What a rotten time to have such a rotten president

Pity poor Ukraine. It is punching way above its weight in its almost five-years-long war with Russia. But Russia, a vicious invader waging a bald war of conquest, has a friend in the White House, and that could yet prove decisive in Ukraine's ultimate demise.

It's almost unfathomable that an American president wouldn't know which side he should be on in such a war. But the highly transactional Trump, who doesn't have a moral bone in his body, clearly doesn't. Despite occasional tepid on-again off-again support for Ukraine, Trump just can't shake free of his inexplicable bromance with Putin and animus toward Ukraine (which was a factor in Trump's first impeachment) and simply do what's right.

Doing right would mean supporting Ukraine unreservedly, but that Trump has never done. He's offered occasional unenthusiastic support in fits and starts that almost always get reversed, and often pushes Ukraine to make unfavorable concessions, which it resists. U.S. materiel military aid to Ukraine is no longer given freely, but rather purchased and paid for by Europe, which has provided the large majority of Ukraine's funding. It's more a business arrangement than helping a West-leaning democracy that's fighting for its life against a brutal aggressor. (Ukraine does get a lot of U.S. intelligence assistance.)

The enormous worldwide mess Trump has made with his own war with Iran is having huge negative consequences for Ukraine. Trump's war has greatly depleted U.S. stocks of interceptor missiles such as Patriots, which Ukraine desperately needs and now can't get. (Trump backed away from a plan to allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriots under license, as he backs away from so much else that might do some good. Trump is nothing if not an unreliable ally.)

Russia is brutally hammering civilian targets in Ukrainian cities with jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles, and Ukraine increasingly has no way to shoot them down. It will be a long cold winter as Russia wreaks extensive damage on Ukraine's energy and other civilian infrastructure.

Trump's Iran fiasco has made a huge mess of the world's energy economy, and that also is hurting Ukraine. One of Ukraine's great successes has been its ability to target refineries deep inside Russia. This has created serious fuel shortages inside Russia, and it has also impaired Russia's ability to export refined products, especially diesel.

And there's the rub. Trump's Iran war has created a serious worldwide diesel shortage, because much of it is refined in the Middle East. Iranian strikes have damaged many Middle East refineries, and the Strait of Hormuz bottleneck has hampered diesel shipments out of the region to the rest of the world. (Two cargo ships sank near the Strait just yesterday.) Thanks, Don.

Much of the word is reeling from the diesel shortage. Diesel prices have set all time record highs in the U.S. The price is up over 70 percent compared to before Trump's Iran war. Because much of the U.S. economy (shipping and agriculture especially) runs on diesel, the high cost of diesel drives up prices throughout the larger economy. The Iran war has played a huge role in keeping inflation high. The September inflation report, just released, has prices up yet again, to 3.7 percent, a huge jump. Inflation was 3.4 percent in the August report.

With the midterm elections just weeks away, Trump is desperate to show he's doing something to bring prices down. And what he's doing is devastating to Ukraine.

It was a brutal one-two punch. First Trump paused sanctions on Russian fuel exports. Those sanctions had been in effect since March 2022, basically for the entire war. The sanctions reduce Russia's ability to raise revenue from fuel exports. It badly needs the money to fund its war.

The second thing Trump did was to announce a deal to import several million metric tons of Russian diesel to the U.S., which is likely illegal under current U.S. law. If the deal proceeds and Russia delivers, it will add several billion dollars to fund Russia's war against Ukraine despite doing little to nothing to lower U.S. prices.

Trump has recently insisted that Russia and Ukraine refrain from attacking each other's energy infrastructure. Ukraine said it was complying; Russia isn't. Trump's only concern is fuel prices in the U.S. which, again, is a problem of his own making. Ukraine has had to be careful in order to not offend Trump, which ties a hand behind its own back. What a rotten situation.

All this puts Ukraine at a serious disadvantage. Its successes against Russian energy has been a singularly effective accomplishment in the war.

If all that weren't bad enough, things have suddenly taken a more ominous turn. Ukraine said that Tuesday night its military has lost access to a military version of Starlink, which is essential to its battlefield communications. This came without warning.

According to the New York Times, "Kyiv relies on the satellite internet network, known as Starshield, which is paid for by the Pentagon. That led Ukrainian officials and analysts to surmise that the restrictions had come from Washington, as President Trump is locked in his latest feud with Ukraine’s leadership."

The Times continued: "At the same time, Russia unleashed dozens of ballistic missiles in a broad attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure early Wednesday, cutting power to 600,000 people in the capital, Kyiv. It was a dark omen for a rapidly approaching winter in which Russia is gearing up to try to push Ukraine to the breaking point as Kyiv runs low on lifesaving air defenses."

It's impossible to overstate how crucial Starshield is to Ukraine's battlefield operations. Thanks in no small measure to the technology plus its own ingenuity, Ukraine has been holding its own in ferocious front-line combat in which Russia is losing many hundreds of soldiers killed per day. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Trump himself was behind the Starshield outage. That outage is indescribably beneficial to Russia. Trump seems to have a favorite in the fight, and it isn't Ukraine.

What a rotten situation in a rotten time with a rotten president. You think elections don't have consequences? Oh, they do.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here. 

How many days till October?

I've never much liked heat. If I had to choose, I'd always take a cold winter day over a hot summer one. But fall is my favorite season. Or at least it was. October is, or was, my favorite month.

I used to steel myself against the summer heat by counting the days to October. Mid-August I'd tell myself: Only 45 days until October. Surely I could hang on for 45 days.

That strategy works less well with each passing year. This year it failed completely. A weeks-long brutal heatwave from August into September eventually broke. But after a brief respite the heat regrouped, and muscled its way into October. Today we have a plenty hot 90 degrees. Tomorrow's forecast, October 13, is 93. Not exactly crisp fall weather.

At least we were warned. When this "Super El Nino" began forming earlier in the year, we were told things could get especially hot. Next year is expected to be very hot also. New global average temperature records will be set, for at least one and maybe both years, to add to all the others. But lest we blame it all on a bad El Nino, understand that this year could portend the new normal in just 10 years, based on the global warming trajectory we're currently on. At least one climate scientist says so. And when the next Super El Nino comes along, its extra heat will be added to an even higher baseline than today's. Something to look forward to.

