Author: A.T.

Save Money: Give Me $100

March 3, 2026March 2, 2026

SAVE MONEY

I switched from AT&T to Andrew Yang’s Noble Mobile (which is really the T-Mobile 5G network) and have been saving more than $50 a month.

You get unlimited talk, text, and data for $50 or less — and, if you use this link, your first month free.

Then, if you’re happy and don’t cancel, they pay me $100.

All this time you’ve wondered how I have so much money “I can truly afford to lose.”

Now you know.

DEMOCRACY VERSUS DICTATORSHIP

Joyce Vance White:

The first time President Obama met with his US Attorneys, he told us, “I appointed you but you don’t serve me. You serve the American people. And I expect you to act with independence and integrity.” None of us ever forgot that.

His words meant the world to us, even at the time. Enough so that people wrote them down, kept them on their desks, and talked with people in their offices about what they meant, over and over.

Imagine: an oath-allegiant, Constitution-respecting president. What a concept.

A.I.

Thursday, I posted Matt Shumer’s scary piece about the rapid — accelerating — pace of A.I.

Professor Cal Newport argues that Shumer’s alarm was overdone: Has AI Changed Work Forever? Not Really (15 minutes).

Yet maybe not that much overdone.

Business Insider checked to see how smart people in tech are reacting to Matt Shumer’s viral essay about what AI means for jobs. Their reactions were varied but hardly dismissive.

A friend at dinner said he has five people on his analytical team and is being encouraged daily by the higher ups to look for ways to use A.I. He recently asked A.I. to do something that would normally have taken one of his team three days to complete. A.I. did it in six minutes. He fears he may wind up having to let his team go . . . and that at some point his higher-ups will find a way to let him go.

Yesterday, I posted Jack Dorsey’s letter letting more than 4,000 people go, nearly half his work force.

As previously noted, we need — urgently — to figure out (a) how to protect humanity from a superior species; (b) how to avoid economic catastrophe and, instead, harness A.I. for the benefit of all.

Not sure how to do (A).

(B) is as simple as learning to get along with each other.

“Isn’t it amazing,” Bill Clinton would frequently observe near the end of his presidency. “We’ve split the atom; we’ve landed men on the moon; we’re mapping the human genome” — now long-since mapped — “and yet the one challenge that’s eluded us is the oldest one of all: how to get along with each other.”

Two Things Can Be True At The Same Time

March 2, 2026

For example:

A.I. is little short of a miracle, infinitely useful. A godsend. <– True.

A.I. will cause massive disruption, if not worse. <– Also true. (See below.)

Or:

The Trump regime is making us healthier. True, if you look solely at their encouragement of exercise and weight loss.

The Trump regime is bringing back measles and has devastated medical research and slashed health care funding. Even more true (and a million times more important).

And:

Trump’s aggression may have wonderful results for Venezuelans, Cubans, and Iranians and maybe even for us, the Middle East, and the rest of the world.

I certainly hope so.

It’s great that the terrorism of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis has been dealt such a blow.

Also true:

Even if his actions do have wonderful results — and they may not — they are the actions of a dictator, not a president constrained by the rule of law and the Constitution.

“He alone can fix it!”

All hail!

Gladiators on the South Lawn for his birthday!

His face everywhere!

It’s intoxicating.

He’s the king of the world! (5 seconds)

It’s exhilarating! (30 seconds).

It’s not going to end well for him.

Join Indivisible.

Invite friend to join you for No Kings #3 March 28.

Support the opposition.

AI COLLAPSES THE ECONOMY

Jack Dorsey writes to his 10,000 employees, 4,o00 of whom he’s letting go):

today we’re making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we’re reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i’ll be straight about what’s happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you’re one of the people affected, you’ll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you’re being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we’ve done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we’ve pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we’ve built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we’re not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i’ll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i’d rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that’s a fact that i’ll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i’ll own it. what i’m asking of you is to build with me. we’re going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we’re going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that’s what i’m focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

HOW IT MIGHT LOOK IN 2028

A Thought Exercise in Financial History, from the Future
by Citrini Research and Alap Shah
Feb. 22, 2026

What if our AI bullishness continues to be right…and what if that’s actually bearish?

What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction. The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored. . . .

Hopefully, reading this leaves you more prepared for potential left tail risks as AI makes the economy increasingly weird.

This is the Citrini Research Macro Memo from June 2028, detailing the progression and fallout of the Global Intelligence Crisis:

The Consequences of Abundant Intelligence
~~February 22nd, 2026~~ June 30th, 2028

The unemployment rate printed 10.2% this morning, a 0.3% upside surprise. The market sold off 2% on the number, bringing the cumulative drawdown in the S&P to 38% from its October 2026 highs.

