The West is having a crisis of moral authority. But perhaps the more uncomfortable question is whether it ever possessed the kind of moral authority it now claims to have lost.

John Mearsheimer, in a recent Substack post, answers the question with characteristic bluntness. He argues that the United States and its Western allies are “morally bankrupt”, pointing particularly to their support for Israel amid the war in Gaza, their backing of Israeli actions in the West Bank and their policies toward Iran. He challenges the familiar Western distinction between the “good” and “bad” states by asking when Iran last committed genocide or initiated a war against another country.

Mearsheimer’s argument is fundamentally about hypocrisy. The West claims to defend human rights, international law and civilian life, yet appears willing to suspend those principles when an ally is involved.

But there is a deeper question.

Perhaps the problem is not simply that Western governments have abandoned their moral principles. Perhaps the history of Western power shows that morality and power have rarely been as separate as Western rhetoric suggests.

The West has undoubtedly produced extraordinary political and intellectual traditions: liberal democracy, individual rights, constitutional government and international institutions. It has also played a central role in building the postwar international order.

But that history exists alongside colonialism, slavery, racial hierarchy, military intervention and wars whose human costs were often borne far from Western capitals.

The contradiction matters.

A state can promote genuine ideals while simultaneously pursuing interests that violate them. The existence of hypocrisy does not prove that the ideals themselves are fraudulent. But it does make claims of moral exceptionalism much harder to sustain.

This is where Mearsheimer’s argument is both powerful and incomplete.

His focus on Gaza exposes a contemporary double standard, but the underlying problem is older than the current conflict. Western powers have repeatedly presented their actions as principled while describing similar behaviour by adversaries in very different terms.

The issue, therefore, is not whether the West is uniquely immoral. Its rivals have their own histories of repression, aggression and political violence.

The real test is whether the West is prepared to judge itself by the standards it demands of others.

Moral authority cannot be proclaimed into existence. Nor can it be secured by military power, economic dominance or control over international institutions.

It has to be demonstrated.

If the West wants to retain any claim to moral leadership, it must accept that its allies are not exempt from scrutiny, that civilian lives cannot be valued according to geopolitical convenience, and that international law cannot mean one thing for friends and another for adversaries.

Mearsheimer calls this moral bankruptcy.

The larger indictment may be more unsettling: the West may never have possessed moral authority as an entitlement. It possessed influence, power and, at times, genuine moral achievements. Whether it deserves moral authority today is a question its conduct must answer.

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Marco Rubio’s latest broadside against the International Criminal Court is what happens when a serious dispute over jurisdiction gets dressed up as an eighteenth-century adventure story.

“Last month, I launched a diplomatic campaign to dismantle the ICC’s threat to our national sovereignty. The Trump Administration is sanctioning ICC President Tomoko Akane and Senior Trial Lawyer Abdoulaye Seye in our unwavering mission to protect Americans from this sham of a court. In honor of our Declaration of Independence, Americans will never be transported beyond seas to be tried for pretend offenses.”

It is difficult to decide which part deserves the larger eye-roll.

Start with the supposed “threat to our national sovereignty.” The United States has a perfectly coherent legal argument available to it: America is not a party to the Rome Statute and has never accepted the ICC’s general jurisdiction over American nationals. Washington has made precisely that argument before. In 2021, the Biden administration explicitly maintained its objections to ICC jurisdiction over U.S. personnel.

Fine. Make the legal case.

But Rubio apparently prefers the theatrical version.

Suddenly the ICC is not merely an international court whose jurisdiction Washington disputes. It is a monstrous foreign apparatus threatening to seize innocent Americans and haul them across the Atlantic.

The problem is that this conveniently leaves out what the ICC actually deals with: allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Calling these “pretend offenses” is not an argument against them. It is simply a way of declaring the allegations imaginary before anyone has to confront their substance.

Then comes Rubio’s strangest flourish: the Declaration of Independence.

“Americans will never be transported beyond seas,” he declares, borrowing the language of the Declaration’s grievances against British imperial rule.

This is magnificent historical cosplay.

The founders were complaining about an empire exercising coercive authority over its colonies. Rubio is complaining about an international court whose jurisdiction the United States itself rejects. Those are not remotely the same thing.

The analogy works only if history is reduced to a collection of inspirational phrases that can be pulled off the shelf whenever the Secretary of State needs dramatic background music.

And then there is “sham of a court.”

That phrase is especially revealing because it replaces the argument Rubio actually needs to make.

If the ICC lacks jurisdiction, establish why. If its warrants are legally defective, explain where. If its procedures are corrupt, produce the evidence.

Instead: sham.

That is not legal reasoning. It is a bumper sticker with diplomatic immunity.

The hypocrisy becomes harder to ignore because American governments have repeatedly embraced international tribunals when they were useful. The United States supported prosecutions for atrocities from the Balkans to Rwanda and beyond. American officials have also historically worked with the ICC on matters involving international justice.

Washington’s objection, therefore, has never really been that international criminal justice is inherently illegitimate.

The objection is considerably narrower—and considerably more revealing: international criminal justice must not acquire authority over Americans without American consent.

That is a defensible position.

What is considerably less defensible is pretending that the ICC becomes a “sham” the moment it investigates people Washington would rather leave alone.

And Rubio’s timing makes the performance even more conspicuous. The latest sanctions target ICC President Tomoko Akane and prosecutor Abdoulaye Seye, amid the court’s investigations involving Palestine and Israeli officials. The measures freeze U.S.-linked assets and restrict dealings with the sanctioned officials.

So this grand declaration about protecting Americans increasingly resembles a very elaborate smoke screen. Nobody is storming the docks to ship American citizens to The Hague. The real fight is over whether international criminal accountability can reach officials whom Washington considers beyond the court’s jurisdiction.

That is a serious question. Rubio’s tweet does not seriously answer it. Instead, he summons the Founding Fathers, invents an imaginary deportation ship, calls the court fake, and sails triumphantly into the sunset.

Donald Trump has finally encountered the one thing his negotiating technique cannot defeat: a negotiating partner who simply says no.

His grand Gaza peace project was supposed to be a masterpiece of transactional diplomacy. Hamas would disarm. Israel would withdraw. Gaza would be reconstructed. Everyone would shake hands. Trump would presumably declare that nobody else in history could have achieved such a spectacular deal.

There was only one tiny problem. Israel apparently forgot to sign the script.

Netanyahu has rejected the Trump-backed proposal because Israel is not prepared to withdraw while Hamas still possesses weapons. Hamas, unsurprisingly, wants Israeli forces out before surrendering the leverage that keeps them alive.

And suddenly Trump’s beautiful 15-point peace plan has reached the stage where everyone is pointing at everyone else and saying: You first.

This is the part of diplomacy that does not fit nicely into a presidential announcement.

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Trump’s instinct has always been to treat international politics like a property negotiation. Announce the deal. Declare yourself the greatest negotiator alive. Pressure everyone involved. Tell the cameras that something “historic” is happening.

Then, presumably, reality is expected to sign the closing documents.

Unfortunately, Gaza is not a Trump-branded hotel.

You cannot put a giant gold sign on the front and announce that the property has been successfully transformed.

The truly magnificent joke, however, is the Board of Peace.

The name alone sounded like something invented by a billionaire who had just discovered diplomacy on Wikipedia.

The Board was presented as though peace were a corporate restructuring exercise. Assemble influential people. Add wealthy donors. Produce a framework. Create committees. Discuss reconstruction. Eventually, presumably, peace emerges from the meeting room like a quarterly earnings report.

