I read the RawStory article

‘I’m shocked’: Chris Christie’s telling Trump moment among revelations in new Russia files

The gist is that during an August 2016 counterintelligence briefing, Donald Trump repeatedly asked FBI and intelligence officials to compare the threats posed by Russia and China. At one point, after Trump asked “Who’s worse?” and an official answered that both were bad but Russia was worse, Trump and Chris Christie turned toward each other and Christie remarked, “I’m shocked.”

It’s a long article. For a shorter summary click here > 1

My first thought when I read Trump’s question — “Are the Russians bad?” — was that it sounded almost comically naïve.

A decade later, it sounds ominous.

Being charitable, let’s assume Trump wasn’t literally asking whether Russians were morally “bad people.” Surely he didn’t believe everyone living in Russia was evil. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he seems to have been asking about the relative intelligence threats posed by Russia and China.

In 2016, Trump was also a political novice being briefed by national-security professionals. Perhaps his wording was simply clumsy.

But that was ten years ago.

We then have to review what happened after he asked it

2016: Russian interference in the election was subsequently documented by U.S. intelligence, Robert Mueller and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee.

2018: At Helsinki, Trump publicly gave Vladimir Putin’s denial of Russian election interference extraordinary weight while standing beside him, despite the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies.

2022: Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

2022–26: War, atrocities, nuclear threats, cyberwarfare, pressure on NATO and continuing Russian hostility toward the West.

Trump has now had ten years of evidence with which to answer his own question.

So is he still naïve?

Ten years later, simple ignorance is almost impossible to accept as an explanation.

Much has been written about Trump’s admiration for strength, dominance and leaders unconstrained by the political norms that constrain presidents in democratic countries. But admiring those characteristics doesn’t necessarily mean failing to recognize that a particular leader represents a threat to the United States.

So is something else going on?

Trump often appears to view both domestic and international relationships transactionally. He places extraordinary importance on his personal relationship with the individual across the table. Traditional categories — ally, adversary, friendly nation, hostile nation — sometimes seem less important than whether Trump believes a particular person or country will cooperate with him.

Maybe Trump means something different by “bad”

In conventional national-security terms, the important question is straightforward:

Does this government threaten American interests and security?

With Trump, it isn’t much of a leap to wonder whether the operative question is closer to:

Is this leader bad for me — or can I deal with him?

That distinction matters.

Trump can presumably recognize that Putin is ruthless while still believing that his own personal relationship with Putin somehow allows him to understand, manage or even restrain the Russian leader.

Let’s bring this to 2026

Just last week Trump again expressed confidence that Putin would not attack NATO territory. On August 27, he dismissed concerns about such an attack and said Putin would not do it, even as U.S. and European intelligence officials remain concerned about Russian operations aimed at NATO.

There is an interesting historical comparison.

After meeting Putin in 2001, President George W. Bush famously said:

“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

In retrospect, that sounds extraordinarily naïve.

But Bush’s assessment of Putin changed as Putin’s behavior changed.

The question is whether Trump’s does.

Trump sometimes seems to go even further than Bush did, expressing remarkable confidence that he understands what Putin thinks and what Putin will or will not do.

After all, if invading a neighboring democracy isn’t enough, what exactly would make Russia “bad” in Trump’s eyes?

Fast forward from August 2016 to August 2026

Ten years ago Donald Trump asked an FBI agent:

“Are the Russians bad?”

After everything Vladimir Putin has done since, democracies around the world have good reason to wonder how Donald Trump would answer that question today.

And perhaps the more important question is:

What would Russia have to do before Donald Trump finally answered unequivocally: Yes, they are bad?

The PutinpTrump cartoonGoogle Images results are striking in their own way. Taken together, years of political cartoons make a point: the Trump-Putin relationship has been fertile ground for satire almost from the beginning.

🎨 See how cartoonists have portrayed Trump and Putin

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There’s now enough evidence to connect several developments. The Trump administration is moving to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, potentially removing road-building protections from tens of millions of acres of national forest. Separately, Interior has undertaken a review of longstanding wilderness-management policies covering the National Park Service, BLM and Fish & Wildlife Service. And just a few days ago there was another striking story: the administration is considering transferring a piece of Yosemite National Park to facilitate access for a private development next door.

Project 2025 has reared its ugly head again. It proposed changing the law so the government could dispose of excess wild horses. If these wild mustangs could read, I wonder how they’d feel about being called “excess wild horses.”

The noxious president, who has never owned a pet — dog, cat, or even a parrot — seems intolerant of anything outside of human control. His older sons have proudly hunted and killed magnificent wild animals.

Wild animals and wild places are valuable precisely because nobody owns them. Wolves, bears and mustangs don’t produce quarterly earnings. Forests and rivers don’t either. None of them cares who happens to be in the White House.

I don’t want to get mired in the muddy swamp of Trump’s psychopathology — for the umpteenth time — but here is a man for whom virtually everything is transactional. The vast majority of us grew up feeling heartbroken by stories about animals who, like Bambi, learned that the forest was beautiful but also dangerous — and that Man could be the greatest threat of all. Bambi’s mother was shot by a hunter while trying to get her fawn to safety. For generations of children, that scene was an early lesson that the creatures of the forest were not merely scenery or resources. They had lives of their own, and human beings had the power to destroy them.

That may sound sentimental, but there is a serious idea beneath it. Under Trump, even nature becomes transactional. A wild horse should not have to justify its existence by turning a profit. Neither should a wolf, a forest, or a river. Once we begin looking at the natural world primarily in terms of what can be extracted, developed, sold or disposed of, “wild” itself starts to look like inefficiency. To Trump, the oligarchs around him, and — one suspects — the worldview embodied in Project 2025, if something can’t be monetized, its value becomes difficult to see.

Another way to put it: if something has no cash value — whether it’s the beauty of a wild landscape or the life of a wild animal — it becomes worthless.

I couldn’t help but notice the picture below hanging my friend’s house. She and her husband live two doors down from me. She’s the author of the Hiccups Happen Substack (check it out) - it’s usually personal rather than political and well worth looking at. Today she wrote “We Are Falling- Concerning earth and things.”

Here’s a summary:

Dianna uses the beauty of a clear-night eclipse as a stark contrast to humanity’s destructive treatment of the only planet we have. From nuclear weapons, guns, pollution, pesticides, plastics, dams, overfishing, fossil-fuel extraction, resource-hungry AI centers, and social media to climate change, wildfires, depleted water supplies, and dying ecosystems, the author argues that humanity’s “minus” column now vastly outweighs its accomplishments. The central message is that Earth could ultimately heal without us, but humans seem unwilling to curb the greed, hubris, and short-term thinking driving environmental destruction. The piece ends as an urgent call for individuals and society to act—through education, conservation, renewable energy, reduced plastic use, political engagement, donations, and voting—while there is still time to preserve a livable world for future generations.

This was before I put the finishing touches on this Substack. The orginal work below depicting wild horses, is by a Native American artist. It belonged to her grandmother. Somehow it seemed like the right image with which to end this story.

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The idea for writing this came when I read the following in this RawStory article, “Terrified Barron Trump reportedly spends summer with mom: ‘He doesn’t go out.’”

“Barron Trump is an adult,” (US Rep. Yassamin) Ansari said. “He is a full-blown adult, and he is very influential in the Trump White House orbit.” See in conext here > 1

The phrase that caught my attention was “full-blown adult.”

Legally, of course, Barron Trump is an adult. He is 20 years old. But biologically — or, more precisely, neurologically — the question is more complicated. The National Institute of Mental Health notes that the brain continues developing and maturing into the mid-to-late 20s, particularly the prefrontal cortex involved in planning, judgment and decision-making.

That got me thinking about something far larger than Barron Trump.

When the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1971, one of the most powerful arguments was summed up in the slogan, “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” If an 18-year-old could be drafted, sent to war and possibly die for his country, how could we deny him the right to vote?

It was a compelling argument.

But what happens if, more than half a century later, we turn it around?

The American serviceman in World War II was, on average, considerably older than the teenage soldier many of us picture when we think about war — roughly in his mid-20s. That happens to fall near the age at which today’s neuroscience tells us the brain is reaching its later stages of maturation.

That doesn’t mean being 26 made those soldiers better soldiers. Nor does neuroscience establish some magical birthday at which a person suddenly becomes mature.

But it does raise an uncomfortable question.

If a 20-year-old’s still-developing brain matters when we’re assessing his judgment, shouldn’t it matter when we’re handing another 20-year-old a military weapon and sending him into combat?

As I was writing this, the news covered an unsettling reminder of just how young some of those service members are: a 19-year-old sailor aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln had jumped overboard in what his wife described as a suicide attempt.

At 18 you can vote. You can enlist. You can sign contracts. You can be prosecuted as an adult. Eighteen is the legal line we have drawn between childhood and adulthood.

But nature didn’t draw that line.

That leads me to a thought experiment.

Suppose we took what we now know about brain development seriously enough to reconsider the ages at which we confer some of the most consequential responsibilities of adulthood.

There are at least three possibilities.

1. Raise the voting age to somewhere in the mid-20s but continue allowing military service at 18. That would recreate the very moral contradiction that helped produce the 26th Amendment — and raising the voting age would face an enormous constitutional obstacle.

2. Keep voting at 18 but raise the minimum age for military service, particularly combat service. That might seem easier to reconcile with what we know about developing judgment and risk assessment, but it would have enormous practical consequences for military recruitment.

3. Raise both ages. That would at least apply the same standard to voting and military service, but politically and practically it would be about as radical a change in our definition of adulthood as I can imagine.

I am not proposing any of these.

That’s why I call this a thought experiment.

We all know 18-year-olds who seem wise beyond their years, who dazzle us with observations and questions demonstrating sophisticated analytical and critical thinking. And we’ve all known people decades older whose judgment makes us wonder how they ever reached adulthood.

I also think back to myself at 20, living in New York City with my soon-to-be first wife. We were both in psychoanalytic therapy and thought, in our full-of-ourselves way, that we knew it all.

Looking back at those heady years, I realize how naive we were. We made major life decisions that, had we possessed some of the maturity we developed over the next five or six years, we might never have made.

