I’m completely disgusted today, and it takes a lot to get me to that point. If you watch our podcast every week, you know I’m a pretty chill guy. I try to take things in stride and focus on the good fight. That’s how I’ve always been. But everyone has their limit, and what’s happening right now in this country should be the limit for all of us.

Here’s the gist from AP, if you haven’t already heard:

The U.S. government will permanently drop tax claims connected to President Donald Trump, according to a settlement document that is part of a deal to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

The document says the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons, and the Trump organization’s current tax issues.”

Now, this comes on top of the federal government’s announcement yesterday, as described by CNN:

The Justice Department on Monday announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate President Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration.

It’s an unprecedented move that would allow the President’s administration to pay his supporters from a government agency he controls with taxpayer money.

There appears to be few constraints on who can submit a claim to the fund. The President has broadly stated that his allies were politically targeted by the justice system, from the years-old Russian collusion investigation to the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection to the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot.

I don’t have to tell you that these are serious developments, and the American people deserve to know exactly what’s happening here.

What’s Going On

A federal judge started asking questions about Trump’s IRS lawsuit, because, as President, Trump was effectively both plaintiff and defendant in the case. Instead of letting a court sort it out, the administration found a backdoor: drop the lawsuit and funnel the “settlement money” (i.e., our money) through the Justice Department. You know, the Justice Department that Trump controls.

Now we’ve got nearly $2 billion of American taxpayer money sitting in a fund, run by people the President can hire and fire at will, with no clear requirement to tell the American people who gets paid or why. In the military, we would have called that a lack of accountability. In government, it’s a lack of democracy.

Only Congress has the power to appropriate money. That’s not a bug of our system but a feature. One of the big ones. The President doesn’t get to write checks to his allies from public funds just because he feels like it. Well, until now anyway.

Pissed off yet? Wait, there’s more.

On top of that, the government has permanently agreed to stop examining Trump’s taxes—his, his sons’, his whole organization. Forever. Through a deal he negotiated for himself. That’s what they call a sweetheart deal, by the way. The rest of us don’t get those.

The tax piece is almost worse than the slush fund piece, not only because no judge or jury heard the case, but also because it isn’t how justice works for anyone else in this country. Trump used the power of his office to make the whole thing go away—for himself and his family and his company—forever. It’s an extraordinarily gross abuse of executive power that puts Trump squarely above the law.

And when you step back and look at both things together, the pattern becomes even clearer: government institutions are systematically being used to benefit the President, not to serve the public. The Justice Department. The IRS. The courts. They are all supposed to be neutral, acting in our interest without fear or favor. The moment they stop being neutral, people stop trusting them. And once that trust is gone, it’s very hard to get back. I’ve served this country and believe in its institutions. But institutions don’t protect themselves; the people inside them have to do that.

Former DOJ officials have warned that this fits a pattern of corruption “eroding DOJ’s integrity and Americans’ faith in the rule of law.” Well yeah. This is so outside the bounds of normal partisan hardball, it’s not even in the same stadium. Hell, it’s not even the same sport. The executive branch is unilaterally directing taxpayer money to political allies of the President while simultaneously insulating the President from any legal accountability. This is a huge departure from American democratic norms. It’s the kind of thing that happens in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

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The Silver Lining?

As furious as this makes me—and should make all Americans—I’m always looking for the silver lining. I can’t help it; it’s my nature. So first off, while the mere attempt to do this is frankly obscene, it will, of course, be met with swift and significant legal challenges. Even a rudimentary understanding of the Constitution would suggest it will be blocked by the courts, but I won’t put anything past the majority in this Supreme Court. Congress can also intervene, and it certainly should. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was already grilled about it by the Senate Appropriations Committee today.

But here’s what gives me some optimism. A monthly poll by Change Research has found that, for the past three months, government corruption has ranked first among Americans’ concerns going into the midterms—and their concern is growing. Thirty-four percent of participants cited corruption as their top concern in February and March, and that number rose to 37% in April. It beat out immigration, healthcare, and even inflation and the high cost of goods, which ranked second, hovering around 30%. That’s astounding. So Americans are paying attention, and they don’t like what they see. And that’s before this latest assault on our intelligence and the public purse.

Think about it…Trump has profited richly from a crypto scheme, increasing his personal worth by billions; accepted foreign emoluments, including a jet from Qatar he plans to keep when (if?) he leaves office; strongarmed law firms, universities, and networks into settling frivolous lawsuits in his favor; stolen Venezuela’s oil and diverted the profits to himself; made millions by dining at Mar-a-Lago with people seeking access; sold campaign merch from the Oval Office; and struck all manner of pay-to-play deals. And that’s not even counting what his sons and son-in-law are up to. It’s disgusting.

In this environment, with Trump’s approval tanking and dragging congressional Republicans down with him, to attempt something so brazen as openly raiding taxpayer funds is…bizarre, for lack of a better word. People aren’t stupid. They know what they’re paying right now for groceries and gas, despite the rosy picture the administration tries to paint. They know who the President is right now, and they remember the promises he made. The percentage of Americans who voted for Trump is not the same as the percentage of Americans who worship Trump. And the former group is getting frustrated, while the latter group is getting smaller.

That gives us a massive opening, less than six months from the midterms. Americans don’t like government corruption. Much like the economy, it’s not a partisan issue. And corruption like this—so flagrant, so out-in-the-open—is impossible to hide or deny. They’re not even trying.

The silver lining may very well end up being not the courts, not Congress, but the American voter.

Hang in there, friends.

Catch Our Weekly Podcast!

Need some hope? There are amazing candidates out there who can help us out of this mess, but we have to help them first! Join us every Wednesday at 3pm ET to meet some of them. This week: Former Rep. Elaine Luria for U.S. Congress from Virginia’s 2nd District

Here’s our last episode, if you missed it.

If you are in a position to support these great candidates financially, please visit Hold The Line PAC.

Madeline is flying solo tonight, live from a New York City hotel room fresh off a NewsNation appearance — and she has a lot on her mind.

She opens with a sharp take on the Kamala question Democrats keep getting wrong: fear isn’t a message, and identity alone doesn’t move non-voters. What actually works — and what Obama and Zohran Mamdani understood — is painting a concrete picture of a better future and showing your work.

Then things get deep. Madeline pulls a thread that starts with Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and data harvesting, and traces it all the way back to an 800 AD theological dispute about the nature of the Holy Trinity. She connects the dots between Charlemagne’s power grab, the 1053 split between Rome and Constantinople, the Crusades, Opus Dei’s founding in fascist Spain, and the Vatican’s wartime deal with the Nazis — all to explain why a small but powerful coalition of Catholic integralists, traditionalists, and war profiteers has been at war with the modernizing reforms of Vatican II ever since.

Along the way: why Peter Thiel’s early Facebook investment wasn’t about social media, what Dario Amodei’s refusal to work with Pete Hegseth may have to do with a bombed girls’ school, and why the people running things behind Trump aren’t ideologues — they’re risk assessors with a very long game.

This one goes places. Take notes.

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Marcus and Madeline open on the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and Tennessee’s lightning-fast move to redraw maps the very next day. If you needed proof that the ruling was never about legal nuance, there it is. They break down what’s happening with redistricting battles across the South and why showing up in November in overwhelming numbers is no longer optional — it’s the whole ballgame.

Then it’s on to Trump’s state visit to China. Marcus isn’t impressed. Xi Jinping negotiates. Trump gives things away. And with Russia, China, and Iran all pulling in the same direction, Madeline connects the dots on why the Ukraine war endgame may be the one prize keeping Trump on board with everything else.

The economy gets its due too — sky-high gas prices, grocery costs, inflation at a three-and-a-half-year high, and a president who literally said out loud he doesn’t think about your financial situation. Plus: why billion-dollar corporations paying less in taxes than teachers should be the easiest argument in the world to make.

And finally — the Drunk Cabinet. Boxwine Shapiro. Whiskey Pete. And the newest addition: Cashtini. Why does this administration keep sending people to Capitol Hill who can’t hold it together, and what would real congressional accountability actually look like?

