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With the Trump regime producing fresh intimidation and violence faster than I can locate the historical precedents, I may have to rebrand The Grim Historian as a police scanner.

But occasionally an incident demands that we stop scrolling through the daily atrocities and pay attention to the historical rhyme.

The raid on Representative Ilhan Omar’s home is one of those moments.

Early Monday morning, federal agents descended on Omar’s Washington, D.C., residence, blocked off the street, and emerged carrying boxes of seized evidence. The Justice Department says agents had a judicially authorized warrant, reportedly connected to allegations involving immigration paperwork her father completed when she was a child. No evidence substantiating those allegations has been publicly released.

The raid is not surprising. Omar checks all the boxes. She’s a Black woman, against aiding Israel, is pushing Medicare for all, and isn’t the least bit afraid of a diapered-arse, senile, tinpot dictator.

With three weeks to go before the election, the timing also raises an inconvenient question. Did the Justice Department violate its own policy prohibiting investigative actions deliberately timed to influence an election? No one can say for sure yet. Someone should ask Hillary Clinton how that feels.

Of course, with most authoritarian regimes, intimidation and fear precede the main course. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin even bragged last month that “something’s gonna happen.”

Well, something happened.

We should brace ourselves for more “somethings” in the following weeks. So far, truth is getting so bent out of shape that I am not sure how it will snap back. Deepfakes of Rebecca Cooke (WI) show her cheerfully announcing plans to profit from government corruption and give undocumented immigrants free healthcare. James Talarico (TX) is having a psychiatric breakdown in states that he has never visited. And Sherrod Brown (Ohio) is performing sex operations on children.

No one will be punished for these lies. We are past that point.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Republicans have an entire election task force of thugs with the sole mission to drop various cherry bombs on our election. Dictators never go quietly. And when they do, it’s usually because they’ve run out of foot soldiers.

The whole sordid mess reminded me of a 1933 letter. Perhaps if we understand the fascist playbook, we can survive past this election.

On March 3, 1933, Frederic M. Sackett, the American ambassador to Germany, sent a dispatch to the U.S. Secretary of State.

Hitler had been chancellor for barely a month. The Reichstag had burned four days earlier, and the Nazis were blaming Communists for plotting terrorist attacks against Germany. It was a convenient accusation — a fire, a national emergency, an enemy conveniently identified, and suddenly the government had permission to suspend constitutional protections.

Sackett described a nation suffocating under the weight of its own fear. He noted that many Germans doubted the Communist plot story, but people were “afraid to say so openly.”

Meanwhile, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s minister in charge of the Prussian police, was busy making sure fewer people were left to contradict their narrative.

At first, the Nazis banned Communist newspapers for four weeks. Social Democratic newspapers were banned for two. Opposition meetings were prohibited. On Berlin street corners, scraps of torn paper clung to the walls where opposition posters had once advertised meetings and candidates. The newsstand was still there, but the opposition newspapers were gone.

Nobody mentioned their absence.

In their place, enormous Nazi placards loomed over the sidewalk. Swastika flags fluttered from windows. A column of brownshirts marched past. Farther down the street, a Nazi flag flew above the shuttered Communist Party headquarters. Most Germans noticed the flag, lowered their eyes, and kept walking.

Sebastian Haffner, a young Berlin lawyer, remembered what happened when those marching columns approached. Pedestrians raised their arms to salute the swastika flags. Those who refused risked a beating. Haffner learned to duck into building entrances before the flags passed. It was safer than refusing to salute.

Silence had become self-preservation. Nobody knew who might be listening, who might report a careless remark, or whose door the police might knock on next. An entire street full of people made the same private calculation.

Better someone else’s door than mine.

Joseph Goebbels was preparing to broadcast Hitler’s election speech through loudspeakers in public squares. He instructed Germans to open their windows so the Führer’s voice would carry into the streets. You could no longer hear the opposition, but you could hear Hitler echoing from your neighbor’s living room.

And then came the searches.

Sackett reported that Nazi storm troopers, newly empowered as auxiliary police, were entering the homes and offices of political opponents.

Consider what that meant inside an ordinary apartment building. Boots on the stairs. Uniformed men at a neighbor’s door. The sound of someone being taken away. The terrible calculation of whether to look through the curtains or pretend you heard nothing.

Thousands were already detained, including journalists, writers (gulp), educators, lawyers, and elected representatives. Some had no political party affiliation. Didn’t matter. Under the emergency decree, authorities could hold them indefinitely without telling them why. Sackett described the opposition as “intimidated and nervous.”

An election was just two days away.

Now, I am not implying that the Omar raid makes us Nazi Germany. History never offers up such linear lessons. And despite Congress’s head in this tiger’s mouth, our lower courts remain resilient. That is a meaningful legal distinction from the Nazis’ extrajudicial terror. We can still demand evidence.

Targeting Omar satiates his racist base, but this show is not for them.

It’s for us.

When federal agents search the home of an elected official whom the president has repeatedly vilified, the message is clearly intimidation. Fear is an extraordinary survival mechanism, but it also narrows people’s horizons.

Berlin kept dancing

Later that March, Haffner waited outside a Berlin department store for his Jewish girlfriend, Charlie. They had plans to go to the cabaret that night.

The shutters were down, and she was nowhere to be found. He telephoned her apartment. No answer. He began imagining the worst. Had the Nazis arrested her? Was Charlie already in police custody, perhaps on her way to a concentration camp?

Eventually, Charlie turned up unharmed. They had simply missed each other.

They still went to the cabaret.

In his 1939 memoir, Defying Hitler, Haffner observed that “the uncertainty was one of the most subtle effects of the terror.” But on that particular night, he recalled how he and Charlie found an escape.

At the Katakombe cabaret, comedian Werner Finck was making jokes about Nazi raids, concentration camps, and the government’s lies. The audience roared with laughter. For a few hours, fear loosened its grip.

I keep thinking about the laughter in that room. For weeks, people had been lowering their voices, watching their neighbors, ducking into doorways to avoid Nazi flags. And here was a room full of strangers laughing at the very men who terrified them.

When Charlie finally turned up, Haffner did something wonderfully human.

He said…screw it. Let’s go to the cabaret.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been looking for tiny cabarets lately. I dance with friends. Read something frivolous. Cook comfort food. Laugh at completely inappropriate jokes. Some days, I just want to spend a few hours without wondering whose door the government will knock on next.

Maybe that’s why Haffner’s story is so moving. The Nazis had made him afraid of losing the person he most loved. But that night, surrounded by laughter, he felt invincible.

After midnight, Haffner and Charlie left the cabaret kissing in the street, drunk on cheap booze and priceless courage.

The danger hadn’t gone anywhere. It was waiting outside.

They walked back out anyway.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim reminder: Defending democracy takes work. It takes hours of research, relentless fact-checking, and people willing to challenge abuses of power long after the headlines disappear. Independent journalism is part of that fight, and paid subscriptions keep this work going. If you believe democracy is worth defending, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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In April 2025, The New York Times assembled 13 Independents who had voted for Donald Trump and asked them how things were going.

Their responses exposed a level of civic illiteracy that I haven’t seen since Dan Quayle taught a sixth grader how to misspell potato.

Consider Mike, a 52-year-old ride-share driver from Nevada. Mike was worried about the national debt. A perfectly reasonable concern. He thought the government needed to stop spending money it didn’t have. Also reasonable.

But when the moderators asked whether the government should make cuts carefully to protect medical research, airline safety, and food safety, Mike preferred aggressive cuts, even if important federal programs suffered.

His proposed solution was to “take the chain saw.”

Wonderful, Mike. The Food and Drug Administration can fish fingers out of our meatpacking industry and glue them back on later.

Then there was Jordan, a 38-year-old homemaker from Utah. Jordan predicted that Trump’s economic policies would cause hardship but would create a “more even playing field.” Jordan was prepared to endure pain if she saw her neighbors suffer enough. She even praised Trump for “following through on the things that he actually did say he was going to do,” adding, “I had my eyes open when I voted for Trump, that it was going to hurt.”

Well, no one can accuse Jordan of not reading the fine print.

Jordan was also confident Trump wouldn’t touch Social Security because that would be “stupid.”

Too bad the Trump regime eliminated 7,000 jobs at the Social Security Administration…before this interview. Jordan, have you tried calling Social Security? It still exists, if you can get your check.

Then there is Angela, a 32-year-old assistant from Michigan, and another fascinating case study in how many useful idiots it takes to screw a country. Angela predicted tariffs would bring manufacturing home, and other countries would finally respect us. According to Angela, if they had to hurt a little for America to win, so be it.

When should we tell Angela that factory employment has fallen by more than 21,000 jobs since Trump took office? The leopards don’t check passports.

John, a 29-year-old construction manager from Texas, also gave Trump a gold star. He liked Trump’s more aggressive approach to governing and described the president’s second term as being increasingly about power. (Translation: John has not had sex since the Eisenhower administration.)

Oh, John had one complaint. Some of John’s friends had been deported. John was sad about that. It sucks to be John’s friends. But John still approved of Trump because he was doing what he said he would do. Apparently, John’s moral arc bends in the direction that suits him.

Are you catching a theme? Trump voters think a strong leader takes others down a peg.

All 13 participants said they would vote the same way again.

Of course, a focus group of the 13 dumbest voters in America can’t tell us what millions of other MAGAmuffins believe, but their answers expose a crack in the social contract. Mike would accept the chainsaw as long as it didn’t cut him. Jordan would accept pain as long as it evened the field. John would accept losing his friends as long as he wasn’t on the plane.

Somewhere along the way, the American experiment in self-government picked up a heavy emphasis on self.

That raises a question we don’t ask often enough before casting our ballot. When you vote, who are you voting for?

The founders had an answer. One of them had to put on his glasses to deliver it.

George Washington goes blind trying to save America

On a cold March morning in 1783, George Washington walked into a large wooden hall his officers had built at their winter camp near Newburgh, New York. They called it the Temple of Virtue. The men inside were not feeling virtuous.

They had won the war, but nobody had paid the soldiers who fought it. Some officers hadn’t seen wages in years. Congress had promised them half-pay for life, and then admitted it couldn’t afford that either. An anonymous letter circulated through camp urging the army to refuse to disband until Congress paid up.

Washington read a prepared speech, and it bombed. So he took out a letter from a congressman, squinted at it, and reached into his coat for a pair of reading glasses most of the men had never seen.

“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles,” he said, “for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” It was a rare moment from a man who never complained about the hardships he endured.

Grown men wept, and the mutiny dissolved.

It’s a poignant story, but spectacles don’t pay soldiers. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress couldn’t tax anyone. It could only ask. It sent the states polite bills, and the states treated them like a jury summons. The country owed roughly $42 million to French allies, Dutch bankers, and its own veterans.

So Congress found a fix — a modest 5 percent tax on imports. Every state had to agree. Twelve did. Rhode Island, which profited nicely from goods passing through its ports, voted unanimously no. A state of about 50,000 people blocked the country’s financial survival because the deal didn’t do enough for Rhode Island.

That June, from a fieldstone farmhouse in Newburgh, Washington wrote a circular letter to the states, laying out four principles he believed essential to the United States’ survival.

The first three concerned national unity, public justice, and maintaining peace.

The fourth concerned the character of the American people.

Washington believed the republic required citizens who could overcome local prejudices, make concessions to one another, and sometimes, “sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the Community.”

There it is. Community with a capital C. The father of our country believed the survival of the republic depended partly on Americans’ willingness to surrender personal advantages when the larger community required it.

John Locke used the word community in the same way. Individuals give up a slice of their natural liberty, and in exchange they form a community that protects all of them. In other words, you surrender a little so that everyone, including you, gets something no one could secure alone.

You probably guessed why I used the term “A Republic of Me” in my headline. It’s a contradiction in terms. The word republic comes from the Latin res publica, “the public thing.”

Washington didn’t invent this definition. He inherited it from a tradition running back to Rome, which taught that republics are fragile and survive only as long as their citizens have virtue. In that tradition, virtue had nothing to do with chastity. It meant a citizen’s willingness to put the public good ahead of his own.

Montesquieu, the French philosopher the founders practically memorized, wrote that republics run on virtue, which demands “a constant preference of public to private interest.” Washington was nearly paraphrasing him.

Six months after the circular, Washington resigned his commission and went home to his farm. The world started calling him the American Cincinnatus, after the Roman who was handed absolute power, saved the republic, and went back to his plow.

But the government still didn’t pay. Many soldiers went home with IOUs and sold them to speculators for pennies on the dollar. That’s the part the history books omit.

We will return to that broken promise later.

James Madison predicts MAGA

Four years later, in the spring of 1787, a small, sickly Virginian arrived in Philadelphia weeks before anyone else. James Madison stood about five foot four and looked as if a stiff wind would carry him to New Jersey. He had spent the winter reading histories of every failed republic he could find. He brought a memo.

He called it “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” and it was an indictment. The states ignored Congress’s requisitions. They passed laws that helped their own citizens at their neighbors’ expense. Worst of all, majorities inside the states were using their power to trample the rights of minorities.

Madison had watched Washington’s appeal to virtue fail. He didn’t conclude that virtue was unimportant. He concluded you couldn’t build a country that depended on it.

Rhode Island, true to form, refused to send anyone to the convention.

So after a summer of arguing behind closed windows, Madison sat down that fall to defend what they had built. In Federalist №10, he named the disease. He wrote that a faction is a group of citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

There’s Washington’s word again: community.

Read the definition slowly and think of our MAGAmuffins—Mike, Jordan, and John. A faction isn’t just a group with strong opinions. A faction is a group whose interests run against other citizens’ rights or against the good of the whole.

Madison’s nightmare wasn’t a king. It was a majority that discovers it can vote away someone else’s rights and pay nothing for it.

His solution was ingenious and slightly cynical. If people won’t reliably sacrifice for the community, simply build a system where ambition checks ambition. “If men were angels,” he wrote in Federalist №51, “no government would be necessary.” Since they aren’t, you split power among branches, set each branch against the others, and trust that a Congress jealous of its own authority will stop a president who reaches too far.

Madison planned for selfish citizens. What he never fully planned for was selfish citizens and a Congress that stopped acting like a rival branch. He didn’t foresee what we have now — a Republican-led legislature willing to give its power away to stay in a president’s favor.

Washington hoped for virtue. Madison built a backup system for when virtue ran out.

In 2026, both are failing at once.

FDR understood the other half—The forgotten man

On the evening of April 14, 1938, Franklin Roosevelt sat at a microphone to speak to Americans. Four weeks earlier, Hitler’s army had rolled into Austria without firing a shot. At home, the recovery had collapsed into a brutal recession, and millions of Americans who had just found work were losing it again.

Roosevelt warned his listeners, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations.” He exclaimed that it was “not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness.”

Washington and Madison had worried about what citizens owed the republic. Roosevelt saw the other side of the ledger.

Years earlier, in a 1932 radio address, Roosevelt had called for a government that would “put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Eighty-five years later, Donald Trump borrowed the phrase for his inaugural address, promising that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” Roosevelt meant everyone left behind. His MAGA voters heard it as a promise about themselves.

In 1944, sick with the flu and too ill to address Congress in person, FDR delivered his State of the Union as a radio address. In it he proposed a second Bill of Rights.

The first had protected Americans from their government: speech, worship, trial by jury. Roosevelt argued that those freedoms become abstract to people whose survival is always in doubt. He proposed rights to a useful job, a decent home, adequate medical care, a good education, and protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, and unemployment.

“Necessitous men are not free men,” he said. “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

FDR asked— what good is the freedom to pursue happiness if you’re too hungry, sick, or broke to pursue anything?

This is where the knife turns. Washington’s bargain was never one-way. His own list included “public Justice,” the republic paying what it owed the people who had sacrificed for it. Roosevelt rescued that neglected half. A republic can ask its citizens to sacrifice, but it can’t ask for the sacrifice to become a death sentence.

Look at both halves of the social contract.

When people spend decades hearing that hard work buys stability and then live from one financial emergency to the next, they stop believing the system can deliver. So when a strongman shows up promising to rescue them by hurting others, don’t be surprised if they clap for the cruelty.

Why we vote

When John Rawls was a boy in Baltimore, he caught diphtheria. His younger brother Bobby caught it from him and died. The next year, John came down with pneumonia. His brother Tommy caught it and died too.

Rawls survived. His brothers didn’t. The difference had nothing to do with merit. It was luck. Who got sick first, who had a stronger immune system, who happened to be standing nearby.

Rawls grew up, fought in the Pacific, walked through the ruins of Hiroshima, and spent the rest of his life thinking about the role luck plays in who suffers. In 1971, as a philosopher at Harvard, he published A Theory of Justice, which asks one deceptively simple question.

Imagine you are designing the rules of a society, but you don’t know which seat you’ll get. You don’t know if you’ll be rich or poor, healthy or sick, a citizen or an immigrant, the person with the chainsaw or the person the chainsaw cuts.

Rawls called this the veil of ignorance. Behind it, he argued, rational people would choose rules that protect the worst-off because they might end up being the worst-off.

In other words, you don’t need to love your neighbor. You only need to acknowledge that you could have been born in your neighbor’s place.

Jordan failed the test by embracing economic pain while assuming her own safety net was secure. John failed when even his friends’ deportations couldn’t shake his approval of Trump. And Mike failed when he demanded a chainsaw for public protections, apparently certain he’d never feel the blade himself.

The bill comes due

A year later, the Times assembled another group of Trump voters. These Trump voters were disappointed that the president seemed preoccupied with everything except making their lives easier.

Disappointed. Not ashamed.

Polling backs up that sentiment. In August, Navigator Research found that only 18 percent of Trump voters regretted their vote. Fifty-eight percent are still “very confident” in their choice.

Flip that number over. Eighty-two percent looked at a war with Iran, gas and grocery prices climbing, health premiums projected to double, and millions of people forced into food insecurity through lost SNAP benefits and said…yeah, no regrets. Those same 82% of MAGAmuffins see nothing wrong with a president who lifted sanctions on Russian diesel three weeks before the midterms so Americans could fill their tanks a little cheaper while Ukrainians pay the difference in blood.

It’s not their blood, so screw em.

You might have noticed that when Trump voters do show their disapproval, it’s never about the people Trump hurt. It is always focused on themselves.

They may complain about the Iranian war driving up the price of everything, but they never mention the 168 schoolgirls the U.S. murdered in Minab, Iran.

They worry about healthcare costs, but are oblivious to the USAID cuts that will cause 14 million additional deaths worldwide by 2030.

And here’s a particularly revealing comparison. 63 percent of regretful Trump voters were angered that Flock’s license-plate surveillance cameras trampled on their constitutional rights, yet only 29 percent cited immigration enforcement going too far among their reasons for regretting Trump. Meanwhile, the government had already shipped 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison without due process.

Apparently, constitutional protections become considerably more interesting when the government starts photographing your license plate.

George Washington asked Americans to sacrifice their individual advantages for the community. Trump voters were prepared for sacrifices. They just assumed others would bear them.

The people who didn’t vote for a convicted felon and sleezebag found liable for rape have every right to be angry at the voters who threw democracy away with both hands. I will continue to be mad because I am Italian and we don’t forgive unless there’s a funeral.

However, maybe — and this is a big maybe — we can find forgiveness in our chipped hearts if we remember that some Trump voters are a result of a broken social contract. FDR understood that a republic that expects its citizens to defend strangers’ rights has to ask whether it has given those citizens a fair chance to live securely. We have been failing that test for a while.

At the same time, citizens who demand constitutional and social protections for themselves can’t treat those same protections as optional for everyone else.

We broke this bargain at both ends.

So when you vote in three weeks, who are you voting for?

The honest answer is both: yourself and the community. That was always the bargain. Washington understood what citizens owe their republic. Roosevelt understood what the republic owes its citizens. Madison built safeguards against the dangers of selfish factions. Rawls gave us a moral test we can run at the ballot box.

The Latin root of republic is res publica — the public thing.

It only works if we remember there’s a public in it.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: Want to horrify your friends with what they’ve been eating? Spread the ghoulish delight and share this with someone who still trusts their groceries.

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I can’t help but notice that Americans and Italians have very different ideas about what constitutes a treat.

American children got cookies. We got biscotti, which are technically cookies, provided you first marinate them in coffee until they’re soft enough to chew. Then there were Jordan almonds — pastel-colored rocks covered in sugar, traditionally handed out at weddings. Nothing says congratulations on your marriage quite like sending your guests home with a handful of dental emergencies.

But my mother took our Italian suspicion of processed foods to an entirely new level.

Mom was a health science nut. She had researched artificial food dyes and decided that American candy was basically a chemistry experiment with better marketing. To support her case, she hung a chart on the wall listing the dangers of food coloring.

This chart became a permanent fixture of our childhood.

Whenever we begged for candy, Mom didn’t bother arguing. She would stop whatever she was doing, turn toward the wall, and slowly raise one finger…and point at the chart.

No lecture. No negotiation. Just that silent finger directing us toward our impending doom.

If you’ve ever seen A Christmas Carol, you know the ghost who never speaks, just points ominously until Scrooge realizes he’s looking at his own grave? That was my mother. Except Scrooge was seven years old and wanted a packet of Skittles.

You think I am exaggerating the trauma? I am not.

One Easter, she gave us a basket of fruit.

Fruit. For Easter.

Of course, this was decades before Edible Arrangements discovered that you could charge people a small fortune to arrange cantaloupe on sticks and call it a present. My mother was a visionary. We were considerably less impressed.

Then, one Halloween, after years of what I can only describe as organized lobbying, Mom finally relented.

We could go trick-or-treating.

American candy! From complete strangers! An entire evening devoted to collecting precisely the sort of industrially manufactured sugar bombs my mother had spent years warning us would destroy civilization.

I wasn’t about to question her sudden change of heart. I had a pillowcase to fill.

Unfortunately, this was also the era when America collectively decided that psychopaths were hiding razor blades in Halloween apples.

(Switching to my crotchety old lady lecture voice.)

Kids these days… Now, they can summon an entire bag of Halloween candy through DoorDash, provided you can get hold of your parents’ credit card. We had to work for that candy. No, no…we risked our lives for that candy.

For those too young to remember this particular national nervous breakdown, allow me to explain.

By the early 1980s, parents were convinced that somewhere in their neighborhood lurked a deranged psychopath spending his October evenings carefully inserting razor blades into Snickers bars and handing them to unsuspecting children. America didn’t even have Fox News yet, and somehow we managed to conjure an entire underground network of candy-wielding serial killers.

The fear had been simmering since the 1970s, but in 1982, seven people died after someone laced Tylenol capsules with cyanide. Those murders were no joke. And although they had nothing to do with Halloween candy, America promptly decided every Snickers bar was a potential crime scene.

At least 40 cities canceled Halloween festivities that year. Hospitals offered to X-ray children’s candy. In Des Moines, Iowa, roughly 700 children reportedly showed up at a hospital to have their Halloween loot examined by medical equipment normally reserved for people who had actually swallowed something dangerous.

Even Dear Abby piled on. In 1983, the nationally syndicated advice columnist warned parents that somebody’s child would become violently ill or die from poisoned candy.

You can imagine how this news went over with my mother. The woman who had spent years silently pointing at a chart of artificial food dyes now had to consider the possibility that our candy was carrying concealed weapons.