Regarding that warming trajectory, the folks over at the U.N. say the jig is up. The hopeful fantasy, long espoused, that humanity might act sufficiently to keep warming at not more than 1.5 C, is being abandoned. Not gonna happen. Staying at or below 1.5 C would have required a dramatic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, and humanity seems unwilling to do that, despite all the earnest promises. Atmospheric CO2 concentration continues to rise every year. We haven't even slowed it. CO2 fundamentally drives climate. It really is that simple.

Our future, for the near to mid term at least, is pretty well set. CO2 and temperature will continue to rise. Life will get more miserable. October will be increasingly unrecognizable, except to those too young to know what it was like to have frost on the lawn the morning after a Friday night high school football game. Everything will change.

Will change? The natural world is already changing dramatically. I wrote long ago about how armadillos, which are native to the deep south, are now common in Kansas. They weren't here when I was a kid (we used to have harsh winters) but they've been migrating north in a warming climate. They've already made it to Nebraska. Onward!

The other day I heard a public radio story about how roadrunners have made it to Kansas as well. The first sighting was actually in 1935, but now they're in 56 counties, and have nearly reached the Nebraska border.

The story explains that "The Greater Roadrunner’s traditional range spans the scrubby desert areas of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and northern Mexico." Scrubby desert. That sounds about right. Expect Kansas to get scrubbier and more desert-like as the climate warms. The "dry line" in Kansas is moving eastward, which will affect agriculture in the state that used to be called "the breadbasket of America." See also this and this.

Back to October. The longer range forecast has the remainder of the month looking more agreeable, starting in not too many days. At least I can hope. But hope for the years and decades ahead has been replaced by gloom.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

I suppose you had to be there

The fall Monarch butterfly migration is underway. Legions of them have been congregating on my tallgrass prairie restoration in southeast Kansas. Yesterday I came upon a hundred (more? many more?) of them feasting on a patch of White Crownbeard (Verbesina virginica), a.k.a. Frostweed. It's an important nectar source that provides fuel for their long journey south. In a nearby field on my place I saw lots of them using Rigid Goldenrod (Solidago rigida). Soon the Willow Aster (Symphyotrichum praealtum), another important nectar source for migrating Monarchs, will be in full bloom.

Monarchs, which weigh just half a gram, travel thousands of miles to their overwintering grounds in Mexico. Crucial fall-blooming plants provide the needed energy for the long trip. Monarchs bide their time in a good location with abundant flowers, fueling up and gaining weight, waiting for a strong north wind to push them onward to their ultimate destination. With a sufficiently strong tailwind they can travel 50 to 100 miles in a single day.

I wanted to provide a sense of what I experienced yesterday, but you really had to be there. Try as I might, it was impossible to capture the scene in a single photograph, with butterflies constantly flitting among the plants, alighting to soak in some nectar, and then moving on to another nearby flower.  The scene was riotous.

It's been a long, hot, dismal, and depressing summer on many fronts. So much is wrong with the world. I was glad to see the Monarchs somehow survived the weeks of 100 degree heat. And the experience reminded me why I do this work in the first place.

Click on the image below for a larger view.  

 Monarch butterflies on White Crownbeard

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

How Social Security increases the "deficit", and why it doesn't matter

One of the unfortunate consequences of the public's debt illiteracy is that we use the words "deficit" and "debt" interchangeably, even though they aren't the same thing.

Deficit is an accounting statement of the government's revenues and expenditures over a period of time, usually for a fiscal year. Debt is the total amount of money the government owes to all its creditors. You might think that the current year's deficit is simply added to the debt, but that is not the case.

Much is being made of the government's fiscal predicament, especially because the national debt just hit $40 trillion for the first time ever. It's quite appropriate to look at what's driving the ever-increasing debt, but unfortunately our very best journalistic enterprises (NPR and the Washington Post, for example) often botch the job. Three years ago NPR's Deirdre Walsh said Social Security and Medicare are the "biggest drivers of the debt." In March of this year the Washington Post's editorial board said "the money retirees receive today is funded by a combination of taxes on workers, who are on average poorer than retirees, and debt." Both statements are false.

Just the other day the Washington Post's editorial board said "Social Security and Medicare both add to annual deficits right now, even though the trust funds still have positive balances on paper," about which I wrote a scathing critique in which, alas, I called the board "stupid." Notice in this rendering the word "deficit," which we'll get to in a moment, and the word "debt" in the earlier Post quote.

Over the years I've written many times about how Social Security is entirely self-financed through the payroll tax. I've explained why it doesn't increase the debt (also to be discussed shortly) and never has. See, for example, this, this, and this. I have never written about Medicare, which is often mentioned along with Social Security, and am not doing so now. The two programs have very different financial realities and, quite crucially, Medicare's problems are deeply connected to the very high cost of healthcare in the United States, which is an outlier among advanced countries, and which we've never been able to adequately address.

Social Security is different. It has always paid its own way and still does. It has never added a penny to the debt and doesn't today. Thus Social Security isn't a "driver" of the debt at all. Somehow NPR, the Washington Post, and others never figured that out. How can that be?

Frequently in my explanations I've mentioned but perhaps haven't well explained the confusion in the public mind about the words "deficit" and "debt." I'm going to more explicitly clarify the distinction here (but without numbers), so you can understand how you should be thinking about Social Security's contribution to each.

As I said, deficit relates to an accounting statement of the government's cash flows over a period of time, usually for a fiscal year. The simplest way to think about it is that you add up all the government's revenues (ie., from taxes), and add up all the government's expenditures (ie., spending on everything the government buys or does), and subtract expenditures from revenues. If the result is positive you have a surplus. If the result is negative you have a deficit. When the government is running deficits it generally needs to borrow to make up the difference in order to fund its operations.

The government's debt is literally the sum total of everything it owes to its creditors. Whereas deficit is usually an annual statement of revenue and expenditures, debt can accumulate over years and decades. As I said, the government debt just hit $40 trillion. That's the total amount the government owes to all the entities that have loaned it money in various ways over time. If you hold treasury bonds, either through direct purchases or through your retirement accounts, you are one of the government's creditors. You naturally expect the government to eventually pay back the amount you loaned it, and to pay you interest in the meantime. Those are the two relevant features of debt: it needs to be paid back, and the government needs to pay interest on it.

