On the menu today: The GOP heads into the midterms with a president thoroughly disinterested in the cost of living and much more focused on his ballroom and exempting himself and his family from tax audits for the rest of their lives. It turns out Graham Platner lied about how he paid for his house. And the Wall Street Journal affirms what I spent the past two weeks showcasing. Read on.
Trump’s Favorite Priorities Are Not What Concerns Americans Right Now
For some reason, a comment from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy at an October 9 cabinet meeting started making the rounds on X yesterday.
Secretary Kennedy: I’ll say this — also there’s many, many other confirmation studies. One of — there’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol. So, none of this is dispositive, but all of it is stuff that we should be paying attention to.
President Trump: But you know, there’s a tremendous amount of proof or evidence, I would say, as a non-doctor, but I’ve studied this a long time.
Kennedy’s claim is absolute nonsense, of course, and you can color me a deep skeptic that Trump has indeed “studied this a long time.”
And let’s face it, demonizing circumcision still isn’t the most antisemitic thing any member of the Kennedy family has ever done. (It’s a high bar to clear.)
Still, Kennedy’s desire to bring up the alleged evils of circumcision at a cabinet meeting is a vivid demonstration that what the president and some of his top cabinet officials worry about is not what the average American worries about — and that is a formula for an absolute shellacking of Republicans in the midterm elections.
You name the poll, and it shows Americans screaming at the administration: The cost of living is too high, and the economy stresses us. Fox News, the Daily Mail, Gallup, YouGov, Morning Consult — all of them consistently show intense economic pessimism and high public disapproval of how President Trump is handling the economy.
Rasmussen Reports, usually the pollster that serves up the most favorable numbers for the president, found yesterday that 43 percent of likely U.S. voters approve of President Trump’s job performance, and 56 percent disapprove. Rasmussen also found that “if the elections for Congress were held today, 47% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Democratic candidate, while 41% would vote for the Republican.” Even in Rasmussen’s sample, 57 percent of respondents think the country is going in the wrong direction, while just 36 percent say the country is on the right track.
The CNN survey conducted at the beginning of May “finds that 77 percent — including a majority of Republicans — say that Trump’s policies have increased the cost of living in their own community.”
Never mind getting President Trump to talk about the cost of living; Congressional Republicans can’t even get the administration to concede there’s anything subpar about the current economy. Remember, President Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, our old friend Kevin Hassett, boasted that “credit card spending is through the roof.” He insisted that it was good news.
The White House homepage still features a statement from the president declaring, “We have unmistakably entered a Golden Age of American greatness, promising even greater opportunity and security ahead,” and a pop-up inviting visitors to submit their e-mails, stating, “Welcome to the golden age.” On May 12, Trump told reporters, “I think we’re in the golden age right now.”
The cost of living is high in vast swaths of the country. Gas prices are too high for most consumers. High gasoline prices make everything else more expensive.
The president, in love with the sound of his own voice, often likes speaking long past the attention span of anyone but his most devoted acolytes. He has offered the longest convention speech and the longest State of the Union address. Because Trump just blurts out the first thing that pops into his head, he often makes statements that are tailor-made for Democratic attack ads in the midterms.
The most recent statement that is near-certain to appear in some Democratic ads is his declaration that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” when negotiating with Iran. Less noticed in that appearance by the president is the fact that, much like his octogenarian predecessor, Trump now misremembers the inflation rate in ways more favorable to his record. Back on May 12, Trump claimed, “If you go back to just before the war, for the last three months, inflation was at 1.7 percent.” That is not the case.
The war began on February 28. Inflation was 2.4 percent in February, 2.4 percent in January, 2.7 percent in December, and if you want to go back further, 2.7 percent in November, not recorded in October because of the government shutdown, and 3 percent in September.
The tariffs are not the only reason that the cost of living is high, but they do make everything you buy that is imported or uses imported parts more expensive. The administration had an off-ramp for the tariffs with the Supreme Court decision about the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The president responded by accusing the Supreme Court of being bribed by foreign powers. (Yes, this is the same president who is accepting a plane from Qatar, a plane Trump intends to be flying by this summer.) Trump just reinstituted the tariffs under a new justification.
The current set of tariffs in place is as byzantine as the U.S. tax code, with different rates on neighboring countries and a seemingly endless slew of exceptions and carve-outs. Just about all of them are being challenged in court. It is about as uncertain a situation as you could get for any American business reliant on imports or exports. That is about two-thirds of small or medium-sized businesses.
In this administration, to know what the president of the United States is thinking or doing regarding an ongoing war paused by a very violent ceasefire, you must check Truth Social. This is a social media platform that he is the majority owner of, run by Trump Media and Technology Group and trading under the stock ticker “DJT.” Trump Media reported $3.7 million in revenue in 2025 and a net loss of $712.3 million.
In those Truth Social posts, the president is often touting or defending the construction of his new White House ballroom. If you asked the median voter to list their top 100 priorities for the federal government, “a nicer permanent location for the U.S. government to host state dinners” would not make the top 100 of probably 99 percent of respondents. Congressional Republicans are now in the position of insisting that the ballroom’s construction is privately funded, but that the only thing taxpayers are being asked to cover are the Secret Service security upgrades. When you spend months and months insisting that the new ballroom won’t cost taxpayers “a dime,” you cannot be surprised when people are upset that the new complex will, in fact, require some taxpayer funding.
