Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00
Category: Uncategorized Page 2 of 118
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 16, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War on voting
Christopher Armitage, Aug 13, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Eighteen states have handed their complete voter files to the Trump Justice Department, the drivers license and Social Security numbers of every registered voter included. Between them, those eighteen states hold 148 US House seats, 36 Senate seats, and 184 electoral votes, roughly two thirds of what it takes to run the House, the Senate, and the White House.
A March 2025 executive order ordered states to change how they run elections and threatened to withhold federal money from the ones that refused to comply. The Justice Department went straight for the data, asking all 50 states and the District of Columbia to hand over their voter files. The Department of Homeland Security rebuilt a dormant database called SAVE so states could run those files through it for citizenship checks.
A second order, in March 2026, told the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on a federally approved list. Financial pressure was also applied via grant conditions that make states rewrite their election rules and run their rolls through SAVE or lose 20 percent of their homeland security funding, a program worth more than a billion dollars. DHS made those conditions official in July, and two dozen states sued within two weeks….
Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky, 08.11.26 [Talking Points Memo]
War
Pentagon Drafting New Nuclear Strategy To Expand Options for Tactical Nuclear Weapons Use
[Antiwar.com, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
Previously reported via Scott Ritter but important not to miss.
Deep Intel on Carrier LINCOLN’s Morale Crisis (YouTube video)
Ward Carroll, August 14, 2026 [YouTube]
4:53
The problem started with the loss of Fifth Fleet headquarters due to Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks early in the war, which some war planners might describe as a single point failure. According to Vice Admiral Verisimo, quote, “When Bahrain was no longer a port for logistics, food and mail, all the gear that was there when the shooting started got stuck there.” So that was an initial very large backlog. That also caused us to undergo very contested logistics, very difficult and long supply lines, we had to prioritize food, which was also a challenge and remains on occasion to be a challenge. End quote.
Deadly clash aboard US carrier Abraham Lincoln leaves seven dead, several injured: Report
[Press TV, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2026]
Seven US Navy personnel have reportedly been killed and several others wounded in a violent clash aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as growing unrest among the carrier’s crew has exposed mounting pressure inside the US military amid a prolonged deployment.
The incident erupted after an adviser to US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Brad Cooper boarded the carrier to address mounting complaints from crew members following protests by their families over the ship’s prolonged deployment, according to Tasnim News Agency, citing an informed military source.
The adviser was reportedly met with boos and had water bottles thrown at him while addressing a gathering of personnel.
The confrontation subsequently escalated into a fight among crew members involving knives and other bladed weapons, leaving seven personnel dead and several others wounded, according to the source….
[Military Times, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2026]
U.S. has lost 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones, roughly 25% of fleet, in Iran war
[Washington Post, summarized by Drop Site Daily: August 14, 2026]
The U.S. military has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during its war with Iran, representing about a quarter of the pre-war fleet and a potential taxpayer cost exceeding $1.3 billion, according to three officials cited by The Washington Post on Friday.
Ukrainian drones wipe out entire US tank brigade in live war game
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]
How Iran Adapted Its Attacks as U.S. War Munitions Dwindled
[New York Times
Russian Arena-M Active Protection System Finally Comes of Age on the Battlefield
[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
…As a first quick background, the Arena-M was originally created to stop various munitions like ATGMs and Javelins, including from “top attack” mode. These are obviously no longer a problem compared to the pervasiveness of drones. But here is test footage of an Arena-M system on a T-72B3M intercepting a small missile from a top-attack and direct trajectory as example of how it works:
The system works by having a small millimeter-wave doppler radar which detects incoming projectiles and then launches a hard-kill countermeasure that is timed and fused to explode near the tank which showers the incoming projectile with shrapnel.
Now, in a recent assault in the Dobropillya direction out of Shakhove, near Pokrovsk, Russian forces reportedly used tanks with these Arena-M systems for the first time. Footage released by the Azov Corp which defends the area showed one possible shoot down of an FPV drone by the Arena system….
But the shocker was that major pro-Ukrainian figures which included American analyst Rob Lee and a Ukrainian Special Operations veteran Dmytro Putiata spoke to the Azov units involved in the attack and learned that the Arena-M system actually worked remarkably well….
As a kid, my parents moved around a fair bit. I went to a lot of schools during my elementary years.
It was instructive.