You might think that each year's deficit adds exactly the same amount to the overall debt, but that is not so. Social Security is the best example of why.

Social Security, which has existed since the 1930s, is and has always been entirely self-funded through a dedicated payroll tax ("FICA" on your paycheck stub). The program was originally designed as a pay-as-you-go system, where current workers fund benefit payments to current retirees. But in the 1980s it became clear that when the baby boomers began retiring some decades in the future, the program would be in big trouble because there would not be enough workers to pay the benefits of all those new retirees.

In the 1980s President Reagan impaneled a commission, headed by Alan Greenspan, to address the problem. The solution, which was enacted into law, was to increase the FICA tax rate beyond what was needed to pay then-current benefits, using the excess to build a massive trust fund which would help pay Social Security benefits when the baby boomers retired way into the future. This was extremely long term planning, looking out decades in advance.

It worked. Baby boomers have been retiring for quite a while, and current benefits to retirees are now being paid by a combination of current payroll tax receipts and withdrawals from the trust fund, which to this day carries a large positive balance. (But it's being depleted rapidly, and is expected to be entirely used up in several years. A fix is badly needed.)

Notice what this arrangement has done to our conception of budget deficits. By definition and intent, for several decades Social Security was running surpluses to build the trust fund. That means payroll taxes being collected exceeded benefits paid to retirees. Our definition of deficit, above, is revenues minus expenditures. For a considerable time Social Security had revenues well in excess of its expenditures. And here's the thing. When Social Security's revenues and expenditures were added to all the government's other revenues and expenditures, it had the effect of making the overall reported government deficit lower than it would have been if Social Security had been left out of the calculation. For a lot of years Social Security had the effect of masking the size of the federal budget deficit. By the way, Social Security's finances were supposed to be reported separately, but usually they weren't when communicating the size of the deficit to the public.

Now the situation is reversed. Tax revenues—the payroll tax—aren't nearly enough to cover benefit payments to retirees. The trust fund, which was intentionally fortified all those years for this purpose, makes up the difference. The treasury simply makes withdrawals from the trust fund to pay for the portion of benefits for which current payroll taxes are insufficient.

Which is great. Really. The system is working exactly as designed, and kudos to the Greenspan Commission and the government for successfully planning decades in advance for this eventuality. But notice what the current situation does regarding our conception of deficit. Withdrawals from the trust fund don't count as current revenue. (The original tax receipts that went into the trust fund were revenue when they were collected, and they were accounted for as such long ago, which is why they masked deficits.)

So if we define deficit as a negative result when expenditures are subtracted from revenues, Social Security is running a deficit by that definition. And if we combine Social Security's revenues and expenditures to the government's overall revenues and expenditures, the effect is to increase the size of the government's overall budget deficit beyond what it would otherwise be. Whereas Social Security masked the size of the deficit for many years, it is now making the deficit look bigger.

And it just doesn't matter!  Deficit is not debt. Deficit does not need to be paid back; debt does. Deficit does not require interest payments; debt does. And while Social Security increases the deficit by some increment, according to our definition, it does not increase the debt in the slightest! This is why you should fixate on the debt, not the deficit, and understand the difference.

The reason Social Security doesn't increase the debt is that its apparent "deficit spending," which is an accounting reality, is entirely a function of withdrawals from the trust fund, to make up the current tax (ie., revenue) shortfall. The trust fund contains actual assets, intentionally accumulated for that very purpose, and the system has been working as designed for many years without affecting the debt at all. Greenspan knew what he was doing.

You can surely see intuitively why paying with money you previously collected and set aside doesn't increase the debt, right? But critics such as the Washington Post insist that the government is pulling a fast one. Because the trust fund's assets consist of special issue (non-marketable) government bonds, the critics cry foul. They say that because the money the trust fund loaned the government has been "already spent," the trust fund consists of "worthless IOUs" from the government to itself.

The answer to this is twofold. Please please please work as hard as you need to to resolve this intellectually, by thinking it through until you get it. You'll be glad when you realize it makes sense, because understanding things is always more satisfying than not understanding. The Post was unable or unwilling to do the work, but you should. The links I provide above to my previous writing will help you do so.

But note also as an objective statement of fact that the government's official accounting of the national debt shows that I am correct. (You'll need to do some digging. This explains more about how to do so.) 

When the treasury needs to make withdrawals from the trust fund (which is a creditor to the government and duly noted in the government's debt accounts; see the previous paragraph), two offsetting transactions occur. One is that the amount the government owes to the trust fund is reduced by the amount of the withdrawal. Government debt in the amount of the withdrawal is thus being retired. But to pay back the trust fund (in order obtain the money to pay Social Security benefits) the government needs to issue new debt, which it does by selling bonds to the public. The new debt increases the overall debt. The new debt and the old, retired debt cancel exactly, and the overall indebtedness of the government remains entirely unchanged! The government's accounts show that this is so. Such offsetting transactions make perfect sense to any accountant, and they should to you too.

That's how it works and how it's always worked. Social Security collects taxes, makes trust fund withdrawals, and pays retiree benefits, all without changing the national debt one iota. Because deficits can be misleading, and because it's debt that actually matters, always concentrate on the debt. 

The Washington Post doesn't get it. It said (quoted above) Social Security "add[s] to annual deficits right now," but that just doesn't matter. It has also said (quoted above) that Social Security "is funded by a combination of taxes on workers ... and debt," but that is utterly false.

Contrary to the Post's assertion, Social Security isn't funded by debt. It is and always has been funded by its own dedicated revenue stream, the payroll tax, some of which has been sensibly accumulated in the trust fund. It has never added a penny to the debt. Because the country will be increasingly wracked by concerns about its growing "debt crisis" going forward, it's crucial, as we consider solutions, to understand what does and doesn't drive the debt. Social Security just doesn't. Never has. So we need to quit implicating it in the problem.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

 

When it comes to Social Security, the Washington Post's editorial board is indefensibly stupid

The Washington Post's editorial board keeps saying indefensibly stupid things about Social Security. Here's the latest. In an editorial titled "To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state," the Post said:

"The trust fund concept is misleading. Both programs are, and have always been, pay-as-you-go, where taxes collected from current workers fund benefits for current retirees. Social Security and Medicare both add to annual deficits right now, even though the trust funds still have positive balances on paper."