When President Trump received more than 77 million votes in 2024, either no one or almost no one voted for him because they wanted a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” for payouts to the president’s allies, or for the president to exempt himself and his family from tax audits for the rest of their lives.
Right now, someone in the comments section is writing that I have “TDS” for noticing all this.
Graham Platner Claims His Dad Gave Him Difficult Personal Loan Terms
Some people find it completely normal that a “military history buff” could “accidentally” get a tattoo of the Nazi SS Totenkopf on his chest, stare at it in the mirror for 18 years, and never realize it was a Nazi symbol until after he started running for Senate.
A lot of those same people also think it is completely normal that the little-known harbormaster of Sullivan, Maine, population 1,246, decided to run for U.S. Senate and the New York Times chose to run a profile on him in August, the New Yorker wrote its own 3,400-word profile of him in September, GQ ran a glossy profile on him in October, and Bon Appetit published a profile on him in November, and that there’s no reason to believe that there was any behind the-scenes hyping of him by Democratic political communications firms.
Yesterday on X, Magdi Jacobs — not right-of-center, just somebody who prefers the truth to lies — pointed out that the mainstream media coverage of Platner has featured massive failures in fact-checking:
For example: Platner told the New Yorker that he got a VA loan for his house. New Yorker published this in their 9/25/2025 magazine. Platner did not get a VA loan for his house. He got a loan from his father, a fact the Washington Free Beacon uncovered after they got the mortgage documents. The Free Beacon published this info on: 5/1/2026.
Not much attention was paid to it. On 5/11/2026, the Free Beacon directly contacted the New Yorker about the discrepancy. Then, on 5/15/2026, NYT published a profile of Platner. On 5/16/2026, they published an interview. Neither the profile or the interview pushback on the previous false claim of a VA loan.
From the 5/15/2026 profile: “[Platner] has said the Department of Veterans Affairs gave him “the support” to purchase his home in 2017. Property and tax records show he bought the home for $205,000 and received a $200,000 mortgage loan from his father.”
The New Yorker published their correction AFTER this profile was published, the same day.
In the NYT interview (5/16/2026), Platner claims (unprompted) he COULD have taken out a VA loan but didn’t, then: “[my dad] gave me a significantly higher interest rate than the bank would have.” In the interview, there is no push-back on the peculiarity of the latter claim (higher interest loan from father), on top of not pushing back on the PREVIOUS claim (VA loan).
Nor is there any pushback in any piece re: Platner’s claim that he and his wife make 60K/year, combined. Platner’s own VA disability benefit, cited at 4.8/month, would be 57.6K. Nor is there any pushback on the 4.8k/month number, which is beyond the realm of regular 100%-ranked disability from the VA ($4,158/month).
I am old enough to remember when the New York Times made a very big deal out of Marco Rubio’s wife’s speeding tickets.
Wall Street Journal: Putin May Militarily Target a NATO Country
I spent the last two weeks telling you what the countries on NATO’s Eastern Flank are doing to prepare for additional Russian military aggression in their neck of the woods. I suspect some folks out there thought I was being alarmist or paranoid in my coverage.
Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, this morning:
Russia is stuck on the Ukrainian battlefield and lashing out with massive strikes on Kyiv. The growing fear in European capitals is that President Vladimir Putin will try next to reshuffle the cards by expanding the conflict to Europe.
In recent weeks, Russia has made increasingly bellicose statements against the Baltic states. It has threatened to bomb “decision-making centers” in Latvia after accusing the country of hosting Ukrainian drone operators, an allegation denied by the Latvian authorities. Air-raid alarms were sounded in Lithuania last week, forcing the government into a bunker, after suspected Russian drones approached its airspace from Belarus.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has also published the addresses of companies allegedly working on drone production with Ukraine in eight European nations, warning of “unpredictable consequences” and “sharp escalation” if military assistance to Kyiv doesn’t cease.
While fears that Russia could expand the conflict to Europe aren’t new, recent developments have made them more urgent. Several European national-security officials have warned that Russia could try to test the cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by targeting one of the Baltic nations, Swedish and Danish islands in the Baltic Sea or alliance territory in the Arctic.
Of course, as I tried to lay out over the past two weeks, Vladimir Putin and the regime in Moscow already are in a form of war against NATO — they just aren’t yet using tanks and planes. Instead, their attacks are coming in the form of large-scale cyberattacks, weaponized migration, drone incursions, deliberate damaging of undersea cables and infrastructure, sabotage, arson, and GPS jamming.
NATO is not at war with Russia… but we’re not not at war with Russia, either.
ADDENDA: Maureen Galindo, running on her “imprison Zionists and castrate them” agenda, lost the Democratic primary in Texas’s 35th district last night. She received 36.2 percent of the vote, or about 7,200 votes; all those voters need to be put into the concussion protocol and have their heads examined.