HEATHER

September 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

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The scene that unfolded today at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a snapshot of politics in the U.S. today. Testifying under oath was Jack Smith, who as special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his retention of classified documents after he left office in 2021.

Questioning Smith were the senators, whose speech in Congress is protected. Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

The courts have interpreted this clause to give lawmakers broad protection for what they say in Congress. Republicans have used this protection to make outrageous accusations and to spread disinformation. That practice was on display in spades today.

Former attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith special counsel on November 18, 2022, three days after Trump announced he was running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Garland said that since both Trump and Biden were likely to be presidential candidates, his appointment of Smith was meant to underscore “the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.”

Trump was not happy about the appointment, calling Smith “a hit man for Obama.”

In June 2023 a grand jury indicted Trump on 37 “felony violations of our national security laws” and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” in his retention of classified documents. Charged alongside Trump was his aide Walt Nauta, who is now the director of Oval Office operations. In December, after Trump was reelected, Smith dropped Trump from the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, has blocked the release of Smith’s report, although it is standard for a special counsel to release a final report.

It is the other case that was the focus of today’s Senate hearing.

On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., charged Trump with four felony offenses “arising from his efforts to unlawfully retain power by using fraud and deceit to overturn the 2020 election results,” as Smith’s final report put it. Trump challenged the indictment on the grounds that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed as part of his official duties and that his actions trying to overturn the election were part of his official duties.

On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court largely agreed with Trump, upending the principle that the United States was a nation of laws, not of men. The Trump v. United States decision sent Smith back to the drawing board to take the case, now stripped of anything that could fall under “official duties,” before another grand jury, and that grand jury returned an indictment for the same offenses. But after Trump was reelected, Smith moved on November 25 to dismiss the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

The case can be resumed once Trump is no longer president.

It’s unclear why Senate Republicans thought it was a good idea to remind people of Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election when the midterms are less than forty days away. Some of them, though, clearly intended to appeal either to Trump or to the MAGA base by using their protected speech to insult and abuse Smith.

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) launched a hit on Smith, setting up the idea he was part of a conspiracy with Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis and her colleague Nathan Wade to persecute Trump.

Schmitt asked Smith: “Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?”

Smith looked confused at the sudden turn in the hearing and asked Schmitt to repeat the question. Once Schmitt did, and asked him if he had ever been to Atlanta during his time as special counsel, Smith answered: “I really don’t think so. It’s possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida, but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.”

“Did you ever meet Nathan Wade or Fani Willis in your time as special counsel,” Schmitt asked.

“No,” Smith answered.

Then Schmitt pounced: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior/Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” A staffer briefly flashed a poster board. Then Schmitt said: “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”

Smith said: “You just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again?”

Schmitt answered: “We’ll put it in a file. You can respond. I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” He went on to call Smith a “villain” and a “dirtbag.”

Smith said: “[I]f this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time…. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, February of 2024.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) figured it out. Schmitt was accusing Smith of being in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game, where he could hypothetically have met up with Willis and Wade. In reality, he was in Maryland at a game in which Maryland played the University of Iowa: the Hawkeyes.

Klobuchar addressed Schmitt: “Could it then be that University of Iowa’s the Hawkeyes, could that be it, and maybe before we show this kind of thing…that might be the confusion over the names of the team but perhaps you should’ve looked at it more carefully….”

Schmitt exploded, accusing her of “trying to rehabilitate the witness.” And yet, newscasters who reviewed tapes of the games found Smith in the stands at the Maryland game.

“You had the teams wrong, sir,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.

Indeed, although Schmitt’s poster board featured a picture of Fani Willis and another of the Atlanta arena, the messages on it appeared to be between Smith’s deputy special counsel J.P. Cooney and another person, asking, “Is 109 Row 1 reserved for Jack?” Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo notes that the Atlanta State Farm Arena uses letters to denote rows in section 109 rather than numbers. The University of Maryland arena uses numbers.