Traders have grown numb. Six months ago, a print like this would have triggered a circuit breaker.

Two years. That’s all it took to get from “contained” and “sector-specific” to an economy that no longer resembles the one any of us grew up in. This quarter’s macro memo is our attempt to reconstruct the sequence – a post-mortem on the pre-crisis economy.

The euphoria was palpable. By October 2026, the S&P 500 flirted with 8000, the Nasdaq broke above 30k. The initial wave of layoffs due to human obsolescence began in early 2026, and they did exactly what layoffs are supposed to. Margins expanded, earnings beat, stocks rallied. Record-setting corporate profits were funneled right back into AI compute.

The headline numbers were still great. Nominal GDP repeatedly printed mid-to-high single-digit annualized growth. Productivity was booming. Real output per hour rose at rates not seen since the 1950s, driven by AI agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance.

The owners of compute saw their wealth explode as labor costs vanished. Meanwhile, real wage growth collapsed. Despite the administration’s repeated boasts of record productivity, white-collar workers lost jobs to machines and were forced into lower-paying roles.

When cracks began appearing in the consumer economy, economic pundits popularized the phrase “Ghost GDP”: output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy.

In every way AI was exceeding expectations, and the market was AI. The only problem…the economy was not. . . .

It goes on at length from there.

How is humanity going to organize itself to harness all that’s good about A.I. without its destroying us?

Should this be left to the Epstein class and Elon Musk to decide?

Operation Epstein Fury

February 28, 2026February 28, 2026

TIMOTHY SNYDER: HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND THE WAR?

[The] facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.

. . . Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies. . . . [W]e have multiple examples of this from both modern and ancient [history] . . .

Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis. . . . [W]e are using military force to take the side of precisely the countries who have enriched Trump and his family. This backdrop must at the very least be stated in the reporting of the war. Along with the subversion of democracy, personal corruption provides a second interpretive framework.

. . . This war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both. These are presumptions, not proof — but they provide the solid lines of inquiry as we learn more about the war.

War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it. On the contrary, war provides the opportunity to see the core of the absurdity and the destruction that is being offered to us.

OPERATION EPSTEIN FURY

Rick Wilson’s take (19 minutes) as of 11am yesterday. (Co-founder of The Lincoln Project, Wilson is the former Republican operative who wrote Everything Trump Touches Dies.)

THE RICH GET RICHER

It’s not fair; but if you do happen to have a $5 million net worth, it may be of interest that the tiny Kentucky-based hedge fund that has been compounding my IRA at 15% a year for the past 18 years has recently re-opened to accept a new tranche of money. And — of possible relevance in these uncertain times — is truly hedged, unlike most “hedge” funds.

Me-mail me if interested and I’ll have them tell you more.

BELATED BONUS

Jimmy Kimmel’s segment on Trump’s State of the Union. Funny and insightful.

Of Freedom And Pedophilia

February 28, 2026February 27, 2026

If you missed yesterday’s post, I make bold to suggest you go back and read it. I think it may affect the way you think about your investments and, more broadly, the future.

The Intelligence Explosion

February 26, 2026February 26, 2026

A.I. is going to eliminate most jobs.

That’s not news.

(See, e.g., Andrew Yang’s 2018 best-seller, The War On Normal People.)

We need — urgently — to figure out (a) how to protect humanity from a superior species; (b) how to avoid economic catastrophe and, instead, harness A.I. for the benefit of all.*

What’s new is how fast it’s happening.

Matt Shumer writes:

. . . I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.

I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn’t just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.

The last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.

And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech . . .

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.

. . . [T]he gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.

Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone.

. . . Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that’s hardest to believe if you’re not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven’t tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you.

. . . Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started.

You need to read this in full.

He has suggestions on practical steps you should take right now.

BONUS

Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That.

Since its peak last fall, Bitcoin has lost almost half its value. We have one question. What took so long?

Worth reading in full.

*Imagine if we could provide all the things humans actually need — food, shelter, clothing, health care, etc. — without having to work much at all. With largely-free energy from the sun powering automated factories and robots to do most of the physical work humans now do, and A.I. to do the rest. Leaving us free to pursue hobbies and passions and social interaction and, well, more or less anything we want. As some retirees already do. This raises myriad practical, political, and philosophical questions — none of them original with me. And a lot of questions about the best way to invest. All suggestions welcome.

Bursting With Things To Share . . .