Marcus and Madeline start with Trump’s stunning admission that he simply doesn’t think about how his decisions affect everyday Americans, and break down why that matters so much to the working-class voters who put him in office. The economy isn’t abstract — it’s groceries, gas, energy bills, and a generation of young people who can’t afford a home or a future.

Then the conversation gets personal. From data centers threatening historic communities like Social Circle, Georgia, to the slow erosion of rights that both Marcus and Madeline once thought were permanent — they reckon with the unsettling realization that the civil rights fights their grandparents lived through aren’t as far behind us as they believed.

Madeline also previews her investigative article series connecting Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, the military industrial complex, and Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” — and explains why Trump posting an AI Jesus photo and attacking the Pope isn’t random noise. It’s a thread, and she’s pulling it.

Plus: Team Pope Leo. Full stop.

The Pope is the most powerful influencer in the world.

1.6 billion people today,

over 60 million of whom are American,

look to the Pope for moral guidance —

To help them see the truth

In a world that is constantly challenging our perception of what is right and wrong.

He’s the world’s most powerful influencer.

That has been the case for over a thousand years —

And world leaders have never liked it.

Because this kind of influencer doesn’t tell you which skin care product to buy or which banking app to download -

He tells you what you should accept as morally right and just and good.

He tells you who you should or shouldn’t trust.

So when Pope Leo XIV opines on the wars in the Middle East, and he tells some 1 out of every 5 Americans that their President’s acts of war are morally reprehensible, and that there is no justification for the killing of innocent people —

He poses an extraordinary threat the Trump administration’s support from the American electorate.

But the American political right isn’t the only group that’s threatened by Pope Leo and the Vatican…

Who is Behind the Campaign Against the Pope?

On a recent episode of Adam Mockler’s show, Democratic strategist Mike Nellis makes the case that behind the Trump administration’s attempt to “erode America’s relationship with the Vatican” is none other than our favorite sweaty tech bro, Peter Thiel.

Nellis surfaces recent, direct quotes from Thiel, in which he publicly states that he is concerned about JD Vance getting “too close to the pope,” and that he worries about the papacy’s “independent moral authority,” and the “global reach” his influence would have.

But why would Thiel be concerned with the scope of the Pope’s authority on moral issues?

And why would Thiel want to undermine the relationship between the Vice President and the spiritual leader of the faith to which he so recently converted?

“Peter Thiel sees the Vatican as a threat because the Vatican actually teaches the Catholic values that I believe in,” Nellis says.

I’d like to dig deeper on this point about Catholic values —

Because with Nellis’ indictment of Thiel here, he’s actually tapping into a controversy that spans over a thousand years;

And for the last sixty years in America, that conflict has been slowly but surely coming to a head.

So I’ll tell you why Peter Thiel wants to drive a wedge between Americans and the Vatican,

But I have to set the stage first —

The Vatican vs The American Right

How the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) Changed Everything

Essentially - the Vatican formally announced in 1965 that Catholics believe in freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, as a matter human dignity;

That all people are equal before the law and in the eyes of God;

That every person in the world has the right to be free from being coerced into practicing any one religion;

And that human dignity universal.

The declaration is known as the Dignitas Humanae.

Unsurprisingly, it pissed a lot of people off -

Particularly those who adhered to the traditional Catholic doctrine —

Which, for the last thousand years, has actually stated the exact opposite…

Just War Theory

In response to Pope Leo’s recent criticisms of the Trump administration’s acts of war, VP Vance cited to a “more than a thousand-year tradition of just war theory” in the Catholic Church.

And he’s not wrong about that -

Since 1095 AD, when it came to issue of the existence of those outside the faith, the formal doctrine of the Church has been error non habet ius -

Error has no rights.

If error has no rights, then people in error have no rights.

For a thousand years, this doctrine was used to justify acts of holy war. The Crusades, the Inquisition, forced conversions, the burning of heretics, and the confinement of Jews to ghettos.1

But the Dignitatis Humanae reversed that principle;

From then on, it would be a matter of formal doctrine that every human being — regardless of race, religion or creed — has an inherent right to religious freedom. To freedom of conscience.

Not because every belief is correct,

But because every person is worthy of dignity.

So yeah, some people didn’t like that.

And I’ll tell you exactly who and why.

The Backlash

The Moneyed Interests

Credit: Marco Bello - Getty Images

So let’s talk about the obvious piece here first –

If the biggest influencer in the world on moral and ethical matters is against war in general - who is that gonna hurt?

Best Answer: War Profiteers.

Bingo.

And who did our friend Mike Nellis tell us he thought was behind the campaign against Pope Leo?

There’s that sweaty tech bro again!

Peter Thiel.

War Profiteer extraordinaire. *Please see my previous article on Thiel’s Epstein connection

But, as I said before, he’s not the only one invested in this fight;

And actually - money isn’t Thiel’s only objective —

The Backlash

The Ideological Interests, Part I

The Heritage Foundation & Opus Dei

There was major backlash in the United States after the Vatican’s pronouncements.

In fact – guess who had one of the most powerful dissenting voices of all?

None other than the man who –

1. Founded the Heritage Foundation,

2. Coined the term the moral majority, and

3. Was famously quoted saying “I don’t want everybody to vote,” –

Mr. Paul Weyrich.

Paul Weyrich has been described as staunchly anti-Vatican II. Indeed, in 1968, he transferred from the Latin Church to the Melkite Church, hoping to retreat from the “modernism” of Roman Catholicism. He believed in “Christianizing America,” and “spreading the Gospel in a political context.”2

Today, the Heritage Foundation is being run by Mr. Kevin Roberts.

Roberts believes that America’s children need to be rescued from the progressive, leftist values in our society today. He has said, “It is not enough to pass laws if we do not form souls.” He also spearheaded Project 2025 - or as Heritage calls it - “The Mandate for Leadership.” The 900-page document explicitly suggests that:

1. Government policy be infused with “biblical principles,”

2. Agencies deemed to be against this right-wing agenda be dismantled, and

3. Executive power be consolidated (contrary to what the Constitution and traditional American values would dictate) in order to impose these ideals upon the American people.3

Once a week, Mr. Roberts receives spiritual guidance from the priests at the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC, who belong to a group called Opus Dei.

Opus Dei is formally recognized Catholic Prelature, with the stated goal of building “a rising militia” of professionals who would infiltrate secular institutions and use their positions to “carry out the orders of Christ.”

Opus Dei founder, St. Josemaria Escriva, felt that society in Spain during the 1930s was becoming too progressive, and that the way to combat that was to “sanctify the world from within,” by recruiting people in high places to join their cause.

From the Opus Dei statutes: “The goal is to bring about "persons of all walks of life, first of all the intellectuals" who practice Christianity so that "all things will be put in order according to the Will of the Creator.”4

Suffice to say: The core tenets of Opus Dei do not comport with those of Vatican II.

Here’s a list of other folks who are connected to the Trump Administration who are also members of Opus Dei or are routinely counseled by an Opus Dei priest:

• Mick Mulvaney — White House Chief of Staff and Director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term. Confirmed Opus Dei member.

• Leonard Leo — Co-chair of the Federalist Society. Board member of the Catholic Information Center. Funded more than half the groups behind Project 2025. Built the pipeline that produced six conservative Catholic Supreme Court justices. The Opus Dei priest at the CIC is a regular visitor at his family mansion in Maine. According to the man who literally wrote the book on Opus Dei, Gareth Gore, the overturning of Roe v. Wade “would not have been possible without the direct involvement of Opus Dei insiders working for Trump.”5

• Larry Kudlow — Director of the National Economic Council under Trump. Converted from Judaism to Catholicism at the CIC by Opus Dei priest Father McCloskey.

• Newt Gingrich — Former Speaker of the House, key Trump ally. Converted to Catholicism at the CIC by Father McCloskey.

• Antonin Scalia — Supreme Court Justice. Regular at Opus Dei retreats. His originalism doctrine is the judicial philosophy of the current conservative Court majority.

