MELANIA

 

TOO STUPID

Donald Trump Is Losing What Little Mind He Has Left

 

Donald Trump Is Losing What Little Mind He Has Left

A small-d democratic leader would notice the public’s outrage and tap on the brakes. But the president of the United States thinks instead like a dictator.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

Hey, Donald Trump, you just launched a war that you’re losing, that’s costing you millions of supporters, that’s tanking your standing among even Republicans, that has the likes of Alex Jones accusing you of contemplating “genocide” and Tucker Carlson labeling your comments “vile on every level.” What are you going to do for an encore?

Hey, I know. How about breaking up NATO and trying for regime change in Cuba?

He may, he may not. Who ever knows with this guy? But both are live possibilities. Trump threw a tantrum about NATO this week, issuing an “ultimatum” to European countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bellyaching about their general lack of support for his war. Cuba is largely under a U.S. blockade that has resulted in massive energy shortages. A month ago, before the reality of Iran had quite set in, Trump bragged that Cuba was next, saying, “Cuba is going to fall pretty soon, by the way.” Just yesterday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said he wasn’t going anywhere.

Here’s the important thing to understand about Trump at this particular point in time. He does not think like a democrat (small d). He thinks like a dictator. A democrat who understood his obligations in a democratic system to the voters who put him in office would stop and think: Gee, the people don’t approve of what I’m doing. Maybe I should pull back a little. And who knows—maybe he will. There are peace talks with Iran this weekend in Pakistan, even though Iran is walking into them with a 10-point plan that Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu) want no part of. But there actually is precedent for Trump seeing that what he was doing was unpopular—the ICE disaster in Minneapolis, most notably—and making a course correction.

Granted, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of other situations in which he’s responded to public opinion. America doesn’t like anything he’s doing, except on sealing the border. Otherwise, he’s in the tank. And by the way, I alluded above to his weak numbers among Republicans: In one recent poll, he’s down to 81 percent among Republicans. That may sound high, but in fact, for that particular category, it’s low. A president’s support within his own party ought to be close to or above 90. Here’s a little context. The 1988 presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was a blowout, right? Right. Dukakis got 83 percent of Democrats’ votes. And he got shellacked. That’s what 80-ish percent among your party leads to.

But even as the walls close in on him, Trump is no more likely to think like a democrat. He will think like the dictator he imagines himself to be. He will think, as dictators do, about three things: To the extent that he cares what the public thinks, he will focus his thoughts on how best to distract their attention and get them thinking about something else; he will think about ways to clamp down on dissent (and more specifically in this case, leakers); and finally, and never to be forgotten with this grubby mountebank, how to make a buck off the current mess.

Let’s break these down. The first thought is the one that will carry Trump to try something with Cuba, or to try to bust out of NATO. He needs headlines that aren’t about Iran. But he also needs headlines that start “Trump moves to” and “Trump declares.”

That’s what matters. It scarcely makes any difference whether these moves are popular. Busting up NATO would of course be monstrously unpopular (and the president cannot simply leave NATO, though laws haven’t stopped him before). Toppling the Cuban regime might in fact be somewhat popular, depending on how it goes. But again, we’ll need to see what China and Russia have to say about that before the final verdict is in. It is liable to be more complicated than Trump imagines, simply because these things usually are.

The second thought is one to take very seriously right now. Zeteo’s Asawin Subsaeng reported this week that Trump is directing a furious hunt for people who leaked info to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for that huge piece about how Trump decided to start this war. The piece is actually an excerpt from their upcoming book, which is expected to contain still more embarrassing details about the Trump regime. “In conversations with close aides and advisers, President Trump has loudly demanded to know who in his Cabinet or his team blabbed” to the reporters, Swin wrote. This is the sort of thing that obsesses dictators.

And finally, never forget that Trump is always on the lookout for his next swindle. Coming up on April 25 is a luncheon at Mar-a-Lago billed as “the most exclusive crypto & business conference in the world.” The announcement of the luncheon jacked up the price of the $Trump meme coin for a minute. It’s not 100 percent certain Trump will be there. But where else would he be? Maybe the golf course.

Consider this week in full. The abominable Easter Sunday social media post that dropped the f-bomb and mocked Islam. The far more abominable post two days later about destroying one of history’s most accomplished civilizations. The complete and utter backing down from it hours later. The phantom ceasefire, which Netanyahu obviously intentionally wrecked. The phony peace plan, on which the belligerent nations are miles apart. Anemic economic growth (0.5 percent, and yes, that’s point-five). Inflation above 3 percent.

