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News for the public, not the powerful.
Is This What the Trump Presidency Is Really About?
Maggie Haberman has covered Donald Trump for decades, longer and closer than almost any reporter alive. And this week, on Mike Allen’s Behind the Curtain podcast, she said something that ought to stop you cold. Haberman said Trump now sees himself as a great man of history. Not a president. Not a public servant. A great man. And she said he believes he’s suffered greatly, and that his second term is, in her words, “some kind of a reparations period for him.” Allen asked whether Trump believes his reign deserves tribute beyond what Americans gave George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Haberman said with Trump you can’t separate what he believes from what he wants you to believe. He says a thing over and over until people accept it, and somewhere in there he convinces himself. So here’s the bigger picture. When a president decides the government owes him personally, every pardon, every contract, every prosecution of an enemy stops being policy. It becomes payback. In Trump’s world democracy is a grievance with an army.
Nine Months At Sea and Hegseth Says It’s All Misrepresented
The USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego in November on what was supposed to be a seven-month deployment. It’s now month nine. Five thousand sailors and Marines have been out more than 260 days with just two short port calls, one in Guam back in December and one in Oman last month. CNN reported Thursday that a sailor went overboard from the Lincoln last month and was pulled out by shipmates. Navy Times and Stars and Stripes report others have gone over the side or been stopped by crewmates. Families describe moldy showers, broken toilets, rationed meals, and a ship store with no toothpaste or soap. One sailor’s text home said the ship had gone three months without milk. Senator Richard Blumenthal has demanded a formal inquiry. Hegseth’s answer Thursday was that reports about the Lincoln are “completely misrepresented.” He also said the Navy can hold the Iran blockade indefinitely. Indefinitely. That’s the word. Those are America’s kids out there, and nobody in charge will say when this ends or have accountability.
What Happens When a War Eats a Quarter of Your Drone Fleet?
The Washington Post reported Thursday that the United States has lost 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones since the Iran war began on February 28th. That’s about a quarter of the entire American fleet. Each one runs between $30 and $50 million. Taxpayers are out more than $1.3 billion. And not all of them were shot down. Some just fell out of the sky when the link between the drone and its operator failed. When the war started there were about 185 Reapers, 165 in the Air Force and 20 with the Marines. The Marine drones fly the Pacific. They haven’t lost one. That’s on top of Reuters reporting this month that virtually all of America’s long-range precision missiles, the ATACMS and PrSMs, are gone. Those are the same weapons Ukraine has leaned on. So we’re six months into a war nobody voted for, the arsenal’s empty, and the Pentagon won’t comment. Deterrence isn’t a speech. It’s inventory. And ours is scattered across the Persian Gulf.
Who’s Watching You Through That Little Black Camera?
Writing for OtherWords, policy analyst Farrah Hassen lays out how the surveillance state moved into your neighborhood. The open-source project DeFlock has mapped more than 128,000 automated license plate readers nationwide. Hassen’s own California town of 20,000 has at least 35. Flock Safety is the biggest vendor. Their solar-powered cameras photograph every passing car and log the make, model, and identifying features. Any police department with a Flock contract can search that nationwide database without a warrant. And Flock’s FreeForm search has let officers hunt people, not cars, with phrases like “male with tattoos.” Roseville, California police ran the numbers on their own system. 71 percent of Flock’s alerts wrongly flagged cars as stolen or felony vehicles. Texas deputies searched 83,000 cameras to track a woman across state lines over an alleged abortion. Officers have been arrested for using Flock to stalk exes. Flock has shared plate data with ICE. Los Angeles suspended its cameras last month. At least 100 cities have rejected these readers. But Hassen’s point is the machine is bigger than any one company. Swap Flock for Axon and nothing changes. Until we regulate the whole industry the Fourth Amendment is not working well.
Could All This Heat End In An Ice Age?
Researchers at UC Riverside published a finding in the journal Science that rewrites Earth’s thermostat. For decades, the thinking was that rain and rock keep the planet steady. Rain pulls carbon dioxide from the air, weathers granite, washes the carbon to the sea, and it locks up in limestone. Planet heats up, rocks weather faster, planet cools down. Dominik Hülse and Andy Ridgwell found a second setting nobody accounted for. As it gets hotter, rain washes more phosphorus into the ocean. Phosphorus feeds plankton and algae, which pull down carbon and sink with it. But warm water holds less oxygen. Without it, the phosphorus doesn’t stay buried. It recycles back up, feeds more algae, strips more oxygen, and buries more carbon. Run that loop long enough and the planet doesn’t just cool. It overshoots into an ice age. Their model says that’s what froze the ancient snowball Earths. Before anybody cheers, Ridgwell is blunt. He says the cooling “is not going to happen fast enough to help us.” We’re talking tens of thousands of years. The lesson isn’t that the planet will bail us out. It’s that Earth’s climate has a temper, and we keep poking it.
Crazy Alert. Trump Took the Other Blonde
The Washington Post reported this week that Trump’s exit from the NATO summit in Ankara last month wasn’t what it looked like. He climbed the steps of the old Air Force One on camera, slipped back down, got into a catering truck, and rode across the tarmac to a C-32A military jet. There was an Iranian assassination threat, and the Secret Service wanted him off that plane. So who got left on the decoy? Marco Rubio. Scott Bessent. Stephen Miller. Steven Cheung. A planeload of staff. And the whole traveling press pool, told to keep their shades down, with no idea the president wasn’t aboard. Who rode with Trump? Pete Hegseth, Dan Scavino, Walt Nauta, and his personal assistant Natalie Harp. Then Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt announced she’s out at the end of the month. Trump says it’s about family. The internet did the math out loud. Harp got the getaway plane, Leavitt got the exit, and social media decided she finally woke up. Trump told the reporters they were probably on a dangerous flight, then added, “But if I go, you go. Right?” Except he didn’t go. How does it feel to be Trump’s decoy?
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, August 13th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
