Politics Chat, March 17, 2026

Hey folks, it's March 17, 2026, evacuation day in Boston, the 250th anniversary of the troops under George Washington, forcing the British soldiers and sailors to leave the town of Boston, the first really major victory in the Revolutionary War. And I have to pre-record this because um I'm actually in Boston for those ceremonies. So um sorry about that. Or at least I'm here now. Um so sorry about that. But I did want to get a few things down as a marker today. And first of all, I want to acknowledge that the information and the news is coming at us so fast that in fact um I have a number of letters written that have not actually ever been published yet because so much is going on that they're old by the time I go to hit the send button and I start again. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, you're you have every reason to be and I will manage to get those things out at some point. But what I wanted to call attention to today is sort of the bigger picture of what's happening in US politics right now. Because what we're seeing finally is the sort of bluster and bullying of President Donald Trump meeting reality in a really big way. So, you know, I've said before that one of the tricks to Trump's success in his lifetime has always been that there was someone to pick up the pieces when he screwed up. There was always somebody there like his father who could make sure that he didn't go bankrupt or the the person who managed Trump u the Trump organization Ellen Weiselberg who would bail Trump out or there were you know everywhere you look there's always been someone the the adults in the room in his first term who could distract him. so he didn't make catastrophic mistakes, those sorts of things. Well, in this term, those people are all gone. You know, his father is dead. Weberg is, I think, in prison. I can't remember where he is right now. He got rid of all the adults in the room around him in the first term. And so, he's really just flying by the seat of his pants. And he has had this idea, I think, that he really was all that and more and didn't really understand the degree to which other people were protecting him. So now he launched a war in the Middle East against Iran, these strikes against Iran in tandem with uh Israel um and his ally Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.