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In 1983, America’s music industry leaders banded together to found a new Hall of Fame, dedicated to rock ’n’ roll. Seymour Stein, a legendary record executive and co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, said the Hall was important because “rock ’n’ roll is the cornerstone on which the modern record business is built.”

But what happens when the cornerstone of your monument collapses? Rock ’n’ roll music, as it was understood for more than half a century, has ceased to be a primary musical art form. It has been supplanted by pop songstresses and hip-hop artists.

When the Strokes’ “Is This It” came out in 2001, it seemed to announce a new wave of grimy rock bands. But the name of the band’s album answered its own question—that was it for rock music. Sure, rock bands still existed. The White Stripes and the Foo Fighters carried the mantle and were both later inducted to the Rock Hall. But they were no longer a priority for consumers. Radio pushed them aside in favor of Britney Spears, Eminem and Beyoncé. Soon, artists brandishing electric guitars while wearing black leather pants would be relegated to Halloween costume pop-up stores.

Fast-forward a quarter century to 2026. There haven’t been any new honor-worthy rock bands in the past 25 years—which is how long it takes for artists to become eligible for the Hall after their first album—so there will be almost no rock ’n’ roll acts to induct for the next 25. It’s comparable to what happened to the Baseball Hall of Fame around 15 years ago. The voting committee could barely find anyone to enshrine who wasn’t tainted by the steroid era.

Yet unlike in sports, the idea of rewarding art based on loosely defined standards is ridiculous. How do you define “worth” in the music industry? Is there a measure for “great” music? Is a band like the Go-Go’s, whose career was effectively built on three popular songs, more worthy of induction than a lesser known but still legendary band like the Replacements? The Rock Hall voters think so.

Preposterously, the Hall continues to snub the most influential bands of the past half-century in favor of the bands they inspired. There would be no Green Day (inducted in 2015) without Minneapolis’s legendary speed-metal merchants Hüsker Dü. Nirvana (inducted in 2014) frequently cited Pixies as a major influence, as did many bands in the 1990s. Yet only the former has been rewarded for its work.

When in 2023 I saw that the Hall had inducted Marxist angst rockers Rage Against the Machine before bands like Sonic Youth, Weezer and the Smiths, I had to check to make sure I hadn’t suffered a stroke.

It’s time to dispense with the Hall of Fame format of art altogether. These hallowed halls are fine for sports, where performance is quantifiable and comparisons between players are defensible. Weighing the relative merit of music is offensive, because it’s impossible.

The solution is simple: Scrap the induction charade and turn the building in Cleveland into the American Museum of Popular Music. The infrastructure for this already exists since the Rock Hall hosts a museum. Add notable bands to the collection when they warrant a place in music history.

Music isn’t a listicle; it’s an experience. Rock was great because much of it didn’t care about popular approval. In many cases, acts earned popularity specifically because they disdained it. Its monument should honor that rebellious ethos.

Note: This article first appeared at the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression website.

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When Samuel Clemens began writing for the Nevada-based Territorial Enterprise newspaper in 1862, his news stories featured what recent biographer Ron Chernow called a “casual relationship with facts.”

Clemens filed a story about a “petrified man” who had been freed from rocks after being dead for three centuries and tales titled “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson” and “The Great Landslide Case.” All hoaxes. The man who would become Mark Twain explained this away by saying, “the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast.”

Twain was a breed of writer that can no longer exist in modern America: the self-mythologizing con artist who lives in the liminal space between fact and fiction. The literary master who can feed a gullible public an alternative reality, but with a wink.

This genre of writers can no longer survive because every American now carries a fact-checker in his pocket. Media consumption is no longer a passive act. It is an active one—and taking the scalp of a public figure who fudges his experiences is one of our most popular sports.

Obviously, there are areas in which truth and accuracy are crucial. We don’t expect modern newspapers to fabricate facts or weave falsehoods into their reporting. However, it is always entertaining when a public figure occupies a space somewhere between truth and fiction.

If today’s technology standards had governed the past, the U.S. would have missed out on some of its most risible pranks. A few clicks on social media would have told listeners that Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast was a hoax. The 20th century was replete with people infiltrating American high society by falsely claiming to be members of European royalty. Facebook has virtually eliminated that fun scam—aside from modern fake heiress Anna Sorokin, whose friends were too gullible to check.

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In the early 1800s, author Washington Irving ran a public relations hoax that would put modern TikTokers to shame. To promote his satirical history of New York City, Irving placed missing person ads in local newspapers seeking the whereabouts of a fictitious author named Diedrich Knickerbocker. Irving claimed to represent a hotel whose guest, Knickerbocker, hadn’t paid his bill. If the scofflaw wasn’t found, hotel management promised to print the full manuscript of a book he’d supposedly left behind. The campaign fooled everyone. The Knickerbocker moniker became so popular, the city’s professional basketball team later adopted it.

None of this, of course, would have happened in the mobile phone era, when Irving’s ruse would have been sniffed out immediately.

Information can be the enemy of fun. Some say you should never argue a point that can be looked up. I prefer a different rule: If you need your phone to buttress your opinion, you shouldn’t be allowed to argue it.

Humans frequently get along without the whole truth, though it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between harmless fun and outright fraud. Elizabeth Holmes is in prison because her fake blood-testing machine could have caused real damage.

Nonetheless, a sizable slice of being human is both fooling and being fooled. P.T. Barnum didn’t need fact-checkers to verify his exhibits; he allowed the public to escape into a previously unknown fantasy world. His career of serving up metaphorical bovine excrement served a valuable purpose, whereas, telling pregnant women that Tylenol is dangerous is simply malicious.

One of America’s greatest exports is big personalities with even bigger stories. As an old man, Twain said that when he was younger, he “could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.” But, with his faculties “decaying,” Twain added that he “cannot remember any but the latter.”

And it is the things that never happened to him that made him the quintessential American.

This column first ran in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression section.

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There is nothing funnier than watching other people laugh. Laughter is one of those biological responses that can be triggered by others, just as seeing someone cry can make others cry. Humor is infectious — it can travel through the air and attack your brain, and no amount of ivermectin can cure you of it.

But seeing other people guffaw is also the easiest way to make other people laugh, which is why Saturday Night Live founder and executive producer Lorne Michaels has always frowned on cast members “breaking” on-air. From the inception of the show in 1975, Michaels has said he didn’t want SNL to be the Carol Burnett show.

From the classic book Saturday Night by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, which documented SNL’s creation:

Lorne did, however, lay down some ground rules, in the process outlining an attitude toward the show. Saturday Night would do sketches, not skits; kids do skits, he said, and so did Carol Burnett.

Lorne made it clear that Burnett’s style encompassed everything Saturday Night should avoid. It lacked subtlety and nuance; it was too broad, too bourgeois, and too smug—especially when the performers broke out laughing in mid-sketch, doubling up at the hilarity of themselves. There will be more integrity and respect for the writing here, he said. From then on many an idea would be derisively dismissed on the 17th floor with the words, “That’s Carol Burnett.”

On this week’s show, SNL finally obliterated that foundational rule. In a sketch featuring Ryan Gosling as a school principal and cast member Ashley Padilla as a teacher, a chyron near the bit’s beginning announced that the material the actors were reading had been changed since the final rehearsal. Viewers were effectively being told that the cast members would be as surprised as they were at what they were reading, with the understanding that there is no way they could keep a straight face.

And they didn’t. Padilla, the show’s best cast member, took a note being passed by her class and read it out loud, unable to hold her laughter in. She and Gosling, a notorious breaker, took turns unwrapping notes taken from her students, each struggling to get through the sketch without crying with laughter.

Viewers undoubtedly laughed because if there is anything funnier than watching someone else laugh, it is watching someone trying desperately to avoid cracking up. But the sketch marked an important shift in SNL after 50 years: it was the first to try to make the cast members break. Lorne’s golden rule is now gone, and while the sketch elicited laughs, were they the right kind of laughs?

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Obviously, people break on SNL all the time. Gosling is a notorious laugher (see: the famous Beavis and Butthead sketch from a few years ago, which made the otherwise stoic Heidi Gardner break), so perhaps writers this week decided to really lean into it and write a sketch that requires him to do so.

But breaking can also ruin a sketch. The early 2000s were full of bits obliterated by Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz bursting into laughter because the sketch wasn’t doing well, and they likely knew they could squeeze some snickers out of the studio audience if they broke character. This habit of Fallon’s irked Tracy Morgan, who in a 2007 interview said, “Laughing and all that dumb shit he used to do — he wouldn’t mess with me because I didn’t fucking play that shit. That’s taking all the attention off of everybody else and putting it on you, like, ‘Oh, look at me, I’m the cute one.’ I told him not to do that shit in my sketches, so he never did.”

(For a more complete list of cast members breaking, check out this 2025 piece from The New York Times, in which I am actually quoted. Is “SNL breaking expert” considered an actual profession?)

And then, of course, there is Stefon.

Bill Hader’s famous Weekend Update character, Stefon, was largely written by then-staff writer John Mulaney, who has said he would change lines between rehearsal and air just so Hader had to read them for the first time in front of millions of people. Mulaney knew this would get Hader to crack up, sending the audience into a frenzy.

Hader has said he felt terrible about all the breaking he did as Stefon. He apologized to Lorne for destroying the “breaking” rule, and Lorne’s response is the perfect way of explaining when breaking is acceptable and when it is not. From the book Live From New York, an oral history of SNL by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller:

HADER: I went to Lorne at an after party once and I said, “I’m very sorry I keep breaking as Stefon. I’m a little nervous because I’ve broken every single time I’ve done it, so now I feel that the audience is waiting for me to break, and I feel a lot of guilt about this.” And Lorne said, “Well, if what you’re saying isn’t funny, then we have a problem. But what you’re saying is so outrageous, everyone’s laughing. It’s when what you’re saying isn’t funny and you’re trying to save the sketch, or you’re trying to pull focus away from other performers, or pull focus away from the idea of the sketch and the writing and just trying to pull it all to you, then that’s when we have a problem.” And I said, “Okay.” I think Lorne secretly loved it because the audience thought it was great. But I should say for the record, every time I broke, I would get angry with myself. I would laugh up there and then this feeling of guilt would kind of ebb through me of guilt. I’d feel very guilty. So after most Stefons, I’d have my head down and I’d be pissed because I’d laughed.

So yes, Mulaney was trying to get Hader to break, which may share some DNA with this week’s Gosling/Padilla sketch. But a Weekend Update bit is very different than a full sketch. And it is also a completely different thing for the show to admit to the audience that a sketch is effectively an improv exercise designed to make the actors burst into laughter. That not only had never been done before, it is anathema to the show’s most fundamental genetic makeup.

Without a doubt, a show like SNL that has been on the air for 50 years needs to adapt, or it will die. Twenty years ago, the show began incorporating digital shorts from Andy Samberg and his pals in The Lonely Island, and it revolutionized the way fans watched the show - suddenly, there were pre-taped viral moments viewers could watch at home on YouTube. It kept the show fresh and relevant.

But Saturday’s sketch was even more historic in that it crossed a line that had never before been violated. Yes, the show needs updating, but its ethos of breaking has worked for half a century — if it now routinely erases that fundamental standard, there might not be much of a show left.

(For a lot more on Saturday Night Live, check out Wasn’t That Special: 50 Years of SNL, my podcast that summarizes and analyzes every season of the show.)

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The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump struck down President Trump’s sweeping IEEPA tariffs. The majority opinion was important, but the most revealing document in the case wasn’t the majority — it was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence, a precision instrument designed to expose how his colleagues have each, in their own way, interpreted the law not as written but as politically convenient.

Gorsuch’s opinion is merciless, serving up a hearty feast of vituperation. He picks apart his colleagues one by one — the progressive bloc, the conservative dissenters, and finally his own ideological ally, Amy Coney Barrett — and demonstrates that virtually everyone on the court has been willing to bend their interpretive principles when the other side’s president was unilaterally legislating.

Start with the liberals. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson joined the majority opinion and reached the right result: IEEPA does not grant Trump the power to impose tariffs. But rather than endorse the major questions doctrine — the rule that courts should demand clear congressional authorization before allowing the executive branch to exercise extraordinary power — they insisted they could get there on plain statutory interpretation alone. In their telling, the word “regulate” in IEEPA simply doesn’t cover tariffs, full stop. No special canon needed.

In other words, in denying the major questions doctrine was applicable here, the liberals argued it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, but was instead a warthog.

Gorsuch was not having it. He spent the first third of his concurrence cataloguing the exact opposite position these same justices took when Democratic presidents wielded power through expansive statutory authority.

