The Picture Says It All

Elon Musk basically made one halfway-smart political call, and that was when he donated rouughy $277 million to the 2024 Republican campaigns. He then briefly recognized that he wasn't cut out for politics:

Wisconsin could go down as billionaire Elon Musk’s last big spend on a political campaign.

And it was a flop.

Musk, the richest person in the world, said May 20 that he would be spending less on political campaigns. The announcement came as Musk is stepping back from his role in the Trump administration, saying he will spend more time focused on his businesses, and just seven weeks after the candidate he backed in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race lost by 10 percentage points.

. . . Musk was all-in on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, even making a personal appearance in Green Bay the weekend before the election wearing a cheesehead hat — popular with fans of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers — and personally handing out checks for $1 million to supporters. It was an extension of Musk’s high-profile role in the presidential race, where he campaigned alongside Trump and headlined some of his own rallies.

. . . But his appearance — and money — didn’t work.

The candidate Musk backed lost Brown County, the home of Green Bay, by 3 percentage points, going on to lose statewide by more than three times that margin.

After the defeat, Musk has said little publicly about the race and his involvement in it. His popularity has also plummeted.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll taken two weeks after the Wisconsin court election found that just 33% of adults had a favorable view of the Tesla CEO, down from 41% in December.

Subsequent disagreements with Trump have hurt him in the pocketbook:

Tesla (TSLA) shares have risen this week as investors may be moving past the fiery public spat between CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump.

The electric vehicle maker’s shares are up 10% this week, recouping more than half of the ground lost last week in the wake of Trump and Musk’s social media shots at one another. The back and forth started as an argument over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” taxation-and-spending bill but spiraled into a now-deleted post in which Musk accused Trump of being in the "Epstein files," referencing the late convicted sex trafficker. The public fight ended up costing Tesla a spot in the illustrious $1 trillion market capitalization club with a one-day drop of more than $150 billion.

. . . Tesla's stock has been on a roller coaster ride this year. Shares shed more than 35% of their value in the first quarter as sales slumped, tariffs hit the stock market, and controversy swirled around Musk. They staged a comeback in April and May after Musk said he would step back from Washington.

But like a guy with a gambling habit who can't stay out of the casino, Musk is back:

Elon Musk, the richest man with visions of grandeur, has announced the creation of a new political party, “The America Party”.

With President Donald Trump capturing the overwhelming majority of middle-America within the new MAGA movement; essentially taking over the Republican party apparatus, I would consider that Musk’s assembly will likely be a collection of never-trumpers, alligator emojis and disgruntled former Republicans.

At this point, I see a partial, but definitely not complete, similarity with Ross Perot, who ran an independent campaign for president in 1992.

Ross Perot had never been elected to public office, but he ran several successful corporations and was involved in public affairs for decades. . . . Perot joined IBM as a salesman. He surpassed his one-year sales quota in just two weeks. After the company ignored his idea for electronic storage, he founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962, which was then contracted by the United States government to store Medicare records. Perot earned a fortune with the company, and by 1968 was named by Fortune as the "fastest, richest Texan". . . . Perot eventually sold his company to General Motors in 1984 for $2.55 billion, and founded Perot Systems in 1988. By 1992, his fortune was judged to be $3 billion (~$5.85 billion in 2023).

The similarities are that both Musk and Perot were political novices, both had become rich beyond the dreams of avarice in tech -- largely with government money -- neither had much personal charisma, and both proved unstable under the pressures of public life. Perot's poll numbers began to slip in July 1992, and senior advisers were resigning. On July 16,

Perot announced on Larry King Live that he would not seek the presidency. . . . He asked his supporters to look for other candidates to nominate for the race, and formed United We Stand to "influence the debate". At this point, Perot had spent $12 million of his own money on the race. Bill Hillsman, who produced a few unaired advertisements for the campaign, wrote that Perot's withdrawal was a tactic to find temporary relief from the press.

. . . On October 1, Perot re-entered the presidential race, with a desire to further explain his economic plans to the American people. The New York Times commented that Perot's "chances of winning are much less than when he quit in July. His only dim practical hope is to confuse and destabilize the contest."