From grade 3 to grade 6 1/2 I was at Emily Carr elementary school in Vancouver. The leaders on the male side were two boys: one red haired freckled Irish kid who wanted to be a football player and a tiny, but extremely fast and coordinated Chinese kid. The class had almost no bullying and it was because of them.
They accepted everyone into their group. You were always welcome to play with them. They were friendly, egalitarian in the way boys are (some are better at sports, but everyone gets to play) and they didn’t bully, and they didn’t tolerate it. Mostly they never had to do anything, other kids followed their example, but I remember one case, and only one, where the Irish kid told someone intimidating a weaker boy the age old “if you want to fight someone, fight someone your own size.”
The fight wasn’t necessary, the kid backed down and his behaviour changed. He wanted to fit in, to have the approval of the leaders.
Half way thru grade 6 my parents moved and I went to a new school in Coquitlam (can’t remember the name, don’t care enough to search.) The leader there was a big kid, only half decent at sports, but he led by constant threats and bullying. And so a lot of the other boys copied him: the pecking order was based on who could shove who around.
Entirely based on who the lead kids were. Entirely. (Teachers were not involved in this stuff back then unless it caused actual injury.)
I hated the boarding school I spent high school in. The kid leadership was… indifferent, not good like the Irish/Chinese pair, or bad like the bully, just self-involved. So there wasn’t much bullying, but there was some, and it could be moderately nasty. I knew one kid who got the “hung up in locker” treatment frequently. Personally I was just ostracized, partially deservingly, but mostly left alone.
But the leadership of the staff was good. The place had fair rules, fairly enforced. The Headmaster, Alan Brown, was on top of the teachers and the boarding house masters. He knew every kid’s name, in a place with about 500 students. And the reason the bullying didn’t get completely out of hand was that he tamped down the worse cases, and he was startlingly effective. Usually the last thing you wanted was teachers involved, but every case I saw him involve in he made better.
His emphasis was on truth. Not lying. Kids do bad shit sometimes, it’s not a big deal usually, but you damn well better not lie about it.
I didn’t like him much, and he didn’t like me: I was sullen, under-performed in most classes and didn’t like team sports. But I respected him and part of that was because he didn’t like me but he treated me fairly. That was the first time I saw an adult with power operate like that.
(That I so rarely saw adults not abuse or misuse their power is one of the reasons I turned into a good analyst. My default assumption is that people with power are scum, and in the current time period in most of the world, that’s the right default.)
As an adult, it was a few bosses who made an impression on me. Once again, if the boss was good, the place was good to work at. If they weren’t, it was always shit. The fish always rotted from the head. Whenever I run into bad service at a corporation regularly (as opposed to one bad apple or someone having a bad day) I know it’s a management issue, and in those cases where I’ve investigated, it always was.
Working at the megacorp was particularly instructive. My first job was to help it go public (yup, bad sign) and my boss (also named Ian) was probably the best boss I ever had. It was a small team, and he trusted us. The strongest memory I have of him is when he gave me an extra task near the end of the job, and I said to him “I’m already working 60 hour weeks. I can do this. But if you give me one more thing, you need to tell me what other task you’ve given me not to do.”
He nodded and agreed. I think I’ve had three bosses total who would have reacted that way.
He also let us take time off when things were slow, which they sometimes were. He was 100% focused on getting the actual job done (given there was a deadline and billions of dollars at stake this made sense, but it still rare). If you were getting it done, what you did in your spare time was up to you.
But what made the megacorp so instructive wasn’t one good boss, it was watching and working on different teams. They might as well have been different companies depending on the boss. Some were wonderful. Some sucked. It all flowed from the boss.
Over time good bosses became rarer, though, because the big boss was now a scumbag standard executive whose primary goal was to make bigger quarterly results so that he could have higher bonuses. The ethics and morality and kindness which had been fairly common slowly went away as the good bosses left, because every slice of heaven had been some boss protecting their workers from upper management, unlike pre-going public when the upper management were basically decent people who expected to get wealthy but not rich.
One visit to the US, to help in a company my employer had taken over, was particularly instructive. I was senior operations, but not management. First day I noticed they were doing something counter-productive: actively harmful, but easy to stop. I went to the manager and told her, she replied (paraphrased and in the condescending tone possible) “that’s a management decision and I don’t want you to ever involve yourself in such decisions again. Just do your job.”
Of course her staff, and indeed the entire company’s staff, were completely demoralized, never accepted ownership of or solved any problem, and always said “I did what you and the rules told me to do. I don’t do anything else.”
Then I got involved in politics, and I can count the number of politicians I’ve met who I’d trust to walk my dog on one hand.
But what all this taught me is that leaders really, really do matter and nothing matters more to how well anything functions than who leads it. Nothing matters more than how we select our leaders.
We, of course, select them badly. But what was interesting to me was watching, over decades, as the number of good leaders declined and as the niches where they could operate were reduced in number. Every year, just a little. Over decades: massive.
Good groups are possible. Better societies are possible. But it all starts with who leads us and figuring how to select the right people.
What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 09, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
The Biggest Skygazing Day of the Century Is Almost Here [YouTube]
August 12, 2026 is the biggest skygazing day of the century. The Perseid meteor shower peaks under a completely moonless sky, the core of the Milky Way stands high in total darkness, and six planets line up across the sky before dawn.
War on voting
This Is What Military-Coup Preparation Looks Like.
WA Lawrence [via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2026]
The blueprint for a military coup begins when armed force enters civilian government and permanent command awaits a usable crisis.
A force approaching 5,000 armed Guard personnel, proposed permanent White House barriers, and a mission extending through 2029 are replacing temporary security measures with continuing federal authority.
“This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back. We’re taking it back.”
—Donald Trump, August 11, 2025 ….
‘Doomsday Scenario’: How Trump and Republicans Could Steal Power – Even If They Lose
Justin Glawe and Asawin Suebsaeng, Aug 03, 2026 [Zeteo]
- Democrats may win enough seats to take back the House, but Republicans can challenge those wins and attempt to steal control of Congress.
- The first path toward this doomsday scenario would be if Republicans replace the current House clerk. The second path is for Republicans to work in lockstep to challenge election results.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 02, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
The Math Behind The U.S. Defeat in Iran
Spencer Ackerman, 30 July 2026 [forever-wars.com]
… By spreading out missile and drone attacks across a wide arc of U.S.-used or aligned military bases and civilian infrastructure (energy, data and desalination facilities) spanning from Kuwait to the United Arab Emirates—and now spreading inland—Iran has forced the U.S. into firing off lots of its interceptors. It also successfully attacked on-base radars that the interceptors rely on for accuracy. While story after story reported that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned about the limited supply of interceptors, known as magazine depth, President Trump insisted that the U.S. had sufficient capability to fend off Iranian attacks.
The actual magazine depth of the U.S. military is understandably classified. But yesterday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank with impeccable establishment credentials—Kissinger was a trustee—published an estimate of the current state of U.S. interceptor stocks. I don’t know what exactly I expected, but the burn rate of the interceptors is so extreme as to make this war look doomed from the outset.
According to CSIS, the U.S. had 2330 Patriot (smaller, short-range) interceptors and 452 THAAD (larger, long-range) interceptors at the start of the war. Five months later, it has between 759 and 827 Patriot interceptors and between 234 and 278 THAADs. Those aren’t figures for the interceptors the U.S. has in the Middle East. They’re the figures for all the interceptors the U.S. has, period.
In other words, the U.S. has so far used up around 66 percent of its Patriot stocks and around 40 percent, conservatively, of its THAADs. It did that in five months across a war it chose. A war that Trump said would be won in four to five weeks.
The rate of expenditure hasn’t been static in those five months. Remember that there was a ceasefire declared on April 8. CSIS’ figures, understandably, show the most intense period of interceptor usage occurring in just the first five weeks of the war. All this helps explain why Trump had to pursue a ceasefire in the first place….
U.S. general warns Pentagon he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel
Dan Lamothe, July 31, 2026 [Washington Post]
The top U.S. general in Europe privately warned the Pentagon this week that he lacks sufficient naval forces to continue protecting Israel from incoming ballistic missiles, officials said, illustrating how the ongoing Iran war has imposed constraints on the military.
Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, sent written notification to senior Pentagon officials saying that without another Navy destroyer he will be forced to choose defense of the United States “homeland” over that of Israel, said the officials, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the correspondence.
Israel and US consider Iran land blockade
Connor Stringer, July 31, 2026 [The Telegraph, via yahoo.com/news]
The United States and Israel are discussing a possible land blockade of Iran, The Telegraph can reveal.
The proposal is one of several options being explored by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to ratchet up economic pressure on the regime after months of strikes and a prolonged campaign failed to bring it to heel….
Iran shares borders with Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, meaning the leaders would have to persuade these countries, many of which they are not allied with, to co-operate.
Washington may view Pakistan and Iraq, which are not considered its close allies in the region, as weak links.
If any of the seven countries bordering Iran agreed to co-operate, they would face their own economic consequences and the threat of retaliatory strikes by the Islamic Republic….
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
‘The Boss Wants This Money’: Inside Trump’s Unprecedented Fundraising Operation
Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and Emily Glazer, July 30, 2026 [Wall Street Journal, via PoliticsNC]
Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments….Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.Trump has been demanding large checks from companies for a range of political and legacy projects—telling executives and lobbyists that their companies should give $25 million or $50 million. He has sometimes offered donors special access….“Trump is shattering all fundraising paradigms in regards to hitting up corporate America for donations. The scope is mind-bogglingly large,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “We used to talk about the Lincoln bedroom being for sale, but this is just a wholesale money trough that’s totally different.” Critics alleged in the 1990s that the Clinton administration allowed overnight stays in the White House’s Lincoln bedroom in exchange for campaign contributions….The White House referred requests for comment to Alvarez. She said the president is the “most successful fundraiser in modern political history” and that Trump plans to use the money to “help Republicans win big in the midterms, build an enduring political infrastructure and continue advancing innovative private-sector initiatives.”“One thing has never changed. President Trump can’t be bought,” she said….Several CEOs and board members said they believe there is a link between their contributions and their access to the president. One chairman of a publicly traded company said that if you give the money, you know you are either checked on a list, or crossed off a list if you don’t….Companies have traded notes about what Wall Street analyst Blair Levin calls “The Trump Transaction Tax,” or a payment outside of the cost of normal business. “Another way of saying it,” Levin said, “is simply that we’re replacing the free market with the market for Trump’s affections.” ….
Christopher Armitage, Aug 01, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship
Mark Danner [The New York Review, August 20, 2026 issue]
Reviewed:
… The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of NATO, the destruction of USAID, and the calamity of the Iran war, Trump’s name is more likely to appear on lists of leaders who have diminished their country’s power than lists of those who have increased it. But that he has become one of the most powerful American presidents—that he has since his second inauguration “put on a demonstration of raw executive power the country had not seen since the presidency of FDR”—is well-nigh indisputable. One could go further and say that not only has Trump, like Roosevelt and Lincoln, successfully imposed on the world’s first modern democracy a “constitutional dictatorship,” he is the only president to have done so in the absence of a true emergency.
How did he do it? Aggressively, brutally, relentlessly—weren’t we all watching him? The more specific answer is that he did it by exploiting the chief executive’s myriad emergency powers or, as Haberman and Swan rather politely phrase it, by “redefin[ing] the very concept of an ‘emergency.’” Another way to put it is that Trump did what Trump does as easily as he breathes: he lied. Is the trade deficit, in uninterrupted existence for half a century, an emergency? Can a country leading the world in energy production be said to be undergoing an “energy emergency”? Can we consider that the southern border, where crossings dropped 77 percent after Joe Biden’s executive order limiting entry, remains in the grip of a “border emergency”? The answer is no. But it doesn’t matter. In issuing more than 140 executive orders in his first hundred days in office—Roosevelt issued ninety-nine—Trump declared that the country was beset by no fewer than ten separate emergencies.
And in the face of this supposedly unprecedented onslaught the president must have unprecedented powers to confront them….
Trump’s National Killer Police Force
[The Intercept, July 24, 2026]
Within the span of a week, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people in Maine and Texas, and another was hit by a truck and killed in Florida after trying to avoid ICE agents. A fourth person recently died in ICE custody after reportedly being denied medication.
Their deaths prompted yet another round of questioning as to how federal immigration agents have amassed so much power and so little accountability. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Naureen Shah, of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Nayna Gupta, of the American Immigration Council, on the consequences of allowing the government to build a national policing force that’s bringing Trump’s war on immigrants into communities across the country.
“The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies — which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies — make them far larger than anything that we’ve seen at the federal law enforcement level,” says Shah. “Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually most militaries around the world.” ….