White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Democratic Lightheadedness Won’t Erase Trump’s Stain

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It sounds like an admonition from a senior detective to a junior colleague: Assume nothing.

Right now, across America, a lot of political assuming is going on, mostly among Democrats. The first assumption is that the Democrats will win the midterms. It is dangerous to assume the winner of any race until the winning post has clearly been passed. Nonetheless, a certain lightheadedness has taken over Democrats and those who are planning to vote with them.

The Democrats are also assuming victory not only in November 2026, but also victory in November 2028. They are dreaming of changes, cosmetic and profound.

Cosmetically, they assume some of the extremes of President Trump’s architectural bric-a-brac in Washington will be torn down — especially the ballroom at the White House and the arch he is dead set on building at Memorial Bridge. Trouble is that people may like the arch and take it to heart. Also, the cost of taking it down will matter.

The ballroom will survive because, well, what could replace it? The East Wing of the White House has gone, and a replica would be an expensive undertaking. Nothing — a gaping hole — isn’t an option.

If he razes the Kennedy Center, the Democrats will rebuild it. The Kennedy name remains dear to them.

The new face of Washington is to be one built by Trump: the ballroom, the arch, and many monuments.

Expect to see these on selfies, postcards and as location identifiers in movies, like the way the London Eye, a Ferris wheel, has come to be the modern symbol of London, taking over from Tower Bridge.

Should a Republican win the presidency in 2028, other Trump changes, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario Lake America, will create optics and likely trigger legal challenges. A Democratic president will turn that clock back with relish, restoring the old names as the beginning of accommodations with Mexico and Canada.

The heavy lifting, as usual, won’t be the optics but the substance. There is a new world order, and future administrations will have to find America’s place in it —  while still facing off against China.

The Democrats, suffering from lightheadedness based on the assumption of victory in the midterms and further victory in 2028, assume that by some magic time travel, the status quo ante will return and the world will be put back together again as it was before Trump 2. Magical thinking.

They should contemplate the significance of Lady Macbeth’s declaration, “What’s done cannot be undone.”

Consider two seemingly irrevocable changes affecting two very different nations, Canada and Iran.

Canada, which has been a constant friend to America throughout its history, is riled as never before. The astute Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has sought to align his vast underpopulated country with Europe. There is even talk of Canada joining the European Union as its 28th member. That is Canadian lightheadedness.

First, the EU isn’t in great shape and has failed to coalesce into a country-like entity. It is riven with national interests and rivalries.

Second, there is the problem of the Atlantic. Whereas most of the EU is contiguous, Canada is far away, and its borders are determined not by a customs post but by an ocean — and by oceans of other differences.

Somehow, despite the loss of trust over torn-up treaties, Canada and the United States need each other.

While at war with America, Iran has discovered a compelling advantage in the region: the Strait of Hormuz. Control of the strait means control of a major asset, affecting the production and export of oil and gas in much of the Middle East. One-third of the world’s fertilizer passes through the strait.

The Trump administration believes America can control the strait and operate it as though it were the Panama Canal before President Jimmy Carter handed it over to Panama.

Sadly, this assumption belies reality. The Iran war has awakened the sleeping dog at the gate, and it is unlikely to obey a new owner or go back to sleep.

I believe we will win the war in the conventional sense, but we can never carry home the prize — that remains a territorial possession of Iran.

Trump’s mark on Washington and the world, like Lady Macbeth’s stain, is indelible.

The Question That Must Be Answered: How Dangerous Is AI?

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Races have winners and losers — at least so I have always thought. At some point, the competition ends and a winner is identified, whether it is first-past-the-post as in a horse race, or first in the marketplace as in a commercial race. Think about VHS and Betamax.

Similarly, we knew who won the space race and many other international races. However, the race we are engaged in with China over artificial intelligence isn’t defined — there are no winning posts, and we don’t even know what winning will look like.

Will we wake up one day and be told we have cleared the winning post and China is in the dust, or the other way round?

We don’t even seem to be engaged in the same race as China. Is it the one President Trump talks about where we are going to out-invest, out-talent, out-research and dominate AI?

