Lead From Day One

The most honest thing ever said about the American War was said by a Vietnamese colonel to an American colonel after the war ended. The American colonel, Harry Summers, told his Vietnamese counterpart: "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield." The Vietnamese colonel, Nguyễn Đôn Tự, thought about it and replied: "That may be so. But it is also irrelevant." That exchange contains the entire war. The Americans won battles. They won firefights. They had superior firepower in almost every conventional engagement. By their own metrics, body counts, kill ratios, territory controlled, they were often "winning." And they lost the war. Because wars are not won by body counts. Wars are not won by kill ratios. Wars are not won by the number of bombs dropped or the cost of the weapons deployed or the technological sophistication of the killing machinery. Wars, especially wars of occupation, wars of colonial imposition, wars fought against people defending their own land, are won by will. And on the question of will, there was never a contest. The Vietnamese people had been resisting foreign occupation for two thousand years before America arrived. Fighting was not a policy position. It was a cultural inheritance. A collective understanding of who they were and what they would do when someone came to tell them how to live. America arrived with the most powerful military in human history and a firm belief that sufficient firepower could substitute for legitimacy. It cannot. It never could. It never will. Irrelevant. That one word, from a Vietnamese colonel to his American counterpart, is the entire lesson.

We absolutely need to investigate the accusations against Swalwell, and prosecute him if necessary. But the fact that this is big news, and 40+ similar accusations against Donald Trump isn't, is beyond me. api.omarshehata.me/substack-proxy…

Okay! But I gotta ask, since you seem concerned about sexual misconduct, have you met President Trump?

On the helicopter leaving the ship right now. This planet is impossibly beautiful from every altitude I’ve seen it…surface to 250,000 miles

Neerja Bhanot, a 22-year-old flight attendant, was on duty aboard Pan Am Flight 73 when it was hijacked during a stopover on 5 September 1986. The hijackers ordered her to collect the passengers’ passports so they could identify and target individuals of certain nationalities, particularly Americans. Recognizing the grave danger this posed, Neerja, along with other crew members, quietly hid many of the American passports. Some were slipped under seats, while others were discreetly discarded down the rubbish chute, making it far more difficult for the hijackers to single out their intended victims. After nearly 17 hours of terror, chaos suddenly erupted inside the aircraft. Neerja quickly opened an emergency door. Though she had the chance to escape first, she instead chose to remain behind, heroically helping passengers — especially unaccompanied children — to safety. Her extraordinary bravery and selflessness cost her her life. Neerja’s courage not only saved countless lives that day but also played a key role in preventing the plane from taking off. One of the children she helped, who was just seven years old at the time, later grew up to become a captain for a major airline. He credits Neerja with inspiring his career and says he owes every single day of his life to her sacrifice.

US Representative Thomas Massie: “We should end all U.S. military aid to Israel.” Do you agree?

MAGA calls Europe freeloaders. Here’s what they’re not telling you. ​1. Ramstein Air Base, the most important US military hub outside America, is built on German land provided rent-free, with Germany contributing hundreds of millions to its upkeep. The US couldn’t replace it anywhere in the world. 2. Every US military operation in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia flows through Ramstein. Lose it and US power projection in the Eastern Hemisphere is crippled. 3. The UK provides and maintains RAF Lakenheath used almost entirely by the US Air Force. Italy provides Aviano. Greece provides Souda Bay. Turkey provides Incirlik. European land. European infrastructure. American operations. 4. The US Sixth Fleet depends entirely on European ports for fuel and supplies. Souda Bay, Naples, 11 Greek ports. Without them the Sixth Fleet cannot operate in the Mediterranean or project power into the Middle East. 5. The majority of NATO’s intelligence and surveillance capacity is hosted on European soil and fed directly to the CIA, NSA and Pentagon. 6. Early warning radar at Fylingdales, UK. Missile tracking in Greenland. Norwegian monitoring stations near Russia. All dependent on European goodwill. 7. It would cost America MORE to bring the troops home than keep them here. European hosts subsidise roughly a third of all basing costs. 8. Europe is America’s largest arms customer. Stop buying American and part of their defence industry goes bankrupt. 9. The bases aren’t charity. They’re America using European soil, European money and European goodwill to project power across the world. 10. We’re not the freeloaders.

25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.

Our country was designed to protect us from people like Donald Trump. #NoKings

D. L. Hughley on Trump: “I’m very proud I’ve never voted for a president who raped women and children. I never voted for a president who defrauded charities. I never voted for a president that celebrated the death of somebody. And half this country can’t say that”

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Former Army JAG here. No quarter orders are a violation of the law of war and Geneva conventions. This is the same order reportedly given during the Caribbean boat strikes. @SecWar is establishing a pattern of issuing illegal orders. I’ve trained hundreds of soldiers on the law of war — our service members have an obligation to follow that law.

Six weeks complete. Week seven starts tomorrow. Before Monday arrives, identify: • One leadership strength to leverage • One leadership gap to address • One team member to focus on developing Intentionality creates excellence. #WeekSevenPrep #IntentionalLeadership

Weekend reflection on six weeks of leadership: You've completed 11.5% of 2026. The patterns you've established are either sustainable or unsustainable. This weekend, honestly assess: Can you maintain your current approach for 46 more weeks? #SustainabilityCheck #LeadershipHonesty

Week six complete. Six weeks of 2026 down. The foundation you've built—in habits, systems, relationships, trust—is now either supporting your team's success or revealing gaps to address. What's working? What needs adjustment? #SixWeeksIn #LeadershipReflection

Pre Valentine's Day leadership message: Show your team you care by: • Removing obstacles in their way • Recognizing their contributions • Investing in their growth • Protecting their wellbeing Care is demonstrated, not declared. #LeadershipCare #TeamAppreciation

Delegation principle for mid-quarter: If you're still doing everything you were doing in January while your team is underutilized, you're the bottleneck. Remove yourself by developing others. #DelegationGrowth #BottleneckRemoval

The delegation opportunity in February: Someone on your team is ready for more responsibility but hasn't asked for it. Don't wait for them to ask. Leaders spot potential and create opportunity. #PotentialSpotting #OpportunityCreation

Mid-February trust reminder: Your team is evaluating whether your January promises were real or just new-year enthusiasm. Prove consistency through sustained action. #TrustBuilding #ConsistentAction