Three moronic sentences strung together with mind numbing stupidity. The Post is counting on you being as ignorant and brain-dead as it is.

Take the sentences in order. The "trust fund," says the Post, is a "concept" that is "misleading." No. Social Security's (I'm ignoring Medicare, which is another matter entirely) trust fund is a real account with real assets. Nothing about it is in any way misleading, and it's not difficult to understand for anybody willing to make a minimal effort.

Social Security and Medicare, continues the Post, "are, and have always been, pay-as-you-go, where taxes collected from current workers fund benefits for current retirees." False. Social Security, which began in the 1930s, was initially conceived as a pay-as-you-go system, but way back in the 1980s it was clear that it could not continue to work that way, because a time would eventually come when current payroll tax receipts would be insufficient to cover current benefit payments. Many decades ago the Greenspan Commission recommended, and Congress enacted into law, additional payroll taxation beyond what was needed to cover then-current benefit payments, in order to build up a massive trust fund to help cover payments when the baby boomers eventually retired. The trust fund has been used exactly as anticipated, exactly as designed.

The Post adds that "Social Security and Medicare both add to annual deficits right now, even though the trust funds still have positive balances on paper." On paper? On paper? That's like saying your own savings or retirement accounts are only "on paper." The Post must think that only big bags of $100 bills count as real assets. How does one even begin to break through such stupidity?

The Post also seems to not understand the distinction between debt and deficit, even though from the standpoint of national finances the distinction is crucial. Deficit is an often misleading statement of annual cash flows. Debt is the accumulated amount the country owes to its creditors. Debt is what matters, period and full stop. And Social Security has never added a penny to the debt. Not a single penny.

Unfortunately, people tend to use the terms deficit and debt interchangeably, but they aren't the same thing. When Social Security was running huge payroll tax surpluses and building up its trust fund, those surpluses had the effect of masking the size of the government's overall annual budget deficit and making it seem smaller than it actually was. The two are supposed to be reported separately, but they were usually combined. Social Security's big surplus, when combined with the government's other revenues and spending, made the size of the government's overall deficit seem somewhat smaller than it was.

Once Social Security finally began tapping (as intended!) the trust fund to help pay retirement benefits, the situation was reversed. Now Social Security makes the overall annual budget deficit seem larger, because Social Security is actually taking in less in payroll taxes than it needs to pay benefits. But no worries: the trust fund makes up the difference. Again, as designed.

The key to avoiding any confusion is to concentrate on what actually matters, which is not the deficit but rather the debt. The debt is not the accumulation of reported annual deficits. Over time, the debt can grow faster or slower than the reported deficits would suggest.

It's the debt that just passed $40 trillion. It's the debt on which we pay interest. It's the debt that needs to be paid back (or, more likely, rolled over). And it's the debt that has not changed a bit as a consequence of paying Social Security benefits.

As I said, Social Security has never added a single penny to the debt. It's important to understand why that is so.

Thus the Post is emphatically wrong when it says, in the editorial's headline, "To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state." But so far, the "retirement state," at least the Social Security component of it, hasn't been a driver of the debt at all. The only way that would change would be for the government to start directly borrowing money to pay benefits—something it has never done, and almost certainly won't do. Social Security is entirely self-funded. Social Security benefits are currently paid by a combination of payroll tax receipts and trust fund redemptions that don't change the debt one iota. It's crucial that you understand this. (Follow the links I provide above and below if you want to learn why.)

And changes to the system to extend solvency, which are long overdue, almost certainly won't affect the debt either. They will probably involve things like higher payroll taxes and higher caps on FICA taxes. (Currently earnings above $184,500 aren't subject to payroll taxes; that cap can be bumped up or even removed entirely.) None of this involves direct borrowing. None of it adds to the debt.

Please realize that it's within your ability to understand how Social Security is funded, even if the Post does not. I wrote an extensive piece in 2013 that goes to great lengths to explain these matters. That piece got a fair amount of notice at the time. The well known economist and commentator Dean Baker recommended it to his Twitter followers. See also this and this.

If the Post can't weigh in on the very real challenges facing our retirement systems without asserting abject falsehoods, it shouldn't say anything at all. We need an intellectually honest and informed discussion of these challenges, and the Post isn't up to the job.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Do people never tire of the unending bullshit?

Donald Trump, the consummate buck-passer, said the other day that voters are "angry at Republicans," but not at him. "They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans," said the leader of the Republican party. Trump's personal approval rating has for some time been in the low to mid 30s across a range of high quality polls. He's deeply underwater on crucial issues such as the economy, inflation, and the war with Iran.

When Trump isn't throwing "Republicans" under the bus, he's in denial about his own low approval. "MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN," he wrote on Truth Social in June.

But what's "real" (or "REAL") is the fundamental problem with Trump. Literally nothing he says should be taken as aligning with actual reality.

On the economy, for example. Even going back to his first term, Trump the bullshitter has portrayed himself as the worker of economic miracles. But the claim, which was always farcical, is now comical. "The economy's the greatest economy we've ever had by far," Trump riffed the other day.

By far! That "greatest ever" economy lost 23,000 jobs last month. GDP growth for the most recent quarter was a tepid 1.5 percent. It was just 2.1 percent for Q1 and a scant 0.5 percent for Q4 of last year. Not exactly a roaring economy. See the reality problem? Annual inflation is running around 3.4 percent. Prices are high, consumers are unhappy, and jobs are becoming harder to find, especially for persons just out of school.

Americans should take the "the greatest economy we've ever had by far" nonsense as an insult to their intelligence. If they have any.

In his version of a great economy, Trump has created an average of just 33,000 jobs per month for his first 18 full months in office. Joe Biden's monthly average was 321,000—ten times as many—over four full years. Obama averaged 226,000 jobs per month over his entire second term. Whatever he may be, Trump is not a job creator.

What he is is a bullshitter.

On the campaign trail running for his first term, Trump bellowed nonsensically that the "real" unemployment rate under Obama was 25 percent. Then he said "Our real unemployment rate is probably 30 percent." Next he said "I actually think it could be as high as 32, 35 percent." And finally, "As high as 35, in fact I even heard recently 42 percent."