February 26, 2026February 26, 2026

. . . which is likely the last thing you want because there’s so much these days.

So, pick and choose:

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks

Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone’

Judges Grow Angry Over Trump Administration Violating Their Orders

. . . though not the judges in Trump’s cult:

Judge Bars Release of Special Counsel Report on Trump’s Mishandling of Documents

Democrats Win Three Elections During Trump’s State of the Union

Two of them were enough to flip control of Pennsylvania’s lower chamber blue. This November: the upper chamber.

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump

Do the 38,000 references to Trump in the Epstein files really prove — as he has assured us — that he’s neither a pedophile not a protector of pedophiles?

Can we be trust him that the millions of UNreleased files and redactions are of no consequence? (Then why the redactions?)

The simple and full answer we’ve been provided thus far: the Dow hit 50,000!

But the real answer was provided 8 years ago: his cult doesn’t care. He could walk down Fifth Avenue and “shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to be gaining many this year, either.

Join today’s 3pm ET weekly Indivisible call.

Support the opposition.

We’re gonna win.

Defying Putin’s Puppet

February 23, 2026

PAUL KRUGMAN

Day 1461 of Putin’s Three-Day War

We’re witnessing a war between freedom and tyranny, between an imperfect but decent government and a monstrous mass murderer — and the U.S. government is de facto backing the tyrannical monster.

How can MAGA tolerate this?

What did their grandparents fight so valiantly for in World War II?

Have they seen Saving Private Ryan?

When they watched Casablanca, whom did they root for: Major Strasser or Victor Laszlo?

Is MAGA really okay with our switching sides?

Krugman concludes:

Shame on America for betraying a valiant ally.

You might almost say that, wittingly or unwittingly — and whether or not stuff like this is true — Trump is Putin’s puppet.

DEFIANCE!

Our friends hosting THE STATE OF THE SWAMP tonight — watch free! — are this morning delivering to every Republican Member of Congress copies of the U.S. Constitution with a message: You swore an oath to this. Not to a man. Remember that tonight.

They’ve flown in the Portland Frog Brigade to handle the deliveries. “That’s right,” writes Defiance founder Miles Taylor, “defiant Americans in blow-up frog costumes will be going door-to-door on Capitol Hill to deliver the Constitution. The same people who’ve been protesting Trump’s ICE facilities — and leading marches nationwide. You won’t want to miss it. Tune in at 930am ET.”

BONUS

Charlie Sykes from To the Contrary:

For days, the FBI had insisted that Kash Patel was on an official trip to Milan for security meetings and adamantly denied that the jet-setting Patel was partying on the taxpayer dime. FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson spent days ripping reports by MSNOW’s Ken Dilanian that Patel would be hanging out at the Olympics.

“Your rag outlet wrote that [Patel] went to hang out at the Olympics on the taxpayer dime – even when provided information that your theory was false. When you’re ready to correct that let me know. Won’t hold my breath,” Williamson wrote.

But then came the video — which rocketed around law enforcement circles —showing “Patel pouring what appeared to be beer down his throat, spraying some of it in the air and screaming in celebration as a player put a gold medal around his neck.”

I love the caption Sykes gave this photo:

The Director of the FBI.

That pretty much says it all.

Whither Bitcoin?

February 23, 2026

But first . . .

ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next.

Also . . .

Peter S. asks:

It seems to me that the Supreme Court should find against Trump in several other areas that are just as clearly not the right of the President to do.

Some of the things he has done reverse or eliminate programs that several or even many Congresses have passed or reauthorized.

And the question I have is: absent a vote in Congress, what right does one President, whoever it is, have to destroy assets of the American people that have been created and built upon and matured in capacity and scope over many decades?

For example, what right does one President have to destroy the Department of Education and all the many capabilities and assets it has that have been built by decades of investment?

Similarly, what right does one President have to destroy all the hard won gains of the EPA over the past 54 years achieved as a result of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars? The clean air, clean water, and everything else achieved over the last 54 years by the expenditure of taxpayer dollars, are assets of the American people and cannot be throw away by the edict of one man without action by Congress.

An analogy would be if a President ordered the scrapping of 80% of our planes, ships, tanks, etc. I am among those who think we should cut our military budget by a lot. But if I were President and tried to do it by fiat, with no Congressional action or input, I am sure the Supremes would rule that it was not in my power to do so.

Then why is it any different when he tries to destroy, without an act of Congress, other assets and capabilities that were created with our money, not his?

