Trump's Dangerous Bubble
The exploding world of 2026 has spotlit heroes who are ineffably thrilling. Those nameless Iranian beauties lighting their cigarettes with the flaming posters of the Ayatollah became the new sensations of Instagram. Such flamboyant defiance was soon gutted by the picture of the fresh, joyful face of the 23-year-old Iranian fashion student Rubina Aminian, now buried by the side of a road after being shot in the head from behind at close range by regime enforcers. She was “a strong girl, a courageous girl…She was thirsty for freedom,” her uncle said. Just one heartbreak among the more than 500 Iranians who have apparently been slaughtered under the darkness of the mullahs’internet blackout. What the resistance risks is as humbling as it is unfathomable.
In Venezuela, the lethal U.S. military takedown of despot Nicolás Maduro was so breathtakingly daring that it stole the focus from opposition heroes we have ignored for so long. Until she received her Nobel prize in December, not many tuned-out Americans had even heard of María Corina Machado, the banned leader of the Venezuelan democracy movement, who had to be whisked, in disguise, out of hiding last month for an elaborately harrowing journey, only to just miss the ceremony in Oslo.
But she’s one of many. For those who missed my video interview on Thursday with one of her opposition confreres, Leopoldo López, he told me about enduring seven years in a military prison or under house arrest. He escaped from Caracas in 2020 in the trunk of a car, speeding through 20 checkpoints to get to the border. If he had not been able to reach Colombia by boat, he had planned to “swim my way out of it” across the river. “There are hundreds of stories like my story,” he shrugged, when I remarked on his bravery. “Hundreds of stories of courageous men and women in Venezuela who have been forced into exile, people who have overcome horrendous torture by the regime.”
Here, we are deluged by images of American wealth worship and the loop of glutinous celebrity lifestyle trivia. Does it take the prospect of being hung up by your thumbs in a hellhole Venezuelan prison to awake moral virility like that of Leopoldo López? Does it take being clubbed by the Iranian religious police to foster the kind of mad moxie that inspires ordinary Iranian women fighting for modernity to chase traditionally garbed male persecutors down the streets of Tehran? In these uprisings, we are watching the hoped-for end point of oppression, but, as history tells us, tyranny starts with public inattention. Americans have let themselves become so immune to Trump’s methodology of lies, the window of acceptance has gotten wider and wider. Forget hoary whoppers like his epic rewrite of January 6th, or his wild claim that he’s secured $18 trillion in investments in the U.S., or that he’s ended eight foreign wars. It wasn’t even of note when Trump threw out en passant on Friday at the White House convening of top oil execs, “I won Minnesota three times in my opinion.” (And only his. He lost Minnesota three times.) After Exxon CEO Darren Woods said at the meeting that Venezuela is “uninvestable” as an oil prospect in its current corrupt state, Trump later showed, with Caligulan caprice, that Woods would be punished for truth-telling. “I will probably be inclined to keep Exxon out,” the Almighty pronounced on Air Force One. Now, Trump’s gone after Fed chair Jerome Powell, supposedly for the cost of the Fed renovation overruns, but actually for the transgression of adhering to monetary policy independence. Swap him out with a sock puppet!
ICE Cracks
Until now, the only alternative to Trump’s crashing through constitutional norms has been Democrats trapped between the performative and the procedural, answering each fresh Trumpian outrage in the language of a law brief, while craven Republicans willingly curtail their own powers of oversight and restraint. But then came the strangely magical revolt in November of the former Trump attack dog Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Remember that time at Mar-a-Lago, when quizzed on her warnings about Jewish space lasers, she told a British reporter to “fuck off”?) It was as if her come-to-Jesus understanding of Trump’s betrayal over the Epstein files had banished her snarl with the ping of a benevolent wand. Trump was further enraged that five GOP senators voted with Dems on Thursday to block him from using additional military force against Venezuela without congressional approval. It offers tiny reassurance to the exploding heads of our allies that something might be done to restrain a U.S. commander-in-chief now about to go manifest destiny on Greenland. (Cf. his latest pronunciamento to the NYT: “I don’t need international law.”)
For Democrats, the Minneapolis ICE shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Nicole Good has grown them some oratorical balls. Yes, we can applaud California Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2025 social media bravura, but it’s had the whiff of strategic hairspray. And kudos to Senator Mark Kelly. With his awesome resume as a Navy captain who flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm and commanded the space shuttle Endeavour’s final flight in 2011, we knew there was more under his astronaut’s helmet than that Yoda-like bald head and always-appropriate statements. He’s now showing refreshing media fire in response to Pentagon Pete’s vindictive assault on his pension, after Kelly reminded service members that they should not obey illegal orders.
Since the shock shooting of Renee Good through her car window, new, authentic expressions of outrage are suddenly cutting through. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s broadside, “To ICE: Get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here,” was a stripped-down burst of real feeling from Dems that went down like a swig of ice water after a drought. And where have they been hiding the formidable Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, who punched through our screens on Thursday with a denouncement of immigration agents as “fake, wannabe law enforcement”? Planted with stout conviction behind the podium in her officer’s cap and gold-starred collar, she was an exhilarating visual counterpoint to the robotic fakeness of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s blown-up lips under a cowboy hat with the message not to believe our lyin’ eyes. I have no idea how the sheriff of Philadelphia suddenly got into the news flow and I don’t care. Bilal’s litany of how ICE agents flouted law enforcement norms was a call and response of righteous viral heat. “Did you hear what I said?” she bellowed. “No law enforcement professional wears a mask, none…Law enforcement professionals do not stand in front of moving vehicles, invoking an action that is ILLEGAL.” And then the clincher line destined for midterm merch: “You don’t want this smoke (pause) ‘cause we will bring it to YOU!” If only Bilal had been around to pound the cautious prevarications out of Kamala Harris on the ’24 campaign trail.
Bubble Wrap
Trump should watch out. He’s handed the Venezuela “transition” over, not to the legitimate opposition, but to the toxic spider at the center of Maduro’s narco state, and he will own the fallout that follows. In Iran, if the regime topples, it will be because the anger of the women who led the 2022 protests is now compounded by soaring prices and the rage of jobless young men, grievances that can’t be rectified by the untying of headscarves. How long does Trump think he can gaslight even the MAGA faithful about the pain of their monthly bills? America’s world-dominating Zeus sounded genuinely baffled when he complained recently to House Republicans voicing concerns about the electoral impact of tariff-created price hikes and surging healthcare costs: “I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public…We’ve had the most successful first year of any president in history.” Licked all over for so long by the uber rich and congressional toadies,Trump is encasing himself in an Ayatollah-sized bubble.
Why I read: "Caligulan caprice" "strategic hairspray" My day is made.
Thank you for trying to connect these fast moving dots. Another doozy, per USA Today: Bill Ackman contributing $10k to ICE murderer Jonathan Ross’s GoFundMe. A piddling amount for an arrogant SOB to own the libs but I sure would love Ackman’s funding of a murderer to be publicized.