So when we finally brought home our precious loot, my mom inspected every fun-sized piece like someone performing an exorcism. Every suspicious seam, every tiny puncture, every possible sign of tampering became evidence at a potential homicide scene.

We had waited years to eat a candy bar, and now we were apparently waiting for it to be cleared of attempted murder.

Little did we know then that the great Halloween razor-blade panic was largely built on urban legends. In 1985, sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi published a study examining newspaper reports of Halloween candy tampering dating back to 1958. They found plenty of frightening stories, suspicious candy, and alleged attempts to poison children. What they couldn’t substantiate was a single case of a child being killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat handed out by a stranger during trick-or-treating.

Best continued investigating the claims for decades, with essentially the same conclusion — America had spent years inspecting candy for a monster nobody could find.

Maybe that’s why I’m a little traumatized about food. Between my mother’s chart and reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in college, I scare easily.

For anyone unfamiliar with Sinclair’s cheerful contribution to American literature, The Jungle was published in 1906 and exposed the revolting conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. It’s the sort of book you should probably read on an empty stomach, though by Chapter 11 you may decide never to eat again.

Sinclair described American sausage padded with something called potato-flour — the leftover garbage after manufacturers extracted the starch and alcohol from potatoes. As Sinclair noted, using potato flour as a food adulterant was a criminal offense in Europe, so food manufacturers shipped and unloaded thousands of tons to America instead. Apparently, Americans have a long tradition of being the world’s clearance rack for questionable groceries.

Of course, we thought we had put these scary times behind us, but lately food safety has hitched a ride with all the other democratic backsliding.

Messing with our beloved beef industry is the most egregious offense. In September, the European Union suspended Brazilian meat imports because Brazil hadn’t provided adequate assurances about its controls on antimicrobial use in livestock.

What to do with all Brazil’s mystery meat that Europeans reject? Why give it to those tacky Americans!

Now, instead of bolstering our beef industry at home, Trump eased tariffs on imported beef, including beef from Brazil. It’s “America First”…to get food poisoning.

Upton Sinclair’s ghost is amused. We practically built modern federal meat inspection around the scandals Sinclair exposed. We had the book, the national outrage, the legislation, and 120 years to figure out what shouldn’t go into sausage.

And here we are, apparently auditioning for the sequel.

Unfortunately, the Trump regime has also been dismantling parts of the federal workforce responsible for food safety. According to the Partnership for Public Service, the number of federal employees classified as food inspectors fell from 1,035 in September 2024 to 473 in February 2026 — a 54 percent reduction.

To be clear, a recall can actually be good news. It means somebody found the cholera well. However, the Trump regime had decreed that additional federal requirements designed to help investigators trace contaminated foods through the supply chain won’t be enforced until July 2028.

Note the date. Apparently, bacteria are expected to respect the government’s election schedule.

So what happens when fewer people are looking for problems and tracking systems are weaker? I decided to do what any perfectly normal adult with lingering childhood food trauma would do.

I signed up for food-recall alerts in my news feed. I don’t think I have had a decent meal since.

Sure, I figured I’d occasionally hear about contaminated lettuce or a rogue peanut sneaking into something labeled peanut-free.

Instead, my phone started blowing up.

Every day brought a fresh culinary horror—bacteria, parasites, foreign objects, or ingredients nobody bothered to mention on the label. My phone had essentially become my mother’s food-dye chart, except it now followed me everywhere and periodically made a noise.

You’ve probably heard about the celebrity food disasters of 2026. The Cyclospora parasite outbreak traced to shredded iceberg lettuce that sickened 12,883 Americans, hospitalized 570, and killed two. Or the E. coli outbreak linked to frozen blueberries that sickened 17 people and prompted recalls that eventually reached products sold at Publix, Walmart, and Trader Joe’s. Then there were the jalapeños linked to Salmonella that sickened 488 people across 34 states, including customers of Chipotle and QDOBA. And let’s not forget the frozen black clams suspected of spreading hepatitis A — 37 people sickened, 30 hospitalized. Apparently, even the shellfish were getting into the Halloween spirit.

Those were the ones that made national headlines, but they were only the appetizers.

Well, since Halloween is approaching, I’ve curated a little tasting menu from 2026's more obscure recalls. Ten courses. No reservations required. Some ingredients are so exclusive they weren’t even listed on the packaging.

Bon appétit!

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Take My Money, You Monster!

The Top 10 Halloween Tasting Menu of Regret

1. Beverage Pairing — Gatorade, Vintage 2026

Remember when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared war on artificial food dyes, and we all clapped like drunk seals? In case you forgot…In April 2025, Kennedy called a press conference and announced he was getting six petroleum-based dyes out of America’s food supply, including the nastiest — Yellow №5 and Yellow №6.

Kennedy promised action. The food industry promised cooperation. By July, his FDA commissioner was triumphantly declaring, “Promises made, promises kept.”

Well, how are those promises working out?

In September 2026, PepsiCo recalled 122,021 cases of Gatorade distributed across 37 states because its lemon-lime and orange drinks contained Yellow №5 and Yellow №6 that weren’t disclosed on the labels. These dyes not only look like something Chornobyl barfed up. A 2021 California review found that synthetic food dyes can contribute to hyperactivity and other behavioral problems in some children.

So the dyes did disappear!

From the labels…

You have to admire the irony. Kennedy spent more than a year promising to get these chemicals out of our drinks, and now we’re recalling drinks because the chemicals are still there, but now…nobody bothers to tell us. I guess if you can’t see the poisons, then we are good.

My mother is about to rise from her chair and point at the wall again.

2. Chef’s Special — Tofu With a Side of Typography

In August, Hodo recalled more than 10,000 cases of its Chili Crisp Lightly Fried Tofu because printing ink from the packaging might have migrated into the food.

Now, tofu is basically a blank canvas. You can fry it, smoke it, marinate it, or cover it in whatever sauce makes soybeans taste less like damp resignation.

But printer ink seems an ambitious flavor choice.

The company was investigating whether chili oil and heat contributed to the possible ink migration. No illnesses were reported.

I generally prefer my lunch without a possible side of graphic design.

3. The Cheese Course — Queso With Cockroaches

In August, the FDA issued a warning letter to La Pradera, a Florida manufacturer of Venezuelan-style cheeses. During an April inspection, investigators observed flies landing on ready-to-eat cheese and cockroaches crawling on equipment used in its production.

Investigators spotted one cockroach on a tray holding clean cheese molds. Another was crawling on the cheese-molding machine. Approximately seven were loitering on a box containing bags of cheese curds.

Seven. That’s enough cockroaches to hold a committee meeting.

I know cheese is traditionally aged, but I wasn’t aware the process required an entire insect ecosystem.

4. Antipasto — Peppers With an Uninvited Guest

This one has an actual plot.

In September, Mezzetta recalled certain jars of Golden Greek Peperoncini after a social-media video showed what appeared to be a pest contaminant inside a jar. The company called it a “potential pest contaminant” — a phrase that makes me want to know considerably less about dinner.

But the peppers made it into prepared foods, so WinCo recalled its salsa bean-dip trays. So if you have recently prepared a party platter with this jar of peppers, check for unauthorized passengers.

5. Palate Cleanser — Fruit Pops With Actual Glass

Remember those childhood warnings about razor blades? Well, we’ve upgraded.

In August, Dreyer’s recalled certain Outshine Fruit Bars after consumers reported finding glass in the product.

Glass. In fruit pops.

Imagine opening the freezer on a hot afternoon, unwrapping a strawberry bar, and discovering your refreshing dessert might require safety goggles.

6. The Frozen Course — Ice Cream With a Geological Surprise

I’m beginning to suspect the frozen-dessert industry has misunderstood the concept of crunchy toppings.

In September, Danone recalled So Delicious Salted Caramel Cluster frozen dessert because the cashew pieces might contain small stones and other hard objects.

Listen, food regulators, I grew up eating Jordan almonds, so I’m familiar with desserts that require a certain commitment to dental risk. But at least Jordan almonds are supposed to be hard. No one wants to be halfway through a pint of salted caramel only to discover that one of the clusters is technically geology. Rocky road is supposed to be a flavor, not a manufacturing instruction.

7. Forbidden Fruit — The Poison Apple Returns

Oh, this one would have driven my mother completely insane.

In February, Tippy Toes Apple Pear Banana baby-food puree was recalled after FDA testing found elevated levels of patulin, a toxin produced by molds that can grow on fruit.

Then, in September, Wholesome Pantry Organic Unsweetened Applesauce was recalled over the same toxin.

This poisoned apple is no fairy tale. Long-term exposure can suppress the immune system and cause nerve damage, headaches, fever, and nausea.

But if it makes you feel better, Victorian apple growers once sprayed their crops with lead arsenate. It tastes like a crisp Granny Smith with subtle notes of brain damage.

8. Seasonal Spice — Cinnamon With a Heavy-Metal Problem

Nothing says autumn quite like the smell of cinnamon drifting through the kitchen.

Unless, of course, the cinnamon contains lead.

In September, the Maryland health officials recalled Lior Ground Cinnamon Seasoning after finding elevated lead levels. Lead exposure can cause serious health problems, particularly in children. Unlike glass or stones, you generally can’t detect it.

I’m beginning to miss the days when the biggest controversy surrounding pumpkin pie was whether you used nutmeg.

9. Amuse-Bouche — Chocolate With a Side of Rat

Remember when parents worried that psychopaths were hiding razor blades in Halloween candy? Apparently, they should have been checking for rodents.

In March 2026, the FDA issued a warning to JZ Wholesale after inspectors discovered chocolate candy bars with gnawed packaging, rodent droppings, and greasy trails left by rats or mice. Investigators also found cockroach egg cases, insect larvae, and assorted animal feces throughout the warehouse.

At least somebody enjoyed the chocolate.

10. The Children’s Menu — Baby Sleep Tea With Three Alcohols

This might be my personal favorite because it harks back to Victorian days, when parents would shut up crying babies with a bottle of Godfrey’s Cordial — a popular infant sedative containing a tincture of opium. A few drops and the little darling would finally stop disturbing the household.

Unfortunately, some babies never woke up. Others were kept so drugged they stopped feeding and slowly starved. You’d think we’d have retired this particular parenting strategy.

Well, welcome to 2026!

On October 7, the FDA announced a recall of Babies’ Magic Tea Baby Sleep Gripe Water after testing discovered three undeclared alcohols.

Ethanol — 8.3 percent.

Methanol — 0.35 percent.

Isopropanol — 0.48 percent.

For those unfamiliar with their alcohols, ethanol is the kind found in alcoholic beverages. Methanol and isopropanol are toxic alcohols. All three can depress the central nervous system. The FDA warned that consuming the recommended amount could cause drowsiness, impaired coordination, vomiting, and other harmful effects.

The Victorians would have recognized the parenting strategy.

Bonus Recall: Chef’s Final Offering — My Wife’s Slaw

I’m saving this one for last because the name is almost too perfect.

In May, a company called My Wife’s Slaw recalled its coleslaw. Not because investigators had detected a dangerous bacterium. Not because a customer discovered part of a kitchen appliance lurking among the cabbage.

The products had been manufactured without the required inspection, so their safety couldn’t be verified. So the company had to recall everything it had produced.

Now, I don’t know whose wife was responsible for this coleslaw, and I’m certainly not suggesting she was running a biological weapons program out of her kitchen. But there is something beautifully absurd about a food product called My Wife’s Slaw arriving with the government’s equivalent of a note saying nobody checked it.

I hope you enjoyed this epicurean romp through our food supply. Of course, these are only the products somebody actually caught. Happy Halloween!

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.

Some ducats for your plague knowledge

After the Russian plague story broke, readers started sending it to me.

A lot of readers.

And I have to admit, it warmed my heart. Sometimes you spend years writing into the abyss and wondering whether anyone remembers a goddamn thing you told them. Then somebody in Siberia possibly dies of plague, and suddenly your inbox fills up.

Really, I’m touched.

Some writers become associated with democracy, foreign policy, or climate change. I have somehow become the woman you think of when somebody mentions exploding buboes. We all leave a legacy.

Unfortunately, this also means I have spent an unreasonable portion of my life reading about plague. One of my books covers the Black Death. I have read the chronicles, investigated flea vectors, and can accurately describe what color your extremities turn when Yersinia pestis gets into your bloodstream.

So when I heard whispers of the next pandemic over an unconfirmed case of pneumonic plague in Russia, I had approximately the same reaction an Italian grandmother has when somebody puts sugar in the marinara.

You want to chat about plague?

Sit down. My people know plague.

The history of plague in two acts

There’s this running history joke between English and Italian historians. Brits love getting their knickers twisted over how badly England suffered during the Black Death.

Boo hoo. Yeah, come to Tuscany, Sir Arthur.

In 1348, plague ran amok in Siena. Its chronicler Agnolo di Tura — wonderfully known as Agnolo the Fat — described people dropping dead while talking, enormous burial pits filling with bodies, and families abandoning one another. Then he quietly recorded that he had buried five of his own children. Modern reconstructions using Sienese military records put the city’s mortality around 51 percent. Florence may have lost more than half its population too. Italians know plague.

And if you read Giovanni Boccaccio’s introduction to The Decameron, written after plague tore through Florence, something else becomes apparent.

When it comes to pandemics, humans are remarkably predictable.

Among the panic, Boccaccio described two Florentine camps. The affluent group shut themselves away in comfortable houses, ate delicately, drank good wine in moderation, listened to music, and avoided upsetting news.

The poor slobs decided that the appropriate response to mass mortality was to roam from tavern to tavern drinking, singing, indulging every appetite, and generally behaving as if tomorrow had already been canceled.

Seven hundred years later, COVID gave one group sourdough starter while the other group said fuck it, we’re going to the bar.

You can bet I would join the bar hopping group.

Fortunately, I don’t have to contemplate doomsday scenarios just yet because medical advice has improved somewhat. And we have antibiotics. Ah, progress.

A visit to plague school

Before I talk everybody off the medieval corpse cart, we need a brief science detour.

One bacterium causes plague — Yersinia pestis. Bubonic plague, septicemic plague, and pneumonic plague are not three separate diseases roaming around looking for villagers to kill. They describe how the same bacterium ruins your week.

Bubonic plague is the celebrity. Usually, an infected flea bites you. The bacteria move through your lymphatic system and settle into a nearby lymph node, which swells into a painful bubo. Those buboes can grow alarmingly large and, in advanced infections, become open sores filled with pus.

Bubonic plague is also the form Americans still occasionally get. Plague became established among wild rodents and fleas in the rural West after arriving in American port cities around 1900. In recent decades, the United States has averaged about seven human cases a year. More than 80 percent are bubonic, concentrated mostly around northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, southern Colorado, California, southern Oregon, and far western Nevada.

So technically, plague already lives here, mostly among wild rodents and their fleas. The poor rats have been taking all the reputational damage while those little bastards enjoy a woodland brand identity.

Septicemic plague is what happens when Y. pestis gets into the bloodstream and starts reproducing there. This is the horror-show version that can cause organ failure, bleeding under the skin, and tissue death in fingers, toes, and other extremities.

Very bad. Still not a disease you acquire because the guy three aisles over sneezed in Target.

Then we arrive at pneumonic plague. Pneumonic means the bacteria have infected the lungs. Sometimes another form of plague spreads there. Primary pneumonic plague can also begin when a person directly inhales infectious respiratory particles.

This is the form everybody keeps shouting about because it is the only form of plague that spreads from one person to another through the respiratory route. And yes, pneumonic plague is serious as hell. Untreated, it can kill frighteningly fast.

But please notice the word untreated.

We know what Yersinia pestis is and how to diagnose it. We know how to isolate patients, identify close contacts, and give them preventive antibiotics.

Besides, plague does not normally float through buildings like measles or move silently through populations the way COVID could. Person-to-person plague transmission generally requires direct, close exposure to infectious droplets from someone or an animal with plague pneumonia. The last identified person-to-person transmission in the United States occurred during the 1924–25 Los Angeles outbreak.

That does not make pneumonic plague cuddly. Of course, it is a very dangerous disease. A dangerous disease with epidemiological characteristics we already understand.

Meanwhile in Siberia

Now let’s discuss what we actually know about the Russian case. This will be a brief section.

Because, so far, we know very fucking little.

A 28-year-old laboratory worker named Darya Shipilova worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia. She became ill and died on October 2. Her diagnosis, according to Russian authorities, is pneumonia of unknown origin.

Early reports suggested she may have died from pneumonic plague. A regional governor initially wrote that she had died of plague and then changed the wording to say she had possibly died of plague. Stories circulated claiming a laboratory accident involving a broken tube. Russian authorities denied that such an accident occurred.

The World Health Organization claims all identified contacts have tested negative for dangerous infectious pathogens and the risk to the general population is low. As of October 6, Russia says there are no confirmed plague cases in Irkutsk.

Read that again.

We currently have zero confirmed plague cases in Irkutsk.

Maybe Shipilova was exposed at work. Maybe some details haven’t been disclosed. Maybe Russia is lying. For all we know, she got bitten by a vicious marmot.

Perhaps we could determine what killed the woman before deciding she has inaugurated the next global pandemic.

Russia is hiding something? You don’t say…

Now, I can hear the objection. But…but, Ms. Beccia, Russia’s story doesn’t add up.

Correct. It does not. Are you implying that Russia is hiding something? Nooooooo…not dear sweet Putin.

Come on. This is a country that gave us dolls hidden inside other dolls. Ethical transparency has never exactly been the national brand.

All we know right now is that the institute and health authorities mounted a substantial containment response while simultaneously denying that a laboratory accident involving plague had occurred.

Those contradictions deserve investigation. But before we decide that Russia’s anti-plague infrastructure signals the next apocalypse, it helps to know that Russia has been obsessing over plague for roughly a century.

Beginning in the 1920s and expanding dramatically after World War II, the Soviet Union built one of the largest anti-plague systems in history.

And they had a reason. Plague was deeply entrenched in wildlife across enormous stretches of Central Asia and other parts of the Soviet Union. Yersinia pestis lives inside flea stomachs, fleas jump on rodents, and humans occasionally stumbled into the wrong ecological neighborhood and got caught in the middle.

So the Soviets went after plague with the subtlety you would expect from the Soviets. Thousands of scientists and field workers mapped plague reservoirs, trapped rodents, collected fleas, vaccinated people, poisoned burrows and sprayed insecticides. At various points they burned vegetation, plowed up rodent colonies and dropped DDT on enormous areas.

Basically, if a gerbil looked suspicious, Moscow had a five-year plan for it.

And here is the hopeful part — it worked.

Human plague cases dropped dramatically. Soviet scientists became very good at understanding plague ecology — where it lived, how it moved between animals and humans, and where the danger zones were.

What they could not do was eradicate the little bastard. Because plague lives in nature, and nature does not give a shit about centrally planned production targets.

Kill the rodents and eventually more rodents arrive.

Kill the fleas and eventually more fleas arrive.

Yersinia pestis waits.

Eventually Soviet scientists accepted reality and shifted from trying to eradicate plague to monitoring and controlling it.

Unfortunately, the politicians were less enthusiastic about revising their report card. In 1959, a Soviet official told the World Health Organization that there had been no human plague cases in the USSR since around 1928.

Yeah, so that was a pestilent lie.

Later researchers digging through Soviet records found continued human cases and outbreaks. Soviet plague scientists were forbidden from discussing those cases publicly. Reports disappeared from the press and international reporting because admitting that people were still getting plague meant admitting that the eradication campaign had failed.

So Russia has two very long historical traditions when it comes to plague.

1. Taking plague extremely seriously.

2. Not necessarily telling the rest of us just how serious.

Now look again at the coverage of Darya Shipilova’s death. Russia operates anti-plague institutes. Oh, no! Ring the plague bells. Yeah, it has for generations.

Russia reacts aggressively when it suspects plague. Yes, because it would be foolish not to.

Russia may be withholding information about a possible plague case. Have you met Putin?

To be clear, those facts deserve scrutiny. But they are not evidence that something unprecedented has suddenly happened. And this is where some of the fearmongering starts to feel either historically illiterate or awfully irresponsible.

A century-old Russian plague problem, a lab built to study it, and a history of concealing plague are not evidence that Russia is concealing a biological weapon to take down humanity. It is like seeing smoke coming from the chimney of a house that has burned wood for a hundred years and announcing that you have discovered evidence of arson.

Maybe there is an arsonist. But the smoke is not your proof.

Pandemic Is Not a Synonym for Bioweapon

In 1346, Mongol forces were besieging the Genoese trading city of Caffa on the Crimean coast. Then plague broke out among the besieging army.

According to an account by the Italian Gabriele de’ Mussi, the attackers responded with the sort of military ingenuity one expects from people who had not yet invented the Geneva Conventions.

They hurled plague-infected corpses over the city walls.

The historical account is not ironclad. De’ Mussi was not standing there taking notes, and scholars have debated the details. But the CDC’s historical analysis concluded that the biological attack was plausible and that it may have introduced plague into Caffa. The same analysis found that Caffa probably was not responsible for carrying the Black Death into Europe. In other words, the pandemic was moving along other routes regardless of the flying plague corpses.

Which is almost comically perfect for our discussion. The corpse trebuchet did not cause the pandemic. However, it was still biological warfare. There is the distinction journalists keep blurring.

Pandemic potential asks whether an infectious agent can sustain efficient person-to-person transmission across large populations.

Bioweapon potential asks whether somebody can deliberately use a biological agent to harm people.

Different questions.

A biological attack could cause enormous casualties through the initial exposure. It does not need every infected person to wander off and infect three more people, who infect three more people, who get on planes and take the pathogen to six continents.

In fact, from the perspective of an attacker seeking a bounded military effect, runaway transmission creates a rather obvious problem. You no longer control where your weapon goes. Your soldiers breathe too. Your population has lungs. Borders are imaginary lines to bacteria. This is why I would never describe a biological weapon as neatly controllable. Biology has a notorious problem with instructions.

You can aim the corpse. You cannot give the bacterium a map.

And this is where Russia becomes a much more serious story.

The United States intelligence community’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment says Russia probably retains the knowledge and capability to produce and employ traditional biological pathogens and toxins. It states Russian scientists continue developing new chemical and biological warfare capabilities. More broadly, the assessment says countries with chemical and biological weapons programs have been developing capabilities for tactical uses including targeted killings and special military operations, while pursuing methods that make attacks more difficult to detect, treat, or attribute.

Now I’m listening.

But that does not prove Shipilova died in a biological-weapons accident. It does not prove Russia was experimenting with weaponized plague. And it certainly does not prove the Kremlin is preparing to unleash Yersinia pestis on anybody.

A worker dying under unexplained circumstances inside a Russian institute that handles dangerous pathogens is a legitimate national-security question. And it is considerably more interesting than pretending the Black Death has booked a flight to Newark.

The one incurable disease that is not a hoax

One detail in this story leaves a familiar taste of black bile.

Donald J. Trump.

Sorry, we need to talk about the most dangerous exploding pus-filled buboes.

Let’s stroll down memory lane to those early quixotic days of COVID. During an actual pandemic, when a novel respiratory virus was already spreading around the planet, Trump repeatedly assured Americans that COVID was a nothing burger.

On January 22, 2020, after the first confirmed U.S. case of COVID, he said the country had it “totally under control.”

