Scott Pelley announcing his Substack in...

Three.

Two.

….

(LOL.)

If I understand what happened, Pelley essentially stood up in the company cafeteria and informed his bosses that they were a collection of short-sighted morons.

To which the corporation responded:

“Thank you for your feedback. Security will escort you out.”

Of course, they fired him.

There is a technical term for publicly denouncing management while drawing a paycheck from management.

It’s called insubordination.

Corporations are not democracies.

That said, let’s not pretend politics had nothing to do with it.

CBS has spent the better part of a year slowly transforming itself into a network acceptable to Trump-world because that’s what ownership wants. That’s what makes the deals work. That’s what protects the interests involved.

The old fantasy that capital automatically opposes authoritarianism was always nonsense.

Historically, capital often discovers it can make perfectly good money under authoritarianism.

Sometimes more.

This is not exactly a shocking development.

What is amusing is watching the media class suddenly discover that ownership matters.

“Oh my God!”

“The independence of journalism!”

“The integrity of the newsroom!”

Friends, where have you been?

News was never independent.

What existed—at least for a period of time—was an understanding between owners, editors, reporters, and audiences that the value of the product depended upon a reputation for credibility.

The audience paid for information.

The network sold trust.

Everybody benefited.

Then somebody discovered outrage had better margins.

First came “Breaking News.”

Everything became Breaking News.

A senator sneezed.

Breaking News.

A celebrity tweeted.

Breaking News.

A congressman accidentally put his pants on backward.

Breaking News.

Then new media arrived and improved the formula.

Breaking News every fifteen seconds.

Breaking News: Be Angry.

Breaking News: Panic Immediately.

Breaking News: Democracy Is Ending.

Breaking News: Buy My Subscription.

Now we’ve reached the final evolutionary stage.

“You are NOT going to believe this shit.”

I am not exaggerating.

That is now an actual news introduction.

That’s the “face” of this “independent news” movement.

Walter Cronkite would be drinking heavily.

Everyone claims to be better than the legacy networks today.

Maybe.

I don’t see much evidence.

Fox sells outrage wrapped in infobabes.

MSNBC/MSNOW/MSGONNABEGONESOON sells outrage wrapped in smug intellectualism.

CBS sells outrage, presently wrapped in red-hatted “Karen-inspired” nonsense.

CNN sells outrage, outraging against outrage. Watch Scott Jennings duke it out!

Half the Substack ecosystem sells outrage.

Half the YouTube ecosystem sells outrage.

The product differs less than the packaging.

One version wraps itself in patriotism.

Another wraps itself in resistance.

A third wraps itself in independence.

A fourth wraps itself in authenticity.

But underneath?

The same product.

Emotional validation.

People don’t want information.

They want confirmation.

They want somebody to tell them they are right, their enemies are stupid, and civilization is collapsing exactly the way they suspected.

The market rewards this behavior.

So the market gets more of it.

If Americans genuinely valued critical thinking, Donald Trump would have been politically buried years ago.

Not because of ideology.

Because of observable reality.

You don’t need a PhD in political science to notice the criminality, corruption, dishonesty, and institutional vandalism.

You simply need functioning eyes.

But that’s not the business model.

The business model is not understanding.

The business model is engagement.

The business model is not informing citizens.

The business model is creating customers.

And customers who are angry come back tomorrow.

So when Scott Pelley eventually launches his inevitable Substack, podcast, video channel, streaming platform, newsletter, community, membership tier, premium tier, super-premium tier, and whatever else follows...

We’ll see.

Perhaps he’ll build something different.

Perhaps he’ll become the latest participant in the great American outrage economy.

My money is on the latter.

The circle of life continues.

As Green Day observed twenty years ago:

“Don’t want a nation under the new mania.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we built.

I was talking with one of my closest friends yesterday — a man who probably would have become a general were it not for his Army MOS. Vietnam veteran. Multiple tours. Eventually, a colonel.

He was also the man who hired me at the Pentagon.

I said to him, “Why do we say ‘Happy Memorial Day?’ It’s odd, isn’t it? We wouldn’t walk into a funeral and say, ‘Hey! Happy he’s dead! Happy funeral!’ But that’s essentially what we’re doing.”

He replied that prior to Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans simply didn’t know the military the way they do now. Before the Global War on Terror, the overwhelming majority of Americans had little direct connection to war. Then, over twenty years, roughly 2.3 million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan across more than three million deployments. Nearly everyone in uniform knew someone who had been killed or wounded.

And that changes things.

In Iraq, 4,418 American service members were killed and nearly 32,000 wounded. In Afghanistan, another 2,350 were killed and more than 20,000 wounded.

No, those are not the catastrophic casualty levels of the Civil War or the Second World War. Not even close.

But what was different was the repetition.

I knew people at the Pentagon twenty years ago who had done six deployments. Before the GWOT, that would have been almost unimaginable outside of World War II. More than half the soldiers I met had done at least two tours. Many had spent years of their lives deployed overseas.

So perhaps Memorial Day once was mostly hot dogs, beer, and the unofficial start of summer. Maybe it really was just summer dresses, parades, and Nat King Cole singing about those “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.”

And honestly, it should be that.

It should be the peace paid for in blood.

Years ago, I visited Normandy.

Places I had studied for decades, I finally stood in myself: Omaha. Utah. Sword. Caen. Vierville. Pointe du Hoc.

We visited the German batteries overlooking the coast. Rusting artillery still sat there facing the English Channel.

The guns silent.