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Except there was one rather inconvenient omission from the business plan. Nobody could actually make Hamas disarm. And nobody could make Israel withdraw. Those aren’t technical difficulties. Those are the war.

The Board’s basic premise was therefore spectacularly backwards. It tried to design the postwar architecture while the people holding the guns were still arguing over who gets to control the building.

Imagine creating a condominium association while two armed gangs are still shooting at each other in the lobby.

That is roughly the intellectual elegance of the project.

And now Netanyahu has supplied the punchline.

Israel’s position effectively reduces the grand Trump peace formula to: Hamas disarms completely, then Israel considers leaving. Hamas’s position is essentially the reverse: Israel leaves, then Hamas considers what it might be willing to give up.

This is not a peace process. It is a Mexican standoff with PowerPoint.

Trump now faces an unpleasant choice.

He can pressure Netanyahu, which would require the president who routinely boasts about his leverage to actually use it.

He can rewrite the agreement to make it more acceptable to Israel, which would demonstrate that his supposedly historic breakthrough was less a peace treaty than a first draft.

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He can pressure Hamas, although persuading an organisation that has already survived enormous military pressure to voluntarily surrender its principal bargaining chip is not exactly a revolutionary negotiating insight.

Or he can do what politicians everywhere eventually do when confronted by an insoluble problem: rename the problem, announce progress and schedule another meeting.

There is, of course, one final option.

Trump could declare that the plan is working brilliantly.

After all, nothing in Washington requires a peace agreement to actually produce peace before it can be described as a tremendous success.

The Board of Peace was supposed to demonstrate that Trump’s personal brand of deal-making could succeed where traditional diplomacy had failed.

Instead, it has demonstrated something considerably more useful.

You can create a board. You can create a plan. You can create a title. You can even create a presidential announcement claiming that everyone is delighted.

What you cannot create by executive order is an agreement between people who believe that making the first concession could get them killed.

And that is the embarrassing little detail hiding beneath all the grand architecture.

Trump did not discover that peace is difficult. He discovered that peace cannot be negotiated by branding exercise.

The Board of Peace was supposed to be the machine that manufactured a Gaza settlement. At the moment, it appears to be manufacturing press releases. Which, in Washington, is practically the same thing—right up until somebody asks where the peace went.

For years, the Democratic establishment has sold its preferred ideology under the comforting label of “electability.” Every challenge from the Left is met with the same warning: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates cannot win. They are too ideological. Too online. Too far outside the mainstream.

The evidence increasingly points in the opposite direction.

The problem isn’t that DSA candidates are unelectable. The problem is that many Democratic elites refuse to accept that their own grip on the party is slipping.

James Carville has become the unofficial high priest of Democratic moderation. His advice rarely changes: move to the center, avoid bold ideas, and trust consultants over activists. It is the politics of the 1990s recycled for a very different Democratic Party.

But Democratic voters are no longer living in the Clinton era.

The clearest example came in Michigan.

Abdul El-Sayed entered the 2026 Senate primary facing an opponent with nearly every institutional advantage imaginable. Representative Haley Stevens had establishment endorsements, a massive fundraising operation, and millions of dollars in outside support. Corporate donors lined up behind her. Major Democratic figures treated her nomination as inevitable.

Outside groups spent enormous sums trying to stop El-Sayed.

They lost.

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El-Sayed defeated the establishment favorite not because he outspent her, but because he out-organized her. Volunteers knocked doors. Small-dollar donors financed the campaign. Voters chose a candidate speaking about healthcare, workers, affordability, and corporate power instead of another carefully poll-tested campaign built around caution.

That victory should have buried the electability myth.

Instead, the goalposts moved.

Whenever a progressive loses, centrists declare socialism dead. Whenever a progressive wins, suddenly the race is “unique.” The district is too liberal. The opponent was flawed. The real test, they say, is always the next election.

The argument can never be disproven because its defenders refuse to let evidence matter.

Electability has become less of a political analysis than a gatekeeping tool.

It allows party insiders to avoid debating policy on its merits. Instead of arguing against Medicare for All, labor rights, public housing, tuition-free college, or taxing concentrated wealth, they simply insist voters will never support candidates who advocate those ideas.

It is an argument from authority.

Trust the consultants.

Trust the pollsters.

Trust the donors.

Trust the people who keep losing working-class voters while insisting nobody else knows how to win.

This mindset also explains why establishment Democrats often rely on enormous financial advantages rather than popular enthusiasm.

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In race after race, corporate PACs, billionaire donors, and well-funded super PACs pour millions into defeating insurgent candidates before voters can evaluate them on equal footing. The message is unmistakable: if progressive politics cannot be defeated through persuasion alone, they can be buried under an avalanche of advertising.

The scale of outside spending against left-wing candidates reveals something important.

If DSA candidates were truly unelectable, there would be no need to spend millions trying to stop them.

Power does not spend that kind of money fighting candidates it considers harmless.

The establishment’s panic says more than its talking points ever could.

None of this means every socialist candidate will win.

Politics is complicated. Campaigns matter. Candidates matter. Local issues matter. Moderates will continue winning many primaries, just as progressives will continue losing some.

But that is a very different claim from saying DSA candidates are inherently unelectable.

The evidence no longer supports that argument.

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory is not an isolated accident. It joins a growing list of progressive candidates who have defeated better-funded, establishment-backed opponents through organizing rather than checkbooks.

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Democratic primaries are increasingly becoming contests between two visions of the party.

One believes power flows downward—from donors, consultants, lobbyists, and television strategists.

The other believes it flows upward—from volunteers, unions, neighborhoods, and ordinary voters.

Recent primaries suggest Democratic voters are becoming less interested in consultant-approved inevitability and more interested in candidates willing to confront concentrated wealth and entrenched political power.

The establishment keeps calling that unelectable. Voters keep proving otherwise.

If you look closely at the antisemitism allegations being thrown at Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s U.S. Senate primary, it becomes clear that this isn’t really about religious bigotry.

It is about protecting the status quo of campaign finance. As of August 2026, federal records reveal that a historic tsunami of more than $60 million in outside super PAC cash has flooded this race, making it the most expensive Democratic congressional primary in U.S. history.

El-Sayed is running a progressive campaign that refuses corporate PAC money. Because his opponents cannot win an honest debate on political corruption, they are weaponizing antisemitism to mask an unprecedented corporate buying of an election.

The spending disparity in the final stretch of the primary highlights exactly what is at stake. According to tracking data from AdImpact, outside groups backing Representative Haley Stevens outspent El-Sayed on television by a staggering 12-to-1 margin, dumping $26.9 million into the airwaves compared to El-Sayed’s $2.1 million.

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At the absolute center of this financial onslaught is AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project. Disclosures show that UDP has funneled roughly $15 million into the race, split between $9.3 million directly boosting Stevens and $5.7 million launched in attack ads to derail El-Sayed.

To mask the corporate blueprint behind this strategy, Stevens and her allies have shifted the battlefield from economics to identity.

When Stevens publicly claimed that El-Sayed “wants to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans,” she wasn’t basing it on his policy records. She was running interference for the billionaire-backed entities bankrolling her campaign.

It is a highly calculated deflection: conflate standard progressive pushback against special-interest groups with genuine hatred toward Jewish people. Yet, as critics point out, UDP and AIPAC ads blanketing Michigan’s airwaves deliberately hide their own identity, omitting any mention of Israel or foreign policy while focusing entirely on character assassination.