Or is it the one China appears to be running, emphasizing using AI as it is now, with the construction of many thousands of deployable robots?

Is it a purely commercial race or a purely military one for both countries?

So far, it seems, we have taken the high road, with proprietary systems, and China has taken the low road with widely deployed, open-source, ready-now systems.

China is aggressively spreading AI across its commercial operations and developing families of robots. The United States is still nibbling at universal deployment. China is mass-producing droves of humanoids that dance, leap in the air, and perform complex duties like cooking.

They entertain and threaten. They are a new workforce, presenting a new level of competition.

Although the United States has reached new heights in invention and pushed the frontiers of AI discovery, it lags in deployment. It has been slower in harvesting the technology.

Now comes the unsettling — actually terrifying — warning from AI researchers that the human race may face extinction as soon as the end of this decade. Three AI bosses — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of Grok — have called for a slowdown and regulatory oversight.

This warning deserves to be treated as truth until proven otherwise.

Could, as the doomsters fear, no bells ring, no shouts of joy echo from the bleachers at the race’s end because AI has killed us all short of the winning post.

It is a strange race run not by the government but by corporations, with the government cheering from the sidelines. Bill Gates has said the thing about AI is that — unlike other dangerous technologies, such as nuclear — the government has no depth of knowledge, no deep bench. Where AI is concerned, the government is an outsider.

When my television crew and I covered the Upscale conference in Malaga, Spain, last year, we got insight into people from around the world surging ahead in the creative uses of AI, without regard to whether they were using Chinese or American AI. For this cohort, these were just off-the-shelf tools.

This was a new generation of creatives using AI with relish to create fine art, advertisements and designs for everything from a new shape for a car or a wild-patterned shoe to a more comfy living room couch.

I had to wonder whether they weren’t the real winners in the AI race: Those who use it without scaling the heights of its technical possibilities or using it to displace truck drivers.

Only two countries are in that race, the United States and China, but all have a stake. In AI deployment, the United States is far from dominant. Indeed, it is down the list of countries where AI is already incorporated into daily commercial operations. Estonia and the UAE stand out.

The United States is challenging the future before exploiting the present.

It is easy to declare the need for regulation and guardrails, but hard to do that when the subject is in constant transmutation, changing daily and likely to change again tomorrow.

I would propose that the Trump administration appoint a small, nimble, non-industry expert panel to answer just three questions: Is AI an existential threat to the human species? What should be done about that? And how much time do we have?

The threat has been debated academically since 1958 — the heftiest warning came from British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in December 2014.

Warnings from within should be heeded. J. Robert Oppenheimer warned about nuclear weapons. His words still govern nuclear non-proliferation policy and security settings.

The creators of an even more dangerous technology are warning, much as Oppenheimer did.

Brain Injuries From Blasts Driving Young Vets to Suicide

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We all get a warm glow when we hear the airline gate agent inviting active-duty service members to board early. What isn’t said, isn’t known, is that some of those young men and women will die eventually by their own hands, and at nearly three times the rate of civilians in the same under-34 age group.

Veterans, particularly young veterans, men and women, are in danger of walking on the dark side in terrible isolation, despair and misery — in a darkness so extreme it defies comprehension by those who are in the light.

These veterans are the victims of traumatic brain injury, a hard-to-diagnose and treat brain wounding by the force of shock waves from explosive blasts. The shock waves can cause minute tears or other damage that medical imaging and blood tests can’t detect in a living patient.

Frank Larkin, who heads up Warrior Call, an organization devoted to helping TBI-afflicted veterans, knows the problem in a savagely personal way: His son, Ryan, a decorated Navy SEAL, took his life at age 29. He was a victim of TBI.

Larkin is a former Navy SEAL, a police officer, a Secret Service agent and a U.S. Senate sergeant at arms. He is a passionate advocate for research, understanding, compassion and giving veterans an ecosystem in which they can feel secure, comforted and part of a tribal continuance that extends from the time in service to life in the civilian world.