To wit: When the Biden administration’s OSHA tried to impose vaccine mandates on 84 million Americans, Kagan and Sotomayor dissented, arguing the statute’s “expansive language” clearly covered it. When the CDC tried to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide through eviction moratoriums, they said the broad statutory language permitted even “greater restrictions.” When the EPA sought to effectively restructure the entire electricity industry through the Clean Air Act, they argued that the statute’s text was “broad” and “expansive” with “no ifs, ands, or buts.” When the Education Department tried to cancel $430 billion in student loans, they said the relevant terms were “capacious” and designed to afford a “potent” power to respond to “national emergencies that were major in scope.”

In every one of those cases, the three justices took the position that broad language in major legislation meant broad power for the executive — and specifically for whichever agency a Democratic president controlled. Now, confronted with IEEPA’s comparably broad language granting powers to a Republican president, they suddenly discovered contextual clues, structural concerns, and statutory nuance limiting that power.

Gorsuch does not accuse them of bad faith. He’s too subtle for that. He simply holds the mirror up and asks: if “regulate importation” in IEEPA doesn’t grant sweeping executive authority, why did “safe and healthful working conditions” in the OSH Act grant sweeping executive authority? The logic is identical. The outcome depends entirely on who’s wielding the power.

But Gorsuch doesn’t stop with the liberals — he turns his pen on his fellow conservatives in dissent. Justices Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito would have upheld the tariffs; Kavanaugh wrote the main dissent, and crucially, he claimed to accept the major questions doctrine — he just thought IEEPA satisfied it.

Gorsuch is polite but unconvinced. He walks through each of the four factors courts use to assess whether a statute clearly authorizes an asserted power and concludes that Kavanaugh’s dissent amounts to “grade inflation.” The fact that no president for nearly half a century invoked IEEPA to impose tariffs — not one percent on one product from one country — should by itself settle the question of whether this is a “newfound” power claimed from an old statute. Kavanaugh waves that away. Gorsuch does not.

More pointed is Gorsuch’s observation about what happens if the dissenters win. A ruling for Trump, the president’s own lawyers acknowledged at oral argument, would afford future presidents the same latitude. This means a Democrat could invoke IEEPA to impose tariffs on gas-powered vehicles to address climate change. Or tariffs on any imports for any emergency any president perceives — and those emergency declarations would be unreviewable.

Gorsuch asks his conservative colleagues a simple question: What president would willingly give up that kind of power? The same conservatives who spent years warning about executive overreach were now, under a Republican president, defending the most unconstrained assertion of executive tariff power in American history.

And then there is Amy Coney Barrett.

Barrett joined the majority and signed on to the major questions analysis. She is, by the result, on the right side of this case. But she has spent years arguing that the major questions doctrine should be reframed as a “commonsense principle of communication” rather than a “substantive canon” designed to enforce Article I of the Constitution. In her view, the doctrine is really just what any reasonable English speaker would infer from the statutory context — not a judicially imposed rule requiring Congress to speak with extraordinary clarity when delegating extraordinary power.

Gorsuch addresses this argument with patience and care, but he dismantles it completely. He runs through case after case where the major questions doctrine produced results that had nothing to do with “common sense” — cases where the agency had perfectly reasonable textual arguments, where any ordinary reader might have concluded the statute said what the agency claimed it said, and where the court still ruled against executive power on the grounds that Congress had not spoken clearly enough.

Calling something “common sense” doesn’t make it common sense. Tobacco is clearly a drug by any ordinary meaning. Greenhouse gases obviously pollute the air. Eviction moratoriums really do prevent the spread of disease. Common sense is doing no work here — what’s doing the work is a clear-statement rule grounded in Article I’s vesting of legislative power in Congress.

Barrett’s framing, Gorsuch argues, is ultimately incoherent. It toggles between a clear-statement rule and nothing at all, depending on how much “skepticism” feels appropriate in a given case. The problem is that “how much skepticism feels appropriate” is exactly the kind of discretion the major questions doctrine was meant to eliminate — the discretion to find congressional clarity when you want to and congressional ambiguity when you don’t.

What ties all three critiques together is a single underlying observation: the justices on this court have been inconsistent, and their inconsistency tends to track their political priors. The liberals read statutory power broadly when Democrats wield it, narrowly when Republicans do. The conservatives applied the major questions doctrine aggressively against Biden’s agencies and then, when confronted with Trump’s tariffs, suddenly discovered that IEEPA said what it needed to say. And Barrett sought to soften the doctrine’s edges precisely in a way that preserved judicial flexibility — which is another way of saying preserved judicial discretion to reach preferred outcomes.

Gorsuch’s concurrence is unusual in American legal writing because it criticizes nearly everyone. It is self-aware about the court’s tendency toward motivated reasoning without being cynical about the enterprise. He believes in the major questions doctrine, he makes a serious case for it, and he uses this moment — when everyone is converging on the same result for different reasons — to insist that the reasoning matters, not just the outcome.

He is right about that. Courts that reach the right answer for the wrong reason, or for reasons they will quietly abandon the next time the political winds shift, are not building law. They are adjudicating outcomes. The lesson of Learning Resources isn’t just that IEEPA doesn’t authorize tariffs. It is that the rule of law that requires the same interpretive framework to apply regardless of who is president.

Gorsuch’s concurrence is a reminder — addressed to every faction on the court — that they haven’t always met that standard. Whether any of them takes it to heart is another question entirely.

More Supreme Court stuff from me at National Review this week. I take on the age-old claim that the court is “secretive,” when, in fact, it is the most transparent branch of government:

When the Court’s 6–3 majority struck down the president’s sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, it did not simply say no and adjourn for an afternoon of pickleball. Chief Justice Roberts wrote a full majority opinion explaining exactly why the IEEPA does not hand the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs of any size, on any country, for any duration he chooses. He cited prior cases, walked through the statutory text word by word, and laid out Congress’s Article I power to set trade policy. You can disagree with every sentence, but you cannot accuse the man of hiding his work.

That is how every Supreme Court decision works. Nine unelected lawyers in black robes are the only people in Washington constitutionally required to explain themselves in writing. Every ruling carries a majority opinion that must lay out the legal reasoning in enough detail to be cited, challenged, and built on for decades. Dissents are published alongside the majority, meaning the losing side airs its objections in the same document, for all of history to read.

Read the full thing here.

Morrissey famously sang “We Hate it When Our Friends Become Successful,” but I couldn’t be happier that my pal Robert George has suddenly become the face of Gen X music. He has now appeared twice on the viral show “Track Star,” in which they quiz regular people (and celebrities) on their music knowledge, and Robert has shown himself to be a grandmaster of knowledge.

He was recently invited back for a full hour discussion of my generation’s culture - watch it here:

I usually provide some background on the last musical piece I add at the end of my newsletters, but not this time. I just love this song.

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One day, during a break in the British House of Commons, Winston Churchill decided to use the restroom. As he approached the trough, his nemesis, Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee, walked in, forcing Churchill to stand as far away from him as possible.

“Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?,” Attlee asked. “That’s right,” Churchill responded. “Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.”

Every generation has its genuinely hilarious politician. Ronald Reagan used to sit at his desk late into the night, jotting down one-liners on 3-by-5 note cards and adding them to his speeches. (Sample: “People who think a tax boost will cure inflation are the same ones who believe another drink will cure a hangover.”) After Reagan was shot in the chest by John Hinkley, Jr., the president looked around at his doctors and famously quipped, “I hope they are all Republicans.”

Donald Trump clearly sees himself in the mold of the world’s most humorous leaders. His MAGA base has already declared him to be the funniest president ever. One scholarly study (presumably from the University of Our Eyeballs) found that Trump was a popular candidate primarily because he was so entertaining.

But Trump’s act doesn’t actually rise to the level of recognizable humor. His schoolyard taunts are well-known to any eighth-grader; there are no clever turns of phrase, unique insights, or timely callbacks. Trump’s “jokes,” which can be served up by literally anyone, are simply verbal flatulence—funny only because they are deeply inappropriate to the serious situation in which he finds himself.

Take this typical Trumpian joke lobbed at 2024 primary opponent Ron DeSantis, which combines the hallmarks of the president’s humor—a childish nickname and a bout of unexpected honesty: “DeSanctimonious…he’s doing good—he’s falling like a rock!”

Nate Bargatze it ain’t. Nonetheless, Trump’s fans react to his tepid jabs in the same manner as the stoic Chrysippus, whose own joke spelled his demise. (After watching a donkey eat some figs, Chrysippus said, “Now give the donkey a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs,” prompting him to die in a fit of laughter at his own C-minus joke.)

But even worse, Trump and his allies are, like Clement Attlee, effectively trying to nationalize comedy. They effectively want the Trump administration to decide what’s funny and what isn’t. For instance, when Trump recently suggested canceling the midterm elections, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt brushed it off, saying he was just “joking.”

Oftentimes, when Trump finds himself in hot water, it is because he is trying to be sardonically irreverent, such as when he recently re-posted a video portraying former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes. In 2019, Trump suggested the recently deceased Democratic Rep. John Dingell was looking up at his memorial ceremony from Hell. In 2018, he accused Democrats who didn’t clap during his State of the Union speech of “treason,” a comment later portrayed by his press office as a simple lighthearted jab.

In the case of the insult comic Dons, “Rickles” > “Trump.”

And, of course, Trump himself spends more time critiquing comedians than virtually any media critic in America. The only difference is that if he doesn’t like a joke by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, or Saturday Night Live, he can threaten to either revoke their broadcast licenses or block a valuable merger. The only jokes the president seems to like are the ones he tells.

It gets even worse when he outsources his jokes to other members of his administration. As Emma Camp noted recently at the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter (for which I also now write), social media posts from Trump’s team are written by deranged edgelords who clearly think owning the libs is high comedy. They spit out racist memes that draw on historical white supremacist literature, then joke that “the memes will continue.”

But, in the words of Trump ally Elon Musk, the president should learn to “legalize comedy.” There are plenty of people in the private market telling jokes that are far better than those churned out by the executive branch.

Just as conservatives want comedians to stay out of politics, the reverse is true. The list of qualities Americans seek in their leaders shouldn’t include “sick clap-backs;” it should instead include things like “making sure America doesn’t fall into abject chaos.” Consequently, Trump should stick to presidenting and let the free market of comedy thrive.

How I Lost Weight

About a year into the Covid-19 epidemic, I was depressed and eating my feelings. Coincidentally, my feelings tasted a lot like pizza, Qdoba burritos, and ice cream. As a result, my weight ballooned, and I felt even worse.

At one point, I went to the dentist, and they refused to do any work on me because my blood pressure was too high. They suggested I go to emergency care immediately to get it checked out. As it turns out, not only was my blood pressure high enough to light Cincinnati, I was having terrible blood sugar readings. (Although on the bright side, if I was ever eaten by a bear, just imagine how lucky that bear would be - given my high blood sugar, it would be like eating the human equivalent of a Twinkie.)

Since then, it’s been a constant battle to lose weight and improve my health. And I dare say I have found something that really works. And I will not gatekeep it because everyone needs to get healthier, and fewer people need to take advice from people who snort cocaine off toilet lids.

Early this year, I just happened to read this piece in the Washington Post about the 5:2 fasting plan. Effectively, you fast two days out of the week - you can pick any days you want, and on those days, you eat under 600 calories (for men) or 500 calories (for women).

If you can will yourself to limit your calories just two days per week, you can eat normally the other five days. And weirdly, I haven’t found that I have been ravenous on the regular eating days - cutting calories two days per week seems to have shrunk my stomach, so even when I do eat normally, I get fuller faster. It appears eating more makes you want to eat more, and eating less makes you want to eat less.

So what does a fasting day look like? I start out with a Fairlife chocolate protein drink (150 calories), which then gets me to lunch, where I have a three-egg omelette with a little cheese and some ham (350 calories.) Then, at dinner time, I have a banana for dinner (100 calories).

In fairness, after six weeks, I’m getting a little tired of the omelettes, so I might switch that part of it up. But in the six weeks I’ve been eating that diet twice per week, I have dropped about eight pounds and my A1C readings are down significantly. Obviously, before trying a diet, consult your doctor and all that, but this one has worked for me. (All total, I have lost over 30 pounds from my Covid-Era high.)

Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that the guy who invented the diet, British physician Michael Mosley, dropped dead last year at the age of 67. The coroner said he died of “natural causes.”

Last week, my National Review piece focused on Donald Trump’s odd habit of attacking non-politicians or media members. It’s common for politicians to harshly criticize other politicians or reporters, but it is really strange for presidents to savage those who aren’t “in the game.” I wrote:

Trump loyalists once understood that attacking civilians had generally been off the table. It’s why they took such umbrage at Hillary Clinton in 2016 deeming “half” of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Shots at Trump were all part of the game, of course — but Clinton turning her ire against his supporters was like an irate hockey player dropping his gloves, skating over to the seats, and starting to punch out the fans.