All the institutional knowledge built up over decades as well as the actual technology, real estate, machinery, systems, etc., are assets belonging to the American taxpayers, created and maintained based upon an act of Congress. How can it be possible that a President can destroy a multifaceted major asset of the American people by fiat?

I’ll ask Carl.

And now . . .

From Lincoln Square:

Is Bitcoin Going to Zero? What’s Behind the 2026 Crypto Market Meltdown.

When people say Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, they are not making a metaphysical claim. They are pointing out that there is no external source from which its value is derived. Gold retains value because it has physical and industrial uses regardless of price. Equities derive value from businesses. Debt derives value from repayment. Fiat currency derives durability from taxation, legal-tender laws, and institutional enforcement. Bitcoin derives value only from the expectation that someone else will want it later. That expectation can sustain a price for long periods, but it is not a reference. There is nothing for valuation to converge toward.

Bitcoin’s defenders often argue that this misunderstands money itself—that money works because people believe in it. But monetary systems are not sustained by belief alone. They are sustained by obligation and settlement demand. Fiat currencies persist because taxes must be paid in them, debts are settled in them, and courts enforce contracts denominated in them. Gold, while no longer monetary in this sense, retains a floor through scarcity and non-monetary use. Belief may initiate a monetary premium, but without obligation or absorption, that premium has nothing to stabilize it.

. . .

Once an asset has no claim on cash flows, no contractual obligation, no external reference, and no compulsory use, what remains is pure speculation. The only way to exit profitably is to sell to someone else at a higher price. That is not investment. It is position timing.

In the end, investments like this resemble a game of hot potato. The objective is not to hold the asset, but to pass it on before conditions change. As long as belief holds, the object can keep moving. But there is no natural owner, no terminal use, and no reason for anyone to be the last holder. When belief falters, the passing stops. Someone is left holding it—and discovers that once it can no longer be exchanged, it cannot be used for anything at all.

It’s great, though, if you’re a kidnapper or are holding the Mississippi hospital system hostage with ransomware.

Also from Lincoln Square:

The Melania Meme Coin Collapse — and What It Means

A digital token branded around First Lady Melania Trump has collapsed 99 percent from its peak, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, which reviewed price data across several Trump-themed cryptocurrencies. The Journal found the token among the worst performers in a broader group of assets tied to the Trump family name.

. . . Trump-themed meme coins associated with President Trump have dropped sharply as well. The Wall Street Journal reported that one Trump-branded coin had fallen about 86 percent from inauguration levels, and other crypto-market trackers cited by Newsweek, CryptoNews and CoinDesk have documented similar declines among politically themed tokens.

Public-equity investments tied to President Trump have also faced significant losses. Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns the Truth Social platform and trades under the ticker DJT, is down roughly 75 percent from its inauguration-day price, according to the Journal, Investopedia and independent price-series data compiled by FinanceCharts.

A separate Trump-family-backed project, the World Liberty Financial token known as WLFI, has fallen about 40 percent since its launch in September, according to reporting from the Journal and Reuters. Reuters also reported that a partner company’s stock dropped after it concentrated its balance sheet in WLFI, drawing scrutiny from market analysts.

Company statements summarized by Reuters describe World Liberty Financial as a decentralized finance platform offering both a governance token and a stablecoin linked to the U.S. dollar. The project emphasizes U.S. market focus, and materials reviewed by Reuters show backing from members of the Trump family.

Critics quoted by Reuters and other outlets have raised conflict-of-interest concerns, noting that President Trump oversees agencies that influence federal crypto regulation while his family is associated with digital-asset ventures. The White House has said the president’s assets are held in a family trust and that ethics requirements are being followed.

The downturn in Trump-linked digital assets is unfolding against a broad slump in speculative crypto markets. Business Insider reported that a 2025 cryptocurrency crash erased roughly $1 trillion in global market value and significantly reduced the paper wealth of high-profile holders of politically branded tokens.

Research cited by CryptoNews found that more than 60 percent of Trump-themed meme coins have effectively failed, losing most of their value and trading activity. CoinDesk has reported that at least one high-profile Trump coin is down more than 80 percent from its launch price.

Even so, the Trump family has profited mightily.

SNOWY WINTER BONUS

The Battle of the Bulge . . . the difference snow made (4 minutes) . . .

. . . back when fighting for democracy meant more than just having to vote, donate, and protest. If you ask me, we’re getting off easy.

As for today, hats off to the Ukrainians, fighting on for a fifth truly brutal winter, largely abandoned by Trump. (Click here in case you’re in a position to help.)