After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where host Andrew Kolvet cheered Schmitt’s attack on Smith. “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game…in Atlanta,” Kolvet said. “It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”

So Schmitt got his right-wing media hit from a completely fabricated storyline. One newscaster noted: “When a witness lies under oath before Congress, he can face prison. When a senator gets it wrong, he says he was just ‘asking questions’.”

Smith, in contrast, stood firmly on facts and the rule of law. “I have been fortunate to serve a country that I love for nearly 30 years in local, national, and international settings,” he said in his opening statement. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded.

“I believe that there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice. A prosecutor’s decisions must be based on the facts and the law. The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in decisions to investigate, prosecute, or decline prosecution.”

As special counsel, Smith said, he and his office “took actions based on the facts and the law.” “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” he said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” he said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions…. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power….

“And…President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”

Smith promised to answer the senators’ questions truthfully. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the President or others.”

“As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms. History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff who served on my team, simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs.

“I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States.

“I remain confident, however, that the rule of law will endure because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.”

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

This 3D Printer Is 15 Times Faster, and the Army Is Already Buying It

If 3D printing is going to hit speed that manufacturing requires, the improvement will need to be exponential.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Sep 29, 2026

 

I think we’ve all concluded that the bloom is somewhat off the rose in terms of 3D printing. Like so many extraordinary advances in science and technology that appear akin to magic for a while, watching a machine that looked vaguely like your microwave turn spools of plastic into physical representations of everyday objects you’d just drawn on your computer was a pretty amazing experience. You could print precision parts, you could print pizzas, and eventually you could print entire buildings. And while Yoda from Star Wars was for years the most frequently printed object, there were plenty of serious and important applications in pharmaceuticals, construction and surgery, to name a few.

There was, however, an unspoken issue that too many of the earliest enthusiasts overlooked, whether intentionally or inadvertently—or because so much of the formative experimentation and developmental work took place in academic environments where time and money were secondary concerns. In any event, for whatever reason, 3D printing hit a fairly substantial barrier in the area of manufacturing, where you might have expected that it would absolutely and rapidly thrive.

The problem was that it just took too darn long to get the job done. Or, as the comedian Stephen Wright used to say: everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. In the hurry-up world that we live in today, where nobody wants to wait for anything, this was a serious impediment and somewhat comparable to one of the biggest obstacles that we’re seeing with the adoption of EVs. While it may only take an hour using a high-speed hook-up to charge your Tesla, you’re still going to waste several hours if you have to wait in line behind a few other people waiting to do the same thing. If it takes 20 minutes to fabricate a single part that a machine could stamp out hundreds of in the same period of time, you’re never going to win the race to replace the old fabrication methods.

Manufacturing assembly lines work on the weakest link theory: that the slowest action or process in the production chain is what dictates the speed of the entire operation. If 3D printing is ever going to graduate to the level of speed that volume manufacturing requires, the improvement in the amount of time required to produce a single part will need to be exponential, not incremental. The span is similar to the best runner in the world, competing in a sprint against an F1 race car. We’re talking about the difference between a system capable of printing a part every 10 seconds as compared to the current production rate that could be hours per part.

I may have seen the future recently at a company called Impossible Objects, which has built next-generation printing systems for manufacturers that it says operate 15 times faster than the current competition and turn out parts that are stronger, lighter, and more precisely honed. Their current machines (backed by dozens of issued patents) already set the bar extraordinarily high, but they expect that the next quantum jump in production speed will be on the order of 65 times. Speaking to the leaders of this team, you get the distinct impression of two ideas that they hold near and dear: (1) if you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do; and (2) it always seems impossible until it’s done.

Keep in mind that these are not toys or lightweight demos, these are industrial production-grade materials as strong as aluminum (on a strength-to-weight basis), which can be produced at traditional manufacturing-like costs. In addition, because many of the new products they are producing (specifically for military applications) require complex geometries, they simply cannot be executed and accomplished with prior injection molding tech. In order to even imagine these new solutions, there had to be a heavy dose of dreams and wish casting. But they got there and have demonstrated something that every good entrepreneur knows: the only thing that ultimately keeps a dream from being achieved is the fear of failure.

