Trump admits to taking a bribe from Iran.

In his remarks Trump didn’t say that gift was for the U.S., just that he received a gift worth a tremendous amount of money. But he can’t tell us what it is. Probably there is no such gift; he was being backed into a corner by a reporter asking how can he make a deal with Iran if he doesn’t trust Iran, and this is the answer that popped out of Trump’s mouth — they want to make a deal so much they sent this amazing gift I can’t talk about. Riiiight. He’s like a child being asked what happened to the cookies. The Constitution says the POTUS cannot accept gifts from foreign entities without the consent of Congress, which I assume means he has to at least tell Congress what it is, assuming it’s not a fantasy gift. Today Iran has nixed whatever peace proposal Trump sent them, showing how eager they are to make a deal..

But the larger point is that if this had been any other president, media would have been all over this statement for being unhinged. It would have been a scandal for the ages. But with Trump, it’s just Tuesday. Nothing to see here.

Paul Krugman has looked at numbers and says it’s definite somebody in Trump’s inner circle is messing with the futures markets. Take the recent moves with Iran — to bomb or not to bomb — for example which saw a jump in trading volume right before news became public.

This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.

This wasn’t the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn’t count the purchases of stock futures.

When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”

Let’s see, what else — MS NOW got hold of some memos from the House Judiciary Committee. apparently related to Jack Smith’s recent behind-closed-doors testimony. It revealed that the FBI believed that Trump’s primary motive for hanging on to the documents was financial They noticed many documents had information that might have impacted Trump’s businesses.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” according to the memo, which tracked progress in the documents and election-interference investigations. “We must have those documents.”

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, Raskin insisted that Trump’s Justice Department has sought to cover up the details of Trump’s “hoarding” of classified government secrets and storing them in his Mar-a-Lago club’s showers and closets — which put national security at risk — as well as the clues to Trump’s motives for doing so.

“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests,” Raskin wrote to Bondi. 

“This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”

Smith also connected lots of dots between Trump’s key allies in Congress and the plot to steal the 2020 election. I expect we’ll be hearing more about this unless Trump nukes Tehran or invades Cuba to distract us.

Finally, here are two pieces to read together. The first is by Paul Waldman, A Dunning-Kruger War, Courtesy of the Dunning-Kruger President. Trump has a long-standing pattern of being betrayed by his own persistent ignorance.

When his ignorance is exposed, Trump claims that he couldn’t have known what he didn’t know, because nobody knew it. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he said in amazement in 2017 when he realized how hard it would be to keep his promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare; in fact, everyone knew how complicated it was — everyone except him.

And this happens over and over and over. Now he’s claiming “nobody knew” that Iran would respond to being bombed as it did — attacking neighbors, closing the Strait of Hormuz, etc. — when in fact there was all kinds of analysis going back years that predicted this was exactly what Iran would do. Which is why other Presidents left Iran alone. Oh, and it’s probably he case he has little idea what’s really going on in Iran now except for watching videos of U.S. bombs falling and going BOOM.

Now see Jamelle Bouie, When a Narcissist Goes to War. “If you can set aside both the unconstitutionality and the immorality of President Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran and focus on the operation itself,” Bouie writes, “it is hard not to be bewildered by the utter lack of real planning, or even basic strategic thinking, that has gone into it.” Trump believed that all he had to do was drop some bombs and the government of Iran would collapse. Easy peasey. Now that it hasn’t, he’s winging it, not knowing what to do or how to explain why he is doing it. And now he’s caught in an escalation spiral he doesn’t know how to stop..

What’s striking is how familiar this pattern feels. The administration did not expect the public to be repelled by DOGE. It did not expect outrage over the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It did not expect Democrats to respond to threats of partisan gerrymandering with their own push to wring as many Democratic seats as possible out of so-called blue states. The administration certainly did not expect the mass mobilizations against the deployment of National Guard troops and the use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving paramilitary force. Minnesota in particular appears to have caught them entirely off guard — a tendency toward docility, it seems, is their base-line assumption about everyone they oppose.

Which raises another key question: Why can’t the White House see what others could easily predict? 

Bouie’s answer is that he fundamentally doesn’t grasp that other people are, well, people.

Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him. He is a consummate narcissist, and he is, without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office. Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds.

By this Bouie means that from Trump’s perspective, everything his him, and whatever else goes on in the world is either for him or against him or irrelevant.  And he assumes everyone agrees with him and is baffled when they don’t. In the past he at least had his fingers on the pulse of popular opinion enough to know what to offer people to get elected. But over the past several months he’s shown an utter indifference even to his own supporters and what they want from him.

And he’s not going to get any smarter.