None of this proves that the voting age should be raised, that the military enlistment age should change, or that 26 is somehow the scientifically correct definition of adulthood.

It does suggest something simpler.

Eighteen is a legal boundary. It isn’t a biological transformation.

And all of this came from one phrase describing 20-year-old Barron Trump as a “full-blown adult.”

Sources and Further Reading

• National Institute of Mental Health — “The Teen Brain: 7 Things to Know.” Brain development continues into the mid-to-late 20s; the prefrontal cortex, important in planning, prioritizing and decision-making, is among the last areas to mature. NIMH: The Teen Brain

• Larsen & Luna, “Adolescence as a neurobiological critical period for the development of higher-order cognition.” A peer-reviewed review of continuing development of the prefrontal cortex and higher-order cognition during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. PubMed: Larsen & Luna review

• Casey, Getz & Galvan, “The Adolescent Brain.” A peer-reviewed review examining the differing developmental trajectories of brain systems involved in impulse control, reward and decision-making. NIH/PubMed Central: The Adolescent Brain

• National Archives — “Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote.” History of the movement to lower the voting age to 18 and the slogan that became especially prominent during the Vietnam era. National Archives: Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote

• Congress.gov / Constitution Annotated — Twenty-Sixth Amendment. The constitutional provision guaranteeing that voting rights cannot be denied on account of age to citizens 18 or older, along with its historical background. Congress.gov: Twenty-Sixth Amendment

• The National WWII Museum — “Preparing for the Citizen Soldier’s Return: The GI Bill of 1944.” Reports that the average American citizen soldier in 1944 was 26 years old, while sailors and Marines tended to be somewhat younger. National WWII Museum: The Citizen Soldier

• National Park Service — “Unfit for Service: Physical Fitness and Civic Obligation in World War II.”Describes changing WWII draft-age requirements; men ages 18–45 were ultimately subject to the draft, while military officials considered those under 18 too physically weak and immature. National Park Service: WWII Draft and Fitness

• USA.gov — “Requirements to Join the U.S. Military.” Current official enlistment-age requirements; the military branches accept recruits beginning at age 17. USA.gov: Military Enlistment Requirements

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This is breaking news this morning:

The Raw Story piece, drawing on new reporting from Zeteo, portrays Natalie Harp as far more than Trump’s ever-present personal aide: she has become an unusually powerful information gatekeeper. Because she has near-constant access to Trump and helps manage what reaches his social-media accounts, senior officials and allies reportedly use her as a conduit when they want Trump to see—or post—something. Stephen Miller, for example, has allegedly given her anti-immigration material to get in front of Trump quickly, while others have successfully approached her about subjects ranging from cryptocurrency to pardons. Staffers reportedly dislike or distrust her but are reluctant to challenge someone with such extraordinary proximity to the president.

The more consequential claim is that Harp may help shape Trump’s perceptions and even his decisions by selecting the material he consumes, much of it from far-right online sources. Zeteo cites an instance in which an economic meeting was derailed because Trump became preoccupied with an election-related article Harp had printed for him. The picture is not of Harp as an independent policymaker so much as a devoted gatekeeper who can influence Trump’s mood, attention and agenda simply by deciding what to place in front of him—making her, in practice, one of the most consequential unelected people in the White House.

It deserves it’s own cartoon:

I read this in The Irish Star yesterday:

While there is a lot to digest in the Irish Star article - check it out - one thing struck me in particular. It’s in the title. Was the reference to Trump being on a posting rampage accurate or not? Was it an example of manic unhinged behavior as his doing this by himself would imply or was Natalie Harp helping him?

We just don’t know because it isn’t clear who makes these serial posts. One of them, from The Irish Star article, is shown below:

The posting rampage referred to in The Irish Star did not occur in the wee hours. It says the barrage began at 11:38 a.m. Wednesday and consisted of 46 posts in less than an hour - but we know that many of his posts have times stamps from late at night.

Someone finds the material, sometimes what is called AI slop (see Wikipedia) and hits “post” or “repost.” We tend to assume that because something appears under Donald Trump’s name, Donald Trump personally found it and posted it, or approved its being posted. That is not true.

There is good evidence that quite a bit of what appears on his account is curated and actually posted by Natalie Harp.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that Harp brings Trump stacks of printed draft social-media posts. According to that reporting, Trump reviews and approves them and Harp then logs into his Truth Social account and posts the material.

The Independent, citing the Journal, put it quite specifically: Harp collects screenshots of posts praising Trump, attacking Democrats, promoting conspiracy theories, or insulting his opponents. Trump supposedly reviews printed versions and, after he approves them, she posts them — sometimes late at night, on weekends and holidays. This is supposition.

The Washington Post reported just last week that Harp “routinely posts for the president” and noted the extraordinary gatekeeping power she has because she controls so much of what gets physically put in front of him. There is evidence that this part is true, but it is not the entire story.

White House officials say Trump personally approves what Harp posts. They also say Trump posts some messages himself. I certainly believe he writes or dictates at least some of them, particularly consequential statements that sound unmistakably like Trump.

But how much do we really know about the rest?

When numerous posts suddenly appear in less than an hour, did Trump personally sit there clicking through every one? Did Harp have a stack he had approved earlier and simply upload them in rapid succession? Did he look at each one five minutes before it appeared? Five hours before? Yesterday?

We don’t know.

And here I’ll go one step further — clearly into speculation.

Considering the extraordinary degree of trust Trump apparently places in Harp, I wonder whether she really needs explicit approval for every routine post or repost anymore. Could there be categories of material she knows perfectly well he will enjoy — flattering AI images, attacks on enemies, extravagant praise — where she has considerable latitude?

I have no evidence, just suspicion, that Trump may have told her, “post whatever you think I’ll like.” I can hear him sayng this to her.

The White House says the opposite, as I expect they would - and it’s possible whoever says these things just doesn’t know.

But given what has been reported about the Trump/Hart relationship, I think it is a reasonable question to ask, not an off-the-wall conspiracy theory.

We do know that people familiar with the situation told the Wall Street Journal that Harp was the person who posted both the AI image portraying Trump as a Christ-like figure and the infamous video containing racist imagery of the Obamas — and that she did so at Trump’s direction. Did Harp post them on her own and assume Trump would appreciate them?

That still leaves us with a murky as mud situation.

When something bizarre, narcissistic or outrageous suddenly appears on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account, the words “Trump posted” may tell us considerably less than we think they do.

That still leaves us with a murky as mud — and to me much more interesting — question about Natalie Harp.

Has Trump come to trust her so completely, and has she become so adept at knowing what will flatter him, amuse him or attack the people he wants attacked in the way he likes to have them attacked, that she no longer functions merely as an aide who posts things for him?

Has Natalie Harp in some sense, become an extension of Trump himself — part of his online persona, able to anticipate what “Donald Trump” would want his millions of followers to see before he even has to tell her? Furthermore, if this is true knowing what we know about Trump and how important something like how he is perceived online would be to him, if he’s allowed Harp to be part of this in a major way it suggests a deep trust he feels for her. It might be too much to say that he’s actually opened his psychological defenses to her in a way he’s never done to anyone else before. I hesitate to use the word “soulmate” for obvious reasons - but Trump might actually feel that in her he’s finally found one, even if there’s no romantic involvement. If Melania senses this that would explain a lot.

This is all conjecture.

We don’t know that Harp has this degree of freedom to post. Only one person might conceivably want the public to know this - not any of his closest advisors and not Trump himself - that person might - and I emphasize might - be Natalie Harp. This could be in a fantasy, wishful thinking, since she is smart enough to know that this revelation would be likely hurt - a leap to a conclusion - the man she is allowed to call Donald - or in her best Marlyn Monroe voice “Mister President," when they sharing private moments.

If Harp has become so close to Trump that she has a license to post whenever and whatever she wants in his stead, it’s almost like she’s become his Highness’s Secret Agent 001.

Some science:

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). It says:

“The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s.”

It specifically notes that the prefrontal cortex—important for planning, prioritizing, judgment, and decision-making—is among the last brain regions to mature.

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This is what I thought in the middle of the night that I wanted to build my Substack around today. It was how finally Trump had a chance to give an order people would embrace and wouldn't end up challenged in court. He could have the satisfaction of ordering flags to be flown at half-staff.

The other things I thought of were the unintended consequences coming from Dolly’s death and Trump’s honoring her.

I thought about the drag performer, Brigitte Bandit, who does her - and who she recognized getting publicitiy - and there’s a good chance will get more - as did the entire issue of drag shows which Trump is vehemently and vociferously against. I thought about Dolly's performer sisters, Stella and Rachel who are not nearly as famous as she is. They got a publicity boost. One in particular is outspoken in her anti-Trump and anti-MAGA opinions.

Dolly stayed out of poltics - see “Dolly Parton says she was offered the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice but didn’t accept it.” CBS News. Not her sister Stella:

I looked at her singer sister Rachel’s X page and share some screengrabs below… It’s an understatement to say that her anti-Trump posts made before Dolly died are harsh.

With so many aspects of this I wanted to address I needed more information. I needed to do more research.

Here’s some of what I discovered.

On how many other entertainers ever had federal building flags flown at half-staff - ONE! This was Bob Hope. When Hope died in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered flags lowered nationwide on the day of his interment, specifically citing both his career as a comedian and his decades entertaining American troops. The United States is officially mourning an entertainer in a way it almost never does — and for seven days, longer than Bob Hope.

On Brigitte Bandit - if she was really on top of things, Natalie Harp might have printed out this article for him before he decided to lower the flags and go all-in on Dolly:

Click to read article

In 2023, Bandit repeatedly testified at the Texas Capitol against legislation restricting drag performances. She showed up in Dolly-style hair, makeup and costume and at one appearance carried a children’s book about Dolly. A photo eventually reached Rebecca Seaver of Dolly Parton Productions, who showed it to Dolly. Dolly responded by having a custom rhinestone-covered guitar made and personally signing it, “To Brigitte. Love, Dolly Parton.” Bandit said afterward, essentially in disbelief, that Dolly actually knew who she was.