Nonetheless, Trump is willing to shout his disdain for rank-and-file Americans from the roof of the White House. Recall that he reposted an AI-created (we suspect) video of himself flying a fighter jet labeled KING TRUMP, from which feces are released on people protesting his actions below.

Just this week, Trump used social media to call U.S. Olympic skier Hunter Hess “a real loser” after Hess expressed “mixed emotions” about representing the U.S. given the trouble happening back home.

The previous week, I wrote about how ridiculous it is that the U.S. Government still maintains a “food pyramid” that purports to tell us what we all should eat:

The idea that the federal government should play a role in determining the food we eat only serves to stroke the egos of those who believe nothing worthwhile happens in the world without bureaucratic approval. What types of diets best serve individual citizens is one of the most-studied topics in human history, and most of that analysis has been conducted by private actors. There are infinite apps, websites, chat rooms, TikTok videos, workout plans, and the like that will get you where you want to go on your fitness journey, all thankfully operating outside the walls of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Leaving nutritional advice to a federal bureaucracy naturally politicizes its recommendations. It makes no sense that the health benefits of certain foods either increase or decrease depending on whom Americans elect as president and which people get appointed to head HHS.

In 1897, England’s Dr. Shadwell warned of the evils of bicycles: notably, they caused the disfiguring “bicycle face,” in which the rider contorts their face with a fixed and anxious expression, afraid they are going to crash or someone is going to throw something at them.

This week, Velocity Girl re-released a remixed version of their 1994 album Simpatico, one of the best power-pop albums from a decade that had a lot of great power-pop albums. Fire up your favorite streaming service and give the whole thing a listen.

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For some reason, around New Year’s Day, I started receiving all sorts of Substack newsletters I couldn’t remember signing up for. Part of this was probably authors realizing they had created a Substack and had never actually posted to it, then wanting to squeeze something out by the end of the year. (I have a co-worker who decided to start a Substack newsletter, and when she went to sign up, she realized she had forgotten that she had already previously created three other Substacks.)

But some of the ones I received, I am certain I never signed up for. People had just started adding my email to their list in the hopes that I was too lazy to unsubscribe. I am vigilant in keeping my inbox clean of nuisances, however, and I buckled down to do a mass cleansing of unwanted newsletters.

Nonetheless, this got me thinking about how I can grow my readership. I will never add people who don’t ask for it, but I want to be more vigilant in putting out a product that people actually really want to read. (Or at least that they want to read more than the 300 newsletters that are about to be started by former Washington Post employees.)

So I want to hear from you - what are you looking for out of this newsletter? How can I make it better? What will incentivize you to suggest it to friends-slash-share it online?

Here are a few questions you can answer anonymously. I’ll keep the voting open for a week.

Next question:

And:

For example, I recorded a brief summary of my last National Review column:

And:

And:

Finally:

I’ll leave the comments section open, so feel free to chime in on other things you’re looking for that can aid you in obtaining Complete World Knowledge. And please, no more questions about how to tell me and Idris Elba apart - he’s the one with the British accent.

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Take a moment and think of history’s greatest displays of passion. Romeo and Juliet. Cookie Monster and baked goods. Charlie Sheen and prostitutes.

Yet none of the unquenchable desires matches the need for the national sports media to see Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo traded to a larger market NBA team. For weeks, grown men nearly wept at the prospect of seeing the two-time Most Valuable Player, finals MVP, and NBA champion on his way to the New York Knicks or Golden State Warriors. Hour upon hour on ESPN and other sports networks was dedicated to “experts” confidently declaring the small-market Bucks would trade their greatest player (and one of the top-three players in the NBA) at the tail end of his prime.

Of course, last week, the NBA’s trade deadline came and went, and the Greek Freak remains in Milwaukee, as anyone remotely paying attention to the team could have told you.

But that did not deter reporters like ESPN gadfly Shams Charania, who has made predicting Giannis would be traded into an annual ritual. The scam is easy to spot - Charania talks to someone “close to Giannis” or “familiar with Giannis’ thinking,” who tells him the superstar is considering what it would be like to play in another city. You know, like every player does every day of his career. Then he reports that Giannis and the Bucks are “discussing his future” (as every star does with his team) or he issues a story saying Giannis is “ready for a new home” at the trading deadline. Welp.

Then Charania talks to someone in another NBA front office who tells him the Bucks are “listening to offers” for Antetokounmpo. Of course, every front office is constantly listening to offers for all their players. It doesn’t mean they take them seriously, but they will always take the call.

And, poof — just like that, Charania has created a story out of thin air that talking heads on television can spend hours yapping about with no actual knowledge of the situation. Legendary reporter and Pardon the Interruption co-host Mike Wilbon has spent the entire NBA season boldly proclaiming Giannis would be traded by the deadline. And when he wasn’t, there was zero sign of humility or reflection on Wilbon’s behalf — he and every other windbag on television simply pivoted to “well, Giannis will obviously be traded in the off season.”

He probably won’t. The day after the trade deadline lapsed, Giannis boastfully posted, “Legends don’t chase. They attract.”

That will not stop Charania and others in the media, who have been reporting for more than six years that Giannis wants to play for another team. In 2020, after the Bucks were painfully run out of the playoffs in the COVID-19 bubble, he was already facing questions as to whether he wanted to be traded.

(Perhaps my favorite made-up Giannis story came from Amazon Prime reporter Chris Haynes, who reported that the star was upset the Bucks waived Damien Lillard. As if Giannis favored keeping a washed-up 35-year-old who would miss all of the next year with a torn Achilles rather than maneuvering to be more competitive this year. It all checked out.)

It is difficult to imagine anyone in the political media being so wrong for so long and still being taken seriously. Consider a Washington Post reporter who year after year reported that the U.S. was within days of bombing Iran, only to have egg on their face when it never happened.

Nonetheless, Charania was on the case at the end of last season:

This year, it began even before the season tipped off:

And it only accelerated as the trading deadline approached during this season.

But Giannis was never going to be traded. For one, the Bucks currently employ two of Giannis’ brothers - Thanasis and Alex - and the second he is traded, the team would stop pretending either of them are NBA players and immediately cut them. Secondly, Giannis is currently rehabbing a calf injury—his second of the year—and his body seems like it may be breaking down. A team that traded for him this year may not even get to use him until next year.

Further, there isn’t any team out there that has the resources to trade for him. Two years ago, the New York Knicks forked over five future first-round picks to pick up middling shooting guard Mikal Bridges from the Brooklyn Nets. If Bridges is worth that much, what is one of the top-three players in the NBA worth? Is there a team out there with twelve first-round picks to fork over?

And as long as we are talking picks, why would the Bucks want picks for an all-time great player who still puts up MVP numbers? Any team the Bucks trade Giannis to is going to immediately become a contender, meaning their first-round picks are going to be in the late-20s. The only temptation to trade Giannis would be if the Bucks could end up with a pick near the top of the draft, where they could swap Antetokounmpo for a future star like AJ Dybantsa of BYU.

There is also the matter that Giannis seems like he really loves Milwaukee. He constantly discusses how the Bucks gave him his first chance in the NBA, how he met his wife in Milwaukee, and how all his children were born there. Take this interview he conducted with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on the night prior to the trade deadline, in which he said he wanted to retire as a Buck:

Nonetheless, the incentive for the national media to manufacture stories is simply too strong. The NBA season is long, and this year it has been pretty uneventful—the networks need something juicy to talk about. So the die is cast:

Step 1: Spend years spreading the false narrative that Giannis wants out;

Step 2: Start saying that all the trade rumors - entirely started and spread by them - is “weighing” on Giannis and the team, making it likely they will trade him.

Shams, indeed.

When I was in high school, my father went to a speech given by political cartoonist Herblock. At the time, I remember him suggesting this as a potential career path for me, as I had a bit of an artistic streak on my mother’s side. (My dad is a military attorney and my mother is a hippie artist, the true definition of “opposites attract.”)

Sadly, I did not live up to his high expectations, as I only succeeded at the writing portion of the assignment. But recently, armed with a drawing app on my iPad, I have taken to sketching out some cartoons. Some recent samples:

There’s a documentary on Hulu called “Camden” that runs through some of the musical acts that have run through the trendy London neighborhood of the same name over the years. It tells the story of the Libertines, who came and went quickly, but who made some great music before their demise.

As soon as my iPhone upgraded to its new operating system, iOS 26, my Apple Watch began alerting me of its displeasure with my life choices.

A couple of times a day, I would get a red alarm warning me that the music I was listening to was too loud and that it would eventually cause long-term hearing damage. Apparently, this feature had been available on iOS devices since 2020, and remained dormant on my devices until now.

The joke is on Apple, because I have always listened to loud music. As a result, I now have to listen to even louder music to make up for my decades of slow hearing loss. You’re too late, ghost of Steve Jobs! Go haunt younger ears!

Why don’t my “smart” watch and phone want me to rock out?

It bothers me. When I signed up for a life tethered to technology, I presumed it was going to make things easier. Superintelligence would streamline my everyday tasks and help me keep in touch with people.

More often, our technology serves to nag us, as if we need a pocket parent scolding us for our poor choices.

My iPhone once got the idea that I wanted to be notified during the day that I wasn’t moving enough. Given my typical Sunday afternoon football-watching habits, I worried my phone might call 911, thinking I was dead.

Friends have told me their phones will alert them when they are in an environment—concert, air show—that is too loud. One gets a buzzing notification from his watch when he gets into the shower.

Another told me she bought her daughter a water bottle that also came with a phone app meant to alert her when she wasn’t drinking enough H2O. Fortunately, humans are born with a built-in app in our brains that tells us, “Hmmm, I’m thirsty.”

It’s impossible to escape the cloud, whether it’s logging your health data or your purchasing habits.

Every food app keeps data on your restaurant trips. Occasionally I get an email from billionaire restaurateur Bartholomew Q. Chipotle reminding me that it’s been a while since I ordered one of his burritos. I imagine he owns a mansion outside of town that sits atop a mountain of rice.

Everything is backward—instead of you watching your TV, your TV is watching you. It is only a matter of time before some streaming algorithm butts in and says, “I see you are about to watch your sixth straight hour of ‘Love is Blind.’ Are you sure you don’t want to watch something a little more intellectually nutritious?”

The answer, by the way, is always “no.” Dating shows teach you far more about modern society than a Ken Burns documentary ever could.

Even social applications contribute. They prod me to respond to messages promptly, condemn my social media inactivity and encourage me to exercise digital social stamina. One day, I ignored a friend’s text for three hours, and I swear my phone muttered a digital sigh, the vibration almost heavy with disappointment.

I imagine the engineers’ memos: User engagement is down; consider adding gentle guilt notifications. What once were simple tools for connection have become managers, life coaches and petty supervisors wrapped in silicon and glass.

Our learned obeisance to the algorithm is the strangest part. We accept this micro-surveillance as a form of care, like someone tapping us on the shoulder, whispering: “We just want the best for you.”

But the line between care and coercion blurs when every mundane act—breathing, standing, drinking coffee, listening to music—is tracked and corrected. Technology has become a moralizing entity, telling us that our personal quirks and indulgences are infractions to be corrected.

I long for the days when I could sing off-key in the shower without fear of a device admonishing me for decibels, or fire down a churro without a smartwatch looking down its long, pointy nose of disapproval over my sugar intake.

Yet here we are, wedded to these little nags, caught in a feedback loop where our rebellion is measured, quantified and catalogued. And while I grip the steering wheel, stereo blaring just loud enough to hurt my eardrums, I can’t help but think: Maybe Steve Jobs never intended this.

Maybe this is a perverse, inevitable evolution of convenience technology—a reminder that when you invite the machine into your life, it doesn’t just help you. It judges you.

This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

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As a writer, the best thing you can do is to make the lives of your readers slightly better. But that often takes a long time - especially in politics, where you spend weeks, months, and years banging away on a keyboard, hoping someone begins to see things your way.

But there is a quicker way for me to improve your life - simply by recommending awesome music I listened to this week. As always, I cranked out a Best Albums of the Year list, and here it is!

(And if you want to hear me discuss each of these picks, listen to the Will’s Band of the Week podcast here.)

10. The Wind-Ups: Confection

It’s lo-fi Ramones.

9. Lady Gaga - MAYHEM

Look, I know I am sacrificing my aging hipster cred here, but this album warrants it. After spending years tinkering with other music styles, Gaga returns to what she does the best - four-on-the-floor bangers.

8. Lightheaded - Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming!

Are you wistful for the late 90’s era of dreamy, Belle and Sebastian-style chamber pop? New Jersey band Lightheaded has you covered. Catchy and lush.