There's one key difference between Perot and Musk: Perot, a native-born US citizen, was eligible to become president, and he was the figurehead of his own third party. Musk isn't a native-born US citizen and can't run for president, but even if he were, his public persona is even more eccentric and unstable than Perot's. But as w3ith Perot, the more people see of him and learn about him, the less they like him.

But an additional problem is that Trump had already claimed whatever political legacy Perot had left.

The populist Tea Party movement and supporters of President Donald Trump have both been compared to Perot advocates. Upon Perot's death from leukemia in 2019, Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris reflected upon Perot's 1992 campaign and referred to him as the "father of Trump" due to Trump's 2016 presidential victory as, like Perot, a populist businessman without traditional political experience.

Trump, unlike Musk or Perot, has personal charisma and the ability to inspire trust in the electorate. His political instincts are far better. And if people were never quite sure what Perot wanted to accomplish, it's even less certain with Musk, whose plans for the future include terraforming Mars and impregnating hundreds, if not thousands, of women with his own DNA -- but the one thing that's certain is he can never be president, which in my view is all to the good.

The real question is how much longer the Tesla and SpaceX boards will put up with him.

Kaitlan Collins Buys A Pied-à-terre On Nantucket

Last night I had what I can only call a medley or amalgam of every dumb recurring dream or nightmare I've ever had, probably familiar to many people, the one where I went to school in my bathrobe, the one where I can't find where my car is parked, the one where I need to use the bathroom but can't find one anywhere, the similar one where I need to find an elevator, the one where I signed up for a course, never bought the books and never showed up for class, but now it's almost time for finals -- and probably half a dozen others.

In fact, I kept telling myself in the dream, "Oh, no, this isn't a dream!", and that meant I was going to have to tell my mother I had to drop out of school. When I woke up and realized it was in fact a dream, I was truly astonished. I went searching on the web for interpretations of what these things meant, and I learned that I was insecure, or that I was preparing for new experiences, or that I was reassimilating my personality, none of which seemed to mean a thing.

As part of the dream, each time a new sequence came up, I kept asking myself, "I wonder what triggered that one?", and I kept recognizing a guy with a suitcase in a previous scene, or something like that, so it was all a little like the Salvador Dali dream scene in Hitchcock's Spellbound. But then, after I woke up, I kept asking myself the same question, "I wonder what triggered that one?" I finaly came up with an answer: CNN staffers livid after Kaitlan Collins buys vacation home on luxurious island getaway.

I realized that Kaitlan Collins's unnatural smirk had been haunting me for days. This simply isn't a real face, it's not a normal expression in repose. It can only be the result of bad plastic surgery or, as I wondered a short while ago, maybe she'd been making a face like that as a child, her mother had warned her that one day it was going to stick like that, and this had finally happened. But it's also the sort of face you see in a dream. Let's also note the dreamlike quality of the story at the link:

The turmoil over Collins' lavish new island getaway came as an anonymous source told Fox News there are 'tears on the horizon' for the left-leaning news network.

Warner Bros. Discovery's shock split into two distinctive companies is a sign the jobs and hefty salaries of CNN's top talent are on the line, media insiders have warned.

. . . Streaming & Studios' domain will be Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO, and HBO Max.

Global Networks, on the other hand, will be news focused, assuming CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery, among other programming.

CEO David Zaslav will take on the leading role of the Streaming & Studios company, while CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels will become the President of Global Networks.

. . . 'Inevitably, Gunnar will look at CNN and decide he can maintain relatively similar profits at a mere fraction of the cost,' Dylan Byers, a former CNN reporter who now works for Puck, wrote in an opinion piece.

'This will have perceptible ramifications on the talent side. Why, for instance, would Gunnar pay Anderson Cooper $18 million a year when Kaitlan Collins draws the same ratings at roughly a fifth of the salary?'

In other words, CNN can fire Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, and Wolf Blitzer, but they can keep Kaitlan Collins, an even more mediocre figure, who will appeal to the same audience for much less money. Not only that, but Collins herself has gamed this out: a normal person looking at potential layoffs by their employer might hesitate before pulling the trigger on a multimillion-dollar vacation home. But Collins figures it's the top-dollar talent who'll be on the way out, not her.

