I’m skeptical, and from Juan Cole’s description even if it goes through it’s unlikely to be a permanent solution.

On 29 September, President Donald Trump advanced a peace proposal that essentially preserves Israeli pre-eminence regarding the fate of Palestinians, though it entails a cessation of hostilities, an affirmation that Gazans would not be expelled (those leaving would have the right to return), and an injunction against Israeli annexation of the Strip.  But Hamas, militarily and politically, would have to surrender all claims, with the Palestinian Authority shepherded and supervised by foreign powers.

Right-wing extremists in Israel are furious, Cole says. And there have been headlines that make it sound as if Hamas has agreed to the proposal, but it really hasn’t. David M. Halbfinger writes for the New York Times,

This did not go the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted.

On Monday, the Israeli leader won a peace plan from President Trump that promised him total victory, in the form of a take-it-or-leave-it message to Hamas. The militant group would have to release all the Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza within 72 hours, lay down its arms and surrender any role in the territory’s future — or Israel would be given a free hand to pursue the group’s destruction.

On Friday, responding to a new ultimatum from Mr. Trump, Hamas announced that it was ready to release all the hostages. But it said nothing about how soon it would do so, demurred on laying down its arms, and said it wanted to “discuss the details” of Mr. Trump’s plan.

To Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Mr. Netanyahu’s, this was “in essence, a rejection by Hamas” of the president’s proposal, he wrote on social media.

To Michael Herzog, Mr. Netanyahu’s former ambassador to the United States, it was “a ‘no’ cloaked as a ‘yes,’” he said in an interview.

There are 20 points in the proposed plan, and nobody’s yet agreed to most of them.

Back t5o Juan Cole:

On the issue of governance, a temporary technocratic “apolitical Palestinian committee” of qualified Palestinians and “international experts” would form a temporary transitional body, subject to a “Board of Peace” personally chaired by Trump. 

So that’s doomed.

Most unfortunately, it is likely to include such figures as Sir Tony Blair, the Middle East’s typhoid Mary when it comes to peace.  The transitional authority would hold the reins till reforms by the Palestinian Authority had been completed.  With immediacy, however, the US would work with Arab and international partners to deploy an “International Stabilisation Force” to Gaza.  The ISF will be responsible for training Palestinian police forces and provide support in terms of vetting recruits, with assistance from Jordan and Egypt.

We don’t know who will be in this “International ‘Stabilisation’ Force,” but I’m betting a lot of them will be U.S. troops.

At this point just about anything that would get Israel to back off and allow food and other aid into Gaza would be welcome. But back to the New York Times:

The turn of events on Friday night was also likely to threaten Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition. His right-wing partners had already been informed, through Mr. Trump’s Monday proposal, that they would have to abandon their dreams of forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza for good, allowing Israelis to settle and annex the coastal enclave. Now, they were effectively being told that Hamas would not be going away after all, and might not even agree to disarm.

“I don’t see how his coalition partners can live with that,” said Shira Efron, an analyst on Israeli policy at RAND Corporation, a think tank.

So this is way far away from a done deal.

Welcome to Day 1 of the shutdown. We’ll see how it works out. It’s telling, perhaps, that Chuck Schumer went ahead with it. Last March when he supported a continuing resolution he got slammed by other Democrats. Perhaps he re-thought his strategy since. My biggest worry is that most voters won’t hear why Dems are refusing to vote for the budget. If they can get it into people’s heads that Dems are trying to help citizens keep their health care, warning them that insurance costs will go up next year because of Republicans., this is useful. But it’s really hard to get a message across to people any more. The Right has its own info-bubble, cultivated over many decades, but the Left has no equivalent.

I’m still worried about yesterday’s military meeting. First, Hegseth — Pete Hegseth spent five months as an infantry platoon leader in Iraq, which seems to be most of his combat experience. At other times he was involved with guarding prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and teaching counterinsurgency tactics. In 2014 he was promoted to Major. That’s also when he began to work for Fox News as a contributor. Then he enrolled in the reserves. For a time he served in the Washington DC National Guard. In 2021 he was excluded from being on duty at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. ostensibly because he’d had “Deus Vult” tattooed to a bicep. “Deus Vult” — God wills it — historically is a phrase associated with the First Crusade that has been picked up lately by Neo-Nazi and anti-Islamic groups. Hegseth resigned from the military shortly after that, apparently pissed off.