On the very day Dolly died, a federal judge again struck down Texas’s drag-show law as unconstitutional — and Dolly Parton figures in the case.

U.S. District Judge David Hittner, an 87-year-old Reagan appointee, ruled that the Texas law was so broad that it potentially swept up protected performances including Dolly Parton impersonators. Brigitte Bandit is one of the plaintiffs. Texas Tribune

Dolly was also an outspoken advocate for LGBT+ rights. She publicly supported same-sex marriage as early as 2009, and repeatedly talked about her large gay following with affection rather than political calculation. In 2016 she said, “I have a huge gay and lesbian following and I’m proud of ’em, I love ’em,” adding that people should be allowed to be themselves. She also talked about gay members of her own extended family and said her family embraced them rather than treating them as different. CBS News

This is from The LA Times: Appreciation: Dolly Parton was special to the LGBTQ+ community. She showed us our country loves us.

• Dolly Parton became a singular icon for LGBTQ+ Americans, a glamorous country star whose love and allyship reached from queer clubs to rural, flag-flying towns that often feel unwelcoming.

• Songs like “Travelin’ Thru” and “Rainbowland” and her plainspoken defense of queer family and co-workers modeled steadfast support as institutions retreated from diversity and transgender rights.

• Her life and message reassured LGBTQ+ people that faith, patriotism and acceptance can coexist, and that the open-armed, pluralistic America they cherish is still worth fighting for.

An then there’s Stella Parton.

If you click the search on X after typing the Stel it took me here:

As I write this here’s her most recent post:

Scoll down and you find two more flower picture tweets but look what’s between them:

I thinking she’s being sarcastic saying “Trump is not sundowning in the mddle of the night” and may very well meaning she thinks he does have dementia.

Keep scrolling and you can see what was on her mind on August. 19 and 20th - note that Dolly died on the 25th. She has only posted flowers since then.

Click above to enlarge image

Here are a couple more of her tweets. You’ll have to go to her X page to see more of them.

There’s yet another Parton sister who’s also a singer, Rachel Parton George. Here’s an article about her:

She doesn’t have an X page but she’s profiled on Wikipedia (here) On August 26, Stella Parton’s Wikipedia page received about 185,000 views, roughly 511 times its normal traffic. Amazingly, their younger sister Rachel Parton George spiked even harder: about 166,000 views, roughly 689 times normal.

Trump made an impossible claim to substantiate after Dolly’s death. He said Wednesday that she “really liked me,” but stayed out of politics to avoid losing fans. Her family may know whether or not this is true - and if they dispute this it will be their word against his.

On the very day Dolly died, a federal judge again struck down Texas’s drag-show law as unconstitutional — and Dolly Parton figures in the case.

U.S. District Judge David Hittner, an 87-year-old Reagan appointee, ruled that the Texas law was so broad that it potentially swept up protected performances including Dolly Parton impersonators. Brigitte Bandit is one of the plaintiffs. Texas Tribune

Dolly was also an outspoken advocate for LGBT+ rights. She publicly supported same-sex marriage as early as 2009, and repeatedly talked about her large gay following with affection rather than political calculation. In 2016 she said, “I have a huge gay and lesbian following and I’m proud of ’em, I love ’em,” adding that people should be allowed to be themselves. She also talked about gay members of her own extended family and said her family embraced them rather than treating them as different. CBS News

This is from The LA Times: Appreciation: Dolly Parton was special to the LGBTQ+ community. She showed us our country loves us.

• Dolly Parton became a singular icon for LGBTQ+ Americans, a glamorous country star whose love and allyship reached from queer clubs to rural, flag-flying towns that often feel unwelcoming.

• Songs like “Travelin’ Thru” and “Rainbowland” and her plainspoken defense of queer family and co-workers modeled steadfast support as institutions retreated from diversity and transgender rights.

• Her life and message reassured LGBTQ+ people that faith, patriotism and acceptance can coexist, and that the open-armed, pluralistic America they cherish is still worth fighting for.

Trump has bestowed an extraordinary national honor on a woman who became an icon to many of the very LGBTQ Americans — including drag performers and transgender people — whom his political movement has targeted.

And Dolly did this without turning herself into a the kind partisan figure Trump would recognize as an enemy. She didn’t say, vote Democratic. Her message was about people she knew. She said that these are people I love, and I am not going to reject them and underlying this, that you shouldn’t either. She didn’t say the words “throw away your petty prejudices” out loud, but for people who listened without bias clouding their hearing they were louad an clear.

What Chat might have told Natalie Harp, had she asked first:

Q: What are the downsides of giving Dolly Parton’s death enormous publicity?
A: You may remind millions of Americans that Dolly was a gay icon, embraced drag performers, supported LGBTQ people, had a fiercely anti-Trump sister, and spent decades refusing to let either political party claim her.

In other words, the more you celebrate Dolly, the more attention you give to parts of her legacy MAGA might prefer people not dwell on.

This has nothing to do with Dolly, but it is so outrageous that it deserves a place as a bonus cartoon for today. It goes with this article:

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Updates:August 27th

There is a meaningful development from today’s hearing: U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper openly questioned why the Kennedy Center is rushing to put Trump’s name back on the building by September 8, after Cooper already ruled in May that the earlier renaming was illegal. The administration has agreed not to proceed before September 8 while the latest challenge is considered.

The AP reports that Cooper appeared skeptical of the administration’s argument that the new wording — essentially identifying the Kennedy Center as restored and renovated by Trump — is merely recognition rather than another attempt at renaming. Importantly, Cooper also pushed back on the suggestion that the litigation itself is interfering with renovation of the building.

That gives you a legitimate new hook for recirculating “First the East Wing. Now the Kennedy Center?” The demolition threat has now gone from an extraordinary DOJ court filing to something being examined in an actual federal-court hearing, with the judge questioning the administration’s conduct. Reuters and AP are both covering it nationally, so this has clearly moved beyond partisan-media attention.

USA Today’s story today is headlined “Opponents call Trump ‘delusional’ for threat to demolish Kennedy Center”and leads directly into today’s federal-court hearing. It quotes Rep. Joyce Beatty’s lawyers calling the demolition argument “a breathtaking assault on the rule of law” and “delusional.”

And it isn’t just USA Today. Today Reuters is covering the Kennedy Center court fight; NPR is reporting the demolition threat; yesterday AP covered the administration’s claim that the Center could face financial ruin; and the Washington Post reported the same confrontation.

When I wrote about this earlier, I wondered whether the demolition threat was Trumpian bluster or something we actually had to take seriously. Unfortunately, it increasingly looks like the latter. Read article:

With stories like ‘Shocking’ Trump DOJ moves during Kennedy Center hearing flagged by lawyer I thought this cartoon was appropriate.

I wasn’t sure there would be a reason to post the cartoon above, which I made last night after learning that the Trump administration had floated the possibility of tearing down the Kennedy Center in a federal court filing. Then there was a segment devoed to it on MSNOW’s “Money, Power, Politics with Stephanie Ruhle:”

There is still a great deal we don’t know. We don’t know whether demolition is an actual plan or another example of Trump’s banging his Florsheim Cap Toe Oxfords shoe on the table like a modern day Nikita Khrushchev.

We know one thing: his administration has now put tearing down the Kennedy Center into the public conversation. What began as an extraordinary argument in a federal court filing is now being discussed on national television.

Is it merely a threat? Perhaps. But after what happened to the White House East Wing, I wouldn’t automatically assume that nothing is happening behind the scenes.

I wouldn’t put it past Trump to have already asked what would be required to make demolition irreversible — to reduce enough of this enormous building to rubble quickly enough that restoring it would become impossible. We saw with the East Wing how rapidly demolition can turn a decision into a fait accompli once the heavy equipment gets the order “start your engines.”

I can also easily imagine Trump having a glorious time while his minions turn his ideas into drawings and mock-ups of whatever monumental testament to himself he might want to put in its place.

This is where the cartoon becomes less of a flight of fancy than it first appears. If preliminary planning were already underway, the public might know nothing about it. Engineers, contractors and demolition specialists could be working long before the first giant excavator or wrecking-ball crane appeared or the architects palns were complete.

By the time the happy heavy equipment showed up, the most important decisions might already have been made.

Follow the latest coverage of the Kennedy Center demolition threat on Google News.

Follow Kennedy Center news here

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Here’s the video which I show a clip from above:

These were the two top trending articles on RawStory yesterday:

Update: Click image for story…

The first RawStory article is the important First Amendment story (here), the second is about what might or might not be a marital spat - or worse - about Natalie Harp (here) Here a brief video showing what the lip reader said Melania was saying:

Two incidents at the Freedom 250 race are making news. One is irresistible gossip. The other may be consequential.

The gossip is why Melania Trump, who had been sitting or standing beside her husband and at one point whispering to him, suddenly got up and left — and whether Natalie Harp’s nearby presence had anything to do with it.

The consequential question is why an unidentified man apparently believed he had the authority to order a Fox News pool videographer to turn his camera away from the presidential suite — and why the videographer complied.

We may never know why Melania Trump got up at precisely that moment. What happened to the camera, however, is not a marital mystery. The gossip question is why Melania left. The press-freedom question is why anyone thought the camera should be pointed elsewhere.

This is the so far unidentified man, and the video clip of him telling the pool reporter to turn the camera away from the presidential suit right now:

This was not a hidden camera in a private residence. It was a news camera pointed at the president of the United States at a public event. If an ordinary spectator some distance away could raise an iPhone and record what was happening — and today’s telephoto lenses make that increasingly easy — what legitimate government interest required the professional news camera to look somewhere else? That is a question officials owe us an answer to.

There is another curious wrinkle. Rolling Stone reports that the White House itself edited Natalie Harp out of official video from the Freedom 250 showing Trump and Melania. There is no evidence that this editorial decision had anything to do with the order given to the pool camera, and I’m not suggesting that it did. But we now have two separate instances involving what viewers were permitted to see: an unexplained instruction telling the news camera to look elsewhere at the event, and a later White House video in which Harp was removed from the picture. At the very least, that makes the question of who gave the camera order — and why — even more worth answering.