We have all seen the movies. Saving Private Ryan. Band of Brothers. The Longest Day. We think we understand what war looked like from those films.

I realized almost immediately that we do not.

Point du Hoc shattered every cinematic illusion I had ever carried about war.

The cliffs are not dramatic in the Hollywood sense. They are worse. Roughly 120 feet high, unstable, jagged, and unforgiving. From the top, you can see nearly the entire landing area below — which means the Germans could too.

Two hundred and twenty-five Rangers landed there on D-Day. By the time they were relieved, fewer than ninety remained combat effective.

Standing there, it became obvious that this was not Robert Wagner and Paul Anka heroically scaling cliffs in a war movie.

It had to have been terror.

Chaos. Confusion. Men drowning, slipping, screaming, climbing through mud and blood while machine guns fired down from above.

The films suddenly felt less like depictions of war than faint echoes of it.

But Omaha Beach was what truly overwhelmed me.

And I say this sincerely: even Saving Private Ryan understates what Omaha must have been like.

You cannot understand that landing until you stand there yourself.

The beach is enormous.

An immense killing field overlooked by bluffs, bunkers, artillery positions, and machine-gun nests with commanding fields of fire. The sand itself is soft and exhausting underfoot even in peace and sunlight. The day I stood there, families were walking the beach while children played near the water.

Broad, sunlit uplands.

That phrase from Churchill suddenly became real to me there.

I walked from the waterline toward the bluffs, trying to imagine what the men of the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions faced that morning.

The Higgins boats approached through rough seas under artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire. If you survived long enough for the ramp to drop, you then had to cross what felt like seven football fields of open beach carrying nearly eighty pounds of gear while being shot at from elevated positions in multiple directions.

The only meaningful cover was the shingle — little more than a slight rise in the sand followed by a shallow trench at the base of the bluff.

That was it.

That tiny depression in the beach became the difference between life and death.

And beyond it still stood the bluffs, the bunkers, the machine guns, and the artillery.

Standing there, you realize the sheer physical improbability of the assault. Not in the abstract. Not as arrows on a map. As human beings.

Young men.

Ordinary men.

That realization stays with you.

But what struck me most was the contrast between what happened there and what exists there now.

People laughing. Windsurfers crossing the Channel. Families enjoying summer along the French coast. Peaceful towns full of cafés, flowers, churches, and ordinary life.

Churchill once said:

“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.”

That was what I saw at Normandy.

The bunkers still exist. Craters from bombs still scar the countryside. The remnants of the Atlantic Wall still sit facing the sea.

But the life of Europe moved forward.

Broad, sunlit uplands.

Then you arrive at Colleville-sur-Mer.

Arlington is solemn and moving. I have been there multiple times, including for military funerals.

But the American cemetery above Omaha Beach is something else entirely.

The entire cemetery feels American. Virginia bluegrass. Trees native to the United States. Perfectly maintained grounds overlooking the coastline where so many died.

It is as if those soldiers remain home, even in France.

Row after row of crosses and Stars of David.

Every one of them someone’s son.

Someone’s husband.

Someone’s brother.

General Mark Clark once said:

“If ever proof were needed that we fought for a cause and not for conquest it could be found in these cemeteries. Here was our only conquest: all we asked was enough soil in which to bury our gallant dead.”

France granted that land to America in perpetuity.

One comment from our Parisian tour guide has stayed with me ever since. He said Paris is beautiful — but that beauty carries shame, because the city was largely spared the destruction that consumed so much of Europe through surrender, collaboration, and capitulation.

He pointed out that unlike Poland, Italy, or much of Normandy, Paris bears few scars of war.

Then he said something I have never forgotten:

“The Americans had no reason to liberate France except that they believed freedom was worth fighting for.”

Standing there, I believed him.

I have seen extraordinary Americans in uniform. I had the honor of working beside many of them at the Pentagon.

But never have I been prouder to be an American than standing on those beaches.

The Big Red One.

The Rangers at Pointe du Hoc.

The 101st Airborne at Sainte-Mère-Église.

The stories are all there. Not as movies. Not as mythology.

As reality.

And what overwhelms you when standing there is not simply the scale of the courage, but the humanity of it.

They were not superheroes.

They were ordinary men trying to survive, protect one another, and come home.

That is what made them heroes.

That is why they deserve remembrance.

Not because they were born different from us.

But because, when history demanded it, ordinary men carried unbearable burdens and endured unimaginable terror so that future generations could live ordinary peaceful lives.

That is Memorial Day.

The peace paid for in blood.

Stephen Ambrose wrote in Band of Brothers that Lieutenant Harry Welsh remembered looking at the sleeping men around him before D-Day and realizing that, despite death surrounding them, none of them truly believed it would happen to them.

“They hadn’t come here to fear. They hadn’t come to die. They had come to win.”

For those remembering loved ones who never came home, perhaps no words say it better than Abraham Lincoln:

“I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

Two things stood out from the actual source material. Neither of them surfaced during a single one of those performances.

First. Ted Cruz, on his own podcast, said this about the $1.8 billion DOJ “anti-weaponization” fund — the same fund that allegedly prompted the alleged Republican revolt against Trump’s alleged self-dealing: he is “a big supporter of it.” Not a reluctant one. Not a politically queasy one. A big supporter. He spent additional minutes explaining that the fund tracks precedent from past judgment funds settling litigation against the United States, and that the legal arguments Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gave to the GOP caucus in the closed-door meeting were the right ones.