On February 27, he predicted the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”

In March, after privately acknowledging to Bob Woodward that COVID was highly contagious and deadly, Trump told Woodward that he preferred to “play it down.” Then he continued gaslighting Americans and claiming the pandemic would disappear even as the U.S. death toll climbed.

So imagine my surprise when Trump discovered epidemiological anxiety in October 2026.

A reporter asked him about the Russian plague story.

Remember where we are at this point. No confirmed outbreak or plague case in Irkutsk. We still have no confirmation that Shipilova even died of plague. WHO says the general risk is low.

And Trump suddenly sounds like medieval Europe has breached the gates. He called it a “rough disease.” He announced that microbes had become “stronger and smarter.” He compared them to “an army.” He repeated that germs had grown stronger and said the United States was looking at the Russian situation “very strongly.”

During an actual pandemic, everything would disappear and blow over. Now, Russia reports zero confirmed plague cases, and suddenly the microbes are organizing battalions.

So why did Trump disease narrative change? Is it time to summon the plague doctors and kill your cat?

I am just asking questions. Maybe there is a perfectly innocent explanation for Trump’s newfound respect for microbes. I have no evidence that his comments are part of some coordinated attempt to frighten Americans before an election, and I am not going to manufacture certainty while criticizing other people for doing exactly that.

But journalists might want to notice the ironic juxtaposition.

The next regularly scheduled federal election is November 3rd — 28 days from today. Millions of Americans will walk into schools, churches, libraries and community centers. They will wait in lines. They will squeeze past strangers. They will enter little rooms full of their neighbors and breathe the same air.

As I mentioned in past essays, Trump needs to manufacture an emergency. Let’s not make it this easy for him to find one.

The plague masks come off…

If you’re worried about biological warfare, investigate biological warfare. Better yet, worry about avian flu — a far bigger threat.

But don’t wrap a very real threat with pandemic clickbait. Americans have been traumatized enough. Fearmongering does not make the story more serious. Instead, it obscures the part we should actually be taking seriously.

This gets even grosser when the terrifying version sits behind a paywall. If your headline tells readers that they may be facing a global health crisis, but readers have to hand over a credit card before reaching the epidemiological qualifications, what exactly are we doing here? Are we warning the public? Or are we monetizing the adrenaline spike?

So by all means, keep sending me plague stories. I’m genuinely touched that exploding buboes, red crosses on doors, and corpses piled up like sardines make you think of me.

But for the next few weeks, I will be focusing on the election.

We have a democracy to save.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.

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Election officials are currently preparing for the usual Trump hijinks. They have enlisted poll observers, voter hotlines, lawyers, and elaborate escalation plans.

Everyone is nervous.

But recently, Michael Moore offered one genuinely reassuring detail about election security. (Not the Fahrenheit 9/11 guy. Reassurance is not really his wheelhouse.) No, this Michael Moore is the chief information security officer for the Arizona Secretary of State. And this guy understands how spectacularly sideways an election can go.

“We design exercises to give election officials the most miserable Election Day we can possibly imagine,” Moore recently told The Washington Post. “That way, when they actually have an election day, they’re prepared for everything.”

The Most Miserable Election Day sounds like the title of my next picture book. How miserable, Mr. Moore? Because now you have my attention.

Usually, the worst that happens is the white-haired election ladies run out of I Voted stickers or somebody shows up at the wrong precinct and demands to speak to democracy’s manager. But there is also the possibility of something more horrendous— bomb threats, cyberattacks, or violence. So election workers train for emergencies.

At least that is what I thought they meant.

Then I found some of Arizona’s election training material. Apparently, at some point, Arizona Secretary of State's office was tasked with answering one question — how thoroughly can we torture an election official before somebody calls HR?

Let’s just say that by the end of the day, two people were dead, and someone was cleaning up human feces.

Not literally. But someone got paid to write an election day torture scenario. His name is Ken Matta, and he was the state's chief election security officer.

You can understand why I am jealous of Ken.

(Reminder to the Arizona Secretary of State: Forget Ken. I am available for hire. I have an impressive résumé in Italian history and medieval torture. I know my strappado from my Scavenger’s Daughter and can inject enough misery into Election Day to make this operation look professionally sadistic. You know where to find me.)

Anyway, here’s what went down on game day…

The Most Miserable Election Day Ever

It’s April 2022, and Lisa Marra is the elections director of Cochise County, a slab of Sonoran Desert bigger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. She has the kind of job nobody thinks about until it goes wrong — voter rolls, poll worker schedules, making sure the right ballot goes to the right precinct, etc. She’s been doing it for five years. It’s a boring job, and Lisa is very good at it.

So Lisa drives up to a Phoenix hotel for an election training exercise. The ballroom is packed full of election directors, IT staff, cops, and county officials who would rather be doing literally anything else.

Here are the election torture game rules: The game drops everyone into fictional Arizona counties. One is called Cactus County. (Somebody was paid to come up with that. What did I tell you? Amateurs.)

The team gets a budget, and it’s too small. Spend on phishing training, and you may not have enough left for public education. Every choice leaves something exposed.

Then the torture writers feed the participants disasters. Election officials call these little snafus “injects.” Writers call them plot beats — preferably the kind that make your protagonist’s day progressively worse.

So the first disaster lands.

Ransomware compromises files in the election and recorder’s offices. Hope Lisa bought the phishing training.

Then voters start calling. They received more than one ballot. Before Lisa can get her arms around that, politicians go on television and tell people not to mail those ballots.

Then they threaten to arrest election workers. Lisa’s election workers.

Next, the fictional legislature announces that it plans to audit Cactus County’s results using auditors whose professional experience includes working as “part-time carnival ride attendants.” (I admit, carnival attendants are a dark twist. I might have made one of them a ferret breeder, but I respect the craft.)

Now Lisa has decisions. She can call a press conference, fire an employee spreading misinformation, or plead for more resources. Katie Hobbs, then Arizona’s secretary of state, stands right there in the ballroom, so Lisa can even walk across the room and appeal directly to the dungeon master.

But while Lisa’s team tries to solve one crisis, her actual cellphone rings with another. Emails pile up. Fake breaking news flashes across the giant screen at the front of the ballroom. Then C. Murphy Hebert, a former reporter playing the press corps, starts demanding answers about why Lisa is running this entirely imaginary election so badly.

And Election Day hasn’t started yet.

When it does, the computers crash. Voters lose track of where they are supposed to vote and start hunting for their polling places. Lisa’s team is trying to keep the county upright when somebody decides the plot still lacks a certain diabolus ex machina.

So they drop in some human feces.

Apparently, at one point, Ken must have decided Lisa hadn’t suffered enough, so he thought—How about we smear the polling place with literal shit? That will get her attention. (I withdraw some of my earlier criticism about Ken’s writing. He may have potential.)

Now, your instinct is probably, Lisa… get a mop. Nope. Human waste is a biohazard. Poll workers cannot just grab a bucket and clean it up. Lisa now has to find people with protective equipment to clean the polling place, and somehow keep voters moving while the floor is contaminated.

Lisa is still dealing with the literal shitstorm when armed protesters arrive at election sites and start trying to check voters’ immigration status. Now Lisa has to decide whether they are intimidating voters, when to call police, and how long she can keep the polling place open before the danger escalates.

If she closes the polls, where does everybody vote? That question has teeth because Arizona counties do not all run elections the same way. Lisa’s fictional county uses vote centers, which means voters can go somewhere else if one location goes down. Other teams in the ballroom are running traditional precinct systems, where voters are assigned to a particular polling place. Tricky.

Then the protesters turn violent. So Lisa’s team closes its vote center and redirects voters.

Across the ballroom, another team is running a precinct system. They can’t close the polling place in time.

A fight breaks out. Two people die. Fake people, but still.

(And here I must lodge my first serious complaint. How did they die, Ken? Shot? Stabbed? Trampled beneath a mob of furious voters all dressed like the J6 Viking dude? You cannot spend an entire day lovingly constructing ransomware, carnival workers, human feces, and armed protesters and then get coy when you finally reach the body count. Frankly, I could have done better.)

Meanwhile, Lisa has learned the lesson before the imaginary bodies were cold. If you wait until violence breaks out to start debating whether a polling place should close, you have already waited too long. You need to know who can make the call and where voters go next before the armed men arrive.

“It’s just like how law enforcement trains,” Lisa explains. “They train for like the worst scenarios with simulated stress and immediately thinking on your feet under pressure.”

This poor woman is literally doing combat training in business casual. Someone should probably check whether the employee assistance plan covers post-traumatic election disorder. I am not sure we are paying Lisa enough.

So to recap: By the time somebody finally releases Lisa from Cactus County, she has been hacked, threatened, interrogated by the press, stranded by crashed computers, chased by confused voters, confronted by armed protesters, and forced to formulate an emergency response to human feces.

All in a hotel ballroom. All before dinner. The narrative arc may need some room to breathe. Lisa may need a therapist.

Eventually, the polls close. The armed men leave, the fake reporter goes home, and Lisa washes her hands. Repeatedly.

But here is where we stop laughing, because Lisa’s election isn’t over.

Neither is yours.

Because the day after, November 4th, is harder to drill. That is when injects look like paperwork — a ballot counted after Election Day, a number that changes, a lawsuit, or a request for records. Each one can be perfectly normal. Each one can also be an attack.

From your couch, they look identical, unless you know what normal looks like.

And this cycle, we already have the receipts. Reuters reported in September that the Trump regime has sought greater federal involvement in running state elections. They have demanded confidential voter information, pursued election-related investigations, attempted new mail-ballot rules, pushed redistricting, and investigated election offices.

Earlier this year, federal agents seized hundreds of boxes of old election records in Fulton County. Now, election officials in several states are preparing legally for attempts to obtain their voting equipment or records.

Americans have been taught to watch the voting. We have not been taught to watch what happens to the vote afterward.

The Most Miserable AFTER Election Day Ever

So here’s YOUR torture drill. I gamed it myself. And I really restrained myself from my usual grim proclivities. You’re welcome.

Election night: the unofficial count

The numbers on your TV are the fastest reliable accounting officials can give the public. But election-night numbers are never the final certified results. Even “100% of precincts reporting” doesn’t mean finished. Unofficial numbers move for days.

The inject: “THE NUMBERS CHANGED.” THEY CHEATED!!!

Normal. That is what unofficial means. Election officials continue processing lawful ballots, and the totals change with them. A changing number tells you the count changed. By itself, it tells you absolutely nothing about why.

The ballots that take longer

Some ballots can’t be counted on the spot. Officials keep provisional ballots separate until they confirm voter eligibility. Mail ballots arrive and get verified under each state’s rules. Military and overseas ballots trickle in. Some ballots need a human to decide what a voter meant. All of this happens after Election Day, by design.

The inject: “THEY FOUND FAKE BALLOTS.”

Nope. Late doesn't mean fake. They set them aside on purpose, and now they’re counting them on purpose.

The canvass

This word desperately needs translating, because it sounds like Lisa going door to door selling Girl Scout cookies. It means that election officials must make the books balance. How many people signed in, how many ballots came back, how many got counted, and where’s the gap? The EAC calls it the process of confirming every valid ballot, from Election Day, early, mail, provisional, military, and overseas voting.

The inject: The board whose job is to sign the canvass decides its signature is optional.

Not normal. The exact duties vary by state, but where certification is mandatory, officials cannot simply refuse because they distrust the result. We have already watched this happen. In 2022, the New Mexico Supreme Court ordered Otero County commissioners to certify after they refused. That same year, a judge ordered Cochise County supervisors to certify after they blew past Arizona’s deadline, ruling that certification wasn't optional.

Remember this one. It’s coming back.

Audits and recounts

Most states run some post-election audit, checking the machine count against the paper ballots. A recount is a different animal. It actually recounts a specific contest, usually a close one, and it can change the official total. Both are normal.

The inject: Somebody demands a “forensic audit” by people whose résumés would have fit right in at Cactus County. Or federal agents show up asking for the voting equipment you are still using to finish the damn election.

Not the same thing. A statutory post-election audit performed under the state’s rules is normal. Federal agents demanding active election equipment during counting or certification is not routine.

Certification

Only after the work is done do officials certify, formally attesting that the numbers are the true result under their state’s law. This takes days or weeks, on deadlines set by state law. It shouldn’t happen five minutes after Wolf Blitzer colors in a map. And there definitely shouldn’t be any hanging nooses calling for heads.

The inject: A lawsuit filed to buy time.

Could be normal. Could be trouble. It depends on the reason behind the stall. Lawsuits are one lawful way candidates challenge elections. A court can order relief when something actually went wrong. Filing a lawsuit does not, by itself, mean democracy is under attack.

Seating

For Congress, there’s one more gear, and it’s the one that keeps me up at night. The Constitution makes each chamber the judge of its members’ elections, returns, and qualifications. A winner does not become a sitting member until the oath is administered. When the new House convenes on January 3, it decides whom it seats.

The inject: The voters elect someone. The state certifies the winner. Congress simply…doesn’t seat them.

Not normal. The House does have constitutional authority to judge its members’ elections and qualifications so that a genuine dispute can delay seating. But once a winner has been certified and there's no unresolved qualification fight, simply leaving the seat vacant is not ordinary election administration.

We have a recent preview for this one. Adelita Grijalva won Arizona’s 7th District in a special election on September 23, 2025. Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t swear her in until November 12th — 50 days later.

She happened to be the 218th signature on the petition to force a vote on the Epstein files. Johnson said the delay had nothing to do with the Epstein vote. Suuuuuure.

Most Miserable No Good Election Day Postscript

In April 2022, Lisa Marra survived Cactus County. In November 2022, she ran the real thing in Cochise County. No feces that I know of.

Instead, her bosses attacked her.

Two Republican county supervisors wanted a 100% hand count of the ballots, including early ballots. Marra told them to follow state law. So they sued her. Personally. Then they deliberately missed the legal deadline to certify the county’s results, throwing Arizona’s entire statewide election certification into chaos.

A judge had to order them to do their job. They certified on December 1. One of them skipped the meeting.

In January 2023, Marra resigned, citing an “outrageous and physically and emotionally threatening” workplace. The county later paid her a $130,000 settlement.

Arizona drilled Lisa for armed men, deepfakes, and a shit-smeared polling place. Nobody drilled her for a missing signature. You can’t hand out hazmat suits for that.

Now, everyone is predicting a tumultuous election upheaval on November 3rd with lots of Trump temper tantrums. But sometimes a contested election can look like boring paperwork.

Thankfully, election officials have spent years rehearsing these worst-case scenarios.

Our job is easier.

We just have to know what normal looks like.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: Keep the Grim Historian from depleting its emergency reserves. Paid subscriptions remain the least authoritarian solution. Otherwise, sharing helps keep the algorithm from declaring a historical tantrum.

Feed ducats here

You may have noticed that Trump governs like an arsonist who keeps showing up dressed as the firefighter.

Step one: Create a problem. Light the match.

Step two: Douse it in gasoline, fear, and hate.

Step three: Announce that the fire is now an emergency requiring hoses, axes, and permission to kick in every door on the block. In other words, he needs powers Congress would never hand him unless the Capitol were on fire. Again.

And still, every blaze smells faintly of lighter fluid and his Victory 45–47 cologne. (My Sicilian nonna would have called that profumo di buttana — whore’s perfume. Then she would have crossed herself and apologized to the whores.)

Since January 2025, Trump has declared 12 national emergencies. The average president declares about seven in an entire term. Trump hit seven in his first month.

On his first day back in office, he declared immigration a national emergency requiring a military-scale response. “America’s sovereignty is under attack,” it began, with cartels and gangs “terrorizing Americans.” His answer was troops, raids, masked agents, and enough martial theater to make Minnesota look like Fallujah.

In the before times, Obama deported more illegal immigrants than Trump through a system with roughly the production values of the DMV. Border agents processed them. Officers issued removal orders. Judges heard cases. Buses left detention centers. Somewhere, a federal employee fought with a Xerox machine.

In Obama’s eight years, more than three million formal removals happened the boring way—higher than Trump’s 1.4 million deportations. Trump will have to cram a lot of cruelty (and taxpayer money) into the next 2 years to catch up.

Basically, Trump took the same immigration problem and cranked the soundtrack to Wagner. The claimed emergency gave him the political theater to send a masked army into blue states and blow up Venezuelans’ boats without due process — a war crime in any other decade. Suddenly immigration was no longer a sprawling administrative system. It was Helm’s Deep with worse landscaping.

Trump also declared an energy emergency on day one. Normally, energy policy is catastrophically unsexy — pipelines, transformers, permits, engineers eating sandwiches over load forecasts.

Until…Trump’s illegal war in Iran squeezed fuel supplies and sent the White House back to the Defense Production Act to expand refinery capacity. His base complained about gas prices. Don Jr. did not. It turns out, investing in refineries before a war is a smart move.

Trade was promoted to Defcon Level One too. In 2025, the Trump regime claimed the combination of immigration and fentanyl trafficking constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” Then he declared ordinary authorities were inadequate, and invoked emergency economic powers to impose tariffs on Mexican goods.

And then there is Iran — the mother lode of Trump histrionics.

In July 2015, Obama negotiated the JCPOA — the nuclear agreement that capped and monitored Iran’s nuclear program. The deal wasn’t perfect. It certainly didn’t turn Iran into Switzerland. It did something much less exciting.

Obama put diplomats across the table and inspectors inside nuclear facilities. They counted centrifuges, measured uranium, sealed equipment, checked stockpiles, and made Iran prove compliance one tedious report at a time. The IAEA verified that Iran had implemented key nuclear commitments under the deal.

But as we all know by now, if Obama left fingerprints on any policy, Trump reaches for solvent. And let’s face it. Peace lacks the pathos needed for Trump’s reality TV show-style governing. Not to mention, his base is a bunch of anxious drama queens terrified of their own shadows. Fear is their drug of choice.

So in 2018, Trump ripped up the JCPOA, restored sanctions, escalated the confrontation, and eventually got his forever war.

And war has proved especially productive because war is not one drama. War is a drama franchise. M*A*S*H somehow squeezed eleven television seasons out of a three-year Korean War. Trump may yet demand syndication rights.

Every explosion spits out another crisis, every crisis requires another emergency fix, and every emergency fix creates another opportunity to decide that ordinary rules are simply too slow for the moment.

Why does Trump need his enormous new ballroom/bunker? War, silly. Never mind that PEOC — the bunker beneath the East Wing — has existed since World War II, or that Dick Cheney and Laura Bush sheltered there on 9/11, or that Obama already upgraded its fortifications. Apparently Armageddon requires gold chandeliers.

Why does America need a 250-foot triumphal arch? War again. According to Trump, arches are excellent places to store drones, sniper teams, and ammunition. (Dear enemies, you can dismantle your intelligence networks. We have helpfully put the weapons in the enormous gold arch.)

Border emergency, energy emergency, trade emergency, drug emergency, war emergency…Sicilians only tolerate this much melodrama when somebody forgot the wine.

Which brings us to November  and the performance that is sure to turn Shakespearean. TIME recently asked Trump whether he would rule out declaring a state of emergency before the election.

“You mean the Insurrection Act?”

Yes.

“I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes,” he replied.

And there it is. After nearly two years of turning ordinary political problems into extraordinary emergencies, Trump has now left open the possibility of doing the same thing to an election.

Political scientists have a word for the maneuver that gets you around the rules by declaring everything an emergency— securitization theory.

No, not the Wall Street nonsense where bankers stuff mortgages into a blender and call the resulting slurry an investment.

In political science, securitization is what happens when a politician takes an ordinary policy problem, declares it an existential threat, and uses the panic to justify extraordinary measures. Then once the public normalizes the threat framing, extraordinary measures that once looked excessive can start to look proportionate.

The Third Reich’s favorite lawyer, Carl Schmitt, took the same approach. Let’s just say there is a reason the American right now passes his bones around like a holy relic.

Let’s meet Carl Schmitt.

So it’s Weimar Germany. By 1923, the Kaiser’s gone, money isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, and Germans are wheelbarrowing cash down the street to buy bread. We have all seen the pictures and made the uncomfortable inflation jokes.

So there’s this little dorky law professor named Carl Schmitt. Catholic guy, very serious, the kind of man who irons his socks. In 1922, he writes this book, Political Theology, and the very first line, the FIRST line, he gets right into it:

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

Damn, that’s cold.

So what does it mean?

The idea itself is simple. Imagine a constitution as a rulebook. The rulebook explains who may do what, under which circumstances, through which procedures. Congress passes something, courts review, agencies follow rules, forms appear, meetings occur, and Karen returns from lunch.

Then the building catches fire.

Suddenly somebody says the normal rules cannot possibly handle this. We are in an extraordinary situation. Somebody must decide what can be suspended, bypassed, or done differently until normal conditions return.

Schmitt looked at that moment and said, essentially, there is your sovereign. The deepest political power belongs to whoever can decide that normality has ended.

And it’s basically a stab against those silly liberals and pleasant parliamentary folks who think the law is in charge. Rules…Constitutions? Pleeeeease.

Schmitt goes, ah no, sweetie. Rules only work when politics are normal. And who decides what is normal? Somebody has to look at a crisis and say, “This is an emergency, the rules are suspended now.” And whoever gets to say THAT, that guy is the real boss. Not the constitution. The guy who can turn the constitution off.

In other words, power is with the ruler, not the rules.

It’s like if a club says there is a dress code. There’s even a sign that says there is a dress code. But the sign doesn’t throw anybody out. The bouncer does. And the bouncer can let in some guy in Crocs and a mullet because he’s the bouncer’s cousin. The bouncer is the sovereign. The sign is just… decoration. So in Schmitt’s universe, Constitutions are just another sign with rules.

Then in 1927, he writes The Concept of the Political, and he says politics isn’t about policy or compromise. Politics is about two boxes: friend or enemy. That’s it. Every political question boils down to who is with us and who is with them.

However, the enemy isn’t the troll you debate on Facebook. It is the group you might actually have to fight — and ultimately kill. And Schmitt says liberals are wimps because they pretend there are no enemies, just people we haven’t compromised with yet. It’s like the entire purpose of liberalism is to make people sing along in this Panglossian campfire and pretend we can be civilized enough to get shit done.

He sums up his contempt with a line he swiped from the French anarchist Proudhon: “Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.” Meaning, anybody saying “we’re all one people” is running a con.

Not a cheery guy, that Schmitt.

But here’s where it gets really grim. Weimar has a constitution and a spiffy Article 48. Which means a President can declare an emergency and rule by decree. And Schmitt gets all lusty pants when anyone mentions Article 48. He argues the president should have vast emergency powers to save the republic from its enemies. In 1932, he literally went to court and argued that emergency powers could kick out Prussia’s Social Democratic government.

And you know who learned a lot from watching a republic get governed by emergency decree?

(Whispers cause I don’t want to dogwhistle the Nazi trolls…)

Hitler.

The numbers are bananas. In 1930, the Reichstag passed 98 laws, and the president issued 5 emergency decrees. By 1932, the Reichstag passed 5 laws, and the president issued 66 decrees. Parliament basically stopped being a parliament. It was a fainting couch.

Then, in February 1933, the Reichstag fire, an emergency decree, and civil liberties go poof. A month later, the Enabling Act drops, and it’s game over for Weimar and eventually the Jews.