No, Trump never "heard" that the real unemployment rate was 42 percent. Not from any authoritative source, at least. If you hear something from, say, your hair stylist, do not take it to the bank. And hilariously, in Trump's very first official unemployment report after taking office, the unemployment rate was instantly back down to less than 5 percent. In a briefing press secretary Sean Spicer said "I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly ... they [the unemployment numbers] may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now." Spicer was grinning at the undeniable absurdity he was spouting.

Trump's saying that he "heard" something is one of his common rhetorical tics. Another is his continual escalation of made-up statistics such as the ever increasing unemployment rate. I call that the "Trump ratchet." Trump can't resist using it, and it instantly flags him as an incessant confabultor or bulshitter or even liar. A recent example is the Reflecting Pool debacle, where Trump insisted vandals had cut the pool's lining with a knife, and in his subsequent retelling the size of the damage kept getting bigger and bigger. First Trump said it was a 250-foot gash. Two days later the gash had grown to 300 feet. Finally it became a 350-foot slit. Well, not finally. By July 13 the "slashes" had grown to "300 yards long." That's 3 football fields. In reality there were no slashes at all, just seams that were coming apart because of shoddy installation.

But Trump's ego was deeply tied up in the project, so he had to find a scapegoat. An innocent bystander got swept up in Trump's vandalism conspiracy theory and was indicted on felony charges for damaging the pool. He had merely stopped on a bike ride for a look, and touched a loose piece of the pool's liner. Those charges were ultimately dropped when Trump's own DOJ admitted in a court filing that "the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented."

The bullshitting is unending. Months ago Trump proclaimed that the U.S. won the war against Iran, yet six months in nothing has been resolved and the enormity of the debacle is increasingly apparent. (Trump loves to declare that he's "won" before the entire game has been played, such as his declaration of victory before all the votes were counted on election night 2020, and his shrieking that he'd been robbed when additional votes were counted.)

Some win. To this day the Strait of Hormuz is mostly closed, the U.S. has substantially depleted several major weapons systems, there's been significant damage to U.S. bases and allied energy infrastructure, U.S. forces have had extended deployments under deteriorating conditions, conditions on a major U.S. aircraft carrier are abysmal and morale is low, the ship can't be properly resupplied because of Iranian attacks on the navy's main supply hub in Bahrain, and Iran, which is surely taking pleasure from Trump's predicament, seems uninterested in even having serious discussions about a way forward. That's so even as Trump keeps pathetically bleating that Iran is desperate to talk. Trump has no idea how to clean up the enormous mess he has made, and so incessantly changes the subject to his ballroom.

Trump has always spewed monstrous lies, such as his despicable claim that Obama wasn't born in the U.S., and his false averment that he saw thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrating when the Twin Towers came down. (It never happened.) But perhaps Trump's biggest lie ever is his insistence, repeated to this day, that the 2020 election was stolen. Innumerable lines of evidence, including from Trump's own DOJ, his Department of Homeland Security, his campaign, state recounts and audits, and dozens of lawsuits, all show that the election was free and fair, and that there was no significant fraud of any sort. It's hard to imagine anything more noxious and destructive to our democratic institutions than Trump's constantly repeated big lie. The reprehensible and systematic undermining of Americans' confidence in their elections is truly unforgivable. 

The continual confabulation, bullshitting, and lying are deeply corrosive to the national polity and to society at large, and should be thoroughly disqualifying. A president who lives entirely in made-up realities can't well govern the country, and a citizenry that willingly lives in a deranged man's made-up realities can't govern itself. We have been seeing what that looks like. Our situation should be utterly intolerable, but somehow isn't. We elected Trump a second time, four years after the start of the big lie and the attack on the Capitol, knowing full well what he is. How can anybody deny that the country is deeply sick? Can an electoral repudiation this November be a sign of real healing? I have my doubts, but we can hope.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

At least my book isn't "slop"

New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill recently wrote a piece titled "I Got Slopped," in which she describes learning that an AI-written "biography" of her life had been published on Amazon. Google informs us that "AI slop is low-quality, mass-produced digital content created using generative artificial intelligence."

Apparently there's a deluge of AI slop books, many of them biographies, appearing lately on Amazon, which has a print on demand service. Some "authors" produce massive numbers of them, using AI to find, organize, and "write" about information in the public domain regarding their subjects.

Hill quotes researchers as saying the number of  e-books published per month on Amazon has tripled, to 300,000, since the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

Wanting to explore the phenomenon she'd stumbled upon, Hill contacted and directly interviewed a prolific slop writer named Bill Johns, who was happy to explain how he operates. Johns has published 445 books—on topics such as sports, eccentric geniuses, famous bridges, alcohol, the Chesapeake Bay—for sale on Amazon. Johns says he sells a few hundred books per month, at an average profit to him of around $7 per book. "It’s bar money at least," he told Hill. Johns aims to "write" ten books per week.

Johns told Hill she deserved a 400-page biography, not the paltry 90-page one that she got. She declined his offer.

Welcome, then, to our brave new world, where reality is increasingly, if not created, then at least chronicled, by machines and software acting as intelligent agents.

I myself have been a lifelong writer of the human sort, though not professionally, and not, until recently, of books. This blog, which constitutes the largest accumulation of my work, is now 21 years old. And I got a late start. All the essays here have been written the old-fashioned way, by me. I work hard to write well. I hope I sometimes succeed, although that's for you, dear reader, to judge. A single essay can sometimes take eight hours, with sometimes dozens of further edits in the days after it's posted.

Having accumulated by now a decent-sized body of work, it occurred to me that there might be some stuff here worthy of a book. So last December I published Does It Hurt To Think about Climate?: Essays on Global Warming, available from Amazon. All the essays first appeared on this blog.

I introduced the book here last year. As I explained then, I make no money at all on sales, which might surprise you considering the book's price. Unlike for the slop authors, money making was never an objective. I priced the book as low as Amazon will allow, leaving nothing for me. The high price is due to the fact that I selected white paper and the highest quality color ink. The book contains some color photos and graphics that I wanted to reproduce well, but that drove up the cost of printing. I'd do it differently now.

Although I'd be truly honored for my book to be on your bookshelf, I can understand why you'd not want to fork over the dough. You can, however, read all the book's essays on this blog, for free. Here they are, in the order in which they appear in the book:

Waving at Volcanoes 

Ice Ages Revisited: A Story of Climate 

PragerU offers "thought-provoking questions"

Mike Johnson: "I don't think..."

