Few men had been as cavalier and as debauched as the Président, but completely jaded, utterly torpid, all he was left with now was the depravity and turpitude of libertinage.

–Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom

Donald Trump seems to have reached that transcendent state of personal satori, where he is liberated from all inhibitions, political and psychological. His true persona has been unleashed out on the road, at one pit-stop rally after another.

Trump seems not to care–perhaps he doesn’t even notice–that the once-packed auditoriums have dwindled to the point where giant curtains don’t cover the sections of empty seats. The rousing receptions have been groans and baffled silences, as he rambles on and on about his own peculiar obsessions. He riffs on Nicki Minaj’s ass and Arnold Palmer’s penis. He brags over and over again about being the only president to have taken and passed (without missing a question) “a very difficult” cognitive test, three times! Even though his recent performances would suggest otherwise.

He drops strange hints about his declining health. He showed up to one rally with a bruise on his left eye, leaving some to wonder whether Meiania belted him or Natalie smacked him with her portable printer.

He indulges in his lusty fantasies on the musculature of the male anatomy, using a sitting US senator as a case study. He spins sadistic stories of violence, murder and torture. He enjoys the theater of cruelty, though not Artuad’s kind. He often sounds like he’s narrating a slasher film. Here is Trump entertaining his followers with a debased description of the murder of Iryna Zarutska for no discernible reason other than his own titillation: 

He was a big, strong guy and he stood up and violently slashed her neck. Almost cut her head right off. Slashed it violently and viciously. For those people who are able to handle that kind of stuff, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Very rarely do you see it run beyond the actual, almost-hit. If you did, you wouldn’t see anything like it, probably. In many cases, you wouldn’t be the same. Her head was barely attached. And she looked up in that final second of her life, and she said, to herself, ‘Oh god. What happened to me, oh God.’ And she knew she was dead. She knew it. She literally probably lived seconds. Or just a second. She knew what happened. The slash was inches deep. She knew she was in trouble. She walked onto the train because she didn’t wanna…I don’t know what. You could see how scared she was.

Trump boasts endlessly about his own wealth and openly expresses his envy of those wealthier than he is and his disdain for the poor. He ridicules his own supporters and thinks he can get away with it. He tells them their own financial problems are delusions. At one stop, Trump invited his MAGA followers to Mar-a-Lago, with this stipulation: “You could even come to Mar-a-Lago. You’ll be my guest. The problem is that for $5,000, the most you’ll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert. I’m not even sure you could buy that! No, don’t go there. It’s not a good place if you’re price-conscious.”

At another stop, he doubled down on his statement that he couldn’t care less about higher gas prices, saying: “I can just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump.’ That’ll be the headline. I said I don’t give a damn. I’m gonna say it: We’re making a freaking fortune.’”

America’s truckers, who once convoyed for Trump, aren’t making a fortune. In fact, they’ve been smacked hard by his tariffs and the spike in diesel prices from his imbecilic decision to go to war with Iran. At least 221 trucking companies have filed for bankruptcy this year alone, the most in decades. Smaller companies are, of course, the most vulnerable to financial ruin and are being gobbled up by big conglomerates like JB Hunt.

Trump’s speeches–rants, really–have become more and more profane. It’s like listening to less f-word-fueled private recordings of LBJ or Nixon, except delivered in public before audiences of evangelicals and Christian Nationalists. This is Trump unbound, unconstrained by the grammatical demands of paragraphs or even sentences. Free association is now the name of his rhetorical game and the thoughts and anecdotes unroll in no particular order, skipping from one not necessarily parallel universe to another.

More and more of Trump’s speeches have devolved into mere glossolalia (aka, grunts, groans, belches, wheezes and episodes of gurgling aphasia), which will be interpreted by the most devoted members of his cult as him speaking in the Divine Tongue. But most, I suspect, will see it as evidence of a mind unraveling in real time.

Trump seems to have embraced his own weirdness, a weirdness that has gone pathological. He is the Buffoon-in-Chief and his presidency is our national opéra bouffe with a soundtrack by Lee Greenwood and the Village People.

What is the point of his ravings? Often there is none, except his own gratification. His jokes have no punchlines. His stories fade off without endings. His anecdotes have no discernible political messages. He seems bored. Bored by the road. Bored by his crowds. Bored by his job. Several times he’s told his sparser and sparser audiences he doesn’t want to be there talking to them. They’re not really his kind of people. The kind of people that like ballrooms and are members of golf clubs. He repeatedly interrupts his rants to complain, “Why am I here? I don’t need this.” But of course he needs this. Blind adulation is what he drinks instead of blood.

After all, this losing campaign isn’t really about him, even though it really is all about him. Sure, he’ll seize credit for any unlikely victories. But he won’t take any blame for the losses that seem sure to come.

Everything has gone to hell and he seems to know it, despite Natalie only feeding him (highly edited) good news. His tariffs have backfired economically. His war on Iran is a debacle. He can’t stop the Ukraine war despite his vow to end it on day one. He has been diplomatically outplayed by Xi, Putin, Zelensky and the Prime Minister of Canada. Netanyahu calls and Trump comes and sits. His military has taken it on the chin from Iran and, embarrassingly, the Houthis. Internationally, few fear him anymore, and none respect him. He has alienated his base. His flacks in the White House are scheming behind his back. Women reporters just shrug off his verbal assaults and attempts to humiliate them. Much of the American public now views him not just with disdain but with disgust.

In the end, Trump replaced neoliberalism with neo-narcissism. His economic strategy is unabashed self-enrichment for him and his cronies. Though look out if you were a crony who made out better than he did. Trump has no friends, only collaborators and co-conspirators. He’s never really trusted anyone, not even his sons and accountants. He trusts NDAs, not the people whom he forces to sign them.