Woulda Shoulda — But Still Can, Must, And Will

February 22, 2026

ARNOLD PALMER

Hard to say, which would be more amazing – that this guy can imitate Trump’s voice so well, or (since he must be lip-syncing) that the President of the United States actually said these things. He wants to be on Mt. Rushmore, but it’s hard to see him fitting in. Was it Lincoln or Jefferson who famously said, “I’d like to punch him in the face?” How do Trump’s thoughts on immigration — “vermin, garbage, scum” — compare with Ronald Reagan’s final speech that I keep posting? (Not that I think Reagan belongs on Mt. Rushmore, either.)

ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES

Imagine if Mitch McConnell hadn’t caved on impeachment and the Senate had voted to not just by the wide 57-43 majority that it did, but by the full two-thirds needed to convict. Everything would be different.

Or if Nader had dropped out in 2000 (or the 50,000 Florida “overvotes” — where people punched Gore’s chad but, to be doubly sure, wrote in his name — had not been thrown out). No war in Iraq, no right-wing Supreme Court, no massive transfer of wealth to the already-super-rich, and no Trump.

Reading Hillary Clinton in Foreign Affairs — Women’s Rights Are Democratic Rights — one can’t help reflecting on how different the world would have been had the 2016 election been decided by the popular vote.

She was Putin’s nemesis (a key reason Putin helped Trump win) and an enemy of autocrats generally.

He was a Putin protege (some would say puppet) and an autocrat-wannabe.

Not that such reflections do any good. “Spilt milk” and all that.

But can you imagine how different the country would have been? With Hillary getting to select three Supremes instead of Trump? (Hats off to two of them, Gorsuch and Barrett, for reading what the Constitution says about tariffs.)

Or if Al Gore, who beat W. in the popular vote, had been allowed to serve?

Well, we can’t do anything about those disastrous elections, but we can do everything about the next two. And I believe will.

> Join millions Tuesday from 7pm to 11pm for The State of the Swamp. Free!

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> Find the NO KINGS 3 event closest to you (scroll down to see the map) and invite friends to join you.

> Start following Headquarters. It had 160 million views its first week.

> Help fund the infrastructure that all 8,000+ Democratic candidates will need this fall — now is the time to fund it! — and then start giving to specific candidates this summer.

We’re going to win.

Those legitimate Mt. Rushmore guys are counting on it.

In Further Defiance

February 21, 2026

Frogs — The Portland Frogs who drove Trump crazy (the costume-clad protesters he called “insurrectionists”) are coming to DC for his State of the Union (60 seconds). Watch them Tuesday night. Sign up — free! — for The State of the Swamp with Robert DeNiro.

Republicans — Republican Governor stands up to Trump.

The Court — Two of Trump’s three appointees, Gorsuch and Barrett, seem actually to have read what the Constitution says about tariffs. The plaudits they’re surely receiving from law school classmates and conservatives they respect may encourage and embolden them for future rulings.

MAGAns — One Betrayal Too Many: Why I Left MAGA by Rich Logis.

This book is a public apology. I am profoundly sorry for the damage I caused during the seven years I was in the MAGA movement. I contributed to the assault on our democracy. I exacerbated the harm caused to others in MAGA. Now I am holding myself accountable by working to make amends.

Former Republican congressman and presidential candidate Joe Walsh calls this brand new book: “A blueprint for those in MAGA who can no longer justify the lies of Donald Trump.” (He switched parties last year.)

A gift sent with love to any MAGAns you know?

Dashiell Wolf Brandt — Takes on Piers Morgan — and a whole lot more — in 3 oh-so-powerful, sobering minutes Instagram makes it almost impossible to share. I think this link will work* (if not, to go to his Instagram page and click on the one headlined COMPARE & CONTRAST) . . . but reliably finding Instagram “permalinks” has stumped both me and my A.I., which has “authoritatively” confirmed permalinks that turn out to take you someplace completely different.

(If one of you can unlock the secret of Instagram permalinks for me, I will extend your subscription by a full year, no charge.)

THIS IS HOW DICTATORS DO IT

Giant banners with their faces hung everywhere. Big brother is watching you — you’d better behave. Stalin did it. Trump’s doing it, most recently, as you may have seen in this New York Times photo, on the facade of the Justice Department . . . which itself has become a facade.

He’s also just named the Palm Beach airport after himself, having first secured ownership of the trademark for this and any other airport he gets named after himself. There is no intention to profit from that trademark, we are assured, but would it surprise anyone if he tried to?

Have a great weekend.

The Consequences of Abundant Intelligence February 22nd, 2026 June 30th, 2028

The Consequences of Abundant Intelligence
February 22nd, 2026 June 30th, 2028