Whether you believe the objective warfare observers along with certain of our own independent government agencies or the latest lies of the drunk running the Pentagon, the fact is that, for our military to remain effective and competitive, they will need to take huge steps forward in every aspect of drone warfare and especially in terms of developing and manufacturing hyper-lightweight disposable devices designed for one-way munition delivery. The hardest challenge for changemakers and innovators is always to get the folks in charge to give up the ways that have worked fairly well for them in the past, but fortunately here, there’s very little in the past to discard.

The latest Impossible Objects machine, which the U.S. Army has already purchased, will produce 10,000 drones per month with a near term production target of 120,000 UAV bodies per year. In addition to the machines themselves, the company supplies its customers with substantial volumes of proprietary consumables which its machines turn into these devices. The annual value of the consumables is about five times the cost of the machines themselves and these materials are not available anywhere else for a variety of reasons.

At first, dreams seem impossible; then improbable; and then inevitable.

SWALLOWING TRUMP'S FILTHY LIES

 

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS HIS LATEST INC. MAGAZINE ARTICLE

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

CONGRATS TO JYL BONAGURO ON A GREAT SHOWING IN AN IMPORTANT EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL HELLENIC MUSEUM

 

RAPISTS AND GRIFTERS - THIEVES AND TRAITORS

 

A FOOLISH CLOWN

 

When historians look back on Trump’s foreign policy in a century, I bet these are their verdict on his most famous policies:

The support of Russia--the most evil.

The pillaging of Venezuela--the most corrupt.

The decision to go to war with Iran--the most incompetent.

The abandonment of Taiwan--the most geopolitically catastrophic.

The China policy--the most craven.

The destruction of US relations with its allies--the most stupid.

NO CLUE...

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Xfinity Is Turning WiFi Into Home Security. ADT and Brinks Should Pay Attention

Disruptive innovation and competition can come from anyone and anywhere.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Sep 22, 2026

Every time I pay a bill for my home security service, I find myself wondering exactly what the value is that I’m allegedly receiving. It’s been a few decades and there hasn’t been a single instance of activity—our pets don’t even trigger any alarms. I’m pretty sure we’re among the millions of families who’ve gone for months if not longer without ever even turning the systems on. We do replace the batteries in our smoke alarms on a regular basis, but they don’t really depend on paying Brinks or ADT in order to operate.

If my insurance company didn’t offer me some modest home insurance discount for having the service, I’m pretty sure we would have bagged the whole thing by now. I guess we’d keep the signs and window stickers, as those are probably the major deterrents in the whole deal. I’m sure there are folks who can recite hair-raising and instructive instances of the benefit of these services, but it’s certainly not me. It feels a little like buying flood insurance when you live in the middle of the desert, although with climate change these days, I guess even those folks can’t be sure of what’s coming down the pipe. They can be certain, however, that if they suffer a loss, their gigantic deductible will make sure that they feel some significant portion of the pain.

All of which brings me to a new offer by Xfinity that seems to raise a serious competitive threat to the firms protecting us against home invasions, break-ins and burglaries. It’s called Xfinity Shield, which is described as an “always-on” home protection and security platform. I want to give them immediate props for recognizing that we lazy civilians can’t really be trusted to turn our own systems on and off on a daily basis. Their new basic program is free and relies on your existing WiFi and certain other equipment in order to work. Don’t get me started on how often my WiFi and cable connections go down, but it happens more often than you’d expect.

