Everything’s Changed July 23, 2024July 23, 2024 In case you haven’t seen this 60-second spot.* Suddenly Trump Looks Older and More Deranged. “Now the Republicans are the ones saddled with a candidate who can’t make a clear argument or finish a sentence” — a twice-impeached felon, who puts more faith in Putin than in the FBI (except when they’re investigating Hillary). Trump’s Alarming New Rant About Dictators Exposes Media’s Epic Failure At a rally in Michigan over the weekend, Donald Trump uncorked one of his longest rants ever in praise of the world’s autocrats, strongmen, and dictators. He hailed Xi Jinping of China as “brilliant” for controlling 1.4 billion people “with an iron fist,” and described Xi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as “tough” and “smart.” We talked to Rick Wilson, the prominent Never Trumper and Substacker, about Trump’s explicit campaign promise of authoritarian rule, the GOP’s enthusiastic embrace of it, and the media’s utter failure to alert voters to what’s coming. Listen to this episode here. Trump admires strongmen. He wants to be the world’s strongest. Obviously, Putin and Orban and North Korea’s murderous dictator Kim Jong Un all hope against hope Trump wins. But what about the Chinese? I asked a friend with deep ties to China (and to traditional Republicans) who our friends in the Chinese Communist Party favor. “Trump for sure. That’s because they believe there’s no person in America who can do greater and more irreparable damage to our polity and our standing in the world than him. The Chinese see Trump as massively discrediting the very concept of democracy and, in that regard, validating their system.” The Republican Convention’s Weirdest Lies It’s particularly rich for Trump to claim to be the candidate of order when the crime rate rose during his presidency and is plunging during Joe Biden’s. In 2023, there was a record decrease in the murder rate, and violent crime, ABC News reported, “plummeted to one of the lowest levels in 50 years.” Trump’s argument about foreign policy is also fundamentally deceptive. . . . Trump wants you to be a goldfish. He wants you to empty your mind of the past so that he can fill it with his own “alternative facts.” The Republican National Convention was one long exercise in creating memories of a Trump term that never existed. The real Trump term was chaotic and dangerous from start to finish, and if Americans’ memories don’t improve soon, the voters who seek peace and stability will instead bring us violence and tears. The money is flooding in. Feel free to pile on. ANIX The news was released before Tuesday’s opening — FDA Approves Anixa Biosciences’ Individual Patient Trial Application For Ovarian Cancer CAR-T Therapy — and the stock promptly fell 9% on very heavy volume. I asked my pharma guru how that could be, and he explained: “The FDA doesn’t “approve” you to dose a second patient. You propose to them a scenario and so long as they don’t have serious safety concerns, you’re welcome to go ahead. It’s like saying that Harvard “approved” you to apply to go to school there by accepting your application. Meanwhile the board of directors is insane and derelict in their duty if they’re wasting 5 million dollars buying their stock instead of conducting clinical trials.” Having the happy gene, I remain hopeful that ANIX may indeed have a therapy for this terrible disease — as well as an effective vaccine to prevent breast cancer. If either panned out — which guru considers a long shot at best — the company would be worth fifty times its current valuation. Clearly: only for money you can truly afford to lose. And speaking of speculations . . . BOREF If you download this new report on sustainable airport taxiing, you’ll find WheelTug on pages 78-80. That the WheelTug concept makes sense and continues to be taken seriously is a hopeful sign — but (needless to say) no guarantee that our decades-long wait will be rewarded. *In part: “As a tough prosecutor, Kamala Harris dealt with men like Trump all the time: rapists, con men, frauds, criminals.” (I added those links because it’s amusing to see who called him those things. I couldn’t find a prominent Republican for the last one; it would be political suicide.)