And perhaps most of all, Trump’s wife appearing to throw him under the bus. Not that she’s any hero. But she’s pretty clearly preparing for the day when the Epstein files are made public and she may have to cut bait, depending on what’s in them.

To any other president, this would be the time to straighten up and fly right. To this one, it’s the perfect time to blow up the most important and durable military alliance in the history of the human race.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

 

Why Aren’t Republicans Fleeing Trump? A tale of two representatives. Noah Berlatsky Apr 10 Cisomani vs. Fitzpatrick: choose your GOP ghoul This week Trump threatened a genocide, lost an extremely unpopular war, and then Republicans got absolutely shellacked in elections Tuesday night as they have been getting absolutely shellacked in elections since Trump took office. And yet. Barely any Republicans criticized Trump for threatening genocide; almost none of them criticized him for losing an incredibly unpopular war. Instead, as congressional reporter Steven T. Dennis noted, virtually the entire Republican Congressional caucus chose to respond to Trump’s horrific threats and incompetent defeat with silence. Republicans who stand with Trump are getting crushed in polls and at the ballot. But their uniform reaction is to…just keep standing with Trump and hope that things get better somehow. To put it mildly, this is not how politics is supposed to work. Usually, when the president’s approval is spiraling down towards the mid-30s and he keeps doubling down on unpopular policies, people in his party make some effort to distance themselves from the president in an effort to overperform him and keep their seats. There are always strong incentives not to criticize your own president because you don’t want to lose primaries, and also because criticizing the president can drive down his approval even more, damaging the party. But at some point—and that would be now!—self-preservation is supposed to kick in, and people in tough districts are supposed to start heading for the exits. So—why isn’t that happening? One useful way to answer that question is to look at the two most exposed Republicans in Congress; Juan Ciscomani in AZ-06, and Brian Fitzpatrick in PA-01. According to analyst G. Elliott Morris, Ciscomani’s district was Trump +1 in 2024; Trump’s approval there is now a shocking -24. Fitzpatrick’s district was Harris+0; Trump’s approval there is now -23. You’d expect Ciscomani and Fitzpatrick to be working to distance themselves from Trump so that some of those people in their district who hate Trump will maybe vote for them. Fitzpatrick And Fitzpatrick is in fact doing just that. He is consistently ranked the most bipartisan member of Congress. In 2021, he was one of ten GOP members to vote to strip Marjorie Taylor Green of her committee assignments in response to comments in which she called for executing leading Democrats. In 2025 he was one of only two Congresspeople to vote against Trump’s Big Ugly Piece of Shit Bill, citing his opposition to the legislation’s Medicaid cuts. At the end of that year he was one of three Republicans to force a discharge petition to bring the extension of ACA subsidies to a vote. This January he gave an interview in which he said he had written in Nikki Haley for the 2024 election and criticized Trump’s “lack of moral clarity”. Critics of Fitzpatrick have pointed out that his efforts to distance himself from Trump are largely performative. He regularly votes with Republicans, and tends to vote against them only when the party has enough of a margin to do what it wants without him. He portrays himself as an independent, but when the chips are down, he is a reliable vote for fascism. The critics aren’t wrong. But the performance still matters. Fitzpatrick is doing what you expect Congresspeople in swing seats to do. He supports his party because a weak and divided party hurts him, but he takes independent votes where he can because a reputation for independence helps him in his district. He is not a hero of the republic. On the contrary, he is a fascist cog destroying the republic. But he is also a member of congress reacting fairly rationally to his electoral incentives. Ciscomani