Read that twice. The senator at the alleged center of the alleged revolt just endorsed the alleged grift on his own show. His complaint was about the timing of the announcement — that it landed during reconciliation week and stepped on the ICE/Border Patrol bill. Not the substance. Not the structure. The calendar.

Second. Cruz then proceeded to explain — with a forensic enthusiasm that ought to embarrass the man — that if Senate leadership had brought reconciliation to the floor Thursday night, half his own caucus would have voted with Democrats on amendments to constrain the fund. Not kill it. Constrain it. The specific amendments coming down the pike, per Cruz: language preventing payouts to rapists, violent offenders, and people who assaulted police on January 6.

These are not amendments offered by people opposed to the policy. These are amendments offered by people who support the policy and need it cleaned up so they can keep supporting it without political embarrassment.

That is not a revolt. That is brand management.

I dealt with this exact species of hypocrisy during the GWOT years. The argument was never “We oppose extraordinary rendition.” The argument was “We support extraordinary rendition but dislike the political optics once photographs and lawsuits appear.” Likewise: “We don’t want terrorists attacking Americans.” Fine. But: “It becomes politically awkward when you must warehouse suspects indefinitely, conduct black-site transfers, or explain to European parliaments why CIA aircraft keep landing at odd hours.”

And oh, did that last one become inconvenient.

The rendition issue damn near detonated multiple allied governments. Australia took damage. Germany convulsed. Spain practically vaporized itself over it.

The point is the same now as it was then: Republicans are aligned with Trump’s objectives. They are merely uncomfortable with Trump’s sales pitch. That distinction matters enormously.

A fairness note, since I am not interested in the lazy version of this argument. Not every Republican is Ted Cruz. Thom Tillis calling the fund a “payout pot for punks” is not brand management — Tillis is a known Trump skeptic with a record of substantive opposition. Bill Cassidy’s complaint that Congress was given no role in the design of the fund is an actual Article I objection, not optics theater. (Both Tillis and Cassidy are not facing re-election, which is when apparently many members of Congress find both a spine and a conscience.) Brian Fitzpatrick co-sponsoring bipartisan legislation to prohibit federal money for the fund is policy opposition, not rhetorical squeamishness. There are three or four senators doing real work here.

Three or four is not enough.

The median Republican senator is doing exactly what Cruz did on his own podcast: endorsing the substance, blaming the calendar, and demanding cosmetic carveouts so the policy survives the news cycle. Three or four genuine objectors do not constitute a revolt. They constitute a footnote that gets cited in 2028 campaign mailers to demonstrate independence from a president the rest of the caucus was busy enabling.

Americans getting shot by ICE? Most Republicans will support it because they’ll cite “law enforcement.” People getting their skulls bounced off pavement by federal agents? They’ll shrug and ask whether the detainee had “papers.” Using children as bait in enforcement operations? You’ll hear muttering about “tough choices” and “operational necessity.” Nine-dollar gasoline after a Middle East escalation? Their concern is not the suffering. Their concern is whether voters associate the suffering with them by November.

Policy alignment remains intact. Only the rhetoric produces indigestion.

So spare me the cable-news theater about “cracks in the coalition.” Here is what will actually happen. The administration will trim the fund. They will write in eligibility carveouts — no violent offenders, no rapists, no Trumps. Whether that gets actually followed? That’s tomorrow’s problem. They will install a notional independent administrator who will, oddly enough, do what Trump asks. Courts will do “court stuff”, and nothing will change there (because all of the lawsuits I’ve seen, while brilliant in prose, misunderstand the idea of “standing” given current Supreme Court doctrine). Republicans will declare victory, vote for reconciliation, and pat themselves on the back for “holding the line.”

That is not a line being held. That is a line being repositioned six inches to the right and renamed “victory.”

There is no revolt. There are Republicans arguing over the deck chairs as the ship goes under.

And the band — played — on.

Stephen Colbert is apparently back on the air.

Sort of.

This aired Friday on some community television station in Monroe County. Which is objectively hilarious.

Now, as someone who has actually worked around broadcast production — commercials, television, agency work, the machinery behind the curtain — what fascinates me isn’t the joke.

It’s what the joke reveals.

One of the recurring spectacles on Substack and YouTube is watching recently unemployed television personalities discover that the product was never entirely them.

A famous anchor gets fired.

A cable host storms off declaring tyranny.

Then they launch their “independent media revolution” from a spare bedroom with the lighting quality of a hostage video and audio that sounds like two squirrels fucking inside a tin garbage can.

And suddenly you realize something:

Television was carrying them.

Not entirely. But substantially.

Because television is not one talented person. Television is an industrial apparatus. Lighting crews. Audio engineers. Producers. segment editors. Camera operators. Graphics. Booking teams. Union technicians. Makeup. Control rooms. Standards departments. Satellite coordination. Post-production.

A small army exists to make one person appear larger than life.

Take away the machine and many of these people collapse into amateur hour almost immediately.

Don Lemon was brutal when he first moved online.

Andrew Weissmann, too.

Not because they’re stupid. Because they discovered that charisma and competence are not the same thing as production.

For years, I believed production quality mattered enormously.

This Colbert bit actually convinced me I was only partially right.

Because this works.

Even though it is deliberately styled to look like Community Access Television from 1994.

Which means one thing:

Colbert himself was most of the product.

That’s rarer than people think.

Most hosts are interchangeable once you remove the machinery.

Colbert is not.

And the fact that this little spoof already works tells me something else most viewers probably missed entirely.

CBS must have released him from his contract. Alternatively, his contract included provisions that made even a parody show possible.

