Christopher Merrill

On the Road to Lviv, my book-length poetic meditation on Adam Zagajewski, cultural diplomacy, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is now available @arrowsmithpress.

Must-read new piece: “The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it.” The Treasury Department just released financial statements showing the federal government has $6 trillion in assets against $47 trillion in liabilities, with another $88 trillion in unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations over the next 75 years. The media mostly ignored it, but you should not. Facts matter. Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 promising to completely eliminate the national debt within eight years. Instead, the debt grew by nearly $8 trillion during his first term alone. The second term is going even worse. Remember DOGE? It promised to cut $2 trillion in waste. Elon Musk himself kept slashing that number, first to $1 trillion, then to $150 billion. Meanwhile total federal spending actually rose 6 percent in fiscal year 2025. DOGE fired tens of thousands of workers, dismantled agencies Americans depend on, triggered dozens of lawsuits, and has now been quietly dissolved. It was a train wreck. Then came the One Big Ugly Bill, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects adds another $3.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years, overwhelmingly to finance tax cuts for the wealthy. No president has run up the debt faster while promising the opposite. We cannot cut our way out of a hole this deep. We have to grow revenue, too. The wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations should pay their fair share. Social Security is now projected to hit insolvency by 2032. Without action, that triggers an automatic 23 percent benefit cut for every retiree in America. The One Big Ugly Bill actually accelerated that date. We need to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, which fixes this by lifting the payroll tax cap on the highest earners. Only millionaires and billionaires would contribute more. If you are tired of being told deficits don’t matter when your party is in power, just want someone to be straight with you, or believe government should actually work, this moment demands the same thing from all of us: honest leadership. We currently have the opposite in the White House. fortune.com/2026/03/23/us-…

BREAKING: Republicans are investigating Jack Smith, but ignoring what he found. New bombshell reporting from MSNow: • Smith uncovered evidence Trump took top-secret docs tied to his business interests • Investigators saw this as a possible motive for keeping them • Trump allegedly showed a classified map on a private plane • Took documents so sensitive only 6 people in the U.S. could access them • Hundreds of classified records found at Mar-a-Lago after subpoenas • Grand jury indicted Trump on 37 counts Instead of digging into THIS… • Republicans are targeting the investigator, not the evidence • DOJ blocked release of key findings • Trump allies pushing probes into Smith himself Republicans are chasing the messenger, not the message or the crime.

NEW: Trump had business motive for keeping classified documents, Jack Smith finds The special counsel’s team found Donald Trump held onto documents so secret only six people could legally review them — and believed his reason for doing so was personal financial gain. ms.now/news/trump-cla…

If you were wondering what has happened to Venezuela since Donald Trump brought "freedom and democracy" to it, the man who oversaw Venezuela’s torture program under Maduro has now risen to the very top of the power structure to now lead the country’s military.

The man who actually got Iran to make a deal that kept Americans safe

Sally Rooney on Mo Salah. From The Guardian in 2017.

Garcia: While you were being assaulted, you told the agents that you had filmed this on your phone? Bazan: Yes. Garcia: And that’s when they took your phone away. These agents didn’t just take your phone. They sold it. They pawned it at a kiosk for $250. Is that correct? Bazan: Yes.

Those in Europe and the US who laud Putin as a defender of Christian civilization may want to reconsider.

Full magnitude of Trump's war of choice is becoming clear. Hormuz is now Iran's preferential choke point. Not only will the price to open it be steep. Iran has demoed that it can regulate passage at will. Trump created a solution to a problem we never had on 2/28.

Fmr. NatSec Advisor Jake Sullivan: "A few days before we started bombing Iran, the Iranians put a proposal on the table in Geneva…my understanding is that our negotiators simply didn’t understand what they were being offered, ignored it, and decided to go ahead and strike."

Jaw-dropping: The U.S. and Ecuador said they had cooperated to blow up a cocaine trafficking operation. Our reporters visited and found it was just a dairy farm, whose residents were brutalized by Ecuadorian soldiers acting on Pentagon intelligence. nytimes.com/2026/03/24/wor…

Awful: Stephen Miller is privately floating the idea of restricting funding for the public education of undocumented kids. This has long been a right-wing dream: They want to get SCOTUS to reverse Plyler v Doe and further chip away at 14th Amendment. New: newrepublic.com/article/208114…

Reflections on today’s creative writing class. @QaderiHomeira @CLMerrill

Don’t look away, @la_Biennale. This is the ugly face of barbaric Russia—destroyed UNESCO World Heritage in the protected center of Lviv. This is the barbarism you wish to normalize at the Biennale. Get real!

🚨 🚨It has taken me a while to process what is happening to Iran’s crude exports as we are truly in uncharted territory: 1. Even before the war began Iran was exported 1.5 million barrels a day and that was all going to China. 2. Over the weekend the Trump administration lifted sanctions on Iranian crude and Iran has started selling that crude to India for the first time since 2019. As it’s been attacking Iran. (Still hard for me to wrap my head around this). 3. The real story isn’t sanctions relief. It’s that Tehran has effectively privatized passage through the Straits of Hormuz. 4. In the middle of the war Iran has been negotiating bilaterally with 🇨🇳 , 🇮🇳, 🇵🇰, 🇧🇩 effectively letting tankers pass based on cargo origin and buyer identity (no Israeli or America cargoes are allowed to pass) 5. 🇯🇵, 🇫🇷 and 🇮🇹 have also started to negotiate with Tehran for part of their cargoes. Iran is treating passage through the Straits like 🇪🇬 treats passage through the Suez Canal. 6. This is unprecedented leverage that Iran didn’t have before the war and difficult to see them ever letting this go unless US offers something significant in return. 7. Iran has effectively managed to break 30 years of energy sanctions against it by defending itself against American and Israeli attacks by weaponizing its leverage in the energy markets -which to date it had never done before. Extraordinary #IranWar‌ #energymarkets #OOPP

Donald Trump is handing nearly a billion dollars in taxpayer money to stop a job-creating, clean power-generating wind farm from being built off the East Coast. He is putting America in reverse and selling us out to his Big Oil donors.

Hello SCOTUS, Congress. You can tell him to take a hike on his efforts to restrict voting rights, SAVE act.

Oh, no.

Under Trump, 23% of blue state requests have been granted vs 89% of red state requests. Trump is politicizing and weaponizing disaster relief. When disaster strikes, every American deserves the benefits their tax dollars pay for. Do not let Trump’s petty partisanship become normalized. It is not okay.