Misfit was here!

Union Maid · Pete Seeger 

Tonight, Trump is throwing an 80th birthday bash for himself (he says it’s in honor of the 250th birthday of the United States) with a “Freedom250” Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the South Lawn of the White House at 8 p.m. ET. 

It will be a bloody gladiator fight taking place inside a 600-ton, 154-feet-tall skeletal structure called “the Claw,” painted red, white and blue. Opponents will punch, kick, wrestle, choke, and use jiu-jitsu on each other until one of them is unconscious or verbally concedes, or a referee stops the fight because one is judged too damaged to absorb any more violence. 

This is a money-making operation for the UFC (which is offering special-access VIP packages for $1.5 million), for Trump buddy David Ellison’s Paramount (which will livestream it to you if you buy a subscription for $8.99 a month — see here), for Crypto.com and Ram (which are sponsoring it), and for Trump (who’s deciding which of his billionaire friends and CEO buddies will be invited ringside. Last night, Trump held a $1 million-a-person dinner at the Trump National Golf Club at Potomac, Virginia, to benefit his Super PAC, Maga Inc.).

Beyond the usual Trumpian issues of self-dealing and pay-to-play corruption, today’s fight also raises the question: What does a cage match on the White House lawn have to do with America’s 250th anniversary? 

Just this: Trump and his regime are seeking to project an America that’s like the winner of a cage match. 

Trump sees everything and everyone in terms of dominance or submission, and he’s hellbent on dominance. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he told his supporters on January 6, 2021, before urging them to go the Capitol. 

He views America as locked in a zero-sum match with the rest of the world, and there’s no limit to our violence. Unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz, he memorably said, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Trump’s entire “manosphere” is obsessed with force and violence. His secretary of “war,” Pete Hegseth, threatens “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” and “maximum violence to the enemy.” When told some fishermen survived the American bombing of their boat, Hegseth reportedly ordered his commander to “kill them all.”

Trump’s secretary of health and human services frequently posts shirtless workout videos in which he’s lifting weights alongside figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kid Rock. He claims Trump has “the highest testosterone level” ever seen in an individual over 70 years old.

Trump’s whole circle — including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and JD Vance — glorify male prowess and power. (In a Twitter exchange a few years ago, Musk said he was “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, who replied: “Send me location,” eliciting from Musk: “Vegas Octagon,” and the suggestion that podcaster Joe Rogan referee.) Musk and Vance champion pronatalism— the belief that the single greatest threat to Western civilization is collapsing birth rates — and argue that Western women must have more children.

Much of the Republican Party is likewise focusing on male virility. Texas Republican senatorial candidate Ken Paxton calls the Democratic candidate “low-T Talarico.”

Part of this comes directly from the fascist playbook, organized around a “strongman” touting male dominance. In that playbook, war and violence are thought means of strengthening society by culling the weak and extolling heroic warriors. 

I suspect many Americans find Trump’s neofascist “strongman” attractive because they feel powerless in a society that’s left them behind. The cage match and similar public displays of aggression enable them to feel vicariously powerful.

Young men in particular — who make up a disproportionate share of Trump’s base — have been economically emasculated. Most lack college degrees at a time when such a degree is necessary (although hardly sufficient) for a decent job, and when some 60 percent of university undergraduates and 67 percent of graduate students are female.

In this way, cage matches darkly echo “The Full Monty,” the 1997 British comedy about unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield, England, who form a male striptease act to make quick cash. 

But the cage match today on the White House lawn is no laughing matter. It’s deadly serious and deeply troubling. 

When so many Americans are struggling to make ends meet, Trump’s gladiator fight suggests that the essence of the nation on its 250th birthday isn’t the democratic ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, nor is it the pull-yourself-up-from-the-bootstraps ambition that’s driven our economy, but zero-sum violence and male aggression. 

Coco - A Pixar Film

Loving Vincent - An Independent Production

Context - Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film

State Attorneys General are our last best hope for stopping Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison from buying Warner Bros — and with it, CNN. They’ve already nearly destroyed and neutered CBS News. We cannot allow them to destroy CNN’s ability to tell the American people the truth about Trump. 

