The week in review - June 27, 2025
Only 1,303 days to go...
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” ~Sun Tzu
Living through these times…
We Need to Make America Grateful Again
Social media didn’t invent envy, but it industrialized it. It turned comparison into a business model. The average teenager spends almost five hours per day on platforms whose algorithms are finely tuned to monetize discontent. We have handed over the emotional development of an entire generation to corporations with an incentive to keep them scrolling and feeling less and less content.
Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us
People try to reason with trolls or appeal to their better nature. These responses are similar to how you might approach a friend who’s inadvertently insulted you, or a family member who disagrees with you about something important. But trolls are not like your loved ones, and research shows that these strategies are ineffective because they misapprehend a troll’s true motives, which are usually to attract attention, exercise control, and manipulate others.
Write about something you deeply hope will happen, but can’t fully control.
Reflect on how important this hope is to you and how motivated you are to pursue it.
Recall a past hope that once felt uncertain but eventually came true.
Write about what you’re grateful for from that experience, including who helped and what you learned.
Connect what you learned then to what you’re hoping for now.
End by naming one small action you can take today toward your current hope.
Finding the humor…
Baby Huey’s weirdest tweet might have been the one he posted on his private account minutes after the attack — not the official White House one, but the one he uses to broadcast important updates about Haitian cat and dog recipes, Hunter Biden’s laptop and Beyoncé’s lack of talent; namely: thank you for your attention to this matter.
We Can Give Trump Every Prize He Can Think Of. He’ll Still Be a Loser
Sure, it’s sort of humorous to consider Trump as Nobel laureate, but the pathetic side more than outweighs the funny. How can a single human being over the age of three be as needy as our Commander-in-Chief? We are governed by a person governed by bottomless insecurity … If giving him a participation trophy would moderate his excesses, I’d say we should do it.
Thought for the day in honor of her birthday…
"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
~ Helen Keller
Must Read Articles:
Trump turns Iran strike intel into loyalty test
“If Iran now decides to move towards a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic. No one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025 may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.”
Schrödinger’s Presidency - When Laws Become Suggestions
Those fluent in Trump-ese know that “two weeks” doesn’t literally mean two weeks. On all sorts of looming policy decisions dating back to his first term, it’s what Donald Trump unfailingly defaults to whenever he has no idea what he’s going to do….
America in 2025 isn’t merely being governed by executive whim; it’s being governed by an executive whose whims are so fickle that, practically speaking, federal “policy” no longer exists. “Policy” describes a set of stable, cognizable rules that citizens are required to follow in governing their affairs. Under Trump, those rules remain technically in effect, but across an array of issues, it’s now anyone’s guess whether they will or won’t be enforced. They’re binding and not binding…
I suspect many Americans sincerely do not understand anymore how the federal government is supposed to operate.
The Hero Complex of MAGA: How Loyalty Turned Into Tyranny
Authoritarianism doesn’t always arrive with tanks and censorship. Sometimes it wears a baseball cap and waves a flag. It speaks in the language of grievance and promises a return to something, order, greatness, control. And for those who feel left behind, threatened by change, or haunted by imagined losses, that promise sounds like salvation.
MAGA doesn’t see itself as authoritarian. It sees itself as the last defense against one. Its supporters believe they are preserving America, not reshaping it into something crueler. But this is the central delusion. The authoritarian impulse doesn’t announce itself with tyranny. It cloaks itself in virtue. It says: “We’re not the problem, they are.”
If This Mideast War Is Over, Get Ready for Some Interesting Politics
And among Iranians, the question that surely will be asked of its clerical leaders and corrupt Revolutionary Guards: “You spent billions of dollars trying to build a nuclear bomb to threaten Israel and remote-control Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. But you brought the war home to our country — our families had to flee Tehran and our generals were killed by Israeli drones in their own beds. All you did was destroy a few buildings and kill some civilians in Israel, and when Donald Trump attacked our three key nuclear facilities, your response was to put on a harmless sound and light show over a U.S. air base in Qatar. You were paper tigers, who only knew how to use technology to repress our own people. Meanwhile, our great Persian civilization is destitute, broken and miles behind the rest of the world…
…Strongmen don’t look so strong when they’re losers.”
What’s in and out of Trump’s big bill as Senate races to meet Fourth of July deadline
Republicans who have majority control of the House and Senate are finding that their push to move fast and change things — namely cuts to federal government programs including Medicaid and SNAP food stamps used by millions of Americans — is easier said than done….And there are extras: One provision from the Senate would provide $40 million to establish Trump’s long-sought “National Garden of American Heroes.”
Highlights
North Carolina gov. vetoes 3 bills, including 2 immigration bills
“I am vetoing House Bill 318 because it is unconstitutional.”
Quotes of the week:
“If the key consideration in whether a written statute will be followed is how the president personally feels about it, the rule of law in your country both does and doesn’t exist.”
