(Editor’s note: Amid the avalanche of takedowns about the embarrassing and repulsive display of corruption and depravity that unfolded at the White House over the weekend, several readers enthusiastically pointed to a piece by author and op-ed columnist Michelle Goldberg, suggesting we repost it. Courtesy of Newsmakers’ New York Times subscription, here it is. /jr).

By Michelle Goldberg /The New York Times

Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way.

Think of it: On the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, America’s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena while capitulating to Iran.

Mike Judge came close to imagining some elements of our debasement in his 2006 satire “Idiocracy,” which depicts a United States led by a professional wrestler whose middle name is Mountain Dew. But if “Idiocracy” captured something of the vibe of Donald Trump’s reign, it was both too early and too lighthearted to nail the sordid specifics, which on Sunday included the fighter Josh Hokit, standing in an octagonal cage wrapped in crypto ads, calling the former first lady Michelle Obama a man.

It is, to be sure, a good thing that the war in Iran appears to be over. Once Trump had dragged America into a quagmire, there was no prospect of ending the debacle on beneficial terms.

Contrary to the caterwauling of Iran hawks, the deal Trump reached isn’t the problem — it’s simply a tacit acknowledgment of a defeat that was already baked in. Still, it marks a moment of American ignominy.

“The fact that the strongest, the mightiest military power in the world, in cooperation with the mightiest intelligence agency in the world — Israel’s — were not able to achieve any of their strategic objectives against a third-rate regional power is quite stunning,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group.

Failure in Iran. Details of the “memorandum of understanding” between the United States and Iran are still emerging; the White House has said the text will be released in a day or two.

But it appears that its main accomplishment will be to open the Strait of Hormuz, which of course was open before the war.

There’s been no nuclear agreement. Reports suggest Iran has not had to give up its ballistic missile program or its support for proxies like Hezbollah. The beleaguered Iranian people have not, perhaps needless to say, been freed from their awful rulers.

Though Vice President JD Vance has said Iran could have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund, it’s not clear what that will look like, or whether Iran might use its control of the Strait to collect some sort of toll.

But by demonstrating its power to withstand American bombing while putting a chokehold on the global economy, it’s achieved a level of deterrence it previously lacked.

“Iran is not likely to take seriously that the U.S. would return to war, certainly before the U.S. midterms,” wrote Daniel Shapiro, Barack Obama’s ambassador to Israel, on social media. “So that means we will be conducting diplomacy without a credible threat of force.”

It probably wasn’t a coincidence that the memorandum of understanding was finalized while Ultimate Fighting Championship cage matches were fought at the White House.

In addition to marking the nation’s quarter-millennium, the U.F.C. extravaganza was meant to celebrate Trump’s 80th birthday. Both Iran and some Democrats suspected he wanted to get the Iran deal done in time for the occasion.

And Trump might have hoped that the event — which at one point had a Marine Corps honor guard onstage with ring girls in sparkly red hot pants and a human-size Monster Energy drink can — would help lure back some of the young men disillusioned by both his war and his mishandling of the economy.

Maybe it will work. Joe Rogan, the podcast host who has been increasingly critical of Trump in recent months, agreed to serve as an announcer. The Wall Street Journal reported on one excited fan who drove seven hours in the hope of seeing Trump’s pageant and said, “It’s like the Colosseum in real life.”

To America’s founders, the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire was a cautionary tale. To parts of MAGA, it’s apparently aspirational.

A clear picture of decadence. But to everyone else, the confluence of America’s failure in Iran and Trump’s Temu colosseum should paint a clear picture of decadence, rot and weakness trying to conceal itself behind macho kitsch.

This is an administration capable of immense, epic destruction, but unable to create much besides spectacle.

The conservative writer Marc Thiessen tried to depict Trump’s lurid festival as a sign of his demotic spirit, opening the White House to the sort of people who go to motocross rallies and monster truck shows. “If you’re offended by that, you may be an elitist snob,” he wrote.

Put aside, for a moment, the fact that Thiessen once clucked that Barack Obama was failing to maintain “presidential dignity.” By this standard — that U.F.C. brawls, which John McCain once called “human cockfighting,” belong in the White House because lots of Americans like them — there can be no standards.

Like Ultimate Fighting, porn is extremely popular, but I somehow doubt Thiessen would defend a Democratic president who invited a bunch of OnlyFans creators to the Oval Office while he was losing a war.

Circuses, without bread. It’s tempting to mention bread and circuses here, except there’s no bread.

On the contrary, Trump and his allies monetized Sunday’s program. In March, Trump obtained shares in the U.F.C.’s parent company. And to watch the show, members of the public needed a subscription to Paramount+, controlled by the Trump ally David Ellison, who bought CBS and then made it friendlier to the administration.

Rather than a gift to his restive base, the event was another example of the administration selling America for parts.

In the lead-up to the fight, the U.F.C.’s Derrick Lewis — who’d later be knocked out by Hokit — told The Journal he felt that he was participating in something historic. “This is one of the events they’ll be talking about 100 years from now,” he said. He could be right, but not in the way he thinks.

Someday, someone might write — or, more likely, film — an American version of Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

Its maker will want to include a scene of the 92-foot steel claw towering over the White House while somewhere inside the building, people scrambled to figure out how to sell a foreign policy disaster as a great victory.

Image: The 2nd Century AD Zliten mosaic depicts Roman gladiators (Wikipedia).

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(Editor's note: A 19th-century grassroots movement launched the idea of an annual national celebration of the American flag, adopted by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1777, long before President Harry Truman signed National Flag Day legislation in 1949. So it seems fitting that a grassroots event in Santa Barbara — a Democratic Women's luncheon on behalf of a Senate candidate fighting the forces of Trumpism — was the local setting for an uncommonly forceful and lucid statement about the meaning of the flag. Here's an excerpt of what Dem Women President Claudette Roehrig had to say about the holiday. /jr).

By Claudette Roehrig

In 1892, American schoolchildren first learned these words:

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

That original pledge was simple, secular, and profoundly democratic. It asked us to pledge not to a party or a single creed, but to a shared republic—and to one another.

It imagined a country where we could argue fiercely about policy and still recognize that we are bound together in a common project.

On this Flag Day, I want us to hear that original language as both a challenge and an invitation.

“One nation, indivisible” is a radical statement in a time when some are working overtime to divide us—by race, by gender, by who we love, by where we were born.

And “with liberty and justice for all” is not just a closing line—it is a constitutional promise. A promise that has never been fully realized, but has always been worth fighting for.

Frederick Douglass once said, “The Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color.”

That was not a description of the country as it was—it was a demand for what it must become.

Unfinished promise. That same unfinished promise lives in every fight we take on today: protecting voting rights, defending reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, standing with immigrants and refugees, advancing racial justice, securing LGBTQ+ equality, ensuring that economic dignity is not reserved for the few, and making healthcare a right for all, not a privilege for the lucky or the wealthy.

And it lives in the urgent work to make equality explicit and permanent in our Constitution. The Equal Rights Amendment is how we finish that work—how we make it unmistakably clear that equality is not conditional, not temporary, and not up for debate.

Somewhere along the way, the flag itself was hijacked.

We have watched extremists wrap themselves in it while attacking our democracy.

We saw it carried into the Capitol on January 6th.

We have seen it used as a symbol of exclusion instead of belonging.

That is a desecration of our flag and of the values it represents.

The history of the pledge itself reminds us that our symbols are not frozen in time—they are shaped by political choices. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, Congress added the words “under God” to draw a contrast with the officially atheist Soviet Union and to send a message about American identity in that moment.

Overnight, “one nation, indivisible” became “one nation under God, indivisible”—but the deepest meaning of the pledge was never that one added phrase.

Because the beating heart of that flag—just like the beating heart of the pledge—is still “indivisible” and “liberty and justice for all.”

True test of patriotism. The real test of patriotism isn’t how loudly you recite the words or how big a flag you hang off your truck—it’s whether you’re willing to live up to them.

The real test is whether we are willing to expand that “all”—and defend it in law.

We are the ones protecting the right to vote.

We are the ones defending bodily autonomy.

We are the ones standing with immigrants and working families.

We are the ones demanding dignity, safety, equality, and healthcare for every person in this country.

And we are the ones who will not stop until that equality is written plainly into the Constitution.

That is not a rejection of American values. That is the fulfillment of them.

So on this Flag Day, let us say it plainly: WE ARE THE TRUE PATRIOTS!

Reclaiming the flag. We are reclaiming that flag.

We are reclaiming that promise.

And we are finishing the work.

We will not be intimidated by those who shout the loudest while undermining democracy.

We will not be distracted by those who try to divide us.

And we will not accept a version of this country where “for all” is negotiable.

We are building a nation that is actually indivisible.

We are demanding a Constitution that actually guarantees equality.

We are insisting that liberty and justice are not selective—they are universal.

This is our flag.

It belongs to everyone who believes in democracy, in dignity, in equality under the law.

This is our Constitution.

And we will not stop until it reflects all of us, protects all of us, and serves all of us.

This is our country.

And we are not giving it back.

Claudette Roehrig, president of Democratic Women of Santa Barbara, is a marriage and family therapist and former board president of Domestic Violence Solutions.

Image: “Birth of Old Glory,” 1917 painting by Percy Moran (Wikipedia).

By Jonathan V. Last /The Bulwark

Once Iran demonstrated the ability to control the Strait of Hormuz in the face of American force, the end state of this war was determined.

At some point, America would give Iran a bunch of concessions in exchange for Iran allowing transit of the strait. Those concessions were always going to be some version of the following:

• An end to U.S.-led sanctions against Iran.

• Cash payments of some sort to Iran.

• An “agreement” which, whatever it said, did not practically bind Iran on future pursuit of nuclear materials.

• Iranian de facto management of the strait, irrespective of international law.

That was always going to be the eventual deal. The only question was the timing. How much pain would Trump be willing to absorb before he surrendered?

Now look at the situation from Trump’s perspective.

If that was always going to be the deal, then what could Trump get out of it? What sweetener could be added to make him bite the bullet?

The sweetener was never going to be substantive—the contours of Trump’s surrender were immutable. His sweetener would have to be cosmetic. The Iranians would have to give him something to get him to “yes.”

They realized that they could afford to give him optics.

Trump thinks of everything in terms of television. Why was announcing a “deal” on Sunday, June 14 more attractive than doing it on Wednesday, June 3?

Because he had a captive audience on June 14 assembled to sell his story about a glorious blood sport in celebration of America/his birthday.² For Trump, the TV version of this story was a good one:

• He breaks the news of his “deal” shortly before the cage fighting begins.

• The event becomes a victory rally.

• The story of the “deal” is then intertwined with Trump’s celebration.

• The upcoming Freedom250 festivities are then used as a clear point of demarcation from which Trump turns the page on Iran, leaves the war behind, and moves on to the midterm elections with a clean slate.

I promise you that in his lizard brain, Trump envisioned the “deal”/cage fight playing out like Apollo Creed’s entrance in Rocky IV: a huge, celebratory American spectacle.

And no. I don’t think Trump remembers what happened after Apollo came prancing to the ring in his Uncle Sam hat.

So that’s why I thought there was a good chance Trump would get a “deal” yesterday. The terms were never in doubt. The Iranians would get everything they wanted. But Trump had to get something to impel him to make the deal; packaging the announcement with his long-planned UFC event was a freebie for Iran.

What is the Deal? The next key was understanding that any “deal” Trump announced would not actually be a deal. It would be a memorandum of understanding, which punted all important questions into the future. This MoU would serve dual functions.

• For Trump, it allows him to claim the war is over and get out of the theater.

• For Iran, it allows them greater control over the next phase of negotiations, which will determine how those conditions up top 👆 are put into practice.

From Trump’s perspective, he needs two things:

1. To get out of the war and make Iran someone else’s problem.

2. To insulate himself politically from the effects of his surrender.

What this means practically is that Trump needs to be able to claim that:

• The strait is open and there are no “tolls.”

• He, Donald Trump, did not give Iran cash.

• Iran will “never” pursue nuclear weapons again.

These are the specifics that will be negotiated in the next phase and I can tell you right now how each of them will go.

• Tolls. Iran will pledge not to charge “tolls” on shipping through the strait. However, they will create a new body to administer the sea lane in the name of safety. Probably they will present this as a partnership with Oman. This new administrative body will, of course, need to charge some nominal fees to ships transiting the strait.

  You know, to cover safety and management costs. Maybe to fund environmental protections.

  But make no mistake, these fees will not be “tolls.” 🙄

  America’s tacit acceptance of this new management structure will mean the destruction of the regime of international laws which governed the strait prior to America and Israel attacking Iran.

• Cash. Trump has long criticized Barack Obama for releasing $1.7 billion in frozen Iranian funds as part of the JCPOA. In order to satisfy his base, Trump needs a way to claim that he, Donald Trump, did not provide any cash to Iran.

  But the Iranians are going to demand hard currency as part of America’s surrender. So Trump will want the surrender payments to come from other Middle Eastern countries. Like UAE.³

  And if America has to find a way to give aid to Gulf States in the name of repairing critical infrastructure damaged during the war? Well, dollars are fungible. You work it out.

• Nukes. The MoU will probably stipulate that the nuclear portion of the negotiations will be worked out . . . at some point in the future.

  And maybe it will. Or maybe it won’t.

  Why would it not get worked out? Because once Trump leaves this war, he ain’t never getting back in. The Iranians had a lot of leverage on Saturday. Now that this “deal” has been executed and Trump has declared victory, their leverage increases. Because for Trump to continue to sell the deal as a victory and not a surrender, he can’t take any actions that would suggest that the Iranians aren’t cooperating.

Whatever happens, the broad contours of the nuclear deal will be something like:

• Both sides agree to work it out in the medium-term future.

• At some point, Iran super-duper double promises not to seek nuclear weapons.

• This promise will be tied to a consequence which is impractical to enforce.

• Iran will wait to continue nuclear progress for a couple years while they spend efforts restocking their drone and air-defense capabilities.

So long as Iran doesn’t test a nuclear weapon before 2029, Trump will be happy. And the Iranians now know that as long as they control the strait, they are basically free to continue progress on their nuclear program so long as they don’t rub Trump’s nose in it. He just needs plausible deniability.

Bottom line. We should be explicit and clear-eyed about what this all means: America lost the war.

America began this war as either a partner or client of Israel. We began with war aims that were unclear, but which variously included regime change, unconditional surrender, the destruction of Iran’s missile capabilities, and a permanent end to Iranian nuclear ambitions.

We will exit the war with none of those goals achieved, and in order to end the war, America had to submit to a host of Iranian conditions. We lost and there is no reasonable way to hide this fact.

So what did it cost us?

Truth and consequences. Here is a rundown of (some of) the consequences of Trump’s defeat.

Iran is now a mid-major power. Before the war, Iran was a pariah state ruled by an aging mullah while fending off massive internal unrest. Post-war, Iran has made a successful transition of power; will have forced the world to stop sanctioning it; will have defeated a regime of international laws and annexed control of one of the world’s most important waterways.

No longer a pariah, Iran is now in the position to force its regional neighbors to make peace with it and learn how to live with the Islamic Republic.

China’s right hand. Have you ever wondered why the Chinese courted the Iranian regime? The ChiComs have no ideological kinship with the theocrats in Tehran. But the Chinese are dependent on the flow of oil east from the Gulf and they understood that Iran might one day control that flow. So they created a working relationship.

Now that Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, China also controls the Strait of Hormuz. Which strengthens China’s hand in dealing with wary neighbors such as South Korea, Japan, and even Australia. Not to mention Taiwan.

China’s pre-existing relationship with Iran is now an extremely valuable source of power undergirding the Chinese ambition to dominate its near-abroad.

End of the unipolar American order. There are lots of ways America influenced the world order it created following World War II. The biggest was by guaranteeing freedom of navigation. We built a bunch of institutions that benefited basically everyone (but mostly us) and took over from the British as the enforcers of freedom of navigation.

The Strait of Hormuz was governed by international laws enforced by American hard power up until 100 days ago.