Also:

• Bill Barr — Former Attorney General under Trump. Opus Dei took the rare step of publicly denying his membership. However, he did served on the board of the Opus Dei-run Catholic Information Center from 2014-2017. His speechwriter was an Opus Deo priest. He also gave a speech at Notre Dame calling “militant secularists” a threat to civilization.

• Pat Cipollone — White House Counsel. Former board member of the Catholic Information Center. Led Trump’s impeachment defense.

To Recap:

Vatican II professes that all humans are inherently entitled to freedom from being coerced into living by the tenets of any one religion - as a matter of human dignity —

Opus Dei’s declared mission is to place its members in positions of elite institutional power — in government, finance, media, education, and the judiciary — to ensure that Catholic doctrine shapes secular law and culture from the inside;

To infiltrate the upper levels of society — government, media, finance, education — and use that influence to reshape institutions according to its religious agenda;

To operate as a transnational network of elites, placed in positions of power across governments and institutions, exercising influence through “holy discretion” and “divine deception.”

Funny - it seems like that the exact same thing Jewish people are accused of doing…

*Please see the follow up article, Accusations in a Mirror: “The Cleverest Trick in the Book”

Now, based on the rhetoric from the Trump administration, do you think Opus Dei has been successful in its mission?

Wait - - don’t answer that yet -

We still have to do JD Vance and Steve Bannon…

The Backlash

The Ideological Interests, Part II

Whatever the Hell You’d Call Steve Bannon’s Version

For a former altar boy who grew up in a Catholic home, Steve Bannon is very well versed in world religions.

As a young man in the Navy, Bannon was frequently spotted at the local occult bookshops near different ports of call. Benjamin Titlebaum, who wrote the book on Bannon, says he took a particular interest in studying Theosophy - the occult belief system to which many Nazis subscribed in the 1930s and 40s due to its emphasis on Aryans as a superior race.6

Bannon now describes himself as a Catholic Nationalist. He believes in integrating Catholic values into the policies of government, but the Church still remains the subordinate entity.7

He also identifies as a Traditionalist. It’s an interesting choice for him, because this belief system is actually rooted moreso in Eastern religions, like Vedic Hinduism and Sufi Islam. As a Traditionalist, he believes that there should be a rigid and definite hierarchy to society, because people are not all inherently of equal worth.8

I know it sounds insane, but so does Steve Bannon.

*Please see my video on Steve Bannon, tech bros, christian nationalists, the military industrial complex and Traditionalism, linked below.

By the time Bannon began his foray into politics, there was already a right-wing religious and political movement brewing which, as a foundational principle, rejected the notions of equality and universal dignity amongst human beings.

He could just jump on that bandwagon.

He started by working as an editor at Breitbart News and hosting his own radio show - War Room - where he could start spreading the rhetorical messages he thought would help bring about a major social change. Bannon is smart, and he’s studied this. He knows you need hearts and minds in order to win a voter’s favor - and that using the proper messaging is the only way to do that.

See - Bannon did exactly what Thiel was talking about when he said they could use technology to bypass the hurdles of democracy. Bannon created a company called Cambridge analytics to collect millions of pieces of data on Americans so he could see what would trigger us emotionally, and then crafted a populist message he knew at least some Americans would like.

It’s a way to win over the hearts and minds of the people without being one of us —

Or understanding us at all.

His craziest idea though - by far - was to train political operatives, whom he would refer to as gladiators, at a school inside of an old monastery in Rome.

Yes - you read that right.

Their job would be to learn the proper messaging and the rhetoric, and to send them out into the world to deliver the good news.

In 2019, Bannon worked with Mr. Benjamin Harnwell - a former right wing aide in British politics - to put the school together. Harnwell was inspired to jump in this fight because he witnessed a nominee for the position of European Justice and Security withdraw himself from consideration for the position, after he received serious backlash for “describing homosexuality as a sin and saying the principal role of women was to have children.”

Harnwell started a Christian right-wing think tank in Rome where he could work to promote the place of Christian values within the government.

And GUESS WHAT HE CALLED IT!!!!

The Dignitas Humanae Institute.

I’m not kidding.

(I’m telling you - these people take the names of powerful things and purposefully recycle them in a way that minimizes their power. It’s a pattern. I’ll show it to you throughout the series. If you slap a label on its opposite, its meaning starts to change.)

The purpose of the institute, in its own words:

The Dignitatis Humanae Institute is a direct response to a growing secularist intolerance to Christians of all confessions that has led to a myriad of attacks on human dignity. Just as many secularist groups have mobilized to create effective advocacy groups across the world, so the Institute plans on doing the same, pushing back the tide of radical secularism which is threatening the dignity of increasing numbers of people, especially the vulnerable and the weak.

So you can bet Steve Bannon loved that guy.

He and Harnwell decided to use the umbrella of the Dignitas Humane Institute to build what they called a “modern gladiator school” for training right-wing politicians.9

To add some institutional legitimacy to the project, they recruited Cardinal Raymond Burke to join their efforts. Cardinal Burke was known to be a vehement critic of Pope Francis’ “modern” ways and frequently spoke out against welcoming LGBTQ+ individuals to the faith.10 Burke told Reuters that he looked forward to promoting projects “in the defense of what used to be called Christendom.”

Turns out, Bannon wasn’t such a fan of Pope Francis either —11

In an June 2019 email exchange the Department of Justice recently released from the Epstein files, it appears that Bannon reached out to Jeffrey Epstein to suggest that they make a documentary about the sexual abuse cover-up at the Vatican:

Bannon: "You are now exec producer of 'ITCOTV [In The Closet of the Vatican].'"

Epstein: "Porn."

Bannon: “Will take down Francis. The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU — come on brother.”12

Interestingly, Cardinal Burke would resign from his position as honorary president of the school in June of 2019 as well. Burke said he realized it was becoming “more and more identified with the political program of Mr. Bannon.”

The project never officially got off the ground — as far as we know.

It appears I have just about reached my word limit for this article.

We will have to deal with JD Vance & Peter Thiel in the next one.

*Please look out for my follow up article JD Vance is a Plant for Peter Thiel

Marcus and Madeline sit down with Bob Trammell, Democratic candidate for Attorney General of Georgia. Bob shares his journey from the one-traffic-light town of Luthersville to the State House floor — and why the current assault on voting rights made 2026 the race he couldn’t sit out.

They cover the collapse of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and what it means for elections at every level of government, from Congress down to your local school board. Bob breaks down his day-one plan to create a Voting Rights Division within the Department of Law, his commitment not to prosecute women or doctors under Georgia’s abortion law, and his vision for using the AG’s consumer protection powers to go after crypto scams, corporate polluters, and the fraudsters targeting Georgia seniors.

Plus — what running for office looks like when your eight-year-old wants to ride along.

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a congressional district map that 1.6 million Virginia voters had approved just 17 days prior. The map was expected to give Democrats 10 of Virginia’s 11 seats in the U.S. House. The court threw it out anyway. And it did so in the name of protecting democracy.

I’ve written in this space before about Pam Bondi and the Justice Department, and about Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon. In both cases, I made the same argument: the people failing us aren’t aberrations but endpoints. They are what you get when the underlying controls break down, and no one fixes them.

What happened in Virginia last week is the same story. Madiba K. Dennie, deputy editor at Balls & Strikes, broke it down so cleanly that I want to use her analysis as the backbone of this piece. Her essay is called “Virginia Supreme Court: To Protect Democracy, We Must Stop Voters From Participating In It,” and if you haven’t read it, you should. What I want to do here is add a compliance layer to what she’s already said, because the pattern she’s describing isn’t just a legal problem but an institutional architecture problem. And that is 100% my lane.

What Actually Happened

The Virginia legislature passed a constitutional amendment to redraw the state’s congressional districts. Under Virginia’s constitution, amendments have to pass the legislature twice—with an intervening election in between—before going to voters for ratification. The legislature did that. Voters ratified the new map in April, 1.6 million to 1.5 million.

