Fully Funded Power, Fully Hollowed Institutions

While Trump stages strength at Fort Bragg and billionaires scramble over the Epstein files, TSA agents work unpaid, measles spreads in parking lots, and accountability becomes optional.

Good morning! Trump rolled into Fort Bragg yesterday and delivered what can only be described as the same speech he delivers everywhere, just with more camouflage in the audience and a larger flag budget. It was the full Greatest Hits album: inflation is “way down,” the Dow is a miracle, America is feared again, Democrats are cartoon villains, and everything bad that has ever happened in human history is somehow still Joe Biden’s fault. Between inflation miracles and stock-market pep talks, he reassured the crowd, “Your 401(k)’s is doing very well. Is anyone doing poorly with their 401(k)? If so, you’re a pretty poor investor.” The only novelty was the $1,776 “warrior dividend,” a patriotic cash bonus apparently designed to answer the question, what if we branded stimulus checks like a fireworks store? Nothing says civic virtue quite like slapping the Declaration of Independence onto a direct deposit and calling it national renewal.

The speech itself was mostly pageantry, campaign rally energy in a military setting, with the usual court-politics undertone: vote correctly or they’ll rename your base again. Trump didn’t even bother to soften it. “That’s another reason you have to vote for us,” he told the troops, because “If we don’t win the midterms they will take it off again. You can’t let that happen.” A military base, recast as an electoral hostage note.

And threaded through it all was the loyalty doctrine. “I have a great loyalty to ICE, the Border Patrol, to our police…” he declared, before promising the assembled soldiers, “My message to all of the warriors here today is your commander-in-chief supports you totally. I support you more… than any of them.” In a healthy democracy, officials defend policies. In personality-driven politics, they defend the person, and the louder the vow, the clearer the signal.

But the real news wasn’t the teleprompter-free nostalgia tour. The real news was what Trump said afterward, on his way out, when the mask slips and the improvisation gets more… revealing.

Asked about Iran, Trump didn’t bother with the careful language of diplomacy or deterrence. He openly floated regime change as “the best thing that could happen,” paired with the reminder that “tremendous power has arrived” and another carrier group is on the way. This is the governing doctrine in its purest form: maximalist demands, vague threats, and the assumption that peace is something you achieve by parking a floating city of fighter jets offshore until the other side agrees to stop existing. He also insisted Iranian nuclear sites have been “totally obliterated,” but helpfully clarified that if there’s any “dust left down there,” well, America can always go grab that too. And just to keep diplomacy nicely boxed into an ultimatum, he added, “We don’t want any enrichment.” The geopolitics are apparently being run on a combination of action-movie dialogue and Home Depot cleanup metaphors.

And through it all, the same rhetorical comfort blanket kept getting pulled up: protect law enforcement, protect the warriors, protect the strong men with the guns, because accountability is for civilians and oversight is what “radical left lunatics” demand when “the Democrats have gone crazy.” In a healthy democracy, officials defend policies. In personality-driven politics, they defend the person. The louder the praise, the clearer the signal: loyalty now outranks independence, and governance starts to look less like public service and more like a royal court with better lighting.

Which brings us neatly, and grimly, to the other story sitting underneath everything right now: the Epstein files, or as Jimmy Kimmel correctly insists, the Trump–Epstein files. Because if Fort Bragg is the spectacle, Epstein is the infrastructure. Business Insider did something unusually clarifying this week: it turned the document dump into a balance sheet. Not a tabloid list of names, but a tally of the wealth orbiting this case, Gates, Wexner, Leon Black, Musk, Brin, Branson, Lutnick, Thiel, a constellation of billionaires whose combined worth comes out to roughly $1.27 trillion. That’s the scale of power now tied, socially and financially, to a man who should have been radioactive long before he died in a cell.

This is the part people keep missing when they treat Epstein like a salacious side plot. Epstein wasn’t a monster hiding under society’s bed. He was sitting at its richest tables. He was embedded in the private infrastructure of elite access, the dinners, the introductions, the financial “advice,” the island invitations, the philanthropic laundering, the quiet assumption that some people simply exist above consequence. A trillion dollars buys a lot of insulation, silence, at the very least it buys hesitation. It buys the kind of world where survivors are expected to wait politely while an attorney general debases herself in front of America.

Now, finally, some heads are rolling. Not because the global elite suddenly developed moral clarity, but because the paper trail has become too large to ignore. The fallout is spreading across business and politics: a logistics titan replaced in Dubai, Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer resigning after calling Epstein an “older brother,” the chairman of Paul Weiss stepping down, diplomats and royals scrambling, former prime ministers facing investigations. This isn’t about guilt by association, it’s about what kind of culture maintained friendly relationships with a convicted sex offender after 2008 and treated him as useful anyway.