Hegseth has a lot more military experience than I have. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he has a better understanding of war. I take it he’s not a “big picture” guy.  If his entire focus is winning by any means, it’s possible he needs to review von Clausewitz — “war is politics by other means.” In other words, war is an instrument of political will to achieve political objectives. And the way war is waged has to be in service to the objective.

If your political objective is just to take over some other country and subjugate its population that’s one thing. But most modern nations (Russia an obvious exception) don’t do that sort of thing any more. It’s more often the case that when first-world democracies send troops abroad, it’s to put down some faction that threatens wider regional war,  And the desired end result is that the liberated population will be your friends and allies and not likely to throw support to radicals who will cause more trouble. And that’s where Rules of Engagement come in. Hegseth obviously doesn’t get that.

And, as I’ve said before, talk of “winning” and “victories” ignores the reality of military actions since the end of World War II. We don’t fight declared wars with other nations any more. Most of the time the “enemy” is a stateless faction or movement that will not surrender. Most of the time the best outcome you can hope for is that the malignant faction will be unable to continue whatever trouble they’ve been causing and will leave. And maybe they’re so decimated that they can’t regroup. It may take a while before you can say there’s anything approximating a “victory.” So no parades or celebrations.

BTW, the international laws of war most nations abide by are a legacy of Abraham Lincoln and our own Civil War. See “Lincoln’s Laws of War.”

Vietnam was a mess for a couple of reasons. The objective, we were told, was to stop South Vietnam from being taken over by North Vietnam. Waging total war on North Vietnam — like, say, by bombing it into oblivion — risked war with China, which would have been a bigger disaster. But defending — and propping up– the corrupt and unpopular Ngo Dinh Diem regime turned into a no-win situation of its own. President Kennedy figured that out and signed off on Diem’s assassination in 1963. If Diem had been replaced by a stronger and more popular leader it might have made a world of difference, but he wasn’t. And then LBJ made the worse decision of his life and sent in U.S. ground troops. But whenever people complain that in Vietnam “we weren’t trying to win,” this tells me they never thought about what we would have won. The only “winning” of the primary objective — keeping the Communist government of North Vietnam from taking over South Vietnam — really just meant an endless occupation and propping up of South Vietnam, unless you were willing to risk war with China. There was never going to be a victory.

Anyway —  what you don’t want to do is wage war in such a way that you make more enemies out of the population you’re supposed to be helping. Hegseth’s approach is a recipe for making more enemies. This is a point Trump, who knows way less about war than Hegseth, misses also, and is way too stupid to understand.

I read a commentary this morning that Hegseth wants our military to be more like Russia’s — basically, dumb, violent thugs. In Ukraine the Russians have demonstrated that being violent and brutal and killing everyone in sight doesn’t assure victory, either. The Ukrainians have held them off mostly by being smarter and more innovative. I’m sorry I can’t find the link now., but I’ll post it if I find it again.

But Hegseth mostly reminds me of every bad manager I’ve ever had. He doesn’t really understand what he’s supposed to be managing, so he makes up for it by cracking down hard on the small bits he does understand — grooming, weight control — and by generally being a belligerent prick so that nobody messes with him.

And many people who understand warfare note that most of today’s military is about technology and intelligence. The combat troops may be the tip of the spear, but the rest of the spear is made of of people working more with their heads than with weapons. Hegseth does seem to struggle with the technology part, doesn’t he?

This made me laugh:

And what can you say about Trump that hasn’t been said? He once again made a total ass of himself in front of the generals. But he’s too big an ass to see himself as an ass. One of the best things I’ve read about Trump’s remarks to the brass is Trump Gave the Military’s Brass a Rehashed Speech. Until Minute 44. by Shawn McCreesh at the New York Times. See also The Commander in Chief Is Not Okay by Tom Nichols at The Atlantic.

I imagine the top brass of the United States military is scared out of its collective wits right now. They’ve seen that their Commander in Chief is a pubescent boy locked in an old man’s body. He’s also a narcissistic simpleton who is not prepared to lead the nation out of a wet paper bag. Likewise the Secretary of Defense/War/Whatever. Pete Hegseth  may be in better physical shape than Trump but clearly never quite navigated his way out of adolescence and has unresolved Mommy issues. Hegseth’s “warrior ethos” seems to mostly involve grooming, lots of pushups, misogyny, and sociopathy.