Crónicas Mexicanas

He wasn't Mexican. But he fought harder for Mexican food — and Mexican people — than most.

His name was Anthony Bourdain — a New York chef, author, and one of the most celebrated food & travel voices in history. He traveled the world for decades. And of all the cultures he encountered, few moved him as deeply as Mexico's.

But Bourdain didn't just enjoy Mexican food. He fought for it to be taken seriously.

——

 He defended Mexican cuisine when the world looked down on it.

Long before Mexican cuisine was celebrated in global food media, Bourdain was calling it one of the greatest and most sophisticated culinary traditions on Earth. He pointed to mole sauces that take days to prepare, handmade tortillas rooted in ancient agriculture — a food culture older than French or Italian cuisine, stretching back to the very beginning of agriculture itself.

"Mexican food is not simple, my friends. Those are, in many cases, some deeply complex and nuanced sauces — and incredibly labor intensive ones. Mexican food should be considered just as sophisticated and celebrated as French or Italian or any other cuisine. It's old, it goes back to the beginning of agriculture." — Bourdain

He pushed back openly against the stereotype that Mexican food was "cheap" or "basic." He said it deserved the same global respect and recognition as any great world cuisine — and he said it loudly, repeatedly, and without apology.

——

 He honored the people behind the food.

Throughout his travels from Oaxaca to Mexico City, Bourdain spent time with home cooks, street vendors, Indigenous communities, and families preserving recipes passed down for hundreds of years. He openly said some of the greatest cooks he had ever met in his life were Mexican women working quietly in kitchens with almost no recognition outside their communities.

He wasn't a tourist passing through. He sat down, he listened, he learned — and he gave credit where it was long overdue.

——

He defended Mexican workers when it was politically risky.

Bourdain spent most of his career as a professional chef, and he never forgot who built those kitchens alongside him. He said nearly every kitchen he worked in was held together by Mexican cooks, dishwashers, and prep workers. When anti-immigrant rhetoric dominated headlines, he didn't stay silent.

"I spent most of my life as a cook and chef working with Mexicans. My loyalties are a matter of record. In almost every kitchen I ever stumbled into, clueless and fearful, it was a Mexican who looked after me, took me under his wing, showed me how to do things... So I ask that whatever your opinion on immigration policy — let us at least acknowledge who is working and living here NOW, and look in our hearts. Ask ourselves what we would do — who we would be — without them." — Bourdain

He also stated plainly that the entire American restaurant industry would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. He said it when it cost something to say it.

——

What made Bourdain rare?

He used his enormous platform — millions of viewers across CNN's Parts Unknown, No Reservations, and beyond — to humanize Mexican culture at a time when mainstream media was doing the opposite. He wasn't performing allyship. He was speaking from decades of lived experience standing side by side with Mexican people in real kitchens.

For many in the Mexican community, he became one of the few outsiders who genuinely listened, genuinely learned, and genuinely gave credit where it was deserved.

A number of you have asked me for a simple overview of where things stand in the race to control Congress, so here’s some information you may find useful. It suggests where we need to focus our energies over the next four and a half months. 

1. What’s needed for control of each chamber

In the Senate now: 53 Republicans - 47 Democrats (or independents who caucus with Dems). Democrats need to gain a net 4 seats to gain control of the Senate.

In the House now: 219 Republicans (or independents who caucus with GOP) - 212 Democrats. There are 4 vacancies (1 in a largely Republican district, 3 in largely Democratic districts). Assuming that none of the current vacancies flip party control in special elections before November, Democrats need to gain a net 3 seats to gain control of the House.

2. Vulnerable incumbent Republicans

Senate Republicans in competitive reelection races, who are considered vulnerable

Maine: Republican Senator Susan Collins is being challenged by Democratic oysterman Graham Platner.

Ohio: Republican Senator Jon Husted is being challenged by former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.