That is extraordinarily interesting.

Normally, major broadcast talent contracts contain enough non-competes, holdbacks, exclusivity clauses, and poison pills to keep someone from popping up on competing platforms immediately after cancellation.

Even if the show dies.

Especially if the network believes the talent still has commercial value.

The whole point is to stop another platform from harvesting the audience you spent years building.

So the fact Colbert can immediately appear in broadcast-style programming — even as a joke — strongly suggests CBS decided it was worth eating whatever penalties, buyouts, or contractual costs existed simply to terminate the relationship cleanly and completely.

That is not consistent with the simplistic “the show was losing money” explanation.

It is entirely consistent with ownership deciding that Colbert had become unnecessary merger friction.

If the economics alone were the problem, the last thing you would do is leave the door open for Colbert to immediately rebuild elsewhere.

And here’s where the larger story gets interesting.

Fifteen years ago, I had dinner with senior YouTube executives in Palo Alto. They openly told me they intended to put CBS, NBC, and ABC out of business.

I laughed in their faces.

Not because the idea was insane, but because at the time, they fundamentally did not understand television economics.

They thought distribution was the business.

It isn’t.

Attention is the business.

Television exists to aggregate eyeballs so advertisers can purchase access to human attention at a profit margin higher than the cost of acquiring the audience.

The programming is bait.

The commercials are the actual product.

For years, YouTube thought creators were just uploading content.

Eventually, they realized creators were building audiences.

Then they discovered something television learned generations ago:

Audience distribution becomes grotesquely concentrated.

A handful of creators absorb most of the attention.

Everyone else fights over scraps.

Substack works exactly the same way.

A few people get most of the audience.

A middle layer gets enough to build a respectable business.

Then there are ten billion people screaming into the digital abyss, hoping algorithmic Jesus notices them.

That’s the actual media economy.

Joe Rogan figured this out before almost anyone else.

Rogan is not a philosopher king. He’s a B-level comic, former TV ensemble player, former cage-fighting color commentator, who built an empire by normalizing an endlessly adolescent masculine archetype and attaching a gigantic audience to it.

That audience became economically valuable.

That’s it.

That’s the whole game.

And someone like Colbert already possesses the hardest part:

The audience.

Millions of people will watch this stupid little public-access parody.

The real question is whether they come back next week.

I suspect they would.

At which point the economics become very interesting very quickly.

Because a stripped-down streaming show with competent production and a loyal recurring audience may actually be a better business than legacy late-night television.

No orchestra.

No gigantic studio overhead.

No bloated staffing.

No decaying broadcast infrastructure.

Just audience aggregation and monetization.

Which is ultimately what television was always doing anyway.

John Oliver already understands this.

Kimmel increasingly does too.

The center of gravity for commentary and comedy is migrating toward streaming because that is where the audience now lives.

Especially the audience that still wants something outside the endless slurry of algorithmic sludge and political psychosis.

And frankly?

Colbert may be one of the first legacy television personalities with enough actual talent to make the transition work at scale.

Not because he was on television.

Because, unlike many television personalities, he might actually survive without it.

But did he?

I’m not nearly as convinced as the pearl-clutching theater critics of the Republic would like me to be.

I’m sorry to see Colbert leave the air. In an era where much of American broadcasting resembles a concussion suffered inside a casino buffet, a man capable of wit, timing, and basic literacy still has value.

But let us not transform a corporate disposal into the Fall of Saigon.

I also remember something Jay Leno once said about Hollywood — one of those accidental moments of honesty that occasionally slips out of entertainers before the publicists tackle them with tranquilizer darts.

The gist was simple:

“We pay you a fortune because eventually we’re going to screw you. You’ll make us billions, we’ll hand you a few tens of millions, then one day we’ll throw you into traffic. That’s the business.”

Correct.

That is the business.

Not democracy. Not constitutional stewardship. Not some glowing cathedral of civic virtue standing athwart tyranny with a trembling candle of liberty.

A business.

And businesses, contrary to what emotionally incontinent partisans on Twitter insist upon believing, are not moral organisms. They are revenue-extraction machines wearing human skin.

Now certainly, in the bedtime story version of America many people still desperately cling to, CBS would have stood heroically before the Orange Sultan and declared:

“No, sir! We shall defend free expression unto death!”

Cue the violins. Release the bald eagles. Bring out Bono to sing something unbearable.

Unfortunately, corporations do not run on courage. They run on incentives.

CBS looked at its pending merger, looked at the political environment, looked at regulatory exposure, looked at shareholder interests, and concluded that Stephen Colbert was more disposable than the transaction.

That’s what happened.

Not dictatorship. Not jackboots. Not secret police dragging comedians into unmarked vans while the Constitution burned softly in the background.

No FBI raid. No FCC seizure. No DOJ ultimatum. No IRS assault teams fast-roping into the studio rafters.

CBS simply made a calculation.

A cold one. A cynical one. A cowardly one.

But voluntary.

And that distinction matters.

Because people are trying very hard to turn this into evidence that Trump personally crushed dissent through overwhelming authoritarian force.

But that is not actually what occurred.

What occurred is something older, uglier, and considerably more common in declining republics:

Anticipatory obedience.

Institutions begin adjusting themselves to power before power even explicitly demands it.

That is how soft authoritarian systems mature.

Not primarily through terror — at least not at first — but through institutions deciding that resistance is economically inconvenient.

The executives convince themselves they are being “pragmatic.” The shareholders call it “fiduciary responsibility.” The consultants call it “risk mitigation.” The lawyers call it “positioning.”