This also resonates with the actual psychology of corporate downsizing. When the committee of people who decide who goes and who stays gets together, they look at the candidates one by one and say, "Smith? He doesn't do much, but we know nobody else would hire him. We can't lay him off." On the other hand, they look at a top performer and say, "Johnson? Heck, he could get a job anywhere. He'll land on his feet. He's the one we can let go and not feel bad about it."

Thus Kaitlan Collins. When I did a web search on her, the problem of her smirk kept surfacing:

In 2023, Reddit users questioned if Collins ever had work done on her lips, citing their sharp corners. "To me her lips are so distracting the way they are always curled up on the ends," one Reddit user wrote. "Is it natural or manufactured?" Other commenters chimed with their thoughts about Collins' possible alterations to her appearance, adding that she might have had cosmetic surgery in areas like her mouth and nose. "There is definitely something totally weird about her lips," another user said. "To me at least the edges of her lips have what I would call little 'winglets' like you see at the end of the wings on a commercial plane. And that nose is really strange."

This brings me to how someone like that could be allowed in front of the cameras at a major network. This past year, there was a pseudo-controversy on On Patrol: Live over whether Dan Abrams, who had started a beard and was beginning to look distinguished in a rabbinical way, should shave it off. Sean "Sticks" Larkin, a popular alumnus of the show, reappeared to deliver the message, almost certainly from mahogany row, which went something like this: "The little I've learned about television, Dan, is that there are three key ingredients, lighting, makeup, and camera angle. It's gonna have to go." And of course, it did.

So how could television executives allow someone with a face like Kaitlan Collins, taking key considerations like lighting, makeup, and camera angle into consideration, in front of the camera? It somehow has to do with the nature of mediocrity, I have a sense. They can always fire the big-ticket talking heads, but they'll stick with mediocrity. At least until they can't -- but mediocrity will still get a long run. My dream told me that.

Very Stable Genius

🚨 Van Jones DROPS A TRUTH BOMB: “Guys, can we cut it out? Donald Trump is not an idiot… Donald Trump is smarter than me, you, and all the critics… this dude is a phenomenal—he is the most powerful human on earth.” 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/dUAKvYUMGm

— TRUMP ARMY (@TRUMP_ARMY_) May 18, 2025

I think we're at the beginning of a remarkable reappraisal of Donald Trump, although there's been a fairly consistent minority opinion that Trump is a "genius" since his first term. I asked, the web, "Is Trunp smart?" It returned, among others, this link at Politico from 2020:

What we learned from Trump’s taxes does suggest he possesses an astonishing gift which could reasonably be called “genius” — if you accept that as a descriptive word rather than a term of praise.

Genius, in this context, means something more than “very smart.” It means an ability to see connections and possibilities in circumstances that even people who are smart in conventional ways do not see. There are some people who possess genius of a certain type in certain arenas who might actually qualify as kind of dumb when it comes to more conventional intelligence of the sort measured in conventional arenas.

Trump’s genius, as illuminated by the Times, isn’t simply for self-promotion but for harnessing self-promotion to a coherent and comprehensive strategy for personal gain. . . . It is a simple fact that in this intersection of self-promotion, self-enrichment, and self-protection Trump has a mind that operates at a different level than most, and he has used it to fashion a historic career.

But from The New Republic the same year:

From the earliest days of his administration, it has been obvious to everyone who has come in direct contact with him that Trump knows very, very little about any policy issue or even how the federal government operates. Among those most alarmed by Trump’s ignorance and incompetence were those in the military and intelligence community. After a National Security Council meeting on January 19, 2018, Defense Secretary James Mattis told aides that Trump had the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader.”

. . . Trump’s mental failings are also painfully clear to foreign diplomats, who are professionally obligated to be frank and clear-eyed about him. Among themselves, diplomats early on shared tips on meeting with Trump: Don’t assume he knows anything about your country, flatter his ego, and be mindful of his extremely short attention span.

. . . In July 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” for his bungling and incompetence. That same month, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster reportedly dismissed Trump as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner” at a private dinner. In 2018, White House chief of staff John Kelly called Trump “an idiot” on several occasions. A long list of other close Trump advisers have also disparaged his intelligence.

