I'm Just Saying.

I’m so tired of Harry Enten treating poll numbers as though they were delivered from Mount Sinai in a golden chariot. He’s concerned almost entirely with the numbers, not what they represent, why they reflect what they reflect, or what forces shaped them in the first place. To him, the number is the meal . Context is just cauliflower pushed to the edge of the plate. And this isn’t new. He was just as excited about poll numbers before the 2024 election, when the spread was usually two points at most and often much smaller. Once you factored in the margin of error, half of what he was breathlessly analyzing wasn’t movement at all. It was statistical pink noise . There he stood in front of his magic wall, treating every tiny fluctuation inside the margin of error like democracy had just handed him a notarized confession. That’s the problem with so much political polling coverage. The number goes up. The number goes down. One candidate gains a point. Another loses two. Suddenly, we’r...

In May 2025, former FBI Director James Comey was vacationing on the North Carolina coast. During a walk along the beach, he came across seashells that someone had arranged to form a four-digit number. Comey photographed them and posted the picture on Instagram with the caption, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” Trump allies quickly manufactured an assassination threat out of the post. Comey removed the photograph, explaining that the violent interpretation had never occurred to him and that he opposed violence. Trump then personally endorsed that interpretation, insisting the number meant Comey wanted him assassinated. The administration subsequently turned that interpretation into a federal investigation and, eventually, an indictment. Donald Trump explained that “86” is a Mafia term meaning “kill.” To make the point, he asked, “You ever see the movies?” Well, yes. I have seen the movies. If Mafia movies are evidence, The Godfather is Exhibit A. It is by far the greate...

 If Trump is only joking about running again in 2028, then first and foremost, he needs to stop. For one thing, it is not funny. There is no wit in repeatedly hinting that you may violate the Constitution and then smirking while your supporters cheer. Second, it is unbecoming of the office of the President. The president is not a nightclub comic testing material on a friendly crowd. He has a duty to respect constitutional limits, not turn them into a running gag. Third, the joke is aimed mostly at stupid people. It is designed for people who either do not understand the Twenty-second Amendment or do not care what it says. They hear “Trump 2028,” laugh, applaud, and treat constitutional government as another prop in the show. Meanwhile, Trump preserves the usual escape hatch. If the crowd likes the idea, he keeps feeding it. If critics object, he says they cannot take a joke. But when asked about serving a third term, Trump did not simply toss off a funny line. He said there were “...

“From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” What in the hell is that supposed to be? There are just so many things wrong with it. First, you do not make war policy on Truth Social. War policy is supposed to emerge from intelligence assessments, military planning, legal review, diplomatic coordination, clearly defined objectives, and some serious consideration of what happens after the first bomb falls. There should be discussions about what the United States is trying to accomplish, what targets actually serve that objective, how Iran is likely to respond, how American forces and allies will be protected, how escalation will be controlled, and what conditions wou...

Over the weekend, I watched White House Down . In one scene, Air Force One is shot out of the sky. My immediate reaction, based on general knowledge and military training, was that the scene was Hollywood bullshit. Air Force One is not merely a large airplane with “United States of America” painted on the side. It is a national command platform protected by secure communications, defensive systems, military planning, and layers of procedures designed to keep the president alive and the government functioning during an attack. Then I remembered which Air Force One Donald Trump had been flying. Almost immediately, the movie scene stopped looking so ridiculous. The Trump administration did not build a new Air Force One in a year. It rushed a former Qatari royal aircraft into presidential service even though it lacked the full defensive capabilities of the older aircraft already available to the president. The press is now treating those missing system...

The Profession of Faith Was Optional Donald Trump began his presidential campaign unable or unwilling to say what religion he practiced. Asked directly, he answered, “I don’t know.” A few days later, he identified himself as Presbyterian. Then came the Bible questions. Trump called the Bible his favorite book, but when asked to name one or two favorite verses, he produced the theological equivalent of Sarah Palin’s “all of them.” He refused to name even one, insisting that his relationship with the Bible was too personal to discuss. Asked whether he preferred the Old Testament or the New Testament, he answered, “probably equal.” A little more than a month before the Bible interview, Trump had been asked whether he had ever sought God’s forgiveness. His answer was equally revealing: “I’m not sure I have.” He explained that when he did something wrong, he simply tried to make it right himself. “I don’t bring God into that picture,” he said. These...