Krauthammer Disappoints 

It's George Will's brain that is melting away 

The Reddest Herring

Lefty Liberal Tomfoolery

Reckoning The Scientific Consensus on Global Warming

The book also contains a Preface that isn't currently available online, plus an addition after the "Reckoning" essay titled "Skeptical Scientists: Roy Spencer as a case study". It also contains some postscripts at the end of some essays.

Global warming is presently going in two directions simultaneously. On the one hand, the U.S. public at large seems less interested and engaged than several years ago. Perhaps that's because of Covid, inflation, the high cost of living, stupid wars, and political discontent generally crowding out climate concerns.

On the other hand, the planet continues to warm rapidly, whether we're paying attention or not. The ten hottest years in the instrumental record have all occurred in the past decade. France has already had three major heatwaves this year. Europe had 10,000 heat-related deaths in late June. A shockingly strong "Super El Nino" is presently developing in the Pacific, which could easily drive global temperatures to new highs. As I write this, France and Spain are fighting historic climate-driven wildfires. A New York Times headline on July 29 reads: "112 Degrees in Paris, Flames Near Bordeaux. France Can’t Go On Like This." Air conditioning is somewhat uncommon in France. Can you imagine? A July 30 headline says "Europe’s Summer of Reckoning Is ‘Just the Beginning’".

A Swedish climate scientist said "2026 is just the beginning. It will inevitably get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I’m afraid, we’ll be passing the limits of adaptation."

A recurrent theme in my book is that while natural climactic variation has absolutely occurred over the eons, the planet is currently warming far faster—stupendously faster—from human causes than it ever has from purely natural ones. Uninformed persons (Mike Johnson, for example, who has his own essay) blather about "natural" variation, but they don't understand it in the slightest. The "PragerU" essay describes severe warming that occurred tens of millions of years ago, during which crocodiles and palm trees existed north of the Arctic Circle, and no ice sheets existed on the planet. Sea levels were hundreds of feet higher than today.

But it took millions of years for the planet to get that hot—a process that I describe in the essay. And as the essay explains, atmospheric CO2 concentration, which fundamentally drives climate, is increasing 10,000 times faster today than back then under "natural" conditions. More recently (geologically speaking) CO2 concentration never exceeded 300 parts per million (ppm) over the past million years; today it is 425 ppm and rising nonstop.

In the "Volcanoes" essay and others I point out that until now the climate has been remarkably stable for the entire period of human civilization, but that we are now moving outside that zone of stability at a frightening rate. Human civilization has never experienced what we're headed for in the not-too-distant future.

Given all that, I thought it could be useful to pull the relevant essays together into a book. I hope that, one place or another, you will read them.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here. 

Chatbots agree on birthright citizenship

On June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly affirmed the plain meaning (i.e., what the words say) of the 14th Amendment with respect to birthright citizenship. I've been reading the concurring and dissenting opinions by the justices, here. One expert historian I heard considers Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's concurrence to be particularly strong.

The decision has caused considerable outrage on the ideological right, which is surprising and amusing considering it affirms not just the plain language of the 14th Amendment, but also law, practice, and previous Supreme Court precedent going back over 150 years.

In other words, nothing has changed regarding our very long understanding of the law. Persons born in the U.S. have automatically been deemed to be citizens ever since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868. And yet the far right is shrieking in horror that the Supreme Court's affirmation will be the nation's undoing.

As an interested citizen, there are various ways to begin to get your arms around this question. You can, for example, seek out and read deeply the works of bona fide experts. To that end, I ordered and have begun reading The Second Founding by Eric Foner. I've only just started, but the book looks promising.

I also decided to ask a few prominent chatbots (I prefer to call them "AI-based search engines.") the following question, to see if their answers would be consistent:

Recently the Supreme Court ruled on birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. As one would expect, Justices Thomas and Alito dissented. I'm curious as to whether and to what extent consensus exists among expert historians on the meaning of the 14th Amendment as regards birthright citizenship. Is it strong? Overwhelming? Mixed?

ChatGPT replied:

The short answer: among professional historians who specialize in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and 19th-century constitutional history, the consensus is very strong—arguably overwhelming—that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was understood to establish birthright citizenship broadly. The disagreement is not nonexistent, but it is concentrated among a relatively small group of revisionist constitutional scholars, legal originalists, and some political advocates rather than representing a major split within the historical profession. [bold in the original]

Perplexity said:

Expert historians and constitutional scholars overwhelmingly interpret the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause as guaranteeing broad birthright citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, with only narrow, traditional exceptions (children of foreign diplomats, hostile occupying forces, and—historically—members of sovereign tribal nations). The consensus is strong, though not literally unanimous; there is a well‑develop but minority “revisionist” line of scholarship arguing for a narrower reading that would exclude some children of non‑citizen parents, especially those here unlawfully.

And Google AI Mode added:

Historical consensus on the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is strong and overwhelming. The vast majority of legal historians and constitutional scholars agree that the framers intended to establish universal, soil-based birthright citizenship for essentially all children born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents' race, status, or citizenship. [bold in the original]

Along with additional discussion, Google went on to say:

While there is a dissenting faction of originalist scholars (who, along with Justices Thomas and Alito, argue the clause was only intended to apply to formerly enslaved people and exclude the children of unauthorized immigrants or temporary visitors), this perspective is considered a distinct minority among mainstream academic historians. The overwhelming weight of historical evidence points to a blanket application of birthright citizenship.

All three AI-based search engines had a lot more to say about this than I've reproduced to here. You can paste my question into each of them and read for yourself, and also ask them followup questions.

What's clear is that there's consensus about consensus: The chatbots overwhelmingly agree that historians overwhelmingly agree that the 14th Amendment should be interpreted broadly with respect to birthright citizenship, because that's what the amendment's drafters and ratifiers intended and said, and thus, what the amendment means.

As with many things (global warming, for example), on what basis would we, mere laypersons, deign to dispute the overwhelming consensus of actual experts whose life's work has involved understanding these matters? Because it applies to a lot of things, it's a question worthy of deep reflection.

Justice Samuel Alito does deign to disagree with the experts, but he tips his hand at the very outset, and shows himself to be less interested in what the 14th Amendment means than in his preferred policy outcome. It's a very bad look for a Supreme Court justice, whose job is to uphold the actual meaning of the Constitution as it is and not how he'd like it to be, and to promote the actual rule of law.