7. The Belair Lip Bombs - Again

At the forefront of Australia’s incredible music scene, this follow-up matches the greatness of 2023’s “Lush Life.” Catchy power pop it’s impossible to stop listening to.

6. The Beths - Straight Line Was a Lie

On their fourth album, The Beths do some growing up. Mostly gone are the crunching, catchy hooks, replaced this time by more creative instrumentation and more personal themes. Their previous albums are all great, but this one is a welcome change.

5. Horsegirl - Phonetics On and On

The Chicago band features four women barely in their 20s, yet they show a maturity found in bands that have been together for decades. Their first album was effectively a tribute to mid-’90s power pop bands, but on their second album, they are developing a sound all their own.

4. Jeanines - How Long Can it Last

As spare as bands come, this Brooklyn duo still manages to put together impossibly catchy, lo-fi bangers.

3. Momma - Welcome to My Blue Sky

It’s power pop. And it was recommended to me by my son. And he was right. It’s so good.

2. Lambrini Girls - Who Let the Dogs Out

It’s crass, it’s obnoxious, and its politics are ridiculous. But punk rock doesn’t need to be fact-checked, it only needs to shred. And this album brings it.

1. Wet Leg - moisturize

It’s the second time in three years I’ve had a Wet Leg album as the best of the year, but it is warranted. Perhaps seeing them live tipped the scales for me. But they have forged an entirely new sound for themselves - it’s effusive, confrontational guitar rock in an era that needs it now more than ever.

On to 2026!

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Courteous Reader:

As I sit near the fire with my companion, Riley the Wonder Dog, I cannot help but wonder what she is thinking. Oh, what mysteries of the world could our pets unlock for us if they were able to speak!

Surely my canine companion would happily convey her thoughts to me if possible. She would regale me with legendary tales of duplicitous squirrels and conniving mailmen. She could teach a seminar on the psychology of manipulating humans into giving you their popcorn!

It made me realize, however, that I, as a human who can speak, have been sitting on a wealth of knowledge I have yet to convey to other humans who can actually understand me! My home study has been overtaken by books stacked high; if I were to perish, all the learning I had done by reading them would simply vanish, never to be enjoyed by anyone.

In effect, I am being selfish by keeping my knowledge to myself. I have thus concocted the affixed list of lessons and aphorisms to aid you, faithful reader, in living your most complete life.

And if you enjoy this list, won’t you please consider subscribing? There will be more!

1. They say that clothes make the man, but I’ve never seen a pair of corduroy pants take a paternity test.

2. If money is all you want, it is all you will ever have.

3. Those who say the pen is mightier than the sword have never been stabbed by either.

4. In college, you drink to go out and make new memories. When you get older, you drink in order to forget things.

5. At work, do not be really good at anything you don’t want to be tasked with doing forever.

6. “Early to bed, early to rise” merely means you do not have a Netflix subscription.

7. The only foolproof way to get a traffic light to change colors is to begin typing a text on your phone.

8. If all the world is a stage, then who is writing this shit?

9. Any work meeting to which you are invited can’t possibly be important enough for you to attend.

10. Jokes to men are as breasts are to women. The better ones you have, the more attention you will enjoy.

11. The half-clothed young Russian supermodel with four followers who just liked your post is probably a porn bot, but it’s probably worth scrolling through 100 of her posts just to be extra sure.

12. There are no guilty pleasures; there are only pleasures, and not enough of them.

13. I have a reverse eating disorder; I think I am far thinner than I am.

14. History is replete with examples of The Hut being out-pizza-ed.

15. Life’s cruelest irony: As a child, you grow up dreaming of the day you would have enough money to eat McDonald’s every day, then once you become an adult, you realize eating that much McDonald’s will kill you.

16. When you give a speech after you receive an award, do not say you are humbled, because you should have been humble before people started giving you awards, and winning an award is actually the ideal time to stop being humble.

17. Reality dating shows aren’t a test of whether people can find love in a short period of time; they are a test of how much torture and humiliation people are willing to endure to remain on television.

18. Using artificial intelligence to write your articles is like hiring a prostitute; the end result may approximate the original, but deep down, you know you didn’t earn it.

19. Even the public marketplace of ideas has a fruits and nuts section.

20. The hardest job in the entertainment industry is being in a shitty band.

21. The way to tell if someone is a Millennial is just to wait 10 seconds for them to mention it.

    

22. When shopping for clothes, always buy shirts that you know will only fit if you lose weight, because that guarantees a poor person shopping at Goodwill is going to get a nice shirt in a year or so.

23. It is never too late for your parents to become famous enough for you to be a nepo baby.

24. Always keep a cyanide capsule on hand in case someone starts telling you about their dream last night.

25. If you are late for an appointment, drive backwards and you will arrive 15 minutes ago.

26. If I were a rapper, I would prefer that you wave your hands as if you cared a great deal. And I would only play venues with inflammable roofs.

27. If you consider your time in terms of its cash value, the time it takes to extract all the jelly from an almost empty jar is equivalent to the cost of buying a whole new jar.

28. If movies are to be believed, the number one cause of crime in America is sleeping security guards.

29. All coffee shops should be required to name their sizes “small,” “medium,” “large,” “extra large,” and “Martin Scorsese’s eyebrows.”

30. Using the word “erudite” by definition makes one erudite.

31. If “ruthless” behavior is cruel, what is this “ruth” that makes us better and how do I distribute it to the chronically dyspeptic?

32. Cheer up! Just because you have low self-esteem doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

33. The saying “take it with a grain of salt” should not imply insincerity. Salt is delicious. When I eat something salty, I don’t doubt its veracity.

34. Don’t trust anyone who explains a scientific experiment taking place “in a vacuum” because no vacuum is THAT big and it would be very loud.

35. I’m going to title my next book #1 New York Times Bestseller.

36. The beauty of cereal is that you don’t need to accompany it with a beverage. It is both food AND DRINK.

37. Should we just start calling regular sandwiches “crustables?”

38. The term “stool culture” is an oxymoron.

39. A properly maintained beard allows a man to decide where his chin begins and his neck ends.

40. Classical stoicism, which teaches you not to worry about the things you can’t control, is incompatible with sports fandom.

41. When people brag about reading a lot of books, the real flex isn’t that they’re smarter than you, it’s that they have so much extra time to read.

42. Stupid people pretending to be smart is preferable to smart people pretending to be stupid.

43. Alcohol doesn’t make other people more attractive to you; it makes you think you are more attractive to other people.

44. Why do we still enjoy Mongolian beef? We’re okay that the Mongols gave the world rape, torture, mass murder, and... a delicious stir fry?

45. The most religious among us are those who have exhausted all other options.

Your poor Friend and Servant,

C. Schneider and the Wonder Dog

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History has a way of turning yesterday’s liberators into today’s chew toys. Ask Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary who helped free most of his island from British rule in 1921 - only to be felled a year later by former allies who thought “most” wasn’t good enough.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, who has built a career on promising the moon and delivering a Moon Pie. For years, his voters shrugged off the bait‑and‑switch, applauding the flourish and ignoring the empty box. But now he’s finally found the one plank his base actually measures with a ruler: the Jeffrey Epstein files.

In January, he vowed to release every scrap the government holds about Epstein’s island of misdeeds. MAGA Nation cheered: finally, someone will name names. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited a group of right-wing influencers to the White House, including one of the most prominent proponents of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, and handed them some folders that allegedly included “Phase 1” of the Epstein files. But anger ensued when the influencers realized they had been duped - most of the information they happily waved over their heads while exiting the White House had already been made public.

Then word leaked that Trump’s own name allegedly appears in the documents, and - faster than you can say “Ghislaine Maxwell” - the promise to release the entire tranche of files vanished. The vault remains shut, and the base that once treated Trump like a golden calf is starting to eye the barbecue sauce.

It isn’t his first sleight‑of‑hand. Trump’s greatest hits include a boast that he could end Russia’s invasion “on day one,” presumably with the same magic wand that can rescind Rosie O’Donnell’s American citizenship. Eighteen months later, shells still fall on Kyiv, and Trump can’t decide whether Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Churchill with Instagram filters or a grifter stealing catalytic converters.

Or consider Trump’s “tariffs to riches” plans. Punitive tariffs, he said, would strong‑arm Beijing and Berlin into begging for trade deals. Instead, he imposed new taxes, rescinded them, re‑imposed them, and delayed them - creating the economic equivalent of a flashing “Exit” sign every CEO could see from space. Prices climbed, factories paused investments, and the only thing definitively “negotiated” was the size of the hole in our wallets.

Oh, and remember DOGE? Elon Musk’s vanity department that said it was going to cut $2 trillion in spending but ended up canceling a few billion dollars' worth of contracts while Trump signed a bill jacking up the national debt by $3.4 trillion over the next decade? But hey, at least the Defense Department deleted its photos of the Enola Gay because of the B-29 bomber’s salacious name. (Rumor has it the plane was fond of watching RuPaul’s Drag Race.)

Perhaps Trump’s biggest broken promise involves his dedication to “deportation theater.” He pledged to deport “the worst of the worst,” but when tattoo‑faced cartel members proved scarce, ICE started loitering outside Home Depot like pencil-necked hall monitors. Families who’d paid taxes for decades suddenly faced a one‑way trip to a country their children barely remembered, while genuine felons slipped through the dragnet like greased otters.

Oh, and how’s that border wall coming along?

When results fail to appear, Trump does what every small‑town magician does: he waves a bigger hand. Hunter Biden’s laptop! Barack Obama the traitor! Hillary Clinton in cuffs! Each new outrage is designed to make supporters forget the last unfulfilled promise. It’s a multilevel marketing scheme for rhetorical bovine fertilizer.

The Epstein stumble is different because conspiracy‑minded voters - the QAnon faithful who believe Tom Hanks runs a subterranean nursery of vampiric toddlers - care about little else. They were promised a Biblical unmasking of elites; instead, they got the political version of “just wait two weeks to cash this check.” If Trump is indeed tangled in the same sordid story he vowed to expose, his faithful may treat him the way an angry mob treats Frankenstein.

None of this was inevitable. Trump could have surfed four years of incumbency into a respectable legacy: criminal‑justice reform, Middle East accords, a pre‑COVID economy spicier than a microwave burrito. But governing bored him, so he outsourced it to Congress and spent afternoons mainlining cable news. When the pandemic hit, the only curve he flattened was his own approval rating.

In 2016, Republicans chose the stand‑up comic over the policy wonk; they can hardly complain the jokes kept coming while the homework went missing. Yet even the most forgiving audience eventually wants a punch line. After a decade of pyrotechnics and reruns, Trump’s act looks like Gallagher smashing the same watermelon for the 19th time—messier, louder, and weirdly damp.

But the poetic justice hath arrived. By elevating conspiracy theories to civic religion, Trump harnessed a volatile energy he thought he could steer. Now that energy is circling back like a carnival ride whose bolts weren’t tightened. Spend years insisting your enemies are satanic, pedophilic puppet masters, and your followers naturally wonder why your own fingers smell of strings.

Trump may soon learn that movements built on grievance eventually turn the spotlight on their director. He is the dog who caught the car and wound up under the tire. If the Epstein files never see daylight because they incriminate him, the backlash will be as deserved as it is predictable.

Promise‑making is easy; promise‑keeping is hard; and promising to expose a child‑sex ring when you might be on the guest list is downright impossible. The base that once cheered every boast is beginning to do the math. And the math, unlike Trump’s promises, always adds up.

ALSO: POSTMORTEM OUTING

I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain (I’m sure you’ll hear plenty about it when I’m done), and there’s a particular aspect of it that had me questioning some things.

Chernow notes something I had not known - that Twain’s daughter, Susy, was most likely a lesbian, or at least bisexual. In some portions of the book, Chernow reprints some of the lurid letters Susy Clemens had written to her college “friend,” Louise Brownell, and they are no doubt saucy. (Word has it Twain and his wife Livy learned of the relationship and pulled Susy out of Bryn Mawr to save her from the love that dare not speak its name.)

Obviously, the role of historians is to describe the world as it was, not as the people of the time wanted it to be. But it seems a little controversial to “out” people a century after the fact. What if Louise Brownell’s family had no idea? What if she had spent her entire life concealing her true feelings, only to have all that work spoiled by a historian in 2025? Doesn’t that show a lack of respect for the dead?

I have spoken to a historian friend of mine who has assured me I am being silly. Historians don’t get to pick facts to report because they would have offended someone centuries ago.

And I get that. But it seems untoward that some of Brownell’s family members are going to learn from Ron Chernow that great-grandma was a lesbian. Sure, nobody in the 21st century cares, and we can all recognize the sadness in the couple needing to keep their relationship secret in the mid-1800s. (Brownell later married a man named A.P. Saunders, a professor of chemistry at Hamilton College.)