Those who supported Donald Trump during his first administration can offer all the familiar excuses: party loyalty, conservatism, judges, taxes, abortion, etcetera, etcetera, blah blah blah, whatever else they prefer to cite. But January 6, 2021, was the dividing line. And January 6 did not begin on January 6. It began on election night, when Trump declared victory while millions of legally cast votes had yet to be counted. He announced that he wanted the voting stopped and said he would take the matter to the Supreme Court. The following morning, he made his demand even plainer: “STOP THE COUNT!” Halting the count at that moment would have left Trump ahead in several states where the remaining ballots were expected to favor Joe Biden. Perhaps, in Trump’s pea brain, Bush v. Gore had established that the Supreme Court could simply stop an election whenever the Republican happened to be ahead. It had not. The Court stopped a disputed recount in one state. But nuance has never b...

Why do members of Patriot Front hide their faces? Because they are cowards. I would call them pussies, but that would unfairly suggest they have ever been near one without a restraining order, a podcast microphone, or a twelve-part manosphere theory about why women, accountability, and direct sunlight are all part of the same conspiracy. You cannot claim to belong to a white supremacist movement, claim your race is superior, claim your intellect is superior, and then be too afraid to show your face in public. If you truly believe you are standing for something noble, powerful, or righteous, why hide behind masks? Why conceal your identity? Why march like some discount militia cosplay troupe and then scurry back into anonymity? If you are supposedly the superior race with the superior intellect, why are you marching around dressed like Lamont Cranston in a Cub Scout uniform mommy just ironed? Oh wait, are the masks an admission that even you know the pointy hoods are a brand...

After the Supreme Court reaffirmed birthright citizenship, Stephen Miller went on Jesse Watters’ show and tried to explain why that was supposedly wrong. His argument, if we are being generous enough to call it that, was this: “Look, Jesse, I can step tomorrow onto the deck of a 747. It does not mean that I am the pilot of that plane and I'm qualified to fly it. Just physically being on U.S. soil does not make you a citizen or qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country.” What in the non-sequitur fuck is he talking about? Does he think birthright citizenship comes with a pilot’s license? And that was only the opening salvo. Miller then spent nearly six minutes flooding the zone, spewing spittle, spite, and speculation. He talked about “deep knife wounds” to the republic, pregnancy-scam fantasies, “Third World nations” that allegedly never invented the wheel, babies growing up to vote for mayors and governors, welfare checks supposedl...

It was quietly announced in late May that Tulsi Gabbard would be stepping down as Director of National Intelligence . Almost immediately, Bill Pulte was named as Trump’s choice to take over in an acting capacity. That should have been its own scandal. When the position of DNI was created, the law said the person nominated for the job “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte had almost none. But Trump does not care about that, because Trump’s singular qualification for any position is blind fealty to Trump. Not experience. Not judgment. Not competence. Not even a passing acquaintance with the job description. Loyalty. And because Republicans control the Senate, and Trump still holds most Republican senators by the short hairs, he had little reason to fear serious resistance. If he tells them a man with no intelligence background belongs atop the American intelligence community, most of them will nod, swallow hard, and pretend the law is more of a decorative su...

JD Vance appeared on The View , and during the appearance, attention turned to Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Vance said Trump “literally reported Jeffrey Epstein to the police.” Then he tried to make that sound even bigger, saying Trump “narc’d on him to the police” and claiming that Trump’s supposed report “led ultimately to Jeffrey Epstein’s down That is a gross misrepresentation of reality. “Narc’d on him to the police” is doing a whole lot of work; and apparently we are saying “narc’d” again. Vance is trying to turn Trump into some kind of heroic informant, as if Trump marched into a police station like Secret Squirrel, or maybe Morocco Mole, carrying a folder, a conscience, and a sudden concern for teenage girls. That is not what the record shows. What has been reported is that a former Palm Beach police chief later told the FBI that Trump called him in 2006, after the Epstein investigation was already moving and as Epstein’s first sex-crime charges were bec...