I’m not a lawyer. There could conceivably be some genuine security circumstance we don’t yet know about, although I have difficulty imagining what it might be. If there is one, the White House should have no difficulty explaining it.

The great abuses of power lead to headlines. The smaller ones reveal something different and insidious: what those around a president have gradually come to assume he is entitled to do. A dam may begin to fail when an insignificant-looking crack is allowed to widen.

Someday Melania Trump may tell us why she walked away. She may never tell us. But Americans shouldn’t need a former first lady’s memoir to learn why someone apparently exercising authority around the president ordered a news camera to look away.

BEST CARTOON THAT ISN’T MINE

DonkeyHotey somehow managed to put much of today’s story into one gloriously overstuffed image. Click below to enlarge.

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Tuesday Update: Trump has now threatened to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” At this point the territorial name-changing shtick is becoming self-parody. More importantly, he can tell the U.S. government what to call a shared lake; he cannot tell Canada what to call it — which is a rather neat metaphor for the trade war itself.

Late morning UPDATE, Aug. 24: Trump escalated the confrontation again Monday, announcing that tariffs on cars, trucks, automotive parts and steel will rise to 50 percent beginning January 1. What looked Friday like the collapse of a negotiation is increasingly looking like the beginning of a much larger trade war. Scroll down for article links.

Also thanks to frequent commenter EllieMae for posting the hockey term for playing rough - elbows up. Mark Carney played ice hockey as a goalie during his time at Harvard University in the mid-1980s and made one brief playoff appearance in 1986.

Update Aug. 26: -Trump’s hockey fantasy

On Friday night, with less than an hour left before a new round of Trump tariffs was scheduled to take effect, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did something Trump does not seem to expect from countries he believes he can overpower: he walked away.

Rather than accept a trade agreement that would have left permanent U.S. tariffs embedded in the relationship, Carney told his negotiators to stop negotiating. He then announced that Canada would retaliate dollar for dollar against the new American tariffs.

The next day he made clear that this was not simply a bargaining tactic.

“America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” Carney said, recalling a warning he had made earlier this year. “That will never, ever happen.”

Whatever one thinks of Carney or of the wisdom of taking on an economy as enormous as that of the United States, he has identified something Donald Trump repeatedly seems unable to understand: possessing vastly greater power than your adversary does not mean you possess the power to make that adversary surrender.

Canada can be hurt badly in a trade war with the United States. Carney knows that. Canadians know that. What Trump may have underestimated is that a country can decide that accepting economic pain is preferable to accepting humiliation and permanent subordination.

And Carney just demonstrated that the weaker country still gets to decide how much pain it is willing to absorb rather than submit.

We now know more about what Carney was being asked to accept. According to Carney, the Trump administration introduced last-minute demands that would have restricted Canada’s ability to make its own trade agreements with other countries and even demanded changes involving Canada’s use of French. Carney called the proposed restriction on Canada’s trade relationships “unacceptable” and “a question of sovereignty.” British Columbia Premier David Eby said accepting such a condition would have reduced Canada to “the economic equivalent of the 51st state.” (AP article)

Seen in that light, Carney wasn’t merely refusing a bad tariff deal. He was refusing what he regarded as an attempt to make Canada economically subordinate to the United States.

Which brings me to an admittedly absurd hypothetical.

America could defeat Canada militarily. Nobody seriously doubts which country possesses the overwhelming military power. But invading and then occupying our enormous neighbor across a 5,525-mile border would be something else entirely.

And if Donald Trump needs a reminder that overwhelming military superiority doesn’t necessarily produce surrender, he need only look at Iran. Nearly six months after unleashing America’s military might there, Iran hasn’t surrendered, the Strait of Hormuz remains a crisis, American munitions stockpiles have been badly depleted, and the costs continue to mount.

Military superiority is one thing. Making another country bend to your will is another.

There’s also a particularly good irony here. Trump should have learned from Iran that military coercion is fantastically expensive and unpredictable, so he turns to his favorite supposedly bloodless weapon — tariffs.

Trump may be deluded enough to believe he possesses superior military knowledge, but my sense is that, at some level, he knows he has to defer to Pete Hegseth and his favored top brass when making military decisions. They may believe what they tell him, or they may sometimes tell him what they think he wants to hear.

When it comes to tariffs, though, I doubt Trump thinks anyone knows more about them than he does.

Trump has been learning the limits of his power, albeit being dragged kicking and screaming—in his fashion—toward a truth he has spent his life refusing to accept: there are some people, institutions and countries he simply cannot make bend to his will.

Now we are waiting to see whether Canada becomes, in a sense, the nonviolent version of Iran: another country Trump assumed he could force to bend through the application of overwhelming American power.

And whether he once again discovers what happens when wishful thinking hits the wall of reality.

Trump’s power can inflict pain. It cannot guarantee obedience.

Addendum:

This has now become a major MSNOW segment while even the Wall Street Journal editorial board is calling it “The Dumbest Trade War Revisited” The Journal’s editorial says Trump’s escalation “makes no economic or political sense,” while its news side is simultaneously treating Carney’s refusal to accept a bad deal as a major test of his governing doctrine.

I wonder how many Americans could name the prime minister of Canada—or pick Mark Carney out of a lineup. That might have been harmless trivia once. It isn’t anymore. The man many Americans wouldn’t recognize is leading the country now retaliating against Trump in a trade war that could raise prices and disrupt businesses on both sides of the longest peaceful international border in the world

Updates:

Reuters: Trump’s new 50% auto/truck/steel tariff escalation. Reuters: Trump escalates tariffs after Canada talks collapse

AP: the strongest straightforward overview of Carney’s retaliation and the rapidly escalating confrontation. AP: Canada promises retaliatory tariffs

The Guardian: probably the best analytical companion to your argument. The Guardian: The lesson from Canada’s collapsed trade talks

Aother development is that the Canadian explanation of the collapse is becoming more specific. Canada’s ambassador to Washington, Mark Wiseman, said the problem was not one single issue but that the written terms diverged from what Canada believed had been agreed verbally. His analogy was essentially that the sides had shaken hands on buying a house, only to discover in the paperwork that important things supposedly included in the deal had disappeared. The Strait Times.

.Carney is pictured below confronting Trump face-to-face and pointing a finger while making his case — hardly the image of a Canadian prime minister cowed by the American president.

Below: These are the two men at the center of what you’ve just read (from the AP)

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The Supreme Court will decide whether the Constitution protects possession of AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles. That is the constitutional question. It is not the practical one, which is what an assault-weapons ban could accomplish in a country already saturated with firearms.

These weapons have repeatedly been used in exceptionally deadly mass shootings, and there are legitimate reasons for restricting them. I should add that I was a gun owner during the 20 years I served as a reserve police officer in Massachusetts. That does not make me a firearms expert, but it does mean that guns are not an entirely abstract subject to me.

But begin with three realities:

• The firearms industry estimates that approximately 32 million AR-15-style and similar “modern sporting rifles” are already in circulation.

• Any politically plausible federal ban would probably stop new sales and transfers while grandfathering many weapons already owned.

• Such a ban could therefore prevent the existing arsenal from continuing to grow, but substantially reducing its size would take years—probably decades.

This matters for another reason that is uncomfortable even to think about—and that I admit I am hesitant to discuss.

I know how easily examining the possibility of political violence can be mistaken for advocating it. Several years ago, after writing some 1,700 Daily Kos posts, I published an article addressing political violence and firearms. Not long afterward, I was banned without explanation or recourse. I cannot prove that article was the reason, but the timing left me suspecting a connection.

Nevertheless, refusing to examine political violence does not make the risk disappear. Actual warfare is not fought with one kind of rifle. Ground troops use standard infantry rifles in ordinary combat, while snipers use specialized precision rifles designed for long-distance killing. If American political violence ever escalated into organized armed conflict, banning one category of civilian rifle would not eliminate the many other firearms that could be used.

Gun ownership for personal protection and hunting is more prevalent on the right, but it is hardly confined to MAGA. Nor would political violence depend upon the continued legal sale of one particular kind of firearm.

An assault-weapons ban would not remove the firearms already circulating from a violent political conflict. Gun ownership for personal protection and hunting is more prevalent on the right, but it is hardly confined to MAGA. Nor would political violence depend upon the continued legal sale of one particular kind of firearm.

None of this is an argument against an assault-weapons ban. A law does not have to eliminate a problem completely to reduce it or save lives. But neither should such a ban be presented as if it could fundamentally change how thoroughly armed this country has already become.

The Supreme Court can decide whether governments may prohibit one category of rifle. It cannot reverse the decades during which America accumulated more guns than people.

An assault-weapons ban may be worthwhile. What it cannot be is mistaken for anything approaching disarmament.

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In my Substack, “Trump Is a Chaff Machine — and the Media Keeps Locking On,” I dismissed the Natalie Harp story as chaff—a cloud of gossip irresistible to the media and obscuring far more consequential things Donald Trump was doing.

I wasn’t entirely wrong. But I wasn’t entirely right, either.

The real story isn’t whether Natalie Harp is romantically smitten with Donald Trump. It is that Trump appears to have placed someone whose defining qualification is her unconditional devotion at the point through which information and access to the president must pass.

Harp may not be functioning as Trump’s chief of staff, but she appears to exercise one of that office’s most consequential powers: serving as a gatekeeper to the president. She helps determine what Trump sees, who reaches him and, at times, what appears under his name on Truth Social. Trump doesn’t drink. But if adulation were alcohol, Harp would be the aide who made sure his glass never ran dry.

Her feelings about Trump matter only because they may influence how she exercises that power. A gatekeeper’s job ordinarily requires judgment, independence and the willingness to tell a president what he does not want to hear. Harp’s letters suggest that her overriding concern is never to disappoint him. That is not evidence of a romance. It is evidence that the person filtering Trump’s world may be temperamentally incapable of challenging him.

She has gone from being someone chasing the president's golf cart to someone metaphorically riding in it with him.

May 2, 2023: Natalie Harp runs uphill behind Trump’s golf-cart procession at Turnberry in Scotland. Less than three years later, she would be sitting outside the Oval Office as one of the president’s principal gatekeepers. Tony Nicoletti/Reach Publishing Services.

