April 14, 2026
Social media; Leadership; Potpourri
Social media
Leadership
Potpourri
Social media
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/04/donald-trump-no-longer-chad/686764/
Since 2015, Donald Trump has been an apex predator on the internet. His social-media posts have caused geopolitical crises (we’ll invade Greenland!) and stock slumps (Amazon shares down 6 percent in one day!). For years, both Trump’s Republican opponents and Democrats tried to get the better of—or stoop lower than—the president and failed.
In contemporary internet slang, Trump is a Chad, an alpha male who almost always comes out on top in any internet spat and dominates his opponents. Those on the receiving end—the weak, feckless losers of the internet—are termed Virgins. Since late February, though, the Chad in chief has run up against a challenger that has relegated him to Virgin status: the Islamic Republic of Iran. The war that the United States fought against Tehran, now in a shaky two-week cease-fire, has been accompanied by a social-media trolling contest. Much as Iran’s forces exceeded expectations against the world’s most powerful military, Iran’s social-media posters have held their own against, or even upstaged, the world’s loudest voice online.
Leadership
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/trump-iran-war-news-taco-what-next.html
If Trump had carried out his threat to destroy all of Iran, it would have been a hideous war crime. That he didn’t follow through makes issuing the threat, to begin with, a huge strategic blunder. The president of the United States is revealed as an aspiring war criminal, a terrorist by inclination. The revelation that his talk was all bluff—the fact that he would invoke such obscene language in the middle of a very real war, in which his orders were killing thousands of people, without thinking anything through—uncloaks him, further, as an unserious man.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/donald-trumps-unfreedom-of-the-seas-iran-war-hormuz-trade-economy-oil
Trump has repeatedly said the status of the strait is not his concern. He views the question through the narrowest of lenses: “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” he says. “We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it and we don’t need it.” This is not strategic sophistication, and not even transactional cleverness; a more astute businessman would better protect the national brand.
These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac. And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration. …
[T]he war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/military-pete-hegseth-trump-bragging-problem.html
There’s a scene in the 1981 Bill Murray film Stripes where a solider introduces himself to his colleagues as “Psycho,” though his real name is Francis. He goes on to threaten to kill them if they ever call him by his real name, touch his stuff, or touch him. At the end of his litany, the sergeant, beyond unimpressed, directs him to “lighten up, Francis.”
The scene captures the same sense of cringe that I felt whenever I heard a radio call sign that broadcast the user’s insecurity to everyone listening. It flew in the face of the mantra of the “quiet professional” that suffused military culture, a kind of sober maturity that was critical to judicious use of deadly force. This description encapsulates the real warrior ethos: Humble, quiet, just doing a job. Quiet professionals understand that violence is risky and costly, and use it only as a last resort. Bragging, threatening, and posturing are all frowned upon. The merits of this culture are obvious. It is designed to weed out the insecure and trigger-happy, the reckless hotheads with something to prove. …
[T]he quiet professional has been replaced with the saber-rattling bully. Our armed forces are now helmed by a secretary of defense whose ideology has directly framed American military power in the term of a “crusade.” He exemplifies this ethos with his pride in his Jerusalem cross tattoo, and his tattoo of the Latin Deus Vult (“God wills it”), both symbols of Crusader power that have no place in our military. This is coupled with Trump’s promises to “bomb them into the Stone Ages, where they belong,” and otherwise threatening to target civilian infrastructure even though such strikes could be construed as war crimes. Trump’s juvenile, trollish renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War is the icing on this self-conscious cake. Or, it would be if we didn’t have so many cringe-inducing comments from Hegseth, such as: “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” …
The results are predictable. Pentagon insiders are calling Hegseth unprofessional, reckless, even “feral.” They are doing this for a reason. Beneath the eye-rolling and laughter at this Francis is real concern. We dislike insecure bellicosity not just because it’s embarrassing, but because it is ineffective. Tough guys with chips on their shoulders make poor warfighters. Judgment and sobriety are at the heart of effective military decisionmaking. …
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s recruiting has famously used aggressive, macho memes to attract the Francises of the world. The Department of Homeland Security itself described it as a “wartime” surge in hiring, appealing to those seeking to hunt down the “worst of the worst.” The results included the horrific inflection points of Minneapolis, the outright murder of two American citizens exercising their right to protest. We are drowning in evidence that, where violence must be employed, it is imperative that it be a quiet professional making the call on when, where, and to what degree it must be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/us/politics/trump-mental-fitness-25th-amendment.html
Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate
As the president threatens to wipe out Iran and attacks the pope, even some former allies and advisers are questioning whether he has grown increasingly unbalanced, describing him as “lunatic” and “clearly insane.”
https://x.com/BenjySarlin/status/2041849002711261501
The one consistent theme of Trump is that he’s incapable of getting any benefit from nonpartisan duties like spaceship landings and national holidays because he has zero concept of nonpartisan duties existing. America 250 will be him ranting at No Kings rallies for a week.
https://thedispatch.com/article/trump-political-project-tehran-war/
Trump describes himself (and his admirers describe him) as pragmatic, a man of common sense, which is the nice way of saying that he is a man without principles or fixed moral commitments, and even the single limited virtue to which he occasionally pays tribute is a one-way street: Loyalty to Trump is all-important, but loyalty from Trump—ask Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump about that. …
[Trump is] a simple man whose actions are most directly and accurately described as the ordinary daily application of his vices: laziness, vindictiveness, greed, vanity, arrogance, cowardice, and, above all, stupidity. …
Trump’s escalating threats against Iran leapt very quickly from mere war crimes (targeting civilian infrastructure) to outright genocide (“a whole civilization will die tonight”), and the bosses in Tehran ran that through their Trump decoder rings to reveal the true message: “I am terrified by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and have no idea how to get myself out of this mess.” …
That the U.S. government is able to achieve its desired military outcome in any conventional confrontation with any military anywhere in the world is understood and hardly contested, as much as a frank admission of the fact would bruise the pride of a few old men in Beijing. …
But as to securing the desired political outcome—Washington’s record is less impressive as seen from the point of view of Pyongyang, Hanoi, Baghdad, and Tripoli, and, no doubt, from Moscow and Beijing.