The Virginia Supreme Court threw the whole thing out. The majority’s reasoning, as Dennie explains, centered on a technicality: the legislature first passed the amendment on October 31, 2025—four days before Election Day, but after early voting had already been underway (it began on September 19). Because more than 1.3 million Virginians had already cast ballots before the legislature acted, the court said those voters were denied their constitutional opportunity to weigh in on the amendment when choosing their legislators.

On the surface, that sounds like a principled procedural defense of democratic participation. But if you look closer, it is the opposite. Because the amendment then went before the voters directly, and they approved it.

Dennie points out that Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, writing for the majority, dismissed the winning margin as representing only 1.69% of total votes cast in the election cycle—a framing she correctly identifies as a creative approach to arithmetic, given that the amendment passed 51.7% to 48.3%. In compliance, we might call that kind of statistical maneuvering motivated reasoning. It is what happens when biases are consciously or subconsciously used to produce justifications for desired conclusions, rather than an objective evaluation of the evidence.

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Is This a One-Off or a Pattern?

This is always the first question I ask. One bad ruling is an error. Two is a coincidence. Three or more is a system telling you something about itself.

Dennie puts the Virginia decision in its proper context: it didn’t happen in a vacuum. It occurred just a week after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively killed the Voting Rights Act, empowering red states to draw racially gerrymandered maps for partisan purposes. Tennessee Republicans moved almost immediately, passing a map designed to eliminate the last remaining stronghold of Black Democratic representation in the state.

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine called this out directly, noting that Virginia actually let the people decide while Republican-led states were redrawing maps through backroom deals. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said the ruling “follows a dangerous trend of tilting power away from the people.”

In compliance, we would call what Virginia’s voters experienced a control failure. The control in this case—the amendment ratification process—appeared to function. The inputs went in correctly. The voters showed up. The result was certified. And then an external body invalidated the entire process on procedural grounds that didn’t stop the process from proceeding in the first place. The court vetoed We the People.

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What a Compliance Audit of American Democracy Would Find

If American democracy were a financial institution, a corporation, or a nonprofit subject to accountability standards, this ruling would not pass its own compliance audit. Not even close. Here is what the audit findings would look like:

• Finding 1 — Selective enforcement of procedural rules. Procedural standards are applied stringently when they produce outcomes that limit the political power of the majority, and loosely or not at all when they protect incumbent power. This is the textbook definition of an uneven controls environment.

• Finding 2 — Outcomes-driven legal interpretation. When the same court system produces rulings that consistently advantage one political party—protecting gerrymandered maps in red states while invalidating voter-approved maps in blue ones—the institution has abandoned the appearance of neutrality. Neutrality is not optional in compliance. It is the foundation.

• Finding 3 — Voter participation treated as a liability, not an asset. A democracy that responds to high voter turnout and ratification margins by finding procedural reasons to invalidate the result is not protecting participation. It is managing it. In any accountability framework, that is a material finding.

• Finding 4 — The corrective mechanisms have been captured. The Voting Rights Act was the systemic corrective for racially discriminatory redistricting. The Supreme Court gutted it. State-level redistricting in blue states was the corrective for partisan gerrymandering in red states. Virginia’s Supreme Court just gutted that too. When the corrective mechanisms are themselves removed, the system has no pathway to self-correction. That is an institution in structural failure.
  

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The Pattern Is the Point

Dennie ends her piece with a simple statement that I think is exactly right: “The Virginia Supreme Court’s decision purporting to override an election is not just a blow to Democrats. It is a blow to democracy.”

I would add that it’s a blow that follows a pattern, one we’ve seen throughout the federal government. The DOJ protecting powerful interests over vulnerable ones. The Pentagon eroding its own oversight mechanisms. The courts finding procedural grounds to invalidate the democratically expressed will of the people. These are all chapters in the same story.

In compliance, the corrective action for a pattern failure is never just fixing the individual incident. You have to address the underlying architecture. In Virginia, the fight isn’t over. Attorney General Jones says his team is evaluating every legal pathway forward. But more broadly, the architecture that needs restoring is this:

• A Voting Rights Act with real enforcement teeth

• Redistricting processes that cannot be invalidated after the fact on manufactured procedural grounds

• Judicial standards that prioritize consistency of application

• An electorate that understands what is being done, and why, and by whom

That last one is where this newsletter lives. We all know something is gravely wrong. I am going to keep interpreting it through a compliance framework. The people pulling the levers are counting on most Americans not understanding the controls environment well enough to see the failure for what it is.

We see it. Crystal clear. And we’re going to keep saying so.

Madiba K. Dennie’s full piece at Balls & Strikes is available here: Virginia Supreme Court: To Protect Democracy, We Must Stop Voters from Participating in It

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Democrats have outperformed Kamala Harris in 193 of 229 state and federal elections since Trump's inauguration. The momentum is real — but so is the backlash. Marcus Flowers and Madeline Somerville break down the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act, what it actually means for minority representation, and why Chief Justice John Roberts has been working toward this moment since the 1970s. Plus: the DOJ's subpoenas targeting Fulton County election workers, why the activist majority on the Court keeps making the unthinkable happen, and what Democrats absolutely must do if they take back the House and Senate in November. Spoiler: another round of committee hearings isn't going to cut it.

He’s the one VP Vance calls when he wants to talk through his thoughts on geopolitical strategy, social ideology, and psychology of the masses.1

He’s the guy who built the operating system upon which the primary players in the military industrial complex—including the United States—have become dependent.

So when Jacobin and The Guardian revealed that the extent of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Thiel was actually much deeper than many of us realized, new media began shining a much-needed spotlight on Thiel, the man—making the argument that perhaps rather than being an eccentric, enigmatic, quirky tech-bro type character, he might actually be someone far more calculated, and far more dangerous, than his public persona suggested.

Last week, on an episode of The Adam Mockler Show, Democratic strategist Mike Nellis made the argument that “…we have to treat Peter Thiel,” considering the tremendous amount of power and influence that he has in our government, “as a serious threat.”

In making his argument, Nellis focuses specifically on three examples of disturbing behavior we’ve seen from Thiel:

1) The extent of Thiel’s relationship with Epstein,

2) Thiel’s campaign to undermine Pope Leo, and

3) Thiel’s global lectures on the antichrist.

Instinctively, Nellis feels that all of this bizarre, seemingly disconnected behavior can all be explained by the same motivating factor. He just doesn’t know what it is.

I do.

But in order to explain the “why,” we have to set the stage first:

We can begin by explaining the surface-level reasons for the interactions between Epstein and Thiel:

Jeffrey Epstein operated the off-the-grid marketplace for the world’s military industrial complex.

Think of him as the Ross Ulbricht of his very own dark web network: he doesn’t make anything or sell anything, but he facilitates the transactions between individuals or entities that cannot operate on the open market. Unlike Ulbricht, however, Epstein was not a passive operator. He was the facilitator. The middleman. Sort of an evil matchmaker, if you will—helping eager arms dealers find clients who either 1) were in need of the tools to wage war, or 2) were looking to invest in the tools.

Peter Thiel is an arms dealer. A defense contractor extraordinaire. Thiel bankrolled the Palantir software, which is officially marketed as “the operating system for defense decision making.”2 His company’s slogan is, “Your software is the weapons system.”3

So why would Epstein and Thiel interact? It’s simple: They’re both war profiteers. Thiel needs buyers for his surveillance software, and Epstein had every defense minister, intelligence chief, and sovereign wealth fund manager in the world on speed dial.

Epstein was Thiel’s broker.

And how do we know this? Here’s a quick timeline of the interactions between the two that we can see from the Epstein files:

2010-2013: Palantir Hits a Wall

• Over-reliance on U.S. government contracts. Needs to expand internationally.

• February 2013: Audio recording captures Epstein advising outgoing Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to “get involved with Thiel and his surveillance firm Palantir.”

2014: Thiel Joins Epstein’s Network

• Reid Hoffman hosts the introduction at his house after Epstein nudges, “Will Peter Thiel be around?”

• Epstein arranges a meeting between Thiel and Barak—former PM, former Defense Minister to Israel.

• Epstein makes at least five attempts to connect Thiel with Bill Burns, then Deputy Secretary of State, future CIA Director. They are eventually put in direct contact.