This meeting, which could have been done over Zoom, cost taxpayers several million dollars.

Retired Marine Col. Mark F. Cancian, senior adviser for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, calculated that it would cost a minimum of $6 million.

“The DOD has not released any cost information. One calculation put the cost at $3.4 million, but that may be low,” wrote Cancian. “My rough estimate would be higher, $6 million, calculated as follows: If there are 1,000 visitors (400 senior officers and 600 support personnel), and each costs $4,000 for air travel, ground transportation, and lodging, then the total travel cost would be $4 million. Extra base costs for overtime, food, and security might be another $2 million, bringing the total to $6 million. That does not include opportunity costs for diverting DOD assets from other activities. There might be lost training at Quantico for the hundreds of military personnel at the base’s schools, military aircraft might be diverted to ferrying VIPs, and events might be canceled because of the senior officers’ absence.”

From the same link above, citing The View:

“I don’t get it. There’s an estimated $6 million that taxpayers paid for their travel, lodging, and security when we all learned a few years ago, you can do it all on Zoom,” said co-host Sara Haines. “So, I don’t know because some of the messages, as Joy mentioned — don’t be fat, shave your beard, go back to hazing people.”

I take it this meeting was entirely Pete Hegseth’s idea, and that Trump invited himself when he found out about it. There are a number of reports out today that Hegseth is crumbling. This is from the Daily Beast via Drezner’s World.

Pete Hegseth is crumbling under the pressure of leading the Pentagon.

The defense secretary—who prefers the moniker “Secretary of War”—is being described by staffers as “manic,” erupting into fits of rage and tumultuous tirades, the Daily Mailreported on Monday.

While he has reportedly always been temperamental, two staffers claim the former Fox News star’s mental state has reached new, frenzied heights after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier this month.

They said Hegseth is becoming increasingly “obsessed” with his own security and exhibits frantic behavior, such as fidgeting and pacing during meetings.

“There’s a manic quality about him. Or let me rephrase, an even more manic quality, which is really saying something,” an insider told the outlet.

“Dude is crawling out of his skin,” another source said….

Also under scrutiny are Hegseth’s extensive personal security demands, which, according to the paper, are now straining the Army agency responsible for protecting him. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) has reportedly pulled agents away from criminal probes in order to safeguard Hegseth’s residences in Minnesota, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.

Trump seems to have been taken aback by the silence of the brass. They sat silent when he appeared. It’s reported Trump told them more than once it was okay to applaud. They did not. They were probably fighting off nausea. News stories say there was mute applause when Trump finished his speech, but otherwise the brass sat on its hands. Trump’s speech was full of his usual airing of grievances combined with bragging about how great he is. Trump wants to use U.S. cities as “training grounds” for the military. Trump thinks the Navy isn’t building battleships properly. Yes, he said battleships. Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. And if the brass weren’t collectively terrified of what he might order them to do before the meeting, they are are now.

Update: Trump admin made up of ‘sniveling losers’ and ‘crybabies’ putting on ‘tough guy act’: analyst

In an article for The Nation published Monday, Katherine Krueger, a contributing editor for Current Affairs, argued that the Trump administration is governed by men who imagine themselves as Nietzschean Übermenschen, but in reality are insecure, performative, and deeply flawed.

She claimed that these figures, especially those at the heart of the administration, project strength and dominance while signaling anxiety, neediness, and a compulsion to overcompensate.

“They effectively control our fates, but deep down, they know they’re sniveling, pathetic, and inadequate, and it eats them up, the article said.

Krueger contended that these so?called winners are “huge losers and crybabies,” despite controlling levers of power. She argued that their contradictory behavior — insisting on total authority while revealing inner fragility — undermines their claim to superiority.

She noted that the Trump era is marked by governing elites who posture as dominators but expose themselves as desperate for validation and unable to withstand dissent or embarrassment.

Yeah, pretty much. And it seems to be most of them. Not just Trump.

Everybody’s required reading today is Paul Krugman’s substack column, Understanding the Coming Premium Apocalypse: Why health insurance is about to become unaffordable. It might also be subtitled “Why Republicans really ought to listen to Democrats and restore Medicaid and ACA subsidies.” This relates to the looming government shutdown and to our stupid  mess of a health care system.

As you know, the Big Ugly Bill is slashing Medicaid spending. There’s a timeline at the Center for American Progress that explains exactly what happens when. Some changes to benefit programs have gone into effect already. The big stuff starts to happen in January 2026. It’s not all waiting until after the Midterms. There will be a lot of pain before the Midterms, and it could drive up the cost of premiums for everybody.

One big factor is that enhanced subsidies enacted by the Biden Administration for people buying insurance through the ACA exchanges will expire at the end of this year (blame Joe Manchin for the temporary subsidies). Krugman explains,

Now the enhanced subsidies are about to expire, and the financial hit to many Americans will be apocalyptic. Gaba estimates what will happen to the insurance premiums net of subsidy for different groups in different states. …

… Many people will face huge increases in their insurance costs. And these increases will be magnified by the effects on the risk pool: some healthy people will be dropping out, raising premiums for those who remain.

In other words, millions of Americans will soon be screaming about unaffordable health care.

Which takes me to my perpetual gripe, which is that if our so-called for-profit free market capitalist (Blessed Be It) health care system can’t survive without massive government subsidies, who are we kidding, exactly? Eliminate the for-profit insurance companies that do nothing but suck profit out of the system and just subsidize the whole thing.

Also, per the Center for American Progress, a possible sequestration of Medicare funds could happen in January 2026. If it does, I believe voters will notice. and blame Republicans.

The Democrats are threatening a shutdown to get Republicans to back off the Medicaid and other cuts to the health care system. This is the right fight to pick, I believe. The question is, will most voters know what the Dems are doing here? Or will they just hear the Republicans’ side of the story?

In other news — you may have heard that Trump is inexplicably giving $20 billion to Argentina to bail out its economy.  And you may have thought, WTF? Judd Legum at Popular Information explains,

Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a $20 billion package to rescue the Argentinian economy. The risky taxpayer-financed deal, which involves trading U.S. dollars for Argentine pesos, has little upside for ordinary Americans. Argentina is not a significant U.S. trading partner, and its economy, long in turmoil, has little impact on the United States.

However, Bessent’s announcement had massive economic benefits for one American: billionaire hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, who has placed large bets on the future of the Argentine economy. Citrone, the co-founder of Discovery Capital Management, is also a friend and former colleague of Bessent—a fact that has not been previously reported in American media outlets. Citrone, by his own account, helped make Bessent very wealthy.

There’s more. It’s worth reading all of it. The $20 billion bailout will not benefit U.S. taxpayers in any way. This is about Bessent using taxpayer dollars as his personal slush fund.

In more other news, there were five mass shootings in the U.S. this weekend, according to this mass shooting tracker. It’s so hard to keep up. A lot of them don’t even make the news any more. Note that the now-deceased individual suspected of attacking a Mormon church in Michigan was by all appearances a big Trump supporter. 

Also, too, I’m a big Jesse Welles fan now.

Update: It appears Trump has no clue about what he’s doing to health insurance costs.

bro we are so cooked

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— April Glick Pulito (@aprilglick.bsky.social) September 29, 2025 at 4:54 PM

From New York I don’t hear much about what’s going on in Portland. I understand there has been a lot of protesting in Portland. Whether there has been much violence is hard to know. Right-wing media would have us believe the city is being burned to the ground. The rest of media reports that in 2025 homicides in Portland have dropped more than 50 percent.

I’m not going to say that the Portland protests have been without incident. In June some people in the No Kings event apparently got out of hand. Portland police made several arrests. I’ve been looking and looking for more recent incidents and not finding any, however. Oh, except for the guy who drove into a crowd of protesters a few days after No Kings.

Then last week there were reports that the city of Portland is considering shutting down the ICE facility. The Guardian reported,

They boarded the windows up after No Kings on June 14, I guess.

A couple of days ago The Oregonian reported —

A Portland Police Bureau assistant chief said in court recently that federal police were “instigating” some of the clashes between officers and protesters outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland.

Naughty naughty. Anyway, now Trump is sending troops to “war ravaged” Portland.

President Donald Trump is directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to send U.S. troops to Portland, he said Saturday on Truth Social, making the extraordinary pronouncement that he is greenlighting the use of “Full Force, if necessary” in an American city.

“At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” he wrote.

I guess Trump is confusing the Portland city government with Antifa. If there were anything warranting this kind of response in Portland I believe Portland news media would have mentioned it. I’m not finding anything.

If ever there was a time not to normalize Trump’s authoritarian fever dreams, this is it.

This should be impeachable. ‘War ravaged’ Portland? He’s insane – & insanely power hungry. The script is set – call an imaginary group a terror group and then send in the troops.

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— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) September 27, 2025 at 12:25 PM

Trump is going to continue to pull stunts like this until there’s a Kent State-style massacre, or worse.

See also Trump’s Reign of Terror is a Sign of His Own Fears and Weakness.

Trump may be sorry he went out of his way to get James Comey indicted. Comey could probably get the indictment thrown out of court, but he seems up for a fight and wants a trial. He’s getting legal counseling from Patrick Fitzgerald. Way back when Fitzgerald got Scooter Libby convicted, and he was involved in taking down Rod Blagojevich. So Fitzgerald is a guy who’s not afraid of a high-profile fight.

Quinta Jurecic writes for The Atlantic,

The Justice Department should never have brought such an astoundingly shoddy case. The decision to do so, under intense pressure from the president to harass his old enemy, is an indication of how thoroughly Trump has been able to corrupt the department.Trump seemingly wanted the Justice Department to find something, anything, to pin on the former FBI director, and he doesn’t appear to care much about the actual charges—or even whether the case holds up in court. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he posted last weekend, later telling reporters that prosecutors “have to act fast.” The 2020 congressional testimony will edge past the five-year statute-of-limitations mark next Tuesday. In any other political moment, this would be obviously impeachable conduct.

Trump is committing impeachable offenses just about daily. I’m not sure he understands clearly what’s impeachable and what isn’t, of course.

By every appearance, this is an astonishingly weak case. The charges focus on an exchange between Comey and Republican Senator Ted Cruz during Comey’s 2020 testimony, where Cruz quizzed Comey on whether he had ever authorized any leaks to the press about the FBI’s investigations into Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016. Comey said he had not. The indictment now alleges that he was lying. The document is sufficiently terse that it’s difficult to say what specific lie the grand jury had in mind—but as my former colleagues Anna Bower and Benjamin Wittes have examined in Lawfare, none of the possibilities makes very much sense.

The Lawfare article is very much worth reading, too.  The charge in the indictment is that Comey lied to Congress. But all the possible theories behind this charge fall apart on examination.

The New York Times framed this perfectly.

An inexperienced prosecutor loyal to President Trump, in the job for less than a week, filed criminal charges against one of her boss’s most-reviled opponents. She did so not only at Mr. Trump’s direct command, but also against the urging of both her own subordinates and her predecessor, who had just been fired for raising concerns that there was insufficient evidence to indict.

And, of course, Trump has a list of people he wants indicted. Letitia James no doubt will be next. She’s not someone I’d mess with, either. See also The Comey indictment is so weak even some in right-wing media aren’t buying it.

Meanwhile, as the cost of just about everything goes up, how much does even the Trump base care about what happens to Comey? Further, if Trump is trying to project strength and power, how strong is he going to look if his cases all lose? If the trial makes him look as petty and stupid as he is?

Something potentially more ominous is happening with the Department of Defense/War/Whatever. This is WaPo:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered hundreds of generals to travel on short notice from around the world to hear him make a short speech on military standards and the “warrior ethos,” multiple people familiar with the event told The Washington Post.

Hegseth’s orders, which were sent earlier this week to senior generals and admirals worldwide, require anyone in a command position with the rank of one-star general or rear admiral and above, as well as their senior enlisted leaders, to be at Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday.

What the bleep? Is that even safe? There is speculation he’s going to fire them all or deliver a lecture on the “warrior ethos” Or maybe he’s going to require them to swear an oath to Trump. This is nuts.

I spend most of yesterday writing a column about a new Texas law that allows prayers in schools. The law does not explicitly stipulate Christian prayers, but Texas AG Ken Paxton keeps saying the quiet part out loud.  And I expect the law will have a lot of messy unintended consequences.

Comey indicted. I’m hearing the case is not even weak. It’s just air. The DoJ is likely to end up looking really stupid. May write about it tomorrow. But feel free to discuss.

I take it Trump made an absolute, colossal ass of himself in front of the United Nations today. I didn’t watch, although I hope there’s a transcript. This is from the New York Times:

Boasting about his own record and at one point questioning whether the U.N. served a purpose, Mr. Trump sought to portray himself as the only leader who could solve the world’s problems. “I’m really good at this stuff,” he said. “Your countries are going to hell.”

As the General Assembly convened on its 80th anniversary with wars raging in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, Mr. Trump also claimed that he had resolved conflicts around the world while the U.N. had done nothing. “Sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them,” Mr. Trump said.

But he also frequently veered off script.

The mess above was scripted?

He warned darkly that a “double-headed monster” of illegal migration and a shift to renewable energy, and called climate change the “greatest con job” ever perpetrated on the world. He accused environmentalists of wanting to “kill all the cows,” personally insulted the Muslim mayor of London and falsely claimed that Muslims in the West are planning to institute Shariah law.

While taking credit for ending conflicts between Israel and Iran, Cambodia and Thailand, and Armenia and Azerbaijan, Mr. Trump again blamed his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden, for Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, a frozen war that has proved intractable.

Here’s the personal insult to the Mayor of London:

“I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor,” the president said. “It’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Shariah law, but you’re in a different country; you can’t do that.”

And on and on. I’ll wait for a transcript. I’m sure there’s a video, but I won’t be watching it. He might as well have been wearing a T-shirt saying “I’m an ignorant pile of shit.”

Update — just saw this. OMG.

Trump literally uses his UN Speech to slam the UN for not hiring him years ago to do renovations of the UN. I’m serious. This is the moron pretending to be President

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— Dean Obeidallah (@deanobeidallah.bsky.social) September 23, 2025 at 11:06 AM

And then, of course, yesterday the guy who told us to drink bleach to get rid of Covid is telling pregnant women to not take Tylenol because it gives their babies autism, a totally unproven claim from Brain Worm Man. Even women with fevers should just “tough it out,” he says. Fever during pregnancy, especially in the first trimester,  has been linked to serious birth defects such as spina bifida and can also cause miscarriages. But, hey, autism, right? WHO and the EU have stepped up and said Trump is wrong, don’t listen to him. I’m wondering if the Tylenol company will sue. See also Trump Tells Pregnant Women to ‘Fight Like Hell’ Not to Take Tylenol at The Atlantic.

Speaking of The Atlantic, David Frum has an interesting proposal in Trump Might Be Losing His Race Against Time.  Trump is frantically trying to consolidate as much power as he can as fast as he can, Frum says, before his public support gets sucked into a black hole. I’m not sure Trump is actually aware of how unpopular he’s becoming, but the people around him may be noticing.

The issue is this: Trump is surrounded and supported by two kinds of people. Some of them are True Believers who really think he’s a god-king. And the others are opportunists who got on the golden escalator purely to cash in. And, Frum says, it may be just a matter of time before the opportunities start to bail.

“In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?” Frum writes. In particular, Frum addresses Pam Bondi:

As Bondi makes her daily decisions about whether to abuse her powers to please Trump, she has to begin with one big political assessment: Will Trump ultimately retain the power to reward and punish her? It’s not just about keeping her present job. On the one hand, people in Trump’s favor can make a lot of money from their proximity to power. On the other, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his crimes during Watergate. If Trump’s hold on power loosens, Bondi could share Mitchell’s fate.

I’m guessing Bondi will go down with the ship, so to speak. She seems to me to be so corrupted that corruption is all she’s got. But Frum isn’t the only person I’ve seen pairing John Mitchell and Bondi in the same sentence lately. It’s on people’s minds. It might be on her mind. Or not. I’m not holding my breath waiting for someone in the Cabinet to break with the boss, but at some point some congressional Republicans may see a brighter future if they create some distance from Trump. The question is, how long is that going to take?

And then there’s the looming budget shutdown. I see that Trump canceled a meeting with Schumer and Jeffries to discuss it. The Dems want to keep pandemic-era subsidies for Affordable Care Act health insurance plans and reverse the Medicaid cuts in the Big Ugly Bill, among other things, and I appreciate that. Still, this is risky business. I’m going to defer to Marcy Wheeler on this one.

One more thing — I don’t often link to my Patheos religion column here, but some of you might like this one, especially if the names Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg ring any bells. The Beat Zen Movement: When Zen Became Cool.

Disney/ABC just announced that Jimmy Kimmel Live will resume Tuesday night. So “indefinitely” was only six days. I’m sure more fallout is to come.

Can we say Trump is utterly out of control? I believe so. Even some of his people think so. On Saturday night he posted a “truth” on Truth Social that he possibly didn’t intend to be public. It appears to have been a private message to Pam Bondi. But it was a public post. It has since been deleted, but lots of people saved it. I got this from Daily Beast:

One suspects that at least some of the “30 statements and posts” exist only in his head. He likes to claim doing things he wants to do is just him bowing to popular demand.

This is in Rolling Stone,

Many observers wondered whether Trump’s initial post, which capped off a wildly authoritarian week, was meant to be a private directive to Bondi. Top officials in his administration had the same question. According to three sources familiar with the situation, several senior officials at the Justice Department, and also at the White House, were blindsided by Trump’s message on Saturday night. 

Some in the Justice Department were left scratching their heads because the Truth Social post directed at “Pam” read so much like a text message or direct message from the president. 

“Yeah, he texts like that,” one Trump adviser says. “It’s a lot like what the president writes online.”

Some administration officials, the sources say, determined that even though it was likely this was another instance of the president accidentally posting a private message publicly, it was best to just carry on, and act like it was a written demand that was always meant for public consumption. 

Demanding that the Attorney General take charge of prosecuting his political enemies is an impeachable offense, seems to me.  Although Trump may not realize that. He doesn’t seem to grasp what “free speech” is and thinks commentary that is overly critical of him should be illegal. Peter Baker, New York Times (as republished in the Seattle Times):

He has suggested that a clutch of protesters who yelled at him in a restaurant be prosecuted under laws targeting mobsters. He demanded that multiple late-night comics who mocked him be taken off air. He threatened to shutter television broadcasters that he deemed unfair to him. He sued The New York Times for allegedly damaging his reputation. And that was just last week.

When threatening government action against those who anger him, Trump can be strikingly transparent about what is driving him. He talks regularly about how journalists, commentators and political actors should not be “allowed” to be so harsh toward him. Having installed a partisan ally to run the FBI, he muses openly about which political critics he would like to see investigated.

Trump is not the only president to bristle at opposition or news coverage, nor the first to try to punish those who angered him. But in modern times, no president has gone so far in using his power to pressure media figures and political opponents, historians say.

At the end of a week dominated by a fraught national debate over free speech that followed the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Trump summed up his view Friday in a remark that would have been shocking if made by any previous president.

“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to network newscasts. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”

I want to know why these remarks were not shocking when made by this president? Any other president, such remarks would have been treat4ed as a major scandal for days. When Trump does it, media shrug it off. He has no idea how good he really has it with media.

But the larger point is that AG Bondi and FCC Chair Brendan Carr are framing their censorship arguments as protecting the public from inaccurate reporting. But Trump doesn’t bother, In his mind, if reporting makes him look bad, it’s illegal.

I haven’t bothe4red to look it up and read it, but by all accounts Trump’s recent $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times was inadvertently hilarious. Steve Benen wrote at MSNBC,

Right off the bat, it’s important to note that describing the court filing as a “lawsuit” is itself generous. As writer Jesse Berney summarized, the lawsuit is “like an 85-page Trump Truth Social post. It’s hilarious.”

That characterization is more than fair. Reading it, I felt a little embarrassed for the lawyers who were responsible for producing it, especially after seeing random Trump-related images that seemed to have been included in this dreadfully silly document for no apparent reason.

U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, the judge who tossed the suit, ruled that Trump’s 85-page lawsuit was way too long and full of “tedious and burdensome” language that had no bearing on the legal case. PBS:

“A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally,” Merryday wrote in a four-page order. “This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner.”

The judge gave Trump has 28 days to file an amended complaint that should not exceed 40 pages. …

… Merryday noted that the lawsuit did not get to the first defamation count until page 80. The lawsuit delves into Trump’s work on “The Apprentice” TV show and an “extensive list” of Trump’s other media appearances.

“As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary,” Merryday wrote. “Although lawyers receive a modicum of expressive latitude in pleading the claim of a client, the complaint in this action extends far beyond the outer bound of that latitude.”

You know that Trump dictated all the stuff about the Apprentice and his media appearances and insisted his lawyers include it. Probably in his mind this makes him an expert on all things media and adds to his credibility.  Like his orange face paint, he has no idea how it really makes him look.

Update: Steve Benen, Why Trump’s directive to AG Bondi should be seen as an impeachment-level scandal