Thomas Bowman, a Marine for 30 years and later the Republican staff director of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and deputy secretary of the Veterans Administration in the first Trump administration, knows the issue from its institutional challenges.

Larkin and Bowman joined me and my colleague, Adam Clayton Powell III, on the PBS and SiriusXM Radio program “White House Chronicle” to discuss a disturbing uptick in veteran suicide from TBI.

When a sufferer seeks and receives medical help, the chances are it will be treated as psychological rather than physical in origin. Bowman stresses how important records and continuity of monitoring are. He believes artificial intelligence will be a great asset in managing veterans’ medical histories and ensuring they are seen as a continuum, not a series of disjointed episodes.

Larkin says his son became withdrawn and “stopped smiling, as if a mask had been put over his face.” He knew his problem, but he was unable to overcome it, even with a dedicated support system. Before he took his life, Ryan asked that his brain be donated to science.

TBI victims can suffer from frequent headaches, sleeplessness, brain fog and shortened tempers. Drugs, alcohol and homelessness complicate and worsen their predicament.

Larkin says young veterans can find themselves “in a very dark place, suffering invisible wounds.”

Things are getting worse on the battlefield. Drones are an increased source of brain damage. These, Larkin and Bowman point out, are unlike mortars and improvised explosive devices: They explode on the same plane as soldiers’ heads.

Not all the damage takes place on the battlefield. Some of it can be part of routine training, the frequent exposure to everything from a soldier’s weapon to artillery and mortar live-fire practice.

Larkin and Bowman speak of the good work at the Department of Veterans Affairs, but also of the numbing bureaucracy there. Larkin regrets the loss of 30,000 personnel at the VA in recent government trimming.

Nonetheless, the rate of veteran suicide is going up, according to the latest VA report. The overall rate for veterans of all ages, based on data through 2023, was 35.2 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 34.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2022. The suicide rate for civilians of all ages was half the rate.

Suicide among veterans is the 12th-leading cause of death for veterans overall but the leading cause of death for veterans under 45, the VA report found.

As a former homicide detective, Larkin believes these suicides are underreported. He says this is sometimes to protect a family and for other reasons.

All suicides are terrible but particularly when the victims are young and have come to that bleak place because they served.

How U.S. Natural Gas Came Back from the Dead

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The Trump administration is proud of America’s dominance in natural gas. The nation is the world’s largest producer and a net exporter.

We produce a quarter of the world supply of the fuel, which has become fundamental to electricity production. Forty-three percent of our electricity is generated from natural gas. According to the Energy Information Administration, it is followed by renewables, between 24 percent and 30 percent, depending on the season; nuclear is at just over 18 percent; and coal a little above 16 percent. Hydro, wood, geothermal and oil make up the rest.

The natural gas success represents a confluence of technologies, collaborations, leadership and commercial courage over more than 50 years. It is a remarkable story of the coming together of a resource, the politics that govern it, the technologies that liberated it, and the machines that use it.

I had occasion to reflect on this when visiting the Rayburn Energy Station in Sherman, Texas. The plant represents a significant move into natural gas-fired generation by the Rayburn Electric Cooperative, which is the power supplier to four distribution co-ops northeast of Dallas.

Panda Power Funds LP built the original plant, which began commercial operations in August 2014; Rayburn bought it in 2023.

The original combined-cycle gas plant consists of two Siemens combustion turbines and one steam turbine, producing 758 megawatts of baseload power. Siemens built these turbines at their plant in Charlotte, N.C.

At an adjacent site, Rayburn is building a station that will have 10 peaking “black start capable” turbines, each rated at 57 MW, which Siemens is building in Sweden. Black start refers to the ability of the turbines to start without external power. That way, they can help restart other generators after a power failure.

Taken together, the installations in Sherman represent the virtues of natural gas: a small environmental footprint, speed of construction, security of fuel supply, reliability, and modularity, meaning units can go out of service for maintenance without isolating the generating station.

No one issue or technology can claim credit for today’s natural gas boom. It is the happy confluence of events and technologies that has saved the day for the electric industry.