History eventually calls it collaboration.

And collaboration rarely begins with a man screaming into a microphone while tanks roll through the streets.

It begins quietly.

A board meeting. A merger review. A conversation with regulators. A memo. A contract not renewed. A newsroom softened. A comedian discarded.

That is why the happy horseshit coming from Paramount about “purely financial considerations” is so revealing.

Of course, it was financial.

That’s the point.

The terrifying thing about advanced capitalism is not that corporations become evil comic-book villains twirling mustaches beneath lightning bolts.

It’s that they become morally weightless.

They stand for nothing except continuity of transaction.

Everything else — journalism, civic responsibility, artistic independence, democratic norms — becomes negotiable if enough money is placed on the table.

And the public keeps acting surprised by this as though Goldman Sachs just got caught sacrificing goats in the basement.

Ladies and gentlemen: this is what corporations are designed to do.

The Redstone family wanted liquidity. Paramount wanted the deal. Political friction threatened the pathway. So suddenly, everyone discovered that the principle was prohibitively expensive.

And over the side went Colbert.

Along with whatever remained of CBS News’ institutional spine.

Now, does Trump benefit from this environment?

Obviously.

Authoritarian personalities thrive when institutions pre-surrender.

The aspiring strongman does not need to explicitly censor everyone if enough corporations decide on their own that criticism is bad for quarterly earnings.

That is the real danger here.

Not that Trump possesses magical dictatorial powers.

But that America’s institutional class increasingly lacks the will to absorb economic pain in defense of liberal norms.

That is the test.

Always.

A free society only remains free so long as its major institutions are willing to lose money, lose access, lose influence, or lose comfort in defense of principles they claim are sacred.

Once every value has a sell price, liberty itself becomes just another asset class waiting for acquisition.

And so no, I do not think Trump “won” in the way his supporters fantasize.

No great battle was fought here. No heroic conquest occurred. No dissident fortress fell after glorious resistance.

What happened was more pathetic than victory.

A group of wealthy executives looked at power, looked at money, and decided they preferred money.

Which is to say:

Capitalism behaved exactly as it often behaves when confronted with concentrated political power.

Like a coward.

So, if I understand correctly, we are now roughly 180+ days into the grandly titled “Epstein Transparency Act.”

Marvelous.

I have seen brick walls with greater commitment to disclosure.

Having worked litigation and discovery, the entire production smells wrong. Not “I disagree politically” wrong. Not “Twitter conspiracy thread” wrong. Procedurally wrong. The kind of wrong that makes experienced litigators lean back in their chair and say: “Alright, what exactly are these people hiding?”

Because here is what one would ordinarily expect from a genuine disclosure process involving a figure like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

Outcome one:

Trump knew Epstein. Partied with him. Socialized with him. Flew around the same social orbit of rich degenerates and Palm Beach grotesques. Perhaps he ignored obvious warning signs. Perhaps he simply did not care. But the records ultimately fail to place him directly inside the criminal enterprise itself.

Frankly, that is the outcome I expected.

Outcome two:

Trump was fully involved. He knew exactly what was happening, participated in it, benefited from it, and the records conclusively demonstrate that fact.

That would be the political equivalent of finding King Tut’s tomb beneath a Buffalo Wild Wings. One of the largest scandals in modern American history.

Instead, we get something far stranger.

He was there, but not there. Contacts existed, but did not exist. References appear, then disappear. Out of mountains of records, the public receives a bizarrely selective handful of pages, followed by the bureaucratic equivalent of a middle finger: “No further production.”

And that is where the instincts of anyone familiar with discovery begin screaming.

Because selective opacity — especially in politically catastrophic matters — does not inspire confidence. It inspires suspicion.

Ordinarily, in large-scale litigation, somebody screws up. A memo slips through. An email survives deletion. A whistleblower appears. Bureaucracies are leaky organisms staffed by exhausted underlings and resentful mid-level managers. Perfect containment is rare.

Yet here, somehow, the system behaves with the eerie discipline of a monastery protecting sacred relics.

Curious.

Meanwhile, everywhere else in the civilized world, association with a trafficking scandal of this magnitude detonates careers instantly. Criminal inquiries erupt. Political figures vanish overnight. Institutions panic visibly.

In America?

Nothing.

Not merely for Trump, but broadly across the governing class.

Which raises an uncomfortable possibility: the institutional priority may no longer be transparency or accountability, but containment.

And this is where the broader failure becomes impossible to ignore.

My own suspicion — and it is only that — is that the Department of Justice catastrophically mishandled Epstein for years. By the time portions of the government understood the scale of what they were dealing with, Epstein likely possessed immense intelligence and counterintelligence value simply because of the people around him. That does not require a Hollywood conspiracy. It merely requires bureaucracies behaving like bureaucracies: compromising principle in the name of “strategic considerations.”

Then came prosecutors who looked at the arrangement and said, correctly: “What in God’s name is this?”

So the machine lurched awkwardly toward accountability after years of apparent accommodation.

Then Epstein died in federal custody under circumstances so absurdly incompetent that half the country believes it was murder and the other half believes it merely looked exactly like murder because the institutions involved were staffed by clowns.

Neither explanation inspires confidence.

At this point, the Epstein matter has become larger than Epstein himself. It is now fundamentally about institutional legitimacy.

Because when the public concludes that elite-connected scandals receive special handling, partial disclosure, selective accountability, and procedural fog instead of transparent adjudication, people stop trusting the system entirely.

And honestly? They probably should.