• Epstein connects Thiel directly with Sergei Belyakov, a former Russian official and graduate of Russia’s spy academy. Belyakov later tells Epstein that Thiel’s insights on the Russian economy were “very helpful.”

• Epstein invites Thiel during UN General Assembly week, dangling “foreign ministers” and “many of the worlds leaders.”

• Epstein tries to arrange meetings between Thiel and the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, telling Thiel: “I will vouch for your discretion.” Makes at least four attempts between 2014 and 2017.

• Epstein invites Thiel to his New Mexico ranch: “There are no people for miles and miles. No eyes, just peace and quiet.” Also attending: “some presidents.”

• Thiel arranges a meeting between Epstein and his Valar Ventures co-founders, counseling Epstein to invest $10-20 million. Epstein floats giving Thiel $50-100 million to invest wherever Thiel sees fit.

• December: Epstein sends Thiel a pitch deck for Barak’s surveillance startup, Carbyne.

January 2015: Epstein’s Crimes Go Global—Thiel Doesn’t Flinch

• Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz named in Epstein lawsuit alleging underage sex ring. Headlines go global.

• Two weeks later, Thiel emails Epstein: “I’ll stop by your island!”

• Epstein: “Does my bad press give you pause?” Thiel: “If I was intimidated by bad press, I would not have gotten anywhere in life.”

2015-2016: Thiel Has “Political Plans”

• Epstein invests $40 million into two of Thiel’s Valar Ventures funds.

• Epstein asks Thiel, “What types of people would you find most appetizing?” Thiel: “Kind of obsessed with politics this year... Russian/European always interesting.”

• Epstein connects Thiel to the President of Mongolia; “the Qataris,” including “his highness,” the “Sultan from Dubai”; Indian billionaire Anil Ambani, connected to Narendra Modi; and the head of the World Economic Forum.

• Epstein tries to connect Thiel with Miroslav Lajčák, the Slovak politician he and Steve Bannon see as future leader of their European right-wing movement.

• May 2016: “Trump delegate? Fun,” Epstein emails Thiel.

• July 2016: Epstein introduces Thiel to Tom Barrack, Donald Trump’s top fundraiser. After the RNC: “Tom Barrack really liked you. You should be closer. So that your advice is considered.”

• Epstein works to get Thiel and Bannon together. His accountant emails a go-between: “Jeffrey knows more about international finance than anyone on Trump’s team, by a long way.”

• August 29, 2016: Epstein hosts lunch with Barak, Barrack, and Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin.4 Emails afterward: “lunch was AMAZING.”

• September: Epstein emails Thiel: “Sorry you are not here, Vitally Churkin debriefing on Syria, wild.”

• Election night: Epstein watches results from Saudi Arabia with King Salman. Next morning routes the Saudi King’s congratulatory call to Trump through Barrack.

• December: Epstein tells Kremlin-sponsored VC Maria Drokova she’ll meet Thiel. She replies: “Seems like he has very certain political plans now.”

2017: Thiel Keeps Coming Back

• Valar sends Epstein investment opportunities marked “super confidential.”

• Epstein: “Are you still playing with Donald?”

• Epstein warns Thiel about a critical BuzzFeed article: “Careful! Donald is vindictive, especially when it is pointed out that he is not the smartest person in the room.” They move to Signal.

• November 27: Epstein’s schedule shows “12:00pm LUNCH w/Peter Thiel.”

2018: The Payoff

• Through Epstein’s network, Carbyne’s CEO is connected to Trae Stephens at Founders Fund—a former Palantir employee and co-founder of military contractor Anduril, who led Trump’s Pentagon transition team. The introduction is traced back through Epstein’s network: “we made the connection to Founders Fund from Peter Thiel.”

• August: Founders Fund invests $15 million in Carbyne—its first Israeli investment. The surveillance startup Epstein pitched in 2014 is now in Thiel’s portfolio.

• November: Epstein invites Thiel to his private island. Thiel’s representatives say he never went.

• Epstein’s $40 million Valar investment has grown to $170 million—the single largest asset in his estate.

From the emails the Justice Department released, we can see that it was Epstein’s job to identify 1) who had the capital, the need, or the political position to become a buyer or investor, and 2) which world power waging war could be a potential customer, and then set up a meeting. He qualified leads, engineered meetings designed to forge relationships, and made a bunch of money doing it.

And when you look at the business model Epstein had set up, you realize his death created a massive need for exactly what Trump’s Board of Peace is doing now.

*Please see the follow-up article, “War: What is it Good For? Ask the Board of Peace.”

So what connects Peter Thiel to Jeffrey Epstein? At the surface level, the answer is straightforward: They’re both war profiteers, and Epstein was Thiel’s broker. The emails make that clear.

What the emails don’t explain is everything else Nellis flagged—the Antichrist lectures, the campaign against the Pope, and why Thiel was completely undeterred by Epstein’s “bad press,” when news of his involvement in a sex trafficking operation broke. We’re still left guessing as to 1) whether Thiel engaged in any illicit sexual conduct connected to Epstein’s operation, and 2) what Thiel’s ideological motivators truly are.

To find out the answers to these questions, we need look no further than Thiel’s relationship with the Catholic Church. That examination reveals much more than the emails from the Epstein files ever will.5

*Please see the follow-up article, “Why the Trump Administration is Pissing Off Every Catholic in America: Answering Mike Nellis’ Questions about Thiel, Epstein & Pope Leo”

Notes:

Palantir’s business model requires war. Every armed conflict is a potential client. Every escalation is a sales opportunity. Every new theater of war is a new installation of the operating system. And the man who bankrolled it spent five years being brokered by Jeffrey Epstein into the offices of defense ministers, intelligence chiefs, and heads of state.

In 2009, there were approximately 60 armed conflicts worldwide. Today there are 130. Air and drone strikes are at an all-time high. Defense spending has reached $2.7 trillion. And the surveillance software that Epstein spent five years brokering for Peter Thiel is now running in every major theater of war on earth. I’m not saying Palantir caused the wars. I’m saying Palantir needs them.

So the moral compasses of those who stand to gain from the success of Palantir are of vital importance and absolutely must be considered in our examination.

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Mara Keller has seen what happens when nobody listens — paralyzed veterans waiting months for a working wheelchair, patients left unattended, problems kicked up the chain and buried. So she's running for Congress in Georgia's Third District to do something about it. Marcus Flowers and Madeline Somerville sit down with the Democratic candidate and HTL endorsee to talk about 26 years of military service, her time at the Atlanta VA, why she carries binders full of constituent concerns, and why she thinks Congress is going to hate her — and why that's exactly the point. Plus: what it means to be a Democrat in an 80% Republican district, why swing voters are the real target, and the core values that got her through years of military retaliation after doing the right thing.

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A leaked internal email revealed that the Trump Administration is exploring ways to punish NATO allies who refused to support its war with Iran—including suspending Spain from the alliance and reconsidering the United States’ long-standing recognition of British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands….

A U.S. soldier was charged with using classified information about a covert military operation to bet on prediction markets and pocket over $400,000….

The president’s own son went on Fox Business to brag about a $24 million Pentagon contract his company just landed….

And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a ride in an Army Apache helicopter to rock musician Kid Rock, prompting Democratic lawmakers to ask why taxpayers were footing the bill for celebrity joy rides.

Any one of these stories would be a five-alarm fire in a normal administration. Together, in a single week, they paint a portrait of an institution in freefall. And I’d argue that Pete Hegseth isn’t the cause of that freefall, but just the endpoint of it. That’s precisely why what I’m watching unfold right now makes my blood boil.

I spent years in the military and in compliance work. I am about as committed to the idea of a strong, professional, accountable defense establishment as anyone you will ever meet. In compliance, we talk a lot about “controls”—the guardrails that exist not because we assume everyone is acting in bad faith, but because we know that without them, even well-intentioned institutions drift toward self-interest.

In short, controls exist to protect the institution from itself. Remove them, and it’s not a matter of if something goes wrong; it’s a matter of when.