Now the strait belongs to Iran. International law has been replaced. We have acceded to this change. We have proven that America no longer has the strength, will, or wisdom to enforce free navigation.

From this, everything will change.

The unipolar world will be replaced by multipolarity. If America does not control everything, then different powers will control different areas. Iran will dominate the strait. The Chinese will dominate the South China Sea. Every set of interests will have to make separate arrangements with each regional power. The Europeans will have to deal with Iran and China—and America—separately. So will the Gulf states. So will the Asian countries. And India.

First, this new order will be inherently unstable. Too many moving parts dependent on too many brittle, authoritarian regimes, with too many overlapping claimed spheres of influence.

Second, America’s relative position weakens. The fact that countries also have to placate the Iranians and the Chinese means, by definition, that our relative importance declines. Meaning that we have less leverage. Meaning that our ability to protect our interests diminishes.

America will have to content itself with bullying South America and the Caribbean nations—and seeing if we can bully the Europeans into ceding Greenland.

Fortunately, that arrangement dovetails nicely with Trump’s ambition for America. He never cared about preserving the American order. He wants to use America to further his own interests—and he can do that more aggressively if international law breaks down and he is liberated to throw America’s weight around in our hemisphere.

Cuba is next and I would not be surprised if we return to stalking Greenland.

The Israeli–American crackup. Over the last two years the government of Israel systematically destroyed its standing in the world. In America, the Netanyahu regime aggressively pursued policies designed to make Israel disliked by both Democrats and Republicans. The last redoubt of support for Israel in the United States came from Trump’s MAGA establishment.

It’s unclear what Israel will make of Trump’s “deal.” Netanyahu tried to stop it from happening—but it’s not clear that Bibi had an endgame for his war. Did he think Trump would absorb political damage for him? That Trump would stick with him forever?⁴

If Netanyahu can’t sell Trump’s surrender to the Israeli public, then he will have two options.

1. Go along with Trump’s surrender and Iran’s new power—and have his career ended.

2. Break with Trump and try to go it alone against Iran.

The first option risks prison for Netanyahu. The second would cause a rupture between Israel and Trump.

If Netanyahu breaks with Trump, it will mean that there is no world in which the next U.S. president continues America’s historic relationship with Israel.

Trump might get away with it. Gas prices will go down. Slowly. And they won’t go back to their pre-war lows.⁵ But directionally, gas will cost less than it did at its peak.

Maybe American voters will look at $3.75 gas and say, “Well things are getting better, I guess” and give Trump credit. Not enough credit to save the House, but enough to hold the Senate.

Americans won’t care about all that “end of the American order” stuff. By November they’ll still understand that inflation is high and they’ll see that interest rates are up—but they’ll barely remember that Trump started a war with Iran. Let alone that he lost it.

Arsonist and firefighter. We often talk about how Trump is both arsonist and firefighter. The Iran war is the best example to date. Trump’s decision to go to war destroyed billions and billions of dollars. Value destruction on a scale we haven’t seen in a long time. Dollars in lost shipping, decreased oil production, destroyed infrastructure. And America will have gotten nothing in return.

Let’s say this clearly: America would be in better shape today if Trump had simply taken $50B in cash and set it on fire.

But, having caused this value destruction, Trump will now claim to have fixed everything. And when our shitty reality gets 10 percent better, some significant percentage of voters will look at Trump and say, Things are finally on the right track!

If Trump gets away with it—if the House is close and Republicans hold the Senate—then what will that say about America?

Jonathan V. Last is the editor of The Bulwark and writes “The Triad” newsletter. Subscribe here.

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Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown brought his insurgent campaign to Santa Barbara on Sunday, telling friendly Democratic audiences that conditions are ripe for a wave election that tosses “enablers” of Donald Trump out of Congress.

At a Democratic Women’s Club Flag Day luncheon at the Santa Barbara Club, and at a Hope Ranch fundraiser later, Brown voiced the themes of economic populism and political optimism that shape his challenge to appointed Republican incumbent Jon Husted in Ohio, where the race is rated a toss-up.

Brown, who lost his Senate seat in the Democratic wipeout of 2024, is among the contenders in a handful of crucial states for whom the party has hopes in the Nov. 3 midterm election of netting the four seats needed to flip control of the Senate, while remaining currently favored to win back the House of Representatives.

“What we see in 2026,” Brown said at the Democratic Women’s event, “we see a bad economy that is rigged — an economy rigged against workers, against the middle class, against people struggling, against poor people.

“We see an economy that’s rigged,” he added. “We see a very, very unpopular war and we see a crooked president.”

A blue-collar voice. Before losing his 2024 re-election bid by three points — as Trump carried red state Ohio by 12 points — Brown was seen as one of his party’s best envoys to blue-collar, working-class and rural voters, traditional Democratic constituencies that have decamped in huge numbers for the Republican Party over the last decade, drawn by Trump’s economic populist promises and unbridled anti-elitist rhetoric.

Instead, Brown said, Trump in office has pursued policies — from tariffs to the unpopular Iran war — that have worsened economic conditions for working people while benefiting his own family, cronies and a small number of super-rich supporters.

“We watched the first day — at Trump’s inaugural — when the billionaires stepped down from their limousines, walking into a building that to me is a sacred space, in many ways for our country, and walked into that building, walking up to the stage like they owned the place,” he said.

“And it’s pretty clear, from day one, from January 20th at noon on, that they did own the place,” he added.

Brown said that when he talks to rural voters in Ohio, who went overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024, large numbers are unhappy with the impact on their export sales of the administration’s tariffs and trade wars; many also are suffering from spiking prices of fertilizer and diesel fuel during the Iran war. Yet many of these voters still do not blame Trump personally for their woes, he said.

“So I’m not running against Trump, nor are (other Democratic Senate candidates),” Brown said. “(We’re) running against people that have enabled all of this to happen to rural Alaska, rural Texas, rural Ohio — they’re fighting back … and those voters are going to hear that.”

Assailing congressional Republicans as “spineless sycophants,” the Ohio Democrat said that “many of these members of the Senate, many of them know better.”

“Some of them laugh at Trump behind his back,” he said. “All of them supposedly love this country. All of them took an oath of office and they simply abandoned that.”

Democratic despair. Brown said he recognizes that many Democrats despair at Trump’s relentless and ruthless attacks on cherished programs, norms and values, but he remains optimistic because of his own political experience.

First elected in the blue wave election of 2006 — when Democrats won control of the House for the first time since 1994 and took effective control of the Senate by picking up six seats, at a time when embattled Republican President George W. Bush was broadly unpopular amid the Iraq War — the candidate said there are many parallels to that political landscape this year.

“It was 2006 … people were unhappy with the war,” he said. “They were unhappy with a corrupt president. And they were unhappy with where the economy looked to be going.”

Image: Sherrod Brown speaks to Dem Women at Santa Barbara Club (Josh Molina photo).

The shocking news this week that the city has burned through its budget reserve not only reshapes debate on major policy decisions in Santa Barbara, but also instantly transforms the race for mayor between council members Kristen Sneddon and Eric Friedman.

On a new episode of Newsmakers TV, Josh Molina and Sofia Wallace join the genial host to break down a big week of City Hall stories — including the advance of long-stalled legislation to regulate vacation rentals in the city, and suspension of the once-sacrosanct 45-foot building height limit on behalf of a Music Academy project viewed as critical to revitalizing downtown.

As a political matter, acrimony and finger-pointing over the startling disclosure that the city has blown through its contingency reserve — about 15 percent of the budget — suddenly places financial stability at the center of debate in the Nov. 3 election campaign for mayor and three soon-to-be-vacant council seats.

Sneddon, a liberal once seen as a formidable front-runner for mayor because of her enthusiastic embrace of rent control in a city where two-thirds of residents are tenants, for the first time finds herself in a defensive posture. The more moderate Friedman has suddenly found an opportunity to gain traction for his candidacy amid a political free-for-all over who is to blame for this week’s grim budget developments.

Not since Claude Rains expressed “shock — shock!” that gambling was going on in Rick’s casino in Casablanca has there been a less persuasive display of surprise than the one Sneddon evinced over this week’s disclosure that the city has exhausted its reserves — after she’s supported a raft of much-debated new spending on housing, immigration services, and a costly new rent board, among other initiatives.

“What do you think we voted against the budget for?” Friedman fired back. “For this very reason…It was very clear to me that we were going to be spending into reserves. And if we didn’t address the problem, this is exactly where we would be — in emergency reserves right now.”

Until now, liberal-leaning issues like rent control and the sovereignty of bicycles on State Street have dominated debate in the nascent council campaigns. The budget has now pushed onto center stage, animating the candidacies of more moderate contenders.

Check out our discussion of these and all the other big stories out of City Hall on this week’s episode, right here on Newsmakers TV.

Watch (or listen to) Episode 572 via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or Soundcloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

By Melinda Burns Santa Barbara News-Press

More than a year ago, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors threatened to revoke the business license of every cannabis greenhouse operator in the Carpinteria Valley who failed to install state-of-the-art technology to control the stench of pot.

The deadline for compliance was this March 18, and the board turned down all requests for extensions. At the time, fully half of the 22 cannabis growers in the valley, a Mecca for the indoor industry, were operating with no odor control systems inside their greenhouses. The “skunky” smell of pot was escaping through the open roof vents and into people’s homes.

As the March deadline came and went, however, the County Executive Office mailed out notices of “intent to revoke” business licenses, and hearing dates were set for appeals in Los Angeles. A sort of last-minute stampede occurred, as growers rushed to install clean-air equipment and avoid a shutdown.

Among the last to join in, the record shows, were Graham Farrar and Kyle Kazan, the owners of G&K Produce and K&G Flowers, respectively, at 3561 Foothill Road. That seven-acre “grow” has triggered hundreds of odor complaints filed by Carpinterians with the county during the past eight years, county data show.

As of this month, county officials said, Farrar and Kazan have installed some, but not all, of the high-tech odor-control equipment they will need.

Today, only one grower is operating with no odor control inside her greenhouses, records show, and that is Heather Abdo, the owner of Bosim 1628 Management Co., a five-acre “grow” at 1628 Cravens Lane. Abdo’s appeal of the county’s notice was heard on June 1 by an administrative law judge with the Los Angeles Office of Administrative Hearings. The judge has 30 days to rule in the case.

Collin Dvorak, the owner of Pacific Grown Organics at 5892 Via Real, is scheduled for an appeals hearing on June 12: he has installed new odor-control equipment, but county officials say they have not signed off on it. Likewise, Farrar and Kazan are scheduled for an appeals hearing on June 16.

It’s a fluid situation: the hearing dates have already changed once and may change again.

Meanwhile, leaders of Concerned Carpinterians and the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis, two citizens’ groups that have long favored tougher regulations for the industry, remain unimpressed by the county’s recent enforcement efforts.

Whatever the growers are doing now, it’s not working, these critics say. They say the pungent smell of pot lingers in familiar hot spots in and around Carpinteria, from the foothills to Highway 101.

“Nothing has changed: the county has totally let us down,” said Lionel Neff, a coalition board member. “The Board of Supervisors has dropped the ball. I feel like we’re all back to Square One.”

“No more excuses.” In all, cannabis is under cultivation in 118 acres of greenhouses — nearly 90 football fields’ worth — at 19 separate operations, just beyond the limits of Carpinteria, a small beach town.

Neff and others say they’re frustrated because many growers are passing over a state-of-the-art carbon filtration system that was developed for valley growers by the Envinity Group of the Netherlands in 2021.

This technology has been proven to eliminate 84 percent of the smell of pot, on average, before it can escape through the open roof vents of a cannabis greenhouse.

The Envinity units, called “scrubbers,” cost $21,000 each and employ five stages of filtration, ionization and ultraviolet light to clean the air. In recent years, they have been installed on 41 acres of cannabis greenhouses in the valley, chiefly by members of the Van Wingerden family, at a ratio of up to 10 units per acre.

But this year, the record shows, valley growers are buying much cheaper odor-control technology, with units ranging from as low as $230 to $13,000 each.

“We’re disappointed that the growers are not using the best available equipment,” said Anna Carrillo, a member of Concerned Carpinterians who closely tracks the local cannabis industry. “We don’t know if these new machines are taking care of the odor. We don’t want to go back to filing numerous complaints that don’t get any enforcement.

“We had hoped, after eight years, that we had finally reached a solution, but we’re not there yet.”

Getting underway. Supervisor Roy Lee, a Carpinterian who won his seat in 2024 partly on the strength of his commitment to require state-of-the-art odor control in all of the valley’s cannabis greenhouses, said he was proud of the policy changes the board has made.

“We have taken a much more community-minded approach,” Lee said. “There will be no more excuses about installing these odor control technologies, and then our enforcement team will go out and investigate. If it doesn’t work, I will make the growers rip it all out and install a technology that does work.”

Errin Briggs, deputy director of county Planning & Development, said that planners were out in the field monitoring the smell of cannabis, particularly along greenhouse property lines, at least once and sometimes three times a week. They respond to odor complaints and make unannounced visits, Briggs said.

This month, planners started monitoring at greenhouse operations between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., when the growers typically open their roof vents wide. The warm air escapes, and so does a blast of the stench of pot. Monitoring between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. will start soon for the same reason, Briggs said.

With the help of Geosyntec, a national consulting and engineering firm with an office in Santa Barbara, the county is working with growers valley-wide to update their odor abatement plans so that the smell does not exceed the odor threshold set by the board at the greenhouse property lines, Briggs said. Some growers may be required to add more odor-control units to come into compliance, he said.

To date, Briggs said, the county has signed off on odor abatement plans at only two greenhouse operations — Autumn Brands at 3615 Foothill Rd. and Ceres Farm at 6030 Casitas Pass Rd.

“We are going through a process: It is not complete,” Briggs said. “I don’t believe we are letting the community down. We are actively working with every single operator to bring them into compliance. Some are already there and others are not.”

Cheaper solutions? In 2018, the Board of Supervisors approved a permissive cannabis ordinance, triggering a massive conversion of most of the cut flower greenhouses in the valley to pot. Since then, Carpinterians have filed about 4,300 odor complaints with the county.

Residents have objected to the pungent smell of pot wafting into their homes, as well as the “laundromat” smell of the greenhouse “misting” systems. These were designed to neutralize the smell of pot after it escaped into the outside air.

As of this March 31, Briggs said, all of the “misting” systems have been shut down on board orders. But since that date, county records show, residents have logged nearly 100 complaints about the smell of pot.

In March of 2025, the board gave the growers a year to install “multi-technology carbon filtration” systems or an “equivalent technology” to help get rid of the stench that was wafting into people’s homes. The wording of the board order was carefully crafted to describe Envinity scrubbers.

But in recent months, records show, the growers have chosen carbon scrubbers that cost between $11,000 and $13,000, made by Byers Scientific Inc., a Bloomington, Ind. firm founded by Marc Byers of Summerland; air purifiers without carbon filters that cost $9,000, made by Genesis Air in Lubbock, Tex.; and carbon filters that cost $230, made by Kootenay Filter of the Netherlands.

Tracing the smell. Genesis air purifiers are widely used at casinos, airports, hospitals and schools. They rely on photocatalytic oxidation (PCO), a process in which ultraviolet light creates a chemical reaction that in turn breaks down smelly gases.

Among the cannabis growers who have installed Genesis air purifiers in the valley is Hans Brand, the owner of Autumn Brands at 3615 Foothill. He hired an engineering firm to test the Genesis units last year; they were found to reduce the smell of pot by 41 percent, on average, before it could escape through the roof vents.

Autumn Brands has seven acres of cannabis under cultivation. At the property line, there were “no perceivable cannabis odors,” the testing found.

Yet Concerned Carpinterians recently sent an email to its 350 members, saying, “Now, most days, Autumn Brands cannabis smells worse than ever.”

In an interview, Jill Stassinos, a member of the group, said she has filed several odor complaints against Autumn Brands since the Genesis purifiers were installed there in March.