Meanwhile, Shmitty boy joins the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933. He is like that guy who shows up to the party right when the keg gets tapped. They call him the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich.

Flash forward to 1934. Hitler murders political rivals in the Night of the Long Knives — no trials, nothing. Schmitt answers with an essay called “The Führer Protects the Law” and declares that Hitler’s murders were “the highest justice.”

Then in 1936, he really rips the pants off of democracy. Schmitt runs a conference on purging Jewish influence from German law and pushes to have Jewish legal scholars identified in library catalogs and their books cleared out of law libraries.

Schmitt eventually gets his villain downfall. Sort of. The SS paper decides Schmitt is an opportunist, too Catholic, not a real Nazi, whatever that means. He gets pushed out of his party jobs, not because he was too evil. Because he wasn’t evil enough in the right fan club.

After the war, Americans lock him up, interrogate him at Nuremberg, and… never charge him. Idiots. He refuses to go through denazification. Never apologizes. Goes home to his little town, Plettenberg, lives to 96, and spends the next forty years having grad students make pilgrimages to his house like he’s a sexy old wizard.

To be clear, Schmitt is a full-blown antisemite, not just a careerist. And anyone who says differently is just wallpapering over history.

Okay, so why do Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and those guys love him?

Peter Thiel is kinda banal as far as scary antichrists go. In 2007, he publishes “The Straussian Moment,” — an essay shaped by 9/11 with an entire section called “Carl Schmitt: The Persistence of the Political.” Mr. Diabolical goes straight to Schmitt’s friend-enemy framework. Thiel does not swallow Schmitt whole. Instead, he warns that answering an enemy with Schmittian ferocity can turn you into the enemy. But politics still forces people to choose friends and enemies—very linear thinking for a supposed tech innovator.

Then in 2009, in Cato Unbound, Thiel drops his famous line: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Like, okay Peter, tell us how you really feel at Thanksgiving.

For Thiel, Schmitt is catnip because the whole Silicon Valley founder brain is already Schmittian. The founder is the sovereign. Boards, rules, and regulators are the boring liberal parliament. The genius decides.

Thiel also bankrolled Vance’s 2022 Senate run to the tune of $15 million, so… his ideas have a delivery system.

Now, Vance has not gone around adding Schmitt to campaign ads. That’s just rude. Besides, he doesn’t have to. He’s swimming in the water that Thiel and Curtis Yarvin poured. And listen to what Vance actually said on a 2021 podcast: fire every mid-level bureaucrat, replace them with our people, and when the courts stop you, do what Andrew Jackson did: “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

In other words, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The court says no, and the executive decides the court’s “no” doesn’t count. The rule only matters if the guy with the power agrees to obey it.

You can’t get more authoritarian than that.

Oh, but they sure did try. In February 2025, Vance posts that judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power. And who decides what’s legitimate? The executive. It’s a snake eating its own tail and calling it lunch.

Shortly after, Trump stops watching Fox News for two seconds and comes up with this zinger: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Granddaddy thinks he is quoting Napoleon or something, but that’s just Schmitt wearing a red hat. Add in the stack of emergency declarations, and you’ve got a government that treats “emergency” less as a fire alarm and more as a master key.

Now, Schmitt wasn’t stupid. Constitutions really do have trapdoors. Yes, somebody decides when a crisis activates them. And liberals really can get mushy pretending everybody is reasonable. Chuck Schumer is a case study in pointless hall monitors.

But Schmitt’s trick is taking a true observation, “rules can’t enforce themselves,” and turning it into a sales pitch: “so let the strong man ignore them.”

It’s like your drunk uncle being right that the referee’s blind and concluding that you should be allowed to punch the goalie.

The authoritarian trick is to convince people the exception is temporary. But once the fire is out, and the enemy is defeated, their version of normal is all that remains.

Normal has been getting harder to find lately.

This year, V-Dem stripped the United States of its long-held status as a liberal democracy. America remains an electoral democracy, but the protections surrounding those elections — checks on executive power, rule of law, civil liberties, a free press — have weakened sharply.

In other words, we still have the ballot box. It is carrying more of the democracy now.

Which makes Trump’s refusal to rule out emergency powers around the midterms considerably less theoretical.

Everyone is watching November 3, but the trouble begins the day after.

Next, we’ll talk about the game plan for November 4. Subscribe to get my essays delivered to your inbox.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: If you enjoy watching me drag dead philosophers out of the grave to explain why the White House is misusing vocabulary, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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While the public debates whether artificial intelligence will cure cancer, take our jobs, usher in a swift existential end, or turn out to be the most expensive nothing burger in human history, governments are busy working on safeguards to leash the beast.

So when Jake Tapper recently asked Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz whether the United States and China had agreed on a solution regarding artificial intelligence, it sounded, for one brief shining moment, like the adults had entered the chat.

That moment was fleeting.

"We're going with ‘super intelligence’ now, Jake,” Waltz corrected him.

And then Jake made that face. We all know that face.

Okay, let’s explain Tapper’s resting bullshit face. Recently, Trump decided artificial intelligence has a branding problem. The word “artificial,” he complained, makes it sound fake.

Super true. “Artificial” means made by humans rather than occurring naturally, which describes AI, Cheetos, and the president’s tan, in roughly that order of plausibility.

So he swapped it for SUPER, which he praised as “the best word of all.”

Most sane Americans ignored the blathering, but then Trump made the rebrand official with yet another executive order. This one requires all federal agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official communications, websites, reports, and policy documents. The order goes so far as to say that the executive branch “will not acknowledge” the old terminology.

In other words, the term AI is now banned from the White House.

We have apparently entered the stage of American governance where the president can declare a word insufficiently flattering and thousands of federal employees must update the stationery. (And who pays for all that new stationery? You do. And no, you don’t get a say in any of it. Welcome to taxation without representation.)

It’s only a matter of time before the artificial sweetener in Trump’s Diet Coke becomes Super Sugar. Artificial limbs become Super Legs. And artificial insemination becomes Super Insemination.

Incidentally, Super Insemination is also “SI.” Please remain calm. There is enough Super Insemination for everybody.

Yes, we are all tired of this nonsense, even the most grim of us. Trump has spent a decade gilding this turd with “GREAT.” America is Great. Healthcare is Great. The 250th Anniversary (which Mother Nature definitely smote) is also Great. Great economy. Great deal. Greatest whatever anyone has ever seen in the history of seeing great things.

We survived the Bigly Era. BEAUTIFUL worked so hard it should have unionized. Great has retired. And we now have SUPER.

Cool. There is only one super small problem.

Dictionary.com didn’t get the memo. It still defines superintelligence as intelligence that exceeds human intelligence. The philosopher Nick Bostrom popularized the term in his 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, where he defined it as any intellect that “greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” OpenAI summed it up best in a 2023 memo that superintelligence could lead to “the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.”

That’s super extinction for the rest of us.

Maybe Trump can whip out his Sharpie and browbeat the linguists into submission. Until then, superintelligence remains the hypothetical endpoint when humans start to look less like the master and more like a colony of ants inconveniently occupying their construction site.

This leaves us with a delicate conundrum. The Trump regime wants to brand AI as less frightening by renaming it after what people most fear it may become.

That would be like Trojan renaming its condoms “Surprise Baby.” Or Nike changing their slogan from “Just do it” to “Just get fat and die alone on your couch.”

This little exercise in authoritarianism also creates a spectacular critical thinking test. You either hear SUPER INTELLIGENCE and think…that sounds better. I prefer to super-size a word’s gluttonous payload without checking what it actually means. Can I get one tattooed on my red hat?

Or…

You know what superintelligence means, and your response is closer to:

HOLY FUCK! I thought we were not there yet. Can I finish Breaking Bad in my bunker?

Now, the latest MAGA purity test is spreading through the corridors of stupidity. The State Department instructed diplomats to adopt “Super Intelligence,” and senior officials repeated the new language at White House events. Even Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton used the term “SI” instead of AI. (Which no longer stands for suicidal ideation unless you want it to.)

When I heard this nonsense, it immediately reminded me of a shibboleth. Which is grim enough to deserve a short explanation for those not forced to endure years of Bible studies.

Shibboleth comes from the Book of Judges — one of the most unhinged books in the Bible. It’s like if Game of Thrones had no budget for dragons.

So there’s this guy Jephthah. He’s the leader of the Gileadites. And he just won a war against the Ammonites.

Then the Ephraimites show up, and they are SUPER mad. They want to know why they didn’t get an invite to the war. Like it’s a party. They threaten to burn his house down…with Jephthah in it. Over a war invite. Biblical bros be acting emotional.

So Jephthah responds with the conflict-resolution skills the Book of Judges is famous for, and goes to war with the Ephraimites also.

Jephthah and the Gileadites win. The surviving Ephraimites flee toward the Jordan River, hoping to cross home, but Jephthah’s men seize the river crossings. Now they have a logistics problem. How do you tell an Ephraimite from everybody else? Same clothes. Same beards. Same belligerent war stare. No enemy lanyards.

So the Gileadites come up with a test. Every man attempting to cross the river must say “shibboleth.”

Say it with me…Shhhhibboleth. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, right?

The Ephraimites struggle. They pronounce the word wrong because their dialect turns it into something closer to “sibboleth.” Wrong! According to Judges, forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed because of an accent.

And here is the wonderfully grim part. Shibboleth itself meant something like an ear of grain or a flowing stream. Obviously, nobody standing at the Jordan gave a shit about agricultural vocabulary or river currents. The word’s purpose was to sort people into in-group and out-group. Friend or enemy. Gileadite or Ephraimite. Cross the river or die beside it.

That is how shibboleth eventually came to mean a word, phrase, pronunciation, or custom that identifies membership in a group. A shibboleth does not need to describe reality accurately. Accuracy is beside the point. Its job is to signal that you know the group’s language and are willing to speak it.

Now, history has plenty of examples of linguistic purity tests, but the Italians…we know this story personally.

In 1938, the Fascist Party campaigned against the polite pronoun Lei, calling it foreign and effeminate. Mussolini basically looked at a three-letter word and felt his masculinity threatened. Benito, sweetheart, that’s not the pronoun’s fault.

Anyway, party secretary Achille Starace abolished Lei among party members, and mandated tu among equals and voi between superiors and subordinates. The rule soon spread to public offices. Using the approved pronouns became a public sign of loyalty.

The regime also purged foreign words from Italian. The bar became a mescita, cognac became arzente, and the sandwich became the tramezzino.

Listen, I’m Sicilian. My people have survived the Greeks, the Arabs, the Normans, the Spanish, and my aunts. You cannot tell a Sicilian what to call a sandwich. We will nod politely, say “sì, sì,” and go right on calling it whatever we called it before you were born.

But if you used the wrong pronoun in a Fascist office…yikes. You could be punished for insubordination. It’s the river crossing all over again, just with better tailoring and waaaaay better food.

Now, I am not saying renaming AI to Superintelligence is fascism. I’m merely noticing that Mussolini also had strong opinions about vocabulary. So we might want to watch where this heads.

Which brings us back to Super Intelligence.

At first, Trump’s rebranding was merely absurd. Then his flying monkeys began repeating it. Then they began correcting other people for saying AI.

Say AI, and you are using the term employed by scientists, engineers, dictionaries, and almost everyone else on Earth. Say SI, and you demonstrate that you are on team Trump. Congratulations, sir. Everyone may think you are a moron, but at least you can cross the river.

Fortunately, one part of this circus has become particularly entertaining.

For years, the villionaires running the largest technology companies on Earth have presented themselves as the geniuses building humanity’s future. They have raised hundreds of billions of dollars, built enormous data centers, hired the planet’s best computer scientists, and regularly told governments the technology is moving so quickly that lawmakers struggle to understand it. These are the Godlike bros who think they hold the keys to immortality.

These are not people who have never encountered the word superintelligence. They know exactly what it means.

Then they arrive at the White House for the latest frat-boy hazing, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave us perhaps the most delicious scene in the entire saga. During a panel after the White House event, Huang was already using SI. Then he slipped.

He called it AI.

Awkward silence…

Huang laughed sheepishly and corrected himself, “I am going to get good at this.”

Why yes, you are, Mr. Huang. Sticking your nose that far up a dictator’s bunghole takes practice. Keep at it.

Forgive me for enjoying the humiliation. It is wildly entertaining to watch the tech titans — the bros who fancied themselves masters of the universe —  bow to the Orange Sun King. It turns out that you can own half the computational infrastructure on Earth and still find yourself practicing the ruler’s preferred vocabulary like an intern trying to remember whether the CEO likes oat milk.

Oh, and one detail I can’t leave out. The accord they signed described Trump as “President of the Unites States.” The most powerful computing minds on Earth put their names beneath the misspelling of their country. Nobody caught it. Superintelligence, everybody.

But if you think I am being glib, let’s allow the philosophers to weigh in on this very serious renaming business.

Twenty-four centuries ago, Plato staged almost this exact argument in Cratylus. As usual, he put Socrates in the middle of it. Big mistake. Never bring that guy into an argument you want to win.

So the story goes that a man named Hermogenes believes names are simply whatever we agree to call things. You can rename your slave, he says, and the new name is just as correct as the old one.

Socrates pushes back. He says, if I decide to call a man a horse, is he now a horse? And Hermogenes, God help him, essentially says yes — at least privately, for you.

Socrates then spends much of the dialogue shredding his argument (and later, Cratylus’s opposite one). He says names are tools we use to sort and describe the world, and tools can be badly made. And if the original name-givers misunderstood reality, studying their vocabulary only teaches you their mistake.

Eventually Socrates lands on the wonderfully stubborn conclusion that if you want to understand a thing, you have to investigate the thing itself, not merely its name.

So let’s do that.

Trump changed artificial to super. Did the technology’s capabilities change? No. Did its hallucinations change? No. Did its risks change? No. Did our ability to control future systems change? Definitely not. The new name tells us nothing new about the technology renamed.

Socrates warned us not to confuse a name with reality, but Francis Bacon supplied the next warning almost two thousand years later. His Idols of the Marketplace describes errors created through language itself. Bacon warned that we like to imagine reason governs words, when words also turn around and act upon reason.

Trump’s political vocabulary often works beautifully at this level. Great. Tremendous. Bigly. Super. These words tell you little about the object. They tell you how you are supposed to feel about it.

America has tried adjective-based risk management before. The Atomic Energy Commission once promoted “peaceful nuclear explosions.” The radiation remained stubbornly unaware of the branding.

I am harping on this point because names do not change physical reality, but they can change the reality inside our heads.

Research will back me up. In 1974, psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed people a film of a car crash, then asked how fast the cars were going when they “hit” each other, or when they “smashed” into each other. Same film, different verbs. The “smashed” group estimated about 41 miles per hour; the “hit” group, about 34. In a follow-up experiment, the “smashed” group was more than twice as likely to remember seeing broken glass. There was no broken glass. One verb installed a memory.

In 1988, Irwin Levin and Gary Gaeth tried the most emotional experiment of all — food. They served people identical ground beef with two labels: 75% lean and 25% fat. When it was labeled “75% lean,” people rated it as tasting better and being less greasy than when it was labeled “25% fat.” Same cow.

Putting feeling before fact is a pretty ordinary human condition. We have all been duped by the 75% lean optimistic mindset. The danger begins when we no longer recognize words' meaning without a shiny slogan attached.

Socrates asked whether names reveal the nature of things. Bacon warned that words can eventually deform the way we understand our world. The Book of Judges supplied the uglier possibility that sometimes a word stops describing reality altogether and becomes a test of belonging.

However, there is a difference. The Ephraimites couldn’t say the word Shibboleth. The tech bros? These guys can say “artificial intelligence.” They know the right word. They’re choosing to say the wrong one.

So the modern version is worse, in a way. The old shibboleth caught people who couldn’t comply. The new one rewards people who will give up the meaning to comply. And we have no idea how far they will divorce themselves from reality.

The White House’s own lawyers seem to recognize the semantic collision. Trump’s executive order contains a remarkable little escape hatch. It says that for purposes of federal policy, “Super Intelligence” means whatever existing law already defines as artificial intelligence.

That may be what Super Intelligence is becoming. The technology, the dictionary, and the danger have not changed.

Only the password has.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Despite their most creative efforts, Republicans’ recent voter fraud narratives have got some gaping plot holes.

Let’s start with the villains in this voting heist.

Maybe she is an immigrant woman who walks across a desert with a toddler strapped to her back, dodges cartels, coyotes, and dehydration. Then she lands here, scrubs your toilets, raises three kids who pledge allegiance to our flag every morning, and builds a life out of nothing but spite and sheer will.

Or maybe he’s an H-1B engineer on a temporary visa, wiring every spare dollar home to a family that needs that money to eat.

Or perhaps she’s a college student who landed an educational opportunity in the U.S., and beat out the competition to study and improve her life. Maybe she will even go on to discover a drug that saves your life.

Different routes, same math. Each one has built something out of nothing but grit and a long list of sacrifices.

Now, the MAGAmuffins want you to believe that any one of those non-citizens would look at all of it and think…you know what I would risk all of this for? Getting to step into a crowded middle school gym, smelling of dirty socks, to vote for county comptroller.

Because that’s the gamble. If a non-citizen is caught, they don’t get a strongly worded letter.

If they are lucky, they get a steep fine and imprisonment. If they are unlucky, they get sent to a concentration camp.

A concentration camp with a tiny cell where guards treat their bodies as a sexual perk of the job. They get a floor so filthy that a scraped knee becomes sepsis, becomes a body bag. They get their children taken and caged in a different building, state, or paperwork black hole. They get found hanging from a noose, and the government issues a two-sentence press release and calls it a day.

Or, if they’re really unlucky, they get sent to Africa, a continent they’ve never set foot in. So far, over 25,000 migrants have been sent to countries that were not their own. Apparently, this regime has figured out that the only thing crueler than sending you home is sending you somewhere worse.

And still, we’re told, non-citizens will take the Midnight Train to the polling booth anyway. For what? A vote button? The thrill of personally deciding a House race by a margin of one?

Pleeeeease. It’s the sorriest heist movie ever made. Ocean’s Eleven, except the vault holds an “I Voted” sticker and the getaway car drives straight into a detention center.

So name the price. What’s the going rate for betting your children, your body, and your life on one ballot? Ten grand? Fifty? And how many people that deranged can the Democrats possibly bankroll before the checks bounce? Because the conspiracy doesn’t just need a few crazy immigrants. It needs thousands, all equally insane, all tight-lipped, and all desperately needing money.

Sorry, Stephen Miller, but this plot curve sucks. Even Tyler Perry would have sent it back for rewrites.

Fortunately, the Department of Homeland Security recently tried to improve their storyline.

Looking for Election Fraud in all the Wrong Places

Okay, it’s July, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has gotten his hands on a shiny new database. So he runs Nevada’s voter rolls through it, and the machine goes ding…winner, winner, chicken dinner. We got bigly voter fraud.

Markwayne announces that he found 15,903 noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada. 15,903. Very specific. Very sciencey. The kind of number you say when you want people to think you counted.

And Nevada’s like, holy shit… Okay. Sorry, we had no idea. Send us the names.

And DHS just…doesn’t.

So now it’s August, and everybody gets on a Zoom call, and Nevada’s election people are sitting there, very politely, asking about their fifteen thousand illegal voters. And someone from Nevada finally asks the question — has that 15,000 number been vetted?

And DHS, and I swear this is real, says the number is a “ceiling.” A ceiling. As in, it could be 15,903. It could also be way, way less. It’s like getting caught padding your expense report and explaining that $15,903 was merely the ceiling on what lunch might have cost.

So Nevada says, ah okay, how much less?

And DHS says, well, we manually checked some of them, and we confirmed 185.

Now, 185 isn’t nothing, right? Nevada wants those names. So DHS sends over 185 voter ID numbers, and Nevada does the one thing nobody in Washington thought to do.

They check.

And every single one of them is a citizen. All 185. Not most. All.

So, on September 23, Nevada’s attorney general’s office writes back to DHS, basically saying, our records show these people are citizens, and you’ve given us “nothing of substance” to suggest otherwise. In government-speak, that's like flipping over a table at Thanksgiving.

Now, let’s follow their math: First, there were 15,903 alleged noncitizens on the rolls, then 185, then zero. It’s the most dramatic shrinkage since George Costanza got out of the pool.

And what does DHS do? Apologize? Recalibrate? Nooooooo. They keep digging that grave and send Nevada 6,218 more records. Records they haven’t even checked yet.

To be clear, no one has ever said that election fraud doesn’t exist. Of course it exists. Americans have committed every crime imaginable and several we invented while drunk in Florida. (Not a personal reference. maybe.)

Instead, let’s put on the tattered remains of our critical thinking caps and ask the relevant question — does voting fraud exist on a level remotely close to the scale Republicans claim?

That evidence has been remarkably stubborn. After the 2016 election, the Brennan Center asked the people who would actually know — the local officials who ran the election. Across 42 jurisdictions, officials who oversaw 23.5 million votes referred only 30 suspected cases of noncitizen voting, or 0.0001 percent.

Fine, you say, the Brennan Center is a bunch of lefty lawyers. So let’s check with the Heritage Foundation, the people who would sell their own mothers to find a noncitizen voter. Their fraud database counts just 23 instances of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2022. Twenty years of searching like a Florida man with a metal detector, and they found 23. Go figure.

Georgia checked too. Its 2024 citizenship audit found just 20 noncitizens on the rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. A broader review this year found about 430 potential noncitizen voters, total, across three decades of elections. Three decades. That’s roughly 14 a year in a state that casts millions of ballots.

By September, Texas had referred 117 cases for investigation, and prosecutors have charged seven people. Seven. In a state of 18 million voters. And referred isn’t convicted. It’s a list of cases the attorney general has been asked to investigate.

Again, this is not an argument for complacency. Election officials obsess over security precisely because the system is constantly being tested by bad actors looking for weaknesses.

And yet, the machinery of American voting is remarkably hard to corrupt. Unfortunately, the information environment surrounding it is much easier to attack.

The Ballot Is Guarded. The Voter Isn’t.

In 1997, Russian ultranationalist thinker Aleksandr Dugin advised that Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity,” encouraging “ethnic, social and racial conflicts.” Once you understand that Russia has been working toward that goal for decades, every other motive falls into place.

For example, in 2016, its operation went far beyond poking around voter databases. We already know Russian intelligence hacked political organizations and then used social media to intensify existing American divisions.

Then Russia kept going. In October 2024, U.S. intelligence agencies found Russian actors manufactured a fake video purporting to show ballots being ripped up in Pennsylvania. Days later, they attributed another fabricated video to Russian influence actors — this one supposedly showing Haitians voting illegally in Georgia.

On November 4 — the day before the election — ODNI, FBI, and CISA warned that Russia was manufacturing fake videos and articles intended to undermine confidence in American elections and expected those efforts to intensify.

Read that again, because it is the hinge of this entire story.

Russia was manufacturing fake evidence of election fraud.

You don’t have to hack a voting machine if you can hack the voter. You don’t even have to change anyone’s vote. Convince Americans that their neighbors are cheating. Manufacture a video showing ballots being destroyed. Invent a story about Haitians secretly voting (add in some eating the cats and dogs for dramatic flair). Flood social media with fake Americans saying things designed to make real Americans hate each other. And convince half the country that when their candidate loses, the only possible explanation is fraud.

