biggest problem is that the autopsy straight up ignores the major reasons Harris lost in 2024. Yes, it’s bad enough that the report doesn’t mention that party bosses failed to coordinate an early exit for Joe Biden, who was too unpopular to win. And there is no mention of Israel/Gaza, low turnout in the cities, and nothing on Harris’s race or gender. But this is a data-driven site, so I want to really focus in on what the numbers can tell us.

When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost — and the reason I am going to explore here, at this website, it being a data-driven website — is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome. This is curiously missing from its main diagnosis. The word “inflation” isn’t mentioned in the autopsy a single time (except in the context of inflation-adjusted ad spending).

He then presents a lot of data, with a chart I don’t entirely understand, that argues you could pretty much have predicted the last several presidential elections based on two factors. “Political scientists have been pointing out for decades that you can predict presidential elections reasonably well using just two pieces of information: how voters feel about the incumbent president, and how voters feel about the economy,” he wrote.

I confess I didn’t pick up on the discontent about the economy in 2024, since it seemed to be coming mostly from the Right. I’m not sure most Americans realized that the post-Covid inflation was a global phenomenon that Biden didn’t cause. And I knew that bringing down inflation isn’t easy, especially bringing down inflation without causing a recession. And Biden, with the help of the Federal Reserve board, was doing it masterfully. In October 2024 The Economist really did call the U.S. economy the envy of the world. But I guess not that many voters read The Economist. They weren’t seeing enough improvement fast enough, so they put Trump in charge.

And it’s also the case that I had no idea how frail Joe Biden had become until that June 2024 debate. But surely other people had seen it. To those who now say that Kamala Harris ran a bad campaign, G. Elliott Morris  writes that she actually did a bit better than the data predicted. “In a sense, then, the surprise of the election is that Harris did as well as she did, considering the prevailing factors against her,” Morris wrote. But it might be that by 2024 the die was cast.

Regarding Gaza, I have read that the the Muslim vote did tip Michigan to Trump, after several Muslim leaders foolishly endorsed Trump. I wonder what they think of those endorsements now. Whether Gaza made any real difference in any other state I do not know; possibly not.

I have noticed there is a subset of Democratic activists for whom Gaza is The Only Legitimate Issue, however.

I’m watching the primary campaigns in my congressional district, NY 17, for the House seat currently held by Republican Mike Lawler. There are three front-runners for the Democratic nomination, all women. I don’t have a sense that any one of these is the favorite. But the arguments for and against these candidates in social media boil down to “We have to vote for X because she’s the most electable, as the others are too far left” versus “We have to vote for Y because she’s the only one not taking money from pro-Israel groups.” What I’m not hearing is how any of these candidates stand on the economy and health care. Lawler made a lot of noise last year about how  he wasn’t going to vote to cut Medicaid and other safety net programs, and then he voted to cut Medicaid and the other programs. Hello? .

And as much as I hate what’s happening in Gaza, the Gaza purists are starting to annoy me as much as the centrism worshipers.

In other news:

Tulsi Gabbard is out as National Security Director. No big surprise. Reuters is reporting that she was pushed into resigning, but that story is behind a paywall.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is in the news again. This is the Associated Press:

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a human smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, finding that the Justice Department’s pursuit of criminal charges was designed to punish him for challenging his mistaken deportation to El Salvador last year.

The ruling amounted to an extraordinary rebuke of a Justice Department that under President Donald Trump has repeatedly been accused of targeting defendants for political purposes. The Trump administration touted the charges against Abrego Garcia last year at a press conference in which then-Attorney General Pam Bondi declared, “This is what American justice looks like.”

“The evidence before this court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, in Nashville, Tenn., said in his ruling granting Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss for “selective or vindictive prosecution.” Without Abrego Garcia’s “successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the government would not have brought this prosecution.”

So will Trump’s DoJ leave the poor guy alone now? Or will it come up with some other bogus charge?

An interesting comment I heard yesterday from one of the teevee bobbleheads is that Trump is getting more and more of less and less. For example, Trump’s wackadoodle nominees have been taking out GOP incumbents Trump doesn’t like in the primaries. This shows us that the base, who care enough to vote in primaries, are still with him. More and more. In the meantime, his support among the general public is falling like a rock. Less and less.

