Chris Abraham

Here’s the extension of my spite theory. When Trump tells reporters he “doesn’t care about polling,” I don’t hear a man liberated from public opinion. I hear a man narrowing the definition of “the people” to “the people who are loyal to me.” That’s a big difference.

Trump isn’t a doctrinal true believer in the way Clinton-era Democrats were true believers about policy, institutions, and public persuasion. He’s an opportunist who follows leverage, applause, and dominance. His deepest grievance is betrayal, especially betrayal from inside the tent.

Now you’ve got a visible schism: the “America First” flank treating him like he’s been captured (by Israel, by the security state, by the foreign-policy machine, whatever the accusation is). At the same time, the deportation industrial push that was supposed to be his domestic momentum engine has run into friction and optics. It got too real. The public didn’t react the way the pitch promised. The energy that was supposed to look like strength started to look like chaos, cruelty, or incompetence depending on the viewer.

So he does what he always does when the audience stops clapping: he changes stages. Foreign escalation is the ultimate stage change. It creates a “serious” frame, swallows the news cycle, and kicks off massive spending rhythms: munitions, replacements, logistics, contractor surge, reserve activation, intelligence churn, the whole national-security weather system. It also produces the kind of volatility that markets and insiders can surf, while letting him claim he’s acting decisively regardless of what polls say.

That “I don’t care” line is the tell. It’s not that he’s above public opinion. It’s that he’s willing to burn relationships, even with parts of his base, if they stop feeding him the only currency he respects: loyalty and deference. If his original lane no longer delivers that, he pivots hard to the lane that can.

Momentum over consent. Loyalty over popularity. Spite over stability.

I’m skeptical of the way “democracy” gets used in media and academic circles like a gold star for countries whose voters behave correctly. Too often, “healthy democracy” is shorthand for “high trust + compliant + aligned with the approved narrative.” When the public opts out, shifts right, goes populist, or rejects elite consensus, it’s treated less like democratic feedback and more like a pathology. That’s a tell. If democracy only counts when the people agree with you, it’s not democracy. It’s compliance with better branding.

Public media is a perfect pressure test for this. In America, trust is the whole ballgame. We’re a suspicious country by design. We don’t automatically believe the state, the institutions, the credentialed class, or the “this is for your own good” voice. So public broadcasting can’t survive on moral authority alone. It survives on felt legitimacy. It has to earn consent by being obviously useful and broadly respectful.

That’s why the European comparisons often miss the point. In places like the UK or Germany, public media often delivers tangible value-add: education, culture, shared competence, and programming that doesn’t feel like it exists to punish half the population for voting wrong. If U.S. public media reliably felt like Mr. Rogers energy, it would be politically untouchable. People would defend it.

But when public media sounds like a permanent “whoop-whoop” alarm about one side, when it feels like narrative enforcement, when dissent gets pathologized, people don’t hear “public good.” They hear “weapon.” And once an institution is perceived as a weapon, it gets treated like one. Funding becomes a battlefield. Trust collapses. The backlash isn’t mysterious, it’s structural.

If you want public media to survive, don’t build it as a scolding machine. Build it as a civic utility that even your political opponents would defend, because they’d miss it if it disappeared.

Here’s my personal theory, updated in real time: this isn’t only about “Iran” as a target, it’s about finding an engine that creates momentum when your preferred domestic engine stalls.

Plan A was domestic. A deportation-centered enforcement buildout can function like a WPA-style jobs and spending program: hire at scale, expand detention capacity, contract transportation and logistics, staff security, medical, and legal processing, and build a whole support economy around the infrastructure. It’s not subtle. It’s expensive, labor-heavy, and politically tribal: the people most willing to take those jobs are the people already aligned with the project.

But that machine creates friction. Legal fights. Public outrage. Constant negative framing. Practical constraints. At some point, the effort stops being a smooth “we’re doing things” story and becomes a daily grind of resistance and bad optics. And when Plan A won’t run at full throttle, the need for a lever doesn’t disappear. Midterms don’t pause. Markets don’t wait. The attention economy doesn’t take a nap.

