Misfit was here!

Glitter

“All journeys end when we reach our destination but the journeying remains a thing apart, unique unto itself. Most of us make life’s journeys without understanding that the journeying is a separate thing.”

August 12, 2026

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

AUG 13

READ IN APP

In Minnesota yesterday, close Trump ally Mike Lindell, the former chief executive officer of MyPillow, lost the Republican primary for governor to Republican state house speaker Lisa Demuth. This loss comes after Trump ally Representative Andy Ogles lost his primary in Tennessee. As Andrew Howard of Politico noted, Trump had endorsed both of them.

Trump continues to insist that voters are angry not at him, but at Republicans for not passing the measures he demands. But a new Economist/YouGov poll released yesterday found Trump’s job approval ratings dropping even further than the numbers the same poll had shown the previous week, with only 33% of Americans approving of his performance.

As Margie Cullen of the USA Today network reports, 60% of Americans think the president is “not honest and trustworthy,” and 69% feel that things in the country these days are “out of control.” Fifty-three percent of those polled think Trump is too old to be president.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former cardiologist, shares that concern. In a New York Times op-ed today, he noted that the president “has not looked well” at times this year. His hands are bruised, his ankles are swollen, and he struggles to stay awake. Reiner listed a number of questions the White House should address to reassure Americans that Trump is able to perform the duties of the presidency.

“[T]he United States does not have a king,” Reiner wrote. “In a representative democracy, the people must have confidence in the health of their leader, and in the leader’s capacity to guide the nation. We have been kept in the dark too long.”

As if to underscore Reiner’s concerns, Trump appeared to be asleep at a White House event yesterday.

The Iran war appears to have undercut Trump’s power internationally, as well.

At 10:31 this morning, Trump posted: “ The U.S.A. has total control over the Strait of Hormuz. I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT! Our Naval Blockade is being called, by everyone, ‘A WALL OF STEEL,’ and there is nothing Iran can do about it. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, their remaining soldiers are unpaid, the IRGC is decimated and fleeing, and their ‘Leadership’ is uncertain, at best! They have No Money—Their country is ‘shot.’ All they have is FAKE NEWS and 300% INFLATION, and getting worse! Iran is all talk and no action, the Bully of the Middle East No Longer. Praise be to Allah!”

In fact, Reuters reported that in the last week, about a single ship a day has passed through the strait. The prewar number was about 130 a day.

National security reporter David Rothkopf wrote: “The man who cowered hiding from the Iranians in a catering truck and who has personally done more to increase Iran’s strategic influence than anyone in its own government ever has, is now blathering nonsense via social media. The world sees him more as an impotent fool today than ever before.”

Trump’s inability to end his war on Iran has eroded U.S. credibility in the Middle East. Yesterday, Daniella Cheslow, Nahal Toosi, Phelim Kine, and Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing of Politico reported that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public rejection of Trump’s Board of Peace plan for Gaza is also undermining allies’ faith in the ability of the U.S. to influence conditions and events in the Middle East. Netanyahu’s defiance of Trump appears to show that the U.S. no longer has leverage to impose its will on the region.

Referring to the Board of Peace that Trump has supported as an alternative to the United Nations, Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the journalists: “It’s really a Trump personal enterprise. So if it can’t get Israel to stand down in Gaza, to withdraw, to allow the Board of Peace to do its work, how can any other regional actor believe that the U.S. can restrain Israel in their neighborhood?”

As his popularity slumps, Trump appears to be collapsing his circle to those close to him personally. The scandal that Trump secretly used a small plane to leave Türkiye for Britain after credible Iranian threats of assassination, leaving journalists and White House staffers to act as a decoy, has provided a crystal clear view of the president. As writer and cartoonist Liza Donnelly summed it up in her Seeing Things: “To Save Himself, Trump Endangered Others.”

The choice of who left the decoy plane to travel with Trump also revealed that Trump opted to protect his loyal aides rather than any cabinet officials, prizing loyalists over members of the government. Dan Lamothe and Cat Zakrzewski of the Washington Post reported today that Trump left Secretary of State Marco Rubio behind on the decoy plane but took with him White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, executive assistant Natalie Harp, and director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta.

The journalists report that Scavino, Harp, and Nauta worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago in between his presidencies after others distanced themselves. Nauta was indicted on six felony counts, including taking part in a conspiracy to obstruct justice, after allegedly helping Trump hide the classified documents he retained after leaving the White House.