“It’s been seven years of fighting the smell and getting the county to regulate it,” Stassinos said. “We thought for sure, with the threat of losing their business licenses, the growers would install Envinity scrubbers. But they continue not to be good neighbors. We used to have such a great community. It’s very sad.”

But, Briggs asked: “How do they know that it’s coming from Autumn Brands?” He noted that G&K and K&G greenhouses, located at 3561 Foothill, had lately been operating with “zero odor control” next door to Autumn Brands. Under those circumstances, Briggs said, it was “really, really unfair to Hans Brand” to pin the smell on Autumn Brands.

“We’ve done a ton of testing in that area,” he said. “We find that when we walk around Autumn Brands, the property line closest to G&K has odor, but on the other side, there’s no odor … These are the problems we’re having with people ascribing odor to a specific facility.”

With regard to the Genesis air purifiers, Briggs said: “When installed and operating correctly, they appear to be effective.”

But Autumn Brands is not the only “grow” with Genesis air purifiers that has some valley residents up in arms.

On Casitas Pass Road, the neighbors of Valley Crest Farms, an eight-acre greenhouse operation at 5980 Casitas Pass Road, say the smell of pot has not abated, even after the recent installation of Genesis air purifiers there, Neff, the coalition board member, said. (According to Briggs, the installation is not complete.)

In 2023, the neighbors and the coalition filed a class action lawsuit against Valley Crest, seeking relief from what they described as “awful smells and noxious odors.” A trial date has been set for November in Santa Barbara Superior Court.

The owner of Valley Crest is Philip Fagundes, a resident of Parlier, Calif. and a member of the dairy farming family that produces milk for Horizon Organic in the Central Valley.

Briggs said planners have tested the air at Valley Crest on multiple occasions, but have not found odor at the property line in excess of the threshold set by board — a “mild or transient” odor lasting three minutes.

The county still has not approved the grower’s odor abatement plan, Briggs said. Valley Crest is equipped with four Genesis air purifiers per acre, compared to eight per acre at Autumn Brands, he said.

Ozone concerns. In a move that has further rattled some valley residents, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazards Assessment recently recommended against the use of PCO devices for cannabis odor reduction because of safety concerns, primarily with respect to ozone, but also because of potential releases of toxic chemical byproducts.

Accordingly, the Air Pollution Control District of Santa Barbara County recommends but does not require that PCO air cleaners be equipped with carbon filters for cannabis odor control.

Genesis offers an air purifier that is equipped with carbon filters, but it is more expensive and uses more electrical power. The Carpinteria Valley growers have chosen not to purchase this model.

At the same time, the Genesis air purifier has been certified by the California Air Resources Board as a device that does not produce harmful levels of ozone. And the testing at Autumn Brands found that air samples did not exceed the health standards for ozone or toxic byproducts.

In certain industries, Briggs said, hydrocarbons in the air that are broken down by PCO units may generate ozone and toxic byproducts, but it has been shown at Autumn Brands that this does not occur in cannabis greenhouses.

“The APCD is commenting from a very conservative perspective,” Briggs said.

“A rug pulled.” At G&K and K&G on Foothill, Farrar and Kazan had been proposing to install Envinity scrubbers. But they told the board in March that they wouldn’t be able to get them in place until April of 2027, primarily because of delays in installing power upgrades. The board rejected their request for an extension.

“The reason they were pursuing Envinity is that it was their impression that that was what the county was mandating,” said Larry Conlan, the growers’ attorney. “It felt like a rug was pulled by the county at the last minute.”

Now, under the threat of losing their business licenses, Farrar and Kazan are installing Byers scrubbers. They have not yet revised their odor abatement plan to reflect the change, Briggs said.

The two partners are major players in the cannabis industry in California. Their company, Glass House Brands, is vertically integrated, with greenhouse operations in Carpinteria, a massive greenhouse operation in Camarillo, a manufacturing lab in Lompoc and 10 dispensaries throughout the state.

Besides G&K and K&G, Farrar and Kazan also own Mission Health Associates at 5601 Casitas Pass Rd., where they have installed Envinity scrubbers. Their Mission Health operation also has been a frequent target of residents’ odor complaints.

Byers Scientific developed the outdoor “misting” systems that growers previously used to try to neutralize the smell of pot. The company’s marketing materials claim that Byers scrubbers have “greater than 90 percent odor control efficiency.”

The technology “performs pretty well” at Farmlane, a 14-acre “grow” at 1400 and 1540 Cravens Lane, Briggs said. The owners of Farmlane, David and Cindy Van Wingerden, installed Byers scrubbers back in 2021.

“We do have odor complaints in that area still,” Briggs said, adding that the growers’ odor abatement plan has not yet been approved. Also, he noted, Bosim is operating next door to Farmlane with no odor-control equipment in place.

Every greenhouse setting is different, and so is the ventilation and the way the odor-control technology is employed, Briggs said; plus, everyone is growing different strains of cannabis with different odor concentrations.

“The odor-control systems are all going to be a little bit different, even if they’re using the same technology,” Briggs said.

Bosim’s appeal. According to the County Executive Office, if a cannabis grower loses his business license, he or she would have to shut down, install odor-control equipment and reapply; and he or she would have to reapply for state Department of Cannabis Control cultivation licenses as well — in all, a potentially lengthy and expensive process.

So far, Heather Abdo, the owner of Bosim, is the only grower in the valley to go before an administrative law judge to try to save her cannabis greenhouse operation.

On June 1, Los Angeles Judge Irina Tentser heard Abdo’s appeal of the county’s “notice of intent” to revoke her business license. The hearing was conducted by video conference and lasted more than three hours.

First off, Craig Wasserman, Abdo’s lawyer, contended that the county’s “notice of intent” to revoke Abdo’s license was not valid: he pointed to a typo in the ordinance code cited in the notice.

“This is a substantial jurisdictional defect,” Wasserman said. “It’s very serious. The mistake should have been corrected.”

Abdo testified that she had asked the county Board of Supervisors for a yearlong extension of the March deadline for installing odor-control technology; and she said the county Planning & Development Department had recommended that the board grant her request.

Abdo also told the judge that she had recently finished paying $20,000 in past-due fees to the department. She said she had submitted a revised odor abatement plan for the installation of Byers scrubbers and was waiting for the department to tell her how many she would need to buy.

Since the fall of 2023, testing performed by the county at Bosim has never detected any odor that led to a notice of violation, Abdo said.

Wasserman said Abdo had been treated with “fundamental unfairness and lack of due process.”

The judge allowed a number of documents backing Abdo’s claims to be included as evidence for her appeal, overruling objections by Deputy County Counsel Sara Brucker.

Brucker argued that the only relevant issue before the judge was Abdo’s failure to comply with the board’s March deadline.

“Appellant was fully aware of the deadline,” she said.

Questioned by Brucker, Abdo testified that she had not received or installed Byers units in her greenhouses or fully paid for them. She said financing was available from the company.

Brucker told the judge that only the CEO, and not Planning and Development, had the authority to revoke a business license. She said the board had found “insufficient grounds” to grant Abdo’s request for an extension, in part because she had delayed submitting her revised odor abatement plan to the county until this March. In any case, Brucker said, Abdo’s request was irrelevant to the hearing, “as that decision was already made.”

In response to a question from Tentser, Brucker clarified that the board order applied to all growers, even if their operations had not been cited for odor violations.

“The appellant has not installed odor-control technology as required,” she said.

Bottom line. In a valley weary of fighting over cannabis, many residents won’t go public with their thoughts about the industry. Here’s what one grower said recently, asking to remain anonymous:

“I wish we could all resolve this in a way that we can hold hands with the community. I wish more could have been done by more growers sooner, so we didn’t have to have the county step in to solve this for us. It’s been very bitter. It’s really unfortunate. It was pretty clear a year ago that this was exactly the outcome we could expect.”

Melinda Burns is an investigative reporter with more than 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. She was a senior writer at the News-Press during a 21-year career at the paper, ending in 2006.

Image: YouTube.

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(Editor's note: A deep gloom has settled over the country, as recent public opinion surveys reflect record-low levels of optimism about the future. It's a tough time to be entering adulthood — amid an unsettled economy, the multiple anxieties of an AI future, and the toxic cloud of Trumpism — and thus an even tougher time to be an adult offering advice to young people. So we were struck by the wisdom, humility, and compassion woven through the commencement address that former D.A. Joyce Dudley delivered to Bishop Garcia Diego High School graduates last Friday night, and wanted to share her words with you. — jr)

By Joyce Dudley

Good evening graduates, families, faculty, and friends,

Id like to dedicate my words today to Dwight Faulding, who passed away about one month ago.

From my perspective Dwight was a true Cardinal - living a selfless life by always going out of his way to be inclusive and help others.

Thank you all for inviting me into your community this evening, and into this moment that is at once an emotional ending, and a very exciting beginning.

Based upon the generous introduction I was given you can see I come to you from a life that has taken many unexpected turns. Although I served as your District Attorney, I also spent years as an educator and writer, while proudly serving on many non- profit Boards and raising four fabulous sons, one of whom was a Cardinal; Matt Capritto, that connection makes this day especially meaningful for me.

Respect and dignity. Your education at Bishop has been rooted in a vision that insists upon dignity—your own and everyone else’s. During your time here you have been taught that every life demands respect. And every life carries responsibility.

So what do YOU want to do with your responsibility?

You will now officially step into a world that is complicated, sometimes noisy, sometimes unjust, and often in need of courage. You bring with you not just knowledge, but habits of mind and heart that will shape your choices … when no one is watching.

In my years as a prosecutor, I learned that justice is not an abstract idea. It is a series of decisions made by imperfect people in real time.

It requires judgment, humility, and restraint. It asks you to hold two truths at once: that wrongdoing must be addressed, and that the person who has done wrong is still a person to be treated with kindness and respect

My best friend the former Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey once said, “Treat everyone like you’d like to be treated if you screwed up.”

Because, in reality, we all make mistakes, and that can be a good thing!

President Obama once said:

“You can’t let your mistakes define you, you have to let your mistakes teach you”

And I would add to that, that you should re-purpose your mistakes by recognizing them as such, and then turning them into lessons.

The easy path - and the right path. In addition to learning from mistakes made by you and others - you will also face moments—perhaps sooner than you expect—when the easy path and the right path are not the same.

In those moments, the outstanding education you received at Bishop will matter. Not because it gave you all the answers, but because it trained you to ask the better questions.

Like: Who will be affected by this decision?

Who is missing from this conversation?

What does fairness, grace and kindness require here?

And then, perhaps most importantly: What kind of person do I want to be when this moment has passed?

Now, I’d like to share something about me, something you might not expect from someone who has spent so much time in courtrooms and lecture halls:

Some of the most important lessons in my life came not from arguments or discussions , but from movement.

Initially: Dance. But later, quiet hikes in nature. Both of which were at times very challenging. Both taught me discipline and presence. It also taught me that you cannot fake balance—you either have it or you falter or you fall, and then you must get up and try again.

You will each find your own version of that—some passion, that reminds you that you are more than just your résumé. Hold onto that. It will keep you grounded when the world tries to measure you only by your achievements.

A dream of kindness. Speaking of which, my dad died when he was 55 and I was 21. I adored my father who was a man of few words.

Before he died he told me he thought I’d grow up to be “a successful woman with a well-adjusted family.” Achievements were very important to my hard-working father, or so I thought.

Fifteen years later, the night before I began my job at the District Attorney’s Office, I had a dream about him. He was standing in a green meadow. I started running towards him, because I knew he would just be here for a matter of seconds. As I ran towards him I began to yell out my achievements, but his expression didn’t change.

When I finally reached him he used his quivering breath to ask me a question “But are you kind?”

I froze, because I needed a moment to consider his question. With his last breath he said “Because that’s all that matters on this side.”

And then he was gone.

Sadly, I never dreamed about him again.

What that dream taught me was to make a daily decision to be kind, especially when it is easier to be indifferent. To listen when it is easier to speak. To stay when it is easier to walk away.

As you go forward, you will carry many identities—professional titles, personal roles, perhaps even contradictions. I’ve lived that myself. Prosecutor and storyteller. Scholar and performer.

These are not opposites; they are facets. You do not have to be only one thing. In fact, you will be more effective—and more fully human—if you allow your different strengths to inform one another.

Conscience and kindness. Finally, speaking to the families here. You have invested not just in their education, but in their formation. You have supported, encouraged, and sometimes gently insisted.

Today is your day as well. Thank you for the love that brought these graduates to this moment.

Graduates, as you leave this place, you do not leave behind what you have learned here. You carry it with you—in your decisions, your relationships, and your sense of purpose.

Wherever you go next, remember this: the world does not just need your success. It needs your conscience. Your kindness.

It needs your willingness to stand up when it matters.

It needs your belief that every person has dignity—and your commitment to act accordingly.

And if, at some point, you find yourself uncertain—as you will—return to that simple, enduring question: What is the right thing to do here?

Listen to the soft spoken voice of your conscience. Act with honesty and courage

And trust that, over time, those small, faithful choices will shape not only your life, but the lives of others.

Congratulations, Class of 2026 Go forward with forgiveness, wisdom, kindness, courage, and hope.

Thank you.

This transcript of Joyce Dudley’s commencement address was edited for clarity and continuity.

Image: Joyce Dudley (courtesy).

A person receiving government food benefits in Santa Barbara County gets about $6.20 a day to feed themselves.

That’s too much for the Trump administration.

On a new episode of Newsmakers TV, SB Independent writer Christina McDermott details how more than 5,000 people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program scrambled this week to comply with new requirements — pushed through by the White House and its congressional allies — to keep their meager rations, and how local nonprofits are stepping up to help.

The Indy‘s Ryan P. Cruz returns to break down the latest numbers, compiled by local immigration rights groups, that show the scale and scope of the administration’s mass deportation campaign on the Central Coast.

And Josh Molina of the News-Press updates the ever-so-slow vote count from Tuesday’s primary election — including a late surge by challenger Luis Esparza, who has just overtaken incumbent Thomas Adams in a Superior Court judgeship race.

The gang also dissects this week’s kumbaya session at City Hall, where council members took turns gushing over an agreement with Yardi Brothers to take over much of the long-stalled redevelopment of Paseo Nuevo mall — despite lots of outstanding questions about how the plan would affect ongoing efforts to build hundreds of units of new housing downtown.

Plus: the genial host offers some soft-spoken comparisons between six bucks of food a day and the mob boss president’s billions of dollars in corrupt gluttony.

All this and more, right here on Newsmakers TV.

Watch the episode on YouTube below or via this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

As every school child knows, Election Night in California is actually just the kickoff for Election Weeks - or sometime Election Months.

Estimates vary but there are well over a million votes out there yet to be counted statewide, which are unlikely to create seismic shifts in most of the results reported since polls closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday - but which could make a difference in extremely close contests.

Supporters of Tom Steyer are twisting themselves in mathematical knots to make the case that he could still slip into the November runoff for governor, but our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest the fall match-up is expected to remain between Republican Steve Hilton and Steyer’s fellow Democrat Xavier Becerra.

Then again, we barely passed Algebra II, so your mileage may vary.

While a weary state and nation hold their collective breath and await final numbers, here are five key takeaways from the June 2 primary.

Woody Allen was right. “Eighty percent of life is showing up,” a phrase famously if imprecisely attributed to problematic filmmaker Woody Allen, came to define the low-profile but high-stakes local race for Clerk, Recorder and Assessor, as aging incumbent Joe Holland dubiously sought a seventh term despite a chronic disease that has kept him out of the office for two years. Guided by über-operative Mary Rose, his chief deputy Melinda Greene combined boundless energy, a keen mastery of the stultifying details of the job, and a relentlessly sunny attitude to stomp her former boss, and send him into a much-deserved retirement.

A pox on rich guys. A quarter of a billion dollars is couch change to a guy like Steyer, but as long as he was setting money on fire in his campaign, it would have done more good for California if he’d just handed each of his one million voters $250 in cash, which is what his political investment works out to at the moment. Steyer is just the latest in a long line of rich and successful business types who failed as California political candidates — see Norton Simon, William Matson Roth and Al Checchi , Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Bill Simon , among others - self-financing billionaire blowhard know-it-alls who looked at the governorship or a U.S. Senate seat as entry level jobs and were rejected by state voters.