Alaska: Republican Senator Dan Sullivan is being challenged by former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola (and potentially another candidate named Dan Sullivan)

Nebraska: Pete Ricketts is being challenged by independent populist Dan Osborn (who came close to defeating Nebraska’s other GOP Senator in 2024).  House Republicans in competitive reelection races, who are considered vulnerable

Juan Ciscomani (AZ-06)

Eli Crane (AZ-02)

David Valadao (CA-22)

Kevin Kiley (CA-06).(Kiley switched his party affiliation to “independent” after California’s Proposition 50 redrew him into a bluer district, but he still caucuses and votes with the GOP majority.)

Jeff Hurd (CO-03)

Jeff Crank (CO-05)

Gabe Evans (CO-08)

Marianette Miller-Meeks (IA-01)

Zach Nunn (IA-03)

Bill Huizenga (MI-04)

Tom Barrett (MI-08)

Brad Finstad (MN-01)

Chuck Edwards (NC-11)

Tom Kean Jr. (NJ-07)(Kean has not been seen in public or voted in the House since March 2026 due to an unspecified medical issue.)

Nick LaLota (NY-01)

Mike Lawler (NY-17)

Max Miller (OH-07)

Rob Bresnahan (PA-08)

Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01)

Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07)

Scott Perry (PA-10)

Rob Wittman (VA-01)

Jen Kiggans (VA-02)

John McGuire (VA-05)

Derrick Van Orden (WI-03)PS: Republican incumbents who lost their primaries to Trump-backed candidates (and could turn on Trump)

Sen. John Cornyn (TX)

Sen. Bill Cassidy (LA)

Rep. Thomas Massie (KY-04)

3. Vulnerable incumbent Democrats

Senate Democrats in competitive reelection races, who are considered vulnerable

Georgia: Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff will face either Rep. Mike Collins or former football coach Derek Dooley after a June 16 GOP primary runoff. House Democrats in competitive reelection races, who are considered vulnerable

Derek Tran (CA-45)

Kathy Castor (FL-14)

Nellie Pou (NJ-09)

Josh Riley (NY-19)

Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)

4. Competitive Open Seats

Competitive open seats for the Senate 

Texas: Scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will face Democratic state Rep. James Talarico for Republican John Cornyn’s seat.

Michigan: Republican Mike Rogers will face a to-be-decided Democratic opponent for retiring Democrat Gary Peters’ seat. 

The frontrunners for the August Democratic primary are Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed doctor who supports Medicare for All and getting Big Money out of politics, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a so-called “moderate” Democrat who is receiving major financial support from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby. 

North Carolina: Former RNC Chair Michael Whatley will face former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper for retiring Republican Thom Tillis’ seat. 

Iowa: Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson will face Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek for retiring Republican Joni Ernst’s seat.

Competitive open seats for the House

AZ-01 (currently GOP-held)

ME-02 (currently Dem-held)

MI-10 (currently GOP-held)

Tina Turner

Say her name:

Happy Birthday America 🎂

250 years. Two hundred and fifty years of the most powerful, most resourced, most theoretically capable nation in the history of human civilization and here is what we have to show for it.

Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.

Two hundred and fifty years of that. And to celebrate, we built a wrestling arena on the White House lawn.

Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single thing that addresses a single goddamn item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With cranes and pyrotechnics and a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and in some cases died trying.

Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.

We built a culture where a football coach makes forty times what a physics professor makes and then express genuine bewilderment at the outcomes. Where a reality television star becomes president and a school district cuts its art program in the same fiscal year. Where children know every statistic of every player on their favorite sport team and cannot locate their own country on a map. Where scientific consensus on vaccines, climate, evolution, and basic nutrition gets weighed against a Facebook post and the Facebook post wins at the dinner table. Where the school that wins the state championship gets a parade and the school that produces a Nobel laureate gets a budget cut.

We chose the bomber over the teacher. The tank over the clinic. The aircraft carrier over the water treatment plant. We spend more on military than the next ten countries combined, including our allies, while veterans sleep on the streets of the cities they came back to. We built the most expensive killing apparatus in human history and then told the nurse she made too much money. We sent young men to die in wars that made defense contractors rich and called it freedom and put a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of the car and called that support. We made the soldier and the police officer into sacred untouchable symbols of national identity and then cut their benefits, denied their PTSD claims, let them die waiting for VA appointments, and sent them back for third and fourth tours because it was cheaper than taking care of them when they came home. We worshipped the uniform and neglected the human inside it because the uniform is a symbol and symbols are cheaper than healthcare and housing and the therapy that would actually help. We built bases in a hundred and fifty countries and could not build enough affordable housing in fifty states. We funded a military budget that could have ended homelessness and medical debt and student debt several times over and we did it with bipartisan enthusiasm and called the people who questioned it unserious.