Okay, I hate to be writing about the same subject in less than two weeks, but Trump says vandals chemically damaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Well, I did a little research, and I asked some friends of mine who are deep into the chemical world, very deep, what magical chemical could both induce algae growth and peel the newly painted surface off in chunks. The closest answer was trisodium phosphate : TSP, Na 3 PO 4 . It contains phosphate, which can feed algae, and, in concentrated form, it has been used in paint preparation. So I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out how much of this magical chemical you might need to create that kind of effect. The rebuilt Reflecting Pool holds about 4 million gallons of water. Since one gallon is about 3.785 liters, that means the pool contains roughly 15 million liters of water. Now, if our magical vandal chemical is, in fact, trisodium phosphate, hereafter known as TSP, we need enough of it not merely to f...

Here is a simple test to see whether you are still judging Trump by ordinary standards or grading him on the curve he built for himself. When Donald Trump says he took a cognitive test and “aced” it, are you impressed? Because if you are impressed, either you need to take that same test yourself or you sold your soul to the devil, and not in some grand Faustian bargain. Faust got knowledge. Dorian Gray got eternal youth. You got a red hat, a recurring donation, and a front-row seat to applaud the downfall of constitutional democracy in real time. So, yeah, that is not what the test is for. It is called a cognitive screening for a reason. Not a genius test. Not an intelligence exam. A screening. And, for real, if you've had middle school English, those words should have gotten you most of the way there. A cognitive screening is not the SAT for senior citizens. It is a clinical tool used to look for signs of cognitive impairment. Passing it means the person did not show the kin...

So basically, what had happened was: Trump tore up the JCPOA in 2018 because Obama’s deal was supposedly terrible, really terrible. Then, seven years and change later, after Iran pissed off Trump’s buddy Bibi, Trump dropped bunker-busters on Iran and declared their nuclear program totally obliterated. Some eight months later, Trump, at the behest of Bibi yet again, attacked Iran with the fury of hell because, although their nuclear program had been TOTALLY obliterated six months earlier, they were now supposedly days away from a nuclear weapon. In the ensuing weeks, according to Trump, he destroyed Iran’s army, navy, air force, and Boy Scout program several times over. And yet, somehow, he still needed to declare a ceasefire. Strange, because if all their defenses were gone, who exactly was still firing? Meanwhile, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, again, how, if their navy was destroyed? wreaking havoc on the world economy. So now Trump, with help from Pakistan, has negotia...

  “Our pool is bigger than skyscrapers”? On Wednesday, June 3, Donald Trump held an impromptu executive order signing ceremony in the Oval Office to discuss renovations at the Lincoln Memorial, including work on the Reflecting Pool. During the event, he displayed a graphic comparing the pool’s length to the height of several skyscrapers. Wait. What? Is anyone supposed to be impressed by that? Because even if it were impressive, and let’s be clear, it is not, he didn’t make the pool bigger. He painted it. That’s the entire achievement being celebrated here. Not construction. Not engineering. Not some grand expansion of American infrastructure. Paint. Color. Surface treatment. So why is he bragging about how much bigger it is than skyscrapers? Is this supposed to explain why it cost so much to paint? Is the argument, “Look, folks, it’s a very long pool, therefore the bill had to be stupid”? Because that is not a justification. That’s just an orange man pointing at a blue rectangle of...

There is a popular internet idea people call the Mandela Effect. It describes the strange experience of remembering something that did not happen, most famously the belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison. That example has always bothered me. False memory is real. People misremember things all the time. But Mandela did not disappear into some boutique safe space where history gets twisted into trivia for people who should know better. He walked out of prison. He helped bring down apartheid. He became president of South Africa. So, first of all, I am not going to make nice with the pop-culture permission slip that lets people trivialize history from the luxury of indifference. Instead, I am calling this the “What They Said” Effect. It matters because it has a lot to do with where we are right now. As Americans, we always want to feel like we are at least as smart as the other people in the room. So when someone says, “You remember this too, right?” people begin checking thei...

“Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” As sad as it is, that may be the only foreign-policy sentence Donald Trump can repeat without contradicting himself halfway through, slipping into the weave, or suddenly going, “Squirrel!” Maybe because it is only six words. And for the record, I agree: Iran should not have nuclear weapons. That should not be controversial. But Trump is not making a serious argument against nuclear weapons. Trump and his sycophants do not oppose nuclear weapons as a category. They oppose nuclear weapons in the hands of countries they do not control, countries they do not like, countries they do not trust, and countries that do not fit neatly into Trump’s rancid racial pecking order. Because if the argument were really “no country should have weapons capable of ending civilization,” then Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and the United States would all be part of the same conversation. And let’s stop prete...