Who is Steve Hilton? As of now, the November run-off for governor looks like a run-of-the-mill partisan contest — except that Republican contender Hilton is not a run-of-the-mill candidate. Becerra’s between-the-lines biography as a political lifer is relatively well-known, but Hilton remains an enigma to voters, many of whom may be surprised when they get a load of his, um, colorful background as a former British political operative who “became the stuff of legend and frequent derision,” according to a Politico profile of his years as an adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron; among other things, he was “immortalized as the unbearably pretentious spin doctor Stewart Pearson in (the TV series) “The Thick of It,” purveyor of such pearls of wisdom as: ‘I like the plasmic nature of your data modeling.’” Read the whole thing.

We are an unserious people, living in a decadent society. It’s a common, if condescending, trope among the political class to view and forgive a vast swath of the electorate as “low information voters” - workaday folk too beset by day-to-day economic and family demands to pay much attention to the details of American civic life. But can’t we draw the line somewhere? The latest vote totals from the Secretary of State show that so far, 18,932 Californians have voted for Eric Swalwell, the disgraced former congressman and erstwhile Democratic front-runner who was driven from the race by some of the most revolting, substantiated allegations of sexual battery since Nero ruled the roost in Rome. Seriously, who are these people?

American politics, awash in slop. The race for the Fifth District Board of Supervisors race was jolted several weeks ago, when the Santa Barbara County Republican Party sponsored and released an AI-generated, racist ad depicting Democratic candidate Ricardo Valencia as a clueless clown stumbling around a dystopian Santa Maria landscape for which a Spanish-inflected narrator blames him. While local GOP hacks predictably defended the digital stink bomb with nothing-to-see-here gaslighting, its author - the son of Santa Barbara’s favorite Jan. 6 insurrectionist Karen Jones - stepped forward to promise much more is on the way, an unhappy development that aligns with growing evidence that California politics will be engulfed by such internet AI swill by November.

Did we mention we’re glad we’re old?

A deluge of final polling in the California governor’s race shows Republican Steve Hilton and Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer locked in a three-way race that will send one of them home and two of them to a November runoff.

In Santa Barbara County, the big stories in Tuesday’s primary election will be who moves on to the general election in the wide-open contest for the Fifth District seat on the Board of Supervisors — among independents Maribel Aguilera and Cory Bantilan and Democrat Ricardo Valencia — and whether embattled six-term incumbent Joe Holland survives a fierce challenge from Melinda Green for the post of (breathe) Assessor-Clerk-Recorder-Voter Registrar.

Thirty-six hours before the first results come in, Josh Molina of the News-Press and the Independent’s Nick Welsh (despite serious struggles with his computer’s balky camera!) — who have closely covered one of the weirder election seasons in memory — join the genial host to break down the developments, latest campaign intel and political gossip, and to help explain why all of it matters.

Plus: what’s behind a surprising bid to unseat a long-sitting local judge, that city ballot measure you’ve never heard of, and a fearless forecast for at least one key race.

All this and more, right here, right now in a special pre-election episode of Newsmakers TV.

Check out the new show via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

For half a century, California Humanities has helped support vital cultural organizations in Santa Barbara — as venerable as the Historical Society, as popular as the Museum of Natural History, as renowned as the International Film Festival, as beloved as Boxtales Theatre Company, as essential as the Public Library.

California Humanities is the statewide partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The independent nonprofit, founded in 1975, has distributed more than $44 million in grants for thousands of community projects large and small throughout the state.

All that changed on April 2, 2025, when the Endowment got “DOGEd.”

“I received a notice late in the evening on April 2, 2025, letting me know that our funding — which we’d had for 50 years at that point — was immediately terminated,” recalled Rich Noguchi, president and CEO of California Humanities. “We were, as we say, ‘DOGEd.’”

DOGE, of course, was the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-directed, right-wing tech bro Red Guard cadre that for a few months at the start of the Trump administration terrorized Washington by recklessly and mindlessly slashing any program or budget its witless operatives deemed “woke.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law in 1965 to ensure the federal government supported culture as much as science, was high on the hit list — and DOGE’s zeroing out of its budget triggered painful downstream impacts for California Humanities and organizations like it in all 49 other states.

This week, as the California Humanities board convened in Santa Barbara for its regular meeting, Noguchi stopped by Newsmakers TV to discuss the real-life impacts of the federal cuts on people and programs throughout California, the state of play in its efforts to reclaim federal funds and secure emergency state financing, and the organization’s strategy to pivot toward fundraising from private donors.

“We put all of our grant-making programs on pause” after the DOGE notices, Noguchi recalled. “All the money that was going out to organizations was put on pause. We also had many current grantees on multi-year grants — commitments we had made — and we then had to send them letters saying we no longer had the funding to fulfill those commitments.

“So that was really painful,” he added.

In our conversation, Noguchi also described his personal and professional journey to his current post, shaped in large part by experience as a Japanese American growing up with the generational trauma triggered by his parents each being sent, at the age of 5, to a concentration camp as part of the World War II Japanese American internment program — for which President Ronald Reagan formally apologized in 1988.

“The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was signed by Ronald Reagan, and it was an apology for the incarceration,” he said. “And what they found in the research to build the case for that legislation is that there were three things that contributed to the constitutional violation and loss of rights for Japanese Americans: fear and hysteria; a failure of political leadership; and outright racism.”

At a time when constitutional rights and the rule of law are once again under siege in the U.S., Noguchi discussed the abiding importance of work being done to preserve and protect humanities programs that advance critical thinking and the fundamental values of a democratic republic.

Watch our full conversation via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Community treasure and über-philanthropist Sara Miller McCune uplifted the reborn News-Press this week, even as another venerable Santa Barbara institution moved to undermine the upstart news operation.

McCune, who played a cameo role in the tumultuous recent history of the News-Press, is underwriting professional salaries for a squad of 12-week summer reporting interns, the outlet reported Monday, effectively quadrupling its editorial firepower.

By contrast, the historic, private Santa Barbara Club in recent days blindsided the News-Press with a startling, censorious rebuke: Five months after inviting Will Belfiore, its boyish publisher, to address Club members as part of its “Distinguished Speaker Series,” executives abruptly pulled the plug — five days before the long-scheduled date for his presentation.

The cancellation unfolded behind-the-scenes in less than 24 hours, as a handful of influential members — most notably Noozhawk Publisher and club stalwart Bill Macfadyen — agitated to torpedo the speech, according to a review of email correspondence and conversations with half a dozen club sources, most of whom requested anonymity to preserve personal relationships.

The episode has ruffled feathers within Santa Barbara’s oldest social club, leading its president to add a special item to this week’s governing board meeting agenda.

At first glance a trifling tempest in a teapot, the cancellation offers a rare glimpse inside the Beaux-Arts walls of the Club’s 1904 Francis W. Wilson downtown clubhouse — an institution founded in 1892 that plays an under-appreciated but outsized role in the local power structure, where business, political, media, and multi-generational landowning elites meet informally to discuss matters of mutual, small-town self-interest.

As a journalistic matter, the Club’s blackballing of the News-Press is the latest twist in a decades-long swirl of controversy surrounding the landmark California news title. It’s also a snapshot of the bitter rivalries in Santa Barbara’s fiercely competitive media landscape, where a handful of underfunded outlets ferociously contend for readers, advertisers, subscribers, and donors while viewing the new online publication as an unwelcome interloper — although the News-Press traces its founding as a Santa Barbara publication to 1868.

“It was definitely a shock,” said the 28-year-old publisher Belfiore, a Santa Barbara High academic all-star and Harvard grad. “It’s a little bit surprising to have that happen here in my hometown.”

Oh, never mind. Last December, the newly-appointed leader of the relaunched Santa Barbara News-Press was delighted to receive a warmly worded invitation to address the Santa Barbara Club membership.

“I am 100 percent sure that our members would be very interested in knowing what the SB News-Press has been up to and what the future is going to look like for the paper,” General Manager Linda Spann emailed him, offering a spring slot on the “Distinguished Speaker Series” schedule.

On May 13 — five days before his scheduled May 18 talk — Belfiore was shocked to learn his appearance was suddenly off.

“We are truly so sorry that we need to cancel,” the club manager emailed him. “While some members were genuinely excited to hear your perspective … the News-Press also carries a complicated and controversial history within our community. Unfortunately, many members expressed strong concerns about hosting this event.”

Unbeknownst to Belfiore, his appearance had been targeted by a last-minute flurry of complaints from members, including Macfadyen — among the most consistent public critics of the News-Press’s return, who has sniped at it in his weekly column while urging community leaders not to support it.

When Newsmakers began inquiring about details behind the cancellation, Club staff, members, and directors were less than forthcoming.

“I can’t comment — it’s above my pay grade,” Spann replied, expressing concern about losing her job.

Macfadyen, responding to multiple voicemails, texts, and email from Newsmakers inviting him to discuss the matter, responded at post time with a brief email:

“Yes, I’ve received your barrage. As you should know, I’ve made it a decades-long practice not to comment publicly on that newspaper. If I ever do have anything to say about it, I’ll do it on Noozhawk.”

In a cell phone interview, Club President Ellen Robinson said that she made the final decision to cancel Belfiore, acting upon Spann’s recommendation, but declined to identify club members whose objections led to her doing so.

Asked directly if Macfadyen was among the group, she told me, “Bill is immediate past president (of the Santa Barbara Club)…his voice is certainly heard.”

Our story to date. From its frontier origins through the halcyon days of the 1950s and ‘60s under the late Thomas M. Storke, the News-Press shaped and served Santa Barbara as one of its foundational institutions — influence that grew after the New York Times acquired it in 1985 and briefly continued after it was sold in 2000 to idiosyncratic billionaire Wendy McCaw.

Then came the infamous 2006 “News-Press meltdown”: mass resignations, firings, lawsuits, union organizing, boycotts, and community rallies as the new owner waged economic, legal and journalistic warfare against her own staff (including me). At one point, Miller McCune stepped forward and offered to buy the paper, which publicly rebuffed and insulted her.

The events of 2006–07 began a slow descent into irrelevance and, finally, bankruptcy in 2023. In bankruptcy court, local philanthropists bought the century-and-a-half-old archive before it could be sold off to an offshore digital click farm, donating the print archives to the Historical Museum and the domain name and digital properties to Newswell — a nonprofit connected to Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism.

Last year, Newswell, which also operates news properties in Stockton and San Diego, relaunched the News-Press as an online outlet, bringing on Belfiore as its first hire. His first assignment was to rebuild the badly damaged brand by forging collaborative partnerships and building community support.

With speeches like the one he was slated to deliver at the Santa Barbara Club, for instance.

How the deal went down. A few days before last Christmas, Club director Spann personally invited Belfiore to speak, after members intrigued by the effort to rejuvenate a vintage local institution suggested the idea to her.

Club staff members and Belfiore quickly agreed on May 18 as the date, and he set about crafting a slide deck describing the outlet’s dramatic odyssey.

A flyer about the event was finally produced on Tuesday, May 12, and, shortly after noon, Belfiore received an all-clear email from Spann: “We’re excited to hear your presentation on Monday.”

Less than 24 hours later, at 8:45 a.m. on May 13, however, he received another email — informing him the talk had been axed.

Newsmakers learned that a few members who picked up the flyer on Tuesday expressed objections over lunch that day — in part from lingering distaste for the McCaw-era News-Press. At least one member also voiced concern that Belfiore would solicit donations, a violation of Club tradition (notably, Spann’s otherwise cheery email to him that afternoon also included a reminder: “We are not allowed to ask members for any donations. No passing the hat”).

When Macfadyen weighed in with Spann and other members during the next few hours, free-floating concern intensified.

Free marketeer Macfadyen may be forgiven for perceiving the News-Press as a competitive threat: among other things, the outlet hired Josh Molina, who had been Noozhawk’s star beat reporter and scoop artist for the previous decade, as editor in chief last year.

Whatever the motivation, his complaints were taken seriously at the upper levels of the Club.

Club President Robinson — who also serves on the boards of the Ensemble Theatre Company, the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, and the Carpinteria Arts Center — said she had looked forward to hearing Belfiore’s talk, but the 11th-hour flurry of objections was too much to ignore.

“Significant concerns were expressed by a number of members,” she said, acknowledging receipt of “Ten or fewer” emails in total. “Given the limited time frame, we wanted to give (Belfiore) as much advance notice as possible.”

Bottom Line. A week after being canceled, Belfiore remained bemused but characteristically sunny — and more focused on Miller McCune’s generosity than on his rebuff.

“The reason I was given was that members were uncomfortable with the topic, which was going to be the News-Press,” he told Newsmakers. “What I can say is that the story here is the rebirth of the local News-Press and how exciting it is.

“The outpouring of community support has been incredible,” he added. “That is the very crux of the story.”

(Editor’s note: Newsmakers Editor Jerry Roberts serves on the Advisory Board of the Santa Barbara News-Press online news site. His fight for journalistic ethics at the defunct News-Press daily newspaper is chronicled in the documentary “Citizen McCaw”).

Images: Noozhawk/SB News Press/Santa Barbara Club logos, signage; Above: the leaflet announcing Will Belfiore’s appearance that triggered opposition in the dining room of the Santa Barbara Club.

ICE agents battering down apartment doors at 3 a.m. Slick oil company lawyers swiping legal jurisdiction over local environmental lawsuits. Tens of thousands of Santa Barbara County’s poorest residents stripped of health care.

That’s the litany of the latest damage the Trump administration has inflicted on the Central Coast — heartbreaking but hugely consequential topics tackled on this week’s episode of Newsmakers TV.

Nick Welsh, Josh Molina and Ryan P. Cruz join the genial host for analysis, behind-the-scenes reports and commentary. The gang also examines the latest from Santa Barbara City Hall, from new developments in the rent control saga to the latest twist in the unending debate over the future of Paseo Nuevo — and, of course, the freshest political gossip from the campaign trail.

Plus: Jerry’s head explodes over the errant sailor linked to Channel Islands incineration.

All this and more, right here, right now on Newsmakers TV.

Watch the new episode (Episode 568) on YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.Thanks for reading SB Newsmakers! This post is public so feel free to share it with a friend and invite them to subscribe for our singular coverage of Santa Barbara.

By Miles Taylor /Defiance.News

Donald Trump is preparing to carry out one of the largest heists in U.S. history.

He is reportedly preparing to use nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money to pay off the criminals he pardoned, the allies who tried to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf, and — through a constellation of family-adjacent vehicles — quite possibly himself. The mechanism, reported last night by ABC News, is brazen beyond belief.

According to the report, the president is preparing to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion slush fund to compensate his political allies, specifically, those who were prosecuted during the Biden administration for crimes. By design, Trump will personally control this fund. And the money will come straight out of the U.S. Treasury.

The beneficiaries are said to include Trump’s former staff and operatives who sought to help him overturn the 2020 election and were prosecuted for doing so, as well as the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.

These are, of course, the men and women who beat police officers with flagpoles, smeared feces on the walls of the building, and hunted the Vice President of the United States through the halls of Congress while chanting for his execution. Trump pardoned them on his first day back in office. Now he proposes to make some of these people into millionaires.

While the settlement language is expected to bar the president from receiving payments personally on three of his existing claims, it doesn’t bar the constellation of companies, trusts, and family vehicles that orbit the Trump name from filing their own.

But we may never know how he spends the cash. Because, by the explicit design of the arrangement, there will be almost no public accounting of where $1.7 billion in American taxpayer money goes.

No transparency. Under the proposed terms, the commission would not be required to disclose its procedures, its deliberations, or the identities of those it chooses to enrich.

While a five-member group will reportedly be appointed to distribute the money, Trump will have the authority to remove those commissioners without cause, making him the de facto overseer. Any leftover cash will be “returned” to the Treasury shortly before Trump leaves office (a detail that tells you everything about who this fund is for and how long the window stays open).