As a general rule, it seems best to let people tell you who they are on their schedule. And if their time runs out, their wishes should be obeyed unless there’s a damn good reason to put their business out on the street.

ALSO:

A few of my National Review pieces from the past few weeks:

Republicans Fumbled the Ball on Social Security

Put Food Stamps on a Diet

In Defense of Humans

Like Government? Hug a Billionaire

FINALLY:

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a resurgence of 1960s-era “chamber pop” (see: Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura and others), but the craze soon disappated. Yet the New Jersey band Lightheaded is bringing it all back - check out their new album “Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming!” on Slumberland Records.

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It shouldn’t be at all surprising that on Tuesday Donald Trump became the first president to willingly say the word “fuck” in front of the media. To date, he has sprinkled his stump speeches with the occasional “bullshit” or “ass,” although he had never uttered the Queen Mother of profanities in front of microphones.

But Trump is a walking obscenity, unable to control his emotions or impulses, making American governance a byproduct of his glandular outbursts, not of law or tradition. Using a swear word is merely a symptom of his coarse imbecility, not the cause of it. It is simply further evidence that he has no respect for norms or etiquette if they restrict him in any way.

Trump uttered the f-word when expressing disgust at Israel and Iran for continuing to bomb each other after the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. Trump had taken credit for a cease-fire between the two nations, but got the “new phone, who dis” treatment from both nations when they decided to resume attacking each other. When he lashed out, Trump wasn’t mad that more people were being incinerated by warheads, he was incensed that the latest round of bombing made him look like a feckless boob. They had stolen the thing he craves the most: credit.

The turn towards profanity by politicians has been coming for a long time, so it is no surprise that Trump has now crossed the final Rubicon of expletives. Members of Congress fighting for attention have now regularly started using “fuck” when commenting to reporters or posting on social media, hoping it will make people listen. Just last year, Vice President Kamala Harris inspired a gathering of young people by saying, “We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that fucking door down.”

Disraeli it ain’t.

When you are the president, of course, you are not competing with anyone for media attention. Every word you utter will be broadcast somewhere, so there is no need to liberally season your language with cayenne pepper.

But like a neglected child, Trump still believes he needs constant attention, which drives both his words and his actions. (Keeping his name in the news also helps him move product, from gold Trump phones to his memecoin scams.)

Yet for all the performative cussing, the truly scandalous parts of the Trump show have always been the policies that actually did something - usually something needlessly destructive - while most of us were still replaying the sound-bite. Start with his tariff binge.

Remember when Candidate Trump promised that trade wars would be “easy to win,” as if the World Trade Organization were a carnival midway and he was armed with an oversized mallet? Once in power he whacked at imported steel, aluminum, washing machines, even French cheese, slapping duties on allies and adversaries alike. Predictably, Beijing retaliated, soy prices tanked, and Midwestern farmers needed emergency bailouts just to stay afloat—subsidies that ended up dwarfing the auto bailout conservatives once decried as socialism.

That wasn’t policy; it was a one-man demolition derby in which American businesses played the role of crumple zones. And every time the stock market convulsed, Trump would tweet triumphantly about how China was paying for everything—a theory so heavily incumbent on central planning it makes Bernie Sanders look like Milton Friedman.

Then there was his crusade against inconvenient First Amendment activity. Trump didn’t merely yell at the press (every president does that); he openly fantasized about “opening up” libel laws so he could sue outlets that wrote mean things about him, threatened broadcast licenses for networks that ran unfavorable coverage, and encouraged police to rough up protesters because they “deserved it.” Now he has threatened to limit access and funding for law firms who dare challenge his edicts in court; and many of them are going along with his bribery.

Even flag-burners weren’t safe: he suggested stripping them of citizenship or throwing them in jail, apparently forgetting the minor constitutional wrinkle that the government can’t punish speech merely for being offensive, even if the speech in question involves literal flame. The foul-mouthed president who claims to “love the Constitution” respects its First Amendment about as much as he respects an unsuspecting Miss Teen USA contestant.

But perhaps the most obscene act came in the guise of “law-and-order” immigration enforcement. Early in his term, masked, armed ICE officers were dispatched to scoop up people whose only crime was overstaying a visa - fathers leaving for work, moms dropping kids off at school, grandmothers with decades-old traffic fines. Deportations of non-criminals spiked, and overnight, whole communities learned the difference between American dreams and American paperwork.

This wasn’t targeted removal of dangerous felons; it was mass eviction doubling as a reality show. Cue the inevitable photo ops, White House talking points about “protecting Americans,” and the conspicuous absence of any evidence that ejecting the neighborhood landscaper made anyone safer.

So spare me the fainting couches over Trump’s vocabulary. This is a man who, after a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were shot to death in their homes, used the solemn event to attack Democratic Gov. Tim Walz. Trump is a man of no morals whose brain is broken beyond repair.

The four-letter word is just garnish. The real obscenity is an economic self-own that torched family farms, a censorship wish list that would make Kim Jong Un flinch, and an immigration dragnet that treated harmless long-time residents like radioactive contraband. Strip away the expletives and you’re still left with a legacy of casualties—wallets, rights, families—each sacrifice made so the former president could preen as the alpha dealmaker.

Swearing may offend delicate ears, but policies born of vanity and vengeance poison the country in ways soap can’t wash out.

ALSO:

Like many men of a certain age, I have a basement full of baseball cards I collected during my teenage years. And maybe once per decade, I will pull them out and check to see if any of them are worth any money. (We have all been told the story of the kid whose parents tossed all their cards when they moved out of the house, costing them a small fortune.)

Over the weekend, I watched an Amazon Prime documentary called The Hobby that discusses the state of the card market as of around 2022. To my surprise, there has been a resurgence in card collecting in the post-Covid era, so I thought maybe I had some cards worth a couple of bucks.

The problem is, in modern card collecting, you never know what your collectibles are worth without having your card graded by a professional rating service. A card’s value is based on whether the card is centered on the cardboard, how crisp the printed photo is, and the like. So a card with a grade of 10 could be worth hundreds of dollars while the same card with a grade of 8 could be worth maybe five bucks.

For instance, I have a 1987 Fleer Barry Bonds rookie card. If it’s graded a 10, the price guides say it’s worth $275. If it’s graded at 8, the price drops to $5. This follows the economics of scotch - you can buy a single-malt that is maybe five percent better than a standard one, but you might end up paying many multiples more for that elusive five percent.

The problem, of course, is that you have no way of knowing what your card’s grade is unless you pay to have it rated. Typically, a grading house will charge you $25 per card to give it a rating. (Or they could charge you much more if you want it graded more quickly.)

You can see the conundrum. By sending in a card to get it graded, you’re basically gambling on its quality. If I pay 25 bucks to have a card graded and it comes back with a bad grade, I just took a financial bath. But if it gets a perfect grade, I may have hit the mother lode.

As it stands, it’s not worth the gamble. So I may be a millionaire, or I may be a guy with a bunch of worthless cardboard in his basement. If the latter is the case, I will have plenty of middling scotch to dull the pain.

ALSO:

Last week, my cohost, Scot Bertram, and I finished up our 50-season jaunt through Saturday Night Live. We watched and graded every sketch, episode, and season, so now the work begins - our future podcasts will discuss where we rank all things SNL.

If you want to listen to our Season 50 summary (released just a few weeks after Season 50 ended), you can do so here - it’s free for everyone.

ALSO:

The New York Times is running a series on the greatest movies of the 2000s, and they are allowing readers to submit their own lists. Here’s mine.

FINALLY:

Hard to believe this song from Chris Staples (not to be confused with Chris Stapleton) is 10 years old, but it’s one of my favorites. It’s primarily for people in too good of a mood who want to feel sadder.

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Imagine a Capitol hearing room once reserved for the likes of George Shultz or Condi Rice. Today, that space hosts a cast that makes the ensemble in Boogie Nights seem emotionally stable. We were warned that Trump’s second‑term cabinet would be a rolling disaster, but the reality has politely exceeded the forecast.

Kristi Noem is first off the clown car. The former South Dakota governor treats her post as a perpetual costume change: bomber jacket on Monday, velvet ball gown on Tuesday. If Noem actually encountered a copy of the Constitution, it would burn her like a cross burns a vampire; “habeas corpus” sounds to her like a new CrossFit move.

At least Noem is visible, which is more than can be said for FBI Director Kash Patel, the bureaucratic Bigfoot. Technically, he runs an agency you fund, yet no camera has captured him since confirmation. Evidently, staff at the ATF saw Patel as often as Elon Musk’s children saw their father, so Patel got the boot from what’s probably the most badass job in D.C.

If it’s raw emotion you seek, Dan Bongino obliges. The former Secret Service agent and now deputy director of the FBI built a talk‑radio empire peddling conspiracy theories, only to be hired into a job requiring him to painstakingly debunk the same nonsense. For instance, on his radio show, Bongino regularly suggested billionaire Trump bestie and teenage girl enthusiast Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison. Now, he is faking a backlash from his conspiracy-minded followers after he declared what we knew all along - Epstein killed himself.

So now America tunes in nightly to watch him bawl on live TV about how exhausting it is to mop up his own rhetorical oil spill.

Security, meanwhile, is Pete Hegseth’s Achilles heel—though he seems unaware he has one. The defense secretary forwards operational battle plans to buddies in an unsecured Signal chat labeled “Protein Shake Recipes/Secret War Plans.” Between emoji reactions, cousins weigh in on whether the 82nd Airborne should pivot left or right. Vladimir Putin must feel like he’s been granted a platinum-level subscription to American secrets free of charge.

Then there’s Scott Bessent, chief economic strategist and walking case study in the Dunning‑Kruger effect. Ask him how tariffs work, and he gushes about “great deals” the way late‑night infomercials tout shammy cloths. Bessent keeps running to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to cite debunked studies used by cognitive fruit flies to argue that somehow American consumers don’t pay tariffs. His next step will be to get Wilford Brimley to do a commercial explaining how we can fund the government with a reverse mortgage.

Hovering over this smoldering ash heap is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who recently strolled into HHS and cashiered an entire advisory board because its members had the audacity to believe in—of all things—vaccinations. He delivers each pink slip with the zeal of someone auditioning for Measles Czar, vowing he won’t rest until every American child can scratch at a spotted rash like it’s 1955 again. In an administration addicted to self‑inflicted wounds, RFK Jr. arrives brandishing the viral equivalent of a chainsaw.

Individually, these characters would be amusing side dishes. Together they constitute the Bonfire of the Mediocrities, a roaring blaze fed by résumés printed on rally swag. The fire consumes policy goals, institutional memory, and the public’s last scraps of trust. Agencies now schedule “explain your basic job” seminars just to keep the lights on.

Predictability is supposed to be the consolation prize of mediocrity—you don’t expect brilliance, but at least you avoid flamboyant collapse. This cabinet flips the formula: their failures are not unfortunate surprises; they’re the entire business model. When your defense chief leaks plans, your economic guru misunderstands tariffs, and your constitutionally illiterate Homeland Security secretary thinks Miranda Rights is an episode of Sex and the City, calamity ceases to be a black swan and becomes a daily press release.

Every conservative mantra—limited government, fiscal prudence, peace through strength—requires grown‑ups who understand levers, not selfies. Trump has taken that principle, stapled it to a piñata, blindfolded the nearest Fox News host, and handed him a bat. The right may laugh, the left may rage, but taxpayers mostly stare at the bill. Adversaries staffed by professionals do not pause while Kristi picks a new ensemble. Markets do not wait for Scott to rediscover Econ 101.

The collateral damage is already measurable. Career civil servants shuffle out the door, taking decades of expertise with them, because no one wants to be the violinist on this Titanic. Procurement deadlines slip, allies stop returning calls, and a generation of policy analysts decides DoorDash offers a clearer advancement track.

Perhaps, in some saner timeline, this cabinet serves as a civics‑class exhibit: choose loyalty over merit and watch the crash in real time. But we inhabit the actual timeline, and the rubble is ours to clear. Conservatives who once prized competence are left rummaging through charred agencies, hoping some manuals survived the heat. At some point, the joke stops being funny and starts being a line item in the deficit.

Fires, even bonfires, eventually burn out. The trouble is what remains: warped steel, cracked foundations, and a stink that lingers in the curtains. Rebuilding will require years and leaders who treat the Constitution as more than a backdrop for a photo-op.

ALSO: The Changing Face of “Real” Estate

If you live in a normal American city, you have no doubt driven by your local mall and seen large retail spaces that are either empty or repurposed for more active pursuits. With people buying more products online, big box stores are being shut down and converted into businesses that allow people to do things rather that buy things. (A Toys R’ Us, for example, could be converted into a giant activity center with trampolines and climbing walls.)

