Author: A.T.

LIVE LONG ENOUGH . . .

. . . and anything is possible.

A friend took this photo at the 6th annual Antiquarian Book Fair in New York.  If you squint at the bottom right corner of the business card, you can see they’re asking $750 for a book that sold for $5.95 in 1978.  The thing is, anyone who’s actually read that book knows that $750 not spent is like $1,500 earned (after tax).

In case you’re wondering, to have grown from $5.95 to $750 in 48 years is to have appreciated at 10.6% compounded.  Not so great, especially as you’d probably have to split it with the bookseller or the auction house or whomever.  And then pay tax the “collectibles” capital gains tax.

TUCKER CARLSON

He dropped his press badge as he deplaned on the way to the Democratic National Convention in 2004.  I picked it up, tapped him on the shoulder, handed it to him, he said thanks, and that was the extent of our relationship . . . until yesterday, when I listened to the longest podcast ever, his two-hour interview with The Daily.  So interesting. (I am not a fan.)

FIRST IN HIS CLASS

According to this (which I have not independently verified), Trump was not “first in is class” at Wharton (into which he transferred from Fordham), as claimed since 1968, he was 147th.  The clip says he wasn’t even in the top half of the class, though 147th out of 362 most assuredly is . . . but (if true), I’d say it proves two things:

> First, that Trump is, at least in his way, smart.  He surely spent much of his time partying rather than studying, so 147th ain’t bad.  (And does anyone really think he’s not smart?  Ill-informed, incurious, intellectually lazy — all that.  But of course he’s smart.)

> Second: that’s he’s a liar, dishonest all his life.  Which is a big deal to people like you and me.

Some of you know Oath.Vote, arguably “the smartest way to do your political giving.”

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We analyze thousands of elections from President to school board to find which candidates need your support the most. We provide our recommendations for free and we don’t sell or share your contact information.

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> If you’re a donor, the website is well worth checking out.

> Whether or not you’re a donor, watch yesterday’s strategy Zoom (20 minutes plus very good Q&A; shorter if you listen at 1.25X or 1.5X speed).

I think you’ll come away smarter.  I did.

Need some?  Then enjoy these 14 minutes in which Representative Adam Smith addresses the Secretary of Defense.  The first minute may start a little slow, but boy does he ever get going.  And going.  

THE SUPREME SETBACK

We’re still going to win back the House, but the White Christian Leonard-Leo-stacked Court has just made it much harder.  You’ve gotten dozens of emails and texts about this already, I’m sure, so all I want to say is that if your budget to help save democracy and pull our wonderful country back from the brink was half of one percent of your net worth, consider doubling it to a full 1%.  If it was 3%, consider making it 4% or 5%.  That would still leave 95%.  Instead of leaving that extra 5% to your kids or grandkids, consider leaving them a country they can be proud to live in.

> A good place to find House races where your money will matter: A House United.

> A good place to fund infrastructure that all our 50 state parties and 8,000+ candidates rely on: the unsexy but indispensable DNC, currently chaired by an indefatigable winner.

(If you’d like to meet him, come to the 27th annual LGBT Leadership Council dinner in New York June 29 — straight allies welcome!  It’s produced by an Academy Award winner and is thus, as fundraising dinners go, pretty good.  Click here.  And while you’re in town, see Hamilton.  Or John Lithgow’s stunning Giant.  Or the Raphael exhibit at the Met.  Both Giant and Raphael close the day before, so if you come for the weekend, you’ll be just in time!)

> If you’re a normal person, just trying to make ends meet — or a formerly wealthy person who, thanks to me, has run out of money “he could truly afford to lose” — then skip all that and join the tens of millions whose $20 here and $30 there collectively dwarfs the money from high-dollar dinners . . . and whose volunteering will produce the blue wave we need to restore sanity, competence, dignity, and the rule of law.

BONUS

Our leavingMAGA billboards are gaining more and more traction:

DUMPING TRUMP: MAGA loses voters as Trump polling plummets (3 minutes).

In leavingMAGA, disillusioned Trump voters find a welcoming, non-judgmental community of folks who’ve been down the same road.

EMERGENCY PLANNING

From The Washington Spectator, by Jonathan Winer*:

The President Is Preparing to Challenge 2026 Midterms. The Country Can Still Act to Protect Them.

This is serious stuff.  Indicting former FBI director James Comey for posting a photo of anti-Trump seashells is, by contrast, pathetic.

NO KINGS?  THIS KING FOR PRESIDENT!