I need to do little editorializing here. This is — by its size, scope, and sheer audacity — one of the most corrupt acts in American history. Full stop.

Trump himself acknowledged the obvious problem in October of last year.

“It’s interesting because I’m the one that makes a decision, right, and, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

Do we need more of a confession than that?

Even Trump himself, a man with a famously elastic relationship to the concept of conflict of interest, could see that suing his own government and collecting from his own Treasury looked, in his own words, “sort of looks bad.”

So his lawyers found a workaround. He will not collect personally, at least not at first. He’ll simply control the spigot; the spigot will pour onto whomever he chooses; and those people will know, forever, who gave them the money and to whom they owe it.

Break the law - get paid. Without a doubt, this will be a foundation for impeachment articles against Donald Trump. But the scale of the corruption is so much bigger than just one man. By doing this, he’s creating a sort of “break-the-law, get-paid” system the likes of which we’ve only seen in the worst, self-serving autocracies.

The American Founders feared this, deeply.

The entire architecture of the appropriations power in Article I (the requirement that Congress, not the executive, decide how public money is spent) exists precisely to prevent a president from doing what Donald Trump is about to do. It was to prevent the president from becoming a profligate king and using taxpayer funds to build ballrooms and self deal and direct federal contracts into friendly pockets.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 58 that the power of the purse was “the most complete and effectual weapon” against executive tyranny.

Trump is now taking that weapon, pointing it at the Treasury, and telling the guards to open the vault. He’s taking the bags of cash and planning to give them to his fellow criminals. He is — in Madison’s construct — creating tyranny right before our eyes.

As part of this scheme, the people who will get rich from our taxpayer dollars are not whistleblowers, jailed journalists, or Americans whose civil liberties were trampled. They are not protesters who were shot in the streets by DHS agents.

No, no. They are people who were prosecuted because they committed crimes. The Jan. 6 defendants were not victims of a “politicized” Department of Justice. They were defendants because they assaulted police officers on live television in front of the entire world.

And now, you, me — anyone who pays taxes — will be paying them for it.

A blueprint for stealing. Consider the precedent that this sets. A future president of either party will now have a blueprint to steal billions from the Treasury. Sue the government, settle the suit on your own terms, and stand up a “commission” whose members you can fire at will.

But it’s even worse than that.

This deal reportedly allows billions of dollars to be handed out in untraceable, undisclosed transactions! Once the U.S. government vaults have been opened for this purpose, they can be opened again and again. The constitutional dam will have been breached.

Put another way, this is the moral architecture of a protection racket. You pay tribute to the boss. The boss makes your problems go away and signs a check. If you cross him, the money stops. But if you stay loyal, the money flows. Every Jan. 6 defendant who pockets a check from this fund will know who signed it, as will every former Trump official he rewards for having been willing to break the law for him and torch the U.S. Constitution in a quixotic quest to remain in power.

Might Trump also use this fund to persuade people to keep breaking the law for him? We’ll see. I know what these offers sound like, because I’ve gotten one. In early 2019, in a meeting at the U.S. Southern Border, Trump turned to me and other officials and told us to take actions that would have been illegal. We reminded him that we couldn’t do what he was asking. He told us to break the law anyway.

“If you go to jail for it, I’ll pardon you.”

That’s what Trump said to us. We declined. But now he’s adding an incentive plan to such offers. Break the law for me, and I won’t just pardon you — I’ll make you filthy rich!

The Founders gave us a republic, and they warned us, repeatedly, what would end it. Once again, I’ll take us back to the Federalist Papers. Hamilton, in Federalist 65, described the impeachment power as the remedy for “the abuse or violation of some public trust” for offenses “which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

There is no clearer abuse of public trust than the conversion of the Treasury into a personal patronage fund in order to enrich his allies and potentially himself.

Why this line is different. We’ve crossed a great many lines in the last seventeen months, friends. This one is different.

This one is the line between a republic that still pretends to operate on rules and a republic that has openly accepted that the rules are whatever the hell the man at the top says they are. The slush fund is the proof.

We didn’t need any more reasons to throw the bums out this November in the midterm elections. But now we have the biggest one yet, at least in dollars.

If Congress does not stop this — which the cowardly and spineless moral contortionists of the MAGA right almost certainly will not — then we need a brand new Congress. The U.S. Treasury is not the president’s personal wallet. And if he makes it one, our representatives should be ready to impeach and remove him.

In the meantime, pay attention to who takes the money. Pay attention to whether anyone declines Trump’s payoffs. History keeps a ledger, and so do we.

Miles Taylor is former Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, the author of “A Warning” and “Blowback” and the founder of Defiance.org. Subscribe to their newsletter here.

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National reporting about the California governor’s race in recent weeks has focused on such weighty matters as: the lack of A-list celebrities running; the increasingly shrinking chance that two Republicans make the run-off; what Democratic front-runner Xavier Becerra said to a TV reporter before an interview; and whether Republican favorite Steve Hilton knows the difference a street taco and a Del Taco.

L.A. Times ace columnist Mark Z. Barabak, who’s been following campaigns across the state for 40 years, reports that few such profound issues are on the radar of Actual Voters, as his latest reporting trip talking to real people in gas stations, fast food joints and shopping malls made clear.

“I think there's a big disconnect,” between what voters and the pundit class are focused on, Barabak said in a return appearance on Newsmakers TV this week.

“Not a single one of them said, ‘Wow, I really want a governor who's going to entertain me and jolly me and keep me happy and be captivating and sparkle and all that stuff.,’" he said. “I mean, I heard a lot about affordability. I heard a lot about gas. I heard a lot about groceries. I heard a lot about people who were worried about their kids, or a 30-year-old waitress who said that ‘I can't think of buying a home and all my friends are moving away.’”

So despite the sentiments of Big Foot bloviators from Back East, Barabak added, “I think this is the most compelling California governor’s race in ages.”

In our conversation, the LA Times ace broke down the state of the play in the race, less than three weeks before the June 2 primary; offered capsule assessments of the top contenders; reflected on the seismic political shocks reverberating from the national struggle over redistricting; provided his own nightmare scenario of the endgame of this year’s white-hot partisan warfare; and shared the latest on the presidential prospects of political frenemies Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.

Plus: the genial host discloses the most valuable candid advice he ever got about covering politics.

All this and more, right here, right now on Newsmakers TV.

Check out our conversation with Mark Barabak (Episode 578) via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

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(Editor’s note: A version of this story is also published in this week’s edition of the Montecito Journal. /jr).

Memo from our Department of Eternal Mysteries and Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Whew, I just finished checking out all 61 candidates for governor and I’m leaning towards the guy who traces his lineage to the Mayflower and sold his pest control company to become a chaplain. Now what else do I need to know about the June 2 primary?

A: Have you cast your ballot for Clerk, Recorder, Assessor and Elections chief yet?

Q: Is that an elected office or a Rube Goldberg machine?

A: It’s one of those things you don’t really notice, like sewer pipes or silicon chips, that’s actually important. The office collects and chronicles the basic records on which our economy runs — business filings, mortgages, deeds, liens, births, deaths, marriages — and documents the market for our most important local industry: real estate. Oh, and they also run free and fair elections.

Q: That sounds like more than a full-time job.

A: Well, yes and no. The man who currently holds it, in office since 2002, hasn’t actually gone into work for a couple of years.

Q: WTAF?

A: His name is Joe Holland and, sadly, he has a chronic illness and stopped showing up. It took a while to notice — probably because he was first elected five years before the iPhone came out and had been re-elected like clockwork ever since. This year, though, people began to notice.

Q: Which people?

A: Notably, the Board of Supervisors, which oversees his $22 million budget. All five members have endorsed his opponent.

Q: All five? When did they last agree on anything?

A: There was that time they unanimously passed a resolution commemorating the contributions of dirt, water and sunlight to Santa Barbara County agriculture.

Q: Who are they endorsing?

A: A woman named Melinda Greene, whom Holland hired 12 years ago to run the Clerk-Recorder division. She’s kept things running smoothly while he’s been, um, working from home.

Q: Is she qualified?

A: She’s a technocrat who gets visibly excited about “increasing efficiencies,” “reducing redundant data entry” and “automation process interfaces.” She is not, however, much of a politician — she’s so nice that, despite being prodded by a trouble-making reporter, she wouldn’t utter Holland’s name, let alone mention that he works from home.

Q: Define “working from home.”

A: Joe says he’s available 24/7 — “I’m available by phone, they can call me and I’m on it in a heartbeat,” he told supervisors at a recent, cringey budget hearing. When a couple of reporters checked in with him via Zoom, though, he seemed to be using a dial-up modem of 1995 vintage with what appeared to be car wax smeared on his camera lens.

Q: Seems like a sad situation.

A: As a personal matter, it is. He has MS and is no longer the high-energy presence from his salad days of BlackBerries and flip phones. As a public interest matter, it’s a tougher call: he oversees a staff of more than 100, a voter roll of 250,000, hundreds of thousands of document transactions and 140,000 property assessments.

Q: How much does he get paid?

A: Also a sore subject. Holland earns $275,511 in salary and $48,677 in benefits, for total compensation of $324,188. He also collects an additional $43,000 in pension benefits from his pre-election years working in the office.

Q: Wait, what?

A: All perfectly legal, though some supervisors have grumbled about “double dipping.” In their wisdom, the Legislature and governor decided years ago it would be unfair to prevent public employees from collecting a pension from a department they later got elected to run. Once elected, of course, they begin accruing additional pension benefits based on their highest-ever salary — payable when they finally retire. Or, in Joe’s case, if they ever retire.

Q: How much does Greene make?

A: $220,205 in salary and $117,762 in benefits — total compensation of $337,967.

Q: Those numbers make my head hurt. Why do I need to pay attention to this again?

A: You may have heard that Donald Trump has threatened to federalize elections, dispatch the National Guard or ICE agents to polling places, or otherwise disrupt the midterms. Some supervisors question whether Holland can manage elections in this charged atmosphere while checking in by text a couple times a day from home.

Q: Is that a real concern?

A: Greene and the supervisors seem to think so. She argues that Trump’s threats may confuse or frighten voters away from the polls and believes the office needs an aggressive communications and social media campaign. Holland seems to feel less urgency: “This is nothing new with regard to what Trump or anybody else might do in this election,” he told reporters, having skipped the supervisors’ special hearing on the subject entirely.

Q: How did we end up with an office with so many words in its name?

A: It started with the Assessor. The old boys who wrote the 1850 California Constitution figured it was wise to have someone other than the Board of Supervisors — who set the tax rate on real property — also determine the value of said property. As government grew more complicated, Sacramento required counties to have a Clerk and Recorder for the paperwork. Elections got folded into the Clerk’s office. Then in 1993, amid the Newt Gingrich government-is-bad revolution, a young conservative supervisor named Mike Stoker consolidated the whole jumble into one office — to save money, naturally.

Q: With all that power, must be fierce competition for the job.

A: Um, no. Holland is only the second person to hold it in 30-plus years, having succeeded the legendary Ken Pettitt, who served from 1994 to 2002. Since then, Holland has cruised to re-election every four years with little or no opposition.

Q: Haven’t we seen this movie before?

A: It does call to mind Joe Biden, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Senator Dianne Feinstein — all of whom spent decades assuring everyone they were as spry as ever and could handle things just fine. Until they couldn’t.

Q: All right, guess I better make a choice. Where can I learn more?

A: “As SB Elections Czar Joe Holland Seeks 7th Term While Working from Home, Challenger Melinda Greene Says She Is ‘Present.’”

Also, check out our interviews with the candidates:

By Melinda Burns /Santa Barbara News-Press

Three weeks before the primary election, the three candidates in the wide-open Fifth District Board of Supervisors race are approaching $400,000 collectively raised for their campaigns, with cannabis growers — and a prominent opponent of the industry — weighing in with cash.

Cory Bantilan, top aide to outgoing supervisor Steve Lavagnino, who co-sponsored the county’s pro-industry cannabis ordinance, has received nearly $36,000 — more than 40 percent of his total raised — from cannabis growers, including Micah Anderson of Willits, owner of the largest pot operation in Santa Barbara County.

A former executive director of the county Republican Party, Bantilan played a behind-the-scenes role as Lavagnino’s chief legislative and political adviser as the supervisor joined former Supervisor Das Williams in pushing through the ordinance in 2018.

Lavagnino has endorsed Bantilan in the current race, but in fundraising, the candidate trails his rivals — Maribel Aguilera, a Santa Maria attorney and City Council member, and Ricardo Valencia, a Santa Maria High School teacher and Santa Maria-Bonita School District board member.

Aguilera leads in fundraising with $173,000; Valencia is second, with $119,000; and Bantilan is third, with $83,000, according to campaign disclosure statements filed with the state Fair Political Practices Commission.

Aguilera’s campaign has significant support from other North County agricultural interests — nearly $40,000 to date, campaign filings show. Big donors include Central West Produce, Sunlife Farm, Royal Oak Ag Services; and Blair Pence, a Buellton-area vintner who is suing the owners of a nearby cannabis operation, alleging that the “noxious” smell of pot is hurting his wine-tasting business.

The organizations endorsing Aguilera include the Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, and the Santa Maria firefighter and police unions.

Valencia has been endorsed by the county Democratic Party, California Working Families Party, Indivisible, Planned Parenthood and Sierra Club, in addition to labor unions. His campaign is leaning heavily on contributions from small donors, including dozens of people who gave $250 or less.

As of April 18, the most recent filing date required for full campaign statements, the amount of cash each candidate had on hand — the key number that political professionals look to in fundraising efforts — was: $102,000 for Valencia, $61,000 for Bantilan and $56,000 for Aguilera.

Since April 18, the candidates have continued to report daily contributions, which are included in the fundraising totals in this article.

If no candidate wins a majority of votes on June 2, the top two finishers in the Fifth District race will advance to a runoff election in November.

The cannabis donors. As a political matter, one of the most most intriguing features of the campaign fundraising sweepstakes is the role being played by cannabis interests. The industry is in its eighth year as a legal business in this county, but the fight over how to regulate it remains contentious.

There is no commercial cannabis under cultivation in the Fifth District, which includes the City of Guadalupe, northern Santa Maria and Tanglewood, an unincorporated community west of the Santa Maria Airport.

But under the 2018 ordinance, the county opened the gates for cultivation of up to 1,417 acres of outdoor cannabis in the Sta. Rita Hills west of Buellton and the Santa Ynez, Lompoc and Cuyama valleys; and up to 134 acres in greenhouses — about 100 football fields’ worth — just outside the city limits of Carpinteria.

Lavagnino accepted tens of thousands of dollars in cannabis industry donations to help fund his 2018 and 2022 campaigns for re-election, the records show. He will retire this December after 16 years in office.

Bantilan did not respond to messages this week requesting comment on the cannabis donations to his own campaign.

The largest single cannabis donor to Bantilan’s campaign, with contributions totaling $7,800, is Kavaughan Bagbeh, project manager for Happy Brands LLC, a La Jolla “brand management” firm, records show. Bagbeh also is the project manager for Santa Barbara Westcoast Farms, a 50-acre outdoor cannabis operation at 1800 West Highway 246.

Westcoast, which is registered to Bagbeh and Carol Carpenter of La Jolla in state records, is the target of a lawsuit by Pence Vineyards & Winery and Quantum Wines, located just across the road from Westcoast at 1909 W. Highway 246.

Last week, Pence Vineyards & Winery donated $5,900 to Aguilera in the 5th District race, records show. Blair Pence is a board member of the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis, a countywide group that advocates for stronger regulation of the industry.

Some of the cannabis donors to Bantilan’s campaign are affiliated with the largest permitted “grow” in the county — SCRSB LLC, with a zoning permit for up to 180 acres of outdoor cannabis in the Cuyama Valley, a vast agricultural region east of Santa Maria. Anderson, the owner, is Chief Executive Officer of LEEF Brands, Inc. of Willits, Calif., one of the state’s largest marijuana extraction and manufacturing companies.

