A Warm-Up Gaggle for a Cold, Hard Collapse

Trump lectures airplanes, praises Orbán, rewrites history, and slurs through policy while Congress buries war crimes

Good morning! The sun is shining here on the Southern Oregon Coast; the republic is wheezing, and Donald Trump is now taking cognitive exams the way the rest of us take ibuprofen: frequently, anxiously, and with mounting alarm from the people who actually understand dosage. But before we get to the neurological three-ring circus, let’s begin with the press gaggle, the low-stakes, high-chaos warm-up routine for the disastrous economic speech, the full dissection of which will post here later today.

This gaggle was Trump doing vocal stretches for calamity. He opened by scolding a reporter for leaning on “a government plane,” wandered mid-answer to knock on random aircraft doors like he was checking for squatters, and announced that he has “a pretty good idea” who the next Fed chair will be, which in Washington translates to: I have offered the job to several people, and they have all suddenly remembered pressing engagements elsewhere.

From there he lurched into health policy with the confidence of a man who has never once skimmed his own insurance paperwork. Insurance companies, he declared, are vampires. Obamacare is a scam created exclusively to enrich them. And the real solution is to give people cash, just hand it over like carnival tickets, so they can go shopping for the “much better” imaginary health plans that exist only in the fever-dream bazaar of his mind. He insisted he won’t give a single dime more to insurance companies, which is a bold position coming from an administration poised to let ACA subsidies expire in two weeks unless Congress steps in to rescue the very program he keeps calling a racket. It’s a complicated plan, he said, which is true in the sense that all grifts are complicated once you try to explain them out loud.

The gaggle was less a briefing than a dress rehearsal, the throat-clear, the warm-up scales, the preview of the chaos to come, before he shuffled into that poorly attended casino ballroom for his big, catastrophic economic speech, the one festooned with “Bigger Paychecks” signs that seemed to grow more desperate the more empty chairs they surrounded. Call it political theater by way of a rummage sale, and by the time Trump finished detonating whatever remained of the illusion that anyone is steering the country’s macroeconomic machinery, the only thing bigger than those paychecks was the void where the audience was supposed to be.

The real main event yesterday was Trump’s sit-down with Politico, the next stop on his endless resurrection tour meant to convince Europe, Wall Street, and maybe even himself that he’s a stable statesman instead of a man yelling “World War II” on live television when he means World War III. Politico opened by crowning him “the most influential person shaping Europe,” and boy did he take that and sprint directly into the flaming heart of global destabilization. According to Trump, Russia has the upper hand in Ukraine because they’re “bigger,” Zelenskyy hasn’t bothered to “read” Trump’s peace plan, Europe is “decaying” because immigrants are ruining Paris and London, and NATO literally calls him “Daddy.” One imagines the actual transcript: Jens Stoltenberg blinking twice into the camera for help.

Trump announced that Europe must become “strong again” by expelling immigrants, reversing decades of democracy, and presumably adopting the policies of Viktor Orbán, whom he praised with more warmth than he has ever managed for a NATO ally, calling him “a very good guy” and “one of the smartest leaders.” He declared that European nations are “decaying” and warned that if they don’t change course, “many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer.” In Trump’s telling, Europe “talks but doesn’t produce,” so whatever consequences befall it, demographic, political, existential, are apparently self-inflicted.

Then came the historical fan fiction. He insisted that Obama “forced” Ukraine to give up Crimea, recast Biden as a human ATM who “gave Zelenskyy $350 billion,” and crowned himself the Henry Kissinger of daytime cable by proclaiming, “I settled eight wars,” most of them, he suggested, by telephone. “It’s what I do,” he said, as if global conflict were a series of customer-service calls he knocked out between episodes of Fox & Friends.

If that wasn’t enough economic derangement for one day, The Guardian dropped a bombshell that reads like a case study in pay-to-play corruption: two billionaire LNG executives, longtime Trump donors, bought nearly $12 million worth of their own company’s stock immediately after a private White House meeting. Days later, the administration handed them a sweet, regulation-melting export license that supercharged their European expansion. The company swears it’s all innocent. The White House swears Trump has “never engaged in conflicts of interest.” And Senator Jeff Merkley, bless him, is politely trying to hold back the nausea while calling for an insider-trading investigation. Meanwhile, Trump’s first day back in office was spent tearing up the Paris agreement, gutting clean energy policy, and setting fossil fuel companies loose like feral hogs at a congressional picnic. Climate disasters continue to rip through the country, but at least the billionaires are getting richer because that is what America is about.