In 1977, the fledgling Department of Energy declared that natural gas had no future. Jack O’Leary, the first deputy secretary of energy, told The Energy Daily’s Richard Myers to stop asking about natural gas as it was “a depleted resource.”

With the technologies of the day, that was true. However, the picture was also complicated by a regulatory burden, with gas divided into “intrastate gas” and “interstate gas,” and into “old gas” and “new gas.”

It took the actions of three presidents — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — to finally untie the regulatory knot.

Likewise, the tech breakthroughs that changed gas from an orphan fuel into coal’s heir took many years.

The oil industry had been experimenting with angled drilling since the 1920s. However, it was horizontal drilling in the 1980s that ushered in a new era in gas extraction with the advent of hydraulic fracturing. This met with new turbine designs that owed much to aircraft jets, and had been pioneered by the Navy for small ship propulsion.

Hydraulic fracking had been tried for years by the oil industry. It took 20 years of trial and error, mostly by the Houston-based Mitchell Energy & Development Corp., to perfect it with development of a better fracking fluid, a new mud pump, and a better drilling bit. Also, 3D seismic enhanced the accuracy of finding gas. The Energy Department worked closely with the developers of these new technologies.

The Rayburn Energy Station is emblematic of what is happening nationwide as utilities face up to rising electricity demand and limited options.

Rayburn President and CEO David Naylor is enthusiastic about the full range of generation options and has embraced distributed generation — which links solar, conservation, demand-side load management, residential batteries and consumer participation to create what is known as a virtual power plant. However, gas was Rayburn’s immediate option, as it is for many utilities.

While Alex O’Brien, the manager of the Rayburn Energy Station, has a penchant for nuclear (he, like many of the plant’s staff, is a veteran of the Nuclear Navy), he understands the immediacy of gas.

Rayburn broke ground on its new peaker turbines this year, and they will be up and running in 2028. In utility terms, that is overnight.

Environmentalists have been critical of natural gas as a greenhouse gas-emitter. In New England, they have blocked pipeline construction. The resulting shortage in the region has been acute, so much so that liquefied natural gas must be imported, at a price, sometimes from Europe.

Until new nuclear power arrives, the utilities are looking to a mix of renewables and natural gas: the fuel that came back from the dead.

Is Rubio Starting a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East?

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The Trump administration has announced and appears to be crowing over an agreement with Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom not only to build nuclear power plants but also to enrich the uranium fuel.

There is no reason for the Saudis to enrich uranium. There are plenty of willing suppliers of enriched uranium and more are coming online.

Besides, it has always seemed curious that Saudi Arabia, with its huge fossil reserves and its abundant, reliable sunshine, should want to stress its industrial infrastructure with a nuclear power program when it clearly doesn’t need it. We are at war with Iran not because of nuclear power, but because it refuses to abandon its enrichment ambitions.

Enrichment raises the potency of uranium fuel by increasing the amount of the fissile isotope Uranium-235.

Today’s generation of light water reactors — the workhorses that provide about 20 percent of U.S. electricity — use uranium that has been enriched by 3 percent to 5 percent. The uranium for the new small modular reactors will be enriched by about 20 percent.

Weapons-grade enrichment is generally considered to be uranium that has been enriched by over 90 percent. But Ernie Moniz, who was secretary of energy in the Biden administration and is a nuclear physicist, told a conference organized by the Earthshot Foundation on June 8 that “you can make a pretty good bomb” with 60 percent- enriched uranium, a reference to the Iranian stockpile that we are trying to destroy.

I have been covering nuclear power — and by extension nuclear proliferation — for more than 50 years. For most of that time, Saudi Arabia has hankered for nuclear power and enrichment. The question is why.

When I began my coverage, there was great fear of nuclear proliferation — that more countries would get nuclear weapons. Those who have, in that time, are Pakistan and North Korea. China acquired a weapon in 1964.

Israel has never declared itself nuclear-armed, but the arms control community believes it has a weapon and that the United States helped it get one years ago.

The original nuclear weapons nations, the United States, Russia, Britain and France, held the technology close and were loath to see any country step in that direction.