The entire affair increasingly resembles a state apparatus desperately trying to manage public perception while insisting nothing unusual is occurring.

Which, historically speaking, usually occurs when something unusual is happening.

But Congress will move on shortly.

Tomorrow, it will be a slush fund scandal.

The day after that, Trump will propose nuking the moon.

Then Mars.

Then perhaps a federal yacht program in his own honor.

And the republic — exhausted, overstimulated, and permanently trapped inside the world’s loudest circus tent — will stagger onward pretending this is all somehow normal.

I’ve seen food fights better organized than this mess.

A few hours ago, the Department of Justice announced that it was settling the case between the President and the IRS. The timing, naturally, is immaculate. One suspects the announcement arrived mere moments before the Judiciary was preparing to inform the President of an awkward constitutional reality: namely, that a man cannot plausibly present himself as the aggrieved plaintiff while simultaneously commanding the very executive departments tasked with compensating him for his alleged suffering. Even in modern America’s carnival jurisprudence, there are limits to how vigorously one may sue oneself and then demand the Treasury cut the check.

So the matter, conveniently, has been “resolved.”

In exchange for dropping the suit, the Acting Attorney General now proposes the creation of an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — a title so grotesquely Orwellian it might embarrass a mid-level apparatchik in a declining Soviet republic. The fund, we are told, will marshal roughly $1.8 billion to compensate the President, his retainers, his flatterers, assorted loyalists, convicted felons whose sentences he commuted, and the various patriotic hysterics who attempted, in one of the more idiotic episodes in American political history, to overturn the government of the United States by storming the Capitol in search of the Vice President, the Speaker, and whichever members of Congress they imagined insufficiently obedient.

These are now, apparently, the officially sponsored victims of the Republic.

The memorandum itself reads less like a legal document than the sort of delirious production one expects from a regime entering its late-decadence phase — all grievance, self-pity, and naked patronage wrapped in the sanctimonious vocabulary of justice. It is the language of men who have ceased even pretending that the state exists for any purpose beyond rewarding friends, terrorizing enemies, and laundering vengeance into policy.

The memo is laughable.

Really? So the instant the money lands in a bank account, the Federal Government suddenly washes its hands of the affair entirely? Fascinating doctrine. One had previously assumed that when the President of the United States obtained funds through fraud — a field in which the gentleman possesses a résumé of considerable depth and professional distinction — the government might retain at least a passing interest in safeguarding public money from being vacuumed into the furnace of his various schemes, collapses, and legal catastrophes.

Apparently not.

Apparently, once the transfer clears, the Republic shrugs, lights a cigarette, and says, “Well, best of luck to everyone involved.”

An especially amusing flourish arrives when the Acting Attorney General, evidently sensing that the whole performance reeks of corruption so strongly that even the walls may soon require fumigation, attempts a defense familiar to every declining regime and drunken ward politician in history:

“Yes, but Obama.”

Observe the intellectual majesty of it. Not a legal defense. Not a constitutional defense. Not even a coherent ethical defense. Merely the ancient cry of the bureaucratic hack caught rummaging through the till: Well the other guy was crooked too.

And then, because modern American politics is incapable of resisting the instincts of a seventh-grade lunchroom argument, comes the final embellishment: Obama was bad, we are better, therefore this particular patronage scheme — this public distribution of money to loyalists, cronies, pardoned hooligans, and political shock troops — is not corruption at all, but somehow a higher and more enlightened species of it.

One begins to appreciate why empires eventually collapse into parody before they collapse into ruin.

Keepseagle v. Vilsack was a landmark class-action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture alleging decades of systemic discrimination against Native American farmers and ranchers in USDA lending programs. The allegation was neither exotic nor difficult to understand: Native farmers were routinely denied loans, delayed loans, reduced loans, harsher terms, and servicing assistance that white farmers received as a matter of administrative muscle memory. The discrimination allegedly stretched from roughly 1981 through 1999 and left entire Native agricultural communities economically crippled.

After eleven years of litigation — and with the Federal Government facing the increasingly unpleasant possibility of eventually losing on the merits — the Obama Administration settled in 2010 for up to $760 million: roughly $680 million in cash compensation and another $80 million in loan forgiveness. Importantly, the money came through the Treasury Judgment Fund, thereby avoiding the congressional circus that had already stalled parallel relief for Black farmers under Pigford v. Glickman and its sequel. In plainer English: Congress had all the enthusiasm of a cemetery for compensating minority farmers, so the Administration used an available legal mechanism to end the litigation without waiting for Capitol Hill to rediscover civilization.

But the settlement was not merely a giant sack of money tossed from a government wagon. It included structural reforms: advisory councils, technical assistance, tribal sub-offices, and review mechanisms for USDA loan programs. The point was remediation of an actual, documented institutional failure.

And even then, the money became contentious.

The claims process yielded thousands of approved claimants, but hundreds of millions remained undistributed. Under the settlement’s cy pres provisions, leftover funds were directed toward nonprofits serving Native American agricultural communities. Predictably, disputes erupted over whether the money should instead be distributed directly to prevailing claimants. The lead plaintiffs themselves eventually split from class counsel and fought over the disposition of the remaining funds. Courts intervened. Modifications were negotiated. More distributions occurred. Ultimately, a substantial remainder was directed into the Native American Agriculture Fund to support Native agriculture over two decades.

In other words: this was the messy but recognizable anatomy of an actual civil-rights settlement after a decade of litigation over genuine discriminatory conduct.

It was not a presidential patronage machine.