In some places the wackadoodle nominees are not going to do as well in the general election. Add to this the gerrymandering that reduces Republican margins in previously safe GOP districts. This could result in a massive backfire. And if Trump’s endorsement of Ken Paxton helps Paxton win the Senate runoff next week against incumbent John Cornyn, this could make a Dem flip a tad closer to reality.

And I don’t see Trump getting any more popular in the next six months.

See David Graham at The Atlantic, The Price of Trump’s Primary Wins.

Trump’s hold on the MAGA base is still powerful, but the same actions that help him maintain it also help erode his standing with the broader public—and threaten to lead Republicans to defeat in November’s midterm elections.

Primary voters—and especially primary voters in Indiana, Louisiana, and Kentucky—are not representative of the general electorate. (Trump won those states by 19, 22, and 31 points, respectively, in 2024.) They aren’t even necessarily representative of the Republicans who vote in the general election, a group that is likely to be less engaged, less ideological, and less politically extreme overall. As a result, votes in November are more likely to hinge on issues such as inflation or the Iran war.

Graham goes on to say that, at the moment, Republicans facing re-election are more likely to want to not cross Trump than to stand up to him. But one of these days that could change. And, ironically, Trump’s desire for personal glory would have been better served by a more adversarial Congress that kept his worse impulses in line.

Speaking of which, it’s a bit too soon to see public reaction to Trump’s new slush fund reflected in the polls. But see Trump approval sinks to record low among Republicans in stunning Fox News poll at The Independent.

The survey, conducted by the Trump-friendly conservative news network, found a seven-point rise in the number of self-identified GOP voters who now say they disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, with just 36 percent of non-MAGA GOP respondents saying they approve of his economic record compared with 74 percent of MAGA Republicans who say they approve.

But the supermajority of MAGA voters who still back his handling of the economy still wasn’t enough to keep his approval rating on the issue from plummeting to just 29 percent — a full 5 percent lower than what the same poll recorded a month ago.

This trend is likely to continue, and the way Trump has been behaving I don’t think he’s capable of turning it around.

I’m reading the slush fund will be really hard to stop. Several lawsuits have been filed, but this Reuters article explains why, for legal/technical reasons, it will be hard for them to succeed. On the other hand, Greg Sargent writes that some Republicans in Congress are opposing the slush fund. Probably not enough, but some. However, even if it’s reversed eventually, the $1.8 billion may have been dispersed by then.

Of all of Trump’s many corruptions, among the most brazen is his suit against the IRS claiming personal damages because an IRS contractor leaked his tax returns during his first term. This amounts to Trump just reaching into the Treasury and helping himself to the People’s money, because he can. And considering that presidents since Richard Nixon have made their current tax returns public, it seems to me that claiming he was “damaged” by the leak amounts to an admission of guilt, that there is something in the returns that would damage him if it became public. But let’s go on.

The original claim was for $10 billion. Then late last week ABC News reported that Trump had decided to settle with Trump for $1.7 billion — $1,776,000,000 to be exact. And this money wouldn’t go into Trump’s pocket, according to Trump. Trump’s Justice Department would set up a slush fund managed by Trump appointees who can be fired by him at will, and this slush fund would be used to pay off people Trump wants to reward for doing him favors. In particular, he wants to be able to compensate people who face legal consequences for breaking the law in his behalf. Or, as David Kurtz puts it, “to pay out ‘damages’ to his allies who purport to be victims of the Deep State, including the Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 defendants.” This is just the thing to possibly compensate a volunteer paramilitary of Brownshirts set on bullying whomever Trump wants bullied.

I also like the way the New York Times puts it:

The Justice Department said that it had created a $1.8 billion fund that could compensate supporters of President Trump who contend they were mistreated by Democratic administrations. The announcement came as part of a settlement with President Trump of his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S.

The new “settlement” was filed in advance of a court deadline. The judge hearing the original suit wanted the “defendants” to explain how they are not just an extension of Trump. No responses had been filed yet. And here’s a twist that I just learned about this morning, Again, David Kurtz at TPM:

Trump’s latest filing is a notice of dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be refiled, but most importantly it contends that the right to dismiss the case is not subject to judicial review under the procedural rules since neither the IRS nor the Treasury Department had yet filed an answer or other responsive motion to the lawsuit.