Here I am, a proud three-time “No Kings” protester, joining the 17 (seventeen!) bipartisan standing ovations for King Charles’s speech, which you can watch or read in full here.

Imagine: a dignified ruler who respects the limits of his legal authority (which in his case is largely ceremonial).

The entire Congress stood up to applaud, among other things, support for NATO! support for Ukraine! condemnation of January 6th! innovation in clean energy! and “confronting the climate crisis with urgency.”

If only the entire Congress would stand up to the current occupant of the White House.

BONUS

President Trump meets King Charles III at a gay consignment shop in Palm Springs, California.

(Scroll through the comments for a photo of Trump and Ivana in St. Petersburg 40 years ago.)

*Jonathan Winer received a distinguished honor award from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “He created the capacity of the Department and the U.S. government to deal with international crime and criminal justice as important foreign policy functions.  . . . The scope and significance of his achievements are virtually unprecedented for any single official.”  He is a member of The Steady State, a nonpartisan organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security which advocates for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

I saw John Lithgow in Giant last night.  “A mesmerizing highlight of the theater season.” — The Wall Street Journal.

So powerful that I’m taking the rest of the night off.  (More or less.)

OPRT

The next quarterly report is scheduled for May 7.  In hopes it will be a good one — with perhaps a debut from its impressive new CEO — I’m going to try to buy some May 15 calls with $5 and $7.50 strike prices.  ONLY, and ever more than usual, with money I can truly afford to lose.  I’ve put in orders for less than the “ask,” and may not get them.  But if I do — and if the stock does bounce — the Coke Zeroes will be on me.

HERE’S WHERE WE ARE

Carl Sagan’s cosmic clock:

BILLBOARDS

I’m having so much fun with this.

From Rich Logis’s e-blast yesterday:

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This morning, a CBS reporter in Cincinnati called me about signs that appeared overnight in front of Catholic churches across the city — each one with a QR code pointing people to Leaving MAGA.

Here’s the thing: I had no idea they were there.

We didn’t make them. We didn’t put them up. A stranger did — on their own, with their own money, in a city I wasn’t in. I found out from the reporter and from a Reddit thread where locals were snapping photos and asking what the signs meant.

Leaving MAGA is going viral.

As you know, we’ve spent the past few months fundraising and preparing to launch our first round of billboards in various cities nationwide — a push that kicked off after a supporter in Pennsylvania put some up on their own and showed us what was possible.

We just put one up a few miles from Joe Rogan’s house, knowing that he’ll pass by it each day. His audience is exactly who we’re trying to reach.

We now have billboards up in Lancaster, PA, and Des Moines, IA, too, with our locations near Mar-a-Lago set to launch in May and June. We also have another going up in Miami next month.

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That social media post I showed you a couple of days ago that had gotten 650,000 views?  As you can see, it’s now gotten 3.8 million!

Rich’s goal is to get at least one billboard up in every state.  Click here in case you’re looking for a place to make a tax-deductible contribution.  (Or me-mail me.)

NEW YORK IN JUNE

And while I’m impoverishing you (as if my investment suggestions weren’t enough):

Me-mail me if you have $1,000 or more — NOT tax-deductible — to do something cool (or $2,000 or more to do something VERY cool) to help save democracy near the end of June.

I realize this is not for everybody and apologize for being so aggressive, but hey.  A lot is at stake.

BONUS

Day One: How the Next President Erases Trump And Restores Our Republic — by Adam Kinzinger.

JIM STEWARTSON

In America’s Defense:

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. . . The entire purpose of the nation’s founding was to prevent a Donald Trump from attaining power.

. . . America was founded on the genocide of Native Americans. It was founded on the slavery of African Americans. It was founded in a time where colonialism and war were the norm, and where exploration of the Earth was nowhere near complete. But within the American Revolution was the core idea of the Enlightenment, that justice should come from law, and that law should come from humans, not gods—or kings.

This core idea has been pushed back against historically, over and over again—by Southern slaveowners, robber barons, Wall Street oligarchs, fascist ideologues, and religious extremists. And each time the idea has withstood those tests and grown more entrenched. . . .

The core contract between “America” the idea, and the people who were either born into it—or sought it out—is that when you live here, you may not get what you want but you’re not going to be living in a dictatorship. That’s basically the only guarantee.

Donald Trump is not only breaking the contract, he’s ripping it up . . .