The Pentagon is one of the most consequential institutions on earth. It controls the world’s most powerful military, manages a budget that now stands at a requested $1.5 trillion for fiscal year 2027, and holds some of the most sensitive secrets any government possesses. The controls around it—civilian oversight, independent inspector generals, non-partisan career leadership, congressional accountability—exist precisely because of how much is at stake.

Now look at what’s happened to those controls under Pete Hegseth.

The Insider Trading Scandal Is the Compliance Story of the Year

U.S. Army Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke was charged last week with using classified information about Operation Absolute Resolve—the mission to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—to place prediction market bets on Polymarket, ultimately netting over $409,000 in profit. He knew the rules. He did it anyway.

In compliance, this is what we would call a whistleblower moment, not because someone spoke up, but because the failure was so visible it could not be ignored. Polymarket itself flagged the suspicious trades and referred the matter to the Department of Justice. In other words, a cryptocurrency prediction platform had better internal controls than the Pentagon did over its own special operations personnel.

The right question to ask here isn’t just “what did Van Dyke do?” The compliance question is: what environment made this seem possible? We already know the White House had to send an internal memo to its own staff last month warning them not to bet on the Iran war using insider information. That memo is an admission. It is the institution saying, in writing, that this is a live risk. That is not a controls environment. That is a culture that has lost its ethical center.

President Trump’s response when asked about it? He compared the soldier to Pete Rose betting on his own team and said the whole world has become “somewhat of a casino.” That is not the response of a commander in chief who takes the integrity of classified information seriously. That is the response of someone who decided long ago that rules are optional for his people.

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The Eric Trump Contract Is the Textbook Definition of a Conflict of Interest

Eric Trump, son of the sitting president, went on Fox Business last Thursday to celebrate his technology company, Foundation Future Industries, landing a $24 million Pentagon contract for humanoid battlefield robots. He serves as the company’s chief strategic adviser and is a major investor. He did not seem to find anything unusual about this. Neither did the host.

In any organization I’ve worked in, this would trigger an immediate ethics review. Not because Eric Trump is necessarily corrupt, and not because the robots might not be useful technology—but because the appearance of conflict of interest is itself a material risk. When the son of the person who controls the Pentagon is publicly celebrating a Pentagon contract, you have a problem. Full stop.

This is also not an isolated incident. Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital investments have already resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in DOD contracts. The Trump family is treating the Department of Defense as a procurement vehicle rather than a guardian of national security. That change from “Department of Defense” to “Department of War” makes a whole lot more sense now.

In compliance, we would refer to this as self-dealing at scale. It’s a red flag not because it is necessarily illegal, but because it corrodes institutional trust. When the people inside the Pentagon watch the president’s family profit from their institution, it sends a signal about what the rules really are. That signal spreads…to people like Van Dyke.

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The NATO Email Is Not a Gaffe. It’s a Strategy.

The leaked Pentagon email, authored by top policy adviser Elbridge Colby, outlined options for punishing NATO allies who declined to support the Iran war. Suspending Spain from the alliance. Reconsidering U.S. support for Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands. These are not the musings of a junior staffer. These are policy options that were, according to officials, circulating at high levels inside the building.

Let’s be precise about what this email reveals. The U.S. has two critical military installations in Spain—Naval Station Rota and Morón Air Base. Spain is a sovereign NATO ally. NATO’s founding charter contains no mechanism for a member to unilaterally suspend another member. And yet, rather than engaging through diplomatic channels, the Pentagon’s senior leadership is drafting punishment fantasies.

In military compliance, we might call this operational risk masquerading as leverage. You do not strengthen alliances by threatening to blow them up. You do not maintain strategic relationships by holding Falkland Islands sovereignty over the head of a partner whose bases you still need. Hardball diplomacy is one thing. This is active self-harm.

And when the Pentagon press secretary confirmed the email was real without denying its contents, and instead framed it as ensuring allies “do their part,” that was a tacit endorsement.

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The Kid Rock Helicopter Ride Is the Morale Story No One Is Telling Correctly

The Kid Rock Apache helicopter story is being covered primarily as a political embarrassment, but it’s something more serious, too. This is the second time in a matter of months that Army Apache helicopters have been involved in Kid Rock’s activities. In March, Army pilots flew Apaches near his Nashville home. The Army opened an investigation and suspended the pilots involved. Then Hegseth intervened and shut the investigation down.

Now, those same aircraft, assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, are being used to give a rock musician a promotional flight out of Fort Belvoir for his summer tour. AR 95-1 Flight Regulations and Department of Defense instructions restrict passengers on military aircraft to specific authorized categories. “Buddy of the Secretary of Defense on a promotional tour” is not one of them.

Hegseth recently fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George and blocked the promotions of four Army colonels to brigadier general. He has systematically sidelined career military professionals while welcoming celebrity friends into operational spaces. This is not the behavior of someone who respects the institution he leads. This is the behavior of someone who sees the institution as a prop.

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The Pattern Is the Problem

In compliance, we have a rule: one failure is an incident. Two failures is a pattern. Three or more failures is a culture.

We are well past three.

When I look at the Pentagon under Pete Hegseth, I don’t see a series of unrelated gaffes. I see an institution whose core controls have been systematically dismantled. The independent voices have been fired. The oversight mechanisms have been neutralized. The ethical guardrails have been treated as obstacles rather than safeguards. And into that vacuum has rushed exactly what you’d expect: self-dealing, information abuse, mission drift, and the slow collapse of institutional credibility.

Hegseth went before the House Armed Services Committee this week to defend a $1.5 trillion defense budget request while the Iran war drags into its ninth week. He called congressional Democrats the Pentagon’s biggest “adversary.” That line got a lot of attention. But to me, the more revealing moment came when Rep. Ro Khanna asked him what the war is actually costing American families—in gas prices, food costs, and economic disruption—and Hegseth couldn’t answer. He deflected. He attacked the question.

In compliance, that’s a material omission. You are managing a $1.5 trillion institution with real costs cascading through the American economy, and you haven’t done the analysis. Or you have, and you’re hiding it. Either way, thoroughly unacceptable.

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In Conclusion

I want to end where I always end these conversations: with accountability, not despair.

Pete Hegseth is not a one-off. He is the natural result of a confirmation process that prioritized loyalty over qualification, an oversight environment that has been systematically weakened, and a political culture that has decided the rules are for other people. The institution didn’t fail to stop him. The institution, as it has been restructured, selected for him.

In compliance, the corrective action for a culture failure is never just personnel change. You can fire Pete Hegseth tomorrow and the underlying conditions—the eroded oversight, the politicized leadership pipeline, the absence of accountability for classified information misuse, the normalization of conflict of interest—will simply produce the next version of him.

The corrective action requires restoring the controls:

• Independent inspector generals

• Transparent procurement processes

• A confirmation standard that treats qualifications as non-negotiable

• Congressional oversight with real teeth

These are not partisan asks. They are the basic architecture of a highly functional nonpartisan institution.

America’s military is the best in the world because of the men and women who serve in it, and the institutional discipline that has been built up over decades. That discipline is not self-sustaining. It requires leadership that takes it seriously. Right now, at the top of the Department of Defense, it is not being taken seriously.

That is the story of this week. And last week. And the week before. And until the controls are restored, it will be the story of every week that follows.

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Need some hope? There are amazing candidates out there who can help us out of this mess, but we have to help them first! Join us every Wednesday at 3pm ET to meet some of them. Next week: Maura Keller for U.S. House District 3 from Georgia

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Sabrina Newby didn't ask anyone's permission to start a minority chamber of commerce, grow minority business participation in Liberty County from 5% to 13%, or launch a product that landed in Walmart. And she's not asking permission to run for Georgia House District 168 either. Marcus and Maddie dig into her DOD background, the obstacles facing veteran-owned and minority businesses near Fort Stewart, her vision for reforming education in rural Georgia, and the very real price she's paid for refusing to wait her turn.