My argument was—and remains—valid: the gossipy Harp coverage, prompted partly by Jon Ossoff’s taunts and amplified when Trump took the bait, diverted attention from far more consequential presidential conduct.

What I have always found significant is how seriously Trump has taken people whom no other president in history would have paid attention to. Several were among the former loyalists I wrote about yesterday in “When His Admirers Leave, Trump Builds Monuments.”

Fast-forward a little more than three years from her golf cart chasing days, and Harp was one of a small handful of aides Trump took with him on the now-infamous catering-truck ride—while Cabinet officials and other senior aides were left aboard the decoy plane.

Among those Trump chose were Dan Scavino, who began his relationship with Trump as a golf caddie, and Walt Nauta, Trump’s former valet and former co-defendant in the classified-documents case. Nauta now serves as director of Oval Office operations.

The catering-truck passenger list was revealing. When Trump believed he might be in danger, the aides he brought with him were not his highest-ranking advisers—the people one would hope were best equipped to advise him if Air Force One were attacked—but those whose relationships with him had been built on personal service and loyalty: the people who made him feel most comfortable.

That is the Natalie Harp story worth covering. Not whether the letters revealed by Michael Wolff show that she is in love with Trump, but why a president has made personal devotion a qualification for proximity and power.

How the image sausage was made: I gave ChatGPT the Virginia Slims parody concept and described the two scenes. Its first version put Trump and Harp in airline-style seats and made the supposedly abandoned officials look as though they were about to climb into the catering truck. I sent it back with two corrections: improvised seating and a wide stretch of tarmac separating the truck from the officials. The result is above.

This is what I mean when I write: The idea is mine; the artist is ChatGPT.

Update: If you don’t have a subscription to the NY Times to read this Jamelle Bouie essay… where he agrees with what I’ve written…

Here’s a summary from ChatGTP:

Bouie’s central argument is that the Natalie Harp story matters far less because of speculation about her personal relationship with Trump than because of the extraordinary influence she appears to have over the information reaching the president. Harp travels with him, spends more time with him than other aides, posts and responds to people in his name, reports only to him, and literally follows him with a portable printer supplying material she finds online. Her inclusion on the secret military flight out of Turkey — while senior officials such as Bessent, Rubio and Miller remained on Air Force One — is another indication of how central she has become. If she is effectively curating Trump’s view of events, Bouie argues, then she may be one of the most consequential people in the administration.

The larger point is about Trump’s presidency, not Harp herself. Bouie portrays Trump as having dismantled or bypassed the traditional systems intended to give presidents reliable, professionally vetted information and to protect them from isolation and groupthink. Instead, he increasingly depends on loyalists who have little incentive to challenge him and may actively feed his prejudices and preferred narratives. Harp is important because she embodies that system: a devoted aide helping construct an information bubble around a president who already rejects unwelcome facts. Bouie’s conclusion is stark — the sensational aspect of the story may explain the attention, but the real danger is a president making enormously consequential decisions while increasingly detached from dependable information and surrounded by people who reinforce his version of reality.

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Several prominent right-wing MAGA figures, including Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Alex Jones, have not only stopped supporting Trump but have made their disapproval very public. (See article)

Others include:

• Joe Rogan — endorsed Trump in 2024 but now sharply condemns the Iran war, Trump’s immigration tactics and his handling of the Epstein files.

• Andrew Schulz — voted for Trump and subsequently said Trump was doing “the exact opposite” of what he voted for.

• Theo Von — hosted Trump during the campaign but now says he feels deeply disillusioned with Trump’s foreign policy.

• Nick Fuentes — once an enthusiastic MAGA propagandist, now calls the movement a scam and has urged his followers not to support Republicans.

• Tim Dillon — was part of Trump’s podcast coalition and has become an aggressive critic, although his original support was less explicit than Rogan’s or Schulz’s.

The real story isn’t simply that Trump is losing supporters. It is that these people insist, as Marjorie Taylor Greene recently put it, “We never changed. Trump did.”

My sense is that Trump really doesn’t pay much attention to this. In fact, it may represent background noise so faint—like the barely discernible hum of a refrigerator—that he doesn’t even hear it.

I am among countless critics who see him as more concerned with gratifying his emotional needs at the expense of governing. Put another way, even what should be pressing issues—such as the Iran war, the economy and North Korea launching missiles—barely register. They may be a little louder than a refrigerator, perhaps more like an air conditioner that turns on and off periodically with a sound you eventually tune out.

What does register is when his grandiose building or naming plans are disrupted or thwarted by what he sees as court overreach into his domain.

Trump is complex and has characteristics associated with what’s called the Dark Tetrad—extreme narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and sadism. Yet when I look at him through a psychological lens, I also see him, paradoxically, as a very simple person.

His needs not only come first, without regard for or even cognizance of other people’s feelings, but they override every other consideration, including the actual work of being president.

I view his primary need as something humanistic psychologists might call a need for affirmation. I’d call it self-adoration.

When I visualize Trump, I see a lonely figure trying to hug himself. For all the cruel cartoon depictions of Trump, I have a mental image of him as a lonely child sitting alone in the evening, hugging himself and trying to self-soothe.

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Update Aug. 22:

The Natalie Harp story continues to be in the news, seemingly with some new wrinkle every day. On Wednesday, for example, the Daily Mail published an article with the headline: “Trump’s under-siege aide Natalie Harp caught in foul-mouthed explosion as insiders reveal White House whispers about her close access to president.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s cozying up to Kim Jong Un is barely being covered.

Now attention is being paid to Trump’s involvement in cryptocurrency. On Wednesday, he hosted a group of crypto executives at the White House.

I consider the Harp story a distraction. The North Korea story is a serious international-relations problem because it upends our longstanding alliance with South Korea.

The crypto story is significant in another way.

Trump’s crypto empire is part of the financial ecosystem surrounding his assault on accountable government. It provides a way for people seeking access or favorable treatment to enrich the president—and potentially themselves—while he weakens the institutions that might investigate them.

From what I can tell, this isn’t yet the stuff of blaring headlines. But there is evidence that much of the public already senses something is wrong. The challenge isn’t merely persuading people that Trump’s crypto profiteering is inappropriate. It is explaining why it belongs near the center of the larger Trump corruption story.

Crypto should not distract us from state violence, politicized law enforcement, attacks on elections and the courts, and executive impunity—issues at the very core of our democracy and constitutional government. Trump’s crypto operation does not directly cause these assaults. Its significance lies in how it fits into the same system of unaccountable power—and gives the president a personal financial stake in weakening the institutions meant to restrain him.

Crypto doesn’t have to pay directly for troops in the streets or prosecutors pursuing Trump’s enemies to serve his authoritarian project. Its role is less direct but no less insidious: the more opaque and less accountable the marketplace becomes, the more readily it can be used by people seeking influence—and by a president seeking personal profit.

Trump’s use of crypto moves the country further into a realm of shady deals that may never see daylight. It is another step toward an autocratic oligarchy in which favors can be sought through purchases, wealthy insiders prosper and the Department of Justice and other government watchdogs turn a blind eye.

At the same time, Trump is using his executive power and influence over Congress and federal regulators to shape the rules governing the crypto marketplace—a marketplace in which he and his family have an enormous personal financial interest.

This is where the crypto story and Trump’s assault on democracy converge: the president profits from a financial system whose value he can influence while weakening the institutions responsible for holding both that system and the president accountable.

The more the government becomes an extension of Donald Trump personally, the more valuable Trump-linked assets become. But becoming a multibillionaire does not, by itself, keep Trump in power. The political advantage comes when extremely wealthy people and powerful industries acquire a financial stake in keeping him powerful and beyond accountability.

Media moguls can influence what millions of people see and believe. The crypto industry offers Trump a different benefit: a money machine capable of enriching him, combined with a powerful financial constituency whose prosperity may be enhanced by his remaining in power.

Stephanie Ruhle calls her MS NOW program Money, Power, Politics. No presidency has ever embodied that fusion more literally. Trump uses political power to generate private wealth, while wealthy interests acquire reasons to preserve his political power.

Under Trump, money, power and politics are no longer merely related. They have become a single, self-reinforcing enterprise.

Tommy’s comment gave me the idea for this.

Addendum: On TV this morning Stephanie Ruhle was discussing the crypto industry.

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An American president who portrays himself as chosen by Jesus sends his son-in-law to negotiate with an Islamic theocracy—and then publicly denies that the negotiations his son-in-law says are continuing even exist. It sounds like an unfunny comedy routine. It is actually American foreign policy.

On Monday, during an interview with Fox News, Jared Kushner said communications between the U.S. government and different parts of Iran’s government were “probably more robust than it’s maybe ever been,” adding:“We are having very positive and active conversations.”

The next day, Trump flatly contradicted him on Truth Social: “There are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Reuters

Iran—and any country negotiating with the United States—needs to know whether the president’s designated envoy actually speaks for the president.

It isn’t unusual for opposing sides in peace talks to issue contradictory accounts of how negotiations are going. That has happened between the United States and Iran. What is unusual is for a president and one of his own lead negotiators to contradict each other—publicly and within a day—about whether any talks or conversations are taking place at all.

The Iranian regime already deeply distrusts both the United States and its representatives. That makes it especially important for Trump’s negotiators to speak with unmistakable presidential authority. By publicly contradicting Kushner, Trump undercut that authority himself.

Now it has been announced that the talks have halted. A U.S. official said, “There have been positive discussions, but President Trump has decided to wait and asked his team not to engage until Iran is ready to make a deal.”

But how is Iran supposed to demonstrate that it is ready to make a deal if Trump has instructed his team not to engage? Rather than waiting for Iran to signal that it has met some unspecified standard of readiness, Trump might first make sure that he and his son-in-law are reading from the same page when they make pronouncements about the negotiations.

Addendum: Where is the secretary of state?

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio—the secretary of state nominally charged with conducting American diplomacy—has been conspicuously absent from the Iran negotiations. Instead, he is leading negotiations involving Venezuela and Cuba—countries we aren’t at war with. Raw Story

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Since this was written, Natalie Harp’s intensely personal letters to Trump have been published in full—providing the media with another irresistible cloud of chaff while far more consequential actions receive comparatively little attention.

Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant—nicknamed his “human printer” because she follows him with a portable printer and a supply of favorable articles—has become a nearly constant presence at his side. Reports have described intensely devoted notes she wrote to him, her unusual access and influence, and her inclusion among the handful of aides taken with Trump when he secretly switched planes in Turkey. All this has fueled speculation about a romance, although no credible evidence has established that there is one.

The Trump-Harp story has been all over the media. New reporting says Natalie Harp worked inside the White House for more than a year without routine security clearance, although the White House says she now has appropriate clearance. That is a legitimate national-security story. Speculation about whether she and Trump are romantically involved still is not. The distinction reinforces my point: when gossip and governance are treated as equivalent, consequential news disappears into the chaff.

Trump’s decision involving North and South Korea has also been reported, but it has received nowhere near the attention devoted to Natalie Harp.

Trump ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea, adopting North Korea’s description of them as inappropriately “hostile” and citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un. These exercises are central to maintaining military readiness within a 73-year-old alliance—and North Korea recently test fired more missile.

This isn’t particularly profound—in fact, it may be profoundly simple. Trump may want Natalie Harp around for much the same reason he keeps Walt Nauta close: he enjoys their company. They are familiar, attentive and intensely loyal. Not every unusually close relationship is romantic. Sometimes people simply prefer spending time with those who make them feel comfortable.

I have my own perspective on the Natalie Harp story: I don’t give a two-penny damn.

Harp’s extraordinary access to Trump and the influence she may exercise are legitimate subjects for reporting. Whether their relationship is romantic is gossip—and, compared with the damage Trump is doing, remarkably inconsequential gossip.

I see it as chaff. The word can mean worthless material or trash, but its military meaning is especially apt: metallic strips released by an aircraft to confuse radar and radar-guided missiles.

There is an irrelevant but irresistible irony here. Chaff is probably among the defensive countermeasures carried aboard the regular Air Force One—and may have been among the capabilities lacking from Trump’s hastily converted Qatari gift jet.

I have no idea whether Trump deliberately creates distractions to draw attention away from the truly harmful things he is doing. I doubt that this particular story was planned. But he doesn’t need to deploy chaff with the precision of a military pilot. His personality, behavior and endless appetite for attention produce a continuous cloud of shiny objects.

Trump generates the chaff. The media decides to chase it.

Update: It is so tempting to write more about this as more details emerge like this story: ‘OMG’: Bellylaughs as photo emerges of smitten Trump aide chasing down his golf cart.

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A New Level of Trumpian Evil

North Korea is the worst government on Earth; Trump prefers it to the prosperous democracy next door

PAUL KRUGMAN

Two related things happened yesterday:

• Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to promise that the Justice Department would always act independently of Trump, saying, “No, I’m not going to pledge that,” and that Trump should have a voice in individual prosecution decisions. Axios Blanche also insisted that Trump would never ask him to do anything unethical or illegal. “He never has. He never will,” he said. The Guardian

• Trump attacked Fox News host Shannon Bream after she questioned Blanche about the anti-weaponization fund and the White House ballroom being built without congressional authorization. Trump complained that her program emphasized negative polls and compared watching her to watching CNN. The Daily Beast

Taken together, these incidents demonstrate that Trump sees any semblance of independence as disloyalty and uses attacks on those who display it to warn everyone else.

Blanche’s assurance may be even more revealing than his refusal to pledge independence. Asked, in effect, where he would draw the line, he employed a familiar form of question evasion: rather than define his own boundary or say what he would do if Trump crossed it, Blanche declared that Trump never would. He also substituted one standard for another—legality for independence. That is not an assertion of independence. It is an expression of faith in the leader—or submission to him.

A president need not explicitly order an illegal act to turn the Justice Department into an instrument of his personal and political will. Trump does not need to summon Blanche and give him direct instructions. Blanche can generally discern what Trump wants by listening to his public statements or simply reading his Truth Social posts. Once he knows what pleases the president, what enrages him, and whom he considers an enemy, he can act in anticipation of his wishes. Independence then disappears not through an explicit command but through anticipatory obedience.

There’s no way to know whether Blanche saw Trump’s attack on Shannon Bream. He didn’t have to see it to understand the lesson. Bream remains one of the few Fox News hosts willing to challenge Trump’s rule.

Everyone in Trump’s orbit—and everyone who covers him—knows it: demonstrate too much independence and you may suddenly be recast as an enemy. The consequences depend largely on how much power Trump has over you. Journalists such as Maggie Haberman and CNN anchor and chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins have survived his repeated attacks and continued to thrive; his denunciations may even reinforce their reputations as independent journalists.

Shannon Bream occupies a different and potentially more vulnerable position. Trump cannot fire her directly, but he can try to turn MAGA viewers against her, discourage administration officials and other allies from appearing on her program, and make Fox executives worry that she is costing the network viewers and access.

An administration official is more exposed still and can be publicly humiliated, sidelined, or dismissed. The penalties differ, but the intended lesson is the same: independence has a price.

Trump has a deeply rooted psychological need to convert people and institutions into extensions of himself.

You don’t have to have taken courses in personality theory, psychopathology, or psychiatric diagnosis to recognize that wanting people both to fear you and to kowtow constantly to you is decidedly unhealthy.

I won’t drag the reader through the work of psychologists and philosophers who have described healthy and unhealthy personality characteristics and arranged them along various scales. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous observation about pornography, we may not be able to define psychological health with absolute precision, but we know it—and its opposite—when we see it.

With Trump, however, this goes beyond psychology and into the more fundamental question of character. Seeing him in his totality—as a person rather than a collection of symptoms, traits, or diagnostic labels—requires no jargon. A child who had a bad experience with someone like him might simply say, “Mom, Dad—he’s just not a nice person.”

Sometimes that simple judgment captures what pages of clinical terminology can obscure.

The problem is that when such a person is president, “not nice” is no longer merely a character flaw.

His need for submission becomes a governing principle.

The Justice Department is expected to be dependent, Fox News is expected to be obedient, and anyone who resists risks being treated as an enemy. Cross out the IN in INDEPENDENT, and you are left with exactly what Trump wants.

LA Progressive

Note: I am proud to have been selected to have some of my Substacks (this article is the first - with their own AI illustration) published in the LA Progressive - I am humbled to be included among their distinguished contributors.

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The cartoon is absurd, of course. Donald Trump is not about to level Mount Rushmore because geology makes it virtually impossible to add his face. But the joke works because the impulse behind it doesn’t feel entirely absurd. Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in being added to Mount Rushmore, and now, after failing to permanently attach his name to the Kennedy Center, he is once again finding ways to put it there.

The common thread may be more than vanity. Trump seems to want something rarer, more enduring than political power On the surface it may appear he yearns for a permanent place in the physical landscape of American history — buildings named himself and actual structures he builds. My sense is that he wants to enjoy as much of it as possible when he’s alive and doesn’t care as much as other world leaders do abut their place in history after they die.

I heard today about an “almost two-hour call” — a Kennedy Center board meeting conducted by Zoom on Thursday, August 13 — in which Trump participated. It isn’t clear how much of those nearly two hours Trump was on the call. If he spent anywhere near the entire time on it, that says a great deal about his priorities.

During that Zoom meeting, Trump’s hand-picked board ultimately voted 20–3 for a new way of putting his name back on the Kennedy Center after a federal judge had ruled the earlier renaming illegal and ordered his name removed. The board also voted to name the grounds around the center President Donald J. Trump Plaza.

It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to tease out why Trump really wanted his name above the name of the Kennedy Center. JFK is an iconic and mythic American figure — think Camelot and his assassination. Add to that the fact that he was not only a Democrat, but one of the presidents who most powerfully defined the postwar Democratic Party.

History is full of rulers and governments trying to control public memory by changing names and removing monuments. Stalin’s name and image were stripped from countless public places during de-Stalinization, just as statues and symbols of defeated or discredited regimes have been removed elsewhere.

But Trump’s impulse seems almost the inverse: rather than removing others from an inherited symbolic landscape, he repeatedly tries to insert himself into it — and, where possible, literally above those who were already there.

I wonder whether, if he could, he’d simply go around removing monuments and street names honoring figures associated with liberal or Democratic political traditions. If he did, my city of Portland might no longer have a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard or a César E. Chávez Boulevard.

In partisan mythology, JFK occupies roughly the place for Democrats that Reagan does for Republicans. Trump seems much freer to encroach upon JFK’s symbolic territory than the GOP’s version of JFK, Ronald Reagan.

That contrast suggests that Trump may be more willing to appropriate JFK’s Democratic symbolism than to challenge Reagan’s protected place in Republican memory, where a direct claim to superiority could provoke a backlash from his own party.

Trump would rather compare himself to Lincoln. Lincoln is safer. He is a Republican, but he belongs to history more than to the identity of today’s GOP. Trump can place himself alongside Lincoln by suggesting he’s the greatest president since him. He doesn’t directly challenging the memory of Reagan, someone many current Republicans personally remember voting for, admiring and treating as the standard-bearer of their political generation.

The impulse toward symbolic self-aggrandizement isn’t limited to getting his name or face onto monuments. Trump has also remade the Oval Office in his own gilded aesthetic, reportedly wanting it to evoke Versailles.

It is all of a piece: existing national symbols and anything associated with the presidency do not seem grand enough until they bear his unmistakably grandiose, narcissistic imprint.

The Kennedy Center gets his name. Mount Rushmore should get his face. The Oval Office gets his gold.

What do the American people get?

Trump spent more than a decade starring in The Apprentice, a reality show built around Donald Trump playing Donald Trump. His second presidency has now been running for nearly 19 months, and at times it feels as though the format never really changed. The sets are far grander, the stakes are infinitely higher, and the audience is the entire country — held captive in a reality show we are no longer merely watching but living in, with Donald Trump insisting on remaining the star.