In the very second sentence (my goodness!) of his dissent, Alito complains: "As interpreted by the Court today, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of “birth tourists,” women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home."

Outrage about "birth tourists" is no way to begin a constitutional argument. It just isn't. Suppose, for sake of discussion, that Alito is correct about the prevalence of birth tourism—something that would not have been contemplated by the 14th Amendment's drafters. Does that change the meaning of the amendment? It does not. Is "birth tourism" an unfortunate loophole? That's a subjective question on which people will disagree.

Alito would happily change the meaning of the Constitution to align with his own policy preferences, but that is neither his job nor his right. Unfortunately, he thinks that it is.

The principle dissent in the birthright citizenship case was written by Justice Thomas. As David French put it,

Justice Thomas’s dissenting opinion represents a kind of originalism that seems to use the text as little more than a launchpad for an often idiosyncratic and contestable analysis of our very complicated history. The problem with such an approach is that it can place the judge’s subjective interpretation of history above the text in the interpretive framework, and that compounds the normal human temptation to see what we want to see in American history.

For example, he spends much time talking about a concept, domicile, that does not appear in the text of the amendment. If limiting citizenship to those domiciled in America was what the authors of the 14th Amendment desired, they could have said so. 

But they didn't say so.

Changing the Constitution and the law by judicial fiat is a project this Court has been eagerly advancing since it gained its overwhelming ideological majority in Trump's first term. For example, the Court essentially decided it was time for the Voting Rights Act to be done with; that it had gone on long enough. Except that "long enough" is a matter to be decided not by the Court by by Congress. The Act was most recently reauthorized in 2006 by overwhelming votes (390–33 and 98–0) in Congress.

The Court recently decided that the Federal Reserve is important enough to remain independent, but other agencies Congress intended by law to be independent are not. In this the Court substituted its policy judgement for Congress's. The Supreme Court refused to intervene in a Texas abortion law that went into effect September 1, 2021, even though at that point Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. The Court didn't overturn Roe v. Wade until June 24, 2022. Thus did a lawless Court allow an unconstitutional law to remain in effect for nine months.

The examples are almost endless. The 14th Amendment has been a particular target of court conservatives. They've been happy to ignore the plain meaning of the language of the 14th amendment, and not just regarding birthright citizenship. Thus did the Court, in overturning Colorado's 2024 finding against Trump, neuter and basically do away with the amendment's provision that an insurrectionist can't hold office in the U.S. Poof! It's gone. In fairness, the decision was unanimous.

John Roberts wrote a very strong and correct opinion in the birthright citizenship case, but the decision only passed 5-4. (Bret Kavanaugh upheld birthright citizenship under a 1940s law, but not as a constitutionally protected right.) Expert historians may overwhelmingly agree about what the amendment means, but the nation's highest court does not. Such a tight ruling invites future attempts to undo it. We've not seen the last of this.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here. 

The Washington Post's moderator bot didn't like my comment about Lindsey Graham

Occasionally I comment on pieces that appear in the New York Times and the Washington Post. (This, for example.) Recently I attempted to comment on a Kathleen Parker column in the Post. Parker was somewhat laudatory of Lindsey Graham.

The Post's moderator bot rejected my comment as violating its comment guidelines. Was I too harsh? Was there a requirement that one not speak ill of the dead? The bot said nothing specific about what it found objectionable, which was quite unhelpful. All it said was to revise my comment and try again.

No comment of mine has ever before failed moderation at the Post. The bot's rejection of this one was instantaneous. There was no human judgement at all. You would think an "intelligent" agent could provide some useful feedback, but no.

By contrast, the Times seems to use a good bit of human moderation (although still no feedback), at least if the sometimes very long moderation delays (sometimes hours) are an indication.

I wanted to have a record of my comment which the Post refused to accept, so I'm posting it here:

Lindsey Graham was a power grubber who effortlessly rationalized the abominable. In 2017 he justified the loathsome 2016 blocking of Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland by slandering Democrats, basically saying they were just as despicable as Republicans.

"I have no doubt in my mind," said Graham, "if the shoe were on the other foot, the other side would have delayed the confirmation process until the next president were elected."

No, they wouldn't have. It was Republicans, and only Republicans, who did the deed. They have a particular affinity for playing dirty. Graham should have been ashamed, but wasn't. At least he was in the party that suited his character.

In rationalizing the vile deed, Graham pompously proclaimed that a new rule was going into effect: "We're setting a precedent here today, Republicans are, that in the last year, at least of a lame duck eight-year term, I would say it's gonna be a four-year term, that you're not gonna fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court based on what we're doing here today. That's gonna be the new rule."

Graham wagged his finger for emphasis. "Use my words against me" should he violate it, he said.

And then he did violate it. Of course he did. Ever the rationalizing opportunist, and despite what he had previously proclaimed, Graham fully supported ramming through Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barret in the fall of 2020, shortly before the presidential election that Trump lost.

And he did it by once again slandering Democrats. Lindsey wrote this to Judiciary Committee Democrats: "I am certain if the shoe were on the other foot, you would do the same."

Amazingly, as George Will wrote, Graham excused his reversal by blaming Democrats for ending filibusters for circuit court nominees. In 2013!!!

So much for his phony highfalutin precedent. So much for the "new rule." So much for "use my words against me." Graham showed what he was made of in those two incidents.

Interestingly (to me), a revised comment did get through. It was accepted instantaneously by the Post's moderator bot. Here's how I did it:

Kathleen Parker had some laudatory things to say about Lindsey Graham, but I thought it necessary to take a critical look at how he'd become an unprincipled partisan operator. I thus produced a carefully considered comment that the Post's moderator bot rejected instantaneously. I said that Graham was a "power grubber."

The moderator bot said I should consult the Post's guidelines for writing appropriate comments and revise mine. Perhaps to make it more civil? It said nothing whatsoever about what it found objectionable, which was quite unhelpful, but it refused to post my comment.

Perhaps the bot didn't like that I said Graham "slandered" Democrats, which he did in fact do in 2017 when he said, regarding Republicans' blocking the Merrick Garland nomination, "I have no doubt in my mind if the shoe were on the other foot, the other side would have delayed the confirmation process until the next president were elected."