In any event, while I often talk about the many benefits of riding someone else’s rails, which means to partner or rev share so you can utilize their existing channels and infrastructure in order to avoid the costs of building your own, it’s even smarter and cheaper to double down and add, extend or bolster your existing offerings and infrastructure to create new products and services that you can provide to your existing customer base. But the Shield service is a great example of another important competitive strategy which is moving into adjacent markets where there are substantial opportunities. Frankly, I would guess that the major security firms—even with the advent of Ring doorbells and similar offerings—wouldn’t ever have imagined that entities like Xfinity would move directly into their space.

The WiFi Shield service provides in-house movement alerts and nighttime monitoring without incremental hardware. The claim (which I’m not vouching for) is that enhancements to their WiFi services will detect changes in the radio frequency signals that are being constantly passed between their Gateway head device and WiFi-connected devices in the home and then send a signal to you through their phone app when there are unfamiliar or unexpected changes. As long as you sleep with your phone nearby, I guess this works if the notifications are audible, although the one thing I don’t love about my current system is the absolutely deafening sirens that go off inside and outside the house, which aren’t part of the basic Xfinity deal. Needless to say, for additional fees, there’s a full menu of additional equipment, cameras, services, and upcharges which will let you build a system that more closely resembles the typical home platforms and packages.

The simple morale of this whole story is that disruptive innovation and competition can come from anyone and anywhere including the players we regard as laggards and last generation performers who are stuck in the hardware business while software rules the world. But the Xfinity Shield is a very important example of how new technology and advanced software and signaling can take existing rails and connections and re-energize and update them to support and offer new competitive services at price points (including free) that will give the big guys in security like Brinks and ADT plenty of headaches beyond wondering about Ring and its doorbells.

 

GOLLUM J.

 

CHAT WITH JYL'S SELFIE AND LEARN MORE ABOUT HER WORK AND UPCOMING SHOW IN CHICAGO

 

Chat with me on SELFIE I get really busy, self absorbed and text messages pile up along with social media messages. On top of my message pile up, I have pages of journals, and digital notes of my plays and poetry and books like Dreams of a Used Pickup Truck - The struggle of Art, that I simply write down and find in various places. It’s hard to organize all this and create constantly. In the somewhat scary age of AI, I wonder do I want something to speak and answer like me and now it even uses my own voice to reply to fans. But it’s really handy and I cannot wait to explore the diary section since I love archiving everything… Chat with me selfie.com/jylbonaguro Create your profile, download the app

Dykes Doing CC Dirty

Go Go Talarico

 Watch the Kimmel Interview

SCUM OF THE EARTH

 

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS HIS INC. MAGAZINE ARTICLE ON SERIAL ENTREPRENEURS

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

OUR OLDEST AND BEST FRIEND HAS PASSED AWAY - R.I.P. GERTIE TULLMAN

                                     R.I.P.

SHE WAS ALWAYS UP FOR A PARTY ... OR A MEAL.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Successful Serial Entrepreneurs Share 4 Habits That Make Their Next Startup More Likely to Work

These aren’t innate attributes—they’re learned skills and boundaries.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Sep 7, 2026

Having invested in several dozen startups over the last decade and read hundreds of business plans, I’ve been pitched by individuals with a broad range of experience and credentials, including some of the most interesting men and women who were previously successful entrepreneurs. These folks were anxiously getting ready to jump back on the merry-go-round and take another shot at the brass ring. Once you get the fever, it can be hard to get over the adrenaline and hurry-up disease and go back to trying to find a day job and live a relatively normal life. Interestingly enough, the one thing that’s almost immediately obvious in these cases is that—regardless of the degree of their prior financial rewards—they have little or no interest in funding their next new ventures with their own funds. It’s the rarest kind of new business builder and true believer who’s interested in putting his or her butt on the line twice.

But, say what you will, trying again is a lot better and healthier choice than retiring or thinking that you’re qualified and temperamentally fit to become a venture capitalist or professor of whatever. Entrepreneurs are congenital optimists who fall in love with every new idea they see and are often miserable investors, while the best VCs are grim and constipated naysayers who reject 95 percent of the deals they are shown. They say “No” all day long with big smiles on their faces and send you off with a hearty pat on the back. 