In contrast, Juan Ciscomani—in a district even more anti Trump right now than Fitzpatrick’s—is doing much, much less to establish a reputation for independence. He’s said he opposes a nationwide abortion ban; he’s said he opposes cutting Medicaid. But he has voted with Trump literally 100% of the time. Ciscomani didn’t join Fitzpatrick in opposing the piece of shit budget; he didn’t join Fitzpatrick in the discharge petition to prevent the end of ACA subsidies; he doesn’t criticize Trump’s moral character. Instead, he vomits out sycophantic pro Trump babble that you’d expect from a member in a deep red bulwark, rather than from a guy who’s constituents overwhelmingly loathe their president. So, what gives? Why does Fitzpatrick behave like a repulsive Republican who knows he’s in a difficult district, while Ciscomani behaves like a repulsive Republican who can’t tell his deity from Trump’s ass? Part of the issue is probably down to differences in temperament and intelligence. But I think you also have to look at the fact that the Arizona GOP is deeply broken. It continually nominates conspiratorial freaks and weird Nazis to contest winnable statewide elections which they then lose. In 2021 the state GOP censured their own governor and John McCain’s widow for not being sufficiently rabid and awful. The party is on its way to nominating rabid whacko Andy Biggs to run for governor, and the Maricopa County GOP attacked his primary opponent for pointing out that Biggs has ties to antisemites and Nazis. Now, I’m not saying that the Pennsylvania GOP is a model of health and decorum. They nominated antisemitic fuckhead Doug Mastriano to run for governor in 2022 and comically inept toad Dr. Oz to run for Senate and then watched both of them get crushed in (again) winnable races. But in 2024 the party managed to settle on the merely odious Dave McCormick for Senate, who narrowly won the seat—and one victory in a major statewide race is more than the Arizona GOP has been able to do in the Trump era despite Arizona being a redder state. Nor has the Pennsylvania GOP censured Fitpatrick for his votes or for talking shit about Trump, presumably because they know he’s in a close seat and they would like him to keep holding it. In short, the guy from the state where the GOP is completely divorced from reality is unable to figure out how to respond to electoral incentives; the guy from the state where the GOP is still tenuously tethered to reality behaves more or less as you’d expect a politician to behave. The logical conclusion is that Republicans who are not responding to electoral incentives are being influenced by a rabid authoritarian party that no longer know how or cares to do democracy. The party is broken I don’t think this is a shocking revelation or anything. But I do think it’s at least somewhat controversial, and therefore worth thinking through. You’ll often see people arguing, for example, that Republicans—in office and out—do not defy Trump because he has some sort of personal, charismatic hold over them. Or people will suggest that Republican electeds are physically afraid of Trump’s followers—as they well might be given January 6 and the way he deliberately targets them for death threats. But Fitzpatrick shows that some Republicans do in fact run against Trump when it makes sense to run against Trump. Others like Ciscomani, do not. The difference doesn’t seem to be charisma or death threats. It seems to be the kind of state party they are associated with. Some state GOP parties are more broken, and more openly fascist, than others. But the truth is that the Republican party as a whole is quite broken and quite fascist at this point. And that means the problem we’re facing isn’t just Trump. It’s an authoritarian party that no longer responds to democratic incentives because it hates democracy. When elected leaders don’t respond to democratic incentives, they are easier to beat at the ballot box. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have not just one fascist, but an entire fascist party to deal with. And that means Democrats need to do more than win elections. They need to crush the fascist party after they win. Are they willing to do that? I hope so. But I am not as certain as I’d like to be.