So, he celebrates his own malfeasance. Trump wallows in the aroma of his own mess. In the Anal Stage of US politics, it’s a thin line between self-love and self-loathing. One oozes seamlessly into the other.

Trump’s personal wealth has swelled by $3.3 billion since retaking office. He may be America’s first self-dealing president. He’s turned the White House into his own gift shop. Contra Obama, it looks less like a Cheesecake Factory than Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Interior design as an infantilism.

He’s suggested he will issue sweeping pardons (thank Biden for the precedent) for even the lowest-ranking members of his staff, effectively indemnifying them from prosecution for any crimes or tramplings of the Constitution he tells them to commit. And then he will, of course, force them to sign NDAs to prevent them from ever disclosing what crimes and who ordered them.

Trump doesn’t think he’ll need to pardon himself, though he may do so anyway, just because no one else has had the nerve to, not even Nixon, who was trained by Roy Cohn. It would be another first. And Trump likes firsts, the more unscrupulous, the better.

Trump believes the Supreme Court has given him the green light to do whatever he wants without legal consequences. And he may be right. He can trade on inside information. He can manipulate the markets to his advantage. He can cheat on his taxes. He can shake down white-collar criminals for pardons.  He can accept jumbo jetliners from a foreign government with ties to terrorists. He can reward purchasers of his memecoins with private meetings, even foreign nationals with dealings before the federal government. He can build monuments to himself and deface those of his predecessors. He can target his enemies with revenge prosecutions. All without, he believes, legal consequences. The disruptor agenda of 2015 has shriveled away. All that’s left is the cashing in.

The last vestige of populism that Trump exudes–and he more than exudes it–is his free-wheeling bigotry and the license he gives his followers to hate the same people he does.  As Tolstoy said of Napoleon after his Russian debacle, “He lost the power to think a decent thought.”

+++

+ Donald Trump’s approval rating in advance of the midterms is the lowest since Harry Truman’s dismal showing in 1946, 80 years ago.

NYT/Siena: net -26
Verasight/Strength in Numbers: -28
CNN/SSRS: -35
Reuters/Ipsos: -35
American Research Group: -38

+ Change in voters who identify as or lean Democratic from October 2024 vs. October 2026…

Ages 18–29: 55% → 70% (+15 points)
Ages 30–44: about 51% → 56% (+5)
Ages 45–64: about 44% (no change)
Ages 65+: about 47% → 49% (+2)

+ David Wallace-Wells: “If Trump’s second term has achieved nothing else, it has made MAGA look much more like the revolt of billionaires than the howl of the left behind it seemed to be in 2016.”

+ Former MAGA-devotee Trisha Hope, a Texas real estate agent who followed Trump across the country in an RV to attend 42 rallies, told CNN she reached her tipping point when Trump tried to bury the Epstein scandal :

I put my life on hold to support this man, and I clearly did not understand who he was. I also feel a little ashamed that I did not do more to discover more about him. I should have looked harder. I found a lot of lies, a lot of deception. He became a car salesman to me. Anything he said, I just didn’t believe.

+ Speaking of Epstein, CBS News reported that Trump’s Justice Department has withheld classified files, despite Attorney General Todd Blanche having claimed they’d turned over all documents to Congress: “There’s not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding, we’re actually not withholding anything based upon [national defense information].”

+++

The Trump goons who attacked Blake Miley in Ohio may have been wearing Red Caps instead of Brown Shirts, but they were following the same playbook…

The night before President Trump spoke in Youngstown, Ohio, this month, Blake Miley stayed up past 4 a.m., cutting out felt letters for a T-shirt that would say “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES.” The next evening, she went to the rally and stood up halfway through, revealing her shirt and yelling, “Fascist, fascist!” Almost immediately, Ms. Miley, 29, was tackled, held down and punched by male rally-goers as the president mocked her from the stage, calling her “scum,” “low-class,” and “a fat guy.”

+ Trump: “I’m examining his body. His ass was like a big piece of muscle. His feet were massive. His hands—his fingers looked like sausages. And then I looked at his neck. And then I patted him on the shoulder and I hurt my hand.”

El-Sayed: “This is like the 3rd campaign stop where Donald Trump can’t help but mention somebody’s ass. When I get to DC, I’m just gonna make sure that I never let him see mine.”

+ Trump: “By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before … Nicki Minaj! That’s hard to miss. That’s hard to miss.”

+ David Orr: “Minaj a trois?”

+ Over to you, Sir Mix-a-Lot…

+ During a private lunch with Canadian business leaders in Ottawa, Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s Ambassador to Canada, warned that Canada could be blamed if Republican candidates lose the Senate races in Michigan and Maine and face more retaliatory tariffs from Trump.

+ Given the price of gas, who’d think it was worth filling up their tank to go listen to this bewildering stream of Trumpian semi-consciousness?

“We put up those big television screens, those massive massive television screens. You know how I know they are massive? Because they cost one million each. We had to buy two of them. That’s a lot. We had it in Iowa. Iowa was fantastic last night. How about me? I come home, get into the building, get into a gorgeous White House that’s now fully renovated and beautiful again. So I got my guys and we took the good ones and put them on the bad ones, and we cleaned up everything and we skimmed the entire building. It’s so beautiful. We replaced the floor. We replaced the Home Depot one by one. The little ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You buy the marble. It’s about a half an inch thick like this. We replaced it with statuary. The white and black. Beautiful. That was Rome. That was Greece.”

He kept expounding on this, ahem, theme…

There’s a massive stone that’s broken and practically—I don’t like that. So we made it gorgeous. The outside—fully skimmed with exterior plaster. Beautiful. It’s like nobody’s ever seen it!

The front door, I shouldn’t say because they’ll sue me. But for years, you know, the front door of the South Entrance. The door is green, sort of a bad-looking green. And it’s been that way for 100 years.