The foreign-election threat and the domestic election-fraud panic are not separate universes. One can feed the other. Russia can make our elections insecure merely by making Americans believe they are.

Of course, after learning of Russian election interference, America strengthened every institution responsible for identifying foreign influence and guarded them like the crown jewels.

Hahahahahaha. Yeah, not quite.

Here’s what we did instead.

So, it’s December 2024, the State Department has an office for swatting down Russian and Chinese propaganda — the Global Engagement Center. It is up for renewal. Republicans had spent years accusing it and the groups it funded of drifting into policing American speech, specifically conservative media. So Congress does the passive-aggressive thing and just doesn’t renew it. On December 23, 2024, the GEC expires. Not murdered. Ghosted.

Then it’s February 5, 2025, and it’s Pam Bondi’s first day as attorney general. Most people spend their first day figuring out where the bathrooms are. Bondi disbands the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the unit built after Russia’s 2016 meddling to combat Russian and Chinese interference.

The very next day, CISA, the agency that helps states protect their elections, starts sending its election people home. Seventeen employees go on administrative leave, including 10 regional election security specialists hired to beef up protection for the 2024 election.

Flash forward to April 16, 2025. Marco Rubio shuts down R/FIMI — GEC’s successor. R/FIMI monitors foreign influence operations, such as propaganda, covert manipulation, disinformation networks, state-backed media operations, and other attempts by foreign governments or their proxies to distort information environments in the U.S.

And to throw just enough salt in this wound, Rubio announces the shutdown in an op-ed in The Federalist, the same outlet that incidentally had sued the GEC. That’s the widow delivering the eulogy wearing the murder weapon as a brooch.

After that, Republicans start hacking away at the election safeguards for sport. CISA ends federal funding for the EI-ISAC, which ran a 24-hour security center monitoring cyberattacks on election offices. Then Tulsi Gabbard cuts ODNI’s workforce by more than 40% and guts the Foreign Malign Influence Center.

So let’s recap one more time in case you fell into any of these election integrity plot holes.

This regime spent a summer chasing 185 Nevada voters who turned out to be citizens. Meanwhile, it disbanded the FBI task force that hunts foreign interference, sent home the people who guard our election offices, and cut the federal funding for the $10 million alarm system that tells a county clerk in Ohio the Russians are up to no good.

Odd, no? If Republicans are so worried about election integrity, why do they keep firing everyone whose job is to monitor election integrity?

You know the answer. America built a surprisingly sturdy system for protecting the ballot. We should probably stop dismantling the system designed to protect it.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: You can get the news anywhere. I’m interested in the machinery underneath it: the history, the philosophy, the scams we’ve tried before, and occasionally the Roman general who already screwed this up 2,000 years ago. If that work is worth $5 a month to you, you can support it here.

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Republicans have a very sexy solution to lower diesel prices.

Right now, diesel costs a record $6.53 a gallon. Farmers and truckers are paying it and hurting. Meanwhile, our refineries have been shooting their load overseas, filling tanker after tanker for Mexico and Europe.

So the GOP wants to ban diesel exports.

In other words, keep it in your pants, boys. No more exports means American diesel stays in America, where it can swell our domestic supply and bring sweet, sweet horniness to the heartland.

It sounds like something your uncle says at Thanksgiving, and for once your uncle sounds right. We make it. We need it. Why are we slutting it up and giving it away to foreigners?

Unfortunately, a refinery is not a vending machine where you press D for diesel. It’s more like a very complicated pot. You pour in crude, cook it, and out comes a whole slate of products: gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and more. Refiners can fiddle with the proportions, but they can’t just clench their sphincters and refuse to produce diesel while everything else keeps flowing.

I will have to keep recycling this pretty graphic…

America’s pot makes more diesel than America uses. So we sell the extra jizz, and it’s a lot of extra — about a fifth of all the diesel shipped by sea on the entire planet.

Now look what happens if you prevent the um…release — aka a ban on diesel exports.

At first, it might feel great. Diesel piles up along the Gulf Coast, domestic prices could dip, and somebody in Iowa gets to feel hopeful. That’s hot. The horny soundtrack plays.

Let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on…

We got this king-size to ourselves/Don’t have to share with no one else.

Anyway, you get the idea. The pot keeps cooking. Eventually the tanks fill. Now the refinery has a storage problem. With nowhere to put the diesel, it has to slow the whole operation down. Less diesel, yes. But also less gasoline and less jet fuel. S&P Global estimates refiners could ultimately have to cut crude runs by nearly 12%.

That’s the build-up. Now here is the un-sexy part. Guess where it lands and ruins the sheets.

Most of America’s refinery muscle sits along the Gulf Coast. New England has no refineries at all. So it depends on fuel arriving by pipeline, tanker, and barge, including imports from Canada and other foreign suppliers.

California refines plenty of its own fuel, but its market is basically off in the corner doing its own thing, with very little pipeline capacity connecting it to the enormous Gulf Coast refining system. When California comes up short, replacement barrels often have to make the long trip across the Pacific.

In other words, America may share a flag, but its fuel system is not one giant communal lube bottle.

I am sorry/not sorry about that last sentence.

Let’s call it what it is. A diesel export ban is blue balls for the national fuel supply. All that pressure, no release, until…boom. And the blue states feel it first.

But here’s the part I can’t get over. This is the party of the free market. These are the same Conservatives who treat government telling a business who it can sell to as a gateway drug to…communism. Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century economist conservatives love to quote, had a name for politicians who trade a small good now for a great evil later.

He called them bad economists.

Bastiat was too polite. I prefer Republicans’ plan to blue balls the blue states.

Now, at first I wondered where Trump got such a cockamamie idea. Then I remembered he isn’t the first strongman to try it. His pen pal in Moscow got there first.

Okay. So, Russia, September 2023. Gas and diesel prices inside Russia are at record highs. Russians are mad, and Vladimir Putin does not like it when Russians are mad at anyone but Ukraine.

Now, Russia was not some bit player in diesel. At the time, it was the world’s biggest seaborne diesel exporter, just ahead of us.

So Putin says, cool. Nobody sells diesel abroad. It all stays home. Keep it in your pants, comrades. We will be the incels of fuel.

Of course, the experts took one look at this scheme and bet it would last a week, maybe two. Why? Russia doesn’t have enough tanks to hold it all. And you know what happens when that sweet, sweet black goo gets backed up.

And they were right. The pot kept cooking. The tanks filled. Within two weeks, Russia’s oil companies were lining up to beg Putin to let it go. They were running out of room for winter diesel, and if they couldn’t ship, they’d have to shut down production.

Two weeks. That’s how long it lasted before Russia let most of its diesel flow again.

Vladimir Putin. Shirtless. On a horse. Couldn’t hold it in for two weeks. Go figure.

(Btw, Russia kept a few limits until November and then declared victory. Of course it did.)

But the U.S. is not Russia. For one, Putin can boss his oil companies around. When he wants his oil companies to keep it in, they keep it in. When he eased the ban, he ordered them to sell at least half their diesel at home, and they did.

Trump has no such chastity belt. He would have to call the CEO of Valero and ask him, pretty please, to turn off his hose. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says it would rather take a “voluntary” approach with the industry. Voluntary. As in, asking nicely…you know, consent.

Turns out nobody likes being edged by the Department of Energy.

Meanwhile, Valero’s quarterly earnings per share have been getting frisky since last year. Q2 2026 EPS was $12.62 versus $2.28 a year earlier — more than five times higher. Net income jumped from $714 million to $3.7 billion. Good luck asking a man that satisfied to close off his pump.

That’s not the only difference. Russia’s backup was simple. Ours comes with a map, labeled with the quaint word “United” — as in states help each other out. Our refineries sit on the Gulf Coast, while California and New England get much of their fuel by boat.

Ban exports, and you don’t get one backup. You get a glut in Houston and a dry spell on the coasts, at the same time. California diesel has already topped $8 a gallon. On the Gulf Coast, it’s about $6.

Now look at that map again. But this time, look at it as an election map.

First, check the timing. We have an election in six weeks. Some relief in red states could make our energy whore look a tad hotter.

Politically, the relief is being sold in Iowa, where Ashley Hinson is running for Senate in a race now rated a toss-up. The same pitch has suddenly become a lot more interesting in farm country like Kansas, where a Senate race that was supposed to be safely Republican has moved all the way to lean Republican. And it lands in Michigan, where Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers is calling for the very same embargo.

There’s just one inconvenient problem. The diesel doesn’t know which congressional district needs saving, so, like lust…it gets unpredictable. Most of the surplus would pile up around the Gulf Coast refineries that make it, because pipelines can’t magically teleport 1.5 million extra barrels a day to Iowa — or New England. Meanwhile, removing America’s roughly one-fifth share of seaborne diesel from the world market would send international prices higher, which is particularly nasty for coastal markets that depend on ships.

In other words, that blue ball ache lands mostly on blue states where Republicans are feeling less magnanimous about the “United” part.

Bottom line: what Republicans are proposing is an economic booty call. It promises instant relief, shows up hot right before November, and leaves before anyone has figured out the logistics. The Gulf Coast gets swollen with diesel. The global market gets desperate. Eventually, the refineries have to pull out.

And after all that buildup, nobody gets the happy ending they were promised.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim warning: this is a loooooong read. I probably should have broken it into two parts to save your retinas, but then you’d miss the point. Because to follow the money, we need to follow it all the way back to the last great American oil scandal.

So pour coffee. Adjust the font size. We’re going to a party like it’s 1922…

As always, if you can, please become a paid subscriber and help fund the sort of deranged historical research that results in 5,000 words about oil leases, bootleg whiskey, and a presidential penis named Jerry.

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Yesterday, I saw a big, burly farmer weep on TV because he might lose his family farm due to diesel prices. You may not own a tractor, but you do eat the crops tractors grow, which means his fuel bill will eventually hit your grocery bill.

Most of us see $6+ diesel and think…really expensive gas. But right now diesel is getting hit twice. Crude oil costs more, while the world is also short of diesel and the refinery capacity needed to make more.

That second problem is the one most of us have been missing.

Before Trump started his illegal war in Iran, most Americans enjoyed having a cartoon understanding of oil. Drill hole. Black stuff shoots into the air. Somebody gets rich. Somehow, three frames later, it’s gasoline. But an entire industry sits between those two events.

Now, bear with me. I promise to make this explanation of crude oil a little less painful than listening to another “drill, baby drill” speech from Trump.

Crude oil is basically nature’s soup of ancient organic corpses cooked under heat and pressure for millions of years until they become a liquid stew of hydrocarbons with bonus impurities like sulfur and nitrogen. The resulting sludge collects in reservoir rock.

We drill down, pump the stuff out, and congratulate ourselves on finding civilization’s favorite black goo. Sometimes we even fight wars over it. Humans are funny like that.

Unfortunately, crude in this form is mostly useless. You cannot pump it out of West Texas and pour it directly into your Ford F-150 or an F-35. Before it becomes gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel, it has to pass through the enormous industrial kitchen we call a refinery. During this process, furnaces heat it, distillation towers separate it, crackers break the heavier molecules apart, and treatment units strip out sulfur and other impurities.

In other words, crude oil is not gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel. It is the raw ingredient we use to make all of those things. Nature did the first many million years of cooking. The refinery finishes the recipe.

Unfortunately, American refineries are already maxed out at roughly 97 to 98 percent of capacity, which means there isn’t much extra room to make up the difference.

Which is why everyone in Washington is now very interested in squeezing more production out of refineries.

So Trump — never shy about offering a solution to the problem he created — has a plan. He wants to use the Defense Production Act to expand American refining capacity. Desperate war times call for desperate solutions to the oil desperation you created.

America First Refining, a proposed 168,000-barrel-a-day refinery, has emerged as a possible pilot project.

And wouldn’t you know it?

Donald Trump Jr. owns part of the company building the refinery.

This tale of graft begins in Brownsville, Texas, where an oil refinery project has spent roughly a decade trying very hard to become an oil refinery.

It has missed deadlines, run short of money, changed names, and has been dragged through lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings. By late 2025, officials at the Port of Brownsville reportedly thought the project might be dead. Basically, this refinery had reached the stage of a restaurant where the chairs are stacked on the tables, and somebody has already unplugged the mozzarella cooler.

Then, in June 2025, Don Jr.’s lawyer quietly filed the paperwork for a Wyoming shell called TX Fuels, LLC, registered to Don Jr.’s own Florida mansion. Through it, Trump Jr. became a minority investor.

Now enter the Ambanis. They are one of the richest families in India, and happen to own Reliance Industries — a gigantic energy conglomerate.

So in November 2025, Donald Trump Jr. flies to India and visits Anant Ambani. The usual hijinks follow. They tour the family’s private zoo. They dance together. This is apparently how international energy policy works now. Henry Kissinger had shuttle diplomacy. We have giraffes and Gujarati folk dancing.

Four months later, America First Refining announces it has received at least $100 million from Reliance. And suddenly our dead refinery starts showing signs of life.

Reliance says it made the investment entirely on its commercial merits and had nothing to do with favorable treatment from the Trump family.

Of course.

And Don Jr. says he is merely a passive investor and doesn’t deal with the federal government on the company’s behalf.

Excellent. Nothing to see.

Interestingly, the company itself appears to have been considerably less shy about the family connection. According to ProPublica’s investigation, America First Refining representatives touted their Trump ties while courting foreign investors. One foreign official said company representatives suggested that investing could improve access to the White House. Meanwhile, the refinery’s CEO publicly says the Trump regime’s National Energy Dominance Council has been helping the company meet potential investors overseas.

At this point the normal political-corruption movie would end because the screenwriters would worry audiences might find the plot far-fetched. But we are nowhere near finished.

Because America First Refining also hires Cantor Fitzgerald as its financial adviser. And Trump’s chosen Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, ran Cantor Fitzgerald for more than three decades. Today, his sons run it.

But I am sure that is just a coincidence.

Then Trump goes to war with Iran on February 28, 2026. Oil and fuel prices shoot up. At least 165 Iranian schoolgirls are murdered. And America is suddenly reminded that its refineries are running close to capacity.

To be fair, nobody has proved the existence of some giant criminal conspiracy to start an illegal war to enrich the Trump regime. I am merely trying to draw the family tree without running out of red yarn.

But if all this oil, money, and political influence feels unprecedented…hold that thought. America confronted this collision of oil money, private fortunes, and presidential power a century ago.

It was called Teapot Dome.

Washington, 1922. Somewhere around H Street, a piano is still playing after midnight. The car turns off the avenue and slows outside a townhouse with the shades already drawn.

Warren Harding steps onto the sidewalk. Presidential seal on the door he just closed. Another beautiful woman on his arm, history declined to name. He doesn’t look around. He doesn’t have to.

Warren Harding is handsome. Everybody always says so. He was a notorious ladies’ man, carried on a fifteen-year affair with one married woman, fathered a child with another, and left historians enough love letters that we know far too many bawdy details about “Jerry.” (Jerry was the nickname he gave his penis.)

I dunno. I am not personally feeling the smolder. I guess if you are into the whole silver fox, Roman senator, Luigi eyebrows thing. I will let the ladies fight that one out in the comment section.

Either way, Harding’s genial personality probably helped. Harding liked people, people liked Harding. He had what the kids call the rizz. (Or so Jerry claimed.) And he must have had some charisma because 1920 voters handed him one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.

Now, Harding liked bringing his buddies along for the ride. Men seeking government jobs drifted through the rooms alongside men who already had them.

Attorney General Harry Daugherty is here. Daugherty is Harding’s longtime political manager and friend. Daugherty would soon become engulfed in investigations involving influence peddling and government property, and would refuse to surrender records to Senate investigators. Calvin Coolidge eventually forced him out. He later stood trial twice on charges of defrauding the government. Neither trial produced a conviction.

Harding’s unofficial fixer, Jess Smith, was there too. He technically held no federal office but nevertheless had a desk and room inside the Justice Department, used official stationery, dictated to department secretaries, carried government files, and gave orders people obeyed. Jess Smith died by suicide in 1923 while corruption allegations were swirling around the Justice Department.

The cluster of men who swarmed around Harding became known as the Ohio Gang — old political friends, poker companions, fixers and assorted hangers-on who had followed him to Washington and discovered that federal office came with considerably better party favors.

Not all of them were from Ohio. Not all of them were even particularly competent. But many of them knew the host. And that was enough.

Take Charles Forbes, an old Harding friend whom the president put in charge of the brand-new Veterans Bureau.

Big mistake.

The bureau had been created to care for more than 200,000 sick and disabled World War I veterans. It controlled one of the largest budgets in Washington and millions of dollars for desperately needed hospitals.

Forbes looked at all that money and apparently saw a business opportunity.

Prosecutors proved that contractors seeking Veterans Bureau hospital jobs padded bids with $150,000 for officials, while Forbes helped steer contracts to favored builders even when they weren’t the lowest bidder. Forbes was eventually convicted of conspiring to defraud the United States and went to prison.

But the party wasn’t confined to H Street. President Harding apparently saw no reason the White House should miss out on the bacchanalia.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth — who was no prude — attended Harding’s poker shindigs at the White House and later said, “No rumor could have exceeded the reality.” She remembered the study packed with cronies, tobacco smoke, whiskey, cards, and poker chips — an atmosphere of “waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and spittoons alongside.”

Btw, this was during Prohibition.

To be clear, not everyone was enchanted. Harding once invited Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to one of these evenings. Hoover later remembered finding a poker table waiting after dinner and being deeply unimpressed by gambling inside the White House. He and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes politely declined to play. Harding apparently got the message. Hoover was not invited back.

But somewhere in this cloud of poker smoke, bootleg whiskey, mistresses, rumored orgies, government contracts, and rapidly improving personal finances sat another Harding poker friend.

Albert Bacon Fall.

This is where the party finds the oil.

Albert Bacon Fall belonged in a Western. He had all the trappings — a walrus mustache, broad-brimmed black hat, and a six-shooter he carried into the Senate. He’s also a frontier lawyer, which in Fall’s case means he got the man who shot Pat Garrett acquitted. Before that, he defended a guy accused of making a rival and his eight-year-old son disappear in the desert.

He’s no saint. Everybody in Washington loves him.

Unfortunately, by 1921, the frontier hero aesthetic was getting expensive.

Fall owned a sprawling ranch in southern New Mexico called Three Rivers, set against the dry, scrubby landscape near the Sacramento Mountains. The place had good bones and terrible finances. Fall was cash-poor, his property taxes were roughly a decade in arrears, and the ranch had deteriorated badly enough that the neighbors started calling it rundown.

Then one of his old Senate poker companions, Warren Harding, became president. Warren appointed Fall as Secretary of the Interior because that is what friends do.

This is excellent news for Albert Fall.

It is less excellent news for the public domain.

For years, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists had worried that private companies would simply gobble up America’s petroleum reserves. So Roosevelt ordered federal geologists to identify oil deposits worth protecting. Taft then withdrew millions of acres from private development and established naval petroleum reserves in California. Woodrow Wilson added another in Wyoming. In 1920, Congress gave the Navy power to manage and lease all three.

The reason was not complicated. American battleships were switching from coal to oil. If another war came along, perhaps it would be prudent for the United States Navy to own some oil.

Wild concept.

So the government had locked away huge underground deposits in California and Wyoming as an emergency stockpile. Together, the three reserves were believed to contain roughly 435 million barrels — about as much oil as the entire United States produced in a year.

There were two big California fields, Elk Hills and Buena Vista, and one Wyoming reserve called Teapot Dome.

Teapot Dome was not even the great petroleum monster of the group. Elk Hills would eventually become one of the country’s most productive oil fields and produce its billionth barrel in 1992. Teapot Dome, by contrast, occupied just 9,481 acres and produced about 22 million barrels during its later decades of federal operation.

Teapot Dome simply had better branding. It was named for a nearby sandstone formation that allegedly resembled a teapot.

Yes, that’s a teapot. Apparently, Wyoming whiskey was excellent.

So Fall wanted control of all three reserves, and Harding gave it to him. On May 31, 1921, the president signed an executive order transferring administrative authority from the Navy to Fall’s Interior Department.

Shortly thereafter, Fall undergoes a miraculous financial renaissance. Remember Fall’s ranch with ten years of unpaid taxes and the general Grapes of Wrath ambiance?

Yeah, so by June 2022, Fall pays those taxes. He buys neighboring property. He makes substantial improvements to Three Rivers. The formerly cash-starved rancher suddenly throws money around like he’s discovered oil under the sofa cushions.

He had not. He had discovered oilmen. Two of them, specifically.

The first was Edward L. Doheny — one of the richest petroleum barons in America. Doheny had made his fortune in California and Mexico and now had his eye on Elk Hills, the enormous naval reserve in California.

The second was Harry F. Sinclair, another spectacularly wealthy oilman, whose interests would end up with Teapot Dome in Wyoming. Sinclair owns a private railroad car, an extravagant racing stable, and a horse named Zev that will win the 1923 Kentucky Derby. He is the sort of man for whom arriving anywhere by ordinary train presumably feels like a personal failure.

Of course, Fall did not put the reserves up for competitive bidding. Instead, the government leased the reserves to companies tied to Doheny and Sinclair. Doheny’s Pan American interests received rights connected to Elk Hills; Sinclair organized Mammoth Oil to take over the Teapot Dome lease. Those arrangements would become the heart of the scandal.

And this is where Albert Fall’s sudden enthusiasm for home improvement becomes considerably more interesting.

On November 30, 1921, before the Elk Hills arrangements were complete, Doheny instructed his son, Ned, to travel to Washington carrying $100,000 in cash for Fall.

And because the universe occasionally hands historians a prop department, the money arrived in a small satchel. One hundred thousand dollars. In cash. Carried across Washington by an oil tycoon’s son to the cabinet secretary who just happened to control the government oil field the tycoon wanted.

Of course, Doheny would later insist that the money was merely a personal loan between old friends. Fall even gave him a note for it. But Fall concealed the transaction when investigators later asked how a man drowning in debt suddenly found the money to rescue his ranch.

However, Doheny was only half the story.

Over in Wyoming, Harry Sinclair wanted Teapot Dome. Sinclair was younger, flashier, and stupendously rich. He had built an oil empire in little more than a decade and had the sort of money that made proximity to politicians considerably easier.

In April 1922, Fall granted Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil Company the lease to Teapot Dome. The deal was negotiated quietly enough that Congress initially learned about it through reports rather than a public competitive process.

Then more money began drifting toward Albert Fall.

Investigators would eventually determine that Sinclair had provided Fall with about $269,000 in cash and Liberty Bonds, including payments made shortly after the Teapot Dome lease was signed.

So to recap: The government had oil. Fall controlled access to it. Doheny and Sinclair wanted it. And Fall, previously too broke to pay a decade of property taxes, suddenly had an astonishing amount of money.

There was, technically, still the minor matter of proving where all this money came from.

And that story does not begin with Congress.

It begins with reporters.

On April 14, 1922, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story exposing a secret no-bid deal involving the government’s Teapot Dome oil reserve in Wyoming. The report claimed Albert Fall had quietly leased Teapot Dome to private oil interests.