Many college profs teaching entrepreneurship are either indifferent and burned-out oldsters who have a thick enough skin to be told by their students that they don’t “get it” or don’t know what the new A.I. world is all about. Or they’re folks whose past ventures almost made it across the finish line but never put enough cash in their pockets to free them from needing a paycheck. They eventually figure out that teaching a bunch of kids is easier and less time-consuming than working a 9-to-5 job with a boss who’s paying attention and paying the bills. So, they spend their days swanning about among a host of bureaucrats who are largely paid to not upset the apple cart, offend the student snowflakes and their parents, or fail to placate the omnipresent corporate donors who pay for their buildings and labs.

When you run into successful serial entrepreneurs and have a chance to examine what makes them successful, there are a few characteristics that they all seem to share. These aren’t innate attributes—they’re learned skills and boundaries.

I’m looking at a prime example now, which is a new business launching a juvenile stationary “bike” called Tovie that helps struggling kids manage various nervous system conditions and sensitivities. The entrepreneurs behind Tovie, Arnav Dalmia and Shivani Jain, were two of the founders of Cubii, a pedal-driven, under-desk, elliptical trainer for adults that attracted nearly 1 million users after a record-breaking Kickstarter launch. Full disclosure: My venture firm invested early in Cubii more than 12 years ago, and the company had a very successful and lucrative $100 million exit in 2020 that made us a lot of money.

Tovie is a smart product. It plays entirely to the strengths and experience of the enhanced management team, and they’re managing the launch, development and funding steps in a manner which worked extremely well for them in the past–walking before they run and iterating all along the way. This is exactly what I’ve seen work successfully for a number of successful serial entrepreneurs in a wide variety of markets.

First, the smartest entrepreneurs recognize that, while many of their skills and strengths are readily transferable and applicable in diverse cases and circumstances, this isn’t the case for accumulated knowledge, experience and expertise in any given area or vertical. Even the best entrepreneurs fail regularly when they embark on new adventures outside of their own skill sets and knowledge–building new businesses really isn’t a great place in the new digital and A.I.-infused marketplaces for on-the-job training–there’s just not enough time or tolerance for anything other than forward motion. Pick your spots carefully, stick to your knitting, and go deep with what you know. Or, simply stated, if you want to beat Jannik Sinner, don’t play tennis. 

Second, the ones who are going to get things done and done well admit and acknowledge from the start what they don’t know. They make it their business to find and onboard the talent, expertise and experience required for their offering. In the case of Tovie, the requisite science needs, educational components, and occupational therapy training weren’t as simple as developing and providing a cost-effective exercise solution for a sedentary and deskbound working population. Mechanical skills were certainly within their prior wheelhouse, and the new prototype is thoughtfully and beautifully built with smooth and curved edges, etc. But the science, technology, programming and gamification that drives Tovie—and which is so critical to making the device responsive to and therapeutic for a specific segment and selection of conditions, needs and sensitivities—were almost exclusively the responsibility of teams of children’s health care experts, clinicians, therapists and educators. Parents were also recruited and incorporated into the design and development process. This was especially valuable and insightful because Tovie is actually designed to be a double blessing—calmer and regulated kids make for calmer and happier parents whose anxiety and angst can otherwise be easily communicated to their children.

Third, it’s critical to understand and control the initial scope of your venture. There are zillions of childhood ailments and thousands of kids in need of cures. But you can’t try to be all things to all people and solve the entire world’s problems.

The Tovie team isn’t trying to eat the whole elephant in one bite–they’re entirely focused on the science of regulation–and they’re proving out the premise that measured and controlled movement helps the nervous system self-regulate. Specifically, steering and pedaling are motions and movements that have calming effect. Their pedaling-to-play approach, which turns screen time into active play time, helps kids feel safe, focused, and regulated—even if they don’t exactly understand the methodology involved. And their systems are loaded with parental controls and tools to adjust, limit, and direct their children’s activities at all times. The Cubii venture made clear that there’s always iterative upside and brand and product expansion opportunities once you’ve established a basic product and a solid foundation.

