Saturday Report 5/16/26 — As Hantavirus Threat Grows, Trump Turns to a Penile Implant Expert to Reassure America...Surprised?

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— So the bombs, the dead Iranians, the smashed cities, and the trillions in regional chaos were all just a PR campaign? Like something to redirect our attention? That’s essentially what Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox “News” Thursday night when he bragged in a senior moment that the entire push to seize Iran’s enriched uranium — the ostensible casus belli for the deadly bombing campaign that’s killed so many children and 15 Americans — is, in his own words, “more for public relations than it is for anything else.” Bloomberg captured the moment while Trump was conveniently in Beijing, far from any uncomfortable reporters who might ask why he started a war over nuclear material he now says he doesn’t really need. The estimated 400 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium are buried under the rubble of the sites he bombed, and the U.S. has nine satellite cameras watching the rubble around the clock. So why did Americans bleed and pay for this war? Two unflattering possibilities: this is the Trump “get out of the Epstein jail free” card — wave a shiny mushroom cloud and pray the country forgets the stories from then-13-year-old girls accusing him of rape — or it’s Trump’s quiet capitulation that he never understood what Bibi Netanyahu and Marco Rubio talked him into. Most likely, of course, it’s both. Either way, somewhere Bibi is smiling and Vladimir Putin — Trump’s mentor in the art of bombing first and lying later — is taking notes for the next time he wants his orange toady to do something stupid.

— Pete Hegseth, the cable-news weekend host with drinking and infidelity problems and a Signal habit, has now blindsided his own Pentagon by canceling the deployment of 4,000 American troops to Poland, the country Trump himself just called a “model ally.” No notice to NATO, no notice to Congress, no notice apparently even to the building Hegseth supposedly runs but is now apparently being directed by Russia. As Politico reported, one stunned defense official said flatly, “We had no idea this was coming,” while Pentagon staff spent the next 24 hours frantically working phones across Europe trying to figure out which ally gets stabbed in the back next. This follows Hegseth yanking 5,000 troops out of Germany earlier this month after Chancellor Friedrich Merz had the temerity to suggest Trump’s ridiculous Iran adventure was making the United States look, well, ridiculous. The Poland-destined troops were already arriving — equipment unloaded, deployment underway — when the order to halt came down. So why is the United States humiliating one of its most loyal allies, at the exact moment Russia is rebuilding its army on Poland’s eastern border? Easy: Putin has wanted American troops out of Eastern Europe for 25 years, and his terrified lickspittle in the Oval Office is delivering. Coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of strategic gift that would appear on Putin’s birthday list, right between “destabilize NATO” and “humiliate Warsaw.” Hmmm, why indeed?

— The Trump administration is now openly preparing to indict 94-year-old Raul Castro, and if you’ve been watching the Putin Doctrine playbook, you already know how this movie ends, too. Reuters broke the news Thursday that Trump’s corrupt DOJ is preparing charges against Fidel’s brother over Cuba’s 1996 shootdown of the “Brothers to the Rescue” planes, with one official describing the indictment as “imminent.” The script should look familiar: in January, Trump indicted Maduro, then bombed Caracas, then kidnapped him, then handed Venezuela’s oil to American donors. Now the same playbook is apparently being dusted off for Havana. Trump warned back in March that Cuba “is next” after Venezuela, and Marco Rubio — whose parents left Cuba two full years before Castro came to power, but has nonetheless spent his entire career pretending to be a Cuban refugee child — appears to be driving the bus. CIA Director John Ratcliffe even slipped into Havana Thursday to deliver the diplomatic equivalent of a ransom note: engage on “economic security” by letting wealthy American businessmen to take over Cuban companies and resorts or get the Maduro treatment. So is Cuba about to become America’s newest Trump colony? Or, given that Trump keeps musing about Canada as the 51st state, Greenland as a U.S. possession, and Panama as our birthright, does Havana get the consolation prize of becoming the 52nd? Either way, the Castro family must be having the same conversation Maduro had right before the special forces showed up at the Miraflores Palace. Watch the Florida Straits.

— In what may be the most spectacular self-own of the week, Trump told Sean Hannity that America needs 500,000 Chinese student visas and that the Chinese Communist Party should be allowed to buy American farmland. This from the man whose entire 2024 campaign was built on the premise that China is eating our lunch, stealing our jobs, and grooming our children through TikTok because the Democrats are “weak.” As Mediaite documented, Hannity actually tried to throw him a lifeline, noting that Beijing would never let Americans buy land near a Chinese military installation. Trump shrugged it off and defended the farmland sales anyway, because the GOP donors who own massive factory farms matter more than the American people. The MAGA Twittersphere immediately had a collective aneurysm: influencer Mike Cernovich howled, “Has China defeated our country?” while Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott vowed her state’s laws would block any such purchases. These are, as one of his own ghostwriters whined, “95-5 issues” inside MAGA world. The most charitable interpretation: Trump, freshly humiliated and out-negotiated by Xi Jinping at this week’s Beijing summit, came home parroting his host’s talking points. The less charitable interpretation: 45 years of Reaganomics have produced a Republican Party so utterly captured by agribusiness, fossil fuel, and big banks that even the supposedly America-first president now reads from Wall Street’s China-friendly script. Either way, the body double theory is starting to look less crazy.

— JD Vance — Yale Law graduate, venture capitalist, couch-lover, and current Vice President of the United States — has officially rolled out the GOP’s 2026 update of Ronald Reagan’s Black “welfare queen”: she now drives a Lamborghini. Speaking to a MAGA crowd in Bangor, Maine — chosen because Gov. Janet Mills dared to stand up to Trump — Vance asked the audience, as Daily Kos recounted, why “people driving Lamborghinis” are pulling down low-income housing assistance and food stamps. He had no example. None. Not one Linda Taylor who, as Josh Levin demonstrated in his 2019 book The Queen, was the one-off serial fraudster Reagan turned into a national caricature to slander every Black welfare recipient in America. Vance also told the same audience that dead people are voting for Democrats and getting food stamps, a remark that drew laughter, though it shouldn’t have, because the federal SNAP eligibility rules cap household assets at $2,750. If you own a $250,000 Italian sports car, you do not, in fact, qualify for food stamps. But Vance isn’t trying to win an argument; he’s manufacturing resentment and hate so Trump’s billionaire Cabinet can finish gutting SNAP, Medicaid, and federal housing assistance to pay for the next round of tax cuts for people who actually do own Lamborghinis. The welfare queen rides again, this time inside JD Vance’s fevered Hillbilly Elegy imagination.

— Speaking of billionaires hunting the social safety net, they just notched their biggest scalp yet. On May 11, former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin — a Yale-educated corporate lawyer backed by Wall Street — won the Connecticut Democratic Party’s endorsement against 14-term Rep. John Larson, the ranking Democrat on the House Social Security Subcommittee and author of the Social Security 2100 Act. That bill — co-sponsored by nearly 90% of House Democrats — would expand benefits for the first time in over 50 years by lifting the FICA cap on income above $400,000, so that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison would finally pay into Social Security like the rest of us instead of finishing their annual contributions by 12:15 a.m. on January 1st. Naturally, billionaires loathe the bill, and they’ve poured shadowy outside money into Bronin’s challenge, as Social Security Works’ Alex Lawson detailed in Common Dreams. Larson, who grew up in the Mayberry Village housing project in East Hartford, called the August 11 primary “Mayberry against Greenwich,” the perfect frame for what is in fact a referendum on whether ordinary Americans get to keep the one program that lifts 22 million people out of poverty, or whether Wall Street finally cracks Social Security’s $2.7 trillion trust fund open and starts feeding it to BlackRock and Citadel. Pay attention to Connecticut’s First District this summer because if the billionaires can pick off Larson, they can pick off any Democrat standing between Goldman Sachs and your retirement check.

— You Just Can’t Make This Up Alert: As Hantavirus Threat Grows, Trump Turns to a Penile Implant Expert to Reassure America. The Trump official Bob Kennedy trotted out this week to calm Americans fears about the growing hantavirus scare is a urologist whose medical specialty is penile implants and who hosted a YouTube show called Erection Connection. That is not a typo. CNN’s KFile revealed Friday that Admiral Brian Christine, MD, the Assistant Secretary for Health and now the public face of America’s infectious disease response, came directly from a private penis-assistance practice in Alabama with no public health background, but plenty of COVID vaccine skepticism, plenty of election-denial commentary, and plenty of conspiracy theories tying George Soros and the World Economic Forum to the pandemic lockdowns. He stood at a podium in Omaha this week and promised a response “grounded in science.” From the man whose previous claim to fame was a media brand built on erectile dysfunction. So when your loved ones ask why the country is staring down its third major infectious-disease scare in a decade with a phallic-surgery enthusiast at the helm of HHS’ pandemic response, just tell them what Kennedy’s boss tells his cabinet officers when reality intrudes: “It’s going to be better than you could ever believe.” Or, as my late mother might have said: G-d help us.

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:
Why Was Hunter’s Cup of Coffee a National Crisis but Trump’s $5 Billion Grift Isn’t?

I’ve been saying this for months now. It’s time to clean house and start over. We the people need to find a way to get rid of all of these corrupt politicians and start from scratch with new rules to prevent this from happening again. Or at least enforce the ones we have on the books. We’re not even doing that anymore.
~ Terrance O’Domhnall

This is a battle over what form of government we are to have, a democracy or an empire. We are not fighting them to remain a democracy; they are fighting us to remain an empire. Yeah, it says “republic” on the label, but what empire has ever told the truth? So they lie, cheat, steal, and murder to keep their power, but only when we let them get away with it. And only those who are scared off or bought off let this empire keep going.
~ Jeffrey Hobbs

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