Financial markets, for their part, are not comforted. Today the Federal Reserve is expected to cut interest rates for the third time in a row, not because inflation has been tamed (it hasn’t), but because the job market now resembles the rear axle of a car that’s been driven through potholes for 200 miles. The six-week government shutdown means the Fed doesn’t even have fresh data; they’re making choices based on September numbers, which is the economic equivalent of piloting a plane using last year’s weather report. Trump, of course, has demanded much deeper cuts and planted a loyalist on the Fed board who dutifully votes for them every time. He continues trying to replace Governor Lisa Cook over imaginary mortgage fraud, and since the Supreme Court keeps swatting his hand away, he’s redirected his hostility back toward Jerome Powell, whom he now blames for everything from inflation to gravity to the fact that his shoes seem to be getting heavier by the day.

Speaking of gravity and things falling: Congress appears ready to sweep a potential war crime under the rug with the efficiency of a teenager cleaning their room by shoving everything under the bed. The House Armed Services Committee chair, Mike Rogers, now says he’s “got all the information he needs” to close the investigation into the Sept. 2 boat strike, the military operation in which U.S. forces killed 11 people, including two survivors who were no longer a threat. Legal experts have repeatedly said the killings may have been unlawful. The Pentagon is stonewalling on releasing the unedited video. And yet, suddenly, the House GOP thinks things look tidy enough. Also worth noting: the top commander overseeing Latin America has been forced into early retirement after clashing with Pete Hegseth’s blood-and-thunder approach to regional operations, making him the latest in a string of more than 20 senior officers purged since January. Nothing says global credibility quite like covering up a potential atrocity while firing the people who tried to prevent it.

And then, as all these crises collided, Donald Trump logged on to the internet and did what he always does when he feels cornered: he typed out a manifesto accusing journalists of treason. In a late-night rant, Trump confessed he has taken at least three cognitive exams in recent months, this, on top of the ones in April and October and the string he took in 2024. Neurologists are unanimous: nobody takes these tests this often unless doctors are actively tracking decline. Trump insists he “aced” them, though he refuses to release results, much like the MRI he claims to have taken “preventatively.” Radiologists say there is no such thing as a “preventative abdominal MRI.” If he had a full-body scan, omitting the brain results is… well, that’s the part everyone keeps noticing, isn’t it?

His own family offers no comfort: Fred Trump III says the signs match exactly what happened to Fred Sr., whose Alzheimer’s diagnosis the family denied while constructing a fake office for him to shuffle around in during his cognitive collapse. And then you watch Trump on stage: slurring through “25 million peace,” muttering about “the weave,” attacking reporters’ “machine-gun lips,” losing the thread of sentences like he’s dropping stitches in real time. Trump now warns that talking about his health is “sedition” and “perhaps even treason,” which is a very normal thing for totally healthy leaders to say moments before they try to outlaw reality.

So here we are: a president obsessed with cognitive tests, an economy run on fumes and political tantrums, a Fed trying to steer blindfolded through a storm, LNG oligarchs getting rich off policy decisions they may have known about in advance, a military being purged for insufficient loyalty, allies abroad bracing for American sabotage, and Congress poised to bury a war crime with the neat efficiency of someone flicking lint off a suit jacket.

Marz and I are logging off for a bit to indulge in far more civilized pursuits, namely, some seasonal gift shopping, which, if we’re being honest, is mostly for him. There is no universe in which a dog his size needs another plush reindeer the size of a small ottoman, and yet here we are, selecting ribbons and tug-o-war toys with the solemnity of statecraft. We’ll round it out by finishing the last of the holiday decorating, attempting once again to hang lights in a straight line while Marz supervises with the stern, quiet judgment of a creature who has never once tangled himself in string lights.