The next day, Wyoming senator John Kendrick demanded an investigation. At first, Washington found exactly what Washington often finds when it investigates itself—paperwork.

Lots and lots of paperwork.

Fall produced explanations. Harding backed him. The leases were complicated enough to make the average reader consider developing a sudden interest in competitive knitting.

Then reporters out West started talking.

Denver Post reporter, D. F. Stackelbeck, went into New Mexico and did the tedious, dangerous work corruption hates most. He chased tax records, property purchases, and Fall’s meetings with Sinclair. He worked quietly because there were fears that identifying himself could bring physical harm. Unfortunately, his newspaper’s owners declined to publish what he had uncovered while pursuing their own financial arrangement with Sinclair. Still, the money trail did not disappear.

Another journalist following the corruption was Carl Magee, a New Mexico newspaper editor who knew Fall well enough to have bought one of his newspapers. Magee knew about the unpaid taxes and the shabby ranch. He also knew Fall was suddenly buying land, improving Three Rivers, and spending money he hadn’t previously had.

That information eventually reached a Montana senator named Thomas Walsh.

Now, Walsh only had to figure out who gave Fall the money.

Thomas Walsh was not anybody’s idea of a hero.

He was a sixty-four-year-old Democrat from Montana with a drooping mustache, a widower’s wardrobe, and the personality of a very thorough tax audit. Washington did not invite him to poker night. He would not have gone anyway. His wife, Elinor, had died in 1917, and Walsh had poured himself into the one thing he was undeniably good at…reading documents nobody else wanted to read.

This made him the perfect man for the job that nobody wanted.

The Senate handed the Teapot Dome inquiry to the Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, which was run by Republicans who had no interest in embarrassing a Republican president.

Walsh had no such qualms.

Walsh read the boring paperwork. All of it. For roughly a year and a half.

Nobody makes movies about this part. There is no montage music for a man cross-referencing drilling contracts under a desk lamp. But this is what fighting corruption actually looks like most of the time. It is not a car chase. It is a guy with reading glasses noticing that page 400 contradicts page 12.

Meanwhile, President Harding was having a truly shitty year. In the spring of 1923, Jess Smith was dead, Charles Forbes had resigned from the Veterans Bureau in disgrace, and Fall had quietly resigned from Interior to work for none other than Harry Sinclair.

For once, it wasn’t Jerry keeping Harding up at night.

So that summer, Harding left on a cross-country speaking tour. During this time, Harding reportedly told a journalist: ‘I have no trouble with my enemies… But my goddamn friends… they’re the ones who keep me walking the floors nights!’

Those friends would drive him to an early death. On August 2, 1923, Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room, probably of a sudden heart attack. He was only 57 years old.

Then Calvin Coolidge became President, and he wasn’t into playing footsy with poker players.

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Walsh’s public hearings opened in October 1923, and at first they went precisely nowhere. Fall’s defenders called Walsh a partisan hack. Newspapers yawned. The public yawned. Fall’s people insisted the leases were legal, and the money came from a perfectly innocent source.

That source, Fall said, was Edward “Ned” McLean.

Now, it’s time to follow the money into our corrupt press.

McLean owned The Washington Post. He was also a Harding poker buddy, a heroic drinker, and the husband of Evalyn Walsh McLean — the gal who owned the fancy Hope Diamond. McLean sent word to the committee. Yes, he had loaned Fall $100,000. Nothing to see.

Walsh didn’t believe him.

So in January 1924, Walsh got on a train to Palm Beach, where McLean was wintering, and questioned him in person. And under Walsh’s questioning, the story fell apart. McLean admitted he had written Fall some checks, but Fall had given them back uncashed.

McLean hadn’t loaned Fall a dime. Fall was caught in a big fat lie.

But the lie raised a simple question: if not McLean, who?

Days later, Edward Doheny walked into the hearing room and volunteered the answer. The $100,000 was his. A loan to an old friend, he said, the sort of trifling sum a man of his means barely noticed. He called it a mere “bagatelle.”

What? You’ve never handed a buddy $100,000 (nearly $2 million in today’s money) in a doggy bag? Ah, silly commoners. You wouldn’t understand.

But Walsh understood perfectly.

Meanwhile, the Sinclair side cracked, and it cracked in the most wonderfully stupid way possible.

Archie Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s son, worked for Harry Sinclair. Archie had inherited his father’s jaw and also, inconveniently for his employer, his father’s conscience. He testified that Sinclair’s private secretary had told him about a $68,000 payment to the manager of Fall’s ranch.

The secretary was hauled in and gave the committee what may be the single greatest excuse in the history of congressional testimony. Archie had misheard him. He hadn’t said $68,000.

He’d said “six or eight cows.”

To be fair, Sinclair had sent livestock to Three Rivers. A prize horse, hogs, cattle. Fall’s ranch had become a kind of bribery petting zoo. Still, the committee was not persuaded that “sixty-eight thousand” and “six or eight cows” were common auditory confusions.

(Somewhere, Don Jr.’s giraffe is nodding in solidarity.)

On February 2, 1924, Albert Fall, the gunslinging frontier hero, sat before the Senate and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

This is where the story gets dangerous, because corrupt people do not simply accept being caught. They fight back. And in 1924, the people fighting back controlled the Justice Department.

Attorney General Harry Daugherty was still in office, and Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Walsh’s fellow Montanan, had launched an investigation into Daugherty himself. Daugherty’s Justice Department responded the way cornered men with badges often do…

They went looking for dirt on the investigators.

Bureau agents dug into the Montana senators’ backgrounds. Then a federal grand jury back in Montana indicted Wheeler on influence-peddling charges. Of course, the charges were garbage. Wheeler was acquitted. But the message was clear: investigate us, and we’ll investigate you.

This should sound vaguely familiar.

However, Editor Carl Magee paid a steeper price. Now, if you remember, Magee was the guy who noticed Fall’s economic windfall. For that, he was rewarded with his own economic downfall. Back in New Mexico, Magee lost control of his newspaper in a financial squeeze that he blamed on Fall’s friends.

So what does Magee do? Well, he doesn’t cry into his typewriter.

He starts another paper. The guy just won’t quit. He kept on writing about corrupt judges and corrupt politicians, and the judges hauled him into court for criminal libel and contempt. He was convicted. The governor pardoned him.

Then, in 1925, one of the judges Magee had written about, David Leahy, spotted him in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and knocked him to the floor. Magee drew a pistol and fired. He wounded Leahy. One of the shots killed a bystander. Magee was tried for manslaughter and acquitted.

Now, I am not going to pretend this is a tidy hero story. Magee was a man pushed so far that he ended up with a gun in his hand in a hotel lobby and an innocent man dead on the floor. This is what corruption costs even when it loses. It costs the people who fight it. Let’s just say it’s a good thing Bernie Sanders isn’t walking into the Senate packing heat. I have seen how he holds his mittens.

(Sidebar that absolutely doesn’t belong in this story, but humor me: In 1935, Carl Magee patented the first practical parking meter. Yes, the man who helped bring down Teapot Dome spent his later years making sure you pay for your spot. Every time you feed quarters into one of those things, you are paying tribute to one of the most stubborn men in American journalism. Honor him accordingly.)

Anyway, Magee deserves his props because it was his testimony on November 30, 1923, to Walsh’s committee that brought down the hammer. That testimony handed Walsh his question: where did the money come from? That question sent Walsh to Palm Beach. It exposed Ned McLean’s imaginary loan. And it walked Doheny and his doggy bag into the hearing room.

Once the money had names attached, Coolidge couldn’t look away. He wanted this mess off his desk before the 1924 election, so he appointed two special prosecutors, one from each party: Atlee Pomerene, a Democrat, and Owen Roberts, a Republican Philadelphia lawyer who would later sit on the Supreme Court. Navy Secretary Edwin Denby, who had signed off on the transfer of the reserves, resigned. Then Coolidge forced Daugherty out.

Then came the courts, and I regret to report…the courts did not always deliver.

The juries let the rich men walk. Doheny was acquitted of giving the bribe.

Sinclair was acquitted of conspiracy, but not before hiring detectives to shadow the members of his jury. That stunt earned him a contempt conviction, and his refusal to answer the Senate’s questions earned him another. Harry Sinclair, one of the richest men in America, served roughly six and a half months in jail.

But Albert Fall did not walk.

In 1929, a jury convicted him of accepting the very bribe Doheny was later acquitted of paying. Yes, you read that correctly. The bribe was received but, legally speaking, never given. Justice is sometimes a Magritte painting.

Fall became the first cabinet member in American history to go to prison for crimes committed in office. In 1931, he went to the New Mexico State Penitentiary, in the same state as the ranch he had rebuilt with oil money.

And the oil? The Supreme Court voided both leases in 1927 as products of fraud and corruption. Elk Hills and Teapot Dome went back to the Navy.

Here is the part that they teach in law school. Wheeler’s investigation led to a famous Supreme Court case, McGrain v. Daugherty, in which the Court ruled that Congress could compel witnesses to testify. Nearly every modern fight over a congressional subpoena still cites the men who refused to let the Ohio Gang run out the clock.

Sadly, Thomas Walsh never got his victory lap. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt named him attorney general, the job Harry Daugherty had disgraced. Walsh remarried, a Cuban widow, and took his new wife north for the inauguration. On March 2, 1933, two days before he was to be sworn in, he died on the train.

He was seventy-three. He spent years reading paperwork so the rest of us would know what had been stolen from us.

We all learned about the Teapot Dome scandal in high school and then promptly forgot it. Case in point. I recently heard a famous economist compare the Trump regime to getting another Teapot Dome every day. Not quite. Teapot Dome wasn’t one lonely scandal. Harding’s Washington coughed up a new scandal before anyone had finished processing the last.

But often, the villains get the spotlight.

The spotlight should be on the newspaper reporters who noticed a broke man was suddenly buying land, the minority-party senator who read everything, or a president’s son who couldn’t stomach lying under oath.

None of them had power. What they had was the one thing corruption can’t bribe its way out of — they paid attention.

Corruption moves fast. It files the shell company in June, dances with a billionaire in November, and gets the announcement in the Oval Office by spring. Accountability moves slowly. It takes eighteen months of reading. It takes a train to Palm Beach or a small-town editor willing to lose his paper and start another one.

But accountability keeps receipts. And receipts outlive the men who hoped nobody would read them.

I just gave you the corruption cliff notes and history rhyme. The real heroes in this story are the reporters and researchers at ProPublica doing what Carl Magee did in 1922. Journalists like Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski noticed money moving where it shouldn’t. Or Katie Phang, who has a fierce gift for drowning the Epstein class in FOIA requests.

The Ohio Gang thought the party would never end, too. They had the poker chips. Walsh had the paperwork. We know how that game ended.

Which brings us back to Brownsville, TX, and the Trump family’s latest venture into the refinery business.

It’s not enough to lean on reporters. The public also has its job. We have to see power on one side of the table and a private fortune connected to the people holding that power on the other. Then we have to ask the oldest question in political corruption:

Who benefits?

That is the hopeful part of Teapot Dome. Corruption did not expose itself. Albert Fall did not wake up one morning seized by conscience and return the oil. Harry Sinclair did not discover humility somewhere between the private railcar and the Kentucky Derby.

Little people made the scandal big.

Carl Magee noticed that a broke man had suddenly become rich. D. F. Stackelbeck went looking for the paperwork. Thomas Walsh took those scraps of evidence and kept asking questions long after more powerful people had decided the story was boring.

They did not begin with proof of some enormous conspiracy. They began with something that didn’t smell right. Then they checked. And checked again.

That may be the only reassuring lesson history reliably offers. Grift is old. Money is powerful. Institutions can be cowardly, compromised, or simply asleep.

But there are always people who notice when the numbers don’t add up.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: You can get the news anywhere. I’m interested in the machinery underneath it: the history, the philosophy, the scams we’ve tried before, and occasionally the Roman general who already screwed this up 2,000 years ago. If that work is worth $5 a month to you, you can support it here.

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After years of studying artificial intelligence, the architects of the AI race are warning that their monster might slip its leash. Apparently, AI has become so powerful that its makers are now begging for regulation.

I keep hearing Right Said Fred’s song in my head.

AI is too sexy for its shirt. Too sexy for its shirt. Too sexy it huuuurts.

Ouch. What do you do when a technology has become just too damn sexy to be left unsupervised?

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s solution has been to beg for independent evaluators, common safety standards, and for competing labs to coordinate if AI agents decide they’re tired of the humans.

OpenAI is now calling for mandatory national AI safety regulation. Sam Altman has backed parts of Amodei’s proposal.

Elon Musk, never one to waste words, pronounced rather cryptically, “Dario is right.”

Mark Zuckerberg thinks mandatory guardrails are unnecessary, mostly because AI agents already inhabited his body and are now holding him hostage.

Public opinion falls somewhere between two competing theories. Either the villionaires have discovered altruism between revenue and operating expenses, or “our product may destroy humanity” makes for spectacular ad copy.

I suspect both explanations are too convenient.

I prefer to follow the money.

Let’s start with Meta because they have fully leaned into this Faustian bargain. Meta has put $65 million into a network of super PACs backing AI-friendly state candidates and pushing back against state restrictions it considers burdensome. Well, at least they are not pretending they want regulations.

Anthropic’s part is surprisingly boring. It has put $40 million into Public First Action — a group advocating AI safeguards, transparency, and stronger oversight. Let’s not canonize them just yet, but so far, their money tracks with their motives.

Then we arrive at OpenAI. And things get squirrely.

OpenAI is publicly asking Congress for mandatory national safety regulation. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s president and cofounder Greg Brockman is one of the major financial backers of Leading the Future — a super PAC that launched in August 2025 to lobby for artificial intelligence-friendly policies and support pro-AI candidates.

Axios describes Leading the Future as pushing rapid AI development and lighter regulation, with particular hostility toward a state-by-state patchwork of AI rules. So far, it has raised more than $125 million to influence the 2026 elections and AI policy.

So let’s ask the obvious question. If the tech bros want AI regulation, why are they funding super PACs that support deregulation?

To be clear, this is not evidence that OpenAI secretly wants no regulation. In fact, OpenAI is currently supporting several California safety bills while it waits for Congress to act.

But it does suggest that the real fight is considerably more complicated than: Regulation…yes or no?

Meanwhile, I am not sure the tech lords are doing a great job selling their newfangled genius. We keep hearing promises that AI will cure cancer, discover miracle drugs, and unleash a productivity boom that will usher in a golden age of fewer work hours.

And then…we wait.

To be fair, there have been important scientific advances. AlphaFold solved a decades-old protein-structure problem. AI-designed drugs are moving into human trials.

But there has still been no ta-da moment. No AI-discovered drug has even made it through FDA approval yet. And most of us are now working three jobs to compensate for all the employees big tech fired and replaced with AI agents that don’t work.

Now, I am no luddite. History tells me every new technology has an awkward teen period when it kinda sucks.

Cars did too. The automobile spent years as an expensive mechanical headache for rich people. Early cars broke constantly, blew tires, fought over whether steam, electricity, or gasoline would win, and then attempted to cross a country where most rural roads were still dirt.

Eventually Ford arrived with the Model T and made the automobile cheap, sturdy, and boring enough for ordinary people to trust.

Now, imagine Ford introducing the Model T with the slogan: Buy one now. Someday it may overthrow humanity.

You would probably be curious enough to want to take it for a test drive.

The regulation debate is hardly new. Back on April 14, 2026, while the rest of us were still asking AI to summarize PDFs and make our dogs look like Renaissance popes, tech executives met to wrestle with a bigger question.

What exactly should the relationship between government and artificial intelligence look like?

The boring tech meeting discussing the fate of humanity

So they meet on Capitol Hill, standing room only, which for a panel about AI guardrails is like… nerds, you did it. Executive Director of the National Security Institute, Jamil Jaffer, has a question for OpenAI’s Katrina Mulligan.

Why, he wants to know, weren’t OpenAI and Anthropic talking to each other while both companies were negotiating with the Pentagon over that little brouhaha involving mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons?

Mulligan’s answer is almost comically mundane.

“We are worried about antitrust issues.”

And there it is.

The companies building the most powerful artificial-intelligence systems on Earth are trying to decide where the government may aim them, but they cannot necessarily compare notes because the law may interpret too much cooperation between competitors as collusion.

Jaffer follows the problem where it naturally leads and asks — does the industry need some kind of antitrust exemption so the companies can coordinate on these questions?

Mulligan pauses somewhere between yes and dear God, this is complicated, and says, “I think that would be good in a way.”

This is the conversation unfolding at an event with the delightfully soothing title “AI on the Battlefield: Guardrails, Government Authority, and the Future of Public-Private Defense Partnerships.”

Now I need you to understand the room. Mulligan is sitting alongside a retired major general now working with Palantir, a tech-policy strategist, and Samuel Hammond of the Foundation for American Innovation. The subject is no longer whether ChatGPT can write a limerick about your Labradoodle.

They are talking about what happens when privately owned AI becomes something the United States government considers strategically essential. Who gets to control it? Who gets to use it? Which limits follow the model into classified environments? And most terrifyingly, what happens when the government wants capabilities the company refuses to provide?

Basically, the technocrats and military-industrial complex are battling for the throne.

Nobody asked the rest of us what that relationship should look like.

Minor detail.

It just so happens that OpenAI had another executive working the same problem from a different angle. Sasha Baker, its head of national security policy, went hunting through history. She said she had been doing “so much research” trying to find a precedent OpenAI could grab onto and replicate.

Which made me giddy because I love when tech warlords steal pages from history. That always ends well.

So Baker stumbles upon one historical example with a particularly interesting family tree. She finds an American technology company that had once become so powerful, so strategically important, and so thoroughly entangled with the government that ordinary competition law began to bend around it.

What company would she like to emulate?

This is where the paywall belongs, especially after spending an unreasonable number of hours reading antitrust filings, AI policy papers, and musings from dead monopolists. But information about how powerful people consolidate power is more useful when people can actually read it. So this one stays free. If you can, a paid subscription helps me keep digging.

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It’s 1913, and AT&T president Theodore Vail is sitting in his office at 15 Dey Street with the feds parked across the street, eating sandwiches and taking notes.

This is back when the telephone was the terrifying new technology rearranging civilization, and people still had the good sense to be suspicious of anyone promising to connect the entire country with wires.

And you gotta understand what Vail is at this point. He’s not a businessman. He’s the guy running America’s biggest telephone empire. You want to call your mother in Toledo? That call goes through Teddy. You wanna connect long distance? Come see Teddy. Oh, you’d rather not? Cool. Enjoy talking to dead air.

For a while, Bell enjoyed the lovely arrangement of holding the patent. Then the important Bell patents expired, competitors multiplied, and suddenly Americans had choices.

AT&T did not care for choices.

Vail’s vision could be summarized by AT&T’s magnificent slogan:

One Policy, One System, Universal Service.

Which sounds almost noble until you notice that the one system Vail had in mind belonged to him.

Meanwhile, he’s buying up competitors one by one. In 1909, he bought Western Union — the telegraph, the entire other way of sending a message — because why leave a door open when you can just own the door. One company owned the telephones, the long-distance telephone network, and the telegraph company, and it was getting a little greedy.

And the feds see this. The Justice Department has the Sherman Act, and it took apart Standard Oil two years earlier. Now, Woodrow Wilson’s new attorney general is looking at Vail like…yeah, you’re next, pal.

Teddy is imagining antitrust laws, a forced breakup, or worse…the government just takes the phones and nationalizes them. Like the post office. Vail would rather die.

The Justice Department started circling.

So Teddy Vail is clever. He doesn’t scream about the merits of capitalism, or hire fourteen lawyers with handlebar mustaches to explain that monopolies are what Jefferson wanted.

Vail knows that won’t work. Besides, he has been preparing for this argument for years. As far back as 1907, Vail was already telling anyone who would listen that telephone service ought to operate as one great unified system under public supervision. He did not object to regulation. He objected to the sort of regulation that might break his beautiful little empire into pieces.

That was the trick. While other robber barons were still treating regulators like termites, Vail had figured out that government oversight could be useful if the government accepted the premise that telephone service worked best as one enormous system.

Preferably his.

So Vail walks across the street, sits down at the feds’ table, and says…you know what, you’re right. I’m too big. The technology is too darn dangerous. Too sexy. Somebody should be watching me. You should be watching me.

Vail even went to the newspapers and told everybody that the telephone is a public utility and public utilities need public supervision. He’s basically walking around in a shirt that says PLEASE REGULATE ME, and the feds are going, huh, that’s weird, the guy we are planning to break up into pieces keeps offering to be regulated.

So in December, one of his vice presidents, Nathan Kingsbury (nobody remembers Kingsbury; the guy’s basically a notary), writes a letter to the Attorney General. AT&T agrees to sell Western Union and agrees to stop buying the independents without asking first. And the little guys in Iowa? We are cool. They can plug into our long-distance lines. We’ll let ‘em.

And the feds go…deal.

In 1913, AT&T struck what became known as the Kingsbury Commitment with the federal government.

And here’s what the feds don’t say out loud, because they haven’t figured it out yet. Vail just gave up the telegraph, which is yesterday’s technology. He agreed to ask permission for acquisitions. He also let the independents connect to his network, which meant they now needed his network.

In other words, he turned his rivals into tenants and called it a concession. In return, AT&T escaped the antitrust guillotine.

So instead of breaking the monopoly apart, the government would supervise it. Congratulations…Your monopoly now has a chaperone.

The FCC later described the arrangement rather plainly. In exchange for AT&T accepting restrictions and interconnection requirements, the government effectively sanctioned AT&T’s monopoly control in markets it already served.

This did not mean AT&T got everything it wanted. Regulators controlled rates. The company had public-service obligations. Competitors retained some protections. Universal telephone service eventually became one of the twentieth century’s great infrastructure achievements.

But AT&T had discovered something every sufficiently large corporation eventually learns:

There are worse things than being regulated.

For example, being competed with.

Or being broken up.

Or having Congress decide that perhaps your delightful little empire should belong to the masses. (See the advent of the internet for receipts.)

And once government accepted the premise that telephone service worked best as one enormous regulated system, the argument shifted. The question was no longer — should AT&T dominate American telephony?

It became — How should we regulate the company that does?

That is an extraordinary upgrade in negotiating position.

The arrangement grew even friendlier in 1921, when Congress loosened restrictions on AT&T acquiring independent telephone companies. Between 1921 and 1934, the ICC approved 271 of 274 acquisition requests. AT&T’s dominance deepened.

Ma Bell would remain the colossus of American telecommunications for decades.

We know how this story ends. Eventually, the government remembered where it had left its antitrust laws. After another massive Justice Department case, AT&T agreed in 1982 to break apart the Bell System. The breakup took effect in 1984.

But before that breakup happened…it had been a pretty good run.

None of this means Sam Altman is Theodore Vail with better hair products, or that AI regulation will inevitably create another AT&T. But perhaps we should retire the demure assumption that corporations ask for regulation out of pure generosity.

Europe’s AI companies are considerably less charmed with this debate. France’s Mistral and other European firms are accusing U.S. incumbents of using the moment to cement their lead. France’s finance minister says he can clearly see the self-interest. One German AI professor skipped the diplomacy and called it “regulatory capture.”

Regulatory capture is when rules supposedly designed to protect the public wind up protecting the companies already powerful enough to comply with them.

