Allen

So, a couple of the boys have been texting me: “Why the hell would Trump drop the Hormuz blockade bomb on a Sunday? It’ll send oil screaming past $120, maybe $130 if the algos really panic. Makes zero sense if you actually want cheaper barrels.” But it makes perfect sense. Beautiful, even. See, Tokyo and Hong Kong are already humming by the time the East Coast is still nursing its coffee. Those futures pits—Dow, S&P, the whole equity complex, plus Brent and WTI on the screens—never really sleep. You’ve got fourteen, fifteen hours of runway before the New York bell. Plenty of time for the right hands to lean in: long the indices in Hong Kong, short the crude in Tokyo, riding the fear wave as the blockade tweet lights up every terminal from Singapore to Sydney. Then, right on cue, before the U.S. opens, comes the pivot. Something about “there’s regime change in Tehran,” “we can do business,” “Talks were Good,” the usual art-of-the-deal baloney. Markets whip around like they’ve been Tasered. Oil gives back the spike, stocks rip higher. The boys in Asia unwind clean, pocket the spread. A few hundred million, maybe more, conjured out of thin air on the back of one perfectly timed Sunday morning post. Not bad for a morning’s work. The Street’s been running these kinds of games for decades: information, timing, leverage. Just never quite so… presidential!!

Blockading a blockade is the work of a pure stable genius like no one has ever seen before. Only @realDonaldTrump could have thought of this. It's like, "You think you can shoot at us? Well, we'll show you—we'll shoot ourselves!!" We should all have tears in our eyes.

When Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear weapons, the price that the other side had to pay had to be fair. I think NATO membership was the smallest thing leaders of Ukraine had to get in exchange for the nuclear arms. What did we get? Nothing. It was not a fair game, and a big mistake. Not only a Ukrainian mistake, but also a mistake by other signatories of the Budapest Memorandum. These are nuclear countries. If they asked you to give up nuclear weapons, they should have provided you with a security umbrella. Perhaps a nuclear umbrella. Ultimately, all of it was a deception. Our nuclear weapons were largely transferred to Russia. For example, strategic aircraft that Russia now uses against us in this war. From an interview on The Rest Is Politics podcast (1/5).

One good use of the supposed two-week ceasefire is to get back to talking about the Epstein files

"The fact is that Trump deserves to be impeached and convicted for his behavior in his second term. The misconduct of Trump, in terms of his corruption and his associates, is unparalleled in our history. His abuses of power leave Nixon in the dust." open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark…

There are no words.

Applebaum's piece is worth reading slowly because the specific details are doing work that the summary can't. Danish military commanders - inside a NATO alliance the United States founded - had to sit in a room and war-game whether their forces would shoot down American planes and kill American soldiers. Some of them still haven't fully recovered from running that exercise. The most popular app in Denmark during Applebaum's visit was one that identifies American products so users know not to buy them. NATO has invoked Article 5 exactly once in its history. On behalf of the United States. After September 11th. Allied troops went to Afghanistan and some of them died there. Trump told reporters those allies "stayed a little back, a little off the front lines." The families of soldiers who didn't come back heard that. Now Trump is in the middle of a war in the Persian Gulf with the Strait of Hormuz locked, oil prices spiking, and he's telling NATO allies - the same ones he insulted and tariffed and threatened - that he's "demanding" they come help solve a problem his own decisions helped create. Applebaum's conclusion is precise: he doesn't connect what he does on one day to what happens weeks later. Allied leaders have drawn their conclusions. The rupture, as Mark Carney called it, isn't coming. It already happened.

"The danger with a sick deranged malignant narcissist like Donald Trump is they end up destroying not just themselves but everyone around them. And so, the real question is whether Republicans will finally realize, 'We have to get rid of him too' and 'We have to help the Democrats get rid of him before he destroys us all."

July 1987, Moscow, USSR — Trump, 41 years old, flies to Moscow at the invitation of Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., Yuri Dubinin. Upon returning from Moscow, the bankrupt Trump suddenly receives loans from 16 banks and, without negotiation. 1/n

“If we consider that President Donald Trump is not a very patient person, then for some reason his patience with the Russians does not seem to run out.” – Kaja Kallas, EU's chief diplomat

No U.S. President should be able to withdraw from NATO without Senate approval. Thankful my colleagues in Congress passed this bipartisan measure.

Concerning. Those fucking Ukrainians are at it again, ignoring the fact that Russia actually has all the cards.

When you have no dignity, you cannot treat others with dignity. This man demeans his office and his country. x.com/7signxx/status…

A reminder From 2024

The media has convinced you that Keir Starmer is the worst Prime Minister in history. They're lying to you.

JUST IN: The country that learned to shoot down Iranian drones over Kyiv is now teaching the Gulf to shoot them down over refineries. Nobody asked Trump. The Gulf asked Ukraine. President Zelensky confirmed at the UK Parliament on March 18 that 201 Ukrainian military specialists are already deployed across UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, with teams en route to Kuwait and 34 more ready to go. These are active-duty government military personnel, not private contractors. They are sharing combat-proven expertise from three years of intercepting Iranian Shahed drones over Ukrainian cities, power grids, and civilian infrastructure. The Gulf states requested the assistance. Saudi Arabia explicitly approached Ukraine. The arrangement is reciprocal: Ukraine provides the expertise that no other country possesses at this depth of operational experience, and the Gulf provides what Ukraine needs most, funding, technology, and air defence systems. Zelensky specifically highlighted Patriot missiles as part of the exchange. The country that cannot get enough Patriots from the West is earning them from the Gulf by teaching drone interception. Trump did not request this deployment. No reporting in any outlet, from Reuters to Al Jazeera to the Kyiv Post, indicates American coordination or approval. The recent Trump-Zelensky tensions over aid disputes and public friction are well documented. This is not a Washington-orchestrated move. It is a bilateral arrangement between Ukraine and Gulf capitals that bypasses Washington entirely. Zelensky built a parallel channel to the Gulf that gives Ukraine what America has been reluctant to provide while giving the Gulf what America’s $23.5 billion arms surge does not include: the people who know how to fight Shaheds because they have been fighting them every night for three years. The expertise is specific and irreplaceable. Ukraine has intercepted thousands of Shahed-136 and Shahed-238 drones since 2022. It has developed detection protocols, jamming techniques, acoustic tracking, small-arms interception methods, and integrated air defence coordination that no training manual teaches. The Gulf states purchased Patriot batteries, THAAD radars, and anti-drone systems through the $23.5 billion arms package. The hardware is American. The operational knowledge of how to use it against the exact Iranian drone variants now striking Gulf refineries is Ukrainian. Israel views this positively. Anything that strengthens Gulf air defences against Iranian drones reduces the threat environment for every country in the region, including Israel. Ukrainian-Gulf cooperation reinforces the anti-Iran alignment that the Abraham Accords established. Israel and Ukraine share a common adversary’s weapons system: Iran builds the Shaheds, Russia deploys them against Ukraine, and the IRGC deploys them against the Gulf. The expertise flows in one direction. The threat originates from the same factory. The Putin dimension is real but secondary. Iran supplies Russia with Shahed drones for use against Ukraine. Ukraine now teaches Gulf states to destroy those same drones when Iran uses them directly. The feedback loop is elegant: every Ukrainian lesson learned from shooting down Russian-deployed Shaheds over Odesa is now applied to IRGC-deployed Shaheds over Ras Laffan. Putin’s Iranian drone supplier is being countered by the country Putin is fighting, on a battlefield 4,000 kilometres from the front line. The irony is structural. The aggravation is intentional. Two hundred and one experts. Government military, not contractors. Gulf-requested, not Trump-directed. Shahed-specific, not generic. And the country with the most relevant expertise on Earth got there before the $23.5 billion in hardware arrived. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

“Although President Donald Trump says he has ‘destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability’, the 0% that remains is playing havoc with the global economy.” -The Economist

When Trump leaves office: The Department of War will go back to being the Defense Department. The Trump Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center. The Gulf of America will once again be the Gulf of Mexico. The unfinished East Wing (it won't be finished by the end of Trump's term) will be rebuilt by the next president, and it will not be a ballroom. Federal agencies packed with unqualified loyalists will fire those people and rehire the career experts Trump fired. The Department of Justice will go back to enforcing the law instead of protecting the president. Scientific agencies like NOAA, the EPA, and the CDC will go back to publishing research without political interference. The U.S. will re-align with its allies and not with its enemies. The presidential pardon power will stop being used as a rewards program for loyalists. Inspectors General will go back to investigating corruption instead of getting fired for it. The White House press room will go back to having briefings, with real journalists and not podcasters. U.S. foreign policy will stop revolving around flattering dictators. And the world will progress as though Donald Trump never existed.

Trump spending the last year threatening, insulting, and alienating our allies — only to now turn around and beg them for help — really is a moment of pure political karma. For decades after World War II, one of America’s greatest sources of strength wasn’t just our military or economy. It was our alliances. NATO. Partnerships across Europe and Asia. A global network of allies who trusted the United States because we stood with them and they stood with us. That system of alliances helped keep the world stable for generations. Trump spent a single year torching those relationships — attacking allies, telling them we didn’t need them, and declaring that America had already “won” without them. Now, suddenly, he wants their help. The nerve. You don’t spend months telling your closest partners to go to hell and then expect them to line up when you snap your fingers. Alliances are built on trust. Trump burned that trust down and now the entire world can see the consequences.

Name calling from a draft dodger doesn't bother me. What bothers me is a clueless commander in chief who took our country to war without a strategy because no one around him has the guts to tell him when he's wrong.