And so it is in Tehran. …
Trump is famously dominated by external forces—by the last person who had his ear, by the last thing he saw on Fox News or heard from radio commentator Mark Levin. Lacking a moral center or intellectual ability, Trump can campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize one day and threaten the overnight extermination of a civilization the next without being very serious about either project. He is not serious in the way George H.W. Bush or Helmut Kohl or Margaret Thatcher were serious—he is serious in the way cancer is.
As serious as a heart attack, as the saying goes, but more predictable.
And so while our forces can bomb Iran into rubble and then make the rubble bounce, that will not be enough to win. Winning in Iran is a political project, one that requires intelligence, imagination, and courage, qualities that Donald Trump does not possess.
[Trump’s] one big promise in 2024 was to lower prices and make life more affordable. His tariffs have done the opposite—so, too, the Iran war. He has cast himself as the champion of the little guy who’s been screwed over by Washington and the elites. Yet in his second term, Trump has wallowed in opulence and narcissistic self-worship, gold-leafing whatever he can, attaching his name to whatever he can, constructing a poorly designed White House ballroom, and pocketing tremendous amounts of money in assorted grift, including his own crypto scam. (In a December poll, 66 percent disapproved of Trump adding his name to the Kennedy Center; only 18 percent favored this self-glorifying move.) His claim that his mass deportation crusade targets criminal migrants has been proven false by horrific accounts of arrests, detentions, and deportations of law-abiding residents, including students, workers, grandmothers, and other valued members of local communities. And the public has reacted with revulsion to his immigration policies. …
Trump is the most successful con man in American history. Maybe in world history.
Potpourri
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:uoohvgkwaivptcw3syxeomkv/post/3miu3lt4bps2e
I hadn’t seen this before. This is pretty remarkable.
Earth with the Moon transiting in front of it.
https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/2040816376768582034
Zohran Mamdani Praising Jesus.
Donald Trump Praising Allah.
Easter 2026.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/04/jd-vance-iran-trump-war-ceasefire/686771/
During Jimmy Carter’s tenure, Iran’s nascent revolutionary government held Americans hostage for 444 days, releasing them one minute into Ronald Reagan’s presidency. During Trump’s, Tehran is holding the global economy hostage. The mechanism has changed—from the embassy in Tehran to the Strait of Hormuz—but the strategy is identical: to imperil the American administration politically rather than defeat it militarily.
Trump and Vance now risk the same criticism that Republicans have leveled at Democrats for decades: Being overeager for a deal, the negotiators walk into the bazaar having already announced that they must have the rug.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/10/trump-hormuz-transactional-american-power/
Trump’s outrageous Hormuz talk shuns basic strategy
U.S. power rests on open seas.
What made the U.S. different was not that it lacked self-interest but that it pursued it in a broader way. It built a system others could join because it offered wide benefits. It restrained its power even as it exercised it. It chose, in other words, to be an enlightened hegemon — one that understood that the surest way to sustain dominance was to make it acceptable.
That choice is now in question.
To treat the Strait of Hormuz as a tollbooth rather than a global commons is to misunderstand both history and strategy. The U.S. benefits most not from charging per ship for access, but from building a world in which commerce flows freely and Washington’s central position is reinforced. To abandon that model for short-term extraction is to trade a durable advantage for a fleeting gain.
If the U.S. becomes just another predatory hegemon, it will discover what history has long shown: Such power is feared, resented and ultimately resisted. And in time, it is not sustained — but overturned.
https://slate.com/transcripts/bU9JNU05WWp3L3hvMDFhZ1J5SEVGNWdiUGE3eC95a01Oc0prQUZaS1A1cz0=
Anne: The Trump administration has said, if you let trans athletes participate in sports, we’re coming after you. Janet Mills, the governor [of Maine] has said, I will sue you. And that is. There’s some main press that says that’s hurting her approval rating. How do you talk about that issue?
{Senate candidate Platner:] This whole campaign … is funded by an out of state billionaire to make sure that we have this discussion and we don’t talk about raising his taxes. That’s why it exists. I think there are like two trans kids that compete in high school sports in Maine. There are 40,000 Mainers who are going to lose healthcare because of the lack of the ACA extension. … I’m sorry. One of those things seems very important and real to me. One of them seems like an invented culture war scare to keep people divided.
https://x.com/jonfavs/status/2029246923484610825
I can’t remember the last time there was such a giant disconnect over a candidate between online (mostly BlueSky) Dems and Democratic voters.
And it’s not like Maine voters don’t know about the tattoo or other controversies -- Platner gets asked about it all the time. They just listen to and accept his answer instead of unquestionably QTing outlets with a clear ideological agenda.
All I’d say is - try listening to the guy. He sat down for our interview wearing an Anti-Fascist Knitting Club t-shirt, talked about how his first community organizing project was fighting an anti-trans school board takeover, and got emotional discussing the horrors of war. If he’s a Nazi, he’s really fucking bad at it.