Thus did Graham ascribe to Democrats the very "despicable" behavior, which I also called "vile," that Republicans in fact committed. Maybe the bot didn't like those words. It might also have not liked my saying that Republicans "have a particular affinity for playing dirty." Can anybody deny that they do?

Back then Graham said "We're setting a precedent here today, Republicans are, that in the last year, at least of a lame duck eight-year term, I would say it's gonna be a four-year term, that you're not gonna fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court based on what we're doing here today. That's gonna be the new rule."

And then he abandoned that rule, which I said he had delivered "pompously" (another violation?) when he supported ramming through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just before the 2020 election, which Trump lost.

Again, he blamed Democrats: "I am certain if the shoe were on the other foot, you would do the same."

My original comment contained no obscenity, no misstatement of fact. I have preserved it elsewhere. https://tinyurl.com/8bm8d2xp

By the way, my comments on Lindsey Graham were informed by two previous posts on this blog, in 2017 and in 2020.  

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Donald Trump has no self control

It has always been standard practice for communications from American presidents to be measured, carefully considered, consistent, and judiciously delivered. 

Except for Trump, who in his first term governed by tweet, presidential pronouncements don't erupt spontaneously out of the ether. Which is to say, out of a disordered mind. Normal presidents don't blurt out into the world whatever happens to fleet through their immediate unconsidered consciousness. (Like ingesting strong sanitizers, for example. Or depopulating Gaza. Or taking back the Panama Canal. Or ...)

In a normal administration there's a constantly working policy apparatus that sits behind and shapes what the president ultimately communicates, which ensures there's some sort of thought process going on, that things add up and make sense. And that they're not just plain stupid.

Of course, Trump is the obvious exception. It's almost silly that I should raise this now, but I'm exasperated. You should be too.

And so it happened that in a Monday Truth Social post announcing the reinstatement of a naval blockade against Iran, Trump added that the U.S. "will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to ​ this very volatile section of the World."

Which was stupid, implausible, illegal, and at odds with previous administration policy, which had rightly held that the Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway and that free passage is a requirement of international law. My reaction was a mental eye-roll: There goes our president again. It was clear from the moment Trump said it that such a toll structure would not happen.

And so it also happened that by the following day, Tuesday, the whole idea was canceled. Just like that.

One day, a twenty percent toll. Next day, never mind. 

It's reminiscent of how Trump announced "Project Freedom" in early May. That was a plan for the U.S. navy to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. That lasted less than two days before being abandoned.

The problem is that the world gets to continually observe the workings of a highly disordered mind, a mind that is not worthy of the U.S. presidency but which nevertheless controls it. It's a cause both for embarrassment and for deep concern.

Of course, this sort of thing happens all the time, such as when Trump demanded, also on Truth Social, "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" very early in the war with Iran. How'd that work out?

But to refer to an embarrassing incident back in March is to lose sight of the fact that this kind of behavior occurs daily. It's a sad and sorry reality that the American president truly has no self control.

Think about how we got whipsawed by the constantly changing made-up justifications for the war as it unfolded. That Trump couldn't make up his mind about what he was trying to achieve demonstrated that he'd not given the matter due consideration in the first place. Which isn't how you're supposed to take a country to war. And so he just made a big mess of things.

Yesterday, when he backed away from his harebrained toll idea, Trump said that he doesn't actually "like the concept of a fee." Really? I mean, really? Then why did he announce it?

Trump also said that the tolls would be replaced by "Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making with the United States." Sure they will. The whole absurd thing gets made up moment by moment and barfed out into the world.

And so it always goes with this most unfit of presidents. Why do we tolerate it? 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Other presidents understood risk and compexity. A self-aggrandizing Trump doesn't.

I previously wrote about how Trump bragged that he alone among all presidents was willing to do what needed to be done about Iran. Let's call him "Decisive Donald."

I wrote that despite Trump's bluster, including demanding "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" early in the war, the American and Israeli military onslaught was not sufficient to solve the nuclear problem, let alone all the other outstanding issues such as Iran's missile program (which remains substantially intact) and support for regional proxies. In the end we find ourselves, as I put it, "Crawling our way back to Obama's Iran nuclear deal." What a pathetic outcome for a self-aggrandizing president who loves to heap scorn on his predecessors—predecessors who are actually smarter and certainly wiser than he is.

Now we wait for a "Memorandum of Understanding," said to be very near, to be signed. That agreement will lay out the path for further negotiations, which could be difficult and protracted.

An analysis in The New York Times says:

Under any deal, experts say, Iran is likely to agree to a limited suspension of enrichment, and agree that half of its current stockpile of highly enriched uranium will be exported and the other half diluted to a lower level of enrichment. But Iran would still retain its nuclear knowledge and infrastructure, including advanced centrifuges.

That, together with an ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz again whenever it chooses, will give Iran a “card to prevent Israel and the United States from attacking again,” argued Danny Citrinowicz, a retired Israeli military intelligence officer who specializes in Iran. It will also give Iran renewed influence in the region.

“A war meant to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons will be the war that pushed them over the Rubicon,” he said. [my italics -mb]

The piece explains that Iran's previous leadership, which we decapitated, was more cautious than the present leadership, which has emerged in the cauldron of sustained war. The previous supreme leader, though vitriolic, was careful not to push certain matters too far. It's likely that Iran is now substantially controlled by an inflamed Revolutionary Guard Corps that is more bristly and combative.

Consider all that Iran has learned thanks to Trump. Iran has learned that it can absorb a lot of punishment. It has learned that despite being pummeled it can hold the world's energy economy hostage whenever it chooses. It no longer has to worry about provoking attack by the U.S. and Israel, because that attack has now happened. It no longer has to worry about a resumption of all-out war, because Trump is desperate to extricate himself from his mess. And it has learned (as North Korea has) that possession of a nuclear weapon is the ultimate guarantor of its security, which is the Rubicon that has now been crossed. All these lessons were previously theoretical. Trump has crystalized them.

What Trump has done has been to focus Iran's mind and clarify its interests. Some sort of nuclear deal will likely be negotiated, and it might look like Obama's. That alone will call bullshit on all Trump's bluster. But the Rubicon having been crossed, Iran's incentives are forever tilted in the wrong direction, thanks to this misbegotten war, which has created a new reality.

Good job, Don. 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.