It seems that transition could soon be coming to our homes. For as long as I have been alive, one way people have demonstrated their wealth has been by having a large home. The era of the McMansion (brought low in the 2008 housing crisis) saw full neighborhoods of giant houses with lots of rooms, pools, and basketball courts - all the amenities favored by the nouveau riche.

But the technological era could start to change the size of the homes people favor. In the old days, you needed different rooms for different things - maybe you needed a few rooms to store books or art or to use as an office. If you wanted a different experience, you had to go to a different room.

But with technology - computers, VR headsets, mobile devices, video games, and the like, you can have all the experiences right there in one room. You can house all your books on one iPad, listen to music and watch every movie available on your television, and travel the world on your laptop computer. Who needs a 15,000 square foot home when you can do literally everything you want in a single 150 square foot room? Why pay all that extra money to maintain a huge house when the ten feet in front of your face can give you all the entertainment you need?

And that is just for the people who manage to maintain a life outside the virtual world. Some people are going to dive into VR headsets and never come out. For these people, large homes will be irrelevant, and anything larger than a single-room home (plus maybe an extra room or two, depending on whether they have families) will just seem wasteful. The only space they will need will be a few feet to lie down while they live their lives inside their own heads.

So look forward to the day when, just like driving an enormous gas-guzzling truck, having a large home will seem like a remnant of the past. Tiny homes will be the natural end result of our estates no longer being real.

ALSO:

For some reason this weekend, I ended up watching the 1999 movie Notting Hill. As a card-carrying Gen X-er, I had never seen it, and given it is one of the staples of my generation’s diet, I felt I should see it at least once.

To my surprise, I found it delightful. Hugh Grant’s back probably ached for months after filming, as he had to carry Julia Roberts through that movie - her only inspired bit of acting is at the end, when she gives her “I’m just a girl” speech.

I liked it so much, I decided to delve a bit more into the ‘90s rom-com genre, renting 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral the next night. Again, the movie starred Grant, and again, I really enjoyed it. (Perhaps the most unbelievable part of these films is Grant’s age - despite playing a rakish, confused young man, he was 34 and 39 years old in the two movies. It is safe to say Hugh Grant moisturizes.)

But I do have once question: Does every Hugh Grant movie involve Grant’s character:

1. Falling in love with an American girl who secretly has a boyfriend; and

2. Grant sleeping with that girl before she runs off, only to have to find her; and

3. Grant having a wacky group of friends that all take part in a plot to help him win the girl back; and

4. Grant has a relative or friend that has a disability that becomes an important plot point in his quest to find love?

(There are other similarities, but they would be spoilers.)

The only other observation: In Four Weddings, Grant goes to watch Andie MacDowell try on wedding dresses. After seeing one dress, he simply says, “DIVINE.”

A year later, Grant would be involved in a very public controversy after hiring a prostitute in Los Angeles. The woman’s name? Divine Brown. It’s like he was signaling us.

FINALLY:

I had never been a big Chris Stapleton fan, although I had known a lot of people who really adored him. That is, until I saw his 2024 performance of “Mountains Of My Mind” on Saturday Night Live:

Beautiful.

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I spent the summer after my second year of college working in a factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While there in the early 1990s, I made some friends around my age, some of whom worked at the factory. Occasionally, we would go to bars, and one night we ended up at a dance club called Metropolis.

That night was particularly memorable, even though I didn’t remember much of it. Evidently, I ended up slow-dancing with a girl to an aggressively loud and fast Nine Inch Nails song. I don’t recall any of this, but my friends still bring it up, so all I can do is concede there is a better than 50 percent chance it may have happened.

What I do know is that I ended up with the girl’s phone number, and I called her. We went on a couple of completely pleasant, innocent dates. Eventually, after seeing her a few times, I was talking to her on the phone, and it was pretty clear I was…how to put this delicately…being “waved in.” The green light was on. The Berlin wall had fallen and my little East German citizens, under oppressive rule for years, were finally being invited to mix with her freedom-loving West Germans. It was go time.

The date and time was set, but I was missing one important requirement: Protection. This was the early 1990s, after all, and we had spent our entire childhoods being told that if you even looked at another person in an overly amorous way, you would probably die of a sexually transmitted disease. And rumor also had it that the mixing of Germans (as you have graciously agreed to call it in this essay) could lead to more baby Germans, and at 20 years old, who needs that? (Kinder having kinder, etc.)

I shouldn’t have been as horrified as I was to go buy birth control. In high school, I had worked as a clerk at a drugstore and rung people up for them all the time without judgment. There are two types of men who buy rubbers in a drug store: The ones who buried them under a pile of other items and acted surprised when you finally got to them (how did those get there?), and the guys who bought only condoms, proudly announcing to everyone in the store they would soon be getting laid. Take that, celibacy Stasi!

But I have always had a phobia of people judging me for things I purchase. At one point in high school, I bought three R.E.M. CDs at once, and the record store employee who rang me up asked me, in a somewhat teasing manner, “So, you really like R.E.M., huh?” I was appalled and darted out of the store. I have spent my life feeling better by convincing myself he was probably a big Milli Vanilli fan. (To me, it feels like every store employee is Jack Black in High Fidelity hectoring the customer for wanting to buy Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”)

Condoms were no different. What if I saw someone I knew while in the store? What if there existed a secret network of drug store clerks who would pick up the phone and report me? (This would later become something called “the internet.”)

If you know anything about Milwaukee, you know Highway 94 stretches from just about the shores of Lake Michigan to the west, with Madison being about an hour away. So I got in my car and started hitting gas stations along the highway, hoping to make my big score there. But every time I got out of my car and started walking around, I felt as if the gas station attendant was glaring at me. I felt the heat of their stare on the back of my neck, but I had to buy something, so I would just grab a 16-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew and get out of there.

I kept heading west on the highway and kept chickening out. Eventually, around Delafield (20 miles outside of downtown), I looked at the seat next to me and realized I had nine bottles of Mountain Dew next to me in the passenger seat. I had to finally engage in some toxic masculinity and just buy some condoms or I was going to end up in South Dakota with sparks trailing from the back of my car because of the weight of a million ounces of soda.

Finally, I stopped at a gas station in Oconomowoc. I bit the bullet and just did it, forcing myself up to the counter. Everything seemed to go fine. To my knowledge, there is no framed photo of me on the wall alerting people to look out for the Mad Fornicator. (Also, the liberation of the East Germans never happened, due to an event so unbelievable, I used the story in my book. Let’s just say law enforcement was involved - I got “cop blocked.” Buy the book to read more!)

Believe it or not, there is actually a point to all this. I spend a lot of time writing about how much the internet horrifies me (more below), but for personal privacy, the internet is a godsend. If you do it right, there is no more walking into a store and being judged by some eye-rolling teen for what shirt or magazine you buy. Purchasing embarrassing items - erection pills, stool softener, Meghan Trainor albums - can all be done via anonymous transaction. (You can even purchase truly humiliating goods, like my book, without anyone knowing!)

I should note, regarding the story above: I understand that my personal mortification must pale in comparison to girls attempting to obtain birth control, which often requires a personal talk with their mother to declare themselves sexually active. I would rather walk into the lion exhibit at the zoo wearing Lady Gaga’s meat dress.

Sure, the internet is mostly horrible, and no reasonable person would prefer to grow up with their life on the permanent record - especially if you know videos would exist of you slow dancing to an industrial metal song with a strange woman at a dance club.

But I recently saw a commercial for a drug intended to help men with crooked…uh…appendages. This was demonstrated in the ad by a bent carrot, an affliction known as Peyronie’s disease:

The ad promises the drug Xiaflex (editor’s note: ugh) will “gradually reduce the bend” in your crooked wiener, although it warns one of the side effects could be “penile fracture.”

OK, let’s take this one issue at a time. First, diseases are typically named after people notable for having the affliction. Can you imagine the international board of disease-naming doctors telling Mr. Peyronie of his honor?

DOCTORS: “Mr. Peyronie, we have great news!”

MR. PEYRONIE: “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

DOCTORS: “We have named crooked penis disease after you! It’ll be like Lou Gehrig’s Disease, just for wayward wieners.”

PEYRONIE: “Uh…no thanks, I’m good.”

DOCTORS: “Sorry, the paperwork’s been filed.” (Unfurls giant banner that says “PEYRONIE’S DISEASE” with his picture next to it.)

PEYRONIE: “Oh God no. Please. No!” (Shuffles out of the room at a sharp angle to the left, given that’s the only way he can walk.)

And from then on, every time he had to claim his reservation at a restaurant, the maitre d’ would say “THE Peyronie? and slowly look down.

Also, I know ads are required to list potential side effects, but “penile fracture?” Can I have some odds here? Is it like one in three, or one in three million? What is an acceptable percentage for you to take a drug that might break your crank in half?

But for the purpose of this column, think about what the process of treating this disease would be in the past. Going to a doctor, having it diagnosed, then going to a drug store and having to talk to a pharmacist about it while a line of impatient customers wait behind you and listen to your every word.

(Related side note: The internet tells me Peyronie’s disease was first described in the year 1561 by an Italian priest named Gabriele Falloppio, which feels like it has to be some sort of joke.

Also, the fact that I was able to find this information anonymously on the internet sort of proves the whole thesis of this piece. If you had to call a friend and ask “hey, what’s that crooked penis disease called,” it seems likely you would find a lot of bananas on your desk at work the next day.)

Sure, not having to shop in actual stores anymore might collapse the U.S. economy, but as long as I don’t have to risk buying something embarrassing, that’s a chance I am willing to take. No more walking into the Gap and being barraged by employees asking you if you’re finding everything okay, as if you had never been in a store before. “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble finding chinos that fit my pet iguana,” you tell them to ensure they leave you alone.

Think of all the minorities who typically get unfairly harassed while walking around stores, who now get to just browse online in peace. Think of the people who want weight loss or hair loss drugs but who are too ashamed to talk to a doctor about it - now they can just get some doctor to Zoom in from his beach house to give them the video once-over and get the drugs mailed to them. (Should Ozempic and other GLP1s be over-the-counter? Maybe!)

So go ahead, young people - bask in the glory of never having to subject yourself to buying embarrassing things in public. This is generally why your parents are so cringe: We were used to suffering personal humiliation in front of others - sucking it up and getting on with it is just our nature. Unlike the legendary Mr. Peyronie, we are just able to get to the point.

ALSO:

With that praise for technological innovation out of the way, now it’s time for some dread.

As you may have heard, Google has launched a new AI product called VEO 3, which lets anyone plug in a prompt and receive a short, almost completely lifelike video depicting what they wrote.

I immediately grabbed a couple of lines from my novel to see how they would look in movie form:

And:

(Trust me, it makes more sense in context.)

It only took a few minutes after the initial excitement of seeing my words in film to realize that we are about to enter an entirely new world. For one, why hire expensive, difficult actors and full film crews to make your movies when they can be generated with a few keystrokes? Why hire writers to write your movies when AI can do that, too?

Sure, it will be cool when we can all make movies. I certainly have ideas. But the entire movie-making industry is about to go up in flames. The era of the movie star will soon be over - instead of Jennifer Lawrence and Ryan Reynolds, we will have digitally-created actors that we can just drop into our own films if we really want to see them.

But even if you’re not in the mood for eulogizing the film industry (it has, indeed, created some of the worst people on the planet), we haven’t fully grappled with what is going to happen to the world when every video clip circulated online is suspect. Informational egalitarianism is cool until you realize that will elevate mistruths that are going to cause people to commit violence against each other. (This is the premise of the new movie Mountainhead on HBO/HBO Go/HBO Now/HBO MAX/MAX/HBO MAX.)

If I can make people say dopey things from my book, then malign actors will be able to make videos of world leaders saying things they never said in order to inflame tensions. This is already happening - a fake video of the new pope denouncing Vice President JD Vance rocketed around the world before fact-checkers realized it was false.

We are about to live in a world where everything we see could be fake and nothing is verifiable. You or I might be able to spot a fake, but what about the hundreds of millions who either can’t or refuse to because it doesn’t comport with their politics? President Trump used a digitally altered photo as evidence a man who committed no crime should be thrown into an El Salvadoran prison camp - as they say, a lie travels around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on.

And, of course, the leaders of large tech companies forge ahead with all this because if they did slow down, they would fall behind the pack. The way society re-orders itself once all truth is negotiable isn’t their problem - they are too busy downing Ketamine and repopulating the planet.

FINALLY:

As I noted on social media, the choices in style and music made by Gen Xers were a protest against the culture of their boomer parents. So I then wondered what Zoomers have to rebel against, given everything their Gen X parents did was obviously awesome?

Take, for instance, The Prodigy, who was cranking out bangers that still hold up 30 years later. Here’s “No Good (Start the Dance)” from their groundbreaking 1994 album, Music for the Jilted Generation.