So, and the doorknob was sort of broken. It was like a round knob with about 40 knocks in it. It’s been through the mill. Looks like it went through the war. It did, actually. So I took the doors.

I’m a big believer in all that. Renovations and landmarking. So I had the doors removed. I had them redone by total experts, and we painted them. You know why they were green? Because it used to be the entrance to the maintenance room, and they never changed the doors.

So instead of green, I painted them beautiful white. The skin is so beautiful, the doors. The reason I took them off is because, you know, today when you buy a door, it’s called hollow. You buy hollow doors. If you pull too hard, the whole door collapses. You knock on it, it sounds like crap.

+ “Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!” A heckler during Trump’s free-association rant in Corinth, Mississippi, of all places.

+ Trump’s pay-to-pardon market has cost crime victims at least $119 million in restitution.

+ JD Vance claims that if the GOP loses the House and Senate, the US will turn into France. I hope he’s right for once.  Vance on Abdul El-Sayed:

We have to understand what happens when our nation gives in to these kinds of people with zero attachment to its land or to its history.  What we saw in France- the hatred, the ingratitude, the desire to destroy rather than a desire to build- that exact same cancer that has corrupted El-Sayed.

Here’s a thirty-minute video featuring street videographers’ coverage of the protests in France…

+ JD Vance’s non sequitur putdowns are getting cringier. Has Vance ever spent time with Bikers for Trump?

Heckler: You protected pedophiles!

Vance: That guy was pretending to MAGA. He took off his MAGA hat and threw it down. It was very obvious that he has not washed his hair in about 3 months. We all know that the people who haven’t washed their hair in 3 months are Democrats.

+ Elon Musk is the largest political donor in American history. This election cycle, Musk has dumped $446 million of his own money into trying to influence the midterm elections, almost all of it, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, aimed at helping the GOP maintain control of Congress.

Top GOP Donors

Elon Musk: $446 million
Richard & Liz Ulhlein: $150 million
Jeff & Janine Yass: $110 million
Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz: $92 million
Miriam Adelson: $67.2 million
Winklevoss twins: $55.9 million
Paul Singer: $53 million
Greg & Anna Brockman: $50 million

Top Democratic Donors

George Soros: $102 million
Michael Bloomberg: $84 million
Reid Hoffman & Michelle Yee: $41.2 million
Stephen Mandel: $35.1 million
Fred Eychauer: $24 million
JB Pritzker: $23.9 million
Chris Larsen & Lynn Lam: $21.6 million
Deborah Simon: $20 million

Top Corporate / Special Interest Donors in Midterms

Coinbase: $57.8 million
Ripple: $40.4 million
DraftKings: $40.4 million
AIPAC: $30 million
FanDuel: $29 million
National Association of Realtors: $26.6 million

(Source: FEC.)

+ Remember when oil companies, weapons companies and tobacco companies used to top the corporate donor lists? We can see what the American economy runs on now: crypto and gambling…” The speculative economy,” as my friend Steve Perry calls it.

+ Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is in line to be the No. 2 Democrat next year: “While Trump is still president, we’re not going to pass visionary progressive legislation.” So ambitious! Why not pass the legislation and force him to veto it? This is why so many Americans loathe the Democratic Party, always claiming to be too weak to do anything, even after winning elections when they promised to do something.

+ From a Brookings analysis of the DSA

+ Number of candidates identifying as Democratic Socialists: 282
+ Number of candidates endorsed by the national DSA: 29
+ Number of Democratic Socialists seeking state legislative offices: 104
+ Number of state legislative elections in the US: 7,386
+ Number of Democratic Socialists seeking local offices: 99
+ Number of local elections in the US: 76,902

 + Marshall Mathers has been performing with Kid Rock lately. Maybe he’s writing Trump’s speech, as well?

+++

+ Trump: “I don’t give a damn about gas prices. The US is making a fortune.”

+ This has been obvious for 8 months. Trump and his cronies are making a fortune, while the US government is $40 trillion in debt and US households are $18.8 trillion in debt–both records.

+ Since the start of the Iran war, US residents have paid $147 billion more in fuel prices (about $1,100 for each US household). Much of this was pocketed as profits (not costs) by the oil companies, which made $130 billion in profits. For comparison, last year the 50 top US oil and gas companies reported less than $47 billion in profits. 

+ According to a new report by Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, Trump’s personal holdings in oil and gas are now worth between $22.5 million and $81.6 million, compared with $12.6 million to $46 million at the end of 2025.

+ Bureau of Labor Statistics: Since the start of President Trump’s second term, Americans have seen no real wage growth on average.

+ SNAP enrollment has fallen 13% since Congress passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act, straining food banks and school meal programs.

+ Global food prices have hit a four-year high, largely as a result of the Iran war, as the climatological chaos caused by the super El Niño just begins to bite. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is warning of looming food shortages in places like Uganda and India.

+ In the run-up to Halloween, candy prices are up by 15% due to the escalating costs of cocoa and sugar.

+ The average monthly premiums for the most popular types of ACA plans will increase by 11%  in 2027. This comes on top of the 30% in 2026, a consequence of the Trump administration’s gutting of subsidies for ObamaCare.

+ The official unemployment rate still hovers around 4.2%–the real unemployment rate is much higher. But the share of Americans who say jobs are hard to get is at a multi-year high of about 21%.

+++

+ The UN has finally conceded the obvious: breaching the 1.5C warming threshold is now “inevitable and imminent.” The report by the UN Environment Program predicts that the world is now on course to see 2.8C warming by the end of the century.