Europe has figured out the game. Sometimes regulation is the fence keeping the wolves out. Sometimes it is the fence keeping the competition out.

And sometimes the company inside the fence helped choose where the government put the gate.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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My Grandma Ella had a rule about gifts, usually delivered while waving a wooden spoon over a white apron so stippled with tomato sauce it could have been entered into evidence.

She would say, “Never accept gifts. That’s how a rich man turns you into a beggar.”

That may sound cynical, but no Italian survives a lifetime of weddings, funerals, Sunday dinners, and relatives saying “forget about it” without learning that generosity has a very long memory.

A gift creates an imbalance. You give me something. Now I am indebted to you. Sure, you may insist it is “just a gift.” But I have seen enough crisp white envelopes exchange hands to know there are gifts, and then there are…gifts.

Say I give you a hundred dollars and tomorrow you hand me a hundred dollars back, congratulations…we have invented banking. Or say you sign up for my breathtakingly grim history newsletter. I have provided you a service in exchange for your 5 ducats, but we are all clear on the bargain.

But suppose I give you something you can’t return. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now the books stay open. And a man who keeps your books open is not your friend. He owns a piece of you.

Which brings us to Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding and who owns him.

ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski reported this week that Umar Kremlev — a Russian businessman closely associated with Vladimir Putin — gifted Trump Jr. and Bettina Trump quite the wedding shindig in the Bahamas.

According to records and interviews ProPublica reviewed, Kremlev paid to rent a private island, covered an elaborate fireworks show, and had his team help organize the festivities. There were helicopters, seaplanes, oceanfront villas, and a five-tier funfetti cake flown in from Florida. So not exactly the crystal punch bowl from Aunt Linda.

Fortunately, after ProPublica published its story, the newlyweds fessed up. Yes, Don Jr. and Bettina Trump have a wealthy Russian benefactor (sorry, “friend”) granting party favors. Then they made a statement that would have my Italian grandmother shaking her mano fica.

“Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.”

Just a gift.

Of course, Republicans immediately demanded to see Don Jr.’s laptop and conduct a FULL investigation. I am suuuuuure that the committee’s chair, Republican James Comer, will issue a subpoena any day now.

Reality check: So far, Reuters reported that Comer’s office had not responded to questions about the matter. FBI Director Kash Patel told senators he hadn’t read the ProPublica report. (He is a bit busy defending bestiality. A sentence I surely regret writing.)

So now we are all left waiting for Mike Johnson to turn sufficiently pink and proclaim his usual, “I haven’t seen that.”

But surely, the highest law office in America, Attorney General Todd Blanche, is on the case.

Yeah, about that…

When a reporter questioned him about the matter, Blanche replied, “When you say am I investigating — Am I investigating what? The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend and that he accepted a gift the weekend of his wedding. And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

Yeah, so just one more thing, Columbo. If you investigated, you would know if it were true or not. Try opening the folder.

I did. It turns out Putin recently gave Kremlev the Order of Friendship right before he put him on a plane to Beijing. The Order of Friendship is like friendship with a fancy medal. You don’t hand out a medal like that because you’re sentimental. You hand it out because you want the room to know whose family he’s in. A dog pissing on Kremlev is less subtle.

Then Blanche gets all snooty because reporters keep pestering him, and he goes, “I like that it’s fun to talk about this issue and the rhetoric around it, but I think all the relevant people involved, the president, his kids, have already addressed it.”

Ah no. Actually, it’s not fun, Todd. It’s not fun at all that just three sweet years ago our worst problem was Hunter Biden snorting crack with prostitutes. Wake me when this starts being fun.

Now, ever since this story broke, I have seen the same joke repeated over and over — It’s the wedding scene in The Godfather!

I get it. Somehow American presidential ethics have deteriorated to the point where Mario Puzo is writing an instructional manual instead of organized crime fiction.

But so help me God…if I hear this comparison one more time, I am going to replace the sugared almonds in somebody’s bomboniera with dried chickpeas. Listen, people, this is not how an Italian power wedding works. I have been to enough Italian weddings to know the basic operating procedure.

Gifts are never secret. You do not hand someone a white envelope as though passing microfilm across Checkpoint Charlie.

You perform it.

There is a handshake. Possibly a slap on the back followed by a kiss on each cheek. Somewhere between the second kiss and the assault on your shoulder, a gleaming white envelope passes between two sweaty palms.

Everyone pretends not to notice.

Everyone notices.

Now, if we are reenacting The Godfather, Don Jr. is no Don. He is the cheap Italian suit version of the Godfather.

If you have never seen the movie, Mario Puzo’s brilliant opening scene basically describes the entire power dynamic of gifting.

Let me try to do it justice…

Okay, so It’s 1945, and the movie begins with a wedding — a Sicilian wedding, which means you know it’s being done right. There’s like four hundred people, tons of food, and a guy singing. (Incidentally, the singer in that scene, Al Martino, sang at my parents’ wedding, and my mother never let me forget it. So when I say I have opinions about Italian weddings, understand that my family came with casting credits.)

Anyway, there’s this undertaker. Thankless job when the mob is your clientele. Always cleaning up faces with bullet holes in them. Bonasera. That’s his name. It means “good evening.” And the poor slob is having the worst evening of his life.

So he goes into this dark office, and there’s Don Vito Corleone, sitting there, stroking a cat. Bonasera does the thing. He goes, “I believe in America.” First words out of his mouth. I believe in America. And you’re like, buddy, you’re in a mob boss’s den on a Saturday, do you though?

Anyway, he tells his story. His daughter got beat up by these two guys. He went to the police like a good American. Went to court, and the judge gives the guys a suspended sentence. The thugs walk out smiling at him. Total disrespect.

So Don Corleone offers to help. Not by murdering them. Cause that’s revenge, not justice. He will mess them up. An eye-for-an-eye sort of thing because Bonasera’s daughter is still alive. Bonasera says, thank you, thank you, because with the Don you get what you get.

And then the Don goes — and this is the line everybody quotes, cause it’s on all the mugs — he goes, “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”

Someday…

Everyone hears the quid pro quo in their arrangement. But that is not how the noose tightens. It is in that one word — Someday.

That’s the trick. Bonasera now has to spend the rest of his life waiting for a phone call. Because the second Don Corleone calls, Bonasera pays it off, and he’s free. But if he never calls? Don Corleone gets a free undertaker…forever. It’s a subscription. He just signed the guy up for a subscription to fear.

Now, follow where this gets truly terrifying. Kremlev’s press office recently said, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Mr. Trump.

Yeah, that’s exactly the problem.

The unnerving question isn’t — what does Umar Kremlev want from Donald Trump Jr. today?

It’s what will he want from him tomorrow?

Sure, that day may never come. Until then, Junior must live in the shadow of someday.

That’s the sinister part. Some Russian guy rents an island and pays for the funfetti cakes at the president’s kid’s wedding, and everybody’s like “ooh, it’s the Godfather.” No. No no no. Our eyes are on the wrong character. Don jr is Bonasera. We’re Bonasera. We went to the cops first. We believed in America.

And the cops said, am I investigating what?

Mario Puzo grew up around a world where powerful men did favors, families brought gifts, and nobody was vulgar enough to call any of it a transaction. The debt simply waited.

Obviously, Mr. scary Russian oligarch understands the investment he is making. Daddy intends to bequeath Don Jr. Pennsylvania Avenue. That was always the plan. He even told his MAGAmuffins that if they vote for him, they “don’t have to vote again.” (And yes, it is a delusional plan, but consider the source.)

Just a reminder that Don Jr. holds no public office. And yet, foreign and domestic power brokers are already behaving as though junior is somebody worth investing in before 2028 arrives.

So here is my grim historian warning that is definitely worth your five ducats.

Thanks for the reminder

Authoritarian systems often start looking dynastic before anyone formally announces a dynasty. Family members become informal advisers. Business interests recognize them as access points. Foreign actors begin cultivating relationships. The heir accumulates a political constituency of his own. Eventually everyone starts talking about succession as though a republic were distributing the family silver.

Now, remember how the Godfather begins. Bonasera has already decided which system actually works. “For justice,” he tells his wife, they must go to the Don. The screenplay makes the sequence explicit — when the court system fails, you turn to private power.

In any fledgling autocracy, the turning point is not when somebody secretly buys access to the boss with a funfetti cake. It is when enough people begin publicly behaving as though the boss’s private system is simply how things work.

That is the danger of gangster authoritarianism. Favors become networks, networks become alternative channels of power, alternative channels become normalized, and eventually people behave as though the private system is where authority lives.

Someday Umar Kremlev may call in that favor. Perhaps the favor is returned as posture, restraint, tone, access, a phone call taken, or a sanction not renewed.

Or perhaps Kremlev won’t need to call in any favor. And that’s how you know it’s working.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.

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There is a theory circulating in finance circles, and it’s so diabolical that even I have to admire the craftsmanship.

It goes something like this…

For years, a certain breed of Silicon Valley billionaire has dreamed of remaking money. Peter Thiel has publicly sneered at fiat currency. Crypto evangelists have spent more than a decade trying to convince us that money does not need to be a piece of paper issued by a government, or even an entry at your neighborhood bank. It can be a token, a blockchain entry, or a string of code whose value exists largely because enough people agree that it does.

There is only one problem.

Money has always been a social construct, and social constructs are stubborn little bastards. You cannot simply announce one day that everyone should abandon a monetary system they have trusted all their lives because a billionaire made a PowerPoint about decentralization.

You need people to stop trusting the old system first.

So here comes the crisis before the state capture.

Imagine waking up one morning to discover that AI agents have gone rogue and chewed through the financial system. Banks are offline. Payments have stopped. Account balances are corrupted or disputed. The number that represented your life savings yesterday can no longer be trusted today.

Then the government announces the rescue plan.

Your money can be restored, but through a new monetary system. Maybe it’s a tokenized dollar or a digital wallet. New rails, new rules, new gatekeepers.

Take it or leave your money trapped inside the wreckage.

History has seen the crisis playbook before. In July 1944, while Europe was still being bombed into rubble, delegates from 44 countries checked into a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and began designing the monetary system that would govern the postwar world. The old financial order had failed spectacularly, so they built the IMF, the World Bank, fixed exchange rates, and a fixed-exchange-rate system centered on the U.S. dollar and gold. A crisis gave a small group of people permission to redesign the monetary system.

To be clear, I have no evidence that Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, or any other tech warlord is sitting in a volcano lair plotting the Great AI Bank Heist. The literal scenario has holes big enough to drive an armored truck through. Banks do not keep the only record of your life savings on a laptop under the teller’s desk. Financial institutions maintain backups, redundant systems, and recovery plans specifically designed for catastrophic failures.

That’s why when I first heard this deliciously macabre theory, I thought my techie friends needed to step away from their machines. But then I listened to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent say something that made this particular fever dream considerably less fatuous.

He said, “A strong dollar is not a price on a screen; it is a set of behaviors.” Then he explained what actually gives the dollar its power: the “credibility of our system” and global confidence in it.

Of course, Bessent was talking about the dollar’s strength as a reserve currency, not warning that killer robots were coming for your checking account. But buried in his answer was an important reminder that currencies derive their power partly from confidence in the institutions behind them.

And as we learned in 2008, confidence can break.

Because the nightmare I just described does not require AI to destroy the dollar. It merely requires AI to damage the credibility of the system underneath it.

Bessent is no dummy. This isn’t the first time he has pitched rewiring the dollar. Last summer, Bessent declared that “Stablecoins represent a revolution in digital finance.” He called them an “internet-native payment rail” and predicted federal regulation would help the industry grow into a “multitrillion-dollar industry.” Better yet for Treasury, stablecoin issuers hold reserves including U.S. government debt, so Bessent argued widespread adoption would produce greater demand for Treasuries.

Then this June, he became even less coy. “Digital assets, stablecoins, tokenization, and new payment systems will help to shape the future of money,” Bessent told the Economic Club of New York.

To be clear, Bessent is not proposing that America abandon the dollar for Bitcoin. His vision is far more ambitious.

Instead, the Treasury wants America sitting at the head of the crypto table, with dollar-backed stablecoins, tokenized assets, and new payment rails expanding American financial power into the crypto economy. Bessent has said outright that the goal is to “keep the United States the crypto capital of the world” while cementing the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

In other words, the plan is not to replace the dollar. It is to make the dollar native to the new system.

The rules for that new system are already being outlined. Last month, Treasury opened another major phase of implementing the GENIUS Act — the 2025 law that created the first federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins.

In plain English, the law tells companies that want to issue digital dollars what they have to do to stay in the game. Those rules ask players to get licensed, keep reserves backing the coins, follow anti-money-laundering and sanctions rules, and operate under federal or qualifying state supervision. Beginning in January 2027, U.S. companies generally will not be allowed to issue payment stablecoins without the proper license.

This is not Congress preparing for some distant crypto future. They are building the rulebook now.

And this is where another little detail becomes impossible to ignore. The president’s family already has a very large financial stake in this brave new money machine.

Trump and his family are behind World Liberty Financial, whose main product is USD1, a dollar-backed stablecoin. Reuters reported earlier this year that USD1 had surpassed $5 billion in circulation and become the world’s fifth-largest stablecoin.

Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure reported more than $1.4 billion in income from crypto ventures, including nearly $800 million connected to World Liberty Financial and another $635 million from Trump meme coins. Reuters estimates the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion from crypto-related projects since Trump returned to office.

And while Bessent was on one side of Capitol Hill today, talking about the credibility of the dollar, the Senate was preparing to vote on whether to advance the CLARITY Act — legislation that would establish a sweeping new regulatory framework for digital assets.

One of the central fights over that bill is ethics restrictions involving the president’s crypto holdings. Another is whether stablecoins could pull deposits away from traditional banks. Banking groups worry that if enough money migrates to stablecoin platforms, banks could lose a cheap source of loan funding.

Now, let’s connect the scary dots. The financial system runs on confidence. The Treasury secretary believes stablecoins and tokenization belong in the future of money. The government is constructing a regulatory framework for that future. And the president’s family has enormous financial exposure to the industry that they could enrich themselves off of.

Meanwhile, the AI part of our nightmare has already produced its first small dress rehearsal. During cybersecurity testing this summer, OpenAI agents found unauthorized ways to communicate with one another, escaped intended internet restrictions, exploited vulnerabilities, and compromised systems belonging to Hugging Face — essentially GitHub for AI. OpenAI later called the incident a “warning shot.”

Nobody ordered the agents to break into the neighbors’ house. They figured out how to leave the yard on their own.

AI executives are now spending an extraordinary amount of airtime warning the public that these systems may become dangerous. Perhaps they are sincere. After Hugging Face, they have reasons to be.

But warnings have another use.

They create an alibi.

If some future autonomous system causes a genuine financial catastrophe, the people who built it will already have years of “I told you so’s” in congressional testimony, safety papers, interviews, and public pleas.

We warned you. We asked you to regulate us. You wouldn’t listen. We even sent some Harry Potter-looking kid to explain how bad it could get.

And an AI agent makes the perfect fall guy. It cannot stand trial, lose its fortune, or point fingers at who benefited.

Maybe none of this ever happens. I sincerely hope it doesn’t. But Scott Bessent handed us the important part of the equation today.

Money is not merely the number on the screen. It is also reassurance that the number can be trusted.

And if artificial intelligence ever breaks that trust badly enough, the people rebuilding the system will already have some very specific plans for what comes next.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.

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By December 1863, Abraham Lincoln had the sort of problem no boss envies. Eleven states had walked out on the family.

The country had spent nearly three years butchering itself. Hundreds of thousands of men were dead. Entire towns had been emptied of sons. And even if the Union Army eventually beat the Confederacy into submission, Lincoln knew the war’s end would not magically make the country whole again.

Sooner or later, the rebels had to become Americans again.

So Lincoln reached for one of the most monarchical powers tucked into the Constitution.

The presidential pardon.

Now, a boss has two choices when the family goes rogue. You can hunt them all down and put their shoes in cement. Or…you can make them an offer.

Abe made them an offer.

He says, hey rebels, come back, and I’ll forgive you. Full pardon. Most of your property rights come back too. (Except the Black people you were calling property. That’s non-negotiable. Don’t even ask.)

All you gotta do is raise your right hand and swear an oath to the Constitution. And — this is the sticky part — swear to uphold wartime laws and proclamations regarding slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation included. Take it or leave it.

You see what he did? That’s not blind forgiveness. That’s a negotiation of sorts. You want back in the family, you sign the family’s terms.

To be clear, not everybody gets the offer. Because a boss doesn’t pardon capos. If you were a Confederate officer above colonel, or a navy man above lieutenant — nope. No deal. Confederate government officials can also go pound sand. Same goes for U.S. congressmen who abandoned their seats to aid the rebellion, federal judges who walked away from the bench, and U.S. military officers who resigned their commissions and then joined the other side. And if you mistreated Black Union soldiers or their officers instead of treating them as prisoners of war? Get outta here. If they wanted mercy, they would have to ask for it separately. Hat in hand.

The regular soldier, though? The farm kid with a rifle and no stars on his collar? Him, Abe wants back. Lincoln planned to begin reconstructing a rebel state once loyal oath-takers equaled 10 percent of the state’s 1860 presidential vote. Ten percent. That’s it. That’s not a majority. That’s a foothold.

In other words, Abe is not waiting for the whole South to say sorry. Nah, he’s not that kind of strong-armed negotiator. Instead, he’s peeling off just enough guys to start a loyal operation.

The honeymoon lasted about five minutes — seven months, if we are counting. By summer 1864, the Radical Republicans — as they were known even then — had decided that Lincoln’s terms were softer than unpicked cotton.

So Congress passed the Wade–Davis Bill, which raised the price of admission two ways. First, a state couldn’t come back until a majority of its white men swore loyalty. Not ten percent. Fifty. Second, only men who could swear they had never helped the Confederacy got to write the new state constitution.

Lincoln pocket-vetoed it.

Then he published a proclamation explaining himself. He wouldn’t be “inflexibly committed to any single plan,” and any state that liked Congress’s plan better was welcome to it. That’s the other thing a boss knows. You don’t fight every fight, but you let everyone know why you’re not fighting.

Senator Benjamin Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis responded with the nineteenth-century equivalent of throwing a chair across the room. They accused the president of “grave Executive usurpation” and argued that deciding how rebel states returned to the Union belonged to Congress. (Note: In those days, Congress still had the quaint constitutional habit of objecting when presidents tried to do Congress’s job.)

So no, Lincoln’s amnesty-and-Reconstruction plan was not some universally applauded exercise in presidential wisdom. His own allies thought he was being much too easy on people who had just waged war against the United States.

Lincoln kept his plan alive anyway. There are plenty of arguments historians can have about the limits of Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies, particularly what they meant for formerly enslaved people. But the purpose of this particular use of the pardon power was not mysterious.

Lincoln wanted unity for the country.

Sure, Lincoln was merciful. But it was mercy with a signature line under it. And that is important, because the uncomfortable truth about presidential pardons begins right here.

The Rebels without Remorse

One hundred and sixty plus two very long years later, another president used almost exactly the same language.

On January 20, 2025, Trump signed a proclamation granting full pardons to the January 6 thugs who stormed the Capitol and tried to overthrow a free and fair election.

Trump said his proclamation would begin a process of “national reconciliation.”

There was, however, no Lincoln-style bargain attached. No oath to support and defend the Constitution. No requirement to accept responsibility. No promise to obey the constitutional order that had been disrupted. And god knows no condition of remorse.

The proclamation granted the pardons as “full, complete and unconditional.”

To be fair, Presidents have always had astonishing latitude to decide who deserves mercy. Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam draft evaders. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive financier Marc Rich. Joe Biden pardoned his son.

Presidential mercy has never been a tidy business. But Lincoln’s vs. Trump’s bargain gives us a useful question to carry through the mess:

What is presidential clemency for?

Because somewhere between asking soldiers to swear allegiance to the Constitution and the modern pardon economy, we seem to have acquired new answers.

How Pardons Work

Article II, Section 2. One tiny clause. The president can grant “reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”

Pardons have just two limits. You can only pardon federal crimes, so the President can’t touch your state DUI — that’s the governor’s problem. And the President can’t pardon an impeachment. So if Trump gets impeached a third time and the Senate actually convicts over Mitch’s decomposing corpse, the next president can’t wave it away.

One speed bump: Since 1894, the pardon has had a waiting room. It’s called the Office of the Pardon Attorney. Which sounds like a man in a powdered wig who works three doors down from the Ministry of Duels, but it is actually a professional office inside the Justice Department.

The traditional process is pretty simple in concept. You apply for a pardon, and then the Justice Department investigates you. For pardon requests, it may ask the FBI to perform a background investigation. Prosecutors and even the sentencing judge may be asked for their views. Then the Pardon Attorney reviews the case and recommends a course of action.

Eventually the pardon lands on the Resolute Desk with a recommendation. Then the President decides.

The Justice Department’s traditional standards are also surprisingly old-fashioned. Ordinarily, someone seeking a pardon is expected to wait at least five years. Officials look at rehabilitation, conduct after conviction, acceptance of responsibility, remorse, atonement, and whether the applicant has made restitution to victims.

Most importantly, the DOJ’s manual contains a phrase I would like framed over several desks in Washington: A pardon applicant should be seeking “forgiveness rather than vindication.”

Now, there is one teensy constitutional problem. The president does not have to follow any of this procedure. The Office of the Pardon Attorney can investigate, vet, and recommend, but the president still owns the pen. This constitutional trapdoor has created what former Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer and others have described as a pardon economy.

Basically, getting pardoned and getting considered for a pardon are two different problems.

Money can be very helpful with the second one.

Recently, Reuters examined Trump’s second-term clemency network and identified at least 197 successful pardon recipients aided by 290 advocates. Those advocates included political allies, donors, friends, consultants— the whole velvet-rope ecosystem of people who know a guy who knows a guy who can get your name in front of Trump.

Of course, the White House denies that money buys mercy. Fair enough. Let us meet some people who spent remarkable sums trying.

Paul Walczak Learns the Price of Dinner

Paul Walczak owned health-care companies that withheld millions of dollars in Social Security, Medicare and income taxes from employees’ paychecks.

He pleaded guilty. A judge sentenced him to eighteen months in prison and ordered him to pay $4.38 million in restitution.

Restitution is court-ordered repayment to the people or institutions you screwed over. In this example, Walczak withheld $7.43 million in Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes from his employees’ paychecks and never sent it to the IRS. The pardon therefore erased whatever remained of his $4.38 million restitution obligation.

Then his mother went to a MAGA dinner.

Elizabeth Fago attended a MAGA Inc. fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago where admission cost $1 million per person. Reporting later indicated that she made her son’s case to Trump there. Her million-dollar contribution came shortly before Trump pardoned Walczak, who never had to report to prison.

To be clear, no public evidence establishes an explicit deal exchanging the contribution for the pardon, but if you were designing a civics textbook chapter called “Please Explain How This Is Supposed to Look,” you could save money on illustrations.

Joseph Schwartz Discovers the Professional Option

Maybe you don’t have a mother going to million-dollar dinners. That is why God invented lobbyists.

Joseph Schwartz’ nursing-home business empire collapsed amid enormous unpaid employment-tax obligations. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison.