Campaign filings show that Anderson donated $500 to Bantilan’s campaign; Kevin Wilson, Chief Financial Officer of LEEF Brands, donated $1,998; LEEF Holdings Inc. donated $2,500, and LEEF Brands donated $5,000, for a total of nearly $10,000 from the company and its officers.

Two years ago, Anderson urged county supervisors not to implement a square-footage tax on cannabis operations, saying it would put his extraction business at a disadvantage. The board ultimately voted not to change the cannabis cultivation tax, which remains set at four percent of gross receipts, or sales, as reported by the growers themselves.

Election filings show other cannabis donations for Bantilan as follows: $5,900 from Michael Palmer of Coastal Blooms Nursery, formerly Ever-Bloom, an 11-acre greenhouse operation in the Carpinteria Valley; $5,000 from the Pacific Dutch Group, Inc., owners of 14 acres of greenhouse cannabis in the Carpinteria Valley; $5,000 from Wil Crummer, CEO of Pro Farms, with 47 acres of outdoor cannabis in the Lompoc Valley, and $2,000 from Thomas Martin, CEO of Central Coast Agriculture, a 30-acre outdoor “grow” west of Buellton.

(Tadd McKenzie is co-president and CFO of the Pacific Dutch Group. Pro Farms is registered with the county as Heirloom Valley).

Lavagnino’s backing for pot. As for Lavagnino, according to a June 12, 2019 article in the Los Angeles Times, Carpinteria cannabis growers donated $12,000 to his campaign in the month leading up to the board vote on the cannabis ordinance in 2018. During his 2022 campaign, Lavagnino accepted more than $28,000 in donations from cannabis growers and related companies, records show.

On the county Board of Supervisors, Lavagnino has almost always been a reliable vote against tougher regulations for the industry, even as outraged residents filed more than 4,200 odor complaints with the county about the “skunky” smell of pot in their midst.

Lavagnino contends that cannabis tax revenue for the county, an average $9 million yearly, has been worth it. Still, he joined his colleagues on the board last year in requiring Carpinteria greenhouses to be equipped with clean-air technology to help get rid of the smell of pot.

Former supervisor Williams, co-architect of the cannabis ordinance with Lavagnino, was narrowly defeated in 2024: his fellow Carpinterians voted 2-1 against him.

Melinda Burns is an investigative reporter with more than 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. She was a senior writer at the News-Press during a 21-year career at the now-departed newspaper, ending in 2006. This piece was first published by the re-launched, online News-Press at newspress.com.

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most effective civil rights legislation in U.S. history, triggered a stampede by white Republican politicians to foist Jim Crow congressional districts on states across the South.

In the wake of the court’s April 29 decision, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee all raced effectively to erase Black and Democratic representation from their states’ House of Representatives district maps — while a court in Virginia tossed out a voter-approved redistricting plan that had been expected to boost the number of seats held by Democrats in that state’s delegation.

The sudden flurry of legal and political action represents a late rally by red-state Republicans in a national redistricting arms race launched by Donald Trump and his allies in Texas last year. As a political matter, it shifted the landscape just six months before a crucial midterm election that had been forecast to be a “blue wave” victory for Democrats.

“Trump and the GOP know they can’t win on the merits,” said Rep. Steve Cohen, who represents the only Black-majority district in Tennessee, which the Republican legislature just gerrymandered out of existence.

“So they’re emasculating the Voting Rights Act, changing the maps, and trying to take representation and power away from Black Americans to hang onto their majority. That’s what this is all about. It’s Jim Crow redistricting,” Cohen added.

At a time when Trump has neutered craven congressional Republicans, and enjoyed broad legal backing for his authoritarian project from the right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court, Democrats are desperate to reclaim a shred of power in Washington by retaking the House — where the MAGA GOP holds only a slim three-seat edge — and adding seats in the Senate, where they are also in the minority.

Amid widespread outrage, bitterness and despair among Democrats and pro-democracy independents over the latest developments, however, the opposition to Trump’s radical agenda remains well-positioned for the Nov. 3 election, for at least five key reasons:

Trump is extremely unpopular. A president’s party almost invariably loses congressional seats in the midterms, and the most reliable single predictor of how relatively well or poorly it performs has historically been job approval rating of the White House occupant during the first two years of his term.

Trump’s numbers are historically bad.

The New York Times tracking poll, which incorporates all major independent public opinion surveys, has shown his favorable rating below 40 percent for weeks, with the latest daily numbers pegging him at 38-to-59 percent favorable-to-unfavorable — a dreadful minus-21-point rating.

Some recent comparisons:

• In 1994, when Republicans took control of the House by winning a then-record 54 seats, President Bill Clinton was also underwater, but by a much more modest 10 points — 42-to-52 percent, approve-disapprove, in a major CNN/USA Today pre-election poll.

• In 2006, Democrats won back control of the House, capturing 31 seats in the midterm as President George W. Bush, damaged by the Iraq War, had job performance numbers similar to Trump’s — 38-to-58 percent, favorable-unfavorable, in the last Gallup poll before the election.

• In 2010, President Barack Obama polled 45-to-55 percent, favorable-unfavorable — minus 10 points — as Republicans won 63 seats in a huge red-wave midterm election.

Democrats are still favored to win the House. Despite the wave of racial gerrymandering across the former Confederacy, political professionals following all 435 House races — as well as the political warfare over redistricting — still forecast a Democratic majority in November, if one that is significantly smaller than projected a few weeks ago.

The authoritative, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which closely tracks congressional races district by district, and has updated its projections in real time with each new twist in the redistricting saga, reports that Republicans will net around half a dozen seats, but not many more, when the dust settles. Political reporter Erin Covey writes:

“We project that the likeliest scenario is Republicans netting around six to seven seats, following a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on the Voting Rights Act and a ruling from the Supreme Court of Virginia overturning the state’s new map.

“Given that scenario, we still believe that Democrats are favored to win control of the House due to the poor national environment for the GOP. But they are no longer overwhelming favorites.”

More broadly, Amy Walter, the Cook Report’s publisher and editor-in-chief, assesses the new state of play this way:

“Republicans have gained a new structural advantage through redistricting. But the political environment continues to benefit Democrats…

“At best, the new Southern state maps, combined with those already completed in states like Texas and Missouri, simply lower the ceiling on projected Democratic gains.”

The Senate clearly is in play. At the beginning of the year, Democrats were favored to win the House but given virtually no chance of netting the four seats it would take to win control of the Senate, where Republicans now hold a 53-47 majority.

Trump’s growing unpopularity — driven by low marks voters give him on the economy - coupled with rising inflation, higher gas prices and widespread unhappiness with the war in Iran, has changed the political calculus. Recent polling shows Democrats have multiple opportunities that collectively could flip the Senate.

The top priority is to hold their incumbents’ seats in Georgia and Michigan, two states Trump won in 2024, where Democrats Jon Ossoff and Gary Peters, respectively, are running for reelection for the first time and will face well-financed challengers. Democrats also must hold an open seat in New Hampshire, which Rep. Chris Pappas is trying to retain after incumbent Jeanne Shaheen decided to retire.

The party’s best chance for a pickup is the open seat in North Carolina being vacated by Republican Thom Tillis, which former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is favored to win.

Other key races in seats held by Republican incumbents:

Maine, where the perennially equivocal Susan Collins — who has survived politically even as the Pine Tree State has grown more Democratic — is being challenged by oyster fisherman Graham Platner, a controversial progressive and high-risk first-time candidate whose grassroots campaign already succeeded in pushing former Democratic Governor Janet Mills out of the primary contest.

Alaska, where Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan holds a structural advantage in a reliably red state, but former statewide Rep. Mary Peltola — with a record of crossover appeal in a state with ranked-choice voting — is running a strong, locally focused challenge.

Ohio, where appointed GOP incumbent Jon Husted holds a consistent, margin-of-error edge over former Senator Sherrod Brown, who is attempting a well-funded comeback.

Three other states are considered longshots but not out of reach: Iowa, Texas, and Nebraska, where Democrats quietly back independent Dan Osborn, who could conceivably knock off Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts in a true, wipeout blue-wave election.

Ironically, this effort could be aided by the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision, and by the Southern states rushing to pass racial gerrymanders in its wake, because it creates additional motivation for Democrats to turn out.

Dems are winning the generic ballot. Polling and data analyst Nate Silver tracks surveys measuring the generic congressional ballot — the collective opinion of voters about which party they prefer to control Congress — and reported this week that Democrats now lead Republicans by a significant margin:

“Today, the generic congressional ballot broke D+6 for the first time this cycle,” he wrote. “It’s currently at D+6.1, to be precise. That’s not a huge change from where it was last week (D+5.9), but still, Democrats are making slow but steady gains. Before April, the generic ballot had hovered around D+5.4 since the beginning of the year.”

“Democrats remain favored to retake the House in November,” Silver wrote in his latest “Silver Bulletin.”

Enthusiasm gap. A series of recent polls have shown Republicans lagging Democrats in measures of enthusiasm and motivation to vote in the upcoming election.

CNN’s Aaron Blake reports:

“A Washington Post-ABC News poll this week, for instance, showed 73% of Democrats said the upcoming election is more important than past midterms. But just 52% of Republicans said the same…

“Similarly, the most recent CNN poll from late March showed just 48% of Republicans agreed that their vote would be cast to ‘send a message that you support Donald Trump.’ That was far less than the 76% of Democrats who said their vote would be cast to send a message of opposition to Trump…

“Finally, a Marquette University Law School poll last month showed just 28% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independent voters said they were ‘very enthusiastic’ about voting in the midterms. That’s 19 points less than the number for Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters (47%).”

Read the whole thing here.

Bottom line. Pro-democracy voters are justified in fuming about the way right-wing justices and judges violated historic judicial norms of avoiding involvement in partisan matters shortly before elections (or, in the case of Louisiana, after voting had already begun).

While Republicans have modestly improved their political position through recent legal and political shenanigans, however, Democrats are still poised to take back some institutional power — if they run effective persuasion and turnout campaigns around the message that Trump’s unchecked power must be curbed.

Don’t forget to vote.

(Editor’s note: Celebrated historian and author Timothy Snyder, best known for his 2017 best-seller “On Tyranny,” in this profound and tightly-reasoned piece analyzes what political scientists view as thirteen traditional bases of state power - and demonstrates how the autocratic president is undercutting the U.S. national interest on every one. Long but worth it. /jr).

By Timothy Snyder /Thinking About…

The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own and succeeded with such rapidity.

It is hard to see this clearly. Even as we oppose individual Trump adventures, we hope that in some way they are based on some understanding of the national interest. They are not. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide.

To get the perspective we need to see the nature of this anti-strategic self-slaughter, it will help to consider thirteen traditional bases of state power.

1. Statehood. A superpower must, at a minimum, be a modern state. This means that it must be an arrangement that includes, via law and other institutions, a larger body of citizens within a common endeavor. There is no sign that the Trump administration regards the United States of America as a state. It treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise.

2. National interest. Another minimal requirement of superpower would be a sense of why that power must be used. The Trump administration exhibits no interest in the good of the people. Theorists of international relations have differed as to how leaders understand national interests; we are intellectually unprepared, however, for a situation in which the leader simply does not care about either the state or the nation.

3. Succession. Again, for a state to maintain itself as a superpower, it must maintain itself over time. The basic requirement of such continuity is a succession principle, a means by which authority is transferred from some people to other people while institutions continue to function.

In the United States, democracy enables succession. Historically, there are means of succession, for example by dynasty (or dynastic adoption, as in second-century Rome) or by the decision of a politburo, as in China or the USSR (in the US this would be a capitalist politburo, the sort of oligarchical coven that got us JD Vance). Getting from democracy to such different arrangements would end the American republic. Trump aspires to stay in power indefinitely, and says so. By putting the vote in question, he puts America in question, and thus American power.

4. Elites. For states to thrive and to accumulate and maintain power, the right people have to be in charge. There is no perfect means to achieve this, and there is the inevitable tension, as the Roman Stoics and others have noted, between the skills needed to rise to the top and those suited to serving some general interest. And those who rise to a position of authority will try to pass it on to their children; the Roman Catholic Church went to the extreme of insisting on priestly celibacy to block this tendency.

Historically, powerful states seek ways to enable qualified people to serve in positions of authority, regardless of birth. Ancient China had an examination system. Napoleon established the principle of merit in both civilian and military life. The United States had a civil service that was the envy of the world as well as a military that was its most meritocratic institution.

The Trump administration has chosen to disable the civil service and to purge the military command of people of quality. This process has been carried out by people who are themselves wildly unqualified to hold any sort of office, let along cabinet positions. To see where we are, we must understand that people such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, about whom one might raise other objections, had no business accepting their nominations, since they lack any qualifications. The fact that such people could be considered, let alone appointed, is a marker of superpower suicide.

5. Education. In a deeper sense, a superpower must have a mechanism to refresh its society, and thus its politics and administration, by preparing its population to understand the challenges of the world.

This administration has done the contrary. University students are forbidden to gather and to speak their minds; university administrations are threatened with retaliation if they allow their faculty to teach freely; libraries around the country, including in military academies, are purged of useful books; public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved; an unregulated internet is allowed and indeed encouraged to transform the public sphere into a realm of emotions and recriminations.

6. Science. The rise of great powers often involves an alliance between politics and science. The ancient Mesopotamians were astronomers whose systems of describing the heavens still mark our ways of thought; so were the Mayans. The Romans managed to operationalize Greek science to build, defend, and cure. The Renaissance was, by no coincidence, also the age of exploration.

Modern imperial powers built state institutions to fund science and attract scientists; the United States from the 1940s was the outstanding example of this trend, and science (often as practiced by immigrants) was the most important basis of American superpower.

Current American policy is to fund science on the basis of primitive ideological taboos, and to discourage young scientists from immigrating to the United States. Senior scientists are also leaving; a colleague in a central position in US science just told me that he is leaving the country in part because the overall environment is better in other places. It is also US policy to cast doubt on basic scientific observations, such as that of human-caused climate change.

7. Energy. Human groups that pioneer new forms of energy technology rise; those that do not fall. This might be the most profound truth of our history; a magnificent forthcoming book demonstrates the significance of energy transitions at the most profound level, that of the history of life on earth itself.

Humans who mastered fire could consume more energy themselves. Humans who domesticated dogs could use their energy to hunt mammoths. Humans who domesticated plants could turn solar energy to their own purposes. Humans who understood weather and climate could turn wind energy to the purpose of exploration and conquest, as did the Vikings.

The United States was established on the cusp of a transition to hydrocarbon energy: coal, oil, natural gas. These forms of energy are now becoming obsolete, not only in ecological but also in economic terms. And yet this administration has chosen to cancel America’s energy transition and subsidize technologies that have no future. This is superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form. And nothing could benefit America’s chief rival, China, more than this choice.

8. Technology. It requires little effort to associate technology with the rise of great powers. Military achievement is associated intimately with innovation; from the spur to the machine gun, the causal relationship is not really contestable.

While the United States spends gigantic amounts of money on weaponry, the Trump administration has chosen to focus on weapons from the past rather than of the future. Trump’s idea is battleships named after himself based on what he remembers of a movie. The plans for “Trump-class” battleships are a mixture of the fictional and the vulnerable, which does reflect the man. The notion is to invest untold amounts of money into a kind of weapon has been understood to be obsolete since 1943, and which if somehow built would be highly vulnerable to weapons other countries now have.

This strategic atavism draws the United States away from national security in its most basic sense. The shape of modern warfare is revealed by the high-tech war between Russia and Ukraine, especially in Ukraine’s successful self-defense. The Trump administration chose to ignore the lessons of that war and to demean and defund America’s Ukrainian ally, to the detriment of American interests and American warfighting.

9. Diplomacy. This art, celebrated by great powers, has been trashed by the United States. It cannot be practiced without understanding other countries, as the most focused American diplomats have stressed (for example, Henry Kissinger, who can hardly be excused of softheartedness). It has rested, in the American and other cases, on the deliberate construction of a diplomatic corps where people train in languages and trade in knowledge.