It was not a loyalty-rewards program for pardoned political foot soldiers.

It was not a public treasury repurposed into a compensation fund for cronies, seditionists, and useful idiots who attempted to overturn an election and then received absolution from the same political figure now positioned to benefit from the payout architecture.

Yet now we are invited to pretend these things are comparable because somewhere, somewhere, in the distant legal fog, both situations involve the phrase “settlement fund.”

Marvelous.

And one need not possess a particularly vivid imagination to see where this sort of mechanism could drift under sufficiently shameless management. Today it is “victims of weaponization.” Tomorrow it becomes allied nonprofits, presidential libraries, trusts, foundations, legal-defense entities, advocacy groups, consulting vehicles, or whichever glorified grift receptacle happens to be politically fashionable among the ruling court eunuchs of the moment.

One billion here. Several hundred million there. Soon enough, the whole thing begins to resemble less a justice system than a state-sponsored rewards program for political loyalty.

And this is where the comparison to Shakespeare becomes darkly amusing.

In Henry VI, Part 2, the famous line — “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” — is spoken not by defenders of liberty, but by conspirators seeking tyranny. The lawyers are obstacles because they preserve structure, process, continuity, and inconvenient reality. They are barriers between ambition and naked power.

But modern institutional decay produces its own inversion. When lawyers cease defending the rule of law and instead become technicians of rationalized corruption — men whose sole professional purpose is laundering appetite into procedure — then they no longer stand athwart corruption. They become its architecture.

And that, perhaps, is the most corrosive feature of all this: not merely the corruption itself, but the transformation of institutions once designed to restrain power into mechanisms designed to legitimize it after the fact.

Graham — part courtier, part panic alarm in human form — arrived to explain to the American people that presidential indifference to the price of food, fuel, and ordinary existence was not a political liability, but apparently a statesmanlike virtue on par with Churchill preparing Britain for the Blitz.

My friend Aaron, in an act of either civic duty or emotional self-harm, shared the clip to Substack.

This is his Churchillian moment, huh?

Well, at one point in my life, I was a speechwriter. If Trump were Churchill, it would have to sound something like this:

If Trump were Churchill, that’s how I think it would have gone.

PS:

Several years ago, standing on Omaha Beach, I listened as our guide described what unfolded there on June 6, 1944. Around us, tourists wandered in sandals. Couples walked dogs along the surf. Children played where boys once drowned in fifty pounds of wet gear before ever reaching the sand. The day was warm, peaceful, almost offensively beautiful.

Churchill once spoke of “broad, sunlit uplands.” Normandy today is precisely that. Green hills. Salt air. Quiet water. Civilization restored so completely that the horror which purchased it has become nearly invisible.

I stood there studying the geography of the beach — the impossible openness of it, the murderous exposure. I pointed toward the waterline and told my daughters that if they wanted to understand, even faintly, what those men faced, one should carry the other on her back and run from the surf to the shingle in under ten seconds.

Another father in our group nodded solemnly and said, “That’s what they had to do.”

“No,” I replied. “That’s what they had to do under a hail of MG42 fire.”

That is the part modern Americans — particularly the theatrical patriots of television and social media — never quite grasp. They inherit the victory and mistake it for the natural condition of mankind. They enjoy the uplands without comprehending the furnace required to reach them.

Churchill understood that leadership in a crisis meant preparing a population for sacrifice in defense of civilization itself. He did not flatter the public. He did not promise easy victories. He did not confuse bravado with courage or grievance with strength.

He spoke to a people facing annihilation and asked them to endure.

Donald Trump, by contrast, speaks to a nation drifting into decadence and asks only to be applauded while it happens.

And Lindsey Graham's comparison of Trump’s indifference to Churchill’s resolve is not merely historically illiterate. It is the sort of vulgar, performative stupidity that could only emerge from a political culture that has replaced statesmanship with cable-news pantomime.

We are not storming the beaches.

We are not meeting the moment.

And Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill.

“‘If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.’”

Now, naturally, you assume Trump said that.

Reasonable guess.

Wrong decade.

That was Prince Phillip in 1986, speaking to British students in China — back when the Royal Family still believed diplomacy meant showing up drunk, insulting the locals, and hoping the Commonwealth didn’t notice.

Phillip, to be fair, was the undisputed heavyweight champion of public gaffes. The man made Joe Biden look like Cicero with a teleprompter. Somewhere in Buckingham Palace there was probably an emergency room reserved exclusively for his press secretaries.

My personal favorite remains: “Still throwing spears?” — asked to an Australian Aboriginal during a royal visit. (That picture below is from that visit, I went and found it.)

Now, if Trump said that, Americans would collectively perform their standard ritual: clutch pearls, faint theatrically, and then immediately continue voting for him anyway.

But no. Prince Phillip.

The amusing part is that you instantly believed Trump could say it.

Which tells us something important.

So on the flight back from China, my friend Aaron is feeding me clips from what I can only describe as Reich Home Shopping Network Television — OAN, Fox, NewsNation, and the rest of the patriotic gelatin. While every normal newsroom is screaming “Jesus Christ, what now!?” these people are airing hard-hitting strategic analysis like:

“37 Velveeta recipes to celebrate Donald Trump!”

“Gasoline prices are down? Does this mean masculinity is back?”

“Is owning a leaf blower now an act of national sovereignty?”

Now, while they may not literally say “slitty-eyed” or “spearchucker,” spiritually we are absolutely operating in that neighborhood.

And from all this nonsense, one thing becomes perfectly clear:

Donald Trump could not possibly care less about Taiwan.