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Furthermore, the money trial extends deep into the establishment machine. Alongside AIPAC, a dark-money super PAC called A Stronger Michigan has independently poured an additional $12 million into defending Stevens without ever disclosing its actual donors.

Challenging the massive sway of these multi-million-dollar lobbies is not antisemitism—it is verifiable math.

Turning a systemic debate over campaign finance into a cultural smear war is simply a tool used by the establishment to make special-interest groups entirely immune to the standard scrutiny applied to any other powerful lobby in Washington.

When the campaign noise is stripped away, El-Sayed’s actual record on religious tolerance stands firm. Following the March 2026 active shooter incident at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, El-Sayed immediately condemned the bigotry, declaring, “There is no room for antisemitism in America.”

His solidarity was real-time and tangible; Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus, noted that El-Sayed was the very first politician to text her with a message of personal support on the day of the attack.

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Ultimately, El-Sayed views the fight against prejudice through his own experience as a religious minority. As he shared with Fox News Digital, “I understand what it’s like to be discriminated against for how I pray. This is why I will always stand against antisemitism.”

He wants to unite marginalized groups against shared threats, but that message is deeply dangerous to a political establishment that relies on endless funding from ultra-wealthy donors.

Michigan voters must see through the $60 million distraction: these allegations are not about protecting a community from hate, but about protecting corporate checkbooks from democracy.

According to David Pakman, the Republican Party is completely broken.

Proof?

They won the presidency. They control the Senate. They control the House. They dominate much of rural America. They continue expanding among working-class voters. Clearly, nothing says “collapse” quite like winning every institution available.

Imagine applying this standard anywhere else.

Apple is finished. Why? They sold the most phones. Classic corporate implosion.

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Apparently victory itself has become evidence of dysfunction. But here’s where the comedy gets even better. When Republicans win elections, it’s because democracy is under existential threat. When democratic socialists win elections, it’s because... they’re irrelevant. That’s an impressive trick.

Republicans control Washington? Proof of decay.

DSA candidates knock off establishment Democrats? Just a noisy fringe.

The political equivalent of Schrödinger’s movement—simultaneously dangerous enough to ignore and insignificant enough to fear. Pakman often portrays DSA activists as online maximalists whose tactics are self-defeating. That would be a stronger argument if recent elections had cooperated.

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Instead, DSA-backed organizing has produced several notable victories in Democratic primaries and local races, especially in New York, where intensive volunteer operations helped propel candidates like Zohran Mamdani and encouraged a new wave of organizing. Membership has also expanded significantly since 2024.

You don’t have to like the DSA’s platform to notice they’re winning contests that matter. Ignoring victories because you dislike the ideology is analysis by omission. Pakman’s criticism also tends to flatten every DSA activist into the same stereotype.

Some spend most of their time on social media. Others spend weekends knocking on thousands of doors. One of those activities changes election results. The other changes Twitter trends. Conflating both makes for clean commentary but weak political analysis.

Even critics acknowledge that DSA organizers have become unusually effective at volunteer mobilization and primary campaigning. Their success has created anxiety among establishment Democrats precisely because some insurgent candidates have defeated better-funded rivals.

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Now, none of this means the DSA is destined to take over the Democratic Party. It also doesn’t mean its broader platform is popular. Many of the national organization’s proposals—such as abolishing the Senate or fundamentally restructuring American institutions—remain well outside mainstream public opinion and have drawn criticism from both Republicans and many Democrats.

But that’s exactly why dismissing the movement outright is a mistake. Political history is full of factions that began as ideological minorities before reshaping larger parties.

The Tea Party did it. Trump’s MAGA movement did it.

Progressive Democrats have already shifted debate on healthcare, labor, and housing. Whether the DSA ultimately follows that path remains uncertain, but treating every victory as an accident while treating every Republican victory as proof of systemic transformation creates an obvious analytical asymmetry.

If Republicans winning everything means they’re “completely broken,” perhaps Democrats should immediately hope to become just as broken. After all, in Pakman’s political universe, electoral dominance appears to be the first symptom of terminal decline.

Donald Trump has never treated constitutional limits as immovable objects. To him, they are props. Obstacles. Conversation starters. If a rule exists, it is worth asking whether it can be ignored, bent, or bulldozed with enough applause.

So when he jokes—or perhaps half-jokes—about serving a third or even a fourth presidential term, the comments are not random bursts of improvisation. They are calculated political theater. The Constitution becomes the setup. The rally crowd delivers the punchline.

“I don’t know. Maybe we have to think about it,” Trump told supporters after references to serving beyond two terms drew cheers. At another event he said, “Am I allowed to run again?” The audience laughed. Trump smiled. Mission accomplished. Every headline became another reminder that he alone decides what the conversation should be.

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The problem is that the Constitution has already settled this debate.

The Twenty-Second Amendment is remarkably clear. “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” There is no hidden footnote. No emergency clause. No celebrity exemption. The amendment was ratified in 1951 after Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented four election victories convinced lawmakers that presidential power required a constitutional ceiling.

Trump has already been elected twice—once in 2016 and again in 2024. Under the Constitution, the road ends there.

Yet constitutional certainty has never been the objective.

The objective is attention.

Trump understands something most politicians never fully grasp. Outrage is renewable energy. Every constitutional scholar explaining why a fourth term is impossible is still talking about Donald Trump. Every television panel debating an absurd proposition is one less panel discussing inflation, debt, healthcare or governing.

It is marketing disguised as constitutional debate.

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His supporters often answer criticism by insisting he is “just trolling.” Perhaps. But American presidents do not occupy ordinary jobs. The presidency is one office where jokes about ignoring constitutional limits inevitably carry weight. Imagine if a military commander casually wondered whether the rules of civilian control still applied. The laughter would disappear quickly.

Republican leaders, notably, have shown little appetite for joining Trump’s fantasy.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has repeatedly acknowledged that the Constitution limits presidents to two elected terms. House Speaker Mike Johnson has likewise indicated that the Twenty-Second Amendment controls the matter. Neither has embraced theories suggesting Trump could somehow engineer another election. Their reactions have been careful, respectful and politically cautious, but unmistakable. The constitutional barrier exists, and they know it.

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That silence from much of the Republican Party is revealing in its own way.

Few Republicans rush to contradict Trump publicly because doing so rarely produces political rewards. Instead, many choose a familiar strategy: treat the comments as entertainment until they fade from the news cycle. Why confront today’s headline when tomorrow’s will almost certainly replace it?

But normalizing impossible ideas has consequences.

American democracy depends on citizens believing that constitutional limits are real, not optional. When public figures repeatedly flirt with impossible scenarios, some supporters inevitably stop treating them as jokes.

Online discussions quickly fill with elaborate theories involving vice presidents, succession loopholes, constitutional conventions or emergency powers. None survives serious legal scrutiny. All consume attention that could be devoted to actual policy.

Legal experts across the ideological spectrum have been remarkably consistent. There is no accepted constitutional pathway allowing someone elected president twice to win another presidential election.

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Changing that reality would require amending the Constitution itself—a process demanding overwhelming support from Congress and the states. In today’s America, finding bipartisan agreement on naming a post office is difficult enough. Rewriting presidential term limits is political science fiction.

Still, Trump’s comments accomplish exactly what they were designed to accomplish.

They reinforce his image as a leader unconstrained by convention. To supporters, he appears fearless. To opponents, alarming. To the media, irresistible. Everyone keeps talking.