So you pivot to the lever that always works: foreign escalation. Air strikes instantly trigger procurement cycles and replacement orders. They spin up contractor logistics. They justify reserve activation. They bring back the whole national-security weather system: terror fears, proxy-war paranoia, emergency briefings, and wall-to-wall coverage. Whether you think it’s wise or reckless, it’s a narrative reset button with a very loud click.

And there’s an emotional accelerant people underrate: spite. When a leader feels blocked, mocked, denied credit, or refused the story they wanted to tell, “fine, then watch this” becomes policy energy. The subtext becomes: you could’ve let me do it my way at home. You didn’t. Now you get it my way abroad.

That’s my read. Not certainty, a theory about incentives, ego, and the eternal hunger of the momentum machine.

A lot of people are talking as if a president must ask Congress for permission before using military force. That hasn’t really been how U.S. government has worked for decades.

Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, the president can deploy U.S. armed forces without prior congressional authorization in certain circumstances. The law requires notification to Congress within 48 hours, not advance permission.

Congress then has a clock, generally understood as 60 days (plus a 30-day withdrawal period), to authorize continued military action or force its end. In practice, this means a president can initiate military operations first and political/legal fights happen afterward.

This isn’t unique to Trump. Obama used it (Libya, Syria strikes). Bush used it (post-9/11 operations). Biden used it (various airstrikes and deployments).

Presidential war-making authority has expanded steadily, especially after 9/11 and the broad Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs).

So whether someone supports or opposes a specific action, the argument usually isn’t “illegal because Congress wasn’t asked first.” The modern reality is that the presidency is an executive office with significant unilateral military authority at the outset, while Congress’s power is mostly to fund, authorize continuation, or stop it afterward.

If people want that balance changed, that’s a debate about reforming war powers law itself, not about pretending presidents currently operate on a “Congress first” permission system.

Here’s my hubris in public: I think the “deportation industrial complex” was supposed to be Trump’s domestic turbocharger. Not just policy, a whole employment ecosystem. You don’t “deport 20–40 million” with a couple press conferences and a stern font.

You need an absurd supply chain: ICE and Border Patrol bodies, transport contracts (buses, planes, fuel), intake and processing, mountains of paperwork, and then the real bottleneck: courts. Judges. Clerks. Translators. Lawyers for the state, lawyers for the defense, lawyers arguing about the lawyers. Plus the physical plant: detention centers, fencing, kitchens, laundry, medical, comms, cameras, generators, and yes, the unglamorous stuff like HVAC techs keeping the boxes habitable.

Add guards, supervisors, auditors, contractors, and the “towns around the prison” effect: diners, gas stations, motels, repair shops, uniform suppliers, bail bonds, you name it.

If that massive internal jobs machine gets jammed up by protests, courts, and ratings that look like a flat tire, my prediction is he pivots to the other reliable accelerant. The thing leaders reach for when the home front won’t cooperate and the economy needs adrenaline: foreign conflict. It’s not even ideological, it’s incentives: unify the base, change the channel, flood the zone, and spin “strength” into a headline.

So yes, I’m calling it: if the domestic turbo fails, we get the rerun. Bomb, bomb, bomb again. I hope I’m wrong. But I’m putting the words here so Future Me can’t pretend I didn’t see the fork in the road.

Alexander Hamilton operated at a fragile moment when the American experiment was shifting from revolutionary democracy toward a structured constitutional republic. Many founders feared concentrated authority after breaking from monarchy, but Hamilton feared instability more than power. He believed popular passions could fracture the Union and that only a strong national government could impose order, credit, and long-term stability.

His program reflected this worldview. Hamilton promoted federal assumption of state debts, a national bank, permanent public credit, and robust taxation authority. These policies bound economic life to federal institutions and elevated national power above local independence. To supporters, this saved the republic from collapse. To critics, it marked the birth of American statism, replacing decentralized liberty with administrative and financial consolidation.

Hamilton openly distrusted pure democracy. He favored leadership by educated elites and durable institutions insulated from sudden swings in public opinion. In a nation still experimenting with self-rule, he prioritized predictability and centralized coordination over grassroots autonomy.

The Whiskey Rebellion became the defining test. Frontier farmers resisted a federal whiskey excise tax they viewed as unfair and distant. Resistance escalated into intimidation of tax officials, and Hamilton urged decisive federal action. The government mobilized militia forces to suppress the uprising, demonstrating that the new republic possessed both the authority and the will to enforce national policy by force. For advocates, this proved constitutional government worked. For skeptics, it revealed how quickly revolutionary ideals could yield to centralized coercion.

Centuries later, Hamilton’s legacy underwent an unexpected cultural revival. The Broadway musical Hamilton transformed a complex, state-building figure into a modern symbol of outsider energy and democratic aspiration. Read playfully, one could see this as history’s most successful reputation reboot: a statesman who distrusted mass democracy recast as its poetic champion, complete with choreography and applause.

From a libertarian or small-government perspective, Hamilton’s true legacy is not rebellion but institution-building. He helped design a republic strong enough to discipline democracy itself, ensuring national authority would outlast revolutionary enthusiasm. Whether viewed as visionary or statist depends largely on whether one values stability over decentralization, and order over radical freedom.

Here we go again.

According to reports, in continuation of today’s US and Israeli attacks, centers in the cities of Kermanshah, Karaj, Chabahar, and Tabriz have also been targeted. Targets in the cities of Isfahan, Shiraz, Qom, and Tehran have also been targeted.

This will doom the communists in Cuba to oblivion, Russia will not send any oil to them, because they will be faced with trying to aid Iran to keep their source of Shaheed drones open to attack Ukraine. China is seeing their oil sources systematically shut down so that they cannot invade Taiwan, unless they do it very quickly. What interesting time to be alive.

The more I think about this there are some similarities between the Chinese strategic military position and Japan’s strategic dilemma in 1940. President Franklin Roosevelt put an oil embargo against them for their invasion of China in 1940. This lead Japanese military planners to adopt a “now or never” attitude towards Pearl Harbor attack planning to secure Dutch oil in Indonesia. With both Venezuelan and Iranian oil taps shut off for Chinese military planning purposes, that leaves only Russian oil. I think this puts Chinese military planning for an amphibious invasion of Taiwan in a very similar dilemma to Japan in 1941.

The trouble is that the Chinese president, like Stalin during the Great Purges, has killed six of seven of his top generals in the military planning committee. But given his focus on invading Taiwan, I think the People’s Liberation Army planning committee will have to carry out an invasion of Taiwan within the next 6-12 months, or run out of oil. This is all leading to another Great War in the Pacific. Just my opinion, but it sure looks like that to me.

This is all ultimately aimed at China. Marco Rubio has kicked them out of Panama and Trump has forced the Mexican President to kill the top narco cartel leader CJNG, who is pushing Chinese precursor chemicals for fentanyl production by the ton into America killing hundreds of thousands of U.S.  citizens annually. Pay back is a bitch. Iran is doomed but this is aimed squarely at China. The communists in Nicaragua will follow after the collapse of Cuba. Putin and Xi Jinping are going to start getting very lonely. Well we will see what happens within the next year. This is starting to feel like 1939.

They are attacking Ali Al Salem AB in Kuwait. Arifjan has to be next.

20 Jesus said to his disciples:  “I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven. 21 You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.’ 22 But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna. 23 Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, 24 leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 25 Settle with your opponent quickly while on the way to court with him. Otherwise your opponent will hand you over to the judge, and the judge will hand you over to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26 Amen, I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny.”