Finally, most people fail to appreciate just how risk-averse true entrepreneurs are and how careful and conservative they are with other people’s money. This is why the Tovie team is so smart to again be pursuing the Kickstarter route, which worked so well for them in the past and which offers a built-in, step-by-step pre-sale measurement tool to get a handle on likely interest and demand before you bet the ranch. New business builders will all tell you that everything costs more and takes longer than you expect, and the only cardinal sin is to run out of money.

Repeaters are also remarkably grateful because they know how lucky they were to have succeeded in the past. This is the non-paralyzing upside of impostor syndrome. They know that they may have worked their butts off and established an entirely new product category, but it was still a major gamble. and there were plenty of bumps and ups and downs on the road to success, as well as folks providing guidance and helping hands along the way. No one does anything material and important all by themselves.

 

 

Coward in Chief

The Catering Cart President

Mary L Trump

Sep 02, 2026

Donald escaping Air Force One via catering truck, leaving press pool and members of his cabinet to fend for themselves after Iranian threat. USA Today photo illustration.

The Air Force One debacle happened a couple of weeks ago, but it is worth continuing to discuss because it has broader implications. First of all, it has all the makings of a bad joke. It is hysterical in the way that it demonstrates what a physical coward Donald is, how inept the people around him are, and it should disabuse anybody of the notion that he is a tough guy, that he is strong or brave. This perfectly exemplifies his complete and utter selfishness and the aforementioned cowardice.

The Secret Service or the intelligence agencies intercepted what they believed were credible threats against Donald and Air Force One. So they removed him without letting anybody else but a very small handful of the select few know. And they snuck him off the plane and put him, and this is just perfection, in a catering cart, which is humiliating. It is something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This is utterly humiliating. It is shameful, and it underscores just how pathetic he is.

On the other hand, though, it is not funny at all because it demonstrates how dangerous and insane the people making the decisions in this regime are. They responded to a credible threat by removing Donald and his handpicked coterie from Air Force One, the potential target. Fine. So let’s talk briefly about who he brought with him.

Thirty five year old Natalie Harp, who I believe is referred to as the human printer, is a woman who spends about 24 hours a day with Donald telling him how great he is, taking down dictation to post his social media rants, and writing him love notes about how he is the center of the universe, her universe. There was Walt Nauta, who used to be his valet and was, of course, his co conspirator in the Mar a Lago stolen documents case, and his former caddy, Dan Scavino. I do not know what Dan Scavino does now. I am sure he made that caddy experience very relevant to working with the president. And, of course, there was the perpetually incompetent Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense. The fact that Donald chose those four people to go with him speaks to his priorities and his insecurities because he could have brought anybody.

The question is not really why Donald chose those people, although it is a potentially interesting question that maybe I will get to at some point. And it is not even why he chose to leave the other people behind, although I think it is important to know who those people were. The flight crew, the White House press corps, members of his cabinet, including Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and some of his closest advisers, Stephen Miller and former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, were left behind.

Again, the question is, why did he leave anybody on the plane at all? By removing him secretly, the people making these decisions made sure that everybody else on that plane remained targets. Because by removing him secretly, they did not remove the threat. They just removed him.

Is there any other way they could have gone about doing this? Sure. I can think of several. They could have said that the plane had mechanical difficulties. They could have said that there was a health emergency. They could have said that something came up with the scheduling and they had to postpone. There are so many ways this could have been done properly, but the fact that they did not just shows you how the people surrounding him are just as incompetent as he is and how deluded they have become into thinking that Donald is literally the only person who matters, that no other human life has intrinsic value.

This is the thing we need to figure out. Why are so many people willing to overlook Donald’s utter lack of humanity and participate in it? They should know by now that it does not matter how loyal they are. I cannot think of two people more loyal to him than Karoline Leavitt and Stephen Miller, and yet he left them on the decoy plane.