And while everyone debates an impossible fourth term, fewer people ask harder questions about governing, budgets, immigration, foreign policy or economic performance.

That may be the cleverest trick of all.

The Constitution, meanwhile, remains stubbornly unimpressed.

It does not care about rally applause. It does not bend for viral clips. It does not negotiate with campaign slogans. It simply states that no person shall be elected president more than twice.

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Sometimes democracy’s greatest strength is also its least glamorous quality.

The rules are boring. They are supposed to be.

The framers—and later the authors of the Twenty-Second Amendment—understood that republics survive not because leaders promise to leave power voluntarily, but because the law eventually leaves them no choice.

Trump can keep asking whether he should serve a third or fourth term. His supporters can keep cheering. Cable news can keep filling airtime with constitutional hypotheticals.

The Constitution has already answered. And unlike campaign rallies, it doesn’t do encores.

Elon Musk, the self-appointed savior of human consciousness, recently graced The Economist’s Editor-in-Chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, with an interview at his Texas Gigafactory.

What followed was an 85-minute masterclass in tech-utopian delusions, casual xenophobia, and the fragile ego of the world’s richest man.

Let us dissect this intellectual trainwreck, because parsing Elon’s brain is apparently our collective civic duty.

Musk kicked off the circus by proclaiming that “AI could surpass the combined intelligence of humanity within five years,” promising a magical “age of abundance” by 2036 where money won’t matter. It is a vast, trademark overstatement.

While algorithms compute at terrifying speeds, equating pattern-matching software to the total sum of human intelligence is classic Silicon Valley hype meant to juice tech valuations. The actual consensus among actual scientists points to severe limitations in AI reasoning, rendering his five-year timeline pure fantasy.

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Between long, dramatic pauses, Elon mumbled, “I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly,” reflecting on his brief, chaotic stint co-running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is true, but heavily understated. Musk poured $250 million into the 2024 election and actively weaponized Twitter; admitting he got “carried away” is just a lazy attempt to dismiss real-world democratic chaos as a minor hobby that went slightly awry.

The comedy turned dark when Beddoes challenged his vocal promotion of fringe, far-right European parties. “What you call the far right falsely… is the normal person,” Musk barked, reducing the entire platform of the radical right down to: “secure borders, safe cities, and sensible spending.”

This is flatly false and a blatant attempt to gaslight the audience. By repackaging groups like Germany’s AfD as merely wanting “safe cities,” Musk completely ignores that independent watchdogs explicitly classify these factions as ethno-nationalist extremists.

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Musk doubled down on his unhinged posts predicting an inevitable “civil war” in Britain, announcing, “I’m against having people coming to a country with antithetical views... at some point there will be a reckoning. I’m against rape and murder.”

This is grossly misleading fear-mongering. Musk implies that immigration directly equates to an influx of violent crime, yet real-world statistics—including data cited by Beddoes from London—show violent crime rates dropping.

When directly asked if he held racist views, Musk offered his definitive, foolproof shield: “My partner is half Indian… I have four children with her… so I would say I’m not racist.”

It is a logically bankrupt defense, the billionaire equivalent of saying “I have a Black friend.” Fathering children with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis does not magically erase his daily habit of amplifying white nationalist conspiracy theories on his own social media network.

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When Beddoes pointed out that large swaths of the public utterly loathe him, Musk snapped, “The shoe is on the other foot. They hate you. They hate you far more than they hate me... I think you’re the problem. The media.” His undeniable proof of universal love? His 250 million followers on X.

This is textbook narcissistic delusion. Confusing hate-follows, bot accounts, and rubbernecking internet users with genuine popularity is embarrassing, especially since independent trackers like YouGov show his public favorability ratings consistently plunging into the negative.

Naturally, the champion of free speech handled this mild journalistic pushback with his signature maturity. Days after the tape dropped, Musk logged onto X to declare Beddoes “a traitor to the West, plain and simple.” Because nothing screams “stable genius saving human consciousness” quite like calling a mainstream financial journalist a traitor for asking you to back up your tweets.

The latest New Yorker reporting reveals something remarkable: former Biden administration officials now say they wish they had done more to restrain Israel during the Gaza war. Some describe moral anguish. Others acknowledge they should have pushed harder or acted sooner.

That would have been a lot more impressive in 2023.

Because while they now speak in the language of regret, they governed in the language of unconditional support.

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President Joe Biden’s message in the days after October 7 was unmistakable. “We stand with Israel.” He promised American support would be “rock solid and unwavering.” Antony Blinken declared, “We will always stand with Israel.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan repeatedly defended the administration’s approach as one of supporting Israel while encouraging compliance with international humanitarian law.

The second half of those sentences rarely survived contact with reality.

By late October 2023, the United Nations was warning of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Aid agencies described collapsing hospitals, widespread displacement, and shortages of food, water, fuel, and medicine. Human Rights Watch documented alleged violations of the laws of war, while Amnesty International repeatedly warned about attacks affecting civilians. None of this was secret. None of it emerged years later from hidden archives. It was happening in real time.

Yet the administration’s public message barely changed.

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Officials continued saying they had received Israeli assurances. They continued insisting they were having “frank conversations” behind closed doors. Washington became addicted to the phrase “private diplomacy.”

Private diplomacy is wonderful.

Especially when nobody can see whether it exists.

Whenever journalists asked whether American weapons might be conditioned on civilian protection, the answer was almost always no. Military aid continued. Diplomatic protection at the United Nations continued. Public criticism remained cautious, delayed, and carefully calibrated.

The administration repeatedly described itself as using leverage.

The obvious question was: where?

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When Biden eventually described Israel’s military response as “over the top” in early 2024, it sounded significant. Headlines followed. Commentators praised the shift.

Then policy barely moved.

The gap between rhetoric and action became the defining feature of the administration’s Gaza policy.

Inside the government, not everyone accepted it.

Josh Paul resigned from the State Department in October 2023, arguing he could no longer support continued arms transfers. Other officials followed over the following months, citing humanitarian concerns and disagreement with administration policy. More than 800 U.S. and European officials also signed public letters expressing concern about their governments’ approach. These dissenters were hardly invisible. They were warning, publicly and repeatedly, that American policy risked enabling further civilian suffering.

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Today’s expressions of regret make those resignations even more awkward.

The people who resigned gave up careers.

The people who stayed now give interviews.

The New Yorker reports that several senior officials believed they should have exerted greater pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and worried that unconditional backing created a moral hazard. Those are important admissions. They also raise an uncomfortable question.

If they knew this then, why didn’t they act then?

Government is full of difficult choices. Nobody seriously claims foreign policy is simple.

But neither is hindsight a substitute for decision-making.

Officials often defend themselves by pointing to competing priorities: preventing regional escalation, securing hostage releases, deterring Iran, preserving America’s alliance with Israel, and responding to the unprecedented October 7 Hamas attacks.

Those were real considerations.

So were tens of thousands of civilian deaths, mass displacement, and repeated humanitarian warnings.

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History judges governments by how they balanced those competing realities—not by how eloquently they describe them after leaving office.

This is why retrospective regret feels incomplete.

Not because people are forbidden from changing their minds.

Because they possessed something ordinary critics never did.

Authority.

They controlled diplomatic recognition. Arms transfers. Intelligence cooperation. Public messaging. Presidential access. Cabinet meetings. National Security Council discussions. They had influence that journalists, protesters, aid workers, and resigned civil servants simply did not possess.

Power is what separates officials from commentators.

Once you’re a commentator, the hard part is already over.

Perhaps these officials genuinely regret what happened. Human beings often do.