Also traveling with the president was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who cheered on Trump’s attack on Iran. Although Hegseth apparently retains Trump’s approval, Natalie Oliverio of Military Times reported yesterday that repeated extension of their tours of duty to more than 8 months while the condition of their ship has deteriorated, with broken showers and little food, has led sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln to self-harm, including attempts to jump from the 60-foot-high deck. More than 200 family members have raised concerns about sailors’ mental health, exhaustion, and safety with Navy officials.

With Trump slipping both politically and personally, there is a frantic feeling in the air as members of the Trump administration and their allies appear to be trying to grab all they can before the midterm elections.

Today Jonathan O’Connell and Sarah Blaskey of the Washington Postreported that the renovations Trump is making to the White House campus will cost at least $927 million, with that money coming primarily from taxpayers. The administration has bypassed Congress to find the funding by channeling money from other agencies and private donors and sending it to an account typically used for routine maintenance.

On Sunday, reporter Scott MacFarlane of MacFarlane News reported that more than $323 million has been funneled from the National Park Service to Trump’s vanity projects on the White House grounds, even as Trump’s own Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, estimates a $30 billion backlog of deferred maintenance in the parks themselves. MacFarlane notes that the number is a nearly 5,000% (not a typo) increase over the $7.5 million spent at the White House in 2024, the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Another $100 million has been allotted to the National Mall this year. The $423 million allocated this year for projects at the White House and the National Mall is more money than had been allotted to Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Mammoth Cave, Zion, and Joshua Tree National Parks, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the Statue of Liberty complex combined.

Outdoor writer Wes Siler of Wes Siler’s Newsletter reported on Monday that House Democrats Jared Huffman of California, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, and Maxine Dexter of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, are launching an investigation into possible insider trading over Trump’s 90% reduction of the national monuments Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante.

Huffman and Dexter wrote to Ross Bhappu, president and chief executive officer of Energy Fuels, noting that Bhappu and board chair Bruce Hansen bought the largest amount of company stock purchased by an insider in the company’s history just days before Trump’s announcement. That announcement opened almost 3 million acres of federal land to uranium mining that would benefit Energy Fuels, just as the company had been asking for since Trump’s first term in office.

Energy Fuels is a giant Canadian mining conglomerate whose leadership has boasted to investors about its close ties to the Trump administration. Huffman and Dexter noted that it has also received a $725 million loan from the Department of Defense to expand a uranium-processing facility near Bears Ears National Monument.

That mill, Huffman and Dexter point out, “has become a radioactive dumping ground, taking in waste from Superfund sites, the Manhattan Project, and even foreign countries, all while storing more than 700 million pounds of toxic material in outdated, single-liner pits that threaten nearby tribal communities and groundwater. Americans are rightfully outraged that spills have occurred along a school bus route and that the mill continues emitting radon and other dangerous pollutants linked to lung cancer, all without modern safeguards or meaningful transparency.”

Trump loyalists are not accepting Trump’s weakening position without a fight. Today, journalists like Sarah Davis of The Hill reported that Mike Lindell, who lost the primary by more than 10 percentage points, is refusing to concede. He claims his team is investigating irregularities in the vote totals.

Representative Ted Lieu ridiculed Lindell’s echo of the claims he and Trump had made about the 2020 election. “Many people say Venezuela rigged the election against Mike Lindell because they don’t like his pillows,” Lieu wrote. “Never seen anything like it.”

What is Ukraine?

The fifth lecture in my new class, "Hitler and Stalin Today"

TIMOTHY SNYDER

AUG 12

READ IN APP

Ukraine has to be at the center of a class on Hitler and Stalin, because it was at the center of both men’s mental worlds. Each of them saw Ukraine as the key to a global transformation: be it the Stalinist plan to collectivize agriculture and build industry, or the Hitlerian plan to treat Ukraine as a breadbasket. In both cases, hugely ambitious ideologies found their axial point in a certain place; and in both cases, the attempt to transform Ukraine led to mass death. Between 1933 and 1945, the most dangerous place in the world was Ukraine. All this, as I seek to show in the lecture, was the latest stage in an ancient history. Ukraine has been less a crossroads and more a source of human innovation for centuries and millennia and indeed tens of thousands of years. Ancient history associated with Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome very often only makes sense in connection with lands that are now Ukraine. With the globalization associated with modern history, Ukraine became for the first time an object rather than a subject of history, as its special position at the connection of steppe and salt water became less important, and as empires with global reach sought to base their power in its resources.

Welcome to the fifth lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

This lecture is titled “What is Ukraine?”

Below are the readings that go along with this week: 

Historical Roots of Modern Ukraine

The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War

As always, thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy and consider sharing them.

Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading:

On Freedom

On Tyranny