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Like Californians before them, Virginia voters this week approved a redistricting plan designed to counter Texas’ and other red states’ mid-decade gerrymandering scheme. Good for you, Virginia. I said last year that our only choice is to fight fire with fire in the battle for democracy, and this has the potential to shift the state’s congressional delegation from 6-5 Democratic to 10-1 Democratic. Naturally, it’s already been blocked by a conservative judge. You see, Republicans don’t like being beaten at their own game. Keep up the good fight, Virginia.

Donald Trump responded as you would expect, declaring the results “rigged.” He then added, “As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum.” Extraordinarily brilliant. We’ve become numb to it because Trump brags constantly, but this is a really, really bizarre thing for an adult to say, especially a President of the United States. And if he’s “just trolling,” as his allies would likely claim, well, that’s not a whole lot better, is it?

Another frequent brag of Trump’s is that he hires “only the best people.” He has said so across both of his terms in office, as well as before and in between. In theory, this is a much less unusual thing to say. A lot of leaders speak highly of the people who work for them, often with good reason. But with Trump, the problem is that his idea of “the best” is pretty far from yours and mine.

So let’s check in on how the extraordinarily brilliant President and his best people are doing this week.

First Off, Trump’s a Misogynist

Trump fired Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on Monday, after reports of alleged abuses of her position, including having an affair with a subordinate and drinking alcohol on the job. If true, the allegations are certainly fireable offenses. She is the third Trump Cabinet member to be ousted in recent months, after Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March and Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this month.

Here’s what all three departures obviously have in common: they’re women. Now don’t get me wrong—they all deserved to be fired, particularly Noem and Bondi, who were by no means “the best.” But it’s also not a coincidence.

We got visual evidence of the way Trump and this administration view women this week, when the White House hosted the University of Georgia women’s tennis team to celebrate their NCAA championship. A photo shared on Twitter/X by a White House aide showed Trump in the center, flanked by a cluster of men who dominated the foreground—while the women champions being honored were huddled in the background. Tennis legend Martina Navratilova’s response said it perfectly: “A photo is worth a thousand words.”

Indeed it is.

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The Men Who Get to Stay

But there’s an even more convincing argument that these three firings are part of a misogynistic pattern. At least three disgraceful men with equally prominent roles in the administration are still very much on the job—jobs they never should have been confirmed for in the first place.

Take FBI Director Kash Patel. The New York Times revealed this week that the bureau investigated one of its reporters after she wrote an article about Patel’s country-singer girlfriend. That doesn’t sound like the best use of the bureau’s resources—nor does it sound like respect for press freedom. Meanwhile, according to a lengthy investigation published by The Atlantic, Patel himself has “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.” He held a press conference to deny the allegations and filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine. He also took the opportunity to call the press the “fake news mafia.”

Hmm…the nation’s top crime-fighter implying that the press are criminals sounds a little defamation-y, no? At least if you’re the super-sensitive type like Patel, who has a long litigious history. Just this week, a separate defamation lawsuit filed by Patel was dismissed in a Houston court. A federal judge ruled that a comment made by former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi, suggesting that Patel spent more time at nightclubs than at FBI headquarters, was “rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation.”

If Patel really wants to help prove his sobriety, instead of filing more lawsuits, he could simply respond to House Democrats, who’ve sent him a standard alcohol use screening questionnaire and asked him to fill it out. Thus far, he has not done so. I’d say, “Gee, I wonder why,” but Patel would probably sue me.

Then there’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose own fitness for office has been questioned by pretty much everyone except the man who hired him. The list of reasons why he should have been fired long ago is much too lengthy to include here, but he extended that list this week. He fired the top naval official during an active naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz because…reasons. And he announced that the military will no longer require U.S. troops to receive the annual flu vaccine, rolling back a mandate that had been in place for eight decades. Dr. Richard Riccardi, a military vet and professor, noted that in the military, “vaccination is not political theater—it is force protection.” I second that.

Servicemembers aren’t the only ones getting less protection. Our third Cabinet clown, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., spent much of this week in congressional hearings, defending the administration’s proposed budget, which would cut HHS funding by more than 12%. Throughout the hearings, Kennedy deflected blame for declining childhood vaccination rates, and said of the huge uptick in measles cases, “It has nothing to do with me.” Yeah, okay.

Kennedy made news for something else this week, too: apologizing (sort of) for saying back in 2024 that Black children who were prescribed “psychiatric drugs” need to be “re-parented.” I guess it never occurred to him that white kids are prescribed the same drugs. Mind you, Kennedy, a former heroin and cocaine addict, helped drive his own kids’ mother to suicide with his philandering and once stopped the family car to give a dead raccoon a penectomy. You know, totally normal dad stuff. No “re-parenting” needed there.

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Meanwhile, Over at Trump’s DOJ…

So yes, misogyny is an issue on Team Trump, but it’s clearly far from the only one. This administration also just doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing. It couldn’t even do the Epstein files right, after years of promises to its own most devoted followers to make it a top priority. Now, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog is investigating the department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The audit follows months of complaints that the DOJ withheld many files and made some victims’ personal information public.

And then there’s the investigation of former CIA Director John Brennan, which appeared to collapse this week. Part of Trump’s long-running effort to prosecute his perceived enemies, the probe led the DOJ to subpoena several witnesses over the weekend, but then abruptly withdraw the subpoenas days later. Veteran career prosecutors say the politically motivated investigation lacks evidence. Shocking, right? One prosecutor who had been overseeing the case was removed from her role after telling colleagues there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed.

That brings us to the deeper problem, which Pam Bondi’s former chief of staff described perfectly: “Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent. Many career prosecutors are not interested in this kind of work. It’s a very small group of people.”

In other words, MAGA and competence just don’t mix. The real best people—the actually qualified ones—want nothing to do with flimsy retribution projects. The kind of slavish deference Trump wants from his underlings, by its very nature, practically demands some degree of incompetence as a prerequisite. We’re all living with the consequences of that incompetence right now.

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In Conclusion

We keep hearing about how brilliant the people running things are. We keep being told they were hired for their excellence. But “extraordinary brilliance” isn’t firing three unqualified women while keeping three equally—or arguably more—unqualified men mired in their own controversies. And “only the best” isn’t hiding your personal scandals behind baseless litigation, ending an effective 80-year military vaccine mandate, allowing a nearly-eradicated virus to rebound with a vengeance, or issuing and rescinding subpoenas in the same week.

Man or woman, what binds all of these people together is gross incompetence.

We don’t need leaders who brag about their brilliance. We need leaders who just do the work quietly, competently, in service of the people they were hired to serve. That’s not what we have right now. And the gap between the boast and the reality grows harder to ignore by the week.

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Need some hope? There are amazing candidates out there who can help us out of this mess, but we have to help them first! Join us every Wednesday at 3pm ET to meet some of them. Next week: Sabrina Newby for Georgia State House District 168

Here’s our last episode, if you missed it.

If you are in a position to support these great candidates financially, please visit Hold The Line PAC.

Marcus Flowers and Madeline Somerville sit down with Duro Haynes, Democratic candidate for Georgia State Senate District 17, for a wide-ranging conversation about what it actually takes to serve a community. Duro shares the lessons he learned working for the late Congressman David Scott — a Georgia giant who passed away the day of this recording — and explains why he jumped into this race: to fight the politics of excuses and deliver real results for Henry and Clayton counties. From the cost of living crisis and free school lunch to transit infrastructure and government accountability, this is the kind of policy conversation Georgia voters deserve.

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There is a particular kind of audacity in America that afflicts a certain kind of person—the kind of person who takes everything and sacrifices nothing. Right now, and maybe in our nearly 250-year history, Donald Trump is the purest expression of that audacity.

This month, the federal government announced that eligible men between the ages of 18 and 25 will be automatically registered for the military draft beginning in December. No opt-in required. If conscription were enforced—something this nation hasn’t seen since the Vietnam era—the Selective Service System would likely use a random national lottery, based on birthdates, much like it did in the 1960s.

The president who might enforce this rule is none other than Donald J. Trump, who received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War—four for college, one for a medically convenient case of bone spurs that his own longtime attorney later testified, under oath before Congress, never existed. Donald Trump, whose father reportedly solicited a favor from a New York podiatrist—a man who rented office space from the Trump family at a discount—to produce the medical paperwork that kept his son out of the war. Donald Trump, who bragged on The Howard Stern Show that navigating the dating scene during the AIDS crisis was his “personal Vietnam” and that he felt “like a great and very brave soldier.” That man might decide that young Americans get drafted into military service.

