Water, Warplanes, and Whatever Trump Was Saying About Tartar Sauce

A world on fire, a capital running dry, Epstein fallout expanding, and a president still rambling about faucets.

Good morning! Today’s news cycle comes to you courtesy of a government that behaves like a lawsuit factory, a climate crisis that refuses to stay quietly in the background, and a president who just gave a 90-minute campaign infomercial to the McDonald’s franchisee conference, rambling about everything from sugar content in soda to renaming the Gulf of Mexico after himself.

Let’s begin with Trump’s latest interpretive monologue performed against a backdrop of golden arches, a speech that will almost certainly be taught someday in political science classes under the module “Signs of a Republic in Freefall.” Trump informed the assembled McDonald’s executives that he is the first “former McDonald’s fry cook” to become president, which would be adorable if it were true and not another entry in the long-running genre of Trump Biographical Fan Fiction. He also claimed the entire McDonald’s skit he filmed years ago received “more hits than anything else in the history of Google,” which I assume Sundar Pichai learned at the same moment we did. Nothing like finding out from a podium at the McDonald’s Impact Summit that you run a search engine built exclusively to flatter Donald J. Trump.

From there, the speech sprinted headlong into delirium. He praised McDonald’s soda fountain Coke for using “real sugar,” demanded more tartar sauce for Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and bragged that he personally renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” (newsflash: he did not). He delivered a long, bewildering military anecdote in which a stealth bomber mission hinged, somehow, on McDonald’s drive-thru activity near a military base. He insisted inflation is “the lowest in eight years,” that gas will shortly be “two dollars,” that “Wal-Mart Thanksgiving is 25 percent cheaper,” and that the U.S. stock market has hit “48 all-time highs in nine months,” which would be stunning were it not completely fabricated. He also explained, in vivid detail, that he personally deregulated America’s toilets, showerheads, dishwashers, and microwaves, all of which, apparently, were suffering from a liberal conspiracy to deny him water pressure. A man who once controlled the nuclear arsenal spent several minutes ranting about faucets.

In other words, Trump felt completely at home. When your daily diet is Big Macs, Diet Coke, and grievance, speaking at McDonald’s is basically returning to the cathedral.

Now, from the land of fast food populism to the land of “Do Not Make Eye Contact With Federal Agents,” the Trump regime has launched yet another lawsuit, this time against California. The administration insists that California’s new laws banning secret police and requiring federal agents to show their faces are unconstitutional, dangerous, and presumably part of Gavin Newsom’s secret plan to undermine the Republic by making law enforcement officers wear… identification. California calls the lawsuit a PR stunt from an administration that cares more about pardoning violent Trump supporters than public safety, and DHS has already announced it will “NOT comply,” which is exactly how you’d expect a healthy democracy to signal that everything is going great.

But we are just warming up. Today, Trump will roll out the red carpet for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, because nothing says “restoring America’s moral leadership” like inviting the man U.S. intelligence concluded approved the killing of American citizen Jamal Khashoggi to the Oval Office for lunch and a black-tie dinner. Trump hopes to lock in 48 F-35 fighter jets, a nuclear program, and a few hundred billion dollars’ worth of Saudi investments. It’s the kind of bold, sweeping diplomacy that asks the eternal question: what could possibly go wrong with giving stealth aircraft and nuclear technology to a man who had a journalist dismembered?

The White House insists this is all to keep Saudi Arabia “out of China’s sphere,” but in practice it looks like Trump is letting autocrats comparison-shop between superpowers until they find the best bundle deal. And beneath all the transactional breathlessness sits the geopolitical bombshell no one in Washington wants to say out loud: giving Saudi Arabia the F-35 would shatter Israel’s long-protected “qualitative military edge” in the region. For decades, Israel has been the only Middle Eastern nation allowed access to America’s most advanced aircraft, not because of sentimentality, but because U.S. policy has treated that air superiority as a stabilizing force, a way to keep potential regional wars from turning apocalyptic.

Now Trump is prepared to toss that doctrine into the McFlurry machine and hit ‘purée.’ A Saudi fleet of F-35s doesn’t just rebalance the region, it rewrites it. It hands the most sophisticated strike aircraft on Earth to a government that wages proxy wars in Yemen, regularly kidnaps dissidents abroad, and whose crown prince reacts to criticism with bone saws. It also puts Israel on notice that its once-untouchable air advantage can be bartered away for foreign investment and better photo ops.

Trump isn’t just selling jets, he’s selling the architecture of regional power like a late-night infomercial host trying to clear inventory before dawn.

—The Epstein orbit continues collapsing in on itself. Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, former Harvard president, and long-time proponent of the theory that rich people are just magically “talented”, has stepped back from public life after newly released emails revealed that he continued chatting with Jeffrey Epstein long after Epstein’s conviction. The emails include dating advice, political gossip, and casual banter about Trump, who Summers called “a clown”, as if Epstein were just another buddy from the faculty lounge instead of a convicted sex offender who kept a ledger of powerful people like it was a social network. Elizabeth Warren called for Harvard to cut ties entirely with Summers, pointing out that anyone who couldn’t bring themselves to break contact with Epstein after 2008 shouldn’t be advising a nation or teaching its students. It’s yet another reminder of how deep the Epstein rot runs, bipartisan, elite, normalized, and still largely unaccountable.

Then there is Iran, where the climate crisis is no longer an abstraction but a civic unraveling. Tehran has recorded one millimeter of rain this year. More than thirty dams are at less than 5 percent capacity. The snowpack has collapsed by almost 99 percent nationwide. The country, already battered by political upheaval and violence, is now staring down the possibility that its capital city of fourteen million people could become uninhabitable. Mosques are full of rain prayers. Meteorologists are begging the sky to cooperate. The government is launching cloud-seeding flights like they’re trying to reboot the atmosphere. Some clerics blame drought on women showing too much hair. Others attribute it to “sin.” Environmental scientists, many of whom have been harassed, arrested, or exiled, are saying what they’ve said for years: this is climate breakdown plus decades of water mismanagement, and the window for avoiding catastrophe is closing.

President Pezeshkian warned that Tehran might have to be partially evacuated by mid-December if the rains do not come. Officials tried to walk it back as “infeasible,” but water experts quietly admit he may be right. There is no infrastructure in Iran capable of receiving 14 million climate refugees. There isn’t even enough bottled water on store shelves. This is what denial buys: collapse on a timetable.

So today’s news gives us a portrait of a planet in two acts. In one, the U.S. president stands before a roomful of franchisees, bragging about renaming oceans and freeing the toilets and reading economic charts drawn entirely inside his own imagination. In the other, an ancient city of millions contemplates the possibility of abandoning itself to the sand because the climate has changed faster than its rulers can keep up.

These stories are not separate threads. They are one tapestry. A world ruled by people who think water pressure is tyranny, but selling nuclear reactors to autocrats is diplomacy, is a world unprepared for the climate future crashing through the door.