So is Trump basically just a successful narcissist? The problem is that narcissists wear out their welcome:

[Researchers] did a survey of people asking them what behaviors they believed increase their status in a group. People who scored low on the [ Narcissism Personality Inventory] tended to list behaviors in which they treated other people nicely. People who scored high on the NPI tended to list behaviors that got them noticed like being arrogant or pointing out other people’s weaknesses. These more aggressive behaviors may in fact bring people status in the short-term, but that status tends to erode over the long-term.

This pattern may be one reason why narcissists often move from one group to another in organizations. They can make themselves noticed quickly, but their behavior leads them to wear out their welcome quickly. And because narcissists are sensitive to when their status is declining, they can recognize when it is time to find a new group.

On one hand, Trump certainly displays behaviors like being arrogant or pointing out other people’s weaknesses. On the other, particularly after comparing Trump to Biden, the electorate appears to have decided it could live with this, and it reelected him. In fact, there seems to be an emerging consensus that Trump has a unique talent for "harnessing self-promotion to a coherent and comprehensive strategy for personal gain", if in fact personal gain is his objective.

Let's take the case of his post-election bromance with Elon Musk, currently the richest man in the world. Mostly at Trump's instigation, Musk donated something like $277 million to his and other Republicans' 2024 campaigns, and apparently as a reward, he spent some weeks in Trump's close company at Mar-a-Lago and the White House. But when it mattered, Trump didn't give him the one big thing he wanted, continuation of electric vehicle subsidies, saying simply that his position against them was well known from the start.

I can only see this as extremely skillful manipulation, and it's almost amusing to see Musk belatedly waking up to the recognition that he's been used. And in fact, Tim Walz's chracterization of Musk, “Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around skipping like a dipshit", wasn't far off the mark. Trump set Musk up for this, letting him get carried away with his own ego, in return for a quarter billion dollars, and all he got was the oppurtunity to jump around on a stage. His boards aren't as impressed.

The interpersonal insight Trump is displaying in this episode alone is something unprecedented. The Trump-as-narcissist narrative is going to have to be dropped.

Why Is Elon So Bent Out Of Shape?

In response to renewed complaints from Musk about the Big Beautiful Bill, Trump said yesterday,

We might have to put DOGE on Elon. You know what DOGE is? The monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies.

At the same link,

The president’s ire comes after Musk expressed his frustration over the sweeping spending bill on social media ahead of Tuesday’s Senate vote.

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” the 54-year-old wrote on X Saturday.

“Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

On Monday, the world’s richest man continued his criticism, saying lawmakers who had campaigned on cutting spending but backed the bill “should hang their heads in shame!”

. . . Trump said Tuesday his former ally was upset over a Biden-era electric vehicle mandate that was reversed by the new bill.

“Elon Musk knew, long before he so strongly Endorsed me for President, that I was strongly against the EV Mandate,” the prez wrote on Truth Social.

Opinions vary on the potential effect on Tesla of the EV mandate phaseout. According to Fox Business,

"Getting rid of this $7,500 tax credit should not impact [Tesla] sales," automotive expert Lauren Fix told FOX Business. "People buy Teslas because they like the product… They know what their customers want, and those that like Teslas will continue to purchase that product."

But according to CNN,

In a note to clients the day after the election, Garrett Nelson, an analyst for CFRA Research, wrote that ending the credit “will widen Tesla’s competitive moat by making competing EV models even more uneconomic, as we believe (Tesla) is the only profitable manufacturer of EVs.”

But now, Nelson is expressing worry over Tesla’s value if the credits go away.

“Our view is the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ would be a net negative for Tesla, as tax credits for EVs, energy storage and solar would be going away,” Nelson said in response to questions from CNN. “That, and ongoing EV market share losses in China and Europe, are some of the primary reasons why we downgraded the stock in April.”

Elsewhere at CNN:

Tesla (TSLA) is expected to report yet another quarter of declining global sales on Wednesday, a not-unexpected stumble after months of falling revenue thanks to increased competition in the EV market and no small amount of reputational damage stemming from Musk’s role as President Trump’s “first buddy.”

Now, you might imagine that if you’re the CEO of a company with sales of its core product in rapid decline you’d want to, like, avoid any public squabbles that would further undermine investors’ confidence in your leadership.