Making civilian nuclear power available to the world has been a plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Dwight Eisenhower launched the “Atoms for Peace” program in 1953.

One of the beneficiaries of that program was Iran. In fact, before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, American companies, led by Bechtel, the giant engineering firm, were set to build reactors across Iran.

America’s global nuclear policy was, de facto, nuclear civilian power, yes, nuclear enrichment, no. It was pretty sensible and has worked well. Now it is set aside.

The U.S.-Saudi Arabia deal comes at a time when many nations would like to start down the weapons path. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are a stark inducement to go nuclear.

If Ukraine hadn’t given up its nuclear weapons, would Russia have invaded? Almost certainly not. If Iran had a proven bomb, would Israel and the United States have attacked? I think not.

Nonetheless, every nuclear weapon is a threat to world security. The danger isn’t only that desperate or ambitious countries will use them aggressively, but also that the danger of accidental detonation is ever-present.

The United States and the Soviet Union were so concerned about this that they shared safety technology. For example, when we developed an insensitive TNT for the trigger of a nuclear device, we shared this with the Russians. Neither side wanted a thermonuclear war triggered by someone dropping a weapon off a forklift.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio would seem to be so busy that he hasn’t had time to read up on the history of proliferation.

Rubio, declared about the U.S.-Saudi Arabia deal, “Suffice it to say that any agreement that we are going to make with any country in the world on civil nuclear is going to be one that will have safeguards in place to ensure that it can’t be turned into a weapons program.”

Rubio might want to take a few minutes to ponder these three things: How it is that we came to be at war with Iran, how Iran started with civilian power and went on to weapons, and how safeguards were bypassed.

Saudi Arabia’s neighbors in that volatile region will soon be at Rubio’s door looking for nuclear power — and enrichment. First up, expect Turkey, then Egypt.

If Congress approves Rubio’s deal, then a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is more or less assured. Is there a worse place to have that happen?

Soft Power, the Secret Sauce of the British Empire

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When President Trump, on the first day of his second term, closed the U.S. Agency for International Development and began dismantling the Voice of America, he also severely curtailed what had been America’s soft power dominance in the world.

With those actions, we abandoned something of inestimable value: the ability to project Americanism, our ideals. Trump retired an entire diplomatic system that had served the United States well since we more or less inherited it from the British.

Soft power was codified as a concept by the late Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in four books published between 1990 and 2023.

While Nye made soft power his own — he coined the term in 1990 — and wrote, lectured and testified before Congress about it, he never totally convinced conservatives what a valuable weapon it was in the national armory.

The proof of that is in the current administration’s indifference to diplomatic and social muscle, and its lack of a mechanism to talk to the Iranian people in Farsi, their language.

Nye believed an important part of soft power was our educational system, and U.S.-educated foreign students going home and spreading the good news about America.

I believe, although it was never thought of that way, that soft power was one of the things that kept the British Empire together. I saw it in action in Africa as colonial rule waned.

James R. Schlesinger, who served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, secretary of defense, and secretary of energy, was a friend of mine throughout his public career and afterward. The one question he asked me constantly was how the British Empire was able to hold together with so few troops spread across so much of the world.

Schlesinger, a former history professor, wondered how those lessons might be applied to America in the late 20th century.

I told him that it was a combination of the hard power of the Royal Navy and British Army but also, importantly, of the then-unnamed soft power.

Take the massacre in Amritsar, in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab. This occurred on April 13, 1919, when a local British commander in the Punjab feared a meeting in a garden might turn violent and opened fire without warning on thousands of unarmed civilians. Official figures reported 379 dead and 1,200 injured; Indian estimates exceed 1,000 deaths.

This massacre hardened Mahatma Gandhi’s attitude to British rule over the subcontinent. His initial reaction, on hearing of the slaughter, was disbelief that the British would do such a thing. He had bought the soft-power assertion of British values, of decency.

Winston Churchill, then serving as the minister of war, told Parliament early the next year that the shooting was “unalterably monstrous.”

I tried to explain to Schlesinger over many evenings, over many years, what I had seen growing up in British Africa as the essence of British soft power.