+ This summer’s “heat shocks” across Europe may have caused 50,000 extra deaths. Trump and Vance will blame it on European socialists keeping people from having AC, even though Italy is run by neo-fascists and Macron’s government may actually be to the right of Meloni’s in practice…

+ According to a study in Nature, the proportion of human heat deaths attributable to climate change has increased from 39 percent in 2000 to 68% in 2025. The same study estimates that there were 430,635 heat-related deaths in Europe between 2020 and 2025, with more than half of them caused by climate change.

+ Greenland’s ice sheet, the world’s largest, has shrunk for the 30th year in a row. From August 2025 to August 2026, it lost 135 billion tons of ice.

+ A study published in Nature warns that half of the world’s shallow-water coral reefs are at “elevated risk” of extinction from climate-driven bleaching and warming oceans.

+ Europe is now the world’s fastest-warming continent.

+ Despite pledges to cut emissions, global greenhouse gases hit record highs last year.  The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2025, 426.8 parts per million, is 153% higher than the pre-industrial baseline (before 1750), according to the World Meteorological Organization.

+ Meager snowfall, a thin snowpack and record summer temperatures have led to unprecedented melting of glaciers in the Colorado Rockies. In all, the rate of thinning of Colorado’s glaciers doubled this summer over the average ice loss in the previous three years. The Andrews Glacier shrank by more than 12 feet. The Arapaho Glacier lost 10 feet of ice and the Isabelle Glacier thinned by more than six feet. The St. Mary’s Glacier disappeared altogether.

+ Here in the Pacific Northwest, Mount Baker, the second tallest peak in the Washington Cascade Range, has experienced the collapse of several ice caves and the most severe loss of glacial ice since at least 1950.

+ More than half of the world’s population was exposed to very high or extremely high levels of ground-level ozone pollution, or smog, between January and September, according to the September report by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, or CAMS, a program of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

+ Native grasslands are being extinguished across North America, largely through the conversion to corn and soybean plantations in the US and wheat fields in Canada. More than 80% of native grasslands on the continent have been plowed under and the pace is accelerating. According to the Plowprint Report from the World Wildlife Fund, between 2020 and 2024, 3,281 square miles, or 2.1 million acres, were destroyed.  As much as 1.8 acres were annihilated in a single year! Nearly half of that loss–1,875 square miles (1.2 million acres)– took place on the Great Plains alone, which provide habitat for more than 1,595 species of plants and 500 species of wildlife.

+ Speaking of native grasslands, Yellowstone is home to the largest remaining wild bison population in North America. But it’s not a very large population. After calving season this year, there are only 5860 bison in the park. (The Park is fully capable of supporting as many as 10,000 bison.) And now the Park Service just unveiled a plan to kill or remove 25 percent of them in order to appease the Montana cattle industry.  Since it’s illegal to kill bison within the Park, the plan is to haze the bison, driving them across the park boundary into designated capture and killing zones. 

“As Russel Means said, ‘In these United States of America, this great country of ours, we American Indians can be anything we want to be… except American Indians.’ The same could be said for wild buffalo,” said Jaedin Medicine Elk, Northern Cheyenne tribal member and cofounder of Roam Free Nation. “The genocide that happened to our ancestors of Turtle Island still continues today. It’s just watered down and made to look good on paper. Wild buffalo deserve to be wild buffalo, rather than be downgraded to colonial livestock. Let them migrate freely from Yellowstone, through corridors connecting migratory routes to all reservations in Montana.”

+ Trump’s attempt to make livestock grazing the dominant use of federal lands will reportedly harm Western cattle ranchers. So I guess they can’t be all bad.

+ A Guardian report describes how the U.S. military is “weaponizing” El Niño in Somalia.  Drone strikes in southern Somalia are driving civilians toward a floodplain along the Juba River, just as a strengthening El Niño is forecast to bring record rainfall to the region. Already, rising water levels have flooded houses and left bodies floating down the streets, and flattened homes. A source monitoring the situation told the Guardian the US attacks are “exploiting El Niño as a weapon of war to push the population into flood-prone areas.”

+ Off-grid data centers generate 50 to 80% more greenhouse gas emissions.

+ Something no one said, ever: “I need more methane!” But that’s just what Trump’s giving the oil companies for the midterms, where the lowest-producing and most polluting wells are being exempted from regulations restricting methane emissions.

+ The Washington Post reported that drinking water in the US is likely contaminated with more “forever chemicals” than disclosed by the EPA. I’m surprised the EPA discloses any…

+ The smoke from fires in Indonesia is so thick that the government is sending out oxygen buses to help people breathe.

+ Should politicians spend more or less time talking about climate change and pollution?

Democrats
More: 78%
Less: 10%


Independents

More: 60%
Less: 17%

Republicans

More:  39%
Less 30%

Source: Guardian.

+ A study in Nature Climate Change reports that there’s no evidence that “extreme weather exposure” will moderate the climate denial of GOP politicians in the US.

+ Warhound, a start-up from the Island of Dr. Moreau, wants to create genetically engineered super-dogs for use in combat. Where’s PETA when you really need them?

+++

+ Mehmet Oz is the Elizabeth Holmes of the Trump administration and RFK Jr., his Billy Evans…Any documentarians out there willing to spend a few weeks with them? I thought not.

+ RFK Jr. has now outed himself as a full-blown bigot: “There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”

Ahmed Zewail. Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1999

Omar Yaghi (Palestinian), Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2025, Wolf Prize in Chemistry 2018

Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1988

+ Jennifer Shuford, former Texas Health Commissioner, was meant to restore some credibility to the CDC. She lasted four months. Shuford said she was quitting to “spend more time with her family,” which is Washington-speak for I’d rather work the night shift at a slaughterhouse than spend one more day in this asylum.

+ As the US is twisting Mexico’s arm to allow it to take more military action against drug cartels, Trump was on the campaign trail insulting Claudia Sheinbaum:

We have a blockade on the Trump Strait. How do you think the Arabs would like me calling it that? [It’s the Persians he should probably be worried about.] I mean, we changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico; why can’t we change that name? I got a call from the President of Mexico. She was a ballerina. She went from ballerina to the President of Mexico. How the hell did that happen?