But sincerity does not erase responsibility.

The civilians who died cannot be helped by memoir-worthy reflections.

The hospitals that collapsed cannot be rebuilt with carefully worded interviews.

The displaced families will never know how many lives might have been saved if American leverage had been exercised earlier or more forcefully.

That uncertainty is precisely why leadership matters.

Real courage is rarely measured after retirement.

It is measured while the meetings are still happening, while the briefing papers are still arriving, while the cameras are still on, and while saying “no” still carries professional consequences.

Regret has one undeniable advantage.

It is safest after the votes have been cast, the weapons delivered, the headlines faded, and the office keys returned.

History may remember these officials for finally admitting that mistakes were made.

It will also remember that they were in the room when those mistakes were still choices.

Somewhere in Washington this week, a group of very serious lawmakers looked up at a hazy orange sky, took a deep breath of mildly irritating air, and concluded that the appropriate response was sanctions. Not on a rogue state. Not on a terrorist organization. On Canada — the country that spends its summers apologizing for weather.

Michigan’s GOP delegation accused Canada of failing to conduct adequate forest maintenance and warned that the U.S. “will look elsewhere, and act on our own” if Canada doesn’t get its trees in line. This is, apparently, the third year in a row they’ve had to write this letter, which raises the obvious question of why nobody has considered that maybe — just spitballing here — the planet is on fire and getting more so, rather than Canada personally neglecting its forestry chores like a delinquent teenager who won’t mow the lawn.

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Not to be outdone, Ohio’s own Senator Bernie Moreno decided smoke was not merely annoying but an “atrocity,” and is introducing a bill that would direct the president to determine whether Canadian wildfires harmed U.S. air quality and then sanction those responsible — freezing assets, revoking visas, and declaring the Canadian ambassador persona non grata until further notice. Nothing says “sober foreign policy” like treating a wildfire the way you’d treat a hostile intelligence operation.

And of course, the President himself weighed in, because the President cannot look at a hazy sky without narrating it in all caps. Trump and congressional Republicans blamed the Canadian government for failing to remove excess timber and brush, holding Canada “responsible” for what he described as America being “unnecessarily invaded” by dirty air. Invaded. By smoke. As if Ontario dispatched the haze via drone strike instead of, you know, having a forest that caught fire during a heatwave.

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Meanwhile, actual experts have gently pointed out that this entire blame game is missing the point — Canada has been fighting wildfires at unprecedented rates since 2023, its worst year on record, and this year’s fires started earlier than ever. But sure, let’s assume the real problem is that Canadians just enjoy watching their own provinces burn and haven’t gotten around to raking.

Here’s the part that makes the whole outrage tour especially rich: this is the same Canada that, just eighteen months ago, dropped everything to help California burn less. When the Palisades and Eaton fires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, Canada had 250 firefighters, aircraft, and equipment from Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta ready to deploy within days of the U.S. asking for help. Alberta sent 40 wildland firefighters, Quebec sent water bombers on top of the ones already stationed near LA since the previous August, and British Columbia sent senior technical staff to slot directly into the incident command structure. Trudeau even managed a line politicians dream of writing: California’s had Canada’s back before, and now Canada’s got California’s.

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So the timeline, condensed: Canada sends planes, crews, and manpower across an international border to help put out someone else’s fire. Eighteen months later, some smoke drifts the other way, and the response is sanctions, visa revocations, and a strongly worded letter accusing Canada of arson-by-negligence. It’s less “diplomatic relationship” and more “guy who borrows your lawnmower every summer, then calls the cops on you the one time his neighbor’s leaves blow into your yard.”

Nobody involved in this outrage cycle is proposing anything that would actually reduce wildfire smoke — not climate policy, not joint funding for suppression infrastructure, nothing. Just letters. Bills. Vibes. Because it’s apparently easier to threaten to revoke a diplomat’s visa than to admit that hotter, drier summers are going to keep doing this regardless of how aggressively Canada rakes.

Big news, everyone: after only twenty years of Pew Research patiently asking the planet “so, America or China?”, we’ve finally hit the plot twist nobody could’ve possibly predicted. China is now seen more positively than the U.S. in most of 36 countries surveyed. Truly a shock, given absolutely nothing that’s happened in the last two years.

More people have favorable views of China than the U.S. in 25 out of the 36 countries and territories surveyed, including Canada and Mexico — you know, the two countries America usually gets to bully in peace. Only six countries still see the U.S. more positively than China. Six.

Read More : Sir Keir Starmer: Man Who Promised Everything and Delivered a Press Release

And it’s not just the vibes-based national favorability — the personality contest is going equally great. People in 22 of the 36 countries and territories favor Chinese leader Xi Jinping over Donald Trump, including in Canada, Mexico, and major European powers like France, Germany, and the UK. Nothing says “leader of the free world” like losing a popularity contest to an authoritarian one-party state in your own allied capitals. Cool cool cool.

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For context on how spectacular this collapse is: back in 2019, a median of 55% across 22 countries held favorable views of the U.S., versus just 39% for China. That’s not a gap, that’s a canyon. Fast forward through some tariffs, some taunts, and a war or two, and — well, one-third of Canadians now have a favourable view of the U.S., down a full 20 points from the year before, while favorable views of China rose 13 points to land exactly even. As the Pew researcher put it, with the kind of understatement only an academic can manage, “there’s no daylight between the two.” Congratulations, America, you’ve achieved parity with an authoritarian state in the eyes of your closest neighbor.

Read More : Saint Lindsey Graham

The survey window itself is a nice touch too — conducted from February to May, a period when the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran. Nothing boosts global approval ratings quite like bombing a country and then acting surprised when the polls dip. And the researchers, bless them, still tried to sound diplomatic about it: “there was just an actual relationship between the outbreak of the war and the sense that the US is just not contributing to peace and stability.” Groundbreaking stuff.

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Best part? Even the “winner” isn’t exactly winning. People in many of the countries have low confidence in both men — so really this is less “China triumphant” and more “two guys nobody trusts, but one of them at least isn’t currently at war with half the map.”

So there it is — twenty years of data, one historic flip, and a survey period that reads like a highlight reel of exactly why it happened.

Read More : “We’re Like Pirates” — The Presidential Quote No One Expected (But Somehow Everyone Should Have)

Sir Keir Starmer arrived promising “national renewal.” He warned it would take a while.

What he didn’t mention is that “a while” meant less than two years, at the end of which he’d resign as the least popular prime minister on record. Handing the keys to Andy Burnham like a man fleeing a house fire he set himself. Nice touch, Sir Keir.

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Let’s do the pledges. He won the Labour leadership on ten solemn promises.

Tuition fees: scrapped from the manifesto, not the fees.

The top-5% income tax rise: quietly euthanised.

The £28 billion Green Prosperity Plan: thrown overboard, along with public ownership and freedom of movement.

WASPI women were told justice was coming. Instead they got a government that carried on exactly where the Tories left off, and left them with nothing.

Pensioners got their winter fuel payments cut, then un-cut once the outrage got loud enough. Principle by focus group. Democracy as vibes.

Read More : The Senator Who Never Met a War He Didn’t Like

Then the National Insurance hike, arriving despite assurances thresholds wouldn’t move, dragging middle earners into higher bands anyway. A man who campaigned as the tribune of “working people” managed to tax working people while calling it something else. Not policy. A magic trick performed so badly you can see the coin up his sleeve.

Now the free speech bit, because it’s the funniest part of the tragedy.

