Saturday Report 5/23/26 — America is officially traumatized, and the diagnosis is in...
The Best of the Rest of the News
— 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:
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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Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:
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.
We need anther revolution, a fact lost on the corporate Democrats, and their consultants, who rule the roost. Concentrating on “kitchen table issues”, tinkering with the periphery of core problems, failing to implement fundamental reforms, failing to aggressively pursue those who have committed obvious crimes and punish them accordingly, will only allow the cancer to metastasize, as we have seen. Our status in the world is destroyed, but we can at least repair our shattered democracy if we elevate and support the generals now standing by.
The Post-Trump Stress Disorder PTSD metaphor that the media is using lately is, of course, a bit off. The main reason is that the traumatic stress is not "post" and it is not yet a "disorder." It is not clear if it will evolve into a disorder either.
Post-traumatic stress was first observed among service members in combat environments. As some of my psychology colleagues have pointed out, when in stress-filled environments for extended periods, our nervous systems tend to change our homeostatic setpoint for tolerating stress. That helps us stay cool when shot at, and behave appropriately - take cover and return fire as needed. The clear evidence for this phenomenon is how we behave once we return home to the safety of America. It takes about 3 months for our brains to realize the stress is gone and reset the homeostatic setpoint back to where it was. Even though there was no term for post-traumatic stress until late in the Vietnam war, all commanders since at least WWI likely understood that units returning from deployment needed several months in stand-down mode before returning to normal operations.
For first-time combatants, it takes about 6 weeks to adjust to the stress. But once adjusted, subsequent combat deployments trigger the homeostatic setpoint change almost overnight. The brain (nervous system) remembers. The "D" part, disorder, appears when even before leaving a combat zone, a service member starts over-reacting to stress, behaving unreliably, experiencing sleep problems, etc., and must be sent home, or once their unit has returned home, their nervous system cannot re-set to normal stress, and they over-react to loud noises, get violent in arguments, have nightmares, etc. that will not go away.
Not everybody is biologically equipped to handle chronic stress. The cruel irony in the case of Trump is that he uses stress as a tool of dominance and control. Like it or not, all Americans' lives are more stressful under the Trump Reich. We now have a Gestapo killing citizens being harassed by ICE agents, we must cope with runaway inflation, Trump seems to have no impulse control, so we cannot anticipate his next assault on an ally or invasion of a country on some trumped-up pretense like possession of nuclear bombs aimed at LA (like why would Iran want to blow up Hollywood?). We have the most incompetent administration in US history, so we now have to worry about getting Ebola or some other deadly disease for which there is no vaccine, because he has shut down medical research under an HHS director who thinks vaccines cause autism.
Our FAA is a disaster, with planes crashing into one another, long waits to board, and now ticket prices off the charts. Trump is now encouraging the pollution of drinking water so that the fossil fuel industry can thrive and delay transitioning to EVs, which are causing severe climate change that is flattening entire neighborhoods with wind storms, wildfires, and floods that Trump laughs off as a libtard hoax. Will Post-Trump Stress turn into a Disorder? Well, it seems like there are a lot more mass shootings in the news of late - could that be related?