Frankly, if I put a revolver to his temple and demanded he locate Taiwan on a map, there’s at least a 40% chance he’d point at Aruba and ask for credit.

I remain unconvinced he could reliably locate Iran either, despite spending the last two months threatening to bomb it back into the Bronze Age every nine minutes on television.

So apparently, the grand “Art of the Deal” with Beijing now works like this:

“Hey Xi — don’t embarrass me over Iran, and you can rough up Taiwan a little. What do I care? You all look the same anyway.”

That, more or less, is the level of strategic sophistication currently emanating from Washington.

And remember:

roughly eighty million Americans examined this man and concluded:
“Yes. That is clearly a stable billionaire genius.”

No.
He isn’t.

And neither are they.

Now here’s where things actually become serious.

Taiwan is not Iraq.
It is not Afghanistan.
It is not some exhausted desert state held together with duct tape, AK-47s, and Toyota Hiluxes with Soviet plumbing welded to the back.

Taiwan is a real country.

It has real infrastructure.
Real engineers.
Real command-and-control systems.
Real industrial capacity.
Real anti-ship missiles.
Real cyber capabilities.
Real manufacturing.
Real education.

This is not a bunch of sandal-wearing insurgents firing homemade rockets while CNN explains tribal politics to suburban wine moms.

Pre-Ukraine, I would’ve said Taiwan was probably doomed in a direct confrontation.

Post-Ukraine?
Post-Iran?
Post-America sticking its national penis directly into an electrical socket and screaming “DETERRENCE!” while the lights flicker?

I’m no longer so certain.

Because modern warfare has revealed something Washington’s professional war-porn addicts still struggle to process:

Defense is often easier than offense.

Russia did not roll over Ukraine.

The United States has spent staggering quantities of money and munitions in the Middle East and still cannot reliably secure shipping lanes from dudes launching drones assembled with the equivalent budget of a suburban Applebee’s franchise.

Turns out conquering populations who prefer not to be conquered is surprisingly complicated.

Who knew?

Now let me clarify something before the internet’s strategic illiterates begin hyperventilating:

I do not think China is omniscient. Xi Jinping is not playing twelve-dimensional underwater Mahjong while America drools into the carpet.

China has enormous problems:
debt,
demographic collapse,
property bubbles,
capital flight,
internal corruption,
a political system structurally incapable of admitting major mistakes.

The People’s Republic is not the Galactic Empire.

But there is a profound difference between:
“China is unstoppable”
and
“China may have concluded the United States is increasingly incapable of coherent strategic discipline.”

Those are radically different propositions.

And right now, the second one matters far more.

Because Beijing is watching the United States behave like a wealthy alcoholic stumbling shirtless through a casino, yelling about freedom while setting its own wallet on fire.

China likely looked at America voluntarily stumbling into a regional war with Iran and thought:

“Surely they aren’t actually this strategically self-destructive.”

Then Washington answered:
“Oh, but we absolutely are.”

And Beijing kept watching.

Now understand:
China is a serious intelligence power.

Signals intelligence.
Cyber operations.
Industrial espionage.
Satellite reconnaissance.
Human penetration.
Economic analysis.
Diplomatic collection.

They do not require omniscience.
They only require pattern recognition.

And the pattern America is currently emitting looks something like this:

Extraordinarily powerful.
Increasingly erratic.
Politically fragmented.
Emotionally reactive.
Governed by a narcissistic game-show host who appears to make geopolitical decisions the way a drunk uncle chooses barbecue sauce.

That distinction matters.

The danger is not that China believes America is weak.

The danger is that China may believe America is inducible.

That is much worse.

Because once an adversary concludes you are reactive, impatient, distracted, and vulnerable to prestige traps, they stop trying to confront you directly.

Instead, they encourage you to exhaust yourself.

They widen distractions.
They deepen dependencies.
They let you consume your own bandwidth.

And this brings us to Taiwan.

Western commentary still treats Taiwan like a simple algebra equation:
China attacks → Taiwan falls.

But amphibious warfare against a fortified island defended by advanced surveillance, anti-ship systems, hardened infrastructure, drones, cyber capabilities, and a technologically sophisticated population is among the hardest military operations on Earth.

Taiwan is not Normandy in reverse.
It is not a Risk board.
It is not a cable-news animation narrated by retired generals who haven’t updated their mental software since Desert Storm.

To invade Taiwan, China would need to mass ships, logistics, transports, aircraft, fuel depots, staging areas, and command nodes across one of the most surveilled maritime corridors on Earth.

Those become targets.

And Beijing almost certainly understands something Washington is rediscovering in Iran:

Escalation ladders are easy to climb.
Controlling them is another matter entirely.

The United States can devastate Iran militarily.
That does not mean it can produce clean political outcomes.

Likewise, China may possess the capability to inflict catastrophic damage on Taiwan.
That does not necessarily mean Beijing can achieve a rapid, sustainable, economically survivable victory.

And that uncertainty is likely shaping Chinese behavior.

Because China historically prefers erosion to collision.
Pressure over spectacle.
Normalization over dramatic rupture.

Which means the greatest danger may not be an immediate invasion.

The greater danger is slower.

More corrosive.

A gradual conclusion spreading quietly through Asia that the United States no longer possesses the political coherence, industrial stamina, or strategic discipline required for sustained great-power competition.

And once allies begin privately wondering whether America can stay focused long enough to finish what it starts?

Deterrence begins collapsing all by itself.

No invasion necessary.