To me, it boiled down to a kind of moral posture, a determination to project British justice as inviolate, British exceptionalism as a moral force, and a general admirable state of decency. The term soft power hadn’t yet been created, but it was the essential ingredient in British colonial administration.

When American commanders sought the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, they might well have said they were seeking to establish “soft power.” But it was too late.

The concept of soft power and how it blossomed for America has wilted under the Trump administration. The posture now is that economic and military power are how we project influence and authority.

Ironically, while I think Nye did something of great value in identifying and promoting the concept of soft power, he and I didn’t enjoy a warm relationship. He had been President Jimmy Carter’s point man for nuclear disarmament and had favored an end to nuclear reprocessing as well as other aspects of the U.S. nuclear ecosystem.

In 1977, we debated in London, and the argument got so intense that we spilled into the street, shouting at each other.

The New Media: A Pea of News in a Mattress of Words

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Journalism is choking on the low-hanging fruit.

Every day hundreds of newsletters and podcasts flood inboxes. These are almost entirely concerned with political goings-on in Washington.

But this isn’t to say that journalism is alive and well. In fact, this is a symptom of journalism’s straitened times.

Mostly, there is just a pea of news in a mattress of words.

The web has made the delivery of journalism cheap and easy, but it hasn’t helped with the high cost of covering the news, of sending reporters to see what is happening in the courts, the state houses, and overseas; or in science and technology, which so affect modern life.

It also hasn’t enabled news organizations to spend months on an investigation that may or may not pay off.

Instead, every minuscule development in politics is treated as a big, breaking event, and is analyzed exhaustively.

Analysis is substituting for reporting. The actual snippet of reporting is often attributed to a newspaper like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, or one of the news services, say, Reuters.

Analyzing nothing much doesn’t change it to something.

Much of what is rushed out as news wouldn’t get past an old-fashioned editor like Jim Michaels of Forbes, who I am told, in that magazine’s print heyday would chide reporters, saying, “You’re telling me things I already know.”

The ease of distribution and recording has also caused blogs with attendant webinars to sprout across the news ecosystem. Much of it is in the form of analysis, more and more analysis of less and less.

The big new entry in my inbox is magazines which were once monthly or weekly, but have joined the frenzy with daily newsletters. These include The Economist, The New Yorker, The Spectator, The Atlantic and even Vanity Fair.

I subscribed because they were weekly or monthly. I didn’t want a daily gusher.

There is also a plethora of digital-only publications — the best in my inbox is ProPublica, which manages original reporting.

The big ones which are, almost, substitute newspapers but are heavy on political coverage include Politico (which is broader) and Semafor. A new entry, NOTUS, is staffed by former Washington Post reporters. So far, it is heavily political.

I remember when people bought the Post for the Style section and its other goodies, not just its hometown industry of politics.

A further indication of the news drought, despite the torrents of words, is how many of the new dailies are quoting what was said on television. Time was when no print outlet would deign to do that. It was expected for television to pick up from the newspapers, not the other way round.

There was a reason behind the old pecking order: Broadcasting needs to have people say things in front of a camera or a microphone. By contrast, print’s best stories come from sources who are keen not to be identified, let alone go on television or radio.

In today’s vengeful times, unidentified sources are essential, to be used sparingly, but nonetheless essential. The reader has to depend on the high standing of the platform and the integrity of the byline to judge the truthfulness.

There is no doubt that the tumultuous politics that began when Donald Trump entered the arena have been good for cable news stations, which have morphed into political channels, shamelessly partisan. The politics have also been good for newsletters and blogs.

But will that be true after the Trump era? The strictly conservative New York Sun reports traffic to MAGA websites is down dramatically.

To escape the virtual political overload, I reach for the three heavyweights among newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and, though diminished, The Washington Post.

What the bulk of the press, from weeklies to big city papers to the new digital entrants, need is a sound source of income so that they have the money to do the job, to weed out local scandal, corruption and abuse, and to develop entertaining writers.

You get what you pay for and in the news business, since it lost its advertising revenue to the likes of Google, you are getting political froth: opinions about the news — most days the same opinion with shadings of difference from many publishers.