Yesterday this was posted by Trump:

Call it grandiose or disgusting, Trump placing himself beside George Washington could hardly be richer. When an Army officer suggested in 1782 that Washington might become America’s king, Washington reacted with disgust and ordered him to “banish these thoughts from your Mind.” Washington fought to free America from a king—and later surrendered power voluntarily. He would not have regarded these images as flattering. He would have regarded them as a betrayal of everything the Revolution was fought to establish.

Lot’s of coverage of Trump posting this:

It prompted me to make this:

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I understand some readers find their email to be overloaded when they subscribe to lots of Substacks. If you’d rather not subscribe, or want to unsubscribe, to A Beta Brain, but still like some of what I post, you can bookmark it and check the stories periodically here:

Check recent Substacks

To bookmark the above page: Press ⌘D on a Mac or Ctrl+D on Windows. If you use your browser’s Favorites/Bookmarks bar, you can also drag the bookmark there for easier access.

Below is a cartoon riff on the famous Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange.

This is the fictional aversion-therapy procedure in which Alex is strapped into a chair with his eyes forced open and made to watch disturbing films while being conditioned to feel sickened by violence.

My version substitutes Trump for the violent films. The joke — with a bit of truth behind it — is that writing about Trump every day can sometimes feel like undergoing my own Ludovico Technique: eyes forced open, unable to look away, subjected to an endless loop of Trump because I have to keep watching in order to write about him.

The cartoons below relate to Trump being shameless:., the topic of yesterday’s Substack

I was up for just a few minutes, barely starting to get the cobwebs out with a cup of coffee, when I saw a segment about six Trump-endorsed candidates who lost. I was inspired to use ChatGPT to make this. Since Trump and his spawn seem to have no guilt whatsoever about grift, it’s at least somewhat related to today’s Substack.

This was the segment I saw on MSNOW:

The image below can substitute for an entire Substack based on this:

Also on this:

“Trump was asked for advice for Democrats going into the midterms. He responded:”

“Well, the one thing is we have jihadists being elected all over the place. We have this — whether it’s communism, jihadism…”

He then added that a friend had called him and told him he ought to use the word jihadist “because that’s what’s happening.” There is a transcript of the remarks from the August 10 White House even

Above… this also fits in with Trump being shameless….

This doesn’t need an explanation:

This was in USA Today:

I did some research on this which confirms what I thought and then made another cartoon. >>

Trump can declare the Strait of Hormuz American territory, but that doesn’t make it so. The strait is not some unclaimed patch of ocean waiting for a flag: its waters lie between Iran and Oman and are subject to their sovereignty, while international law protects passage through it as a vital international waterway. The United States could patrol it, defend shipping through it, or even temporarily control it militarily—but simply announcing that it is now U.S. territory has no legal magic behind it.

Trump’s declaration has no legal effect because military control of a strait does not transfer sovereignty over its waters, especially when those waters lie between Iran and Oman and remain subject to international navigation rules.

My reaction to the following:

Trump posted the following about his great friendship with the leader of a communist country:

I’m surprised he didn’t have someone simply use AI to change the photo. It took me all of two minutes to do this with ChatGPT - in fact it’s so simple to do even Trump could have done it himself if he has a laptop.

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I understand some readers find their email to be overloaded when they subscribe to lots of Substacks. If you’d rather not subscribe, or want to unsubscribe, to A Beta Brain, but still like some of what I post, you can bookmark it and check the stories periodically here:

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To bookmark the above page: Press ⌘D on a Mac or Ctrl+D on Windows. If you use your browser’s Favorites/Bookmarks bar, you can also drag the bookmark there for easier access.

Yesterday

I was watching Katy Tur’s show yesterday and a guest was discussing Trump’s grifting, his crypto scheme and charging for early Truth Social posts. He said “shamelessness was his superpower.” I thought this was a great description and checked to see it was applied to him before. It was at least twice:

In May 2025, MSNBC ran a segment specifically titled “His superpower is his shamelessness”: A look at Trump’s crypto, with Teddy Schleifer and William D. Cohan discussing the ethics of Trump’s crypto ventures.

And the formulation goes back even further. A 2019 Washington Post column by Max Boot was literally titled “Trump’s superpower is his shamelessness.”

Then I got to thinking about shame and its cousin guilt.

The simplest distinction is that guilt is about behavior, while shame is about the self: guilt says, “I did something wrong”; shame says, “There is something wrong with me.”

Trump seems incapable of experiencing either of these.

Healthy guilt can serve a purpose that shame often does not. Appropriate guilt can lead to acknowledgment, responsibility, apology, restitution, and changed behavior. Shame is more likely to produce hiding, defensiveness, humiliation, or attacks on whoever exposed the failing.

For decades, existential philosophers and humanistic psychologists have distinguished the capacity to experience appropriate guilt—recognizing that one has actually done something wrong and accepting responsibility for it—from the excessive, irrational or neurotic guilt that can impair psychological health. (See footnote > 1

Clearly, the boy on the right in the illustration at the top of the page represents Donald “No Guilt, No Shame” Trump.

He is the child who gets caught red-handed and responds not with embarrassment, remorse, or even a moment of self-reflection, but with a smirk.

In the cartoon below he has moved beyond sneaking a cookie or two and and he’s cleaned out the jar entirely. That’s the point: Trump’s most striking trait is not simply that he does things most politicians know better than to do, but that being caught seems to carry so little emotional cost for him — and to make matters worse he rarely if ever suffers any significant consequences for his misdeeds.

When guilt and shame appear to exert little restraint and significant consequences rarely follow, wrongdoing loses some of its most important deterrents. Hence we see Trump defying one norm after another. Here are a few of the many examples:

• launching and promoting the $TRUMP meme coin, then offering its largest holders access to a presidential dinner; Reuters estimated buyers spent about $148 million acquiring the coin to qualify.

• his company now charging institutional customers $60,000–$100,000 a month for early access to Truth Social posts, including potentially market-moving presidential statements.

• firing independent inspectors general without the required advance notice to Congress; a federal judge subsequently found eight of those firings unlawful.

• more broadly, continuing to mix the presidency with family business and crypto interests despite repeated conflict-of-interest criticism; the White House has maintained that Trump’s assets are managed in trust and that there are no conflicts of interest.

What is striking is not merely that these norms are crossed. It is that Trump makes no effort to conceal crossing them. The cookie jar isn’t hidden. He seems perfectly content for us to watch him empty it and defiantly carry away the cookies.

There is a connection between shamelessness and blamelessness. If you never experience guilt, never accept responsibility, and never seriously reckon with the consequences of your actions, it becomes remarkably easy to see yourself as blameless. The people harmed by your decisions may be everywhere. In the mirror, somehow, you still see none of it. (Click to see enlarged image below)

The cartoons below relate to Trump being shameless:

I was up for just a few minutes, barely starting to get the cobwebs out with a cup of coffee, when I saw a segment about six Trump-endorsed candidates who lost. I was inspired to use ChatGPT to make this. Since Trump and his spawn seem to have no guilt whatsoever about grift, it’s at least somewhat related to today’s Substack.

This was the segment I saw on MSNOW:

The image below can substitute for an entire Substack based on this:

Also on this:

“Trump was asked for advice for Democrats going into the midterms. He responded:”

“Well, the one thing is we have jihadists being elected all over the place. We have this — whether it’s communism, jihadism…”

He then added that a friend had called him and told him he ought to use the word jihadist “because that’s what’s happening.” There is a transcript of the remarks from the August 10 White House even

Above… this also fits in with Trump being shameless….

This doesn’t need an explanation:

This was in USA Today:

I did some research on this which confirms what I thought and then made another cartoon. >>

Trump can declare the Strait of Hormuz American territory, but that doesn’t make it so. The strait is not some unclaimed patch of ocean waiting for a flag: its waters lie between Iran and Oman and are subject to their sovereignty, while international law protects passage through it as a vital international waterway. The United States could patrol it, defend shipping through it, or even temporarily control it militarily—but simply announcing that it is now U.S. territory has no legal magic behind it.

Trump’s declaration has no legal effect because military control of a strait does not transfer sovereignty over its waters, especially when those waters lie between Iran and Oman and remain subject to international navigation rules.

My reaction to the following:

Trump posted the following about his great friendship with the leader of a communist country:

I'm surprised he didn't have someone simply use AI to change the photo. It took me all of two minutes to do this with ChatGPT - in fact it's so simple to do even Trump could have done it himself if he has a laptop.

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I understand some readers find their email to be overloaded when they subscribe to lots of Substacks. If you’d rather not subscribe, or want to unsubscribe, to A Beta Brain, but still like some of what I post, you can bookmark it and check the stories periodically here:

Check recent Substacks

To bookmark the above page: Press ⌘D on a Mac or Ctrl+D on Windows. If you use your browser’s Favorites/Bookmarks bar, you can also drag the bookmark there for easier access.

Yesterday

Read Epstein article.

This is in the news:

I won’t go into detail about what Trump has done about the aircraft carrier launch systems. Read a few of the articles linked above for details.

What I want to focus on instead is a concept in cognitive psychology called processing fluency. (See Wikipedia) There is a well-studied tendency for things that are easier for us to understand, process or mentally visualize to feel more convincing or true. Everybody does this to some degree, but Trump is president, and his decisions about military matters can be enormously consequential.

What may be happening in Trump’s thinking is something like this: steam is visible, mechanical and easy to picture; electromagnetic propulsion is largely invisible and vastly harder for a layperson to intuitively understand.

That’s where understanding this aspect of Donald Trump’s psychology should give us chills — and delight our adversaries. Combine a strong reliance on intuition with his “I know everything about everything” narcissism, and you get a particularly dangerous combination: a president who may mistake what feels obvious to him for what is actually true, even when people who have spent their careers studying the subject tell him otherwise.

There is another concept that fits my argument beautifully: intellectual humility — essentially recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and being willing to revise a belief in light of expertise or evidence. Its opposite, intellectual arrogance, involves overestimating one’s own knowledge and ability to reach correct conclusions.

Add this to Trump’s narcissism and the combination becomes especially dangerous. Processing fluency can make the intuitively understandable feel true; grandiosity can make someone unusually confident that whatever feels true to him actually is true.