Or, you could take the Musk route.

. . . “This BFF situation has now turned into a soap opera that remains an overhang on Tesla’s stock,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, a longtime Tesla defender, said in a note to clients Tuesday. “Tesla investors want Musk to focus on driving Tesla and stop this political angle… being on Trump’s bad side will not turn out well, and Musk knows this.”

Ives remains bullish on Tesla, but in recent months he has been speaking out about the damage Musk’s political swings have done to the company’s image, which isn’t helping the company’s sales problem.

Another factor that none of the published stories mentions is the fear factor among prospective and current Tesla owners that people will vandalize their cars out of anger at Musk. Thus I've been seeing Tesla bumper stickers like the one above, which are presumably aimed at disarming potential vandals who might think the owner endorses Musk and DOGE. This, of course, is almost as bad as a product getting a reputation for making people sick or killing them -- buy a Tesla, and someone might key it. Who needs that grief?

But I've already mentioned what I think is Musk's real worry:

in the end, Musk works for his corporate boards of directors, who give him his options, his bonuses, his perks, and his planes, and right now, they aren't happy.

Back to the second CNN link:

Tesla shares, the backbone of Musk’s personal fortune, are down 37% from their post-election peak, when Musk was becoming a fixture at Mar-a-Lago. The thinking on Wall Street back then was that Tesla’s problems were manageable, and that any blowback from the company’s liberal base would be outweighed by the benefit of having Musk in the White House, influencing regulations.

It might have worked, briefly. But the pair’s falling out now has investors worried Trump will aim his retribution directly at Tesla.

Board members have a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of investors:

As a board member, your fiduciary responsibility is to act in the best interests of the company and the shareholders you serve.

Having a fiduciary duty is an important responsibility. Damages could be awarded to beneficiaries if a fiduciary fails to fulfil their duty, and this is called a breach of fiduciary duty.

The most important job of a corporate board is to hire and fire the CEO; in the case of Musk's companies, Musk himself. I've got to think the boards of Tesla and SpaceX are getting pretty nervous. The problem is that Musk is having a hard time staying focused and dealing with the pressure, but given the turmoil in his personal life, that shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. As Trump says, he may well wind up back in South Africa. Trump has a lot of insight.

It's also worth noting how skillfully Trump has played Musk over the past year. If you think about it, a comparative pauper, he's squeezed the richest man in the world for all he was worth. And even before that, Musk bought Twitter/X at a big loss mainly to give Trump a platform, while Trump was running a competitor, never needed X, and still doesn't. Deep down, I have a feeling Musk, supposedly a smart guy who nevertheless dated Amber Heard, knows he got rolled by Trump, who I think is actually a much smarter guy.

Sam Tanenhaus On Trump

Sam Tanenhous, who has written extensively on the conservative movement, has an essay out this morning on Trump at Vanity Fair, The Godfather Presidency: How Donald Trump’s Governing Style Mimics the Mob. The title promises, but it doesn't deliver. He talks extensively about Trump's formative years, but the fact is that the mob was on its way out starting with the Kefauver Committee in 1950-51 and continuing through the Apalachin Meeting of 1957, the assassination of Albert Anastasia the same year, and Bobby Kennedy's war on the Mafia from 1961-63.

The closest association he can draw between the Mob and Trump is with John Gotti,

the folk hero mobster, who operated out of Trump’s home borough, Queens, and whom the New York press—and this magazine—covered in the 1980s at the same time they were trailing Trump. Many remember Gotti as the well-dressed goon. Fewer recall the mass demonstrations held on his behalf when he was on trial or the politicians who spoke admiringly of him.

Wait a mement. The only thing Tanenhaus can hang on Trump is that Gotti was also from Queens. But think of the differences: Gotti was in prison at 51, dead ten years later. Since then, Trump has been a reality television star and twice electd president. Pretty much the only thing Mafia dons learned during Trump's lifetime was how to get gunned down or sent to prison. Trump must have had other role models. Tanenhaus tacitly acknowledges this:

In my 35 years of writing about and reporting on US politics and ideology, I can’t think of another time when so many professional observers seem so utterly at a loss to analyze, or even categorize, the president’s MO. And most of them have gotten it wrong. Trump’s operating model is not, as some maintain, the foreign autocrat—even if he curries favor and sings the praises of Putin and Orban and Erdogan, and cozies up to Middle Eastern potentates. Neither is Trump’s model his crafty lawyer-mentor Roy Cohn—even if he practices Cohn’s mantra: Deny, deflect, delay. It’s a mistake, too, to think of Trump as a latter-day P.T. Barnum, a showman-salesman mugging for the TV cameras and effusing on Truth Social.