This is the government of a former human rights lawyer who now presides over roughly 30 arrests a day for social media posts deemed “grossly offensive” — 12,000 a year, more than America managed at the height of the Red Scare, and he did it without even the excuse of a Cold War.

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Comedian Graham Linehan got five armed officers at Heathrow over some tweets, and it took the Met five months to produce an apology so limp even he called it not really an apology. Meanwhile the government deployed facial recognition at a protest rally and blocked speakers from entering the country in case they said something naughty. Under Starmer, you could get arrested for a joke about immigration but not, apparently, for lying about a wealth tax.

And Jeremy Corbyn. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn.

Starmer built his entire leadership brand on unity, then turned around and suspended his own predecessor within months, over a sentence about the scale of an antisemitism report.

Corbyn was eventually barred from standing as a Labour candidate entirely and drummed out of the party he’d represented for over four decades.

Zarah Sultana got the same treatment for posting the wrong opinions about Gaza. So did a handful of MPs who dared vote to scrap the two-child benefit cap.

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Starmer didn’t purge the left because it was radical. He purged it because it was inconvenient, and then acted baffled when Corbyn walked off and built an entire new party out of the wreckage, one that helped bleed Labour dry from the left while Reform bled it dry from the right.

A pincer movement Starmer built with his own hands, gift-wrapped, and mailed to his enemies.

Which brings us to Gaza, the crown jewel of the whole performance.

Asked directly whether Israel had the right to cut off water and electricity to Gaza’s civilians, Starmer said yes, it does, then spent months insisting everyone had simply misunderstood him.

He ordered Labour MPs to vote against a ceasefire motion in November 2023. Once in office, he suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licences to Israel — a fig leaf so small it barely covers the fig — while F-35 components kept flowing through the global parts pool Israel’s air force drew on throughout the campaign.

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He proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, which led to thousands of arrests of people holding up bits of cardboard. Somewhere between declaring unqualified support for Zionism and jailing sign-holders, the moral clarity he promised on day one quietly excused itself from the room.

Jeremy Corbyn — hardly a neutral witness, but accurate here — said Starmer could have ended child poverty and grotesque inequality and instead facilitated genocide in Gaza.

Read More : Saint Lindsey Graham

That’s the whole premiership in one sentence: infinite promises, a war on the people who took them seriously, and moral courage rationed like it was still under wartime price controls.

He leaves office as a cautionary tale in vapidity. Proof you can win the biggest majority this century and still convince the entire country you stood for absolutely nothing.

A man dies. Within hours, his entire record gets replaced with a highlight reel narrated by people who spent thirty years disagreeing with him. This is not new. But the reactions to Lindsey Graham’s death are such a perfect specimen of the genre that they deserve to be studied, mocked, and gently autopsied.

The “war criminal becomes war hero” pivot.

Trump called Graham one of the greatest senators he’d ever known and a true American patriot. Fine, sure, that’s just Tuesday for Trump. But watch how fast “hawk who never met a war he didn’t want to extend” becomes “patriot” the second the obituary drops. Same guy, same votes, new adjectives.

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The Piers Morgan Grief Olympics.

Piers Morgan — a man whose entire personality is being mad on television — announced that people mocking Graham’s death proved the political left are the least kind people on Earth. This is the same Piers Morgan who has built a career out of screaming at guests until they cry. The self-awareness bypass here is not just missing, it’s been surgically removed.

Now is not the time.

Numerous conservative commentators insisted this wasn’t the moment for politics, only for prayer. Curious how “not the time” only ever applies to the guy’s critics, never to the eulogists who are, right now, politically rehabilitating a foreign-policy hawk in real time. Apparently silence is only mandatory for one side of the room.

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The “decades of service” defense

Governor McMaster called Graham irreplaceable and said we shall not see his like again — which, depending on your opinion of the Iraq War, is either a tragedy or a relief. “Decades of service” is doing a lot of lifting in these tributes, as if longevity in a job is the same thing as doing that job well.

The bipartisan absolution tour.

Senators from the other party lined up to praise Graham’s willingness to work across the aisle, because nothing erases a hawkish voting record like a nice story about lunch in the Senate dining room. Comity is a real thing and it’s nice, sure. It is also not a policy outcome, and it does not un-launch a single airstrike.

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Here’s the actual problem.

None of this is really about respecting a dying man. Death didn’t change what he voted for. It changed who’s allowed to talk about it out loud. For 48 hours, the entire discourse gets outsourced to eulogists, and if you bring up the actual voting record, you’re the monster, not the guy who spent three decades pushing for more wars.

So here’s the deal.

You can skip the ghoulish gloating and still refuse the sainthood treatment. Nobody’s obligated to celebrate a death. Nobody’s obligated to pretend a record vanished either. The record doesn’t get a eulogy. It just sits there, waiting for the news cycle to end, so it can be quietly filed under “legacy” instead of “consequences.”

That’s the whole trick. Grief is real. The laundering is not.

Lindsey Graham didn’t just support wars. He collected them, like a man with a stamp album, except the stamps were countries and the glue was American blood and treasure.

Iraq in 2003? Yes, obviously. Graham backed the invasion that helped kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and handed the region a new terrorist franchise called ISIS. A rookie mistake, if it had actually been a mistake and not a lifestyle choice.

Libya, Syria — sure, why not. Graham also backed military interventions in both countries, which left Libya divided between rival factions and Syria devastated for over a decade. Two for the album.

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Yemen? He cheered on the Saudi-led intervention, calling Saudi Arabia a “mortal enemy of the Iranians” and a strategic partner worth keeping close. Never mind that the war produced one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the century.

Niger, of all places. After four American soldiers died there in an ambush, Graham admitted he hadn’t even known a thousand troops were stationed in the country, then immediately called for the US military to do more there, not less. Ignorance, followed swiftly by escalation. A classic Graham double play.

Venezuela in 2019? He wanted troops in. Venezuela again in 2025-26, once Maduro was actually grabbed? He noted, unprompted, that the country happened to sit on a nice chunk of the world’s oil, and mused about the partnerships to come. Coincidence, surely.

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Then came Iran, the true love of his political life. Graham didn’t just want war with Tehran — he wanted allies to bankroll it. He publicly urged the UAE and Saudi Arabia to send their own jets into the fight, then scolded Riyadh on social media for being merely “marginally helpful” while Americans died. As though the Saudis owed him a war.

He wanted the Marines to storm an Iranian oil terminal, comparing it, with a straight face, to Iwo Jima. One assumes the historical parallel between a WWII amphibious assault on an Imperial Japanese stronghold and seizing a 21st-century petroleum facility was, to Graham, simply obvious.

And when the bombs did finally fall on Iran, he wasn’t shy about the upside. He told Fox News that once the regime fell, there’d be a new Middle East and, in his words, a great deal of money to be made. Nothing says principled foreign policy like openly narrating the profit margins live on cable news.

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Even his own party eventually got tired of him. Younger Republicans accused him of running Washington’s war machine practically solo, dragging America toward “another Iraq.” Graham’s response was to double down, publicly coaching Netanyahu on how best to talk Trump into bombing Iran, because subtlety was never really his genre.

Ukraine, NATO, Israel, Gaza — flattened, per his own suggested policy — the Kurds, the Golan Heights, Kharg Island: there was scarcely a conflict on Earth that Graham didn’t find a reason to join, escalate, or personally lobby someone into starting.

He was, by every honest account, extremely consistent. Whatever the war, whoever the enemy, wherever the region, Lindsey Graham could be reliably found standing at the door, holding it open, gesturing America inside.

Rest in peace, senator. The war machine will have to find its favorite doorman elsewhere.

Read More :

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Somewhere in a Washington hospital, Mitch McConnell is either recovering, resting, or reviewing the afterlife’s tax code. Nobody knows. His office isn’t telling. His colleagues keep having “lengthy, substantive” phone calls that somehow reveal nothing except that he was “fully engaged,” which is now doing more rhetorical heavy lifting than most sitting senators.

He hasn’t cast a vote since June 11. He’s 84. He’s been in the Senate since 1985 — before Google, before the Berlin Wall fell, before some of his colleagues’ grandchildren were born. And the Senate is currently stalled on an $87 billion Pentagon funding package partly because one man’s medical chart is classified above top secret.

This is not a scandal. This is Tuesday in the United States Congress.

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The Problem, Explained Slowly, For Congress

America’s gerontocracy isn’t a bug. It’s the operating system. The average age of the Senate hovers well into the 60s, with a healthy contingent pushing 80 and beyond, running committees that oversee war, currency, and the internet — three things none of them grew up with.

McConnell isn’t an outlier. He’s the mascot. A man who announced his own retirement, is still technically employed, and whose continued presence in office is now sustained entirely by vibes, phone calls, and a Kentucky succession law nobody wants to trigger.

Meanwhile, Kentucky has one working senator. The other is a rumor with a Senate parking pass.

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The Impact: Democracy, But Make It a Nursing Home

When your appropriations committee can’t move because one member is unreachable, that’s not “institutional continuity.” That’s a failure state with a nice suit on.

Gerontocracy doesn’t just mean old leaders. It means policy calibrated to a generation that will not live with its consequences — climate deadlines, AI regulation, national debt math that only works if you die before the bill comes due.

It also means power calcifies. Committee chairs by seniority, not competence. Leadership bottlenecks held by people who remember the Cold War better than they remember this morning’s briefing. And when health becomes classified information, voters are left choosing between candidates and cardiac events.

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Compare and Contrast, Class

France elected Emmanuel Macron at 39. Whatever else you think of him, nobody had to issue a “he sounded good on the phone” statement to prove he was alive.

New Zealand had Jacinda Ardern running the country at 37, having an actual baby in office, which is more transparency about her physical state than McConnell’s team has offered in three weeks.

The UK, for all its chaos, has a built-in gerontocracy release valve: the parliamentary system lets the party yank a struggling leader out with a no-confidence vote and a stiff cup of tea. No 40-year incumbency required. Rishi Sunak was 42 when he became PM. Nobody had to speculate about his pulse.

Even the House of Lords — Britain’s official retirement home for politicians — is more honest about what it is. It doesn’t pretend to run day-to-day government. America’s version of a House of Lords is just called “the Senate,” and it still writes the checks.

Japan, often mocked for its own aging leadership, at least has mandatory retirement norms baked into party culture. The U.S. Congress has no age ceiling, no cognitive testing, and no mechanism beyond death, resignation, or expulsion by scandal.

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Solutions, In Case Anyone With Subpoena Power Is Reading

Term limits. Not radical. Two-thirds of the world’s democracies function fine without electing the same person for four decades.

Mandatory, transparent health disclosures for high office — not campaign-trail vibes, actual medical review boards, the way airline pilots and nuclear plant operators are checked before we let them touch anything important.

Age or tenure caps on committee chairs, so leadership isn’t just a very slow game of musical chairs where the last one standing controls defense spending.

Succession clarity written into law before the crisis, not scrambled together via news leaks and EMS dispatch audio, which is currently Kentucky’s entire contingency plan.

Closing Thought

Somewhere, a 27-year-old with a law degree and actual ideas about AI policy is being told to “wait their turn” by a chamber where waiting your turn can now literally mean waiting for someone’s turn to end. The greatest democracy on earth, and its succession plan is a fax machine and a prayer.

God bless America. Someone check its pulse.

FIFA doesn’t do politics. Ask Gianni Infantino. He’ll tell you, repeatedly, unprompted, at every press conference — sport and politics don’t mix. It’s basically the organization’s core scripture, right up there with “the beautiful game” and “financial transparency, we promise.”

Which is why it took FIFA about a week in 2022 to boot Russia out of the World Cup entirely over the Ukraine invasion — no hearing needed, no disciplinary committee deliberation, just gone. Decisive. Principled. A gold standard in rules-based sporting order.

And then there’s everything else.

Israel has spent over a year fending off suspension requests from the Palestinian Football Association, backed by UN experts who explicitly called on FIFA to suspend Israel over what they termed an ongoing genocide in Gaza.

UN experts called on FIFA and UEFA to suspend Israel as a country team from international football as a necessary response to the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.

FIFA’s response, after eighteen months of very serious deliberation? A $190,000 fine for discrimination and racist abuse, with suspension left unresolved. FIFA’s own reasoning was that the West Bank’s legal status is simply too complicated a matter of international law to weigh in on.

Somehow the sovereignty question that stumped the ICJ, the UN, and half of academia got resolved in about five minutes when it was Crimea.

Analysts have a theory for the discrepancy, and it isn’t subtle. One expert pointed to the United States’ role as World Cup co-host and the notably close relationship between Trump and Infantino as a key factor — and Trump promptly went and proved the point himself, live, on camera, during the actual tournament.

When American striker Folarin Balogun picked up a one-match ban for a red card, Trump simply phoned Infantino and asked him to look into it. Within days FIFA reversed the suspension, and Trump took a victory lap on Truth Social thanking FIFA “for doing what was right.”

Infantino, for his part, insists FIFA’s judicial bodies are independent and operate autonomously. Independent bodies, coincidentally, that hand out Trump personal peace prizes and reverse suspensions after a single phone call.

So there’s your rulebook: instant, uncompromising justice for Moscow. Endless “unresolved legal complexity” for Tel Aviv. And for the guy who owns the host nation, apparently you just call the front desk.

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There’s a quiet myth that being president is a full-time job. The Trump family has disproven this so thoroughly that economists should probably start teaching it as a case study.

Let’s start with the merch, because it’s the most honest part of the operation. Nobody pretends the $99 sneakers or the Trump Bibles or the fragrance called “Victory 45-47” are anything but what they are: a president monetizing his own face like a theme park gift shop. At least the merch table doesn’t claim to be public service.

Then it gets more creative. Somewhere along the way, “president” quietly became a job title with equity options attached. World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture co-founded with his sons, brought in hundreds of millions of dollars from token sales alone. A Trump-linked meme coin added several hundred million more. Add it up across the family’s crypto ventures and you get a figure north of a billion dollars in a single year — which is an impressive number for a business whose core product is a coin with a picture of the guy on it.

The structure is the funny part. Seventy-five percent of the proceeds from the family’s crypto brand flow to an entity controlled by a revocable trust that Trump himself can amend at will. “Revocable” is doing a lot of work there. Past presidents put their assets in blind trusts precisely so they couldn’t see, or touch, what was making them money. This trust has 20/20 vision and a Twitter account.

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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did something wildly radical: it read the Constitution and applied it.

In a 6-3 ruling, the Court struck down Trump’s executive order trying to end birthright citizenship. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the language of the 14th Amendment plainly extends citizenship to virtually everyone born on U.S. soil, leaning heavily on the 1898 Wong Kim Ark precedent — settled law for well over a century.

You’d think a ruling grounded in 128 years of precedent would be met with a shrug. Instead, MAGA world treated it like the Reichstag fire.