The real issue isn’t steam catapults. It’s what happens when the same style of thinking is applied to questions involving war, intelligence, nuclear weapons, public health or the economy. In those areas, the simplest explanation can be emotionally satisfying, vivid — and completely wrong.

And when a president is completely wrong about vaccines, military strategy or tactics, for example, the consequences aren’t merely academic.

People can die.

Regarding yesterday's post about Karoline Leavitt:

There is a meaningful new rebuttal to the Karoline Leavitt AI-photo story.

The New Republic has examined the disputed photograph against the Getty Images archive and reports that the photograph in Leavitt’s farewell post appears to be the genuine Anna Moneymaker/Getty photograph—not an AI-altered version of it. Its headline is unusually unequivocal: “People are accusing Karoline Leavitt of sharing an AI-altered image in her goodbye post. But the photo appears to be real.”

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View all recent posts

Update to yesterday’s Substack:

Just now on TV, Trump praised Karoline Leavitt: “Those lips — they move like a machine gun.” Of all the ways he could praise his press secretary, Trump chose to focus on her lips.

Update 2: Having a few hours to think about it, I think this merits a cartoon:

Goes with:

Trump Acknowledges Gas Is Expensive But Says He’ll ‘Never Apologize’

President Donald Trump told a crowd of police officers Friday he’ll “never apologize” for starting a war with Iran that has sent gas prices soaring, while simultaneously applauding himself for how low gas prices would be in a fictional world where he hadn’t embarked on his war of choice.

“You have to pay a little bit more [for gas]. You’re at $4,” he conceded. “It’s OK, I mean, I’m not — I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing.”

He then imagined a world where, “if you didn’t have” war with Iran, gas would be “down below $2 in many states.”

[Editor’s note: We do have a war with Iran, and gas is not below $2 in any state.]

“You just have to remember that what we’re doing is a great service for the world,” Trump said of the conflict that has upended energy supplies and commerce around the world. “And we’re really doing a great job.”

Read Epstein article.

Above: I used ChatGPT AI to remove the add-ons in The Daily Beast.

Update: Just now on TV, Trump praised Karoline Leavitt: “Those lips — they move like a machine gun.” Of all the ways he could praise his press secretary, Trump chose to focus on her lips.

Update 2: Having a few hours to think about it, I think this merits a cartoon:

Update 3: There is a meaningful new rebuttal to the Karoline Leavitt AI-photo story.

The New Republic has examined the disputed photograph against the Getty Images archive and reports that the photograph in Leavitt’s farewell post appears to be the genuine Anna Moneymaker/Getty photograph—not an AI-altered version of it. Its headline is unusually unequivocal: “People are accusing Karoline Leavitt of sharing an AI-altered image in her goodbye post. But the photo appears to be real.”

Yesterday before the above story was published in The Daily Beast I made these cartoons about Karoline Leavit (click images to enlarge):

Then the The Daily Beast (subscription) published the story about the AI altered image (top of page here). It didn’t hit the mainstream even though it all but begged to be shared by other media. I found one secondary outlet, Atlanta Black Star (‘Walls Are Closing In’: Karoline Leavitt Caught Using AI In Goodbye to Trump After Abruptly Leaving White House Days After He Put Staff in Harm’s Way), already picking up the AI angle, and RatedNews was carrying the Beast story, but I didn’t see major independent follow-ups yet from outlets such as CNN, NBC, AP, NYT, WaPo, etc.

Later in the evening Business Insider picked it up:

I decided to wait until this morning to see whether the story about her AI face had legs and was worth writing about. There is a meaningful increase in social-media spread: the Daily Beast story about Karoline Leavitt has now climbed to about 5,360 upvotes on Reddit’s r/politics, up substantially from roughly 3,100 when I last checked. The Reddit discussion is also generating debate there in over 360 comments about whether the evidence establishes AI alteration specifically versus conventional digital retouching and other things.

Here’s the way the story evolved:

1. Leavitt posts a highly personal farewell statement about leaving the White House to devote herself to her children.

2. Instead of the statement being the whole story, attention turns to the photograph accompanying it.

3. X labels the image “Made with AI.”

4. The Daily Beast compares it with the original and reports apparent cosmetic changes.

5. RawStory picks it up and begins incorporating the AI issue into other coverage.

6. Business Insider picks it up, while adding the intriguing wrinkle that X later removed the AI label.

7. Reddit attention grows into the thousands.

Aside from my curiosity about how Vic Verbalaitis at The Daily Beast first noticed this, there are three basic unresolved questions:

1. What exactly was changed?

2. Who changed it and why?

3. Why did X first flag the image as “Made with AI” and then remove the flag?

I’m mainly interested in the second question. If Karoline Leavitt knew the photograph had been altered and she approved its use, what would lead someone as media-savvy and intensely scrutinized as she is to take the risk of posting it?

I think the most interesting psychological observation is not vanity by itself. Vanity is too easy and too universal. Almost everyone prefers a flattering photograph. The intriguing part is the apparent mismatch between reward and risk. If she knew, she was potentially accepting a public humiliation and mockery in exchange for looking somewhat better in one farewell photograph.

It’s possible she had an immediate desire to control how she appeared at an emotional moment, and that the manipulation did not seem like a big deal. It’s still hard to believe she thought nobody would notice, or that if somebody did notice, the media wouldn’t pile on.

If she was trying to manipulate how people saw her — not as a press secretary; being a Trump stooge is set in stone with critics of MAGA — but physically, she’s turned part of the AI story into whether she feels so insecure about her appearance — her face and figure — that she decided to have her image digitally altered and, to her mind, enhanced.

Instead of people glancing at a flattering farewell photograph and moving on, thousands are now studying her face and figure, comparing photographs and discussing what might have been altered.

In a weird and illogical way, it’s also possible that at some level of awareness she had in mind an audience of one: Trump himself. This is weird because he sees her so frequently in person. He knows how she looks. But she also knows whether he watches her press conferences — my hunch is that the image conscious and TV-savvy president always or frequently does — and is judging how well she does and how she presents herself.

Leavitt isn’t a patient in my office free-associating in an attempt to discern unconscious motivations for things she’s done to please a man — one who we might already have decided was a father figure to her. It’s only conjecture to suggest that she wanted the picture to depict her in a way that pleased “Daddy.”

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Above goes with:

I read this in RawStory:

One of the most worrisome signs coming into Trump’s second administration was that he right off named Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff. Wiles is a lot of things, including an unrepentant and cynical supporter of the most corrupt and incompetent president in history, but she is most certainly not incompetent. Indeed, her mastery of the political dark arts is best proven by the almost non-existent turnover within this oil spill of a White House.

Click cartoons to enlarge.

This inspired me to use Chat to make this:

I was propted to use ChatGPT to make the above cartoon when I saw this:

HUFFPOST frequently uses clever alliterations of their front page even when the article - in this case “Trump Claims ‘Total Control’ Over Hormuz Strait In Post Proclaiming ‘Praise Be To Allah!’ - doesn’t use that phrase.

Trump is known for coining nicknames, but turnaround is fair play. In fact his name, particularly Don, lends itself to so many insulting alliterations with adjectives including, but not limited to, those in the cartoon: Dubious Don, Dozy Don, Delusional Don, Desperate Don, Dishonest Don, Drowsy Don, Diminished Don, Distracted Don, Disoriented Don, Dangerous Don, Devious Don, Defiant Don, Dodgy Don, Dysfunctional Don, Deranged Don, Disgraced Don, Dissembling Don, Demagogic Don, Dictatorial Don...

And with Donald you get the rhythm of something almost like a comic-strip character: Delusional Donald, Dangerous Donald, Dishonest Donald, Desperate Donald, or one of my favorites, Doddering Donald:

If you can think of more:

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This makes me think of comedian Kathy Griffin and her reality show My Life On The D-List. Of course she was never on anything that could remotely be called a D-Listt. All six seasons of the program were nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality Program, with seasons 2 and 3 winning in 2007 and 2008. “D-List” was largely Kathy Griffin’s self-deprecating comic persona.

You may remember her from when she faced significant backlash after posing with a model of Donald Trump's head covered in blood.

The image cost Griffin her CNN New Year’s Eve job and even prompted a Secret Service investigation. She was questioned by agents, but the investigation was later closed without charges. Initially, she apologized for the image but later retracted her apology, stating that the outrage was overblown.

There’s an interesting comparison with James Comey. Kathy Griffin posed with a Kathy Griffin posed holding a prop made to resemble Trump’s severed, bloodied head. The Secret Service investigated her and questioned her, but she was never charged. Comey, by contrast, posted a photograph of seashells spelling “86 47” — an ambiguous political expression that he said meant getting rid of the 47th president — and years later found himself criminally charged with threatening Trump.

If nothing else, the contrast says something about how differently provocative expressions involving Trump has been treated under his first and second administrations.

I was curious as to whether Comey’s lawyers could use this in his defense so I asked ChatGPT and this was the answer:

In 2017 federal authorities investigated an unmistakably provocative depiction of Trump’s severed head and concluded that criminal prosecution wasn’t warranted. Yet this government asks a jury to regard two numbers arranged in seashells — “86 47” — as a criminal threat.

That doesn’t legally dispose of Comey’s case, but rhetorically it’s powerful, particularly if his lawyers can introduce evidence about how threat cases have historically been evaluated.

At present Griffin’s comedy tour is called her comeback special was titled My Life on the PTSD-List.

A substantial part of the story behind it concerns the fallout from the Trump episode. As you can see here…

… she is very political and thanks to the Trump bloody head episode she can suggest that if she was on the D-List, Trump has moved her to the A-List among comedians.

Click above to enlarge

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The following goes with Trump critics awed by Karoline Leavitt’s surprise resignation: ‘Very big deal.

I read this in RawStory:

One of the most worrisome signs coming into Trump’s second administration was that he right off named Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff. Wiles is a lot of things, including an unrepentant and cynical supporter of the most corrupt and incompetent president in history, but she is most certainly not incompetent. Indeed, her mastery of the political dark arts is best proven by the almost non-existent turnover within this oil spill of a White House.

Click cartoons to enlarge.

This inspired me to use Chat to make this: