Saturday Report 5/23/26 — America is officially traumatized, and the diagnosis is in...

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— Why doesn’t anybody mention that Trump himself is the biggest recipient of his “settlement” $1.776 billion fund? The New York Times exposed this in an article with the headline “With Trump’s Deal, a Possible $100 Million I.R.S. Penalty Melts Away.” Back in 2010, the IRS busted him for allegedly claiming a deduction for his failing Chicago tower twice, a crime, and has been trying to collect around $100 million (plus interest) from him ever since. But this new Thug Fund will eliminate all claims against him, his kids, and his “affiliated entities” and businesses, for all past, present, and future times. So he gets to keep the $100 million (plus interest). And the media — other than that one reference in the Times — seems to have completely ignored it. Where’s the outrage? Can you imagine what would happen if Obama had tried to give himself $100 million out of our Treasury?

— America is officially traumatized, and the diagnosis is in. Robert Reich, writing at Raw Story this week, points out what every therapist, primary care physician, and exhausted spouse already knew: we are a nation with full-blown PTSD. The American Psychological Association now reports that 76 percent of Americans cite the future of the country as their leading source of stress, outpacing the economy, work, and money. As Reich notes, “anxiety has moved from being a psychological disorder to becoming part of a seemingly natural order.” After 45 years of Reaganomics gutting job security, shredding the safety net, and concentrating wealth at the top — followed by a decade of Trumpism’s daily firehose of cruelty, corruption, and constitutional vandalism — the American nervous system has simply checked out. Marriages are postponed, births are falling, and pharmacy shelves groan under the weight of antidepressants and stomach pills. The Founders wrote in the Preamble that the goal of the rule of law outlined in the Constitution is there to “ensure domestic tranquility.” That bargain has been broken by a strongman who promised to fix the anxiety and instead became its single largest source.

— Welcome to the Golden Era, where six in ten Americans can’t afford lunch. A grim new New York Times analysis finds that 61 percent of Americans are cutting back at the grocery store — skipping the meat, downgrading the produce, swapping name brands for generics, and in some cases just skipping meals — while a companion interactive Times piece lays out exactly what Trump’s Iran war is costing every American household at the pump and on the dinner plate. Brent crude is hovering around $110 a barrel, gas has rocketed from $2.98 to over $4, and diesel — the lifeblood of every truck hauling lettuce from California to your Safeway — is up more than 45 percent. The American Enterprise Institute, hardly a leftist outfit, estimates that gas alone will cost the average household an extra $550 by the end of September. Trump, who once promised to lower prices on Day One, shrugged this off as “a small price to pay” for doing whatever it was that Netanyahu wanted him to do to Iran. But the cost of groceries and gas is no big deal for the guy who’s golfed 21 percent of his second term on the taxpayer dime, had a chauffeur since he was a toddler, and always had the maid do the shopping. It’s far more problematic, though, for the family rationing pizza to pay for the war he started.

— The Trump administration tried to ban voting machines in half the country, and we’re only finding out now. A bombshell Reuters investigation, summarized at the New Republic, reveals that White House adviser Kurt Olsen — whose actual job is finding ways to retroactively prove Trump’s stolen-election fantasies — spent last year pushing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to declare Dominion Voting Systems software a “national security risk” in order to force 27 mostly blue states into hand-counting ballots, which would have slowed down returns and produced chaos in those states. The plan only collapsed because Lutnick’s team couldn’t manufacture even a fig leaf of justification. There is, of course, zero evidence that any voting machine has been hacked in recent days. But why let facts get in the way? The same administration sued and raided the Fulton County, Georgia election office in December, and has filed lawsuits demanding voter rolls from more than 30 states. The Trump/GOP strategy is transparent: poison the well in advance so that any Republican loss in November can be declared fraudulent on cue, and then they can refuse to seat in the House any Democrat from a “fraudulent” district next January. This isn’t election security. It’s a slow-motion coup with paperwork.

— Marco Rubio is about to inherit a starved island, and he’s calling it a legacy. The Guardian reports that Secretary of State Rubio — the Cuban-exile hardliner who built his entire career on the dream of toppling Havana — is now days or weeks away from achieving it through what his own staff calls a “starvation campaign.” One former Rubio chief of staff told reporters that regime change would be “the capstone of his political career.” Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Cubans rallied at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Friday, as the government distributes evacuation maps and stages civil-defense drills. “Cuba is a small and poor country, but one with experience confronting US imperialism,” said lawmaker Mariela Castro, daughter of Raúl. Trump, never one to dial down the menace, floated a “friendly takeover” in February — the same word “friendly” he used about Venezuela right before Maduro was hauled off. We’ve seen this movie before. It opens with sanctions, builds through CIA cables and oil embargoes, and ends with body bags. Forty-five years of Reaganomics taught us nothing about Latin American adventurism; apparently, neither did sixty years of Cuba policy.

— If you wanted a green card, the new rule is: leave the country to get it. On Friday afternoon — the timing was not accidental — USCIS quietly issued a memo requiring nearly all green card applicants already inside the United States to pack up and finish their applications from their home countries. Mediaite reports the new rule guts the “adjustment of status” process used by 820,000 of the 1.4 million people who got green cards in 2024: the spouses of American citizens, the H-1B engineers, the farm workers, the nurses. USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler insists the policy will stop people “incentivizing loopholes.” Translation: “Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants are not white people, and that’s all the Trump administration wants to come into the US. Too many Black and Brown people have already arrived, and it’s time for them to leave.” Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS analyst now at Third Way, warned the New York Times that the already-overburdened consular system “could have families separated for months or years.” Years. Of separation. By design. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week, and the courts are the only thing left standing between a child in Pittsburgh and a parent stranded in Karachi.

— Trump, acting like a 10-year-old bully, posted an AI video of himself beating up Stephen Colbert and throwing him in a dumpster. The White House posted it too. As Mediaite documented, the president of the United States — and then the official @WhiteHouse account, with the chipper caption “Bye-bye 👋” — distributed a fake clip showing Trump physically assaulting the Late Show host just hours after Colbert’s emotional final episode with Paul McCartney. Earlier that morning, Trump posted that other late-night hosts would “soon follow” and added: “May they all Rest in Peace!” Amazing: if you posted that about Trump, you’d probably get booted off a social media channel and possibly have a visit from the Secret Service. The president of the United States is publicly fantasizing — in AI-rendered video, on official White House channels — about violence against a private citizen who told jokes about him. And this is the same administration attempting to jail James Comey for posting a picture of seashells. The asymmetry isn’t a glitch; it’s the entire system. In an autocracy, the strongman’s violent fantasies are policy, and the citizen’s beach photo is a federal crime.

Comments on the Friday’s Daily Take:

Republicans Found $1.8 Billion Overnight for Trump’s Thugs — So Why Are Seniors Choosing Between Food and Medicine?

What I would really like to know is how was this money “found”. My impression was that money spent by the federal government had to be appropriated by congress. So, when was this money appropriated by congress?

~ Shara Peets

The plutocrats who fund the Republican Party want their elected puppets to keep the Epstein files hidden, prevent the IRS from auditing their taxes, and make taxpayers reward the violent insurrectionists who tried to destroy our republic.

~ Sam Myovich

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.