~ Nick Catoggio
“Everyone went all the way, bursting through psychological and military barriers we never imagined would be breached. If they don’t stop now, or soon, they will all get where they are going: into a forever war — everyone, everywhere, all the time — that will leave nothing and no one unscathed.”
~ Tom Friedman
“It’s always important in the Trump script, the fallback is always who to blame, who to blame… Just have to have someone to blame. Tulsi is in the line of fire.”
~Michael Wolff
Lowlights
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) handed out a flyer listing 10 states that would stand to lose the most amount of federal Medicaid funding over the next decade. North Carolina would forfeit the most by far — $38.9 billion, according to Tillis. That includes nearly $10 billion in lost hospital receipts. At the bottom, the flyer stated: Medicaid coverage for over 600,000 North Carolinians would be at risk.
But conventional military weapons are only one tool in Tehran’s arsenal. As a researcher who studies how Iran partners with militant groups, I know Iran still has the means to target its enemies. Despite the degradation of its military capabilities, Iran can leverage proxies, criminal organizations abroad, and cyberattacks to hit Israeli, and possibly U.S., targets.
ICE detainee dies in transit as experts say more deaths likely
A 68-year-old Mexican-born man has become the first Ice detainee in at least a decade to die while being transported from a local jail to a federal detention center, and experts have warned there will likely be more such deaths amid the current administration’s “mass deportation” push across the US. The death occurred as private companies with little to no oversight are increasingly tasked with transporting more immigration detainees across the US, in pursuit of the Trump administration’s recently-announced target of arresting 3,000 people a day.
Trump to limit sharing classified info with Congress
Since his first run for president in 2016, when his campaign was investigated for its ties to Russia, Trump has been deeply suspicious of the intelligence community. Tuesday's disclosures only increased that sense of paranoia.
Trump wages all-out fight for control of Iran strike narrative
President Trump is going to extraordinary lengths to defend his claim that U.S. airstrikes "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, determined to cement the operation as a defining victory of his presidency. Trump has staked his credibility — and major parts of his foreign policy legacy — on the success of Saturday's military intervention, which punctuated decades of U.S. debate over the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
The D.N.C. Is in Chaos and Desperate for Cash
Rufus Gifford, who served as the finance chairman of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign and maintains relationships with many top donors, suggested Democrats were being sent the wrong message at a time when they are desperately looking for “fight and leadership.”
“What they are seeing is headline after headline of incompetence and infighting, and I think that is a real problem not just for the D.N.C. but for the larger Democratic brand,” he said. “We need to come together and focus on the issues at hand. That’s got to happen now. And I mean today. And if that can’t happen, we need to shift course.”
Trump Justice Dept. Pressuring University of Virginia President to Resign
The Trump administration has privately demanded that the University of Virginia oust its president to help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts…The extraordinary condition the Justice Department has put on the school demonstrates that President Trump’s bid to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which he views as hostile to conservatives, is more far-reaching than previously understood.
The government’s extensive pressure campaign has stripped billions of dollars from elite universities, including Harvard, which has been the target of investigations from at least six different federal agencies. But this is the first time the administration has pushed a university to remove its leader.
South Dakota eager for Trump’s statue garden near Mount Rushmore despite local opposition
Officials in South Dakota are pushing hard to build President Donald Trump ‘s proposed National Garden of American Heroes in the Black Hills near Mount Rushmore, but the effort has sparked a backlash from Indigenous groups who see the area as sacred….Trump signed an executive order earlier this year to build the garden, to feature 250 life-size statues of historical figures in honor of the country’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. Applications for sculptors are due in early July, though the administration no longer seeks to have it completed by next summer.
The U.S. House has approved $40 million for the project, which is being overseen by the Department of Interior and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Senate hasn’t yet approved the funding.
ICE Detains Marine Corps Veteran's Wife Who Was Still Breastfeeding Their Baby
Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre doesn't know how to tell his children where their mother went after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her last month. When his nearly 2-year-old son Noah asks for his mother before bed, Clouatre just tells him, “Mama will be back soon.” When his 3-month-old, breastfeeding daughter Lyn is hungry, he gives her a bottle of baby formula instead… “It’s just a hell of a way to treat a veteran,” said Carey Holliday, a former immigration judge who is now representing the couple. “You take their wives and send them back to Mexico?”
The Trump administration wants to shut down the agency that investigates chemical explosions
For more than a year, a little-known government agency has been investigating the incident. But the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board will likely shut down before completing its probes of the Dow explosion and other such incidents across the country. President Donald Trump’s administration has quietly proposed shutting down the board, an independent federal agency charged with uncovering the causes of large-scale chemical accidents.
The housing market is in the absolute dumps
There's not much to like in real estate right now: news of ICE enforcement actions at home building sites, tariffs raising the price of construction materials, and of course, weak demand in general.
"It's less about mortgage rates, and more about economic uncertainty," says Eric Finnigan, vice president of demographics research at John Burns, the real estate consulting firm.
Folks are nervous about the job market, in particular.
America's older population is growing as its younger cohort shrinks
What I read every day…