But time after time, from Minneapolis, a city picked for militarized assault based on a racist meme about Somalis, to my home of Los Angeles, the first target of the Trump gestapo, to small towns and neighborhoods across the country, the reaction to the regime’s attempt to instill state terror has been justifiably, righteously hostile. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were avatars for something much deeper.

The United States must never be mythologized. It has been party to untold crimes. Its founders were imperfect men, and its leaders have been a very mixed bag. But underneath is a basic promise that cannot be erased by one man, or one regime: This is not a monarchy. We don’t do dictators here.

I’ve spent six years documenting everything going wrong in America. I’ve studied our predicament from every conceivable angle—from psychology, to science, to philosophy, to geopolitics, to metaphysics. It’s bad. And it’s going to get much worse before it gets better.

But despite the damage that will result from this catastrophe, it will never eliminate that American promise from the minds of more than 300 million people. That is the fatal flaw in the plan of our would-be destroyers.

I’m angry at our government. And I’m disgusted with our political leadership—in both parties. But I’m not angry with America. It was a damn good idea, a remarkable project that two centuries after its establishment gave me the chance to raise three boys into men. It is my home and I will defend her, and demand that we keep her promise to my grandchildren.

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The costs of Trump’s contempt are starting to show — Fareed Zakaria

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In the United States, President Donald Trump’s periodic insults hurled toward Europe tend to get treated as routine tantrums, part of the reality TV show that is now the White House. But in Europe, the accumulation of abuse has reached a tipping point.

. . .

Europe and Canada are not about to embrace China. They have serious conflicts with Beijing over Ukraine, subsidies, electric vehicles, critical minerals and market access. But both will play nicer with China where they can. They will hedge. They will deal with Washington when they must, Beijing when it suits them and others whenever possible. A recent Foreign Affairs essay by Chinese scholar Da Wei argues that for Beijing, the great new geopolitical fact is that there is now a deep Europe-America divide — ready to be exploited.

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We will get through this.  Though Trump Putin is hoping we won’t.

GOES WITHOUT SAYING DEPT.

Thank heavens no one was injured last night!

Hats off to the Secret Service.

MAUREEN DOWD – MUST READ

Trump, Iran’s Newest Hostage

NOAH HAWLEY – FUN READ

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

→ I’m not sure I fully agree with this (“For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.”).  But it’s such a great story.

You know the billboards you’ve been helping to fund?

This one went up in Des Moines last week:

Someone posted it on X, and — as you can see — it’s gotten 650,000 views and 43,000 likes.

LeavingMAGA is becoming “a thing.”

BONUS

The Short, Ridiculous Trial of a Protestor Arrested in an Inflatable Penis Costume

Seriously.

Which Capitalism Are We Defending?  by Nick Hanauer.

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. . . There is no such thing as capitalism in the singular. There are many capitalisms. The capitalism of 1880s America — child labor, company towns, no weekends — was capitalism. The capitalism of 1955 America — 35% union density, 91% top marginal tax rates, the GI Bill building the largest middle class in human history, GDP growth rates double what they are today — was also capitalism. Denmark is capitalist. Singapore is capitalist. The neoliberal version we have run in America since roughly 1975, delivering four decades of stagnant wages for most workers while routing nearly all productivity gains to the top, is also capitalism.

These systems produce radically different outcomes — in wages, mobility, life expectancy, civic trust, democratic stability. The question is never “capitalism, yes or no.” The only question that has ever mattered is: which capitalism, designed how, for whose benefit? . . .

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Nick, a billionaire, is one of my heroes.

Long-time readers will know I’ve long pitched his 2012 TED Talk — Rich People Don’t Create Jobs” (6 minutes) — and, from 2014 —Beware, Fellow Plutocrats, The Pitchforks Are Coming (20 minutes).

This latest piece is, I think, so worth reading in full.

But first . . .

. . . a few notes from Trump’s team*:

> BOBBY

DON’T LET SCIENCE GET IN THE WAY OF A GUY WITH A WORM IN HIS BRAIN

CDC won’t publish report showing covid shots cut likelihood of hospital visits.

I’m not saying the worm is still there — we only know about the worm because Bobby told us — but it clearly ate something important while in residence.  The mercury poisoning may not have helped, either.

> PETE

“AN ABSURD MANDATE”

Annual flu vaccine no longer required for U.S. military, Hegseth says.  He calls it “an absurd mandate.”  Now that we’re making America safe for measles again — why not?

Also:

Hegseth Says U.S. Troops Are Fighting for Jesus. The Pope Disagrees.