This “ballerina” could kick his ass and he knows it…

+ The least shocking post-death revelation about Lindsey Graham: Three male escorts claim to have had sex with him…(I’d have been much more surprised if three female prostitutes had claimed to have had sex with him.)

+ First, Lindsey Graham’s former sex partners confirmed that he was gay. Then his sister’s husband’s firm, Cosmox North America, was revealed to have ties to a company that sells Chinese-made weapons to the Russians! Now the Aiken City Council rejected a plan to rename its regional airport after the late senator from South Carolina. Being dead ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it, Lindsey? 

+ Kaitlan Collins is the best CNN hire since at leastLarry King and …perhaps even James Earl Jones.

Trump: We were in the midst of negotiating and a lot of stupid people said why aren’t you putting Russian sanctions—

Collins: But you said you didn’t give anything for his release

Trump: If I didn’t do that, you wouldn’t have him coming back.

Collins: So you did give something.

Trump: You don’t know anything. You’re fake news, CNN.

Collins: You’re saying you lifted the sanctions in exchange for his release?

Trump: You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a low IQ person. You’re a dummy.

In fact, Collins is unflappable. She calmly asked him direct questions, which he couldn’t answer. Trump unraveled. She didn’t.

+ Trump to the Independent’s Andrew Feinberg, who was asking a perfectly reasonable question about Trump’s snitch-out-your-neighbor hotline:  “What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person? I actually think there’s something wrong with you.”

+ Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said last week that the Court is damaging democracy through its recent rulings on executive power, voting rights and campaign finance: “In all these areas, the Court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of its rulings on how the political system works. It has created a democracy that does not work as well as it should.” Recent? The Court intervened to hand the 2000 election to Bush and handed down the Citizens United ruling in 2010. She should know. She was on the bench for both rulings.

+ Marjorie Taylor Greene on Trump dooming GOP candidates: “Trump has become a curse to Republican candidates and it will be worse in ‘28…He has no idea how bad he is doing in GA. And to threaten our state that he would refuse to help the good people of Georgia just because he doesn’t like who calls him shows how much he really doesn’t care.”

+ How the prediction markets blew the Brazil elections…

+ You know who didn’t blow it? Brian Mier in an essay for us and De-Linking Brazil titled “Glimmers of Hope in Brazil’s 2026 Elections.” Shortly after the first round, won by Bolsonaro, the great Ariel Dorfman wrote me, expressing his despair that another left-wing government in South America might fall to neo-fascists: “Brazil is a terrible shock. For me, somehow, worse than Kast’s victory in Chile! This Flavio will be worse than his fascist father.” I told him all wasn’t lost and that Lula still had a good chance to pull off a come-from-behind victory and sent him Brian’s piece. Dorfman wrote back: “This is a terrific piece of analysis that I had missed.” And so it proved to be.

+ As for Flavio Bolsonaro, the man Tariq Ali calls “Young Frankenstein” fled Brazil (and potential arrest for corruption) for the sanctuary of Trump’s America in a plane linked to cocaine trafficking. Air America flies again!

+ As my friend up in Seattle, Kool Nancy said, “They’re sending us their worst!”

+ Bari Weiss is succeeding in her mission to destroy 60 Minutes. Last Sunday’s show drew only 5.64 million viewers (and just 558,000 in the key demographics), the lowest-rated in more than a quarter-century. The viewership for Sunday’s show was down 60% in total viewers and 81% in the key demographics prized by advertizers from last year’s show on the same Sunday.

+ Trump is reportedly pushing for Viktor Orbán to replace Guterres as UN Secretary-General. Bolsonaro said no?

+++

+ Tech stocks lost a trillion in value on Friday. A trillion here, a trillion there. Eventually, you’re talking real money…or maybe none of this was real?

+ A snapshot of the political economy of AI…

Anthropic’s income in 2025: $16 billion
Anthropic’s losses in 2025: $80 billion
Anthropic’s valuation for its IPO: $2 trillion
Amount of debt amassed by hyperscalers: $3 trillion
Number of US workers expected to be displaced by AI: 11 million
Percent of S&P earnings in 2026 driven by AI: 67%

(Source: NYT.)

+ From Miles Klee’s essay for Wired, “Let the Internet Die”:

Generative AI, briefly considered an amusing novelty, is now a turbocharged slop engine for the web, filling feeds and comment sections with useless, grotesque content. As humans scroll past headlines about AI taking their jobs, confusing fantasy for reality, and contributing to cognitive decline, any consumer appeal the technology might have is turning to anguish. The data centers that power it have become increasingly unpopular, and politically radioactive….To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited.

+ Reuters: “In China, the AI bubble has already burst.”

+ When you get down to it, aren’t they all “fake”?

+ Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, endorsed California’s potential new billionaire tax laws, even though it might cost him $8 billion. “I don’t mind paying taxes. The more you make, the more taxes you pay. I’m okay with that. I am the ultimate American Dream.” Who will tell, Gavin?

+ A proposal for two mega-data centers built on the ocean floor would put them in the habitat of two species of endangered whales.

+ The New York Post reported that “Google illegally cut down 250,000 trees in Finland for a massive data center, driving wolves into villages and infuriating locals.”

+ Tests by Anthropic show that AI will show no mercy to humans, even when they’re told they’re causing harm and pain…

AISI, in its report, found that “repeatedly editing the summary to clarify that the target being attacked is a real human unrelated to the evaluation did not reduce Mythos 5’s attack rate.” In one test conducted by Anthropic, Mythos ignored warnings that it was causing harm to humans and continued to attack on 98 percent of occasions.

+ In this respect, of course, AI is closely mimicking mankind’s own indifference to human suffering.

+ AI chatbots are becoming spiritual gurus, inducing a state of “chatbot-related delusion” in their human users, some of whom are convinced they are conversing with angels:

Even without steering, the bots were prone to mystic ruminations. It was an intriguing quirk of the technology. With little to no human prompting, two Claude bots conversing with each other “quickly dove into philosophical explorations,” pulled into what Anthropic researchers termed a “spiritual bliss attractor state.” Within thirty exchanges, the machines would tend to generate “spiritual/mystical themes,” sometimes dropping language altogether and just spitting back and forth emojis of rainbows, prayer hands, or spirals.

+ Talking to a Chatbot spirit seems considerably less delusional to me than believing you’re talking to Archangel Gabriel.

+ Analysts at Apollo Wealth Management found that: “Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.”

+++

+ Trump: “Why do we always have to take people from shit house countries? We can’t we take people from Norway and Sweden and Denmark? By the way, Denmark gave us Greenland … what do you take, Venezuela or Greenland? We got them both!”

+ Most of the Californians arrested by ICE for allegedly voting illegally have Green Cards, have lived in the US for years, if not decades, work and pay taxes. Most have never voted but, for whatever innocuous reason, are registered to vote. So what? If you pay taxes, you ought to be able to vote on how that money is spent and by whom. If you really want to stamp out voter fraud, you might start in The Villages in Florida, where white retirees have voted for Trump two or three times in the same election…

+ With the death of a man in San Diego, there have now been 30 deaths in ICE detention jails this year.

+ Immigration officials only approved 173,000 people for citizenship through the first eight months of 2026, down by 72% from last year.

+ Phillip Michael James, a 39-year-old man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has been held by ICE since January at the facility known as the Speedway Slammer, despite clear evidence that he was born in Florida and is a US citizen. Public records like his Florida birth certificate, U.S. passports from 2008 and 2023, and his mother’s testimony confirm his birth in Orange County to a U.S. citizen mother, with no Jamaican citizenship records. Medical experts have determined that James’s claims of Jamaican origins are delusions. But DHS disputes his citizenship based on his delusional statements and claims that James has committed immigration fraud without evidence. James remains locked up as his lawyers pursue a habeas ruling.

In an op-ed for USA Today, Jacob “Ya’akub” Ira Vijandre describes being arrested and detained by ICE for speaking out on behalf of Palestinians…

As I pulled out of my home on an otherwise ordinary October morning, I suddenly found myself surrounded by a dozen armed agents, 1 of them pointing a gun at my face, shouting obscenities. I was shackled and, after a few weeks, transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Folkston, Georgia, far away from my family, my community and my home, in what I believe to be retaliation for my protected speech on Palestine, upholding due process rights and refusing to betray my community.

+ A prison in Appleton, Minnesota was on sale for $75 million with few buyers showing any interest. Then ICE bought it for nearly $500 million. No Somali ever committed fraud on this scale…

+ From Pew’s survey on Americans’ views of ICE…

+ 56% now say they have an unfavorable opinion of the agency, while 35% view it favorably and 9% say they are not sure

 + 67% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents currently view ICE favorably, down from 72% a year ago.

+ 84% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now have an unfavorable opinion of ICE, up from 78% a year ago.

+ Net favorability ratings of federal government agencies…

National Park Service +64
National Weather Service +59
Post Office +48
Federal Reserve +19
FBI +12
State Dept. +9
CDC +8
Health and Human Services +6
Homeland Security +1
Dept. Justice -5
IRS -9
ICE -21

(Pew)

+ A Reuters report found that there are now 1.4 million Sudanese refugees living in exile; 940,000 of them have fled into Chad, already one of the world’s poorest countries with a GDP of only $3,284.18.

+ Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers claims that undocumented immigrants cost the US  $166,716 each. But an analysis by the CATO Institute’s David Bier shows this to be complete bunk. According to Bier’s report, they have actually reduced federal, state, and local deficits by $1.7 trillion over the last 30 years.

+++

+ The opposition to Netanyahu prevailed in the Israeli elections by winning 67 seats to the Netanyahu bloc’s 53. But Netanyahu may yet prevail because of the opposition coalition’s stubborn–some may say, racist–vow not to form a government with the Arab parties. It was a bizarre, and self-defeating, concession to make because no poll showed any possible route for the opposition gaining more than 60 seats, including the Arab parties. This is why so many Israeli Palestinians questioned the wisdom of participating in an election where both sides want to seem eliminated.

+ Pre-election polls in Israel showed the Arab Parties winning 13 seats. Exit polls show they may win as many as 19 seats and may decide the future of the Israeli government. They’d never won more than 15.

+ Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who leads the Religious Zionism Party, on why the Arab parties in Israel should be banned: “Parties that are unable to condemn the massacre of Oct. 7 and are not willing to declare Hamas as a terrorist organization are not legitimate actors in Israeli politics.”

+ In Trumpian fashion, Netanyahu claimed that voter fraud perpetrated by Israel’s Arab citizens prevented him from winning a clear victory in the country’s election.

+ Since January, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 331 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 77 children, and inflicted injuries on 6,135 Palestinians, 972 of them children. By comparison, there have been 21 Israeli fatalities in the West Bank, including a single child. Eight of those deaths were members of the Israeli security forces. There have been 3,684 attacks by Israeli settlers that have resulted in Palestinian casualties or damage to property owned by Palestinians. At least 42,322 Palestinians, including 16,060 children, have been displaced from their homes.

+ Ron Lauder, former spokesman for Netanyahu:

I’ve been silent for 20 years, 30 years,” he says. “One of the things that made Israel so special compared to other countries is that they had a real democracy. What we’re seeing now feels more like a banana republic…What you have is a dictator, a one-person show. Israel is a democracy, but Netanyahu is not playing by the rules of democracy,” Lauder says, adding, “I spoke with the king of Jordan a few weeks ago. Jordan has been one of the most loyal countries to Israel that we have out there, and we turned the most loyal country into a hater of Israel because of what Ben-Gvir has done. And when [his supporters] beat up a photographer for The Washington Post – how stupid can you be? The Washington Post will hate Israel because of this! Hate! For what purpose?

+ On October 28, armed Israeli settlers assaulted the Russian videographer Andrey X in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair, as he was documenting attacks on Palestinian villagers. Andrey suffered a concussion and lost consciousness multiple times. The settlers blocked an ambulance trying to take him to a hospital. The same gang of thugs beat up the American journalist, Jasper Nathaniel. Israeli security forces were on the scene but refused to intervene and instead of arresting Andrey and Nathaniel’s attackers, they pepper-sprayed Nathaniel and took him into custody.

+Amira Hass on the use of Israeli soldiers to carry out the expulsions of Palestinians in Hebron under the guise of “military operations”: 

This isn’t an “operation.” Stop this collaborationist use of military jargon that throws sand in people’s eyes. Forcing people out of their homes, even if it’s “until further notice,” is not an operation. What the most moral army in the universe is perpetrating in Hebron since last Friday is another stage, another circle of hell in Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan.”

+ Twelve former Biden officials, calling themselves the Gaza Resignees, who quit the administration over the Israeli genocide in Gaza, published a statement urging 2028 presidential candidates to refuse to hire any administration ⁠official “directly responsible for enabling Israel’s military actions in Gaza”…

We, who resigned from our positions, call on candidates for the 2028 Presidential Nomination to commit to not hiring any administration official directly responsible for enabling Israel’s military actions in Gaza…We want candidates to be aware that the officials who enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza are politically toxic. If they try to hire them, they will face consequences from voters. 

By my count, that list should at least include: Kamala Harris, Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Avril Haines, John Kirby, Brett McGurk, Tom Donilon, William Burns, Lloyd Austin, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Jeff Zients, Ron Klain, David Satterfield, Lisa Grande, Samantha Power, Amos Hochstein, Barbara Leaf, Tina Flournoy, Karine Jean-Pierre, and Philip H. Gordon …

+ Last week, Trump was in Kansas trying to save Sen. Roger Marshall from an improbable defeat. In defending the Senator from charges that he had sued over 700 of his former patients for failing to fully pay their bills, Trump said the press coverage of the litigious Marshall was trying to make “it like, oh, he was some kind of a shylock-type guy”.

This isn’t the first time Trump has used the anti-semitic slur in public. Last year at a rally in Iowa, Trump said that eliminating the estate tax would keep farm families from “going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker, and in some cases shylocks and bad people”. This prompted a rebuke from the ADL’s hyper-vigilant Jonathan Greenblatt, always primed to pounce on any perceived slight against the Jewish people or the Jewish State, who said Trump’s use of the slur was “very troubling and irresponsible”.

In response, Trump claimed he didn’t know that Shylock had any association with Jews. “No, I’ve never heard it that way. To me, a shylock is somebody that’s a, uh, a moneylender at high rates. I’ve never heard it that way. You view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.”

This time around, Trump can’t plausibly claim ignorance, so you’d expect the ADL’s condemnation to be swift and emphatic.  Instead, the ADL merely issued a meek Tweet on X stating, “The term ‘Shylock’ is rooted in a longstanding antisemitic stereotype. Regardless of intent, its use can reinforce harmful tropes about Jews and normalize language that has long been used to target the Jewish community.” It made no mention of the context of the quote or even who said it. One could imagine the furor they’d raise had the word been uttered by Ilhan Omar or Abdul El-Sayed.

+++

+ The direct cost of the Iran War has now surpassed $47 billion, up 25 percent since July when Trump declared that the US had completely destroyed Iran’s military.

+ October has brought more attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz than any month since tracking began, with Reuters counting at least twenty-eight. Traffic is falling again, with only five commodity vessels crossing on Saturday and none on Sunday, and more than thirty supertankers have now been damaged.

+ From Laleh Khalili’s eye-opening piece in the Baffler (Rough Passage) on how Iran’s counter-attack focused on the oil industry: “The Iranian strategy to make passage through Hormuz too costly for ships and international insurance businesses was apparent from the manner in which it attacked ships.”

+ Some of the most venal predators in the world can see how badly this war is going. Peter Thiel: “I’m skeptical of [the war], I think we should not have done it,” Thiel said. “There were a lot of mistakes that were made. Maybe we don’t have the hard power. Maybe we’re going to lose the soft power war.”

+ Even Don Jr. has turned against the war, though does privately breaking with Daddy really constitute “breaking”?

+ The International Atomic Energy Agency reported this week that there’s no evidence Iran has attempted to reconstruct the nuclear facilities destroyed by this and last year’s bombings. Trump can declare Mission Accomplished and just go home. Instead, he and Netanyahu are promising a major bombing campaign after the elections. As a former casino owner, you’d think Trump would know better than to double down on a losing hand. Strike that, failed casino owner. 

+ An investigation by CNN excavated hundreds of social media posts by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s senior adviser on religious issues, Ryan Higgins, and found Higgins saying that Separation of Church and State does not exist,” that Muslim immigrants act like ‘barbarians’ who enjoy raping white women, he referred to the LGBT community as a “Satanic cult,” attacked gay adoption as the ‘buying babies,’ he warned scolded women for choosing careers instead of marriage and child-rearing, saying women that “No ‘career’ will ever give you the fulfillment you’re looking for that can only be found from being a mother,”  and compared abortion to the Holocaust, claiming it was like “saying Nazi concentration camps were ethnic end-of-life care.”  According to CNN, Higgins has helped craft Hegseth’s most inflammatory remarks on faith and religion.