How do you rebel against what was already, by definition, rebellion? By being boring?

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In one Saturday Night Live sketch mocking a Democratic presidential debate, George Stephanopoulos, played by cast member Mikey Day, tells Joe Biden, played by Jason Sudeikis, “you have 60 seconds.”

“But the doctor said I had six to eight months!” answered Sudeikis’ Biden.

That was February 8, 2020.

If you have turned on a television in the past week, you have been inundated with finger pointing over who knew what as Biden faded out of the 2024 presidential election. Some Democrats blame Biden’s handlers for “covering up” his deteriorating mental condition, leading to his horrific crash in the final debate with Donald Trump. (To add to the controversy, Biden this week announced he had been diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer that had spread to the bone.)

As a new book by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson argues, Biden’s decision to run for re-election last year undoubtedly handed the presidency to Trump. Even after Biden dropped out of the race, Democrats handed the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris, who had an even lower approval rating than Biden. It was virtually impossible for her to run a plausible presidential campaign in three months.

But even as Biden’s enablers swore up and down that the president spent his free time using his immense cranial powers to solve the mystery of cold fusion, the American public didn’t buy it. Discussing Biden’s age and cognitive abilities was a third rail for much of the media, but voters could see with their own eyes what was happening to Biden as he stammered through speeches and moved as any 80-year-old man would.

Much of comedy is saying the truths nobody else will say, and in this case, Saturday Night Live was screaming about Biden’s condition for a half a decade. Both in sketches and in Weekend Update jokes, SNL tried to warn everyone about what was happening.

Take this joke from Weekend Update Colin Jost in October of 2019:

“Joe Biden for the first time called for President Trump to be impeached and removed from office after he finally realized that the Joe Biden Trump keeps attacking was him.”

Or this Sudeikis joke from December of 2019 while playing Biden in a debate sketch: “Have you noticed I’m playing with almost a full deck of cards tonight? I haven’t even told a long, rambling story yet - but I got one locked and loaded.”

The show dedicated some full sketches to Biden’s mental condition. In October of 2021, with Sudeikis hosting, they opened the show with a sketch about how far Biden’s faculties had diminished since Sudeikis played him as vice president on the show. When modern Biden sees former Biden, he remarks that he can’t believe how “lucid” he is.

In 2022, a fake movie trailer presents Biden’s decision to run for re-election as a horror flick. The film shows cast member Punkie Johnson adding up Biden’s age on her computer calculator, then recoiling in horror as she realizes he will be 81 years old in 2024:

At the end, the characters all settle on Biden after considering the other potential Democratic candidates, which ended up predicting what was actually going to happen in two years.

In fact, between 2019 and 2023, the jokes about Biden’s mental acuity were all over SNL. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:

Season 45, Episode 15 (March 2020): Jost jokes that he can’t wait for the Trump-Biden debates because they are going to have to be the first debates “moderated by a Jamaican nurse.”

Season 46, Episode 9 (December 2020): Jost jokes that Dr. Jill Biden isn’t actually a medical doctor, but “she has at times functioned as a nurse” as they show a picture of her holding up Joe. The crowd groans loudly at this one.

Season 46, Episode 15 (March 2021): After Biden gave a one-hour press conference, he was asked if he plans on running in 2024. Weekend Update co-host Michael Che joked: “Which is probably the nicest way to ask him if he plans on being alive in three years.”

During the press conference, Biden used a “cheat sheet.” Jost joked that he had an exclusive look at one of them, which said, “YOU = JOE BIDEN.”

Season 46, Episode 18 (May 2021): It had been announced that Kamala Harris was getting her own wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s. Che added, “while Joe Biden is the first wax figure to become president.”

Season 47, Episode 4 (October 2021): A report had come out that Biden repeatedly used the “F” word behind the scenes in meetings. Jost joked: “More concerning, the F word he keeps using is ‘forget.’”

Season 47, Episode 12 (January 2022): A new study showed the economy rising at the fastest rate since the Ronald Reagan administration. Jost: “Biden has even started using Reagan’s catchphrase, ‘Where am I?’”

(During this time, the Weekend Update desk began wearing out this photo of Biden looking confused):

Season 47, Episode 18 (April 2022): After Biden finished a speech, he turned to shake hands with an invisible person. Jost: “Hey, her name is Kamala.”

Season 48, Episode 1 (October 2022): In a sketch lampooning ESPN’s “ManningCast,” Peyton Manning (played by host Miles Teller) says, “Joe Biden’s lost his marbles. They’re not even going to mention that?”

Later that episode, during Weekend Update, Jost mentioned a speech Biden had given earlier in the week when he asked if Congresswoman Jackie Walorski was in the crowd - but she had died a month earlier. “Even worse, he keeps forgetting this woman is still alive” Jost said as he pointed to a picture of Kamala Harris.

Season 48, Episode 2 (October 2022): In a sketch called “So You Think You Won't Snap!,” game show host “Morgan Freegirl” (played by Bowen Yang) reads current headlines. “Did you know that when Joe Biden was born, we didn’t have highways?” he asks Heidi Gardner’s character. He shows a clip of Biden on 60 Minutes discussing his mental acuity, which leads Heidi Gardner’s character to chug wine.

On Weekend Update, Jost showed a clip of Biden giving a speech at a car factory in which the president opened with, “Let me start off with two words: Made in America.” Jost, looking nonplussed, said, “Let me respond with two words: ‘Jesus H. Christ.’”

Jost then then noted Biden had gotten upset when reporters yelled questions at him. He then added, “Questions like, ‘what year is it,’ and ‘who is the current president?’”

Season 48, Episode 5 (November 2022): James Austin Johnson, playing Biden, notes that he is often seen talking to people who don’t exist.

Season 48, Episode 7 (December 2022): Biden had just forced railway workers to accept a deal that doesn’t include paid sick leave. On Weekend Update, Che joked: “But how do you expect to care about sick leave when he shows up to work every day with full-blown CTE?”

And yet despite all of Biden’s difficulties being mocked week after week, his cognitive decline still snuck up on a lot of political observers. One of the unfortunate byproducts of having a media so in the tank for one of the candidates is that people look to comedians to tell them the truth.

In this case, it was entirely warranted.

ALSO:

This week in National Review, I looked at how Biden’s decision to run for re-election robbed us of the post-presidency second act, which is an American tradition:

America used to elect presidents young enough that, when they left office, they still had decades of public service ahead of them that they could use to burnish their legacies. Take George W. Bush, who exited office at age 62: Who knew that a man whom the left once burned in effigy as a war criminal would one day become America’s lovable uncle? Bill Clinton was only 54 when he left the presidency, and despite his many scandals and impeachment, he has spent years as an A-list public figure. Sure, the bitter-enders will never admit that they may have gotten a little carried away during an opposing president’s tenure, but most Americans forgive, forget, and welcome their former nemeses back to civilian life. (Think of the Democrats when they retroactively realized that, as bad as they thought George W. Bush was, they had no idea what horrors lay on the horizon. “We thought that guy was Hitler?!”)

But America’s newfound enthusiasm for gerontocracy — Biden left office at 82, and at the end of his term, Trump will be 82 — reduces the chances of having ex-presidents around. What we do know is that Joe Biden will likely not have a post-presidency career in which he paints pictures of veterans for charity. He almost certainly will not spend decades building homes for the poor or producing films for Netflix.

The prior week, I wrote about how we are all outsourcing our brains to artificial intelligence, which is making us boring, awkward, and dumb:

The day is certainly coming when people will just be too lazy to interact online, an activity that just a few years ago was itself considered lazy. Dating websites are already rolling out AI “wingmen” that write dating profiles for people, then contact other users on their behalf. We are in the age of Cyrano de Zuckerberg. (Whatever happens, do not give Roxane your credit card number.)

But as the quality of AI gets even better, so will the temptation to simply offload all your thinking to the algorithm. Why go through the painstaking process of acquiring social etiquette, figuring out how to fix things around the house, and learning to read and write when it can all be done for you with a voice command? Becoming a fully formed human is difficult. Why not export all the challenging work to your own digital Jeeves?

Read all my columns here.

FINALLY:

Is it strange that a man in his 50s enjoys music written for women in their 20s? Perhaps - but when you can write songs as catchy as Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio does, it’s bound to happen. (Plus, Bob Odenkirk is a big fan, so I am in good company.)

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If you’ve followed conservative commentary in recent years, you’ve likely encountered the refrain: "I’ll criticize Donald Trump when he deserves it, and I’ll praise him when he deserves it."

It’s a fair stance at first glance - nobody should be judged solely on a single mistake or a marginally faulty opinion. Further, society often distinguishes between private behavior and public performance, allowing figures like Alec Baldwin, despite shooting a woman, to continue their careers, or Bill Clinton, who turned the Oval Office into an underground massage parlor, to weather political storms.

Yet, there are lines that cannot be crossed without consequence. Some actions and beliefs serve as glaring indicators of a fundamental lack of decency or intelligence. These individuals not only flout societal norms but also revel in their defiance, undermining any claim to respectability.

Consider U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whose career is marred by a series of public and private scandals. From treating spouses as expendable to allegedly assaulting women to being accused of showing up to work drunk to financial mismanagement (read a full accounting of his misdeeds here), Hegseth embodies a pattern of behavior that transcends political criticism, reflecting a deeper disregard for ethical standards.

From the moment Hegseth was plucked from Fox News to serve as Defense Secretary, it was clear he wasn’t remotely qualified for the job. And right on schedule, he began behaving disgracefully, setting up Signal accounts to share classified information about military operations with wives, friends, and - oops! - magazine editors. Hegseth’s recent travails are the most predictable scandal ever because he has lived his life as a reprobate, and this is what terrible people do.

Then, there's Donald Trump, whose compulsive lying has become a defining feature of his rhetoric. His unchecked fabrications now jeopardize the economy and erode America’s global credibility. For figures like Trump, any attempt at compartmentalization rings hollow. Their egregious conduct overshadows fleeting moments of coherence, rendering them unfit for any benefit of the doubt.

Compartmentalization may sometimes work when assessing politicians or celebrities, but it doesn’t work in our everyday lives. No one says, “Sure, Joe slept with my wife, but he has great musical taste.” Once you cross a line of decency, you are no longer given the luxury of selectivity.

And under Trump’s wing, the number of disgraceful politicians damaging America has grown unabated. Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who’s so dumb he’d starve to death if he got trapped in a grocery store, recently demanded hearings into the “real cause” of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City.

Johnson will fall for literally any bogus conspiracy theory. He believed the COVID-19 vaccines actually made the pandemic worse and told the public the virus could be cured by using mouthwash. He denied the violent nature of the January 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol, saying “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law." And now he’s a 9/11 truther.

This is not a man who should be congratulated when he gets things right, like when a toddler manages to poop on the toilet without help. He is a man who has severe mental defects that cause him to live in a delusional world inhabited only by insane people.

Similarly, in Hegseth and Trump, we encounter individuals whose actions and words expose a profound moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Their transgressions are not mere missteps but reflections of character flaws that defy redemption through occasional sensible remarks.

Compartmentalization, as a principle, serves a vital role in evaluating public figures. It allows us to assess performance separate from personal failings, recognizing that none of us is flawless. However, when behavior consistently undermines societal trust and ethical norms, compartmentalization ceases to be a valid defense. It becomes a tool of evasion, shielding the indefensible under the guise of political expediency.

In the realm of leadership, character counts. It serves as the bedrock upon which credibility is built and decisions are judged. Hegseth, Trump, and Johnson, through their actions, have forfeited the right to selective forgiveness. Their legacy is one of shattered norms and diminished trust, where each falsehood or ethical lapse reinforces the certainty that some individuals are beyond redemption through mere rhetorical acrobatics.

In other words, you do not “gotta hand it” to 9/11 truthers, vaccine deniers, or men who assault women. They do not deserve a place in either government or decent society. Compartmentalization is the last refuge of the scoundrel, and, ironically, those who use it to defend terrible people in order to remain in good standing with a political party should not be forgiven, either.

ALSO:

In my National Review piece this week, I discuss how, over the past decade, social media has helped Republicans but killed the Democratic Party’s messaging machine. Suddenly, even moderate Democrats are being tarred by the most extreme elements of the left in a way Republicans aren’t harmed by their crazies:

Today, one public school teacher with a TikTok account, green hair, and a septum piercing can hijack a political movement. Six college students with a bullhorn and a drum can become the face of a party they don’t even belong to. Ragtag speakers at a climate rally demanding the end of capitalism become stand-ins for every Democrat running for office in a red or purple district.