“Accordingly, voluntary dismissal under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) is available as of right, and requires neither leave of Court nor the consent of any party,” Trump’s lawyers argue. They go farther in a footnote, in telling the judge that they are filing a notice of dismissal, not a motion to dismiss, because she has no say in the matter under appeal court precedent: “dismissal is self-executing, terminates the action upon filing, and divests the district court of jurisdiction.”

The bulk of the notice is dedicated to telling Judge Williams to back off: “Upon the filing of this Notice, no judicial analysis is appropriate, and any ‘subsequent order purporting to dismiss ‘all claims’ . . . [would be] a nullity,’” it contends, citing case law.

I wondered last week if a court would have to sign off on Trump’s settlement with Trump, and I couldn’t find an answer. So the answer seems to be, I guess not.

And today the DoJ announced the establishment of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Yet this isn’t over. Today House Democrats filed an amicus brief with the original judge, asking her to put a stop to this blatant exercise in self-dealing. Rep. Jamie Raskin has been arguing that the creation of the slush fund is unconstitutional, since only Congress can appropriate funds to be used by government (in this case, the DoJ). So there may be a court challenge after all, although who knows how that will turn out.

And if you (like me) are struggling to remember what was learned from Trump’s tax returns, see Key takeaways from six years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns from CNN and 18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records from the New York Times.

Trump has been back from China for several hours now, and as near as anyone can tell he came back empty-handed. He claimed he had made some trade deals, but so far these claims have been unconfirmed by China. Maybe the Chinese will be buying soybeans and Boeing jets, and maybe they won’t.

See Franklin Foer, Xi Jinping Was Only Humoring Trump. It begins,

Spare a moment, please, for the lame-duck superpower. It calls itself the leader of the free world, but the free world no longer believes it. When it extends its hand, nobody rushes to accept. When it threatens, nobody trembles.

Foer’s piece argues that Trump, the lame-duck president, is turning the U.S. into a lame-duck superpower.

After President Trump arrived in Beijing this week, Xi Jinping showered him with pomp befitting a summit of great powers. Yet the Chinese leader permitted potshots at his guest to go viral on his country’s internet rather than suppressing them, as some observers expected he would during a state visit. Xi answered Trump’s lavish praise by sternly lecturing him about meddling with Taiwan. In the end, Xi offered nothing of great substance—no solutions to the war in Iran, no sweeping trade deals, no promises of access to rare earth minerals. Xi used the visit to humor the lame-duck president, waiting for his time to pass.

Xi believe the U.S. is in a decline from which it will not recover.

During the first Trump administration, foreign leaders flattered and accommodated the president out of deference to American power. They feared it; they relied on it. During the second administration, and especially since the beginning of the Iran war, their calculus has quietly shifted—not because the strategy of obsequiousness has failed, but because it’s no longer worth the trouble. Like many of his counterparts around the world, Xi has begun to assume that it’s not just Trump who is term-limited; it’s also his nation.

Trump’s war in Iran was meant to showcase American power. It did the opposite. In the course of failing to remove a much weaker regime or eliminate its nuclear threat, the United States blew through its arsenal—so much so that allies in the Pacific reasonably wonder whether enough munitions remain to protect them. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is now worried that it lacks the firepower to execute contingency plans for defending Taiwan.

Trump really is running the U.S. the way he ran his businesses. He was a terrible businessman also. But Trump’s biggest problem is that he can’t bully the whole world. Nobody is afraid of him any more. And Trump’s folly in Iran has shown the world our military limitations, which are becoming more limited by the hour. Both China and Iran, Foer says, are not interested in cutting deals; they are just waiting us out.  It’s a bleak assessment, but I can’t say he’s wrong.

Regarding Taiwan, do keep in mind that Taiwan has a near-monopoly on the production of the advanced semiconductor chips that are essential to pretty much all the technology you can think of. If this production capacity fell into China’s hands, this could create a situation worse than what’s going on in the strait of Hormuz.

Trump has complained that Taiwan “stole” the U.S. semiconductor industry, but that’s not true. What happened, as much as I understand it, is that beginning in the 1970s Taiwan invested considerable money and resources into developing ways to mass produce chips precisely and efficiently. They don’t design the chips themselves but produce chips for other companies. It’s less expensive for other companies around the world to have Taiwan make their chips than to make the chips themselves.  The Taiwanese didn’t “steal” anything. They did something very smart that paid off for them.

