The day Trump turns directly into the camera, and flanked by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama explains with perfect diction and elegant sentence structure that his life been a near century-long project to subvert, exaggerate and then destroy the American conservative project...

This is a joke guys, he's actually choosing them based on whether they were invited to Dan Driscoll's birthday party.

bsky.app/profile/shar...

Yes, but that could be the whiskey.

Pete Hegseth, whiskey in hand, and also in other hand, staring at a list of massively more accomplished Generals and mentally sorting them into the type of man his daddy issues make him yearn for the approval of, and those his daddy issues make him instinctively insecure and furious at.

Don't appreciate you all being so negative about my new position before it's even announced.

Conveniently for those in the Iranian regime hoping to run a lucrative extortion racket, international ship ownership is messy and just about any vessel that hasn't quietly paid your tithe can be fired upon for giving you "Israeli/US vibes".

Also, unlike Trump's tariffs which overwhelmingly hit US consumers, a Strait-toll will not end up being paid by Iranians.

Huge applause all around.

People talk about 'cancel culture' but in the UK, "Keir Starmer is a fool for hesitating to march us alongside Trump into this morally necessary, strategically sound, and cost-free war in the Middle East" is a position you're somehow still allowed to be in public life after loudly sharing.

... and kill the people we're negotiating with.

Yes, which was in and of itself a gritty, anti-hero led reboot of a previous auteur's, "secure a deal with Iran that succesfully achieves your primary objective of limiting their nuclear program".

From the people who brought you last year's smash hit, "slowly discovering the limits of what you can coerce countries into with tariffs" comes this year's can't-miss series, "rapidly but still somehow too slowly discovering the limits of what you can coerce them into with bombs and Tomahawks."

I would also like 19 minutes live coverage on every TV network to provide the public absolutely no new information while regurgitating my last month of social media posts.

The discourse might be explained by the way that for every one young dweeby conservative guy, there are two reporters from the New York Times breathlessly following in his wake trying to decipher him like a wall of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Really funny that Trump didn't ask anyone, "hey, is Sauer any good at this?" before taking the completely unprecedented step of turning up in person to oral arguments and watching him get absolutely mauled.

You can't simply pull back, and the store doesn't magically fix itself though, is I guess the problem.

I don't think the two are hugely contradictory?

Crashing my car into an antique store is both pretty final and does a lot of economic damage.

On the flipside it's probably not that hard to spot where someone's parked an AWACS.

The thing is huge.

Oh, word?

Happy #TDOV! 🏳️‍⚧️

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Asking them how hold they think you are is an error. The response will not improve your mood.

"Wow, great jacket! It makes you look cooler than you actually are."
- My team, 'complimenting' me

Was the last time he checked 1805?

The Administrator of the 7 people left at USAID weighs in.

At $1.5 trillon the US Defense budget in 2026 is somewhere between 3 and 5 times Iran's total GDP.

The $200bn the White House wants from Congress as supplementary war funding is four times more than Iran's total government budget in 2025.

If Trump thinks European countries won't pay Iran a transit fee to get ships through Hormuz...

-laughs in Nordstream-

But also like, yeah, if the challenge was getting ONLY those parties already willing to sign away their right to do digital border taxes...

"If the WTO ⁠cannot ​achieve this commonsense aim, the United ​States will work outside of the WTO with all interested partners to ​get it done."

...

The "with all interested parties" is very funny.

If I flip a coin and call heads, I'm disappointed if it comes up tails even if I was well aware there was an excellent possibility that would be the outcome.

This was the less positive of the small range of possible outcomes, all of which were modest.

No one is surprised by this in that it was well known this could happen, but it was hoped it could be avoided in favor of something marginally better (moratorium extension, vague instructions on reform).

Threatening the drinking water and electricity of 93 million people because the IRGC whose control of Iran you accidentally made unshakeable won't agree to a protection racket deal with your son-in-law.

Governments spend millions to prevent foreign spies using state of the art technology to eavesdrop, only to have Private Scared'n'Horny walk off base to tell Glitter and Stardust when and where his HALO drop into Kharg Island will be - which they already know from Pete Hegseth's Signal chat.