Under the Trump administration, the foreign service has been trashed. The principle of diplomacy, such as it is, is that other countries will do what we want because we are big and bad. This has not worked. The bizarre notion that the president can himself “make deals” is the sign of a religious cult; like most cults, its activity is the generation of ever more creative excuses for the lack of performance. There is no evidence that Trump knows how to negotiate, and abundant evidence that he does not: for example, defeat in trade wars with China; personal vulnerability to the preferences of Russian leaders, and the disaster of Iranian nuclear enrichment, of which Trump himself is the chief sponsor.

In practice, critical negotiations, with Iran and elsewhere, have been put in the hands of two people, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with close personal relationships with the president and obvious economic stakes in the relevant conflicts. The diplomacy of the Huns was far more sophisticated than this. It is hard to overstate how primitive the current American approach is, and how much joy it brings to America’s enemies.

10. Alliances. Great powers have allies. To be sure, they might change these alliances rapidly for reasons of interest, as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire famously did. The whole history of the Roman Empire, for that matter, was one of active diplomacy with neighboring barbarians (as the Romans saw matters); archaeology bears witness to the arrangements that were made. The history of modern European empires was also one considered alliances, as the architects of American superpower understood.

Under the Trump administration, useful allies are mocked and marginalized for no reason other than personal whimsy and a sense of grievance. Because there is no sense of state or national interest, there can be no understanding that alliances are of service. Trump feels annoyed because he is losing a war and removes US troops from Germany; those troops are there to enable the United States to win wars. I personally cannot think of any other example in which the leaders of a great power behaved in this way, presumably because these kinds of choices are inconsistent with the maintenance of power.

The United States now seems to be treating as “allies” middle eastern countries that have nothing to offer except their own interests in the use of American armed forces in their own region, permanent engagement in the disastrous politics of oil, and financial opportunities for people personally close to Trump.

11. The international system. Postwar America did something far more impressive than build a system of alliances; it essentially created a set of laws, rules, and norms that allowed American power to maintain itself and to expand. The European Union and NATO, so abused by the Trump people today, were indirect and direct results of American policies intelligently designed to maximize American trade and security interests.

But the achievement was far broader than that, and indeed historically unprecedented: the construction of laws and conventions that kept one country in the center of the world.

Today, the Trump people make themselves at the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference and similar gatherings and complaining that the rules are against them -- the exact opposite was the case, because America made the rules. In deliberately destroying its own international system, this American government is improving the position of its rivals China and Russia, who have been calling for exactly this to happen, but who lacked the ability to make it happen.

12. The idea of victory. A superpower wins in confrontations, at least some of the time. This administration loses again and again and is seen to lose by others. Trump announced that his main weapon of influence would be tariffs, but then lost his trade war with China, leaving Beijing more powerful and more emboldened.

The Russo-Ukrainian war is a curious case. It would serve the interests of the United States in prosperity and stability for Ukraine to win; but under Trump the United States has switched its policy to one of support for Ukraine to support for Russia. So it has lost in that way. But since the United States has made that pivot, Ukraine has performed ever better in the war, and Russia has performed worse. And so the United States, amazingly, has managed to be the loser in the same war a double sense: by failing to see its own interests, and then by failing to fail.

The Iranian war is an obvious strategic defeat in every traditional sense; insofar as there were any American objectives, they were not achieved. Trump’s policies have left Iran with more enriched uranium in the hands of a more radical regime which holds new sources of economic power in the world.

In the current situation, in which military options have been self-humiliatingly exhausted, the useful instruments would be those that involved communicating with the Iranian people or influencing Iranian society. Those institutions existed until very recently; they were willfully demolished, to great fanfare, in early 2026.

The United States is now governed by people who celebrate defeat in symbolic terms characteristic of states in disastrous decline. Consider Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the rescue of a US pilot as the resurrection of Jesus. The screaming blasphemy of this might distract us from its strategic helplessness. Christological images of this sort are used as propaganda to transform defeat in the real world into victory in some imaginary one.

The U.S. lost the war in Iran. Among other things it was not able to sustain an air campaign. The downing of a US fighter meant than an individual mission failed. It is happy news, of course, that the pilot survived. But the notion that this was a “literal miracle,” as Hegseth claimed, brings the United States, sadly, into the tradition of losers who use Jesus to claim to be winners.

An historical example of this was Polish Romanticism, with its idea that the collapse of a republic (chiefly due to wealth inequality) made of Poland the “Christ of Nations.” Donald Trump’s own self-deification has to be seen in similar terms: a president who could assert power in this world would not have to claim that his real authority comes from another one. His fantasies of the total destruction of Iranian civilization are part of an apocalyptic panorama that is inconsistent with decent politics.

13. Finances. Though not the most interesting historical subject, budget disaster stands behind many of the most notable collapses of state power, ancient and modern. Under Trump our national debt now approaches $40 trillion. National debt is higher than GDP of the country for the first time since the end of the Second World War.

That is a notable point of comparison: it is normal to run big deficits when facing the challenge of the scale of a world war. We are running huge deficits for an entirely different reason: because we decline to tax wealthy individuals and corporations. That is not an approach that is consistent with fighting and winning wars, nor with maintaining the social services that allow a modern society to function.

More profoundly: it reflects an approach to politics -- government as customer service to the very wealthy -- that leads us from power to ethics.

The war can lead us to a diagnosis of superpower suicide.

Wars cannot be won by people who have no idea what they are doing, because they have no frame of reference (such as the nation or the state) beyond their own feelings. They cannot be fought well when the wrong people are making the daily decisions and the wrong weapons are being deployed. They cannot be reasonably brought to an end when there is no practice of diplomacy and no notion of the value of alliances and no concern about corruption.

But even a strict focus on power will lead us back to justice. But just as the war is only a symptom of superpower suicide, so superpower suicide is only a symptom of a still deeper condition, the one that must be addressed.

Even if all we cared about were American power, we would have to ask ourselves how to undo the distortions of democracy and the drastic inequalities of that enabled world-historical levels of strategic buffoonery.

After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable.

The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible.

From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

Timothy Snyder writes the “Thinking About…” newsletter on Substack. Subscribe here.

Photo-illustration by Salon.

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(Editor’s note: Isaac Saul is the founder and editor of Tangle, a non-partisan, subscriber based newsletter that, in an age of hyper-polarization, offers an intriguing value proposition: their writers cover the biggest U.S. political stories of the day by “summarizing arguments from the right, left, and center,” then publishing their own take on the issue. In this post for which he dropped Tangle’s paywall, Saul dissects Trump’s personal corruption, providing the most comprehensive and detailed analysis we’ve read on the matter. Saul is an excellent journalist who writes with voice and incredible factual depth and so this piece is very long. It’s very worth your time, as a deep dive guide to the unprecedented way Trump wields political power to serve his personal financial interest. I’ve bold faced some key facts throughout. /jr).

By Isaac Saul /Tangle

My oldest brother has an incredible gift: He’s capable of saying the most incendiary, inappropriate things at the perfect moment and somehow getting a laugh regardless of who he’s in front of.

I’m not quite sure how he does it. But I’ve watched him perfect this art since I was a kid. It used to be most apparent with my parents, who’d sometimes have trouble disciplining him because he could essentially shit-talk his way out of any situation and earn a laugh. As we got older, it felt like this talent elevated to a new tier, like he’d beaten the “mom is mad” boss and moved onto “can I get the priest to crack a smile in the middle of the funeral?”

I’ve been thinking about this skill a lot recently. This innate ability some people have to do something in a particular way that disarms everyone around them, and then the way some people try to replicate that behavior in the exact same context, with the exact same approach, and get disastrous results (I think, often, about trying some of the jokes I’ve heard my brother make to my mom, knowing full well they would never quite land, though I can’t say exactly why).

Anyway, in April, The New York Times broke the story that President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law are negotiating a luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires who are simultaneously lobbying the president to lift economic sanctions on their country.

I’ll write that sentence again just in case it didn’t land the first time: President Donald Trump’s children are negotiating a luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires who are simultaneously lobbying the president to lift economic sanctions on their country.

I can’t explain why that story doesn’t have quite the same punch as, “According to The New York Times, Hunter Biden is negotiating a Biden-branded luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires; those Syrian billionaires are also lobbying President Joe Biden to lift economic sanctions on their country.”

Yet I know that, for some reason, the real story we’re living through right now — the one where Trump’s kids are funneling money directly to their family fortune while the U.S. government hands out favors in return — just doesn’t seem to get any traction with the public.

I consider myself a pretty fair-minded guy whose politics are quite moderate. And I still believe the Hunter Biden story deserved as much attention as it got. I spent years following the laptop and gun charges story, and I found the details both alarming and unsavory.

If you click the “Hunter Biden” tag on our website, you’ll see more than 20 stories that involve the president’s son from the four years of the Biden administration. We wrote about everything from the suppression of the laptop story to the Twitter files to the business deals Hunter tried to loop his dad into to his prosecution for gun possession, and I spent most of those four years demanding more answers than we were getting.

I don’t regret pursuing or publishing any of those stories. There was plenty of smoke, and Biden wrapped his time in office by abusing the power of the pardon to ensure there would never be real accountability if there was criminality.

But I’m disheartened and frustrated now to see that right-wing writers, Trump voters, and Republican politicians who cheered me on when I was investigating potential Biden corruption are now just ignoring the comparably gargantuan scandals of (alleged) corruption we’re witnessing now.

Firehose news fatigue. On some level, I can understand the discrepancy: There’s so much news, and so many allegations about Trump that it becomes easy to tune it all out (both for his supporters and critics). News fatigue is real, and when we consume the news we are often fed content from organizations and individuals that share our politics.

But, to state it plainly: After reviewing the evidence of the first 15 months of President Trump’s second term, I believe the president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it.

I can’t level that claim directly and unambiguously because we haven’t really had the basic facts adjudicated, since Republicans in Congress have opted for complete and utter fealty to Trump in every manner imaginable. There is no oversight, or accountability, or even the slightest inclination to ask about these actions in the majority party. The Trump administration has also dismantled many of the federal watchdogs responsible for prosecuting fraud, grift and corruption, so few of its actions have been probed in any meaningful way.

Instead of indictments, congressional investigations, or public hearings, the best we are left with is great reporting from journalists, the occasional leak from the administration, a right-wing writer here or there willing to say the real thing out loud, and then a whole lot of “Occam’s razor” questions like, “Which is likelier, that the person who made a massive financial bet on oil prices 20 minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire knew about it or just got extraordinarily lucky?”

During President Joe Biden’s term, the Department of Justice could say, at least, that it had investigated the president’s son. Republicans in Congress also conducted a yearslong investigation into the Hunter Biden business ties and how they might link back to the president.

Here, though, we have nothing; every story I’m about to point to has not produced even a unified statement of concern from, say, a half dozen Republican senators worried about government corruption.

Remember, Hunter’s story was about drawing a $50,000/month salary while his dad was vice president and then allegedly trying to arrange some business ventures he might cut Joe Biden in on once he was out of office. Republicans’ yearslong investigation never turned up any hard evidence of the latter, though there was enough smoke I still think the story was plausible.

Today, we’re talking about the president’s children launching multi-billion dollar business ventures — several of them — while the president is in office, and then explicitly exchanging all manner of domestic policy victories, foreign policy concessions, and literal pardons in the construction of those deals. Trump himself has all but admitted this is happening. He told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he tried to separate his family business from his administration during his first term, so he isn’t even trying now.

I have tracked these stories with one of my senior editors for the last year and a half. The list of things that have happened is so long and shocking when you see it all together that I’m not entirely sure how to present it. I’ve gone back and forth; maybe I should build a flow chart? What about a spreadsheet? Should this be a YouTube video, instead of a written piece? Will anyone actually read the entire thing? Can anyone actually process this level of self-dealing, corruption, and shadiness at once?

Ultimately, I decided that the best I can do is try to write all these instances down in an engaging way that might grab your attention and wake us all up from whatever stupor we’re in. So… here goes.

Start with the cryptocurrency. Perhaps the largest vehicle for Trump’s self-dealing has been his foray into cryptocurrency. This is a complicated space that I will try to make as straightforward and simple as possible.

In 2024, the Trump family launched a crypto company called World Liberty Financial. Trump is listed as a “co-founder emeritus.” By December of 2025, they had profited roughly $1 billion from proceeds while holding $3 billion in unsold cryptocurrency tokens, amassing a fortune larger than their entire real estate portfolio.

At the same time the president was pushing his family’s new crypto venture, he was cutting crypto regulation, touting the potential of private digital currencies to help the U.S. economy, and promising to unleash the industry he and his family were simultaneously profiting from.

But the president wasn’t only directly making money in an industry he was deregulating; the Trumps benefitted through intermediaries, too. Last summer, World Liberty Financial bought a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million from investors to buy its own cryptocurrency, WLFI. The Wall Street Journal tepidly described this setup as an “unusually circular transaction with the same party as buyer and seller” that could net the Trump family an additional $500 million.

Essentially, the Trump family launched a cryptocurrency firm while deregulating the crypto industry, then bought a separate firm that it used to buy its own cryptocurrency while also raising three quarters of a billion dollars from investors to buy that same cryptocurrency.

Just days before he was inaugurated, Trump also launched a personal “memecoin” called $TRUMP. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies made about internet jokes, pop culture moments, or viral trends. They have no underlying value or technological purpose; the value of the coin is driven entirely by social hype.

Trump created hype for his memecoin by launching it months after being elected and just three days before being inaugurated. He promoted $TRUMP on social media and, while president, even held a dinner for the top 220 holders of the coin at one of his golf resorts in Virginia. He held another one at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend. The initial coin offering released 200 million tokens of its billion-token supply to the public on the first day. The price skyrocketed 300% overnight and hit an all-time high of $74.27 on January 19, right before Trump’s inauguration. $TRUMP has since cratered, losing 97% of its value (for context, if you had bought $1,000 at its peak, your $1,000 would now be worth about $30).

Trump, naturally, profited. The exact figures are hard to pin, but The Financial Times estimated that the scheme netted him personally about $350 million, while Trump’s holdings of the coin through a separate partnership could be worth billions more. It wasn’t just the president, either; First Lady Melania Trump launched her own memecoin, which also skyrocketed in value before a massive sell-off that she profited from (what people in the industry call a “rug pull”). Most of the people who bought and held the coin based on the hype the Trumps created ended up losing most of their money, but the coin’s creators got rich (or, in this case, richer).

Quid pro quos. This cryptocurrency foray hasn’t just been a vehicle for self-enrichment, but also a vehicle for quid pro quos.

Perhaps the most obvious and overt involved Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who was being investigated by the SEC for fraud. Sun, in the midst of his investigation, bought $75 million of WLFI — the World Liberty Financial coin — and then became an adviser at the company.

Shortly after that investment, the SEC backed off its investigation and settled with him for $10 million, a small fraction of the expected penalties he was set to pay (on top of potential prison time). Of course, it’s possible that the SEC, an organization now openly being influenced by the president, just happened to back off its investigation in the weeks following Sun’s $75 million investment into Trump’s crypto firm.

It’s also possible that the two events are related.

The crypto story, though, hardly ended there. In late April, CBS reported that Sun was suing the Trump administration’s World Liberty Financial, alleging fraud.

That’s right: Sun, whose initial case has since concluded, has now turned around and sued the Trump family, alleging that the president and his sons are illegally blocking him from selling his digital tokens that are worth as much as $1 billion. Sun also claims that World Liberty Financial tried to pressure him into investing in its stable coin, and that the company froze his tokens after he refused to commit more money to the business.

It’s hard to identify the villain.

Sun’s apparent quid pro quo to get out from under government oversight is just one example.

Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, was pardoned by President Trump shortly after Zhao helped boost WLFI’s prominence by allowing the currency to be traded on the crypto exchange Binance, which Zhao started. After the pardon, Zhao became one of the Trumps’ business partners, boosting the family’s crypto empire while skating serious charges that he allowed money to flow to terrorists, cyber criminals, and child abusers on his platform.

If that’s not enough, more shocking news broke this week.