Several months ago Congress approved the sale of $14 billion in arms, including missiles, air-defense systems, and anti-drone equipment, to Taiwan. This has been waiting for Trump’s sign off. Now Trump is saying he’s withholding approval in order to use the arms sale as leverage to force China to make a deal. It doesn’t seem to be working. Chris Buckley in the New York Times:

Taiwan’s government has been waiting for months for Mr. Trump to sign off on a $14 billion package of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defense systems intended to fortify the island against Beijing’s military threats.

Mr. Trump himself had pressured Taiwan to spend more on its own defense. Now he is using the very arms his administration had pushed the island to buy as leverage with China, the United States’ main adversary.

Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One after leaving China on Friday that he had discussed the weapons package with China’s president, Xi Jinping, during their summit this past week in Beijing. He was asked in an interview with Fox News whether he would approve the Taiwan deal.

“No, I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said in the interview, which was recorded in Beijing but aired after he left. “It depends.”

“It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said. “It’s a lot of weapons.”

He did not go into details about what he wanted in return, but Mr. Trump has pushed China to make major purchases of American airplanes, ethanol, soybeans, beef and sorghum.

It’s not working, dumbass. Just sign off on the sale. Assuming we still have the weapons to sell and haven’t burned them out in Iran already.

If I could draw, I would draw a cartoon showing Trump as a Chinese peasant kowtowing to Emperor Xi Jinping. The usually imperious Trump appears to be playing the role of eager supplicant in China. And I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Bill Kristol:

In the Great Hall, Xi greeted the American president politely but professionally, calling on the United States and China to be “partners, not adversaries.”

Trump responded much more personally. “I have such respect for China, the job you’ve done. You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody, you’re a great leader. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway because it’s true.” Trump also liked the ranks of Chinese children the state assembled to greet him with forced enthusiasm, telling Xi: “I was particularly impressed by those children. They were happy, they were beautiful. Those children were amazing.”

It’s a kowtow, twenty-first century style.

Xi has warmed Trump about Taiwan being “handled poorly” could lead to a dangerous situation.  WaPo:

“The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U. S. relations,” Xi said, according to the Foreign Ministry readout. “If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”

In the meeting, Trump did not respond to Xi’s comments about Taiwan and moved on to the next topic without acknowledging them at all, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive closed-door meeting.

Per Business Insider, here is the complete list of people accompanying Trump in China.

• Apple CEO Tim Cook
• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink
• Blackstone CEO and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman
• Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg
• Cargill CEO Brian Sikes
• Citi CEO Jane Fraser
• Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins
• Coherent CEO Jim Anderson
• GE Aerospace CEO H Lawrence Culp
• Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon
• Illumina CEO Jacob Thaysen
• Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach
• Meta president and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick
• Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra
• Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon
• Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
• Visa CEO Ryan McInerney

Also Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who was not on the official list but is joining according to a Truth Social post. Even better, Eric Trump — who is running the Trump family business now — is there also,  “The Trump Organization has said Eric Trump is traveling to China only to support his father, and there is no indication he will pursue business while there,” says the New York Times. Sure.

The Times article says Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tagged along also. Why is Hegseth there? That’s very weird.

And I don’t entirely understand what these people expect to accomplish in China that relates to, you know, the United States.  One might think that all these people going to China could be looking for business opportunities for themselves. Considering that China is providing critical economic and technological support to Iran to help Iran survive Trump’s war — mostly buying Iran’s oil and helping them make missiles — it seems a bit surreal for Trump to be undertaking a friendly diplomatic visit to China now. And Trump has been so addled lately there is genuine concern that any deal he might make with Xi Jinping would involve a promise not to interfere if Xi invades Taiwan. 

At this point, everything about the Trump 2.0 Administration has failed; it’s all a shambles. The tariffs have been a disaster. Inflation is up more now than it was when Trump took office. the Iran War is turning out to be an even bigger mistake than Dubya’s invasion of Iraq, if that’s possible. And Trump himself exhibits little interest in fixing any of it. He has mentally retreated into his pet projects like the ballroom. Trump may have invited all these people along to China just so he doesn’t have to deal with anything himself.

And do see Paul Krugman, The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance.