Sixty days from today Americans will vote to fill all 435 seats in the House and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate.

It’s a contest where Trump has few good options.

Neither does America.

Trump is desperately pulling every string. He is warping the mail-in voting. He is cutting voter attendance: in Texas, for example, 1 million voters were taken off the voter roles and 92 polling stations were closed (of course, in the highest populated counties where the Democratic voters lived). This is systematic voter fraud.

He has to do that because his own policies are so self-defeating.

In fact, that could be his MAGA motto; Man Against Getting Ahead. He has shot himself in the foot so may time that it’s as if he was fighting against himself.

American wages have fallen to 43% of GDP, the lowest since the great depression. For every dollar the US economy produces, workers are getting less of it than at any point since 1929.

It is an economy where the bosses look after their own, in ways that are upsetting to workers. The number of Amazon workers who live on food stamps has more than tripled, while Bezos spends $200-billion on AI.

In the past, he could reply on his one proven skill: he could divert attention when things were closing in. Remember the dogs and cats that were being eaten by Haitian immigrants in Springfield? Or the “Gulf of America”? Well, now no one cares that he labelled Lake Ontario “Lake America”. Been there, Donald, not funny.

The polls forecast a blue wave sweeping both House and Senate. The the waves are being generated by the exorbitant cost of living, Trump’s deep unpopularity with the political center and the massive enthusiasm gap Democrats enjoy over Republicans.

Trump is frantically trying to put up flood walls by halting mail-in voting – the way that one in three Americans vote.

Trump tried to order the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to refuse to deliver ballots unless the voter is on a list — which doesn’t exist yet — created by each state and sent to the post office for checking against mail ballots.

A USPS official has filed a whistleblower report alleging the agency is pushing ahead with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement Trump’s order giving the federal government more control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking the plan. According to the whistleblower, USPS is moving forward anyway. A court said stop. Trump’s operatives said “keep going, just don’t tell anyone.”

Trump’s plan involved “rushed development; a zero percent failure rate; and poor management [are] cause for concern on their own. Taken together they present a clear picture of a fatally flawed process that cannot and will not protect American voters. Put plainly: this process will likely lead to chaos, confusion, and the inability of many Americans to have their vote counted”.

His executive order is still illegal and unconstitutional.

Once the voters are poised to mark their ballots, the Republican record is pretty thin.

It has been 189 days since Israel and Trump launched the war in Iran. The US still has no good options for getting out; no fast way to restore the international waterway that carried a fifth of the world’s traded oil and gas.

Trump has stretched US military capability and credibility as never before this century. He faces a more ruthless foe in Tehran than he did before he invaded on 28 February.

It is fast losing its army. Due to executive resignations, the US is now without an Army Secretary, Army Deputy Secretary, and Senate-confirmed Army Chief of Staff.

It looks like the armed forces have concluded that Trump has lost the war.

And that’s not even counting the loss of US weapons and bases. There has been an immense military, logistical, and financial drawdown of $37.5 billion. And the other day, an Iranian anti-aircraft missile was fired toward a U.S. F-35 fighter jet escorting ships in the Strait of Hormuz. F-35 fighter jets are stealth, they shouldn’t be detected. But Iran found a way to detect them. This was the second incident; in the first an Iranian “loitering missile” detected it and exploded next to it, the F-35 returned to base damaged.

More than half a trillion dollars was spent developing the F-35.

There is something very wrong with American weapon procurement.

A US special forces unit in Germany has been experimenting and building their own drones, as well as participating in drills on waging unmanned warfare. They absorbed the lessons from the Ukraine war, and set out in a dedicated unit to reproduce them. The new acting Army chief of staff, Christopher LaNeve – who was appointed by Pete Hegseth – ordered it to stand down and refocus on being a ordinary airborne unit. They traded in a promising capacity for ordinary rifles. It takes a certain genius to throw away the future like that.

If the Hormuz blockade continues, gas prices will keep climbing in the US.

Trump would have you believe that he has solved the problem for the US by obtaining Venezuela crude. Not so. It will take years or even decades to build the refining capacity to deal with Venezuela heavy crude. Trump will be long gone as president before that oil flows.

In the meantime Trump has been fighting every environmentally sound solution that struggled to the surface.

He does not understand that one ship load of solar panels will generate the same energy as 50 ship loads of LNG or 100 ship loads of coal.

All this at a time when the global fossil fuel industry receives some $11-million per minute in government subsidies.

The future is the power he is fighting against. He has given away billions in taxpayer dollars to cancel wind and solar projects. American EV cars have been set back; a national grid to power the cars was abandoned. There has never been a time when an American president has done so much deliberate harm to the American economy.

Closer to home, you can’t get much closer than a consumer’s toilet paper.

Because of Trump’s new tariff war with Canada, prices in the US will roll up. The US accounts for more than 20% of global tissue consumption despite having only 4% of the world’s population. The average American uses 141 rolls of toilet paper per year. Canada provides the paper and the pulp for American mills. Toilet paper imports are now subject to a 50% tariff, thanks to Trump.

In the contemplative private moments of their lives, Americans will remember.

Trump’s approval is now at an all-time low of 28%. A nasty blogger suggested that he will not pay attention until it’s below 16.

The only thing Trump has going in his favor is that the Ballroom will probably be finished soon. I’m sure folks across the country will be cheering. The Supreme court decided that the American people did not have a say in halting it.

But even here, Trump has lit the fuse to its destruction.

He has established the precedent that a president can decide on his own to destroy an historic building and put up another.

So the president that follows him will have no problem just tearing down his ballroom and rebuilding the historic icon of the East Wing. And the rose Garden. And the Kennedy Center. And USAID. And Voice of America. And FEMA, the CDC, the FBI and the Department of Justice. And NATO. And America’s relationship with Canada, Greenland and Mexico.

Politico nails the Republican problem in a few tight words: “the president is focused entirely on having fun, claiming a personal legacy and targeting personal rivals. When Trump is not living the life of a 12-year-old boy — hosting UFC fights on the White House lawn and watching Indy cars go vroom through downtown D.C. — he’s fixated on naming things after himself, doing renovation work and seeking vengeance via the Department of Justice or by renaming Great Lakes.”

It is no laughing matter when the American voter is paying $4 for a gallon of regular. And while a war with Canada may sound odd, the rising tensions with Ottawa could prove politically fatal to border-state Republicans in the two races they most need to win: Maine and Michigan.

The fundamental problem is that polls show voters don’t think Trump cares about them or their priorities.

This is a disaster for Republican politicians. When you can’t even fake concern anymore, there is very little left in the Republican bag of make-believe.

The voters will not think of it ths way, but ultimately it comes down to this: America is $4-=trillion in debt. There is nothing to show for it.

No modern infrastructure.

No universal healthcare.

No free college or university or trade school.

No universal basic income.

No universal childcare.

And now, I believe, a wave is coming that is so big even Trump can’t fake his way out of it.

Sixty days and counting.

Count on it.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at THE DAY AFTER - How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World – A Progressive Political Playbook on Saving Democracy

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Sorry to intrude again, but a mapping application that many thought no longer existed has raced from the back to become the lead app, after refusing to give in to Donald Trump.

Trump was looking for a distraction from the Iran War so he decided to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America”. It fit somehow, in his short-circuiting brain, with a plan to take over Canada using tariffs. Don’t even bother to try to follow the strategy.

Immediately the big corporate names folded and followed his lead.

Both Google Maps and then Apple Maps, capitulated. Lake Ontario was renamed Lake America in their applications.

Law firms, media firms and tech billionaires have all folded to Trump; there was very little ‘save democracy’ push-back.

Until MapQuest.

Following its refusal to follow Trump’s executive order, MapQuest’s U.S. App Store ranking steadily climbed, as consumers downloaded the app to show their support for the company’s stance.

MapQuest’s rank climbed from No. 128 on August 28 to No. 92 the following day, and then hit No. 3 this Monday, August 31, when it was also No. 1 in the Navigation category. By Tuesday of this week, MapQuest had reached the No. 1 spot across both apps and games on the U.S. App Store.

The app has now been downloaded an estimated 632,000 times in the U.S., according to data from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower. Across the US and Canada combined the app has been downloaded over 1.5-million times.

According to TechCrunch, these new users aren’t just casual downloaders; they’re actively engaging with the app.

MapQuest GM Doug Berger said:

“What’s been incredible is that people aren’t just installing our app — they care enough to communicate directly with us — making feature requests and submitting bug reports on social, and in our app reviews. Our small team has been working around the clock to build features people are asking for. We are aiming for everyone to have a great experience with the app.”

There is no question that it comes from people who want to defy Trump. More than half of MapQuest’s year-to-date U.S. downloads —56% — have occurred from August 27 through September 1. During this time period, the app’s U.S. downloads increased by 123% day-over-day and were up more than 50 times compared to the same period last year.

MapQuest, BTW, still calls the Gulf of Mexico by its original name, instead of Gulf of America.

Slap you twice, Donald!

MapQuest even released an online tool that lets you rename Lake Ontario to whatever you want it to be.

MapQuest was the original mapping application and was overtaken by Google Maps.

But MapQuest was not subtle when it turned down Donny’s order to change the name:

Polls show Trump’s efforts at renaming the lake found favor with only 14% of Americans. That margin is more lopsided than when Trump moved to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” last year. Back then, polls showed more than 7 in 10 Americans opposed it.

MapQuest said in a statement that usage of its app was running at about 50 times the usual rate.

Berger said “Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right, by downloading our app.”

Other protests continue to escalate. A giant “Lake Ontario – Now and Always” sign in English and French was erected over the weekend near Grimsby, Ontario. Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, said: “No one’s going to call it Lake of America. It’s been Lake Ontario for hundreds of years. It’s going to continue being Lake Ontario.”

According to The Guardian: “On Monday, three Democratic US representatives, Tim Kennedy and Joe Morelle of New York, and Debbie Dingell of Michigan, introduced legislation called the Hands Off Our Great Lakes act, seeking to block the Republican president’s federal order to rename the lake, and prevent future changes.”

Trump has long had poor polls on his tariffs, but the map-changing moves are among the worst polls to date. Reuters polling in December showed Americans opposed Trump’s tariffs overall, 53%-23%.

And despite Trump blaming Canada for the tariff escalation, significantly more Americans say the United States is more responsible for the dispute (46%) than say Canada is (12%).

Ten times as many people expect the tariffs to mostly hurt their personal financial situation (40%) rather than help it (4%).

There is very little appetite for a clash with Canada.

His renaming efforts are just salt in the wound, reminding everyone of his distraction with trivial measures.

As Yahoo News pointed out: “Just imagine before 2025 a president holding an event at the White House — which Trump did for “Lake America” — for a move that 14% of Americans support. It’s virtually unthinkable. But in Trump’s second term, it’s par for the course.”

A course that MapQuest is racing along very successfully.

The lesson for corporations: your boss is The People, not the president.

And that will show up in The Profit.

So pay more attention next time.

Trump is temporary. The People are not.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at THE DAY AFTER - How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World – A Progressive Political Playbook on Saving Democracy

Gloria Steinem passed away this morning; she was 92. She took her first steps towards advocacy for social justice because of the suffering of her mother.

Apologies if it seems like this column is becoming an Obituary Notice, but the people who meant a lot to me and my friends are now reaching their end. I suppose it is a natural wave, but it hurts just the same…Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, now Gloria Steinem – very different people, yet each a treasure. It is when you lay those cards on the table that you can realize where our real wealth is: in the warmth and strength of the heroes who rose among us.

Her father and mother lived in a trailer in Toledo; just before she was born her mother had a nervous breakdown. She was left as an invalid, trapped in a world of fantasies. Her mother’s stories of suffering during the Depression taught her the importance of the social politics of Franklin Roosevelt. She watched her mother making soup out of leftover potato skins while listening to FDR’s broadcasts to raise her spirits. Gloria began to realize:

“The mere thought of conflict was enough to depress my already depressed mother. I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later, I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be “unfeminine”, so we suppress it – until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.”

She believed that doctors’ apathy toward her mother’s condition stemmed from anti-woman hostility. It became the baseline for her understanding of social injustices: that women lacked social and political equality.

She became a journalist and social movement activist who was recognized as a leader of “second-wave” feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with high popularity in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. She was a co-founder of Ms. magazine, and the Women’s Action Alliance.

At the outset of the Gulf War in 1991, Steinem joined other prominent feminists to oppose the U.S. operation in the Middle East. She claimed that the ostensible goal of “defending democracy” was a pretense.

She consistently opposed military intervention and war with Iran throughout her life.

When asked if she had advice for Trump specifically, she replied: “Resign”.

Her advice for the coming generation: “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

Goodbye to Gloria our icon, who set so many people free. I am sure there will be many inspired people who will pick up her torch of equality and carry it forward.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at THE DAY AFTER - How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World – A Progressive Political Playbook on Saving Democracy

There has never been a cabinet of clowns quite like this one.

Trump only takes advice from jellyfish who float spinelessly around him, feeding him decisions that he can understand; decisions so simplistic that they have bankrupted America and killed its military standing.

An outrageous example is Peter Navarro.

He has been in the public eye recently ranting about Canada.

He was talking about the current tariff dispute between Trump and America’s (former) best friend. He said that Canada needs to get permission from the US to make deals with other countries.

Otherwise, Canada is a threat to national security.

In other words, being a separate country making its own decisions is unfair to the US and should not be allowed.

He painted the Canadian ally as treacherous. He said Canadians are people who “will stab you in the back;” they are “arrogant,” and a country Americans are “disappointed in.”

He is reflecting Trump’s warped persona that has no room for a “win-win” situation. It has always been “for me to win, you must lose.”

There is no international agreement in the world that could function like that. Everybody trades with the understanding that everyone will win.

Except Trump.

He thinks that if he claws back $40-billion from Canada and gives nothing, that he has won. In fact, he would be sailing right into the iceberg.

It’s exactly the same situation as the tariff wars that are tearing down American economic leadership.

The guy who steered Trump down the “tariff” path was an unknown zit put forward by Trump’s son-in-law.

Peter Navarro was however highly recommended by an expert named Ron Vara. Navarro featured this expert in more than a dozen of his books, including the 2011 book Death by China. Navarro was a big China hawk.

And then an Australian academic exposed the hoax after failing to find any historical record or background for Vara online, and noticing the name was an anagram.

‘Ron Vara’ is actually Navarro….R-O-N V-A-R-A.

He was shamelessly plugging himself by quoting himself and he didn’t care who found out.

So for all these years, Trump has been taking advice from a man whose biggest booster is…himself.

Navarro was recommended to Trump by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner cruised the Amazon web site looking for books on economics that would give Trump’s campaign some novelty. Navarro’s idea seemed ideal.

Navarro’s tariff wall idea was debunked by Adam Smith three hundred years ago. The idea that industries should be “ re-homed” back to a motherland was trashed by international studies. Besides, ‘re-homing’ is only aimed at manufacturing; our economy is based (two thirds) on service industries, which by their nature are born re-homed…they are ‘office businesses’.

Trump’s entire focus on tariffs and manufacturing is a total waste of time.

Rachel Maddow writes with horror that “It is hard to get your head around how much damage this one man can cause. I think it’s even harder to get your head around simultaneously the fact that he can do damage of this magnitude with such a teeny, tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny amount of thought. You think it would take like a grand plan and some big brains to figure out how to destroy the economy of the richest nation on earth, but that’s not how it’s working out. Turns out it doesn’t take a big idea or a lot of big brains working together.”

It takes Jared Kushner doing no research, Trump never having economic sense, a scam artist, and an idea that appealed to Trump’s drive for personal control over everybody. If there are tariffs, then you have to appeal to King Donald. The whole world would be on bended knee.

That’s all it took for the world’s most successful economy to veer off the cliff.

And now that giant brain is focused on Canada-US relations.

Idiots like Navarro try to demonize Canada.

Americans aren’t having it.

Almost 80% of Americans view Canada positively.

But the rest of Trump’s clown cabinet is now rushing forward to condemn Canada.

Pete Hegseth, in an attempt to mock the Canadian military, decided it would be funny to fat shame a teenager.

A girl who joined the cadets. A school sponsored program for children aged 12 to 18. The Canadian Cadet Program is a federally funded youth development program for Canadians between the ages of 12 and 18 focused on leadership, citizenship, and community service. They are not members of the military.

In the picture that Hegseth posted, this cadet was receiving an award. The fat-shaming outrage reached the desk of General Jennie Carignan, Chief of Defence for Canada.

Instead of focusing on the war in Iran, Hegseth threw insults across the border. His boss changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

TV host Hegseth has a few pictures from his immediate past that positioned the kind of man who would fire a swath of military leaders, guillotine the military’s Stars and Stripes VIPs over articles critical to Trump, and manage to lose a war to the 16th-place military power of Iran.

His buddy Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that he delivered a “beat down” to Canadian PM Carney, going on about the size of the Canadian army and how much Canada depends on the US for protection.

This from a guy whose country has never won a war it had to fight on its own. Whose troops joined the Canadians in WW1 & WW2, who had been fighting years before them. In fact, Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibwe soldier in the First World War, was credited with 378 confirmed kills and 300 captures, making him the most effective sniper of WWI. Canadian military snipers hold a world-renowned reputation for precision, holding several historical and modern long-distance combat records. Canadians were the best attacking force in WW2, advancing farther on D-Day than any other allied army. Recently, Rob Furlong, a former Master Corporal, held the world record for the longest confirmed sniper kill in combat (2,430 meters) from 2002 to 2009 during the Afghan War. An unnamed JTF2 sniper set a new benchmark in 2017 in Iraq, achieving a record-breaking confirmed kill at an incredible distance of 3,540 meters (over two miles).

It goes without saying that Canadians were in that war to support America. And we lost people.

Bessent had also scoffed at the Canadian military and made a crack about its “old” submarines. He forgets that just one of those “old” submarines and its crew once took out the Nimitz in joint wargames after sneaking past its comprehensive anti-submarine air and naval screens.

It would probably be unwise for the army to try to plan an invasion of Canada at the moment anyway…

I would think that American attention would be better focused on finding out why its weapons are so expensive and so poor. The vaunted F-35 stealth jet – half a trillion in the making – has been detected several times in the Iran war, and one was damaged.

But enough about the military. With all his wise men around his table, Trump can’t get America’s economy to kick into gear at all.

Canada’s Toronto Stock Exchange is outperforming Wall Street and the entire Euro-zone. About the performance of PM Carney, four words are spoken that would never apply to Trump; “He does the work.”

While Trump was golfing and his cabinet buddies were partying, Carney was flying around the globe signing massive new trade agreements. When it came time for the biggest military purchase in Canadian history, up to a dozen new submarines, Carney bought German.

Even in the depths of his rants about Canada, Trump had to exempt Canadian oil and electricity. Without them, half of America goes dark.

One commentator summed it up nicely [apologies – the language is in Australian…]

As the article explains about Carney: “Not one of the hottest. The hottest. Did you hear that all the way down in your lukewarm piddle pool at Mar-a-Lardo dipshit Don?”

If you check the global surveys, Canada now sits alongside Switzerland as the most loved country in the whole world, and the reason has nothing to do with a flashy cabinet group. Turns out if you spend eighteen months not threatening anyone, not tariffing anyone, and not posting deranged 3am screeds about your own allies, the entire world lines up around the block to shovel money at you.

Mat Winkler, co-founder of Bloomberg News, put it like this: “Canadians are like hobbits. They’ll save the world for you. They’re consistently underestimated.”

Quiet, polite, yet somehow always the ones left standing when the fighting stops. Trump looked north and saw a doormat. What was actually there was a Rhodes Scholar PM and a population that was annoyed with Trump and his cabaret of clowns.

Speaking of which, there are a few we haven’t mentioned. Robert F Kennedy Jr leads the Department of Health and Human Services. He has systematically dismantled federal scientific advisory panels, and watched as record-breaking parasitic infections including measles surged in outbreaks. The U.S. has recorded its worst year on record for cyclosporiasis (a foodborne parasite) with over 4,100 cases.

Markwayne Mullin is the Secretary of Homeland Security and almost comically unqualified. He tried to defend Trump’s position on the Iran war by evading the label “war”. A reporter noted that ‘The president called it war and Secretary Hegseth called it war, and when you walked up just now, you called it war…’ Mullin said: ‘Okay. That was a misspoke.’

We’ve had a lot of misspokes from the Trump genius squad.

The blame for the wreckage this cabinet is causing lies unreservedly with Trump himself. His fragile ego, his bottomless corruption, and his malignant jealousies have burned out the core of the federal administration.

Taken together, they have driven the American ship of state up onto the rocks, and now they are trying to sell off the parts.

There is still time for Americans to repair the damage. Trump’s boys are under orders to attack Canada and other allied targets before the mid-term elections, to try to find a Cause that their voters can support.

Ignore them.

It’s the Fall, and the season is changing. The leaves are coming down. A new world awaits.

It is one where the game controllers will be taken out of the hands of the imbeciles.

A new team is coming on the ice…one that can play with America’s oldest friends and allies.

It will be a pleasure to share the rink again.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at THE DAY AFTER - How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World – A Progressive Political Playbook on Saving Democracy

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!

AI apps can exploit you but the media will not care.

A podcast by journalist Cory Doctorow comes down hard on the American healthcare system, because of the way it exploits nurses.

It is infuriating beyond its original message.

It is a great reveal about how the American healthcare system prefers to hire contract nurses rather than staff nurses because they can then avoid paying union rates. And the system uses an app that goes to a data broker and finds out how much credit card debt that nurse is carrying.

Are your spidey senses tingling yet?

The more credit card debt they are carrying, the lower the wage they’re offered. The nurses are offered a “desperation wage”.

The contract nurses’ data are placed through four giant apps that are nationwide, each of which calls its service “an uber for nursing”. We see this everywhere we see gig work. It’s called algorithmic wage discrimination, labelled by scholar Veena Dubal. I call it “AI-Repressed Wages”.

But the main point for me is how US-centred the news is, regarding the wage apps. It is part of a hall of mirrors where the American media ignores global trends and sticks to reporting what it can see in its own small playpen.

Either the media genuinely have no idea of what is happening, or they are reporting news that a “centrist” Democratic population would like to hear.

I am excluding MAGA readers from this discussion because they don’t read. They exist to follow a leader. They are neither Left=Wing nor Right-Wing; they are a Cult that is unhappy with choices and having to make up their minds about issues. If we put that level at about 25% of the American public, I think we would have it nailed. This is not a good thing or a bad thing – I think it is a human average for any society. One person in four just wants to be told what to do. Ignore them – do not bother trying to appeal to them or trying to make up polices that they would like. They hate you; get over it and move on.

To illustrate the bewildering focus of the media on one story line, let’s continue for a minute on the story of the AI-repressed wages. It is beginner than one job category, of course. Uber drivers, for example, also use an app that observes whether they’ve accepted lowball offers before, and if they have, the wage that they’re offered go down and down and down until they find the lowest wage a driver is willing to accept.

Automated products that aim to increase workforce efficiencies through the introduction of monitoring and decision-making systems that determine wages have greatly increased recently.

There are 20 AI vendors today offering AI-Repressed, surveillance-based wage calculators.

None of their systems provided a means for workers to access the personal or social data that are collected.

Substack’s Gloria Maloney has a good take on the entire nursing waterfront of Digital Exploitation, including surveillance pricing and customer manipulation. It is a sobering look at how prices are changed to obtain a maximum return based on personal data.

Why is America different from other countries in being unable to deal with it?

This is all about national regulation – it is a ‘regulatory capture’ story. None of this would be possible in an environment with even very weak labour protections, and without privacy protections.

The only reason they are able to do this, is because unfettered data brokers exist.

They exist because no one has made them illegal.

The last time a consumer privacy law was passed was in 1988, when President Reagan signed a law that made it illegal for video stores to disclose your VHS rentals.

Every other form of privacy invasion since then is perfectly legal in America.

This is the expensively procured inaction of a heavily concentrated, privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at scale. There is a direct line from this to many of the wrongs we worry about in our world, including those nurses whose paychecks go down, because they can’t get privacy for their credit card bills.

Tech companies aren’t spying on you because privacy is dead. They are doing it because privacy never existed.

Google spies on us for the same reason that your cat knocks over your ornaments.

Because they can.

And no one makes them stop.

It is a direct attack on the American Dream.

But in Canada and the rest of the world, other nations believe they live in a society, not an economy.

And while it is true that all societies – as well as economies – have to deal with the challenge today of AI wages, the solutions start with an understanding and an awareness that AI-set low wages are abhorrent.

In all Canadian provinces regulators have introduced strict safeguards that make it a criminal offense for unaffiliated employers to agree to fix, maintain, or control employee wages. The Competition Bureau actively monitors how algorithmic software can facilitate illegal, tacit coordination or “hub-and-spoke” wage-fixing among competitors.

British Columbia introduced digital platform regulations that explicitly address algorithm-based pay, mandating basic wage transparency and minimum earnings thresholds for platform workers. Ontario enacted the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, introducing pay transparency and minimum wage protections specifically targeting gig workers subjected to algorithmic tracking. In a twist on the use of AI, Ontario also requires employers using AI to screen, assess, or select workers during the hiring process to explicitly disclose its use on public job postings.

Stats Canada says that AI adoption has not yet systematically rewritten general labor market compensation trends across traditional professional sectors. There is still time to act.

Earlier this summer, the international community got involved. In June the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO) had its first meeting on global standards for gig workers in sectors such as ride-hailing. They adopted Convention No. 193, to set binding labor standards for gig and platform workers.

The majority of more than 400 members - including governments, employer groups, and workers’ representatives - voted in favour of the employment standards convention. ‘YES’ votes came from the governments of China, Japan, Germany, France ​and South Africa. Eight voted against…including the US. (Canada abstained).

The U.S. representative told delegates the U.S. did not support a prescriptive binding convention in fast-evolving areas of the economy.

I would have thought that a fast-evolving area was the very place where prescriptive legislation was needed, but nobody asked me.

The World Bank estimates that the number of app-based gig workers globally is more then 400-million people.

A response to years of documented abuse and exploitation, the convention also sets, for the first time, international rules concerning algorithmic management.

The rules say that platforms must disclose how and when automated systems ⁠are being ​used to manage pay and access to work.

For years, platform firms have sought to obscure this reality. They characterize themselves as passive intermediaries – firms that merely match the supply and demand of services.

They would not, for example, tilt wages down if a worker is desperate.

The Convention cuts through this nonsense. By affirming the status of platform workers as bearers of rights and platform firms as bearers of corresponding duties, it situates platform work within the scope of labor protection, regardless of how platforms themselves define their own role.

Now these international provisions must be translated into national law through ratification and implementation by states.

But the key has been forged: the algorithmic systems through which platforms organize work must be understood as mechanisms of labor governance, and therefore as legitimate subjects of regulation.

In other words, those AI firms in the US that portray themselves as neutral data providers should be regulated.

Have you seen any of this in American media?

Has the story about American nurses or Uber drivers carried a whisper about the international movements against the AI wage suppression platforms, or about what the other countries are doing to remedy it?

The US firms that can shift compensation decisions away from human managers - and clear legal standards - into the arena of automatic discrimination, are getting away with silent murder.

It is not of course that fault of the AI. It is the directive of the human behind the inquiry.

And in an unfettered capitalist system, those minds are scheming against their fellow citizens.

Now, the new international convention says that workers must be informed of the use of automated systems and the extent to which such systems affect their working conditions or access to work.

In other words, companies have to shine a light down the dark corridors of AI calculation.

It remains to be seen how successful this will be in illuminating some of the core mechanisms of algorithmic management in the US, such as task allocation and performance scoring.

But it sets out a framework to address how data’s value can be assessed. Ride-hailing data, for example, might be valuable to city authorities doing transport planning, raising it above the level of profit-taking from a lower rate for Ubers.

That would be a social, rather than an economic, benefit.

It goes right to the core of what makes the US different from other states.

It’s about, on the one hand, the difference between how states balance transparency and commercial secrecy - the ultimate question not only for the new AI application but also for all public policy going forward.

But it is also about the awareness of other approaches that is largely missing in American media.

I am guessing that Substack readers do not fall into that category; you read more than most people and your reading would include international views. Excellent.

But you are left trapped in a box where the media wanders around in puzzled circles asking (for example) why Mamdani won the Mayoral election inf NYC.

Media tend to focus on “centrist” Democrats and how unhappy they are and how they plan to re-take the city.

But here is a revolutionary thought: what if “centrists” don’t really exist, and the people have swung behind a candidate who promised to actually do things for people?

Because in the rest of the world - i.e. Not America - Mamdani is not a socialist.

He is at the center of the spectrum.

His policies would not be worthy of a headline in Paris, London or Tokyo.

His approach and his popularity would be, but his stance would not.

The people of NYC could see this right away. Despite the millions of dollars thrown at his opponents, the people won.

And its now not just NYC, but Florida (Angie Nixon), Michigan (Abdul El-Sayed), Colorado (Melat Kiros) and Pennsylvania (Chris Rabb)…there will be others.

And the thing about the REAL centrists - those called “socialists” now – is that once they start showing what people-based policies can do, their popularity soars.

The trick for the more universal adoption of the socialist agenda – centrist in very other corner of he world – is for socialists to work under the name of liberalism. This is what Ronald Reagan feared: that “under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.”

Thanks for the hint, Ronald!

But to put him at his ease, we could point out that support for the “free market” has not completely collapsed in the US.

Support for unfettered capitalism has taken a nose-dive.

It seems to me that the alleged “socialists” – see also world-centrists – are voting more for fair play than for a full-on Left Wing agenda.

And I don’t understand why the media is not covering the story this way.

It may be because they are confused by the hold-outs of yester-year.

Four Democrats just put forward a motion to condemn the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They also condemn leaders like Mamdani.

Mind you, the DSA platform, called “Workers Deserve More,” stresses eliminating the Senate, granting amnesty for all immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, and replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote for president.

So I can see why four House Democrats disagreed with it.

But the House motion was greeted with anger: “A majority of YOUR CONSTITUENTS in Kent county voted for progressive candidates and damn right we want our government to take care of us,” said one angry message. “What are you doing? Are you actively trying to lose? You want the weather lady to take over??”

Republicans yell “socialism,” and Democrats scramble to prove they aren’t socialists, and suddenly we’re having the exact conversation Republicans wanted us to have.

There is a reason that the party has shifted its Center to the Left

The world today is 700% richer than it was fifty years ago.

But the average person in the US is only 8% richer.

The richest one percent are 4,000% richer.

I suspect that trickle-down economics is for the birds.

And even they are not happy.

But if you read the mainstream media, you would never know.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

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This is the full intro to the book; thank you for being a full subscriber.

Trump has brought America down faster, further than any other President.

For his followers, what critics saw as idiocy became proof that he wasn’t part of the establishment

But idiocy, when handed the nuclear codes, stops being entertaining. Authenticity doesn’t prevent pandemics, b…

Read more

This is the abridged intro to the book; full subscribers will get the full version.

Trump has brought America down faster, further than any other President.

For his followers, what critics saw as idiocy became proof that he wasn’t part of the establishment.

But idiocy, when handed the nuclear codes, stops being entertaining. Authenticity doesn’t prevent pandemics, balance budgets, or unite fractured nations. Idiocy in the highest office isn’t just embarrassing; it’s dangerous.

Robin Wade Gonzalez is an independent author who has written a book that shouts at you abou the dangers of ignorance. Gonzalez provides both an autopsy and a warning: when the media forgets its duty to truth, democracy becomes just another show.

Gonzalez sends two decisive messages:

Trump’s most incredible talent wasn’t making deals; it was selling failure as success.

The ultimate measure of his legacy will not be how much damage he caused, but how much resilience America can recover in response.

America loves to imagine itself immune to collapse, a democracy so sturdy that no single person can bring it down. The Trump years cracked that illusion wide open.

Democracy, by nature, is a gamble. It trusts the wisdom of the crowd to choose wisely, again and again. But there’s no guarantee of wisdom ; only the hope of it. Sometimes the crowd mistakes bluster for strength, arrogance for confidence, ignorance for honesty. Sometimes the crowd elects an idiot and calls it a revolution.

America didn’t just elect a president in 2016 ; it elected a celebrity.

On paper, he was a businessman. In reality, he was a brand.

The lesson he imparted was: if you can fake conviction long enough, people will mistake it for competence.

Populism thrives on the illusion that solutions are simple and that only “ the people ” see the truth clearly.

Trump cut through the noise with slogans that fit neatly on a red baseball cap. For millions, that was enough.

Where others saw ignorance, they saw authenticity. Where others saw recklessness, they saw courage. Where others saw idiocy, they saw rebellion.

It didn’t matter that he offered no coherent strategy. The hunger for disruption was so deep that chaos began to look like courage.

Media complicity was involved from the beginning, when Trump’s campaign was treated like a punchline.

In chasing clicks, the media gave him billions in free coverage more than all his rivals combined.

From the primaries to election night, the refrain never changed: “He can’t possibly win.” He insulted war heroes, mocked the disabled, bragged about sexual assault, and his poll numbers kept rising.

Millions of Americans were tired, tired of the Democratic Party being more invested in symbols, slogans, and social crusades than in their daily struggles.

By the 2020s, Democrats had turned politics into a moral sermon.

The Black Lives Matter ( BLM ) movement began as a legitimate cry for justice. But Democrats, eager to ride their moral wave, turned it into a brand. Slogans filled speeches, murals filled streets, yet the root problems — crime, inequality, and policing reform — barely budged. People wanted safer neighborhoods, better jobs, and functioning schools, not hashtags.

Trump didn’t need brilliance to look competent; he just needed to look normal.

Americans are not against immigration. The country was built on it. But the Democratic stance on border policy gradually became indistinguishable from an open-door invitation. Any attempt at enforcement was branded as racism.

Trump seized on that disillusionment perfectly. He didn’t need nuance; he just needed to point at the Democrats’ cultural overreach and growl, “They’re coming for your way of life.”

By 2025, the national mood was exhaustion. Voters didn’t want lectures; they wanted results. They wanted stability, not slogans.

Under Trump, Twitter evolved from a sideshow into the nerve center of governance. Foreign leaders, generals, senators, and even his own cabinet members started their mornings not with classified briefings but with the presidential feed.

One morning, Defense Secretary James Mattis woke up to find that the president had banned transgender Americans from serving in the military by tweet.

Policy no longer flowed through institutions. It was dictated in real time: thumbs first, consequences later.

For Trump, Twitter wasn’t just a platform. It was oxygen. He craved the validation, the dopamine rush of likes and retweets.

Exiled from his favorite stage, he built a new one: Truth Social. Marketed as a “free speech platform,” it became less of a digital town square and more of a gated compound of cult worshippers.

In the end, Trump’s greatest weapon had been taken from him not by impeachment or election, but by a “suspend account” button.

Trump instinctively grasped that dismantling truth was more effective than defending lies. By calling the press “the enemy of the people,” he turned skepticism into treason. By labeling every unfavorable report as “fake news,” he trained millions to reject anything outside his narrative.

And the lies flowed like confetti. Wind turbines caused cancer. Mexico was paying for the wall. COVID - 19 would “disappear like a miracle.”

The irony? It wasn’t that people believed his lies. It’s what they needed to. The Trump era proved that for millions, truth is less about accuracy and more about identity. To admit he lied would mean admitting they were fooled, and that was unbearable.

In the end, Trump didn’t just fight a war on facts for a time; he won it. He left behind a country split not by ideology but by reality itself. One nation, two universes. One Constitution, two versions of truth.

Once a president teaches people that truth is optional, democracy becomes elective too.

The virus exposed everything Trump had spent years pretending didn’t exist: complexity, accountability, and consequences.

The pandemic demanded consistency, empathy, and strategy, three qualities that simply didn’t exist in Trump’s operating system. Governors begged for resources ; Trump picked fights on Twitter. Medical experts tried to issue warnings; Trump contradicted them in real time. The CDC struggled to regain credibility while the president openly undermined it from the podium. America wasn’t fighting one virus; it was fighting two: COVID-19 and Trump’s ego.

By the time Operation Warp Speed delivered vaccines, the damage was already cultural. Public trust had evaporated.

His first presidency was branded by COVID-19, a virus he downplayed until it devoured the nation. His second term arrived in a world still haunted by pandemics, new variants, and the lingering trauma of 2020. And once again, Trump treated science like an unwelcome guest…

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at THE DAY AFTER - How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World – A Progressive Political Playbook on Saving Democracy

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A new aggregate of dozens of polls shows the Republicans trailing in eight states that are key for their Senate seat vote in November.

The Democrats dominate by an average of more than six points.

There is not one poll in the top 30 that puts Trump’s party ahead.

Republicans are being warned of “historic losses” in the midterms.

According to the latest Real Clear Poll aggregate, Republicans are down 2 points in Alaska, 7.5 points in Georgia, 2.3 points in Maine, 1.8 points in Michigan, 2.6 points in Ohio, 2 points in New Hampshire, 8 points in North Carolina, and 1.9 points in Texas.

South Carolina is the only state polling positive for the Republicans. Of course, it was also the first state to secede in the Civil War, so you know where its judgement capacity lies (“Come on and join us, boys – these Yanks won’t fight!”)

Trump himself won’t be on the ballot this time, which could complicate Republican efforts to turn out the MAGA base, while Democrats are highly motivated. In my view, if Trump were running the Democrats would be even more motivated…straining at their chains…frothing…

Affordability is the dominating issue, which means it was great timing for Trump to declare a trade war with Canada. And then there is the matter of the discount beef that is angering Western voters.

The word “discontent” is not strong enough. “Spitting rage” might be closer.

If this works out the way it seems, Trump is going to be fighting for his political life in his remaining years as president.

Best to get that Ballroom finished ASAP, head into the bunker and slam the door.

There are many ghosts and ghouls coming for him…we have forgotten the sins that will rise again:

Get popcorn.

And go out and vote!

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!

California is America’s wealthiest, happiest and most progressive state.

California’s GDP grew 5% in 2025. It has three times the investment of all the other states combined.

It ranked second nationally behind Washington state and was more than double the 2.1% national average. It easily outpaced major state economies like Texas (0.9%) and Florida (1.6%) in early 2026.

It was growth of a high order, driven heavily by professional and business services ($568.4 billion), information/tech ($525.5 billion), and real estate ($460.5 billion).

California retains its position as the world’s fourth-largest economy, closely rivaling nations like Japan, the United Kingdom, and India.

It is likely to continue its momentum, as it leads the U.S. in startup capital and venture capital attraction.

It has one big secret:

Compared to the rest of America, it has a relatively even income distribution.

That may not be what you’ve heard.

Certainly there have been a lot of headlines about the movement underway to make that wealth curve even more level. The “Wealth Tax Initiative” will be on the ballot on November 3^rd, and thus far looks to be favored by the public.

Pushing back in California are some 200 billionaires whose combined wealth exceeds $2 trillion—equal to roughly half the state’s GDP – so there is work to be done. Like in New York City, the wealthy types have threatened to leave California – some have even taken out citizenship elsewhere – but research studied by experts on millionaire migration shows that high earners rarely move just because of taxes. Rich people stay tied to major global hubs for business, culture, and social reasons.

All of that is beside the point: In California, the top 10% hold 44.7% of wealth – still not something to brag about as a model of income distribution, but it is almost twice as good as the US average.

In the US as a whole, the top 10% of wealthy people hold 75.2% of all wealth.

Nationally, this wealth continues to accumulate. According to the Financial Times, US corporate profits have hit a record high while workers’ slice of the pie has sunk to historic lows. Pre-tax earnings hit 18 per cent of national income - the highest share since the second world war.

But California’s income distribution is more like Canada, where the top 10% own 47% of all wealth- than like the US.

This is different from the ell-known “gini coefficient”, because it eliminates the effects of extreme wealth.

The average Canadian (and Californian) is almost 25% wealthier than the average American, because the wealth is spread more evenly.

This is important, because the closer an economy gets to equal incomes, the faster an economy will grow.

This is my observation alone and should not be cited as a law (not yet, anyway).

But we can back our argument from Europe, where the fastest-growing economy is Ireland. It grew at a rate of 3.9%. Between 2012 and 2021, incomes grew fastest at the bottom of the income distribution, leading to a decline in measures of income inequality. Like California and Canada, the top 10% in Ireland hold 47.3% of net wealth.

Ireland has the most progressive and redistributive tax and welfare system in the European Union, doing more than any other European country to offset market income inequality and reduce household poverty. For low-income and average-income earners, personal income taxes and labour taxes in Ireland are significantly lower than the EU average. In fact, no other tax system in Europe does more to reduce household income inequality than Ireland’s, according to a study by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).

In a nutshell, the mass of Irish people have more disposable income to spend than in other EU countries. And social transfers in Ireland dramatically reduce the at-risk-of-poverty rate, proving highly effective at leveling take-home income inequalities.

An analysis by Evonomics (‘the next evolution of economics’) backs up the notion that in rich countries, greater wealth inequality/concentration goes with faster economic growth over the shorter term, but over the long term it’s associated with much weaker growth. In the long run, trickle-down fails badly.

Democracy grows.

There are more ideas, more innovations, fewer barriers, and more involvement than in a pinched oligarchical state.

Back to California: the state is creating jobs three times faster than America as a whole. It is contributing nearly 1 in 6 jobs added nationwide in 2025. This means that California added 30,166 of America’s 181,000 new jobs.

For perspective, California’s population is 39.5-million, compared to America as a whole at 342.6-million.

I don’t know if the following measurement makes any sense – I think I just created its first use-case – but a way of looking at the power of the difference between the two, is to consider how many jobs got generated compared to the overall population.

I call this “job pop”. Like popcorn.

In the US, with its less-equal wealth curve, 181,000 new jobs were generated among 342,000,000 people. This would work out to one new job for every 200,000 people, roughly.

In California, the same exercise leaves us with the finding that a new job grows out of a much smaller pool of workers. Each job grows out of a pool of only 1,300 people.

That is a big difference in the efficiency of job creation, and the heat of the economies.

California’s economic boom had pleasant consequences. The state was able to erase its projected multi-billion dollar deficit and create a balanced budget for 2026-27. The increased revenues came from a tech and AI boom, accompanied by resilient financial markets.

Governor Newsom signed his final budget before leaving the office of Governor of California with a $0 deficit. “We’re leaving the state in good hands for the next Governor,” he noted.

I must point out that Newsom’s opposition to Trump’s policies include the tariffs on Canada, so I am a bit biased in his favor. Most Californians oppose the tariff, in fact, because the wine and farm groups lost money when Canadians stopped buying their goods.

He did put it succinctly, so Trump could figure it out.

What did California do with its extra state revenue?

It boosted the education status of its citizens.

The key ingredient to economic growth.

California spends nearly $30,000 per pupil annually on public education, backed by a $151 billion state and local budget for the 2026–27 school year.

It expanded Transitional Kindergarten (TK) for four-year-olds and 3.5-million free school meals for all students. Universal TK saves each family nearly $14,000 every year.

Test results and student outcomes continue to improve thanks to investments like these.

That kind of support is being extended to other areas of society.

Here is why equality of income matters - or, more directly, getting the involvement of millions instead of the involvement of a millionaire.

In roughly one long human lifetime, we went from a world where electricity wasn’t even in every American home, to artificial intelligence.

Ponder how extraordinary that is.

That wasn’t the accomplishment of six CEOs.

It was millions upon millions of humans stacking knowledge across generations.

One person discovered something. Another taught it. Another improved it. Another built infrastructure around it. Another found an entirely different application for it 70 years later.

And now we’ve reached a point where that accumulated inheritance could create unprecedented abundance.

Yet somehow in many places we have installed an oligarchy, which says that a tiny ownership class gets richer beyond comprehension while everyone else is told there simply isn’t enough to go around.

But it has been all of humanity that provided those centuries of knowledge. Workers provided the labor. The public funded foundational research and infrastructure. The Earth provided the minerals, land, energy, and water.

If humanity built the ladder together, all of humanity deserves a share of what we can reach from the top.

The tragedy of poor education means one-quarter of all Americans would be happy living under a dictatorship – that is Trump’s base.

Another power-wielding slice in the top one percent actually desire a dictatorship, because that is how they can make more money.

That is why so many groups - like the California Democratic Party and the California labor movement - stood with Bernie Sanders in supporting the five percent wealth tax on 250 California billionaires. The tax will bring in up to $100 billion, which will be spent on state-run health programs, public schools and food assistance.

Yes, California – like Canada or anywhere else – has problems to fix.

But it has a chance to change, thanks to its relative wealth equality. Contrast this with the greater inequality across the entire nation, and the results are instructive. The Wharton School’s 2026 Best Countries Index surveyed over 15,000 people across 33 countries and ranked 85 nations on quality of life — safety, healthcare, education, economic opportunity, public services.

The United States, the largest economy in the world, came in 27th.

It was behind Canada (3rd).

Behind Germany (9th).

Behind the UK (13th).

Behind Japan (14th).

There are all countries with wealth equality more akin to California than to the US as a whole.

There is no doubt that the US can create huge private companies. Nvidia, the chip maker, is valued at roughly the gross domestic product of Germany, the world’s third-largest economy; Apple is valued above the annual output of Britain; Alphabet above that of France.

We should be uneasy, however, in assuming that this corporate formation and growth will continue without a change in wealth equality.

I believe that California, with all its faults, is a better model of the future.

Certainly a better model than the one being lashed together in Florida at Mar a Lago – a model that has pushed the world into a degree of chaos that it has not seen in years.

The cost of this chaos? Trump has wiped out $9.6-trillion in wealth and retirement savings alone in his first 100 days.

It’s better to be a Newsom.

Better to be in California.

Better to eat tortillas than tacos.

Spread the wealth, carry the weight, and move up fast.

California is only getting started.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

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Reflecting Pool disaster, Version 2

He drags behind himself a grey scythe of ignorant industrialization.

The National Monument in Big Bend, Texas, is now a scarred tribute to a failed border wall.

The ancient Cotton Wood tree groves in Arizona have been chopped to the ground.

Old growth sequoia forests in California are now logging roads.

Minnesota’s Boundary Waters are now open to foreign mining.

The Rose Garden in the White House grounds is cement.

And now Washington’s oldest grove of cherry trees is under threat of the chain saw in an effort to please Trump’s desire for a golf course.

As is the golf course itself.

Trump wants to create a notable golf course in Washington, open to the public but capable of hosting professional tournaments. He is now pushing for an overhaul with a blueprint by Tom Fazio, who has designed several of the president’s golf courses.

It seems that the re-structuring of the current golf course would require the removal of Washington’s oldest grove of cherry trees — a gift from Japan in 1910 — that currently sits between the fourth and the ninth holes on the White Course. In the Fazio plan, the grove is shown in the middle of the practice range. Its fate is uncertain.

A shipment of 2,000 trees sent from Japan in 1910. President William Howard Taft ordered the 1910 shipment burned due to insect and disease infestations, but agriculture officials saved 24 trees to study. They planted them in a remote part of East Potomac Park.

Out of those 24 quarantined trees, 17 survived for over 114 years and form the oldest known group of cherry trees in the capital.

Their fate in unknown in Trump’s new design…

A slight confounding factor is that the island the course sits on, is sinking.

Soil was dumped on part of the site to try to raise it, but it seems that the soil was contaminated.

The DC Preservation League, a nonprofit, as well as two local residents sued the administration over concerns that the dirt was contaminated, and that major renovations would make the course less accessible. The fill has tested positive for toxic metals.

In response, a federal court told the administration that any major construction could not proceed until the suit was resolved.

No matter how the suit gets resolved, big areas need to be cleared for the infrastructure that is needed for tournament courses: the U.S. Open, held at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, N.Y., dedicated over 45 acres of land to grandstands, concessions, broadcast, security and logistics.

U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes said “she wanted advance notice before the government removed more than 10 trees or brought equipment larger than a sedan onto the property,” which Trump’s team certainly did not give her.

“A person familiar with the legal proceedings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said the government has not notified the plaintiffs or the court about the recent tree work,” reports the Washington Post.

Trump has still not released final design, construction schedule or estimated cost for the “renovations” he has planned for the course.

Trump indirectly justified the removal of the cherry trees.

Overall, the new plans show the East Potomac Golf Links being expanded about 50 acres into parkland that is currently being used for picnicking, fishing, cycling and other recreational activities.

Preservationists are in the process of challenging the Trump administration’s redevelopment of the East Potomac Golf Links in the U.S. District Court, arguing that the plans violate an 1897 congressional act establishing East Potomac Park for the “recreation and pleasure of the people.”

A government attorney who previously told the court that the Interior and the Park Service were “trying to meet” a September construction date.

The Washington Post has now reported that Trump has gone ahead and chopped down dozens and dozens of the cherry and sycamore trees at the historic golf course.

In the early 1900’s Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo arranged the initial shipment of 2,000 cherry trees as a symbol of friendship to the United States. The trees reached Seattle by ship in December 1909 and arrived in Washington, D.C. by train on January 6, 1910.

They were inspected and found to contain plant diseases, so most of them were destroyed.

Undeterred by the setback, Tokyo sent a new, larger gift of 3,020 healthy trees in 1912. They established the legacy celebrated today by the National Cherry Blossom Festival.

The trees on the golf course could be remnants of Japan’s earlier 1910 shipment. At one point, the area was used for agricultural research, and historic records indicate that not every tree from the original shipment was burned.

Trump terminated the public 50-year lease, then moved to direct renovations through the National Park Service and golf architect Tom Fazio.

The East Potomac Golf Links is public property owned by the federal government, not by Donald Trump.

Cutting down trees on federal property is a FEDERAL CRIME under the Destruction of Government Property Act.

It is uncertain whether the iconic cherry blossom groves are still standing.

Hundreds of them were removed, however, for one unfortunate fact: the island on which the golf course is situated, is sinking.

Floods have inundated the course before, with 1936 and 1989 being especially bad.

The island is artificial.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the 330-acre park in the late 19th century using fill dirt and dredged material from the Potomac River.

Studies show the artificial island has sunk at least five feet since its creation. Water levels around the area have risen more than two feet due to climate change and environmental factors.

The aging seawall holding back the river is falling apart and requires repairs estimated to cost upwards of $600 million.

Parts of the park and its walkways are frequently underwater.

Trump nevertheless announced that construction to turn the affordable public course into a PGA-caliber destination would begin on September 1, 2026.

The non-profit D.C. Preservation League and local golfers have filed lawsuits to block the project over environmental concerns and the potential loss of affordable public recreation.

“The island is sinking,” said Rebecca Miller of the DC Preservation League, which is suing to block the project. “It’s made of fill dirt, and the waters are rising.”

Ed Stierli of the National Parks Conservation Association, a non-profit advocacy group, also said that when he saw the renderings of Trump’s plan, “One of the first questions I had was: Are they completely ignoring the landscape here?

“Unfortunately, what’s moving forward here is almost a replica of the type of thinking we’re seeing with the Reflecting Pool: An administration ignoring climate, ignoring science, ignoring the Park Service’s own plans,”

The White House only said that Trump had “built some of the greatest golf courses in the world” during his career as a developer.

His demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a massive, gilded ballroom and bunker, ended up with toxic debris from the site dumped on the golf course grounds, according to testing conducted for the National Park Service. The debris tested positive for lead, a study shared by the National Park Service said. ​The study also detected pesticides, chromium, PCBs, petroleum byproducts and other toxic chemicals exceeding laboratory reporting limits.

Some 30,000 cubic yards of excavated soil from the $400 million ballroom project have been dumped.

The administration was planning to take over the site on August 30^th with landscaping, deferred maintenance and tree-clearing scheduled for the next day.

A spokesperson for the National Links Trust, which operates the course, told the outlet that the news was a “complete surprise.”

Trump also wants to build a 250-foot “triumphal arch” near Arlington National Cemetery and a National Garden of Heroes with statues of 50 notable Americans. I wonder if Trump will be one of them.

The Kennedy Center is next. In a legal filing, Trump-selected board of the Kennedy Center said that the arts complex and living memorial to President John F. Kennedy may be torn down if its plans for a two-year renovation and to add President Trump’s name back on the complex do not move forward.

In other words: add Trump’s name or we tear it down.

You could hear the same kind of threat in a schoolyard from the local bully.

Trump’s proposal would put Trump’s name on the entryway sign twice, and again on a third location on the complex’s grounds.

If these stories were written as fiction, no one would believe them.

Trump is operating so far outside the law that he’s in his own galaxy.

What few of us understand, is how America could have gotten to this point? Where are the fabled “checks and balances”?

I am actually confident that justice will prevail, but it’s taking a long time to ride into town…

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

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”I think Canada has done a very good job of supporting research in areas that really matter to society,” said Dr. Seth Guikema of the University of Michigan. Dr. Guikema will start at Western University in London, Ontario in January.

Canada just hired 48 scholars away from US universities, including Harvard, Yale, and MIT.

This program is part of the Government of Canada’s $1 billion Research Chairs program, a national initiative to attract top-tier researchers in areas of strategic priority to Canada. The program’s premise is that talent recruited abroad yields results at home: chairholders build their teams in Canada, train the next generation of Canadian researchers and form partnerships that reach across institutions and sectors.

The recent hit to America’s universities will take 50+ years to restore in terms of American scientific, technological and educational excellence after their absence.

And it cuts even deeper…

On Aug. 27, Prime Minister Carney announced a $541-million program to recruit 64 world-class research chairs and 63 emerging leaders from around the world. In addition to the 48 leaving US institutions, some 400 Junior researchers are coming as well.

The new hires are in fields like health and biotechnology; climate, environment and the Arctic; and AI, quantum and advanced materials. Smaller but important clusters address democracy, community resilience and social policy.

This isn’t just a general support program for science or even for excellent scholarship.

It is focused funding, tied to Canadian prosperity, health and growth.

The work of the researchers will be transformed into technologies and applications that will change people’s lives.

A specific example is a good illustration: Canada is investing nearly $100 million in BC life sciences companies Kardium and Evonik. Up to $31.25 million will support Kardium’s $125-million Burnaby manufacturing facility, expanding capacity and supporting 1,000 skilled jobs. Up to $68 million will help Evonik build a Nucleic Acid Competence Centre, supporting 260 jobs and expanding Canadian capacity for next-generation mRNA vaccines and therapies.

Investment in the future works – literally.

Nominees for the grants had to be living and working outside Canada to be eligible. Some of them (22) were expatriate Canadians who had gone to the US as part of their career path. The new grant program therefore corrects a flaw in the current Canadian system – one that requires more support for post-degree jobs within Canada.

I don’t know whether the government has plans to address this in future, or whether they expect that a boost across all Canadian sectors will provide the job market that these researchers need.

Health, advanced digital technologies, and climate resilience were the top three fields.

The pull from around the world included most of the science-oriented nations, including the US, Europe, India, China, Japan and Australia, but also encompassing Peru, Singapore, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.

The New York Times immediately placed the blame for the sweep of American researchers on the Trump administration:

“Turmoil in American academia, precipitated by a crackdown on prestigious universities by the Trump administration and attacks on scientific research groups, has allowed Canada a rare opportunity to lure some of those schools’ top minds north.

“While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration’s assault on science is behind their departure.

“I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world,” said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. “And I woke up one day and that wasn’t true anymore.”

“He has been recruited to McGill University in Montreal.”

The Canada-bound brain drain from U.S. institutions began last year as the Trump administration put forward policies that targeted foreign students, academic freedom and funding for equity-related programs.

The Trump administration has put U.S. colleges in its cross hairs, accusing some of cradling haters of America. It has launched policies that threaten to expel international students and jeopardize funding and academic freedoms.

One of the earlier defectors was Timothy Snyder, an author and historian who I greatly admire. I have covered his work on Ukraine in previous posts. He and his colleagues had published a widely shared New York Times video opinion piece titled, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”

Now Snyder is at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where he joined Brian Rathbun and Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, international relations professors who made a similar move last year from the University of Southern California.

“At the Munk School, we are totally committed to freedom of inquiry, to the independent pursuit of scholarship and to academic freedom,” said Janice Stein, the founding director of the Munk School. “For some coming from the United States now, those core values are of paramount importance.”

It formed a model for the federal program that is just unveiling: bring in world renowned experts and form a hub of opinion-setting leadership.

Snyder predicted a continuing exodus of academics from the United States.

“If you let a horrible authoritarian who destroys institutions come to power, people are going to leave,” he said.

Now he will be teaching the university’s largest class to date. More than 1,000 students have signed up for his course: “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

Synder credits the Canadian social environment for bringing people like himself into the country: “We have to first respect the Canadians, because Canada itself has done much more to resist Trump than anything in the United States thus far.”

There is indeed a commitment to building the Canadian future; it is an incredibly optimistic environment.

“While certain countries are cutting research and turning their back on academic freedom, we’re doubling down on science,” Mélanie Joly, Canada’s industry minister. She billed the recruitment program as the world’s “largest talent attraction” project.

For the impact on a specific Canadian university, we could look at McGill in Montreal. It has an established strength in health, sustainability systems and public policy research.

Now, it will bring in:

Chloé Arson, who joins McGill’s Faculty of Engineering from Cornell University. She does groundbreaking research in geomechanics, rock damage and healing, and AI-enabled subsurface exploration. She advances the clean energy transition and is a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER and BRITE awards. She will reinforce Canada’s position as a leader in sustainable resource development, energy security, and climate adaptation.

Tomislav Friščić, a global leader in green and sustainable chemistry, whose return from the University of Birmingham will boost the pharmaceutical, mining, metals and advanced materials sectors. It will accelerate Canada’s adoption of green chemistry solutions and drives economic growth.

Julie Lockwood, a world-renowned ecologist, joins McGill’s Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences from Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the interplay between environmental changes and invasive species, and will strengthen Canada’s biosecurity and climate resilience and help protect biodiversity and ecosystems. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America.

Sameer Sonkusale comes to McGill’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences from Tufts University. An entrepreneur and global expert in bio-integrated medical devices, he has developed award-winning wearable, transdermal, and ingestible technologies, holds 56 patents, and has founded three MedTech startups. His research program in closed-loop precision medicine will strengthen Canada’s capacity in digital health and chronic disease care. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors.

Phillip Zamore joins McGill’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and will collaborate with McGill’s DNA to RNA (D2R) Initiative. His distinguished career in RNA biology and therapeutics spans four decades, during which his discoveries have led to novel therapies for human diseases. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the (U.S.) National Academy of Sciences and the (U.S.) National Academy of Medicine.

Ethan Zuckerman, a prominent media scholar, comes to McGill’s Faculty of Arts and the Max Bell School of Public Policy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as a top global thinker, his research focuses on digital cosmopolitanism, including how large technology platforms shape public discourse, democratic participation, and online civic spaces. His work contributes to evidence-based digital policy, transparent AI governance, and platform accountability.

You might think that an expenditure like this would weaken Canada’s economy.

Canada’s economy grew by 3.3% annualized in the second quarter, its fastest growth in 3 years.

And it leads the G7 for growth.

Some costs are recognized as investments – and rewarded.

And people, of course, are the most rewarding of all investments.

Canada is lucky that Trump does not recognize personal attainment – even if it is a tragedy for America.

But Canada – and other countries of the world – will be ready to rebuild America when the time is right.

When a change has been made at the top.

In the meantime, BTW: Canada has expanded citizenship eligibility for people who can prove their Canadian ancestry, resulting in thousands of applications from Americans. Check your documents!

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!

”I think Canada has done a very good job of supporting research in areas that really matter to society,” said Dr. Seth Guikema of the University of Michigan. Dr. Guikema will start at Western University in London, Ontario in January.

Canada just hired 48 scholars away from US universities, including Harvard, Yale, and MIT.

This program is part of the Government of Canada’s $1 billion Research Chairs program, a national initiative to attract top-tier researchers in areas of strategic priority to Canada. The program’s premise is that talent recruited abroad yields results at home: chairholders build their teams in Canada, train the next generation of Canadian researchers and form partnerships that reach across institutions and sectors.

The recent hit to America’s universities will take 50+ years to restore in terms of American scientific, technological and educational excellence after their absence.

And it cuts even deeper…

On Aug. 27, Prime Minister Carney announced a $541-million program to recruit 64 world-class research chairs and 63 emerging leaders from around the world. In addition to the 48 leaving US institutions, some 400 Junior researchers are coming as well.

The new hires are in fields like health and biotechnology; climate, environment and the Arctic; and AI, quantum and advanced materials. Smaller but important clusters address democracy, community resilience and social policy.

This isn’t just a general support program for science or even for excellent scholarship.

It is focused funding, tied to Canadian prosperity, health and growth.

The work of the researchers will be transformed into technologies and applications that will change people’s lives.

A specific example is a good illustration: Canada is investing nearly $100 million in BC life sciences companies Kardium and Evonik. Up to $31.25 million will support Kardium’s $125-million Burnaby manufacturing facility, expanding capacity and supporting 1,000 skilled jobs. Up to $68 million will help Evonik build a Nucleic Acid Competence Centre, supporting 260 jobs and expanding Canadian capacity for next-generation mRNA vaccines and therapies.

Investment in the future works – literally.

Nominees for the grants had to be living and working outside Canada to be eligible. Some of them (22) were expatriate Canadians who had gone to the US as part of their career path. The new grant program therefore corrects a flaw in the current Canadian system – one that requires more support for post-degree jobs within Canada.

I don’t know whether the government has plans to address this in future, or whether they expect that a boost across all Canadian sectors will provide the job market that these researchers need.

Health, advanced digital technologies, and climate resilience were the top three fields.

The pull from around the world included most of the science-oriented nations, including the US, Europe, India, China, Japan and Australia, but also encompassing Peru, Singapore, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.

The New York Times immediately placed the blame for the sweep of American researchers on the Trump administration:

“Turmoil in American academia, precipitated by a crackdown on prestigious universities by the Trump administration and attacks on scientific research groups, has allowed Canada a rare opportunity to lure some of those schools’ top minds north.

“While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration’s assault on science is behind their departure.

“I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world,” said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. “And I woke up one day and that wasn’t true anymore.”

“He has been recruited to McGill University in Montreal.”

The Canada-bound brain drain from U.S. institutions began last year as the Trump administration put forward policies that targeted foreign students, academic freedom and funding for equity-related programs.

The Trump administration has put U.S. colleges in its cross hairs, accusing some of cradling haters of America. It has launched policies that threaten to expel international students and jeopardize funding and academic freedoms.

One of the earlier defectors was Timothy Snyder, an author and historian who I greatly admire. I have covered his work on Ukraine in previous posts. He and his colleagues had published a widely shared New York Times video opinion piece titled, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”

Now Snyder is at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where he joined Brian Rathbun and Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, international relations professors who made a similar move last year from the University of Southern California.

“At the Munk School, we are totally committed to freedom of inquiry, to the independent pursuit of scholarship and to academic freedom,” said Janice Stein, the founding director of the Munk School. “For some coming from the United States now, those core values are of paramount importance.”

It formed a model for the federal program that is just unveiling: bring in world renowned experts and form a hub of opinion-setting leadership.

Snyder predicted a continuing exodus of academics from the United States.

“If you let a horrible authoritarian who destroys institutions come to power, people are going to leave,” he said.

Now he will be teaching the university’s largest class to date. More than 1,000 students have signed up for his course: “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

Synder credits the Canadian social environment for bringing people like himself into the country: “We have to first respect the Canadians, because Canada itself has done much more to resist Trump than anything in the United States thus far.”

There is indeed a commitment to building the Canadian future; it is an incredibly optimistic environment.

“While certain countries are cutting research and turning their back on academic freedom, we’re doubling down on science,” Mélanie Joly, Canada’s industry minister. She billed the recruitment program as the world’s “largest talent attraction” project.

For the impact on a specific Canadian university, we could look at McGill in Montreal. It has an established strength in health, sustainability systems and public policy research.

Now, it will bring in:

Chloé Arson, who joins McGill’s Faculty of Engineering from Cornell University. She does groundbreaking research in geomechanics, rock damage and healing, and AI-enabled subsurface exploration. She advances the clean energy transition and is a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER and BRITE awards. She will reinforce Canada’s position as a leader in sustainable resource development, energy security, and climate adaptation.

Tomislav Friščić, a global leader in green and sustainable chemistry, whose return from the University of Birmingham will boost the pharmaceutical, mining, metals and advanced materials sectors. It will accelerate Canada’s adoption of green chemistry solutions and drives economic growth.

Julie Lockwood, a world-renowned ecologist, joins McGill’s Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences from Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the interplay between environmental changes and invasive species, and will strengthen Canada’s biosecurity and climate resilience and help protect biodiversity and ecosystems. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America.

Sameer Sonkusale comes to McGill’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences from Tufts University. An entrepreneur and global expert in bio-integrated medical devices, he has developed award-winning wearable, transdermal, and ingestible technologies, holds 56 patents, and has founded three MedTech startups. His research program in closed-loop precision medicine will strengthen Canada’s capacity in digital health and chronic disease care. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors.

Phillip Zamore joins McGill’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and will collaborate with McGill’s DNA to RNA (D2R) Initiative. His distinguished career in RNA biology and therapeutics spans four decades, during which his discoveries have led to novel therapies for human diseases. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the (U.S.) National Academy of Sciences and the (U.S.) National Academy of Medicine.

Ethan Zuckerman, a prominent media scholar, comes to McGill’s Faculty of Arts and the Max Bell School of Public Policy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as a top global thinker, his research focuses on digital cosmopolitanism, including how large technology platforms shape public discourse, democratic participation, and online civic spaces. His work contributes to evidence-based digital policy, transparent AI governance, and platform accountability.

You might think that an expenditure like this would weaken Canada’s economy.

Canada’s economy grew by 3.3% annualized in the second quarter, its fastest growth in 3 years.

And it leads the G7 for growth.

Some costs are recognized as investments – and rewarded.

And people, of course, are the most rewarding of all investments.

Canada is lucky that Trump does not recognize personal attainment – even if it is a tragedy for America.

But Canada – and other countries of the world – will be ready to rebuild America when the time is right.

When a change has been made at the top.

In the meantime, BTW: Canada has expanded citizenship eligibility for people who can prove their Canadian ancestry, resulting in thousands of applications from Americans. Check your documents!

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!

Amid cratering polls, an illegal war, gangs of gestapo ruling the streets, and an economy that is tanking, Trump lifted his gaze from his Ballroom to re-name one of the Great Lakes.

“Lake Ontario” has had that name long before there was an America, but that was not good enough for Trump.

He “changed” it to Lake America.

He did not take up my suggestion of changing the name of Lake Michigan to Lake Epstein.

He cannot legally rename the shared international body of water for Canada or the rest of the world.

Canadian officials, including Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, immediately rejected the change, stating the lake remains Lake Ontario “now and forever”.

Tim Houston, the premier of my province of Nova Scotia, responded: “We’re into some real foolishness now. It’s Lake Ontario, buddy.”

Wisconsin governor Tony Evers shared a video of himself changing the name of Lake Michigan to Lake Wisconsin. He made it official by signing a restaurant napkin.

The Seaway itself has a portion that runs through Canadian territory, so if one country wanted to make a change and have it stick, it would be Canada.

International mapmakers, foreign governments, and global bodies are not bound by U.S. domestic policy and will continue using the historical name.

Then Trump shed light on his future plans:

“The lake change, Lake of America, was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually. As you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico. We changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America. So if you think about it, we have a Gulf and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”

Maybe we’ll change them both.

SO….

Maybe the Atlantic will be called “The American Ocean”

And maybe the Pacific will be called “The American Ocean”

They can be differentiated by calling the Atlantic “The American Ocean (Right)”, and the Pacific can be called “The American Ocean (Left)”.

In short form they could just be “The American Ocean”

That should be a lot less confusing.

That way, Europe will open out into the American Ocean, just like Japan.

Planes from Australia will cross the American Ocean, just like planes from Africa.

See how much more convenient that it is?

Of course, if you are planning a vacation rendez-vous with your relatives and said “I’ll meet you at the American Ocean”, you might have an awkward moment when they showed up 3,000 miles away.

But think of the pluses: any nation trying to invade America would probably get lost in Trump Topology.

Or as PM Carney would say, in his “hydronym”. No doubt this reference sent everyone scrambling through Google yesterday (it means “the proper name of any body of water, such as a river, lake, sea, or ocean”).

Or we could tone down our oceanic ambitions a bit.

There is a portion of the Atlantic known as the Sargasso Sea.

It is a rotating pool of water that has no directional current.

It is covered in a blanket of seaweed.

You can swim in it, but it has tiny jellyfish larvae floating in surface mats; they can cause skin irritation.

Its dead-calm winds used to trap wooden sailing vessels for weeks or months, leading to severe shortages of food and fresh water…like the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which ran out of supplies when Trump’s strategies pushed its base away by 2,000 kms.

So, the Sargasso Sea is a body of water that:

- Goes nowhere

- Circles repeatedly

- Irritates everyone

- Is a trap that people avoid…

Sounds like the “TRUMP OCEAN” to me?

Votes?

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!

New polls show Trump auguring even deeper into the mud.

Satisfying as that is, I agree with those among us who have said: “enough polling!…just get on with vote!”

Much as I’d like nothing better, that move is beyond my power. But there is one aspect of polling that always intrigues me, and that is the picture it paints of the reasons for voter disapproval of a candidate.

I mean, the reasons beyond the usual complaints that Trump is a thin-skinned bully who can’t make a serious plan; his most recent move in his tariff war with Canada has been to sign an order directing the interior secretary to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

G Elliott Morris has released a new assessment of Trump’s situation, and it’s even worse than we had thought.

He wrote of three things that jumped out at me:

· Opposition intensity is at a high point. “The president heads into the home stretch of the midterm elections at nearly a high point for intensity of opposition to him”.

· Disapproval is 3:1 over approval. “In our new poll, the gap between Americans who strongly disapprove of him and those who strongly approve is now nearly 3-to-1”.

· The push against Trump is now mostly in his own coalition: “Movement against the president is now primarily in his own coalition, with significant softening in the share who say they “strongly support” the job he’s doing over the last two months.”

The intensity factor is bleak news for Trump.

A 32-point gap has grown between strong disapproval and strong approval — 3-to-1 — up from a 22-point, 2-to-1 average across all of 2025. Only 47% of Trump’s own approvers feel strongly about it now, down from 54% last year.

Trump is now net negative on all of the dozen issues that Morris tests for.

Border security, the last one in his favor previously, fell from +1 in July to −5 — its worst reading yet.

The “Prices” issue has fallen to −48, a new record low, down 6 points from July’s −42. Just 24% approve of Trump’s work on prices; 73% disapprove.

Satisfying as that is, I find it hard to believe that anyone has a good word to say about prices. I’d like to see an interview with one of those people who had a ‘positive’ rating for prices…or a brain-wave monitor of the respondents.

More than a third named prices and inflation as the single most important problem facing the country. It is the No. 1 problem for Republicans (36%), Democrats (37%), and independents (38%) alike.

This is the first time where the president’s rating is clearly below zero on every issue.

Says Morris: “Nearly half the country does not merely disapprove of Trump, but disapproves strongly: 49% of adults strongly disapprove of how he is handling his job as president, against just 17% who strongly approve, a 32-point gap and a ratio of nearly 3-to-1…

“What has changed most in the last few months is on Trump’s own side: the share of his approvers who feel strongly about his performance fell from 54% in 2025 to under 47% now. As I wrote earlier this month, Trump and Republicans are getting squeezed from both ends; his own voters are cooling on him even as independents move toward Democrats. So his coalition did not just shrink; the remaining supporters have softened.”

Prices were singled out as the top issue among their top three problems, at 49%, ahead of jobs (40%), and health care (37%).

Democrats still lead on the issues voters care about most.

On whichever issue each respondent named as the country’s most important problem, Democrats lead on handling it, with a 10-point edge that has held steady for months.

Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot 49–43 among registered voters.

Among only those voters who say they are definitely going to vote in November, Democrats hold a 9-point lead.

82% of Democrats, 53% of independents and 21% of Republicans say things are going poorly.

All of these numbers were generated before Trump unleashed his 50% tariff attack on Canada, which will hurt agricultural communities. In MAGA country places like dairy farms in Wisconsin, John Deere plants in Iowa and auto chains in Michigan, Trump has added huge costs to equipment and ingredients.

Michigan is a very clear case of shooting-yourself-in-the-foot.

For decades, the auto makers had been assembling cars and trucks on both sides of the US/Canada border; it was not uncommon for a car part to cross the border six times before finl assembly.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick inserted himself in the final tariff talks and declared that tariffs would not be cut on heavy trucks. Last year, he said that he wanted to move auto production out of Canada and into the United States, so at a U.S.-Canada summit, Lutnick told a Canadian audience that the United States was no longer interested in buying Canadian-made cars. Tariffs on cars and light trucks, which were “only” 25 percent, will rise to 50 percent on January 1. Automakers will also pay 50 percent tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

This nukes the idea pf a seamless North American market for both production and consumption.

Trump is also squeezing out efforts to shift production to EVs, which are more efficient than cars powered by internal combustion engines. He revoked the federal target that EVs comprise 50 percent of new car sales by 2030 and froze the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program that would have creates a national EV charging network.

Then he terminated the $7,500 tax credit for new EV purchases.

There was a sharp drop in planned EV investment in Georgia, South Carolina, and Arizona.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rolled back the fuel economy goals that were intended to promote the shift to EVs, by cutting the 2031 fleet average target from over 50 mpg down to 34.5 mpg. Long-standing fines for automakers failing to meet fuel rules were eliminated entirely.

Republican incumbents have so far refused to intervene, allowing Trump’s take-over of Congress’s power to tax to continue. Michigan GOP senatorial candidate Mike Rogers has ducked all questions about Trump’s tariffs, for example, letting the Democrats own the auto debate.

The same is true with the new “discount” in the price of beef – attainable only by bringing in meet from (say) Venezuela. America’s ranchers are having a terrible time with increased prices, water shortages and supply problems; the last thing they need on top of that is beef with a 25% discount sticker.

And a deadly infection.

There is a good chance that the beef Trump is trying to flog to the American has the upper limit of chloramphenicol, a banned antibiotic, onboard.

It is a move, of course, condemned by the cattlemen and ranchers who used to e such big Trump fans before. Importing foreign beef has triggered severe political and economic backlash from Western cattle ranchers, agricultural groups, and farm-state lawmakers.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), R-CALF USA, and The United States Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) have all publicly pushed back. The move has created a deep political rift in historically conservative, beef-producing Western states. Lawmakers like Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-I.A.) have slammed the policy as a temporary band-aid that benefits the (foreign-owned) meat packers. Even rural Texas is giving Republicans a hard time: Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller confirms that some Republicans will lose in November due to rural voter outrage. For him, it’s not just meat pricing -it’s also data centers, transmission lines and years of stalled promises.

Michigan, Indianna, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Ohio look likely to follow the anti-Trump trend as well.

It is true that the polls can change overnight and are not a reliable forecast of behaviour on voting day, but they do provide a nice guide to the inner workings of the Hive Mind of party politics.

Certainly, if the polls are ignored, and their forecasts come true, then a plague will descend on the party organizer who let the alarms bells ring without a response.

Luckily for the Democrats, Trump ignores every warning that he is given. Planning requires work, and that is not on Trump’s list of favorite activities.

So we will sit tight, hold the polls quietly in clenched hands, and wait for the hammer to fall.

Then we will say:

“Told ya!”

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!

ANOTHER THANK-YOU TO THOSE WHO ARE BUYING ME A COFFEE!

While Ukrainian troops approached milestone progress in their defence of the homeland, the CIA has kept quiet about the clandestine trip to Moscow by its Director John Ratcliffe.

Ukraine has almost completely regained control of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

For those of you who have lost track of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast [region], it is the most important industrial region of Ukraine. Its 3-million people are centred on Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city and a major economic hub.

Russian forces originally pushed into its eastern territory, but subsequent Ukrainian counter-offensives have reclaimed ground.

In fact, Ukrainian forces have almost completely regained control of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

Now, President Zelensky says that only about 10 sq km remain to be liberated – three small settlements where, he states, there are “virtually no Russian troops” left.

The importance of this goes beyond the single Oblast, though.

Zelensky said that since the beginning of 2026, Russian forces have occupied 990 sq km of Ukrainian territory, while the defence forces have regained control of 820 sq km.

The riveting part of his comment is this bit:

“We believe that in 2026 we will reach an equal amount of Ukrainian territory temporarily occupied by the Russians and territory liberated by us.”

In other words, Ukraine will have taken back half of the territory that Putin grabbed in his surprise attack.

The total amount of conflict territory, Russian and Ukrainian combined, is 1,870 sq km. To bring themselves up to the half-way point, Zelensky’s soldiers have to regain 935 sq km. That means they have to take back another 115 sq kms by the end of this year.

They have already regained 820 sq kms. It does not sound impossible to reach the half-way mark.

I don’t want to sound flippant; it’s easy for me to sit at my desk and agree Zelensky. But it’s important to give weight to what he is saying. Canada has the world’s largest Ukrainian population outside the Mother Country itself, so I will be inundated with angry notes if I misspeak.

Looking at it from his point of view, his soldiers have a record of success.

We sometimes forget that when Russia invaded in 2022, it snatched fully 115,000 sq kms of Ukrainian territory; 27% of the country. Successful Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson later that year pushed Russian control down to roughly 18% (45.000 sq kms) by November 2022. Russia has already lost 70,000 sq kms of its original conquest.

That was a huge initial success.

Now Russia is holding on to the edge of an important Oblast. If they lose just 115 sq kms, the region can be claimed as “wholly regained” by Ukraine.

This is a big achievement in a war that has cost Russia so dearly.

The Russian military has suffered 1.48 million battlefield casualties and as many as 450,000 deaths since its February 2022 full-scale invasion. Putin’s war has lasted longer than Stalin’s war against Hitler. Putin has had a net loss of roughly 400 square kilometers of territory in the Spring alone.

These rates are astounding. Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times greater than all U.S. fatalities in all wars combined since World War II – including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran and Iran. Putin’s losses are more than nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War II.

In addition, Russia’s monthly casualty rates of over 30,000 per month in 2026 have likely exceeded Russia’s recruitment rates of roughly 27,000 new recruits per month.

Much of this has been due to Ukraine’s innovative use of drones—including AI-enabled drones—as part of its aggressive air interdiction campaign.

Even where Russia is advancing, it is only an illusion. Russia’s ground offensive has largely stalled, with an average rate of advance of approximately 50 meters per day around Kostiantynivka, 70 meters per day around Pokrovsk, and 90 meters per day around Sloviansk. These are among the slowest rates of advance in any war over the last century.

Putin is losing at least 1,200 and 1,500 killed or wounded soldiers every day. They pay their lives to advance the length of half of a football field. That would be a disastrous record for WW1 trench warfare terms.

Russia has also lost 12,300 tanks, 25,230 armored combat vehicles, 139,754 vehicles and fuel tanks, 48,641 artillery systems, 2,062 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,588 air defense systems, 440 aircraft, 354 helicopters, 481,605 unmanned aerial vehicles, 2,387 unmanned ground systems, 35 ships and boats, and two submarines.

Some 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have also been killed in action since the beginning of the full-scale war.

And the war continues to spread, to Ukraine’s advantage. Zelensky has confirmed that the UK and France have approved production of the SCALP/Storm Shadow a long-range cruise missiles in Ukraine.

Ukraine already produces 10 million drones by itself each year, with a target of 20 million for next year. The “drone superpower” is now Europe’s first line of defence.

Across Russia, refineries and warehouses are burning.

Some 40,000 Ukrainian “pilots” fly the drones with their gaming helmets and control sticks. When their drone is destroyed, they start up another one. No one dies.

It is in Crimea that the true scale of Ukrainian success can be weighed. It is almost cut off, without electric power half the time, and with people trying to leave every day.

Russia built a war around mass, artillery, and occupation, just like WW2.

Ukraine is answering with precision, attrition, and a campaign against the roads and fuel that keep the occupation alive.

Ukraine’s drone commander, Robert Brovdi, says, “We will isolate Crimea in the near future.”

Brovdi, better known by the call sign Madyar, commands Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces from a secret underground post near the front. His campaign has cut traffic on the Novorossiya highway by more than two thirds in the past month. That road is one of Russia’s key military supply routes through occupied southern Ukraine into Crimea.

His target list is roads, bridges, fuel, and air defence. He wants to make Crimea harder to supply, harder to reinforce, and harder to pretend that it is safely held by Moscow. The glamour of modern war has been replaced by a spreadsheet in a bunker full of people with game controllers.

I would not want to be a Russian soldier, knowing that I am giving my life fighting a Gameboy.

But that is not all Putin has lost.

As noted by the Center For strategic and International studies (CSIS):

“Everyday Russians are suffering from a sputtering economy, higher prices on groceries and other expenses, tax increases, significant internet restrictions, and an oppressive crackdown on freedom of speech—largely because of the war in Ukraine.

‘In addition, major cities throughout Russia, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, have come under attack by Ukrainian drones and long-range missiles, not just towns and cities in Russia’s border region with Ukraine, such as Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk. Crimea has also come under withering attack by Ukraine, forcing Russia to close summer camps and beaches, disrupting fuel supplies, and causing electricity outages.”

Location of Ukraine drone strikes Jan 2025 – Jun 2026

Back behind the scenes, Ratcliffe’s trip to Russia was done in true CIA style: a U.S. Air Force C-17 military transport plane left Riga at 9:00 AM and landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport at around 10:00. It departed Moscow again at 5:30 PM and landed in Riga an hour later.

The plane had previously been stationed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland — the base also used by Air Force One and other planes carrying top U.S. officials.

The visit is significant because it is the first publicly known trip to Moscow by a CIA director since William Burns traveled to Russia in November 2021. He met with senior Russian officials and spoke directly with President Vladimir Putin to warn him against invading Ukraine. Burns knew about the planned Russian invasion of Ukraine through highly detailed U.S. intelligence intercepts, satellite imagery of troop buildups, and his own direct diplomatic experience with Vladimir Putin.

The fact that Burns had foreknowledge of his invasion did not change Putin’s course of action. He had decided that the US would do nothing – just as it had sat on its hands when he invaded Crimea.

This is the penalty of “Chamberlain diplomacy” – you can’t stop Hitler by giving up pieces of another country (Czechoslovakia in September 1938). It makes your following warnings (about Poland in 1939) worthless…and WW2 will start.

President Obama said afterwards that the US did not fight for Ukraine at time because “Crimea was full of Russian speakers, and there was some sympathy to the view that Russia was representing its interest. The Rada [Ukrainian parliament] at the time still had a number of Russian sympathisers. The politics inside Ukraine were more complicated.”

While hindsight is perfect, I have to comment that his avoidance of a real protest made the situation much more “complicated” - in fact, it led to a war the scale of which has not been seen since WW2.

I am reminded that it only takes one person who believes in a cause to decide the fate of a war.

Young Vitalii Skakun was a Ukrainian marine combat engineer. On the first day of the 2022 invasion, he stood on a strategic bridge as Russian tanks charged forward. His job was to blow up the bridge to stop them. But he ran out of time to escape. He had to choose: save his own life, or defend his country. He chose to stay; he said goodbye to his friends; he blew up the bridge with himself on it. The Russian column was stopped, its tanks were backed up for miles, and Kiev was saved. Few people outside Ukraine have ever heard of him. But millions in the West owe him their freedom.

It was not Obama alone, of course – an entire European Union had to be persuaded to go along with even a half-measure like sanctions. Biden was able to step up to that challenge – after Ukraine had demonstrated that it could hold off Russia.

And now Ukraine is demonstrating that it can win its independence from Russia!

That was not close to being a concept back in 2021.

Ratcliffe’s car heads down a street in Moscow.

Ratcliffe’s visit marked his first known official trip to Russia. The CIA director has maintained contact with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), who has previously signaled a willingness to meet Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe’s visit involved “contacts between security services”

One unkind online commentator wondered if “he is on an exchange program with the KGB?”

Ukrainian officials said they expected to receive a briefing after the CIA visit.

Ukraine had been asked by the US not to strike Moscow or St. Petersburg while Radcliffe was in town. “They don’t believe in the strength of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s air defenses,” a person familiar with the situation told the Kyiv Independent.

I am struck by the significance of this one request.

The war has developed to the point where Ukraine has to be asked for permission for the US to fly a plane to Moscow.

If Putin looked out his window, he could see that his war is over.

His gains are being re-absorbed; his assets are being demolished. The Russia he started with is not the one he is trying to defend: weakened, stripped of any ‘super-power’ glamor, it crawls along, waiting for Putin to give up or die.

He is under no pressure. He doesn’t care about the lives lost, and the war gives him a control stick over the country.

In Putin’s 26-year rule, he has had Russia at war for 21 years.

It’s what he knows.

Not what he’s good at, just what he knows.

As CSIS puts it:

“…despite Russia’s battlefield challenges and economic vulnerabilities, the United States and Europe have failed to fully wield economic or military pressure. Without greater costs in blood and treasure, Putin is likely to keep fighting—even as he pushes his country toward an economic, political, and military abyss.”

Ukraine also shows no sign of collapsing, even after years of relentless Russian attack.

When Ukraine wins, it will be the undisputed master of Europe – exactly the opposite of what Putin was shooting for.

It will not be the first time that the story of history is written in irony, with ink that is red.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!

Sorry to do this to you again, but a day after America’s first lady Dolly Parton passed away at 80 years, actor Tim curry has followed her offstage.

I wouldn’t have intruded on your day, except to note that he was also 80 yeas old.

A remarkable coincidence.

Tim was not everyone’s favorite, but I confess that loved the energy he threw into his roles.

Perhaps my favorite was the “Rocky Horror Picture Show”. I remember the theatre filling with laughter and illicit smoke from bongs and hand-rolls. Fans yelled out the dialogue, danced in full costume and pelted the screen at appropriate times with various foods. It was a delightful moment to be young and stupid.

Tim passed away peacefully at his Los Angeles home. A cause was not immediately available, though Curry had suffered from several health issues since having a severe stroke in 2012. He was confined to a wheelchair after the stroke, but still performed many voice roles.

Like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula film characters, Tim’s persona was forever cast by the mad scientist character in ‘Rocky Horror”.

But he was more than a one-trick pony.

He first starred when he was in his twenties as a stage actor in London in the musical “Hair”. He morphed into Mozart for the production of “Amadeus” (Tony nomination).

He became the con man Rooster Harrigan in the musical “Annie” (1982); the arch-villain Darkness in Ridley Scott’s fantasy “Legend” (1985; the butler Wadsworth in the mystery “Clue”; the villain Bill Sikes in the 1982 TV movie of “Oliver Twist”; and the terrifying clown in the movie “It”..

Pulling straight from Variety magazine: “He notably appeared as Plaza Hotel concierge Mr. Hector in “Home Alone 2” (1992), heavy Jigsaw in the “Lethal Weapon” spoof “Loaded Weapon 1” (1993), Long John Silver in “Muppet Treasure Island” (1996), Russian terrorist Major Vladakov in the film version of “McHale’s Navy” (1997) and Gomez Addams in the direct-to-video “Addams Family Reunion.”

Tim never seemed to obtain the kind of fandom that I thought was his due. Maybe because everything was over-layered by the “Rocky Horror”. He did get three Tony nominations and an Emmy nod during his five decades in the industry.

He was born April 19, 1946, in rural Grappenhall, Cheshire, England.

While Dolly Parton played herself, Tim defined what meant to play a rainbow of other people, delighting us with heroes, villains and comics.

The world needs everyone, and all the portrayals.

But I sure hope that none of our 80-year-old Substack readers get spooked by this coincidence…just think: there may indeed be another 80-year-old whose passing would be celebrated, not respected.

Thank you for the memories, Mr. Curry, and for showing us such a gentle understanding of the human character.

NOTE: I would like to thanks everyone who has taken the trouble to “Buy Me A Coffee” in response to my work. I would love to thank everyone personally, but it’s hard to do on Substack…

“Is the president’s power over voters waning in this midterm election year?” asked the headline in Bloomberg.

It’s a Serious Publication so I guess they had to make that a question, but all the polls are coming back with the resounding sound of a great flushing.

Not to dress up bad news, Harry Enten, chief data analyst from CNN, concludes that Trump’s numbers are “horrible.”

I apologize for all the technical jargon here.

But to spell it out a different way: “It’s the worst this century for a president at this point in his second term “

The low numbers are reflected in numerous surveys, so they weave a cloth of truth.

Forbes says the record low is at 31%.

A new YouGov/Economist projection shows that Trump’s net job approval is now underwater in 47 out of 50 states.

West Virgina, Idaho and Wyoming are the outliers, in case you were wondering.

West Virgina and Wyoming are in the bottom three US states for education. Idaho does better in education, but has a radical conservatism that ignores the state’s dependency on the feds; Idaho receives $1.15 to $1.69 for every dollar it sends to the federal government. Maybe this will eventually occur to the voters there, because Trump is taking away their income when he cancels programs to support the rich.

Also, Idaho has a massive cattle industry with 2.5-million head of cattle – more cows than people – and Trump has just sold them out to cheap Argentinian beef. Ranchers used the word “betrayal”/ The Idaho Farm Bureau Federation criticized President Trump’s plan to allow 300,000 metric tons (over 660 million pounds) of tariff-free foreign ground beef into the U.S. over 90 days, warning it harms local producers. Idaho ranchers are already struggling with severe drought, high operating costs, and the aftermath of destructive wildfires.

We’ll see how long Trump’s relative popularity lasts.

Trump’s approval ratings in his second term are the worst of any 21st-century president among Independents – the largest voting block - scoring lower than George W Bush during his Iraq war and Richard Nixon during Watergate.

Trump is now 31 points underwater, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. At the beginning of his term he was at least positive, if only by 6 points.

He had thus dropped 37 points in only eight months.

It takes a certain political genius to do that.

According to Common Dreams: “At every turn, Trump has tried to erode US democracy and the good of the people during his second term. While campaigning to end both inflation and the Ukraine War, he has not ended the war and caused prices to skyrocket thanks to his tariffs and his immoral and illegal war against Iran. He has redirected taxpayer money from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the US Agency for International Development (predicted to cause the deaths of 4.5 million children under 5 years old), and scientific and medical research to fund tax cuts for billionaires, expand the brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency by a factor of nine, and now seeks $1.5 trillion in Department of Defense funding (that’s $10K a year per taxpayer if divided evenly).”

His Iran War caused about 3,500 Iranian deaths and 4,300 Lebanese deaths.

At this time in his first term as president, he was also unpopular, but he was “only” 12 points underwater.

He is now doing 19 points worse than he was in his first term.

And in 2018 the mid-terms were quite disastrous for the Republican party. They lost 40 Congressional seats.

You know what the wrong way to pick up those ratings would be?

You pick a trade fight with the friendliest country in the world.

This is not the way to boost popularity.

The bad news for Donald is spread across the polling world:

RealClearPolitics (Aug. 21): 39.5% approve, 57.2% disapprove

New York Times (Aug. 21): 37% approve, 59% disapprove

Silver Bulletin (Aug. 21): 38.2% approve, 57.9% disapprove

The following map shows how this translates into seats in 2026.

The honey-coloured dots are voting against Trump.

It comes down ultimately to fine-grained, human detail.

Like Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown, who now has a 54% edge to win a Senate Seat. In Red Ohio.

In South Carolina the three-star navy admiral who was fired by Pete Hegseth, Nancy Lacore, has won the Dem primary for the governor’s race.

In Arkansas Hallie Shoffner leads incumbent Senator Tom Cotton by 3 points in a new poll. A Republican loss in Arkansas would be a genuine political nuclear bomb.

FiftyPlusOne’s polling average has Trump underwater by 24 points: 36.1% approve to 59.9% disapprove. Disapproval isn’t just a cities-and-suburbs story anymore; it’s creeping into genuinely rural, red-leaning PUMAs too,

YouGov says 66% of Americans now think “arrogant” is the best word to describes Trump. The share calling him a strong leader has sagged from 49% just after his 2024 election to 36% today.

The new Economist/YouGov poll has Democrats up 7 on the generic ballot overall — and up 23 points among the most enthusiastic registered voters.

Rural voters have swung toward Democrats since Trump’s inauguration, leaving the GOP’s current rural advantage just shy of its 14-point edge in the 2018 wave. Rural and suburban voters haven’t looked this Democratic since 2018.

Nine Senate races are now leaning Democratic or up for grabs…

Republicans today hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate. A flip of four seats would give the Democrats the majority.

In conservative-leaning Alaska, for example, Mary Peltola leads Senator Dan S. Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, by more than five percentage points.

Even in Texas Republicans who are angry at Gov. Greg Abbott’s refusal to block data centers are giving his Democratic challenger hope for an upset. Gina Hinojosa is running to prevent Republican Greg Abbott from winning a record fourth term as governor. Hinojosa, a lawyer and state legislator based in Austin, is now within a point of Abbott, a sign of weakness in a state where the GOP usually boasts a nine- to 12-point advantage.

Six polls in three weeks showing the Texas race in a virtual tie, including public polls from Texas Public Opinion Research, Fox News, and Texas A&M/ReconMR/Siena. Since launching her campaign, Hinojosa has closed the gap from an 8-point race to a 1-point race as she gains name recognition. Her biggest lever is the issue of data centers, which are increasingly unpopular with a public tired of surrendering their rights to the wealthy.

Polling shows that 75% of Americans now oppose data center development in their communities.

Trump’s bad polling numbers also come from the overwhelming majority of Americans who said they were concerned that the war against Iran would continue for an extended period.

The Democrat move is not just happening, its going to progressive Dems. Last week in Florida the progressive state Representative Angie Nixon pulled off a stunning victory. Her opponent for the primary run, retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, is now putting money, resources and political support behind Nixon after his loss. This is a new chapter in the Blue Book…co-operation moves a nation. The man lost; acknowledged it; respected the voters’ decision; and now is helping the person who beat him. Class act.

Trump is unpopular with people with no party affiliation as well as those on the left. According to a Washington Post poll, he is scoring worse with independents than Richard Nixon during Watergate.

In the blindness of his desperation, Trump is demanding that Congress pass a law that would require voters to show their passport or birth certificate at polling stations. It is a move that would disenfranchise millions of people…I mean, who knows where those things are?

I will tell you who the people are who would be least likely to be able to find the documents: Republicans in lo-education states.

A Washington Post survey found rural voters were less likely to have passports, suggesting that Republicans, with their strong base in less populated areas, would suffer disproportionately. Groups who “have lower education levels and less access to documentation” would also be affected.

Those groups are Republican in their voting habits.

If Trump gets his bill passed, he is shooting himself in the foot.

And every Republican who can’t find the papers needed to allow them to vote, will blame Trump.

His efforts to gerrymander certain districts did not help him either. They created more competitive districts and energized the Democrats.

Beside all that, the SAVE Act is pointless. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s tally of legally determined election fraud shows “1,546 proven instances” over many years. That’s hardly a democratic crisis.

If Trump ever has a plan, it is either pointless or going the wrong way.

But we knew that when he took over the Capitol Building, didn’t we? What was his brilliant strategy after taking it over? Was he going to airmail it to Mar a Lago? There was zero foresight in that move.

Trump is saying that “the actual Polls are tremendous.” He calls the record-low polls part of “demoralization operations”.

He can call the polls whatever he wants.

As long as he goes down to a thunderous defeat in November and beyond.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!

I am sad that this afternoon we have to share the news that Dolly Parton has passed away.

I confess I am just writing this because I feel a need to connect with those who will also miss her.

Dolly Parton’s “Imagination Library” gifted more than 332-million books in its 31-year existence.

She herself did not have a chance to go any further than High School, as she was brought up in a “dirt poor” one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains of Sevier County, Tennessee. Her family was so impoverished her birth-doctor was paid with a sack of cornmeal.

Her father could not read or write; he was a sharecropper and tobacco farmer. Her mother taught her and her eleven siblings the traditional Appalachian songs.

When she went to school, there is a pretty good chance that the ‘coat of many colors” she later sang about really existed: a mesh of rags that her mother sewed together, and she wore with pride as the other kids laughed at her.

She composed her first song at age five (“Little Tiny Tassel Top”, about a corncob doll) and landed her first job at age 10 in the Cas Walker Show.

What impresses me about her drive, is that she never let her hard-earned success become a reason to lord it over other people.

It wasn’t a rags-to-riches story in the conservative sense, where you tell people that they only have to work harder and everything will be fine.

Instead, her impoverished upbringing gave her a desire to give back. She knew what it was like to struggle. Her father’s illiteracy inspired her to create her Imagination Library.

This is America – and humanity - at its best.

No one should have to go through the poverty she went through; we need to help each other. It could be argued, I suppose, that her struggles made her a better person. I am glad we shall never know…I am sure she would have chosen a more equitable childhood if it had been made magically possible for her.

That is beside the point: this remarkable lady became part of our lives and shared the gifts of music and reading with the world.

We shall miss her – and her Coat of Many Colors.

Thank you, Dolly Parton.

Trump has threatened to re-name Lake Ontario as “Lake America”. (His trade talks with Canada are not going well…)

I have a counter-proposal: rename Lake Michigan as

All in favor please re-post…

Cheers!

Seventy-seven American cattle producers are going out of business every day. Years of drought and down markets have pushed them to the brink.

They are getting little public sympathy; the call from the public is to “bring down beef prices” – the prices that were driven through the roof by Trump’s economic and tariff policies.

Trump said he would help American consumers by bringing in 300,000 metric tons of discount beef, without applying his tariff.

Pause for a second: if his solution to this problem is to take off his tariff, why doesn’t he apply that to everything else that suddenly jumped in price…?

But Trump has thus far refused to say where the beef is coming from.

The ranchers voted for him. Three times.

When you elect a con man, expect to be conned.

His announcement about the subsidy actually only prevents another spike in already skyrocketing prices. Trump states that he will make sure that these 300.000 tons of beef will sell 25% below market price. He can’t make good on that promise. He can’t determine the price at the cash. He exposes national producers by making promises he can’t keep in order to camouflage the consequences of his child-like tariffs before the midterms. Just another hoax to keep the MAGA crowd pleased.

It’s notable that none of the Republican Senators who were elected to protect these Ranchers did anything when Trump revealed his solution.

300,000 metric tons of beef works out to be 660 million pounds. That’s about five percent of total ground beef consumption, or 15% of beef imports.

It’s hard to imagine 1.2-million head of cattle…

…so try to picture 300,000 small cars, each packed with a ton of beef.

Now you ask: Where does anyone get 300,000 Metric Tons of Ground Beef?

Well: it must come from a large Beef Producing Country: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India and China… for the most part.

Argentina just had huge amounts of export beef rejected by China, so it’s got extra.

And Trump is a buddy of Argentinian President Javier Melei. Trump gave him $40-billion to help stabilize his economy. Much of that went to Argentina’s farmers, to help subsidize their exports. Trump and Milei have the same bombastic style, and Milei is a big fan of Trump; he was the first foreign leader to visit him after his election victory. Trump has labeled Milei his “favorite president”. Milei even does a version of the Trump Dance (the one where it looks like he’s strangling a rabbit).

Come to that, MAGA could stand for Make Argentina Great Again.

And of course the American oligarchy has Plans for Argentina. The global rich like Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel have Argentinian citizenship. Thiel has moved his family there and bought a mansion. He’s hedging his bet that the US might turn on the rich and try to tax them.

Thiel is worth about $32-billion, so he could afford some income sharing.

This is a long tradition. Back in The Day, Argentinian President Juan Perón’s admiration for European fascism allowed Nazi deserters like Adolf Eichman and Josef Mengele to escape on the “Ratlines”.

So there are many reasons to think that Trump would prefer to get his beef from Argentina.

There is even a precedent. When Trump alienated China – the world’s largest buyer of soybeans – with tariffs, Argentine soybean farmers replaced American farmers and sold 2.5 million metric tons to China. That’s $13 billion worth of soybean exports down the drain.

But Trump is on the farmers’ side.

In a transactional trade-off, this multi-billion dollar economic package forced open American borders to unprecedented levels of foreign agricultural competition.

Signed in February 2026, the deal aggressively quadrupled Argentina’s low-tariff beef quota from a modest 20,000 metric tons to a staggering 100,000 metric tons annually.

Millei “donated” $2 Billion to Trump’s “Board of Peace”— the one where Trump alone both oversees and controls the funds?

U.S. officials rammed the expansion through to artificially suppress domestic grocery costs, completely blind-siding domestic cattle ranchers.

For the last six months, massive volumes of cheap foreign lean trimmings have poured directly into commercial meatpacking hubs across the Midwest and Mountain West.

Industrial processors are using these imports to systematically blend away domestic supply, undercutting American producers at historical herd lows. So Trump gives Argentina $40 billion in 2025 and they give him $2 billion to personally control, and then he buys beef products from them. Nothing to see here.

The beef is funneled straight into industrial processing plants to manufacture bulk, low-cost ground beef—quietly fueling the nationwide supply chains of major fast-food chains, institutional cafeterias, and commercial food services.

It floods the supply chain with foreign beef right as the flesh-eating New World screwworm parasite has breached U.S. borders, forcing strict quarantines on vulnerable domestic herds.

Some ranchers are not happy.

“We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices,” Trump wrote, claiming the plan would “reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again.”

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the country’s largest cattle industry trade group, blasted Trump’s announcement almost immediately.

“Flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd,” NCBA CEO Colin Woodall said.

The organization said cattle markets had already “turned sharply lower” Friday morning following Trump’s announcement, hurting farmers and ranchers at a particularly sensitive moment as producers make decisions about whether to expand their herds.

“Today’s announcement and other market interventions throw cold water on the prospect of herd expansion and sacrifices long-term stability for short term messaging,” Woodall said.

Cattle futures fell to eight-month lows following Trump’s announcement.

In October 2025, Trump publicly floated importing more beef from Argentina as a way to bring down American beef prices.

“We would buy some beef from Argentina,” Trump said at the time, arguing that doing so could lower prices and help Argentina.

American cattle producers were furious.

NCBA warned at the time that expanding Argentine access to the American market would “harm American cattlemen and women” and interfere with the market.

The group warned that attempts to manipulate the market risked “damaging the livelihoods of American cattlemen and women, while doing little to impact the price consumers are paying at the grocery store.”

The United States Cattlemen’s Association sounded a similar alarm, warning Trump that expanding Argentine beef imports could threaten domestic producers.

“Expanding beef imports from Argentina would risk the very foundation of U.S. cattle production and the heart of rural America,” the organization wrote. “U.S. producers will lose in any deal with Argentina.”

In February, Trump authorized an additional 80,000 metric tons of Argentine lean beef imports for 2026, distributed through four quarterly tranches.

Even then, cattle producers emphasized that Americans should be able to know where their beef comes from.

Now Trump is proposing an influx nearly four times the size of that Argentine quota increase, compressed into just 90 days, while declining to tell the American public which countries will provide it.

Nothing in a temporary import surge can meaningfully address underlying supply problems or the structural factors responsible for the shortage.

Trump is screwing American farmers and ranchers who voted for him, three times. But everything with Trump is transactional.

The focus, from America’s viewpoint, needs to be on a cattle industry that is already struggling to rebuild a herd that has fallen to approximately its lowest level in 75 years.

Trump is not answering any questions about the cattle producer staring at feed costs, land costs, fuel costs, equipment costs and financing costs.

Nor about rural communities whose economies depend upon American agriculture.

Or the people Trump spent years promising he would put FIRST.

And as I’ve mentioned, here’s where the hypocrisy becomes blinding. Trump’s economic philosophy has been sold to Americans on one central argument: Foreign imports hurt American producers, therefore tariffs protect American industry. BUT when beef prices soar, suddenly the solution becomes: remove the tariffs and import foreign product.

Hello! Which is it?

Economists have even questioned whether this latest import plan will meaningfully reduce grocery store beef prices because the proposed volume represents only a relatively small percentage of total U.S. beef consumption. But it was enough to drop cattle futures following Trump’s announcement.

If Trump actually wants to solve this problem, then rebuild American cattle production. Help ranchers expand their herds. Increase competition in meat processing. Protect consumers from monopolistic practices. Maintain uncompromising food safety inspections on imports. Give consumers meaningful country of origin transparency. And stop pretending that flooding the market with foreign beef is some brilliant long term strategy for American food independence.

Destroying domestic production in exchange for temporarily cheaper imports is one of the fastest ways imaginable to make a country more dependent on foreign imports.

And in all of this…

What happened to “America First”?

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. A regular summary of a topical book will provide more depth to enable full subscribers to stay ahead of the conversation.

In the coming weeks we will look at WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT – Trump, power and the death of serious politics – How a reality show became a presidency.

PS - If you have enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a Coffee!