According to The Wall Street Journal, World Liberty Financial inadvertently partnered with two men the U.S. government had sanctioned a month before for helping run a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars from Americans through online scams.

To repeat: Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against a transnational criminal syndicate for stealing billions of dollars from Americans in online scams. A month later, two of the men it sanctioned partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.

The evidence of crypto investments from foreign nationals operating as de facto bribes doesn’t end there.

Consider the story of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president and one of the most powerful politicians in the Middle East (he’s served as the UAE’s national security advisor since 2016).

He stewards an empire of wealth worth roughly $1.5 trillion, and a firm closely tied to him secretly signed a deal for a 49% stake in WLFI worth $500 million — including $187 million paid upfront to Trump family entities just days before Trump’s inauguration.

Shortly after Trump took office, the administration undid a national security block that would have prevented the UAE from getting up to 500,000 advanced Nvidia AI chips.

Some right-wing writers, like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, have been brave enough to take this story head-on — but many have ignored it.

Sometimes, the favors happen en masse.

The crypto industry as a whole was a top donor to Trump’s 2025 inauguration fund, and the SEC then dropped or paused over a dozen cases against crypto firms, or simply handed them huge access to government-directed crypto entities. Several of those cases, like Sun’s, were tied directly to donations. Coinbase donated $1 million; its lawsuit was dropped. Ripple ($4.9 million) and Solana ($1 million) had their tokens added to the national Digital Asset Stockpile.

I want to pause here to remind people that we spent all four years of the Biden administration talking about Hunter Biden’s alleged $50,000 a month salary while working at an energy firm in Ukraine, and the possibility that he was setting up some business deals for his father after he left the vice presidency. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced articles of impeachment alleging Biden “abused the power of the Office of the Vice President, enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, by allowing his son to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept various benefits—including financial compensation—from foreign nationals in exchange for certain favors.”

Conversely, the final tally of investments from parties with conflicts of interest into crypto assets personally managed by the Trump family safely enters the range of billions of dollars — a scale of thousands of millions, in just one sector and in just over one year, while the president was actually in office.

It’s not just cryptocurrency.

The Jared connection. Much of the self-dealing, appearance of corruption, and conflicts of interest have little or nothing to do with cryptocurrency.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, is now representing the U.S. in the Middle East as a negotiator to end the Iran war, despite having no congressionally approved title or position in the administration. He also operates Affinity Partners, a private equity firm that received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in 2022.

One might expect that the war in Iran, whose end Kushner is attempting to negotiate, and whose future Saudi Arabia has a direct stake in, might dissuade him from pursuing these business interests. Instead, it’s actually drawn him toward the opportunity. Here is The New York Times:

Jared Kushner, one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, is trying to raise more money for his private equity firm from governments in the region.

Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.

In 2024, Kushner defended the investment from the Saudis, claimed it wasn’t a conflict of interest, and demanded his critics “point to a single decision we made that wasn’t in the interest of America.”

Here, I’ll remind you that the Saudis are both investing in Kushner’s firm and pushing the president to continue investing U.S. taxpayer dollars and U.S. soldiers in the war against Iran, their regional enemy. Trump, you’ll notice, is doing just that.

Again: Kushner has not been formally accused of any criminality. Congress is not even investigating these conflicts of interest. But are we to believe that the president’s son-in-law is not considering, say, a $2 billion investment in his private fund while operating as a government representative in the Middle East? Are we supposed to think the president and his chief negotiator are not having their decision-making impacted, even marginally, by the Saudis’ investments?

This single conflict of interest would be a major scandal in any other administration. If none of the crypto self-enrichment and quid pro quos existed, or if this were the only financial complication at hand, it would still be grounds to question the integrity of the administration’s foreign policy, and it would be worthy of months if not years of hearings and investigations. But it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

The Saudis were also hosting their international golf tournament at Trump’s Doral and Bedminster properties while Trump was approving a nearly $142 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, ignoring concerns from his own Pentagon about selling them F-35 fighter jets. Trump even named Saudi Arabia a major non-NATO ally. Even more, the Trump organization is partnering with the Saudis on Trump Tower Jeddah and other Saudi real estate developments.

Then there’s Qatar, which offered Trump a $400 million luxury airplane to be used as Air Force One while simultaneously making investments in his crypto venture — all culminating in favorable U.S. arms sales worth $1.96 billion in March of 2026. Eight foreign governments have hosted or sponsored events at Trump properties in the first year of his second term.

Trump’s hotels also serve as a vehicle for profiting from diplomatic relations. Foreign government officials visited Trump properties 60 times during Trump’s first year back in office and paid millions in direct payments to those properties. Trump International Hotel received approximately $3.7 million from foreign governments. Oh, and Trump also happened to select the Trump National Doral Miami hotel to host the December G20 summit later this year.

All of this is material conflict of interest or outright corruption that has been documented through publicly disclosed deals, investigative reporting, FOIA requests, and more.

Toothless ‘ethics agreement.’ But there are plenty of other concerns that we don’t have clarity on. For instance, some traders have been making massive, seemingly irrational bets on Trump reversing course on major policy decisions just minutes before those reversals are made public. These people are trading on things like an announcement that tariffs would be paused or a ceasefire in Iran — with timing that only administration insiders could have anticipated.

Even arguing about whether the president has committed any crimes or engaged in corruption or self-dealing is almost beside the point; my own thoughts don’t really matter.

More pressing is that the president lied to voters — both his supporters and his opponents. In January of 2025, Trump released an “ethics agreement” detailing how he’d handle his personal business interests while in the White House. The agreement itself is close to meaningless; it has no teeth, makes no promises to divest assets, and unlike the agreement from his first term, does not prohibit him from striking new deals abroad while president.

Yet it did make a promise that the Trump Organization would not strike any deals directly with foreign governments apart from “ordinary course transactions.” And still, even that tiny little narrow promise — it appears the Trumps broke it.

Here, I’ll interject with one more reminder: When Hillary Clinton was first lady, she endured a weekslong scandal over reports that she had once made nearly $100,000 from investing $1,000 in cattle futures — an investment she’d made a dozen years before Bill Clinton became president.

By the time Trump ran for office in 2016, under the “drain the swamp” mantra of rooting out corruption by other politicians, he excoriated the Clintons for… taking money from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East monarchies. That money, which Trump criticized her for accepting, was going to the Clinton Foundation — a philanthropic fund run by the Clintons. The money Trump is taking now goes directly to private businesses he owns.

It’s not just foreign entanglements, either.

Domestic entanglements. A lot of what I’ve written so far has involved the Trump administration simultaneously dictating foreign policy while also taking funds, in some form, from foreign governments, leaders, or wealthy foreign actors. Yet plenty of this is happening domestically, too.

For instance: The Trump Organization launched Trump Mobile, a branded phone that costs $499 and an additional $47.45/month for the “47” plan. The Trump organization does not manufacture the phone or provide cell service (the phone itself has yet to be released, and the network will be operated by Liberty Mobile Wireless). Instead, Trump licenses his name to the deal and then promotes it using the presidential brand while he is in office — all at a cool profit.

Wherever you look, there’s another potential profit.

Last spring, the Trump family opened an exclusive club in Washington called “Executive Branch” that charges $500,000 per membership. The parent company of Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, even launched as a publicly traded organization with his initials, DJT, as its ticker; Trump himself holds a huge stake in the company and the stock’s value has fluctuated based solely on Trump’s political fortunes. Shoot, the president’s son, Eric Trump, went on Fox News and graciously received congratulations about his own company receiving a $24 million Pentagon contract.

Just yesterday, while I was finishing up this story, The Financial Times reported that the Trump sons had taken a stake in the Kazakh mining company that just won a $1.6 billion contract from the Trump administration. Then, hours later, a Bloomberg story landed in my inbox about the U.S. Air Force agreeing to buy an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from a company backed by President Trump’s sons. During a talk I did with college students at St. Olaf College in Minnesota this morning, one of the students asked me about the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. investing in and advising the gambling and prediction market companies Kalshi and Polymarket. I didn’t even know about it. I’d just spent the past week writing and researching claims of corruption against the Trump family, and I’m still discovering glaring new examples every day.

You might be thinking: Where are the people who are supposed to be enforcing laws against this kind of self-dealing and corruption?

Good question.

More than a dozen Inspectors General have been fired since Trump took office. Those are the independent watchdogs responsible for rooting out fraud, waste, and corruption across the federal government. The DOJ has issued guidance paring back its Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement, meaning malign foreign influence is being prosecuted at a much lower rate. Trump also suspended the anti-bribery enforcement law known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for four months, then reinstated a narrower version of the law with approximately half of the previous bench of prosecutors to enforce it. He also rescinded Biden’s executive branch ethics requirements on his first day in office; the administration essentially operates without published guidelines to point to for how the Trump family does business with foreign governments and entities.

All the other quid pro quos. While Trump’s behavior amounts to obvious self-dealing or, in some cases, conflicts of interest, other investments he’s received have shown a direct pattern of pay-to-play benefits — simple monetary quid pro quos.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance lobbied Congress to exclude them from a ban on stock trading. Trump took roughly $50 million for his inauguration fund from organizations facing federal enforcement action, including Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan, and Toyota. Each of those companies was facing federal investigations that were either paused or frozen in the wake of the donations. Apple donated $1 million to the fund, then Trump exempted Apple products (manufactured in China) from tariffs — a decision that likely saved the company billions of dollars.

Perhaps most explicitly, Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post and founder of Amazon, agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump’s life that netted her an estimated $28 million. This, along with the Post’s editorial board taking on a more conservative bent, appears to have yielded some results — now Trump is openly musing about rebooting The Apprentice on Amazon, with Don Jr. as the star.

During Trump’s first term, frustrated by the Post’s negative coverage of him, he regularly targeted Bezos by pushing aides to increase U.S. postal shipping rates on Amazon. This time around, Trump and Bezos appear to be on good terms. The same is true of Qatar, which Trump once denounced as a terrorism sponsor yet now counts as an emerging ally.

It’s not just financial deals, either; Trump’s pardons have all but declared it open season for corruption all across the country. The president has given special latitude to Republican members of Congress who have been convicted of serious crimes.

Chris Collins, the first House member to endorse Trump in early 2016, was convicted of insider trading — a straightforward scheme where he sat on a corporate board and tipped off his son to dump shares before non-public news became public. Trump pardoned him. Duncan Hunter, another early Trump endorser, pleaded guilty to using campaign funds for personal expenses. Trump pardoned him. And, of course, there is George Santos, who brazenly lied about his own biographical information and committed wire fraud and identity theft; Trump commuted his sentence (and canceled remaining fines and restitution payments) after telling Newsmax he was open to the pardon because Santos was “100% for Trump.”

That’s only a partial list for Trump’s second term — if you go back to his first term, you could add in Steve Stockman, Rick Renzi, Robin Hayes, Duke Cunningham, and more.

Consider this remarkable statistic: According to GovTrack’s Legislator Misconduct Database, at the end of his first term, Trump had pardoned a majority of all Republican Congressmen convicted of felonies in the 21st century. These Congressmen — convicted of defrauding donors, taking bribes from the military industrial complex, and stealing money from charities — they are the swamp. Yet Trump gave them a pass.

Those free passes go far beyond Republican members of Congress, too.

Todd and Julie Chrisley, two reality TV stars convicted of defrauding banks for $36 million, were pardoned after their daughter spoke on stage at the RNC. Sheriff Scott Jenkins was pardoned before he began his 10-year sentence for bribery. Lawrence Duran, a Medicare executive convicted of a $205 million fraud scheme, was granted clemency. Jason Galanis, convicted of securities fraud and defrauding the Oglala Sioux National of $60 million, had his sentence commuted. Former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada and his chief of staff Cade Cothren were pardoned after their convictions for public corruption.

The most egregious example is probably Trevor Milton, who donated $1.8 million to Trump’s re-election fund heading into the 2024 race.

Milton was found guilty of securities and wire fraud for lying to investors about nearly all aspects of his company’s technology; Milton famously showed investors a video of a functional truck his company had developed that was actually rolling down a hill. After his conviction, he owed $676 million in restitution to the victims of his scheme. Trump’s pardon wiped that restitution out. Milton’s defense attorney is former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, and when asked about the pardon, Trump said he’d never heard of him until someone recommended his pardon, adding, “They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president.”

The list goes on and on and on. Fraudsters and corrupt politicians all being let off the hook — all for no reason other than their support for Trump or connection to someone in his orbit. In some cases, as with Milton, Trump purports to have pardoned them without even knowing who they are — either a blatant lie or an admission of how recklessly he’s wielding one of his most unchecked powers.

This system has created an entire pardon economy, in which people close to Trump — including formerly pardoned people themselves like former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) — now charge exorbitant fees to secure a pardon from Trump. If you’re a rich, corrupt executive or former Congressman who screwed over investors or donors and are about to go to jail, you just need a million dollars and the phone number of someone like Blagojevich, who then goes to the president and helps set you free. This is not an exaggeration; it’s happening right now.

An indisputable portrait. Together, this story paints a picture that I find impossible to deny: Trump is swimming in self-dealing, corruption, and quid pro quos. His defenders will note that other presidents have profited from the office before; this is true. They may further posit that rules like the Emoluments Clause are rarely enforced; this is also true.

But they can’t or shouldn’t deny that we’ve never seen anything like this. We’ve never seen the scale, the brazenness, or the volume of the self-enrichment, corruption, and betrayal of ethics. Trump is using the presidency to make himself exorbitantly rich, even when the strategies to do so cost his supporters hundreds of millions of dollars, eliminate restitution for victims of fraud, or could impact critical foreign policy decisions like whether or not to continue a new war (that is costing taxpayers billions).

Rather than drain the swamp, as he promised, the president is pardoning and freeing the swampiest denizens of Washington, D.C. (and the country), and signaling to the rest of them that they can insider trade, take money from donors, and enjoy all manner of bribes and self-dealing so long as they keep supporting and paying the man in the White House.

He appears to be running the most corrupt administration in American history.

Worse yet, the evidence presented here is really just a look into only what we know has happened since January 20, 2025.

Even with all my tracking, organizing, reporting, research and writing, I still can’t capture it all. To give just one example that broke since I began writing this: Trump has promised for months on end that his new ballroom was going to be privately funded through donations. He solicited private donations to fund it (which were also vehicles for people to win the president’s good graces) and collected that money. But then, just this week, the president announced that he’d also be asking Congress for $400 million to fund the ballroom. How does one quantify something like this? Corruption? Broken promises? Both? Something else?

Bottom line. I think about all this and come back to my brother. Why is it, really, that his vulgar, dead-pan humor works so well when it lands so flat from others? Part of it is the trust — the goodwill he earns in other ways with me or his audience. Part of it is the brazenness — the risk he’s taking, the discomfort and shock that makes the joke exciting and funny in a way that draws a laugh. These qualities feel analogous to Trump in some ways; he’s earned and built a deep reservoir of trust with his supporters. The brazenness of his operation as a president is part of the Trump appeal.

Yet the comparisons should really end there.

The long-term effects of laughing at an inappropriate joke are much less important, and dangerous, than the downstream effects of accepting a president and federal government openly enriching themselves and their friends with no accountability.

Perhaps the trust in President Trump and the fun of it all has led so many of his supporters to ignore what is happening right in front of our eyes.

Maybe the firehose of stories has overwhelmed his opponents to the point they don’t even know how to begin considering repercussions. But as we watch the president perpetrate a century of scandal in just 15 months, we’re left looking around in bewilderment at the response. Will the members of Congress who wrung their hands over Hunter Biden do something now? Are we ready for a future where we’ve normalized this level of grift? Is this kind of behavior no longer disqualifying?

As I sit staring at the blinking cursor in my “Trump corruption” Google doc, just waiting for the next tip to come in or the next story to ping across my feed, I can’t help but wonder — are there enough of us left who actually care?

For more of Isaac Saul’s journalism, you can subscribe to Tangle here. Saul recently appeared on The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller. Listen to their conversation here.

Photo illustration by the Milwaukee Independent.

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