SherronWatkins

Trump is going to get way, way worse. 👇🏼 John Thune will be held accountable for this. He could have walked into the White House with Schumer and a few others and said — knock it off. You can't send civilization-ending tweets. Get someone in charge or we're building a coalition to remove you. That would have worked because here's what people don't understand about Trump. He hates people who kiss his ass. I know this man. He respects people who stand up to him. Yet nobody will because they think it'll cost them their careers. So nothing happens and it gets worse. And when something truly catastrophic occurs — and it will — these same people will come running out saying the emperor has no clothes. Our adversaries are shaking their heads. Wondering how one man was allowed to wreak this kind of havoc on a country like this. It's embarrassing.

Tomorrow, @TexasMonthly will be dropping a ~12,000 word story on Paul Pressler, the alleged sexual predator who remade the Southern Baptist Convention and helped ordain the marriage between the GOP and white evangelical voters. There is *a lot* in there and I hope you'll read it.

Tonight, the world is witnessing the export of the Israeli military’s doctrine of engineered abandonment. In a violent raid in international waters, Israeli naval forces have intercepted, boarded, and systematically disabled various boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla. After smashing engines and destroying navigation arrays, the military retreated—intentionally leaving hundreds of civilians stranded on powerless, broken vessels directly in the path of a massive approaching storm. Furthermore, communications with multiple vessels have been jammed, severing their ability to coordinate or signal for help. While flotilla participants face a calculated death trap at sea, the people of Gaza remain the primary targets of a relentless, years-long campaign of starvation and slaughter. The logic being deployed tonight is identical: the Israeli state creates the conditions for death, sabotages the means of survival, and then waits for "nature" or "circumstance" to finish the job.

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank. It just published a 30-year study showing immigrants paid 14.5 trillion dollars more in taxes than they received in government benefits. Every single year. For thirty years. Without exception. The country was lied to. Here is what the study found.🧵

If both the Pope and the King of England are telling you to get your shit together, you need to get your shit together.

Man fighting stage-4 cancer. Age 82. Lifelong stutter. Gives coherent answer on democracy. Every hesitation: “proof of dementia” Trump can’t name his Defense Secretary. Forgets what country he’s in. “Just Trump being Trump” Pick a standard. Any standard.

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue. On April 21st, the left screen moved first. I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug. At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy. On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me. At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire. Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83. I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags. My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports. The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026: Reviewed. That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. Let me show you my flags. March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it. March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it. April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it. April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it. April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it. That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one. The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March. Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012. Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence. Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets. The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade. I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email. The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action. One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared. One account is a coincidence. But there were six. Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000. My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger. March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes. The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event. The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting." Then the White House sent the email again. I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread. I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated. But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed. Zero prosecutions. As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations. The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still. In my field, we call this price discovery.

ICE has violated almost 100 court orders. Let me say that another way. 100 times ICE was caught brazenly ignoring the law. 100 times a court told them to immediately stop. And 100 times they ignored the order. That's an out of control agency that shouldn't get another dime.

Historian @TimothyDSnyder sums up a year of Trump choices and policies in one overall conceptual framework, which he calls “Superpower suicide.”

“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” — Pope Leo XIV

One day, kids will study Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu the same way we studied Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

@DavidAFrench The error of Balaam and the talking donkey! Amazing how Peter and Jude warned of this in the New Testament, but I never imagined it would be as easy to spot. Sticks out like a talking donkey!

This is sad to read.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: "Other Republicans are terrified. They're cowards. And I really have to call out Speaker Mike Johnson, who calls himself a Christian. I don't know how he can stand by those words. That's what was so offensive to me. Any Christian serving in Congress or the administration really need to take pause and ask themselves, 'As a Christian, do you really support the president calling to wipe out an entire civilization of people?' I don't think you should, because that's not what Jesus said and that's not what Christianity is all about."

"A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons... a war might be started... by little men, the ones moved by fear and pride." Hillary was right about everything.

When David French and Alex Jones BOTH think you've lost your mind... when Tucker Carlson and the Pope BOTH find your words "evil"... ... maybe you should pause and reconsider your direction?

We don’t know what will happen tonight: if Trump will back down or commit war crimes. But I do know that Congress has the power to stop this. Republican Leader John Thune must call the Senate back into session immediately. And Congress needs to vote to stop Trump’s war NOW.

Wake up: he is calling for A NUCLEAR STRIKE. Seek his removal immediately.

An American president threatening the death of an ancient civilization is in some ways the end of the 250-year moral experiment of a constitutional republic that the framers saw as a model for all mankind.

Trump is flirting with the idea of murdering 10 million innocent civilians by dropping a nuke on Iran. FUCK YOU CONGRESS, YOU PATHETIC COWARDS.

It’s just important to understand that Trump posts what he posts on Christian holidays because he loves to emasculate, humiliate and shame the Christians around him. They openly claim Trump is their vehicle to advance their agenda, but on their own holidays and at their own events, he can’t help but make it openly, plainly clear to them that he is using them and they are his vehicle—not the other way around.