All that may apply to Trump the entertainer. But Trump the president is shaped by someone he observed at much closer range from childhood on: his father, Fred Trump, the great mid-20th-century apartment builder and developer of outer-borough New York. For many years father and son were partners who mastered the byways and back alleys of real estate at a time when, as two of the period’s best reporters wrote, New York was a “city for sale.”

So Trump's real role model was his dad, Fred Trump, who worked in real estate, which meant he sometimes had to deal with the Mob, but he also had to deal with politicians, competitors, unions, reporters, bankers, investors, whomever. In fact, for Tanenhaus, mobsters are an inadequate comparison. He's actually looking for something more like Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost:

When Trump lost to Joe Biden, he recalibrated. Exiled to Mar-a-Lago, he tightened his hold on both houses of Congress, consolidated the sometimes lockstep allegiance of the Supreme Court, and clawed his way back, despite having been impeached twice by the House, convicted on 34 felony counts, and found liable in an array of lawsuits. As if to make up for lost time, second-term Trump, operating with Mob boss impunity, has become the consummate party boss in the tradition of New York’s Tammany Hall, an era when pols bragged about how many judges they had in their pocket.

Self-assured and self-obsessed, fearless and fearsome, the interloper of 2015 has become the folk hero of January 6, 2021, and now is widely acknowledged to be the dominant American political figure of the 21st century, as mythically big as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan were in the 20th. Trump’s success derives from his innate understanding of how to wield bare-knuckle power by creating his own kind of syndicate in the time-tested style of both the political clubhouses and the Mob-adjacent New York real estate business of his youth. He is, without doubt, the capital’s most effective and intimidating executive since LBJ.

He's actually making my point for me here: comparisons with FDR, LBJ, and Reagan are certainly apt. But Lucky Luciano and John Gotti simply aren't in that league. Satan eats those guys for breakfast. If Trump isn't Hitler, he must be Satan. Let's keep these things in perspective.

But there are pieces of the puzzle that don't fit Tanenhaus's model of a Trump who, like LBJ, has everyone's pecker in his pocket. Let's look at two things that happened over just this past weekend: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carey's U-turn on the digital services tax, and Sen Thom Tillis's sudden decision to retire. I think we need to acknowledge that neither owed anything to Trump; trhey actively opposed him, and he didn't bribe either to do what they did. As of Sunday,

As expected given the nature of their dependency, the Canadian government has rescinded the digital services tax against U.S. tech companies.

The June 30th collection is halted and the Canadian government led by Mark Carney will be bringing legislation to rescind the tax entirely.

, , , In the bigger picture Canada has a serious problem.

Canada is entirely dependent on the USA; there is no part of the Canadian economic system that can survive without total dependence on the USA.

Or let's look again at Sen Tillis's decision not to run:

Apparently Tillis caved THE NIGHT Trump scorched him!

Tillis called President Trump and Majority Leader Thune on Saturday night and informed them he wouldn’t be running for reelection.

Both Carney and Tillis simply folded; they didn't have any cards to play, and Trump knew it. There was no back channel deal of any sort, they lost fair and square. A better metaphor for Trump here is the poker player, not the Mafia don. Tanenhaus's main point seems to be that politics is a rigged game, and Trump somehow learned to rig it better than anyone at his father's knee. This leaves out the manifest truth that poker is a game of skill, and some players are better at it than others.

But even if Tanenhaus won't acknowledge this, his metaphors are off: Mafia dons were never that good at what they did. I asked AI if John Gotti was a successful don, and it replied,

John Gotti was a complex figure, achieving success as a media celebrity and crime boss through intimidation and violence, but ultimately his reign led to the downfall of the Gambino crime family due to his recklessness and eventual conviction.

His tenure as head of the Gambino family lasted only seven years; his career ended at 51. Tanenhaus keeps wanting to tie Trump to Gotti, but he spends more time comparing him to FDR, LBJ, and Reagan. Maybe he should have dropped the Mob and gone straight to Satan; at least he would have had his metaphorical structure more proportionate.

Chris Cilizza On Thom Tillis

I'm trying to get my head around this whole Thom Tillis retirement business. After Tillis annmounced that he couldn't support Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, putatively due to Medicaid cuts, Trump posted,

Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against ‘Senator Thom’ Tillis,” Trump wrote in another post. “I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina and, so importantly, the United States of America.

Tillis immediately folded, saying near the end of a rambling statement,

As many of my colleagues have noticed over the last year, and at times even joked about, I haven't exactly been excited about running for another term. That is true since the choice is between spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with the love of my life Susan, our two children, three beautiful grandchildren, and the rest of our extended family back home. It's not a hard choice, and I will not be seeking re-election.

His tone was rueful. He referred to

working across the aisle in the Senate to pass the largest investment in mental health in American history, passing the Respect for Marriage Act and monumental infrastructure investments, and reestablishing the Senate NATO Observer Group. Sometimes those bipartisan initiatives got me into trouble with my own party, but I wouldn't have changed a single one.

In Washington over the last few years, it's become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.

So the subext seems to be that he'd been digging a hole for himself with Republicans, he knew it, but he didn't have the stomach for the primary fight he almost certainly now anticipated.

So let's move to the video from Chris Cilizza embedded above. Cilizza's career has been uneven. He left a ten-year gig at The Washington Post in 2017 for a step up at CNN, but was laid off there in 2022. More recently he's been pitching himself on YouTube as an "independent journalist", which is to say someone who lost a high-profile network job but hasn't found a new one, just like Megyn Kelly or Tucker Carlson or Mark Halperin.

In the video, he reviews Tillis's opposition to Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. At 1:54:

Tillis voted against it because it has cuts to Medicaid that he said would adversely impact his constituents in North Carolina. Makes some sense, right?

Well, maybe, except that the Medicaid cuts are national, they'll affect people in all 50 states, including the constituents of every Republican senator. He seems to be the only one concerned enough to make the cuts a deal breaker. (Rand Paul, the other Republican "no" vote, thinks spending cuts in the bill don't go far enough.) Why is Tillis the only standout on this issue? And before he went to the Senate, he built his career in North Carolina with a harder line on those same constituents:

In a 2011 speech, Tillis said, "What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance" by getting people who "had no choice" but to receive public assistance "to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government."

In other words, Tillis has been all over the landscape over his career, and it's hard to deny that some of his positions have been taken from expediency. Cilizza draws a different moral at 4:42:

It is unique to have a President of the United States who simply wants agreement with everythiing he does, even if it is bad politics for a senator or a house member. Trump just wants you to say you support Trump. That's it. So even if Tillis had legitimate worries and complaints about Medicaid cuts impacting his constituents, that doesn't matter to Trump. Trump wants you to be for him. That's it . . . which leaves you basically with two options in the modern-day Republican party, you can one, get on board with Trump always and forever, or two, get out of politics.

He's buying into the stereotypical view that Trump is narcissistic, ego-driven, a my-way-or-the-highway type. Considering Trump's record of success against generally bad odds throughout a political career undertaken as a retirement activity, I think this view is harder and harder to sustain. But now Cilizza contradicts himself. He thinks it's reckless for Trump to drive Tillis out of politics when Tillis is the safest bet to keep that Senate seat Republican in 2026:

And Donald Trump as party leader, his goal should be to hold on to as many Senate seats as possible, House seats too, because that's how you retain power in Washington. But I think his real goal is to drive total and complete adherence within the party.

The problem is that if you get too many Tillis-style "independent thinkers" who are " willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise", especially with the majorities as slim as they currently are, you don't actually retain power in Washington. Hasn't this been the lesson of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell? It's pretty plain that Trump's object is to remake the Republican Party, and a big part of that job has been to force certain retirements, so far including Romney, McConnell, and Tillis, with several others still to go.

Cilizza seems oblivious to Trump's purpose here, but even Tillis's Wikipedia entry should make things clear:

In 2014, Tillis announced that he would not seek reelection to the state House, instead running for U.S. Senate against first-term Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan. In the Republican primary, he was endorsed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, then-North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The New York Times called Tillis a "favorite of the party establishment."

. . . On May 6, he won the nomination with 45.68% of the vote over Greg Brannon and Mark Harris, described as a victory for the Republican establishment over the insurgent Tea Party movement.

. . . After the release of the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 United States presidential election, Tillis called Trump's comments "indefensible". According to Politico, he "began the Trump era by negotiating with Democrats on immigration and co-authoring legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller" but has increasingly aligned himself with the president due to pressure from his party.

Tillis won both of his Senate campaigns with slim margins, suggesting that he's less of a Republican favorite than someone North Carolinians judge a little less bad than his opponents, and they'll hold their noses and vote for him if that's their only choice. It seems to me that Trump is still feeling lucky, and he may as well gamble that he can come up with a better alternative.

The Biden Enterprise Is Broke

Hunter Biden is now being sued for unpaid legal fees by Winston & Strawn. https://t.co/FCb4qAnZB3 With his father out of power and influence peddling no longer an option, bills are coming due for Hunter ...

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025

The most recent news from the Bidens is that the white-shoe firm Winston & Strawn is suing Hunter to recover $50,000 in unpaid bills. For a firm like that, $50,000 is de minimis, so I'm a little puzzled, except that it probably shows the firm no longer sees any benefit at all to writing the money off as a lagniappe for the Bidens.

This comes on the heels of Kevin Morris's family cutting him off after he "loaned" Hunter $6.5 million to cover legal fees.

I think this is also directly related to Joe's last-minute pardons for his brothers and sister, their spouses, and not least, Hunter, saying "he wanted to prevent them from being targeted by 'baseless and politically motivated investigations'". The real meaning is there's no longer any money in the kitty to finance their lifestyles, much less pay their lawyers.

The Biden boodle has never been anything more than smoke and mirrors. Hunter and Joe's siblings prospered based on the idea that any money people lost in blue-sky deals with them could be made up in favors from Joe, which never quite materialized. Meanwhile, Joe himself seems to have been giving them money in addition to what they could snatch from their marks, all of it on the basis that it would one day pay off big, whixch it never quite did. Kevin Morris is not unique.

There's also a difference between the Bidens and the Clintons, who were able to enrich themselves after leaving the White House broke, that due to the legal bills they faced after Bill's impeachment. They were able to get book deals and speaker fees, as well as Hillary's ability to attract money and favors, first from being in the Senate, then from being Secretary of State, and then from being about to be probably president.

There's no such continuing potential with the Bidens. Joe's memory is so badly shot that any book he could get ghostwritten would have no insight, no anecdotes, no insider revelations worth reading. Any attempt to put him on the speaker circuit has already proven laughable. Dr Jill's star appeal has faded, such as it ever may have been, and any new book would just be ghostwritten bromides. Hunter has already written his tell-all.

The question is why anyone ever thought the Bidens were worth the investment. This piece suggests that even the putative "coverup" if Biden's mental decline was actually delusional trust in Biden's abilities by his staff:

A cover-up, as we’ve understood the term to mean since Watergate, involves deliberately hiding something you know to be true. Biden’s closest advisers, however, were operating in a fog of delusion and denial; they refused to believe what they could see with their own eyes. Despite the president’s obvious cognitive decline, they had convinced themselves that he was fine. Their failure to recognize, up close, what everyone else could see from afar—that Biden was too feeble to run for reelection at the age of 82—led to a political disaster.

. . . Mike Donilon, Biden’s senior adviser and confidant, who was with him more than almost anyone, swears he never saw the president mentally diminished. So unless someone produces a failed neurological exam--or a deep-sixed Parkinson’s diagnosis--this was not a classic cover-up but a case of collective denial among Biden, first lady Jill Biden, and the president’s closest aides. Out of a desire to cling to power or just wishful thinking, they believed what they wanted to believe.

I'm wondering if the whole Biden enterprise was anything other than a confidence game. It sure took a long time for the bubble to burst.