Trump kicked things off with the dignity of a man who just lost a video game. He posted that the ruling was “too bad” for the country.

Then, in the same breath, he insisted Congress could simply pass a law to override a constitutional ruling, adding they’d have his “Complete and Total Support.”

This is the legal equivalent of losing a chess game and then explaining that actually you can just pick the board up and throw it at your opponent. Congress cannot legislate around the Constitution. That’s the entire point of a constitution. Trump has now lost this argument to the judicial branch, and apparently also to eighth-grade civics.

Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, didn’t take it much better. He reportedly mused about the “dissolution of the union” over a ruling that simply reaffirmed what the Court has said since 1898.

Nothing says “I trust American institutions” quite like threatening to torch the country because those institutions ruled against you using the actual text of the amendment.

Senator Eric Schmitt called the decision “wrong, dangerous, and disastrous for American sovereignty” and floated a constitutional amendment as the fix.

Ironically, that’s the one honest answer in this entire saga — and also something that requires two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states, meaning it has roughly the same odds as Schmitt personally colonizing Mars.

Ted Cruz called it a “travesty,” a word Cruz reserves for any ruling that doesn’t let the executive branch unilaterally rewrite the Bill of Rights by decree.

Tim Pool, never one to undersell a constitutional ruling, apparently suggested Republicans should just pack the Supreme Court with more conservative justices so they’d never lose another ruling again.

That’s a remarkable thing to say about a decision that just came down 6-3, authored by a Republican-appointed Chief Justice, joined by a Trump-appointed justice. The problem, by Pool’s own logic, isn’t that the Constitution says what it says — it’s that not enough judges are willing to ignore it.

Then there’s Brilyn Hollyhand, who summarized the movement’s entire legal theory with the observation that you can’t “jump our fence, give birth, cheat the system” and expect citizenship.

Punchy line. Has nothing to do with the actual case, since the plaintiffs weren’t fence-jumpers, and “cheating the system” isn’t a legal category, it’s a vibe.

Even Speaker Mike Johnson got caught mid-rant against birthright citizenship when a reporter read him the ruling live. By all accounts, his face did the talking his mouth couldn’t.

Why this is all nonsense:

This isn’t new law — it’s 128-year-old law. Wong Kim Ark settled this in 1898. The Court didn’t invent a right; it declined to un-invent one.

“Congress can just pass a law” is not how constitutional law works. Five justices ruled this is a constitutional guarantee, not a statutory one. Statutes can’t override the Constitution — that’s the whole hierarchy.

The “only country that does this” claim is false, and has been debunked repeatedly. Roughly three dozen countries, including Canada and Mexico, grant unconditional birthright citizenship.

Kavanaugh’s dissent is being misused. He didn’t say the 14th Amendment allows ending birthright citizenship — he said Trump’s executive order violated existing statute, while leaving open that Congress could legislate narrower exceptions without touching the constitutional floor. Treating “maybe Congress could tweak a statute someday” as “the Constitution doesn’t mean what it says” just isn’t accurate.

And court-packing to guarantee future wins isn’t a legal argument — it’s an admission the current legal argument is dead. If you need more friendly judges to win, you didn’t have the law on your side; you had a headcount problem.

In short: the Court did the most boring, institutionally normal thing imaginable. It read 150 years of precedent and applied it. MAGA’s reaction was to treat textualism like betrayal — because it turns out they liked the Constitution right up until the Constitution disagreed with them.

Where does one even begin with a man who has so consistently, so enthusiastically, made the rest of the world’s far-right look like they’re just not trying hard enough?

Israel’s National Security Minister — yes, the man is in charge of security — has spent decades proving that if you say the quiet part loud enough, for long enough, eventually someone will give you a cabinet post. Democracy truly is a beautiful thing.

Let’s take a loving walk through some of his greatest hits.

“Encourage emigration”

Ben Gvir, never one to mince words, has repeatedly called for the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza — a phrase that’s doing an enormous amount of moral heavy lifting. Because when you’ve been subjected to a siege, your infrastructure has been leveled, and the man proposing your “voluntary” departure is also the one controlling the guns, the word “voluntary” becomes something of a creative writing exercise. Ben Gvir pushed this position as official policy as recently as 2024, framing the ethnic cleansing of 2 million people as a kind of career counseling service. How thoughtful.

“Gaza should be resettled by Jews”

In a 2024 cabinet meeting — because apparently these things get said in cabinet meetings — Ben Gvir openly backed the resettlement of Gaza by Israeli Jews and the permanent displacement of its Palestinian population. This isn’t dog-whistle politics. This is a foghorn politics, the kind that makes even some hardline Likudniks shuffle uncomfortably in their chairs. Ben Gvir, ever the visionary, sees no reason to be coy about what has historically been called a war crime.

“Starve Gaza”

One of the man’s more economical policy proposals: in 2023, Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich both backed cutting off food, water, electricity, and fuel to Gaza entirely. Ben Gvir called for “a total siege.” Not a surgical operation. Not targeted pressure. A total siege. Of 2.3 million people. In the 21st century. Delivered with the casual confidence of a man ordering a sandwich.

Meir Kahane’s portrait in his living room

Before he was a minister, Ben Gvir was famous for keeping a portrait of Meir Kahane — a man so extreme that the Israeli government itself banned his party and the US designated it a terrorist organisation — on his wall. Kahane advocated the forcible expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. Ben Gvir has spent his career rehabilitating this legacy, which is a bit like a German politician in 1960 decorating his office with a fondness for Streicher and calling it “heritage.”

“Terrorists don’t deserve to live”

In 2023, Ben Gvir said, with characteristic subtlety, that Palestinian prisoners who were hunger striking should be allowed to die, and that “terrorists don’t deserve to live.” The definition of “terrorist,” conveniently, expands to fit whatever is politically useful at the time — a feature, not a bug, of this worldview.

What’s most remarkable about Ben Gvir isn’t that these views exist — extremism has always had its entrepreneurs. What’s remarkable is the institutional laundering. A man barred from serving in the IDF because the IDF considered him too extreme is now the minister overseeing Israeli police. A man who idolized a designated terrorist’s ideology now sits in cabinet.

Itamar Ben Gvir isn’t an aberration. He’s a mirror. And not everyone likes what they see — but the ones who do gave him a ministry.

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There are moments in political media that stop being embarrassing and start being archaeological — fossils of a man, preserved in amber, staring into the void where his brain used to be.

Dave Rubin’s appearance on Jubilee Media’s Surrounded, released on May 31, 2026, is one such fossil. Frame it. Put it in a museum. Label it: Homo Influencer, Late MAGA Period. Cause of Death: Asked a Simple Question.

The premise of Surrounded is almost too poetic for a man of Rubin’s intellectual caliber. One person sits alone in a chair while opponents approach one at a time and attempt to debate them. It is, quite literally, designed so that the solo debater cannot run away. Rubin, who has built an entire career on running away from ideas that challenge him, apparently didn’t read the format description. He sat down anyway. This is what scientists call a strategic error.

The killing blow came from a participant going by the handle “parkergetajob” — already a man with more self-awareness in his username than Rubin has demonstrated in a decade of broadcasting.

Parker sat down and asked what should have been a layup for any MAGA pundit worth their talking points: “What is one main metric that Donald Trump has made better off since he got into office? An example would be GDP, unemployment, inflation, et cetera.”

One metric. One. The man even provided examples. He gift-wrapped it, put a bow on it, and slid it across the table.

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