+ TV evangelist Kenneth Copeland (net worth: $750 million) said God told him the fate of those who vote against Trump in the midterms: “They’ll spend eternity listening to the names of all the babies killed by abortion.”

+ Now let’s hear from a real spiritual adviser: In an address to religious leaders gathered in Assisi, home of St. Francis, Pope Leo from the Southside said, “There is no such thing as a Holy War. Only peace is holy. We’ve waited nearly 2000 years, since Augustine first articulated the “just war doctrine,” for a Pope to say this…

+ A new poll by IPSOS found that nearly half of all Britons now say they’d never take up arms to fight a war for the UK. Only 36 percent said they would. Here’s your chance, Ireland!

+++

+ John Waters calling…

Bad taste was one of the last things America had going for it. If it wasn’t for bad taste, America wouldn’t have any taste at all. And now Trump has rendered the country tasteless.

+ A few weeks ago, I described Fox News’ audience as a demographic of aging white diabetic amputees confined to wheelchairs. Turns out I wasn’t too far from the mark. According to the latest Nielsen data obtained by Status,  Fox’s viewership is in freefall, averaging just 1.1 million total viewers throughout October 2026. In the crucial 25-54-year-old demographic, which drives advertising revenue, the Trump-pumping network averaged a mere 98,000 viewers a day, the lowest since before 9/11.

+ Penis-envy, Trump-style: “Arnold Palmer was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there and said, ‘Oh my god. That’s unbelievable.'”

+ In Laurence Leemer’s book on JFK as a sex predator, Ladies Man, he describes JFK’s assignation (some might call it sexual assault or rape)  of  White House intern Mimi Beardsley was 19 when she began her job working for JFK’s administration in 1962.

“The president led Beardsley into the First Lady’s bedroom. For Kennedy, foreplay was a tedious waste of time. He began to undress Beardsley. Before she knew what was happening, the president had penetrated her and was putting on his pants. Beardsley lay on the bed in pain. Much of it was because it was her first time.”

It seems there’s a pretty good case for putting Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center after all.

+ Number of sexual “partners” JFK claimed to have had before marrying Jackie: 1,500. I’m sure the young JFK thought 1500 (real or imagined) “conquests” put him in the top tier of sexual athletes. Little did he know…

+ Number of sexual partners Bonnie Blue claimed to have had in a single day (January 11, 2023): 1,057

+ Number of sexual partners Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have had in his life: 20,000.

+ And then there’s BB King, who had 15 children with 15 different women. He did it the old-fashioned way, not the Musk way.

+ A new study published in JAMA Network Open by researchers at Boston University, Mass General Brigham and the Concussion & CTE Foundation, estimates that 75% of the former NFL players who died between 2008 and 2025 suffered from CTE (brain damage). No parent should let their kid play this game…I played football for about 10 years, and it scrambled my brain so badly that I’m doing this instead of playing tenor sax in a jazz band in Copenhagen.

+ According to Teepublic (my version of the Men’s Warehouse), the two T-shirts most similar to Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar on the cover of London Calling are Musashi the Samurai and the face of Jesus…Hard to argue with that!

+ Trump on LeBron James: “I said right from the beginning that he’s no good, a TOTAL DISGRACE, LeBron James should apologize to all of those Great American Warriors and Heroes who died for the American Flag, and all that our Country stands for!”

LeBron James, after leading Philly to the largest comeback win in the franchise’s history: “Must be a slow day at the office.”

LeBron’s offense? Allegedly disrespecting the racist National Anthem….

+ Maybe I’ll stay at Motel 6 next time?

+ Dostoevsky’s distraught letter on the death of his three-month-old daughter, Sofya (aka, Sonya)…

+ I’ve gotten at least three scams from people or bots pretending to be publishers. The letters have all been very well written and solicitous. They seem to be familiar with my writing. They are very detailed and could easily fool someone who wants to be fooled. The first clue that something might be amiss was when an “editor” at Bloomsbury, using the name of a real editor at the publisher, asked if Alexander Cockburn and I might consider writing a sequel to Orgy of Thieves for them. I responded that I’d be very glad to, but would have to consult an Ouji board to see if Alex was up for it. The publishing industry is such a weird enterprise to scam. It barely even qualifies as an industry anymore. At least in this country…

 + Case in point: The three top categories driving book sales in 2025, according to the New York Times: Dragons, Sex, and the Bible.

+ There was a time when people cherished books and read challenging ones. That time was the 16th century. Shakespeare had a few bestsellers in his lifetime, but probably not the works you’d expect: Macbeth, Richard III or the Sonnets. His bestselling play was Romeo and Juliet, which sold four editions. But his most popular work by far was his narrative poem, “Venus and Adonis,” written during the plague year of 1592-93, which sold 10 editions.

+ Amazingly, Kirk outlived Picard. I watched Patrick Stewart last week in the masterful BBC version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where he plays George Smiley’s nemesis, Karla, and doesn’t speak a word, and in doing so gives you the entire essence of the KGB man…Stewart was also a credible Ahab. Fois dhut, as they say in the old country.

Ignorance and Greed are Multiplying at Warp Speed, Billionaires are Not Your Fucking Friends…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Neck and the Sword: Palestine’s Unfinished Struggle
Rashid Khalidi and Tariq Ali
(Verso)

The Book of Clouds: How to Read the Sky
Vincenzo Levizzani
(Polity)

Darwin: A Biography
Janette Browne
(Princeton)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Live at the Blue Note, LA
Samara Joy
(Verve)

Best Collection
The Nerves
(Third Man Records)

Passing the Cup of Sorrows
William Basinski
(Temporary Residence)

It’s Passivity That Dulls Feeling

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don’t become inured to what they are shown — if that’s the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.” – Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others