> KASH

Need I say more?

> TULSI

Ditto.

> KEVIN

Paul Krugman calls Kevin Warsh, the next Fed Chair, Trump’s Sock Puppet:

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. . . He was asked who won the 2020 election . . . and evaded. . . .

He was also asked about the spurious prosecution of Lisa Cook, asked about the spurious charges being brought about Jay Powell and refused to take a stand in support of people who will be his colleagues once he gets to the Fed. . . .

What was on trial was, can he at least pretend to be not a total hack? And the answer is no. He’s afraid to even show a little bit of verbal independence without substance when it comes to Donald Trump, which is bad.

It should be utterly disqualifying for the position because being the Fed chair is important. It requires a lot of independent judgment and requires a lot of credibility because the Fed is mostly needed in moments of crisis. And in those moments of crisis, people need to believe, markets need to believe, but the general public needs to believe that we’re talking about people who are serious experts and seriously have the interests of the nation at stake rather than their partisan political views.

He failed that test with flying colors. And he will be confirmed anyway.

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And now!

From Florida’s Sun-Sentinel:

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I’m a lifelong Republican. This is not what we voted for

I am a lifelong Republican from Boca Raton. I never imagined I would be writing something like this.

But here we are.

Like many Floridians, I feel unrepresented — not by the opposing party, but by my own. That should alarm anyone who still believes in representative democracy. When elected officials stop listening to theirconstituents, we are no longer participating in governance. We are being managed.

Recently, my U.S. senator, Rick Scott, sent out an update touting his efforts to pass the SAVE Act, a bill framed as necessary to prevent noncitizens from voting. The message was urgent, emphatic and unwavering.

It was also deeply disconnected from reality.

There is little evidence that noncitizen voting occurs at any scale that would justify sweeping new federal restrictions. What the SAVE Act would do, however, is create new barriers for eligible voters — particularly married women, seniors, disabled individuals and lower-income Americans — who may face additional hurdles in proving citizenship under stricter documentation requirements.

There is also a question of scale. Even conservative-leaning data sources have documented extremely few cases of noncitizen voting over decades, compared to the billions of ballots cast nationwide in that time. Meanwhile, millions of Americans lack ready access to documents like passports or birth certificates, and tens of millions — particularly married women whose names have changed — could face additional hurdles under stricter requirements. That imbalance raises a fundamental question: Are we solving a real problem, or creating a new one?

As Republicans, we used to stand for limited government and individual freedom. We believed the burden should not fall on citizens to prove themselves again and again just to exercise a fundamental right. That principle seems to have been abandoned.

At the same time, far more urgent issues are being ignored.

We are witnessing executive actions that raise serious constitutional questions, including military engagement abroad without clear congressional authorization. Regardless of party, Congress has a duty to assert its role in matters of war. Silence is not leadership.

We are also seeing growing alarm from communities across the country about immigration enforcement practices — families separated, detainees held without timely charges, and reports that demand transparency and accountability. These concerns deserve serious attention, not deflection.

Yet instead of addressing these pressing issues, our leaders are doubling down on legislation that appears more about political strategy than public necessity.

This is not the Republican Party I have supported my entire life.

Across the country, Americans are exercising one of our most fundamental rights: peaceful protest.

Demonstrations on March 28 reflected a growing sense that voices are no longer being heard through traditional channels. Dismissing these movements does not make them disappear — it deepens the divide.

Let me be clear: This is not about abandoning conservative values. It is about reclaiming them.

We should be defending the Constitution, not sidestepping it. We should be protecting the right to vote, not making it harder. We should be demanding accountability from every branch of government, regardless of which party is in power.

And above all, our elected leaders should be listening to the people who elected them to serve.

If the Republican Party continues down this path, it risks losing not just elections but the trust of those who once stood firmly behind it.

I am one of them.

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Katherine “Kitty” Donovan, of Boca Raton, is a retired Broward County school administrator with 37 years’
experience in middle schools, a grandmother of three boys and the Florida state senior ambassador for Giffords
Gun Owners for Safety.

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And here I append my daily plug for leavingMAGA.

* “I’ve seen better cabinets at IKEA,” read one NO KINGS 3 sign.  Turns out the “basket of deplorables” was not so much that small portion of Trump voters who are Klansman, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers or clean-cut torch carriers at Charlottesville (“Jews will not replace us!”) . . . as they are perhaps the appallingly incompetent, corrupt, reckless crew with which he has populated his regime.