We are watching a system under strain. On one side: Trump’s endless performance of strength, loyalty, and dominance, delivered at military bases and on airport tarmacs before another taxpayer-funded golf weekend. On the other: the slow, grinding exposure of a trillion-dollar elite ecosystem where accountability has always been optional. The spectacle is loud, the money is quiet, and the truth, as usual, is buried somewhere underneath the applause lines.

That tension, spectacle on top, impunity underneath, is not confined to Epstein’s billionaire orbit. It’s the defining pattern of the entire administration right now. Because while the White House is busy staging rallies about “warriors” and pumping the Dow like it’s a moral argument, the actual machinery of enforcement at home is beginning to buckle under the weight of its own abuses.

Case in point: the Department of Homeland Security has now officially shut down as of midnight, not because Congress can’t count votes, but because members of Congress remain at an impasse over whether to impose new guardrails on federal immigration enforcement. Democrats have refused to vote for DHS funding without measures such as requiring agents to remove masks during operations, wear body cameras, and obtain judicial warrants before entering private homes — reforms they argue are necessary after a spate of high-profile shootings by agents and mounting public backlash. Republicans, while already having funded ICE and Customs and Border Protection under last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, rejected many of the Democrats’ proposals, and lawmakers left town without a deal. As a result, TSA screeners, FEMA disaster workers, Coast Guard uniformed personnel, and others are now required to work without pay to keep essential functions running, including airport security that could be strained by staffing shortages, while immigration enforcement continues uninterrupted thanks to the prior funding infusion that keeps ICE and CBP operational even in the shutdown.

And Minneapolis is exactly why this fight is happening. The city has become a flashpoint for Operation Metro Surge, where federal agents have been filmed using aggressive tactics against civilians, where two U.S. citizens have been killed, and where the official narratives are now starting to collapse in court. Just this week, two immigration agents were placed on leave after prosecutors cited newly discovered evidence “materially inconsistent” with sworn testimony and an FBI affidavit in a case where two Venezuelan men were accused of violently assaulting an officer, charges that were abruptly dismissed with prejudice. Translation: the government walked into court with one story, and reality showed up with another.

At the same time, a federal judge in Boston ordered the United States to retrieve a 19-year-old Babson College student mistakenly deported to Honduras, because the administration, having admitted the error, still couldn’t be bothered to fix it on its own. That ruling was a reminder that the Executive Branch does not get to deport people by mistake and then shrug its way into amnesia.

If you want to see what institutional erosion looks like when it’s not wearing camouflage or sitting in a hearing room, look at Spartanburg, South Carolina, where pediatricians are now running measles triage out of their parking lots.

Doctors at Parkside Pediatrics have been examining children through car windows to keep one of the most contagious viruses on earth out of waiting rooms filled with babies too young to be vaccinated. The outbreak has now surpassed 930 cases, the largest in three decades. Some schools in the area reportedly have vaccination rates below 20 percent. The herd immunity threshold for measles is 95 percent. Not a gap, but a chasm.

This is not happening because we lack a vaccine. The measles vaccine is one of the most effective medical interventions ever created. This is happening because we have spent the last five years turning basic public health into a culture war.

In Trump’s first term, it was COVID denialism, magical thinking, and grievance politics wrapped in flags. In the sequel, it’s measles. Not because we don’t know how to stop it, but because “medical freedom” has been rebranded as a moral good and expertise has been demoted to opinion. The nation’s top health official built a career casting doubt on vaccines. Local leaders are afraid to say the obvious out loud while governors mumble about “personal choice,” and churches host vaccine clinics where almost no one shows up.

So it falls, once again, to the people in scrubs. One nurse practitioner put it plainly: many parents have “lost respect and fear for this disease.” That’s the quiet tragedy. Measles was functionally eliminated in the United States a generation ago. It required no revolution. No trillion-dollar investment. Just collective agreement that children shouldn’t suffer from preventable illness.

Sadly, we have devolved into a system where loyalty outranks independence, where Dow numbers substitute for governance, and where accountability is treated like persecution, and even viruses get politicized.

Somewhere between court politics, unpaid federal workers, and parking lot measles triage, it is apparently Valentine’s Day.

So consider this your reminder: call someone you love. Hug your people, and you pets, and protect your sanity. The headlines are not slowing down.

Marz and I have a busy weekend ahead, but there is so much more to write about. Sometimes I wonder if that is a good thing or a bad thing.