Yesterday, I counted 19 of these offerings in my inbox. I gave up on the breathlessness and read a book.

The Fun Is Running Out for Trump’s Presidency

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There is a powerful force that affects politics as much as it affects individual lives. It is fatigue.

We just get darn tired of something, be it a job, a relationship, a hobby or a routine. We have been devoted to it for years, and suddenly we want out; we want to do something else. What we loved doing has become boring and tedious. More work than fun.

A kind of national fatigue played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union: People were tired of the system and its oppressiveness. Likewise, South Africa.

I was in and out of that country just before apartheid came to its timely death. Ordinary White people, including Afrikaners, said they had had enough; they were tired of the whole complex, cruel structure.

It is my contention that President Trump wants out — that for him, the fun is over. The old stimuli — his daily television domination, the adulation, the global recognition — once so important to him, are ebbing.

Michael Wolff, Trump’s biographer, and James Carville, the picaresque Democratic activist, have both speculated, along with several commentators, that Trump may not finish out his term. They imply that some external force, like illness, will cause him to leave office.

But I think he would like to do it by choice because he isn’t enjoying it anymore. The music has stopped.

Trump said during his first term that he had left a good life — by implication, a better life — before he became president. The first year of his second term was more to his liking than his whole first term. He roared back into office in 2025 with advantages he didn’t have in 2017.

Now he was the man, admired by some, feared by many. His whims or idiosyncrasies became policy. He took over America as though he had bought an apartment building and was knocking down walls and digging a swimming pool.

Trump had a palpable majority, and his base, which had developed a kind of religious commitment behind the slogan “Make America Great Again,” was solid.

In Congress, he had a majority, thin but blindly loyal.

The transformation was complete. The Republican Party had morphed into the Trump Party, faithful and unquestioning. He was careful to staff this second administration with men and women who accepted his liege. Additionally, he came in with a kind of manifesto in the form of the sweeping Project 2025, crafted by the sycophantic Heritage Foundation.

Trump bulldozed his way through his first 100 days, signing nearly 40 executive orders on his first day back in the White House. He made Elon Musk the foreman of an unconstitutional entity: the Department of Government Efficiency. It battered the bureaucracy but also established, from the start, Trump’s unbridled power.

“You’re fired!” moved from the fateful catchphrase on the TV series “The Apprentice,” which had made Trump a national celebrity, to a tool of government and a way of cowering the workforce.

In Congress, the withdrawal of Trump’s favor was feared as a career death sentence. Privately, Republican eyes rolled, but publicly, it was Trump all the way.

This year, the edifice of certainty is beginning to wobble.

Being president isn’t all plaudits, and some Trump voters are looking away, worried about the ravages of his private army in the form of ICE and the loss of America’s global stature. They are also concerned that the rich aren’t just getting richer; they are now an aristocracy, rich beyond measure, akin to the feudal lords.

Then came the Iran war, where miscalculation, aided by hubris and ignorance, has led to the real possibility that we will settle for less than we had before the first U.S. shot was fired.

In short, Trump took up arms against a sea of troubles and made them worse. Governing has proved to be more complicated than he dreamed.

It has long been a tenet of the right wing that there are simple solutions for complex problems. It is also the Trump creed.

I would wager the main thing keeping Trump from declaring victory and adjourning to a life of golf and self-congratulation would be that he desperately wants to finish his two acts of self-adulatory construction: the White House ballroom and the triumphal arch.

Trump has shown every indication that he sees his legacy not in Middle East peace or global security, but in the currency that made him: concrete and rebar.

Trump shows many signs of fatigue, of being tired of the job and its endless crises. Polls suggest many people are fatigued with him, too.

The Collision Between Money and News — We Lose

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Trillions, as in trillions of dollars, are being bandied about in the way millions were, then billions. But take a look at 1 trillion expressed numerically: 1,000,000,000,000. Awesome, isn’t it? Twelve zeros.

The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year. Very soon, the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk.