We chose entertainment over education so many times and for so long and at every available level of society that we forgot there was a distinction worth making. Spectacle over substance, performance over policy, the aesthetics of greatness in place of the actual thing, and the feeling of winning instead of asking what was being won and who was paying for it and what it would cost the people who came next.

Rome had bread and circuses. We Americans have food stamps and a wrestling ring outside the Oval Office.

250 years. This is what we built. This is what we chose. This is what we are celebrating. And the most perfectly, catastrophically, irreducibly American thing about all of it is that anyone pointing at this image and asking what it means will be called unpatriotic by people watching it on a television they bought on credit they cannot afford to pay back, rooting for a sport they cannot explain, in a country they cannot describe, celebrating a birthday they cannot contextualize, for a nation that has spent two and a half centuries confusing the noise it makes with the work it never did, all while claiming to be the greatest country on Earth.

Happy Birthday America! You have never looked more like yourself!

This is a brutal assessment. Of course we have done many wonderful things for the world and for our country. Unfortunately, everything mentioned in this essay is accurate. Where do we go from here?

Make America Great Finally?

Make America Great It’s About Time?

Sometimes I provide you with information that I hope you’ll find helpful in making arguments with others. I don’t expect that what I share with you will change the minds of committed Trumpers, but the facts and the evidence may have some sway with Republicans and independents who are wavering about whom to support in the midterms. 

One of the main reasons Trump was elected was his pledge to keep the United States out of wars, especially the kind of “endless” wars America has fought in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Obviously, he broke that pledge. We’re now well into the fourth month of a war he said would be four or five weeks at most. 

In addition, the war he initiated in Iran was a war of choice — Iran did not attack the United States, and most specialists in foreign policy say Iran was not close to devising a nuclear weapon at that time. (It’s likely to be closer now, or at least more committed to making one.)

Yet in a lengthy interview with Kristen Welker, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which aired Sunday, Trump was once again trying to rewrite his own history, He claimed:

“I didn’t guarantee no war. So when you say I promised, I didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months.”

In fact, Trump repeatedly and unequivocally promised during the 2024 election campaign that the U.S. would not have any wars during his second presidency. 

Herewith, some examples.

In a June 2024 social media post, Trump described the election as “a choice between STRENGTH or WEAKNESS, COMPETENCE or INCOMPETENCE, peace and prosperity or war and no war.” 

In one of the highest-profile speeches of his campaign — his July 2024 address to the Republican National Convention — he said, “With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don’t have wars.”

He made the promise again and even more directly during an August 2024 rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania, saying: “Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all.”

Trump reprised the same pledge in an August 2024 interview with Adin Ross, an online personality. After saying there were no wars during his first administration, he promised, “And we won’t have wars again.” 

At another rally that month in the hotly contested state of North Carolina, Trump approvingly cited Viktor Orbán, then the prime minister of Hungary, as supposedly having said, “Make sure that Trump gets reelected president, and you’re not going to have any more wars.” Trump reiterated moments later, “No more wars. No more disruptions. We will have prosperity, and we will have peace.”

Trump told versions of the Orbán story at numerous other events. For example, in the swing state of Wisconsin in October 2024, he said, “Viktor Orbán said, ‘If Trump comes back, you won’t have any wars. You won’t have any wars.’ And he’s about as tough as they get, and he said it loud and clear and he said why. But you won’t have any wars.”

Finally, in his victory address in November 2024, Trump made a clear promise that he would not start a war — even when he no longer had to persuade voters to elect him. He said in that high-profile speech: “Four years, we had no wars, except we defeated ISIS. … They said, ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.”

In reality, of course, Trump has been one of the most bellicose presidents in modern American history. 

Have a Far-Out ‘MonKeeCule Monday’ my Friends