To be clear, automatic Selective Service registration is not itself the same thing as a draft. Congress would still have to authorize one. No one is being called up today. The measure passed with bipartisan support as a cost-saving reform. I understand all of that.

But we are at war with Iran. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said that a draft is “not part of the current plan right now,” but Trump “wisely keeps his options on the table.” So let’s not pretend this is happening in a vacuum. And let’s not pretend, for even one second, that the man keeping those “options on the table” has any personal understanding of what those options actually cost.

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What Choosing to Serve Actually Means

I served in the U.S. Army. I know what it means to choose to raise your right hand, to stand in a line, and take an oath that you mean with every part of yourself. I also know what it means to watch people who came home differently than they left—or who didn’t come home at all.

The all-volunteer force we have maintained since 1973 is a testament to something important about American character: that genuine service, the kind that sustains a democracy, has to be freely given. It can’t be manufactured by a government form or compelled by the threat of a felony conviction. The men and women who have defended this country since Vietnam chose to do it. That choice is the foundation of their honor.

A draft does not produce a more committed military. It produces a larger one. And history tells us clearly what “larger” tends to mean: more war. Bigger war. And the people making the decisions now—the guys standing behind podiums talking about warfighters like they’re playing “Call of Duty” and saying prayers written by Quentin Tarantino—work for an administration that feels completely insulated from consequences.

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The Insult Compounded

In 2016, when Khizr Khan stood at the Democratic National Convention holding a copy of the Constitution, his Gold Star on his chest, and told Donald Trump “you have sacrificed nothing and no one,” Trump didn’t accept the rebuke. He attacked. He implied that Ghazala Khan, a mother who could barely stand to look at a photograph of her fallen son without breaking down, had been “not allowed to have anything to say.” He turned the grief of a family whose son died in uniform into a political battle that served no one but himself.

This is the man who reportedly called American soldiers buried in a French military cemetery “losers” and “suckers.” This is the man who mocked John McCain—a prisoner of war who was offered early release and refused it to protect his fellow captives—by saying “I like people who weren’t captured.” This is the man, with all of that history, who now presides over a system being built to register your sons.

The audacity isn’t incidental to Trump. It is fundamental to who he is. He has spent his entire life operating on the assumption that rules are for other people, that the draft was for other people, that sacrifice was for other people, that grief was something other people performed while he joked about how brave he was for sleeping around in the ’80s.

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What a Draft Really Signals

Let us be honest about what a draft has historically meant for this country. It has not meant a short, decisive action by a government acting out of genuine necessity. It has meant the expansion of a war beyond the willingness of volunteers to fight it. It has meant that the people with power decided the war was worth continuing—at the cost of other people’s children. It is the most sobering decision any president will face.

We are currently in a war with Iran that was launched without a declaration of war from Congress. The ceasefire is precarious. The administration has explicitly refused to rule out ground troops. And the president’s spokesperson describes the possibility of a draft not as unthinkable, but as one option among many that a “wise” commander-in-chief keeps available.

I am not saying a draft is imminent. But I am saying the groundwork is being laid by a man who has never in his life understood what it costs. A man who, when his generation was called to serve, made sure his wealthy, connected dad found a doctor willing to write a letter. Because wealthy, connected people always find a way.

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In Conclusion

Service is not something you can compel into meaning. The men and women who have volunteered to defend this nation did so because they chose it. That choice is sacred in a way that no draft notice ever will be. What we owe them, and what we owe the young people whose names will soon be automatically added to federal rolls, is a government that takes the weight of that seriously.

We do not have that government right now.

When Khizr Khan told Donald Trump in 2016 that he had “sacrificed nothing and no one,” he was right. He’s still right. The only difference is that now Trump has a mind wrecked by 10 years of aging and derangement and his hand on the register.

And somewhere right now, an 18-year-old boy is about to be added to a list by a man who never once stood where he stands.

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The biggest mistake I could make as a political analyst would be to underestimate an adversary. To assume that there’s no method to the madness I see.

It would be easy to look at someone like Trump and think: He doesn’t know what he’s doing; He’s just making ego-driven decisions and screwing everything up.

But here’s the thing:

There is SO MUCH CORPORATE MONEY riding on this presidency. Do you think that the billionaires financing Trump are going to leave the outcome of their next big move to chance? No way. Technological advancement has allowed our biggest risk-takers to calculate nearly all of the possible outcomes of the decisions they make. That way they can prepare for whatever might happen and control for as much uncertainty as possible.

Make no mistake: The corporate interests behind Trump are NOT leaving their fortunes to chance.

So what does that mean for our analysis of Trump’s moves in geopolitics?

It means we can’t write off the possibility that there really is a substantive reason - or even perhaps a well-thought out plan - behind Trump’s seemingly capricious moves.

It means that we need to look at all the players involved here, and consider:

1. Their primary goals (both stated and covert),

2. The ideologies motivating them,

3. The consequences they’re looking to avoid, and

4. Where their allegiances truly lie.

So that’s what I’ve done.

I started with a simple question: Why would Trump engage in wars he campaigned against, knowing they’d cost him the public approval he needs? That question led to another. And another. And another. Until I stopped asking about Trump altogether — because I realized Trump wasn’t the right place to look. **

When I realized a player was making a move that didn’t seem to make sense, I learned to always ask the question:

Qui bono? Who benefits? And in what ways?

Now, you might be thinking — The answer is obvious here. It’s all about the money. It’s greed and power. Team Trump just want all the natural resources they can get their hands on.**

I believe those are indeed major motivating factors - but they’re not the only ones.

Because when you start asking “why” in the right places, you end up deep down a rabbit hole —

That leads straight to war-monger’s alley,

That dumps out into an Epstein Vortex,

That twists into a global Jewish Conspiracy,

That spins into a centuries-old Catholic Labyrinth,

That drops directly into a Tech Bro Web,

That exposes our universe’s very own Professor Moriarty. Sitting at the center. Where everything moves at his direction, though he never touches a string.

And I’m left with no choice but to ask the question: “What if everything we’re watching isn’t chaos — What if it’s construction?”

Jump in, y’all. Here we go.

* For those who choose to follow the thread with me: Questions have only been considered “answered,” if there was only one possible answer available. I use intuition and my knowledge of human psychology - which I have studied extensively as a jury consultant - to guide my direction in my research. However, all stated conclusions will be based upon facts and facts alone. I will indicate when and where there are answers that remain unsettled. The goal is to get it right. Period.

Here are a few [safe] assumptions I have kept in mind along the way:

1. A negative outlook on the Republican party is harmful to most every corporate interest. Democrats want to regulate them; Republicans don’t. If the public doesn’t trust Republicans, they won’t elect them.

2. Even if the upcoming midterm elections and/or the 2028 presidential elections are rigged, negative public perception of Republicans will still be problematic.

3. Therefore: Trump getting impeached is bad for business.

4. And finally: The corporate interests involved here? Yeah - They’re not stupid. They are well aware that:

   1. The war in Iran is unpopular with all the people they need in order to win the next election(s).

      1. The independents and first-time Gen Z voters who decided to give Trump a chance are seriously regretting their votes.

      2. Those two groups were the linchpin that tipped the election in his favor.

      3. Tucker, MTG and Candace are brewing a mutiny.

      4. The majority of not just the American public, but people all over the world, have a negative view of Israel.

** It’s worth mentioning: They’re absolutely terrified of us. Wanna know why they all have underground bunkers they’re building? It’s because they’re terrified that one day, we will realize that there are more of us than there are of them.

Note: We’re STILL dealing with the propaganda corporations have created to fight back against the reputational damage FDR caused when he exposed corporate greed back in the 1930s. The worry was that - if the public continued to see the power dynamics this way - they’d never elect a Republican again. Further explanation of this origin of corporate propaganda in American history is a series for another day.