It does not matter what you do for him, how you lie and cheat and steal for him. It does not matter how you debase yourselves for him because he does not care about anybody else unless somehow they are of use to him. And then that is another question worth asking. How is it that Walt Nauta, Dan Scavino, Natalie Harp, and Pete Hegseth are of use to Donald Trump, and yet his Secretary of State, Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt, and the Secretary of the Treasury are of no use to him whatsoever? Who with the tiniest bit of self respect can continue to work for this man who literally keeps trying to get people in his orbit murdered? If you do not believe me, just remember January 6th.

Explaining the psychology of these people is getting harder to do because this is just the latest in a long line of things that have happened in the last few months that demonstrate just how weak, corrupt, and in decline Donald is. His flailing is becoming more obvious and his self aggrandizement more grandiose because he is desperate to assuage his pathetic little ego. Meanwhile, he is making it clear that, with the exception of that special handful of people I mentioned earlier, he cares nothing about the health, wellbeing, and safety of those closest to him.

I think the best way to understand, to the extent that we can understand, why these people are continually willing to debase themselves to Donald despite the fact that he does not care if they live or die, is that Donald is not good at many things, but he is very good at this. He is good at getting people to make micro concessions to him. Over time, as he and they become more comfortable with the concessions they make to him, the asks get bigger. We have seen this in a broader sense with the electorate as well. Donald has gotten people who continue to support him to accept things that would have been unacceptable earlier.

I am pretty sure we are going to get to the point where he is going to say, “Hey, in order to make America great again, you have to be willing to give up your Social Security.” Or, “Hey, in order to make America great again, we are going to have to put your children into reeducation camps.” And they will all basically say, “Okay, we will willingly do that for you.” This is something that happens slowly over time.

I recently spoke with a Yale professor and former FBI agent about the experiments at Yale University in the early 1960s that psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted. Participants were told by people wearing white lab coats to inflict shocks on other participants who were in other rooms. The point of the experiment was to see the role authority played in people’s willingness to override their own hesitance to inflict pain on other people.

When one of the subjects administering the shock showed hesitance because they could hear, even though they could not see, how the person they were shocking was responding, the person in the lab coat, the authority figure, told them they must continue for the sake of the experiment. More than 60 percent of the time, the subjects were willing to administer the highest level of shock because they were told to by an authority figure. The alleged victim was not actually being shocked, but the subjects did not know that. The Milgram experiment showed people’s relationship to authority and how problematic it could be. We are seeing this play out in real time, both at the societal level and, what we are more interested in right now, the interpersonal level between Donald and the people who continue willingly to choose to be in his orbit.

How much are they willing to put up with? I would not be surprised at this point if they were willing to shock themselves to death if Donald told them to because, in their worldview, he is the ultimate authority and compared to him, they are nothing.

Whenever we see pushback, that is shocking, not in the electric shock sense, but in the, “Oh my God, somebody actually stood up to him,” sense, because it happens so rarely. We saw Jeanine Pirro recently willing to draw the line when Donald was pressing her to indict people falsely for having vandalized the reflecting pool, which, of course, did not happen. Pirro’s willingness to draw the line in the sand here was completely self interested because she did not want to get disbarred for bringing a fraudulent prosecution.

It is also important to remember that Donald was not angry with her because she did something wrong. He was angry with her because she would not break the law for him. When she said, “No, I cannot continue to do this unethical, potentially illegal thing,” she was in trouble. And she did not like being in trouble with Donald. So guess what? She is once again choosing to do his bidding, potentially putting her law license and her future at risk.

That keeps happening in different ways and in varying degrees with all of them. But here is what I would say to anybody still willing to put up with this, who is still willing to debase themselves, who is still willing to risk everything for a man who does not care if they live or die: You people are going to get punished. Donald never will. And your punishments are going to be severe.