“The Trump-Musk feud is not so much a distraction as it is evidence of a societal tendency toward abstraction, even obfuscation. A cage match is easier to watch than a discussion about who deserves benefits and resources.”

“All of this hullabaloo about nonsense deals with Britain and China serves to distract from the brute reality of the Trump and MAGA trade agenda.

There are no real deals.”

“..this is the constant problem of trying to make sense of the signs from people in Trump’s orbit—the recurrent use of white supremacists’ favorite sequence of numbers, ambiguous (and sometimes unambiguous) Nazi salutes, and other dog-whistling. How much benefit of the doubt really should be given?”

What we all just witnessed had all the earmarks of a criminal conspiracy to deprive Abrego-Garcia of his constitutional rights, as well as an impeachable offense. The fraud scheme was a phony agreement engineered by the US to have Bukele say he lacks power to return Abrego Garcia and he won't do it.

“But this branding is profoundly misleading. In reality, Donald Trump and his allies have been using “anti-Semitism” as a pretext to advance a radical agenda that has nothing to do with Jews at all—and that most American Jews do not support.”

The thing about Trump’s team is that we learn how many morally bankrupt, marginally intelligent, men of utterly average substance have walked among us, seemingly successful, running money-making firms, CEOs and venture capitalists - even the richest man in the world.

They have been unmasked.

“Musk and Trump have destroyed the shield that once protected America from the next global contagion. Deadly diseases don’t bother with borders; no wall will keep them out.”

“Stifling inconvenient discussions is dangerous business, and it goes far beyond book talks. The Trump administration has flaunted its contempt for many of the country’s cultural, scholarly, scientific, medical, and educational institutions while announcing its intention to defund and destroy them.”

“To say, then, that Trump lacks the temperament or attention span to be a dictator offers little comfort. He is patrimonialism’s perfect organism. He recognizes no distinction between what is public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal, national and personal.”

“In truth, the Trump administration has given us no reason to believe that it cares about reducing the national debt.”