I have nothing against Musk. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has given the United States the solar revolution, the electric car, and a viable heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Co. still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about streamlining the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge too far for Musk. A disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, was evidence of the harm that accompanies gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn’t the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When so much money is floating around, press freedom is in trouble.

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David.

Together, they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+, which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

If the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture.

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount was a booster of nuclear power, movies such as “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. No news is bad news.

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons): “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” 

Write that in the corporate prospectus.

News organizations need to be owned by news people, like Ted Turner, Bill Paley and, yes, Rupert Murdoch.

The Woman Behind Trump’s Overnight Truth Social Raging

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President Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, likes to say that his administration is the most transparent in history. Possibly, she is right.

That is, if you think letting it all hang out is the kind of transparency Leavitt has in mind.

Certainly, it all hangs out in a way we have never seen in Washington. Trump has turned the Oval Office into a kind of television studio where he insults the press, talks to foreign leaders and, on occasion, berates them (Ukraine, South Africa and Canada) in front of the press.

Then there is the president’s late-night posting on Truth Social, when a meteor shower of invective, scorn, misinformation, disinformation, self-adulation, and allegations, interspersed with policy declarations, reveals him unedited. In those posts, he has urged colonizing Greenland, taking over Canada and, recently, adding Venezuela as the 51st state.

All of it set about with capital letters, exclamation points and AI-generated pictures — some of the most offensive ones have included Trump as Jesus, the Obamas as apes and, more recently, Illinois Gov. JD Pritzker gorging on an enormous hamburger.

The insults keep coming, accusing enemies and even his predecessors of being weak, having low IQs and, of course, being “losers.” In this scathing and self-aggrandizing stream, some are even traitors, including former President Barack Obama. Arrest him!

It is a bravura performance without equal. It is also hugely popular with diehard devotees of the president. His account on Truth Social has 12.5 million subscribers. One night recently, there were 55 posts — some clearly composed and some forwarded from right-wing sources, alleging conspiracies, malfeasance or trumpeting Trump.

Journalists assigned to read them have called them variously rampages, rants, wild sprees and storms. But read them, they must.

This is Trump in a stream of consciousness, unvarnished, and an essential source of news because what the president of the United States says is news.

Traces of varnishing have been appearing: The number of spelling mistakes, bizarre word formations and grammatical errors has gone down, even as the volume has accelerated.

The Wall Street Journal has revealed the unseen hand on the keyboard. It is the hand of Natalie Harp, the president’s personal assistant, an influential but unsung force in the White House.

Harp, according to the Journal, scours fringe news and social media for repostable comments and produces AI-generated illustrations. She then hands them to Trump. He selects and adds them to his own comments, and a post is born.

Sometimes the posting is feverish. The night the Iran War began, there were more than 90 posts.

Harp, 34, is the epitome of a Christian conservative, coming from a religious family in California and attending two Christian-right universities, Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. She came to Trump’s attention when she was reporting and hosting for the ultra-conservative television network One America News. He asked her to join his presidential campaign.

Don’t think that Trump and Harp’s overnight spewing is wasted. He has all those followers on Truth Social, but his real strength is that the mainstream media is obliged to quote some of his comments daily.

What Trump says on Truth Social is also heard around the world. It isn’t just journalists who follow it; nations have to pay attention. In capitals from Tehran to Moscow, London to Beijing, Trump-raging is essential reading.

The Trump Show, for that is what it is, is a radical departure from how presidents have traditionally communicated with the public. Trump posts directly, sometimes without regard for how his words will be received.

It used to be that speeches were the window through which the world could see how an American president was thinking. They were crafted, agonized over, passed around, redrafted and sometimes delivered with last-minute handwritten additions or subtractions by the president.

They were policy documents for the present and the future. With Trump, it is the improvisations that inform or confuse.

Presidential speeches through the years have given us history’s milestones, whether it was Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address or FDR’s First Inaugural Address.

Who can forget the speeches of JFK in Berlin, Reagan at the Berlin Wall or Obama in Cairo?

With Trump, it is the firehose delivery that is remembered, especially in overnight posts. Transparent?