HUBBELL

 

Hegseth's (Un)Holy War. April 10, 2026 Robert B. Hubbell Apr 10 Our troops, our American warriors, deserve the credit for this day, but God deserves all the glory. Tens of thousands of sorties, refuelings, and strikes carried out under the protection of divine providence; a massive effort with miraculous protection. Pete Hegseth, April 8, 2026, declaring victory in Iran. The US military accidentally struck an Iranian elementary school, in an attack that state media said killed at least 168 children and 14 teachers, likely due to outdated information about a nearby naval base, according to two sources briefed on the preliminary findings of an ongoing military investigation. CNN, March 11, 2026 We’re certainly investigating. But the only side that targets civilians is Iran. Pete Hegseth, March 9, 2026, commenting on Trump’s claim that Iran targeted the girls’ school. America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. . . . No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. Pete Hegseth, March 2, 2026, at Pentagon news conference, refusing to comment on the number of civilian deaths in the US war on Iran. At least 2,076 people have been killed by US-Israeli attacks on Iran since February 28 . . . 240 women and 212 children are among those killed. Over 26,500 people have been injured, including at least 4,000 women and 1,621 children. Al Jazeera, Real Time Tracker for deaths and injuries in US war on Iran. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Pete Hegseth, Mar 25, 2026, reading a chaplain’s prayer at a Christian service at the Pentagon. Pete Hegseth claims divine guidance and protection for America’s war on Iran, giving “glory to God” for every video game explosion that snuffs out a human life created in the image and likeness of God. His embrace of Christian nationalism from the Pentagon pulpit violates the Constitution and desecrates the very Christianity he seeks to force onto the members of the US military, all Americans, and the grieving Iranian families who have lost innocents to precision-guided missiles that cannot discriminate between combatants and school girls. Despite millennia of prayers for victory by soldiers heading to battle, God does not take sides in war. Pete Hegseth’s perversion of Christianity has led to direct conflict between the Pentagon and Vatican representatives of Pope Leo XIV. See Newsweek, The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy. Per Newsweek, a Pentagon representative told a Vatican envoy that the Church had better align itself with the US, alluding to the Avignon Papacy. For those unfamiliar with the Avignon Papacy, it refers to a 68-year period (1309–1377) during which the Catholic papacy was relocated from Rome to southern France and dominated by the French crown.¹ In context, the allusion was a threat to the independence of the Catholic Church (my gloss, not stated in the Newsweek article). Pope Leo has been directly critical of statements by Trump and Hegseth. In response to Trump’s threat to “destroy” a “whole civilization,” Pope Leo said, There are certainly issues here of international law, but even more than that, it is a moral question for the good of the people. I would like to invite everyone to truly think in their hearts about the many innocent people, so many children, so many elderly, completely innocent, who would also become victims of this escalation. I invite everyone to pray, but also to say to their political leaders, to the authorities, we do not want war, let us work for peace. We are a people who love peace. America Magazine, Pope Leo: Trump’s threat to destroy Iran ‘truly unacceptable’. Religious leaders of every denomination should condemn Hegseth’s invocation of divine providence in an unholy war that is flouting the so-called “stupid rules of engagement” that exist to protect civilians. There are many grounds for impeaching and removing Trump and Hegseth. Among those reasons should be their blatant attempt to “establish” Christianity as the religion of the US military and their deliberate refusal to abide by the laws of war, the Geneva Convention, and the UN Charter. Opportunities for Reader Engagement Join me as I host Dan Osborn at my home and meet the independent candidate for US Senate from Nebraska. Can Dan Osborn, the union industrial mechanic fighting for working-class voters beat MAGA Senator Pete Ricketts, the child of billionaires? Last cycle, readers of this newsletter gave Nebraska Independent Senate Candidate Dan Osborn his best fundraiser in the final month of his race. This Monday I am hosting Osborn at my home for an update on the contest (polls show it’s tied) and help get him from 46.5% to winning! For background, Dan is the former president of his union, a Navy veteran, and a Nebraska National Guardsman. He’s pro-choice, pro-worker, and key to a Senate that fights for our shared values. Watch his launch video here. When: Monday, April 13, at 8:00 pm Eastern/ 5:00 pm Pacific on Zoom. Moderated by Robert Hubbell. Register for the Zoom here. No donation required, but of course welcome: Donate here. Hosted by Downtown Nasty Women,Markers For Democracy, Team Min, 31st Street Swing Left, and Senate Circle. In-person meeting with Oath co-founder in Manhattan, NYC, on April 13, at 6:30 p.m. You are invited to an in-person meeting with Brian Derrick, co-founder of the Democratic online fundraising platform Oath, about the impact of strategic, data-driven giving. Oath analyzes every general election race in the country and gives it an impact score that lets you know where your money is needed most. You can also get recommendations for where your money will go the farthest based on your personal priorities, like Flip the US House or Fight Back Against Ice. No donation is required to attend this event in downtown Manhattan on April 13th at 6:30 pm. RSVP here! Use Oath to give smart so we can WIN BIG in November! Concluding Thoughts I am sending an abbreviated. newsletter this evening because Jill and I attended the Bruce Springsteen concert in Los Angeles on Thursday evening. It was a late night, and we are boarding a flight in a few hours to visit our daughter, granddaughters, and son-in-law in Tennessee for the weekend (and I still haven’t packed!). Bruce Springsteen is a proud member of the resistance and outspoken defender of democracy. I will write more tomorrow, but for tonight, let me say that he began the concert with a prayer for the safe return of our troops, then sang War (“What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!), and followed with “Born in the USA.” A few songs into his set, he sang “The Streets of Minneapolis,” a touching and powerful ballad about the bravery and example of the people of Minneapolis. Bruce also delivered two “spoken word” sets that directly addressed the lawlessness of the Trump administration. He closed the concert with a plea for unity and a call for activism. If only only every major star would use their celebrity to speak out against Trump and urge Americans to defend the rule of law we would be further along in out effort to reclaim our democracy. There is a reason they call Bruce Springsteen “the Boss.” I will be traveling much of Friday and joining our granddaughters, daughter, and son-in-law for dinner on Friday evening, so I will send a short(ish) newsletter for Saturday morning, and I will not hold my regular Saturday livestream. Talk to you tomorrow!