In the social media era, the Democratic coalition’s balancing act has tipped hard toward the loudest and most ideologically rigid participants. Republicans, meanwhile, have figured out how to use this to their advantage. They don’t have to paint all Democrats as radical; they just have to show the country what the very visible radicals are saying, kick back, and let the algorithm do the rest.

Consider the average voter in a swing state. Maybe people in that category aren’t deeply engaged in politics. Perhaps they’re just trying to keep up with their mortgage, their kids’ playdates, and what’s happening on The White Lotus. And then they log on to Facebook and see a viral video of a progressive activist shouting down a speaker for not using the proper pronouns. Or they see their liberal neighbors lionizing a telegenic young man who shot a health insurance executive in the back, depriving his two sons of a father. To those voters, this is now what the Democratic Party stands for. Not jobs, not health care, not education, but fringe cultural obsessions that alienate more people than they attract.

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The best thing a podcast can do is make you take a look at something you’re already familiar with and see it in an entirely different way. That’s the case with the One Song Podcast, which takes famous pieces of music, breaks down every instrument, beat, and vocal, and casts them in a unique light. It really is genius, and I can’t stop listening to it. Here are hosts Diallo Riddle and Luxxury discussing the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Cherub Rock:”

Today, I went on 620 WTMJ in Milwaukee to discuss this topic, along with whether Musk’s DOGE is going to live on past his tenure and whether Saturday Night Live needed to apologize to the British actress whose teeth it mocked.

I’m tinkering with the idea of doing more video, so subscribe to see if that happens!

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There’s a fine line between “tech visionary” and “sex cult leader,” and Elon Musk just erased it quicker than he erases Twitter users making fun of him.

Thanks to a stunning Wall Street Journal exposé, we now know Musk isn’t just playing house with a few exes—he’s quietly running what amounts to a eugenic harem. Fourteen confirmed children, NDAs as thick as congressional budgets, surrogacy negotiations like venture deals, and a compound in Austin where the mothers of his “legion” of children are meant to live in coordinated, baby-bearing harmony. This isn’t a parenting strategy—it’s the NXIVM cult sponsored by Tesla.

Musk doesn’t want a family. He wants more human startup projects. In his creepy worldview, humanity is circling the toilet because not enough “smart” people are having kids, so naturally, he’s taken it upon himself to reseed the earth with his personal genome.

(Given his recent bungled attempt to reshape the federal government, which has been soaked with math errors and misinformation, there is no evidence Musk has a high intelligence - he is as much of a genius as Katy Perry is an astronaut.)

He doesn’t see himself as a father, he sees himself as a fertility angel investment fund. (Insert joke about “raising a seed round” here.) Women don’t date Elon Musk, they get recruited like unpaid interns for the apocalypse. And if they step out of line—ask for a lawyer, resist a gag order, or request the radical luxury of naming the father on a birth certificate—his fixer shows up like a mafia consigliere reminding them how “going the legal route always leads to a worse outcome.”

Ashley St. Clair found this out the hard way. A conservative social media influencer, she gave birth to Musk’s son, Romulus, and Musk responded by trying to buy her silence with $15 million and $100,000 a month—provided she agreed to never say his name in relation to the baby. You know, because it’s his privacy we should be concerned about, not the child whose father is seeking the private information of every American taxpayer.

And when she refused the NDA, guess what? Payments got slashed. First to $40K, then $20K. Because that’s how all the best dads show love—by financially blackmailing the mother of their child when she wants him to publicly acknowledge the baby exists.

Elon Musk calls his growing brood a “legion,” which is funny, because it’s exactly the kind of thing a delusional cult leader would say to justify his breeding program. There’s not even subtext here—it’s text. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he wrote, “we will need to use surrogates.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong with being interested in fertility rates and how they will affect our society, culture, and economy in the future. If we don’t make enough new people, a lot of America’s infrastructure will crumble and its economic engine will slow.

But that is entirely different than recruiting women for a personal breeding project. And it goes without saying that Musk is cheered on by many of the same people who would be horrified if, say, the wrong people (read: NBA players like Shawn Kemp) were having too many babies.

This is not normal. This is not quirky. This is a Waco reboot with better Wi-Fi.

And like any cult leader, Musk has his own compound. Not figuratively—a literal compound in Austin, where he tried to gather the women carrying his children under one roof. The only thing missing is matching jumpsuits and Nikes.

One of the women, Shivon Zilis, lives there now and is reportedly the high priestess of the whole operation, enjoying “special status” among the mothers. You know, in the way the first wife gets to sit closest to the Kool-Aid.

Grimes, another of Musk’s baby-mothers (and notoriously terrible Coachella DJ), says the court battle with him over their three kids bankrupted her. She also claimed Musk kept one of their children from her for five months.

But she still fares better than the women who didn’t get romantic with him, like the ones who just got a DM saying, “Hey, want to have my child?” That happened to crypto influencer Tiffany Fong, who turned him down and promptly saw her Musk-boosted social media earnings crash.

This is not a man trying to build a family. It’s a man trying to mass-produce a legacy. He’s obsessed with ensuring that the future is populated by mini-Musks—children engineered by IQ and curated like angel investments. Undoubtedly his new AI program, Grok, is busy cranking out content titled “Why You Should Let Me Knock You Up.”

And while all this is unfolding, Musk is also serving as the head of “Government Efficiency” for President Trump, eyeing up cuts at federal programs like Social Security and Medicaid. Because if there’s one thing more disgusting than weaponizing your wealth to silence the mothers of your children, it’s doing it while gutting aid for people raising kids the normal way.

This is where the Musk myth finally falls apart. He’s not Tony Stark. He’s not a misunderstood genius. He’s a manipulative tech cultist who treats women like satellites in his reproductive orbit, using money, power, and paranoia to keep them silent and compliant.

In what universe is this acceptable? When did we decide it was fine for a man with this much power to run a privatized sperm cult out of a gated community, to treat the women he impregnates like customer service reps, and to use his wealth to rewrite the basic rules of parenthood? How well-adjusted are his little band of clones going to be when they grow up and realize they aren’t the offspring of a loving dad, they are simply a science project?

If Elon Musk wants to build a better humanity, great—he can start by acting like a human being himself. But he doesn’t want to improve humanity. He wants to own it. And he’s doing it one NDA, one hush fund, and one silenced mother at a time.

This isn’t the future. It’s a fever dream powered by narcissism. For the love of God, women of America, please stop letting Musk fire his rockets at you.

ALSO:

Remember when the rapper C-Murder was found guilty of murder? This week, the drummer for the New Pornographers was charged with possessing child pornography.

FINALLY:

The debut album from Raleigh, North Carolina’s Teens in Trouble was recently released and it’s got all the great power pop hooks of a Weezer record. (Although the band seems to be primarily the product of Lizzie Killian, who suffuses it with a strong feminine vibe.)

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This week, one stark reality has become increasingly clear: President Donald Trump’s capacity for awfulness is no longer theoretical; it's palpably real.

After Trump’s decision to catapult America into a trade war with the world, the S&P 500 Index dropped 10 percent in two days. On Friday, the Dow Jones lost over 2,200 points. His inconceivably inane and malignant tariffs have already cost Americans trillions in wealth, and there is no end in sight as other countries retaliate.

Things have gotten so bad that even shameless Trump sycophants are worried. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who would immediately produce a can opener from his jacket if Trump asked him to eat dog food off the floor of the Oval Office, has criticized Trump’s mindless tariff scheme, calling the inevitable retaliatory tariffs “terrible for America.”

From the outset, Trump has defied conventional political logic, weathering scandal and controversy that would have sunk any other leader. However, until this week, all of the offenses defining his tenure have shared a common theme: they didn’t significantly affect the life of the average American.

Consider the recent uproar over the Signal leak. The revelation that Trump's administration mishandled information over a military operation in Yemen was met with predictable outrage from critics and concern from military experts. Yet, for many Americans, this scandal was distant and abstract. It involved geopolitical intricacies and military strategies that, while crucial, did not directly impact the daily lives of citizens back home. No American soldiers died, and the bombing of the Houthis was a success. It was, for much of the public, a victimless political crime.

Similarly, Trump's relentless assertions about the 2020 election being stolen and his controversial handling of classified documents have stirred controversy primarily in the realm of rhetoric and legality. These offenses transgress norms and challenge institutions, but crucially, they haven't inflicted tangible harm on ordinary Americans in their everyday affairs. They remain, to a large extent, theoretical crimes—debatable, divisive, but detached from immediate consequences for most citizens.

President bangs a porn star while his wife is home with a newborn? It’s got nothing to do with me. Trump takes Putin’s side in a war against an American ally? Ukraine is so far away! The chief executive creates a new meme coin, then scams his supporters for a billion dollars as he pulls the rug out from under them? Crypto-what?

But now, there's one arena where Trump's actions have decidedly pierced the bubble of political theater and impacted the lives of everyday Americans: the economy. The president's ignorant view of tariffs, particularly his tariff policies that have precipitated market volatility and staggering declines, has proven far from harmless. Once a barometer of economic health and investor confidence, the stock market has cratered under Trump's trade policies, leaving retirement funds vulnerable and business outlooks uncertain.

Unlike the esoteric debates over election integrity or the proper handling of sensitive information, the economic repercussions of Trump's tariff policies reached directly into the wallets and livelihoods of American families. Jobs are now in peril as businesses will struggle to adapt. What was once a distant concern for economists and policy wonks became a pressing reality for Main Street.

Virtually every one of Trump’s scandals involves a stunning mix of ignorance, hubris, and dishonesty. It was just a matter of time before he poured this toxic cocktail on an issue that affected people outside the Beltway.

With his destruction of the American economy, he might have finally found an issue in which his voters have skin in the game. If the MAGA crowd continues to support him after this, then they deserve to lose their money; it’s just a shame that everyone else will also be paying the penalty for Trump’s imbecility.

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When can a $20 million campaign contribution actually hurt a candidate? When the donation is given by a cartoon megavillain.

When tech billionaire Elon Musk dropped a colossal pile of money into the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court, it was supposed to be a game-changer. And it was — just not for the side he intended to help. The cash went to bolster the campaign of former Attorney General Brad Schimel, the conservative in the race. But instead of propelling Schimel across the finish line, the Musk Millions acted like a 50-pound ankle weight strapped to a guy already running uphill.

Musk, ever the political neophyte, seems to believe that money equals votes. But anyone who's spent more than ten minutes in a swing state knows it’s far more complicated than that. Wisconsin isn’t Twitter. You don’t get to spend your way into popularity with a few dramatic posts and some Super Bowl-ad-level checks.

By the time Musk’s cash flood hit, the airwaves were already saturated with TV ads. A recent poll showed that only 38 percent of Wisconsin voters had a positive impression of Musk, while 60 percent had a negative impression, so Democrats hung Musk around Schimel’s neck. All the tech billionaire really did was hand Democrats a golden opportunity to paint Schimel as his corrupt toadie.

The results were telling. Schimel ran a full six points behind another conservative (Brittany Kinser, running for state superintendent of instruction) on the statewide ballot, a gap almost certainly caused by the Musk stink that blew up Schimel’s candidacy like a Tesla battery fire. In a state where elections are often decided by the width of a slice of gouda, that’s a death sentence.

(The idea that a conservative would run closer in a state superintendent race than a state supreme court race is unheard of in Wisconsin, especially on the same night - Teachers' unions typically dominate superintendent races.)

"It looks like Elon Musk's intervention probably backfired," Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university's Elections Research Center, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last night. "It really provided fuel for Crawford's campaign and a kind of focal point for people who were upset by what's happening in Washington."

The election continues a catastrophic streak for conservatives in Trump-era state supreme court elections in Wisconsin. Conservatives once had what seemed like an insurmountable 5-2 majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. They've now lost 4 out of the last 5 races and are in a 4-3 minority.

This court election had national implications from the start. The left tried desperately to frame the race as a referendum on Musk — a Donald Trump proxy with worse personal approval ratings and fewer working satellites. Now that their strategy of guilt-by-billionaire has worked in Wisconsin, expect to see it rolled out in races across the country.

But while the Musk angle may have made headlines, the stakes in this election were always much bigger than one donor or one candidate. This wasn’t just about who sits on the state’s highest court. It was about whether Wisconsin will still have a legislature that reflects the will of voters — or one that’s rewritten by a handful of progressive justices.

If Schimel had won, the court might have served as a check on this judicial activism. But now, with Judge Susan Crawford ascending to the bench, the progressive project will accelerate. The court will be seen not as an impartial arbiter of law, but as the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party — a place where failed policy ideas go to be resurrected by robe-wearing partisans.

And so Elon Musk, perhaps thinking he was saving America from the brink, ended up pushing Wisconsin a few steps closer to the edge. His $20 million investment bought conservatives nothing but headaches. Next time, maybe he should spend it on building a time machine — so he can go back and stay out of Wisconsin.