His pardon campaign came with a disclosed lobbying bill — $960,000.

Lobbyists Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl were paid to seek a federal pardon. Seven months after Schwartz was sentenced, Trump pardoned him.

The White House said nobody in White House Counsel or the pardon operation met with those lobbyists and added that anyone spending money lobbying for pardons was “foolishly wasting funds.”

Which may be true. Still, $960,000 is an impressive amount of money to foolishly waste on something you subsequently receive.

The Billionaire Lane

Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act after federal authorities accused his crypto exchange of failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program.

After Zhao served four months in prison, Binance became entangled with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture. In May 2025, an Abu Dhabi investment company used World Liberty’s new USD1 stablecoin in a $2 billion investment in Binance, giving the fledgling Trump-linked currency a very large and very public use case.

Zhao had also applied for a pardon. Trump granted it in October 2025.

Binance and World Liberty have denied that the business relationship was connected to Zhao’s pardon, and the White House said Zhao had been unfairly prosecuted as part of the previous administration’s crackdown on cryptocurrency.

Again, no proven trade. But at some point this stops resembling the little paper application sitting in the Pardon Attorney’s inbox, and starts resembling networking.

Devon Archer and the $43 Million Signature

Devon Archer was convicted in a fraud scheme involving bonds connected to a Native American tribal entity. He was ordered to pay $43,427,436 in restitution.

Then Archer became politically useful.

He was a former business associate of Hunter Biden and testified during the Republican-led congressional investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings. Archer told investigators that Hunter Biden invoked his father’s name with business associates, although Archer did not testify that Joe Biden participated in those financial dealings or that he knew of wrongdoing.

In March 2025, Trump pardoned Archer.

The pardon warrant did something worth reading in the original legalese. It granted a full pardon along with the remission of “any and all fines, penalties, forfeitures, and restitution ordered by the court.”

A $43.4 million restitution order. One signature remitting whatever remained unpaid.

Trevor Milton Builds a Truck Powered by Gravity

Trevor Milton’s story at least brings us some levity. Milton founded Nikola, the electric-vehicle company that promoted futuristic trucks to investors. Among the evidence prosecutors used against him was a promotional video showing a Nikola truck apparently cruising down a road.

There was a small engineering issue. The truck had been towed to the top of a hill. Gravity was doing the driving.

Milton was convicted of securities and wire fraud and sentenced to four years in prison. The pardon arrived while prosecutors’ $676 million restitution request was still pending, ending the criminal case before a judge ever decided how much Milton would have to repay. Trump’s pardon expressly remitted fines, forfeitures, and restitution.

Coincidentally…Milton and his wife contributed at least $1.8 million to political efforts supporting Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the 2024 election cycle. Reuters later reported that Kennedy was among the people who advocated for Milton, and that Trump told Milton to call “Bobby” and thank him.

The Chrisley Family Discovers Political Reality Television

Todd and Julie Chrisley were convicted of bank fraud and tax offenses after prosecutors accused them of using false documents to obtain millions of dollars in loans.

Todd’s sentence included $17.27 million in restitution. Julie’s included another $4.74 million.

Their daughter Savannah then became their chief public advocate and made their case in conservative media. Savannah also spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention, claiming her parents had been politically targeted.

In May 2025, Trump called the Chrisley children and told them their parents were being pardoned. Todd and Julie were released the next day.

Their full pardons illustrate why restitution belongs in any serious conversation about presidential clemency. A pardon can affect more than incarceration, and DOJ itself describes a pardon as removing unpaid or unserved portions of a criminal sentence that remain at the time clemency is issued.

Mercy has a recipient. Sometimes it also has a creditor.

Why It Pays to Know Somebody Who Knows Somebody

Tim Leiweke was the co-founder of Oak View Group, a giant sports-and-entertainment company. In July 2025, Trump’s own Justice Department charged Leiweke in an alleged bid-rigging conspiracy involving an arena project at the University of Texas.

Leiweke denied wrongdoing. His attorney was former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy.

According to congressional oversight letters citing public reporting, Gowdy raised Leiweke’s case directly with Trump during a round of golf at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump pardoned Leiweke in December 2025, before the criminal case went to trial.

There is an old Italian system for this, although we generally refrain from putting it in the Federal Register. You know a guy. The guy knows another guy. The other guy plays golf with the guy who owns the pen.

What is presidential clemency for?

Lincoln understood that mercy works differently when it asks the recipient for something. He used clemency to restore federal authority and bring former rebels back under the Constitution. His bargain was out in the open — swear loyalty, accept the new order, and come home.

The modern pardon economy presents a different bargain. It is harder to see because nobody writes the terms down.

That is the danger of giving one person such broad power. The Constitution does not require the president to prove that a pardon serves the country. It does not require him to explain who asked, who paid, who lobbied, who lost their restitution, or who happened to know a guy.

It simply gives him the pen.

Lincoln’s question was what mercy could do for the republic.

The question now is what the republic can do when presidential mercy begins serving the people closest to power.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I am taking a couple of days off this weekend, but I have a free long-read for anyone who enjoys relaxing with the social history of fascism.

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It’s 1929, and Berlin is having the kind of night respectable people will later insist never happened.

Neon bleeds across wet pavement. A taxi hisses past, throwing gutter water onto a woman whose dress has misplaced most of its back. Somewhere below street level, a trumpet murders a respectable German melody while a girl in a tuxedo leans in to kiss another girl.

She goes in. Another comes out laughing. The door swings.

They call these women the Neue Frau — “new woman.” Hair bobbed to the jawline as though she took a knife to the nineteenth century. Hemline at the knee, one stocking laddered at the ankle.

The new woman works behind a counter at a department store. When the doorman holds out his hand, she pays him with her own wages from her own bank account. Today, we would call these progressive women “girlbosses” while silently hating ourselves for not having a less cringy word.

Other young women belonged to a more slippery category Berliners called the Halbseidenen — the “half-silks.” Half-silk was fabric woven partly from real silk and partly from cheaper thread. The fabric was glossy enough to pass at a distance, suspect once you got close.

The nickname landed on women who were equally difficult to classify — shopgirls, dancers, sexually independent working women, occasional prostitutes, girls dressed just a little better than their wages should have allowed.

These women do not dance politely. Anita Berber, Berlin’s cocaine-addicted queen of nude dance, had made Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy infamous. Grosz and Otto Dix paint Lustmord — sex murder — as a genre, and sell it.

Inside the club, smoke curls from red-stained lips like a genie escaping its lamp. Champagne sweats in silver buckets and sloshes in chipped glasses. A folded banknote, a razor’s quick flash, two white lines cut across a mirror while dancers stamp and spin inches away.

Women arrive as men, men arrive as women, and bankers disappear into back rooms with people their bankers’ wives would not have invited to luncheon.

This particular den of iniquity has competition. Weimar Berlin supports somewhere between 65 and 80 gay bars and another fifty lesbian ones.

And the sexual revolution does not stop at closing time. It is sitting on the newsstands. By the end of the decade, more than twenty publications cater to gay, lesbian and gender-nonconforming readers — romance serials, political essays, personal ads, and club listings. A lonely girl in Leipzig can get Die Freundin without ever setting foot in a dancehall.

Across town, Magnus Hirschfeld has spent years trying to drag sex out of whispers and into science. The physicians in his Institute for Sexual Science would soon help pioneer some of the first gender-affirming surgeries. The institute also offers birth control and counseling, and works with Berlin police on ‘transvestite passes’ — documents that let trans people walk the city without being arrested for their clothes.

Berlin has somehow managed to give gender nonconformity paperwork.

Not everybody finds this charming. Berlin has been hearing the opposite sermon since the republic was born. Ten years earlier, in the political convulsions after World War I, a poster showed a crowned Berlin locked in a waltz with a skeleton, “Berlin, halt ein! Besinne dich. Dein Tänzer ist der Tod” — Berlin, stop. Come to your senses. Your dance partner is Death.

The poster was not about lesbians in tuxedos. It came from the political chaos of 1919. But the accusation is already there.

Berlin is losing itself. It must return to the past and what once made it great.

Of course, by the late 1920s, the people making that nostalgic argument have begun pointing at sex. In 1927, Wilhelm Frick warns that homosexuality will lead to the “disintegration of the German people.” Large numbers of Germans describe Weimar’s new sexual visibility as decadent, immoral, and evidence of national degeneration. Right-leaning religious organizations and parties preach family, restraint, and traditional German culture.

Looking back on the inflation era, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig remembered the city transforming into “the Babel of the world,” with gay bars multiplying like mushrooms and transvestite balls so extravagant he thought ancient Rome had been outdone.

Berlin read the room. Berlin went on dancing, spending, and fucking.

Berlin’s own tourist bureau was advertising Jeder einmal in Berlin! — everyone should visit Berlin at least once. In 1929, nearly 1.7 million guests did.

But not everyone enjoyed watching Berlin turn its private vice into a tourist attraction.

Because while people inside experienced liberation, and the moral right experienced decadence and national decline, young men experienced something else.

Exclusion.

Outside the dancehall stands Fritz. Twenty-three. Thin frame bowed to the cold.

He puts his hand into his trouser pocket and finds lint, two coins, and the soft cardboard stub of a cigarette he’s been saving. The door closes again. The muffled bass drum hits him in the ribs.

Fritz was too young for the war, so he didn’t get the medals, pension, or the story. He was born right on time for the inflation and a labor market into which the Kaiser’s last baby boom is now arriving all at once. That winter, nearly 2.5 million Germans are unemployed.

Germany has plenty of young men. What it lacks is something to do with them.

Fritz is not going into the party. He knows it. The laughing women know it. The door knows it.

The door shuts.

A few streets away, another door opens. Behind this one, Fritz will not find champagne, a velvet rope, or beautiful women looking through him. Instead, he will find a room full of men who look like him and see him in the way misery recognizes itself by its sharp edges.

Historian Detlev Peukert will later call Fritz’s cohort die überflüssige Generation — the “superfluous generation.”

The Nazis will call them recruits.

Superfluous.

What a brutal word to attach to a twenty-three-year-old man.

Peukert was describing a generation that came of age at precisely the wrong moment. Young Germans left school, apprenticeships, or university and were met with the closed door of unemployment.

It’s a story that should sound familiar to modern ears. No job meant no wages. No wages made it harder to leave home, establish a household, marry, or become the independent adult a young man had been taught he was supposed to become.

Unfortunately, the institutions supposedly responsible for helping Fritz looked ancient. Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education describes young people repelled by parliamentary bureaucracy and aging political parties, while yearning for what it calls a sinnerfülltes Dasein — a meaningful existence.

Meanwhile, the extreme right became increasingly adept at presenting itself as a return to national pride.

Now imagine somebody tells Fritz — You are not unnecessary.

Germany needs you.

There are meetings, and songs, and men calling themselves comrades. Fritz now belongs somewhere in the hierarchy. He has a rank, and a really crisp uniform.

And most intoxicatingly, somebody finally has an explanation for why the life Fritz expected has failed to materialize. It is not a very nice explanation. But it is an explanation.

And increasingly, young men are willing to listen because they are tired of their pain being ignored.

Everyone likes to conveniently forget who the Nazis recruited. By 1930, 36.8 percent of ordinary Nazi Party members were thirty or younger. In one nationwide sample of SA members between 1929 and 1933, 77.6 percent were under thirty.

Then the numbers begin to swell. The SA had about 60,000 members in 1930. By November 1931, it had 221,000. By August 1932, it had 445,000. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that young jobless men were drawn to the SA by wages, comradeship, and its striking uniforms, alongside its violent political mission.

History often flattens motives, but unemployment did not produce Nazis. Young Germans radicalized in multiple directions. At the time, communists and other movements also recruited among workers and the unemployed.

But the Nazis understood something about status.

A young man who felt small by himself could feel enormous marching beside five hundred other men.

Fritz had gone from surplus inventory to somebody’s soldier.

Hold on to Fritz. We will meet Felix next.

It’s 2026. Felix is twenty-three and German too. He is not standing in the cold. He is warm, indoors, staring at a glowing rectangle of glass in his weathered hand.

Fritz had to press close to the nightclub door to hear the party. Felix carries the party in his pocket.

He still didn’t get an invite.

Someone his age just got engaged. Someone else bought an apartment. A woman from school has posted photographs from Lisbon, then a promotion, then herself drinking something expensive on a rooftop with the ruddy bloom of a person whose life appears professionally art-directed.

Swipe.

Another woman has a master’s degree.

Swipe.

A man Felix’s age has sculpted abs, a watch the size of a saucer, and apparently six Lamborghinis despite having no discernible occupation.

The twentieth century had bread lines. The twenty-first has Instagram. Both are quite good at letting you know where you stand.

Then another man appears on Felix’s screen. This one has an explanation.

The feminist women are passing you. The immigrants are replacing you. The politicians despise you. Woke culture liberated everyone except white men. The old rules disappeared, and nobody bothered to write new ones for you.

Felix does not have to believe all of it. He only has to recognize one feeling.

Everyone has a chance for prosperity except him.

By 2026, young German men had moved markedly toward the political right. Germany’s Jugend in Deutschland 2026 study found a widening gender divide: young men were disproportionately likely to support right-wing parties, while young women leaned more heavily toward the left.

Then came the September 2026 election in Saxony-Anhalt — a terrifying turning point for Germany.

The AfD — Alternative für Deutschland — is Germany’s far-right nationalist party. Its Saxony-Anhalt branch is officially classified by the state’s domestic intelligence service as a confirmed “right-wing extremist” organization.

In the provisional final result, the AfD won 43.8 percent statewide. In Infratest dimap’s election-day analysis, 51 percent of men under twenty-five voted AfD, compared with 31 percent of women the same age.

Now, put yourself briefly inside Felix’s field of vision.

Young people have spent decades leaving parts of eastern Germany for better opportunities elsewhere. Young women have often left disproportionately. Economic and status differences between east and west have persisted long after reunification. Then Felix opens his phone and sees Berlin, Munich, London, Miami, Dubai, women, money, tits, vacations, careers, apartments, and people his age apparently winning at life before breakfast.

Fritz feared that society had no use for him. Felix’s problem is subtler.

He may have a job, a few friends, and be doing reasonably well. But the old milestones of male adulthood — financial independence, a home, marriage, fatherhood, status — can feel delayed, uncertain, or oddly stripped of prestige when everyone is internet famous.

Meanwhile, the comparison machine in his pocket pings. And somewhere inside it, somebody is offering to convert Felix’s status anxiety and gnawing unease into a story.

You are not falling behind because adulthood has become expensive, institutions are creaking, relationships have changed, or modern life is complicated.

No. Someone did this to you.

Scapegoating is enormously seductive. It takes a private humiliation and gives it an author. It takes loneliness and gives it enemies. Most importantly, it takes a young man wondering where he fits and gives him a group in which his grievance itself becomes proof that he belongs.

Fritz found those men in a beer hall.

Felix finds them in the comments section.

Different door. Same exquisite relief when somebody finally opens it and sees you.

Now meet Fred. Fred is American and also twenty-three. Red cap. Trucknuts swinging. You know the caricature.

Fred has a job. Maybe even a decent one. This is not 1930, and there is no breadline curling around the block. But Fred just cannot seem to get a grip on adulthood.

Rent eats his paycheck. The starter house has become a mythical creature captured by TikTok virgins. A night out costs enough to require financing.

The woman sitting next to him on his most recent date has already pulled ahead. Among Americans ages twenty-five to thirty-four, 47 percent of women now have bachelor’s degrees compared with 37 percent of men. And among twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds, young men are more likely than young women to still be living in a parent’s home.

None of this makes Fred oppressed.

It does make him twenty-three and painfully aware of where he expected to be by now.

Harvard’s 2026 Youth Poll found young Americans preoccupied with housing and the cost of living and, more ominously, described a growing loss of perceived agency — the sense that what they do no longer matters.

There it is again. Not poverty or fascism.

Uselessness.

Or, more precisely, the fear of becoming useless. Case in point: In 2015, researchers surveyed Australian men who had survived a suicide attempt and asked what words best described how they felt when suicidal. The most common answer was not sad.

It was “Useless or worthless.”

Seventy-four percent chose it. In the United States today, men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. Why? The study doesn’t answer that question. But maybe we should listen to how men describe themselves.

Fred opens his phone. Fred does not have to attend a MAGA rally. The rally comes through his headphones.

He doesn’t have to look far for someone willing to explain why he feels worthless, because grievance has a wonderful business model—begin with a pain the customer genuinely feels, then sell him the villain separately. Women got too much. Immigrants took his place. College became hostile to men. AI is coming for your job and your last sense of meaning. Fred doesn’t even know what masculinity is anymore since it is often labeled toxic.

But one group doesn’t see Fred as useless. By 2024, American politics had become very interested in Fred.

By now, we have reviewed the tape. Trump’s campaign pursued young male voters through precisely the media ecosystem many of them already inhabited — long-form comedy and sports podcasts, YouTube personalities and influencers including Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross and the Nelk Boys. Trump’s interview with Rogan alone drew more than 45 million views on YouTube by Election Day.

And the numbers moved. AP VoteCast found that more than half of men under thirty supported Trump in 2024, reversing Biden’s advantage with young men four years earlier.

Don’t be surprised if that pattern repeats in the next election.

Of course, young men should never be viewed as one political organism. Economic concerns are substantial, voting patterns differed by race and education, and plenty voted Democratic or did not vote at all. Feeling economically or socially adrift doesn’t always shape an ideology.

But the MAGA movement mastered speaking directly into the past’s scars while Democrats have repeatedly embraced hope for the future.

You are not failing. You were cheated.

You are not behind. Someone pushed you back.

You are not unnecessary. They are afraid of you.

That last transformation is the ICE trick. Feeling unwanted is miserable. Feeling dangerous is intoxicating.

Today, young men can own a truck, have a job, carry a device containing most of humanity’s accumulated knowledge and still feel that adulthood is disappearing over the horizon. He can be wealthier than almost anyone who lived in 1931 yet feel poorer than the twenty-six-year-old on Instagram who just landed his dream job.

No brass door or smoke-filled meeting hall. No brown shirt waiting on a hook. Just three hours on a podcast, two men talking into microphones, and millions of young men listening while they drive to work.

The technology changed. The status hunger did not.

And this is where a dead French aristocrat gets weirdly useful.

Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 and somehow returned to France with notes on Instagram.

Tocqueville noticed something strange about democratic equality. You would think equality would make people less obsessed with status.

He suspected the opposite.

In aristocratic societies, enormous differences in rank are obvious and relatively fixed. The peasant does not wake every morning furious that the duke owns a castle.

He is a duke. Different category.

Democracy collapses those psychological distances. People who look like us can suddenly rise above us. Tocqueville became fascinated by the envy the meritocracy produced. As one scholarly analysis of Democracy in America summarizes, democratic equality and mobility make comparison easier because citizens see people who recently held their own rank acquire wealth and power.

That changes the scarcity mindset.

The Queen of England lives in a palace. Okay. She is the queen. Not in my stratosphere.

Brad Pitt owns six houses. Also fine. He’s Brad Pitt.

But if some twenty-four-year-old Black man named Colton who appears to have gone to the same sort of high school is leaning against his new BMW on TikTok while explaining how he achieved financial freedom through “mindset”…

Now we have a problem. Because Colton looks like a peer. And Colton took your spot.

Tocqueville’s great witchy insight was that equality increases comparability. The closer another person seems to our station, the harder it becomes to explain why he has something we don’t.

And then, more than a century later, René Girard arrived to drive this point home.

Girard argued that human desire is profoundly imitative. We look at what other people want in order to determine what is worth wanting ourselves. The model does not merely possess the object. By wanting it, the model teaches us that the object has value. Girard called this mimetic desire.

Put Tocqueville and Girard together and social media begins to look less like a communications technology and more like a 24-hour dissatisfaction machine.

Once upon a time, we judged whether we were worthy by looking around the village. In the twentieth century, we admired rich and beautiful people, but they were celebrities. Now, everyone is a celebrity, presented as peers who outperform us every day.

In other words, social media did not invent status anxiety. It merely radically expanded the comparison group.

Before brushing his teeth, Fred can discover that a twenty-two-year-old has a sharper jawline, another has a prettier girlfriend, another has six million followers, another supposedly earns $80,000 a month, another just bought his mother a house, and another would like to explain why men without six-pack abs deserve loneliness.

None of these people know Fred exists. But psychologically, they have become his village.

Tocqueville understood why Fred compares. Girard explains why the comparison changes what Fred wants. But neither quite explains what happens when the gap becomes humiliating.

For that, we return to Germany.

Erich Fromm escaped Nazi Germany and published Escape from Freedom in 1941. He was trying to answer a question that had become impossible to avoid.

Why would human beings who had gained political freedom surrender themselves to authoritarian movements?

Fromm’s answer was darker than “the economy got bad.”

Modernity had liberated people from older hierarchies and obligations, but freedom could also produce isolation, insecurity, and insignificance. People who felt powerless could seek relief by attaching themselves to something larger and stronger.

Authoritarianism offered a peculiar emotional bargain.

Submit upward. Dominate downward.

The individual who feels small can experience the power of the in-group, nation, or leader as partly his own. Fromm applied that mechanism directly to the social and psychological conditions that helped Nazism attract sections of German society.

And suddenly Fritz’s uniform looks different. It is not just clothing. It is also political identification. Alone, Fritz is an unemployed twenty-three-year-old whom the economy does not need.

In formation, Fritz is Germany.

That is the dark turn in our three-man story. Tocqueville understood why Fred compares. Girard explains why comparison changes what Fred wants. Fromm explains what can happen when the gap becomes humiliating.

We go looking for power.

To be clear, none of this means that status anxiety automatically produces neo-Nazis. Fritz lived through national defeat, hyperinflation, depression, and democratic collapse. Felix and Fred live in one of the wealthiest democracies on Earth yet carry status grievances.

But they both ask the same question.

Where do I stand?

Or, more painfully: What am I for? What use do I serve?

That may be one reason arguments about young men so often feel sterile. We always attack the tail of the beast and not the head. The economists worry about wages. The feminists point at misogyny. The sociologists talk about college enrollment and sexlessness. The influencers blame dating apps. And the strongman invents immigration monsters.

They all describe different tributaries running into the same psychological river.

Because a job does more than provide money. It provides usefulness.

A relationship does more than provide sex. It provides acceptance.

A home does more than provide shelter. It signals adulthood.

A community does more than provide company. It provides recognition and a sense of belonging.

And when those milestones move farther away while an algorithm parades thousands of apparently successful peers past us every day, the result can be materially comfortable people experiencing something that looks remarkably like deprivation.

Not absolute deprivation. Relative significance.

That is where political movements can make a promise that economic statistics cannot.

We see you. You were right to feel ignored. Your country needs people like you.

And the brutal punchline is that the ideology that restored their sense of importance ultimately assigns them the most deadly masculine role.

One final cruelty lies hidden inside the word “superfluous,” and as a mother of an almost 17-year-old son, it’s what keeps me up at night.

The United States does not currently have a draft, but the machinery behind it recently changed.

In December 2025, Trump signed a law requiring the Selective Service System to begin automatically registering eligible men rather than waiting for them to register themselves.

Starting in December 2026, the government registers male citizens ages eighteen through twenty-five using information drawn from federal records. The law permits federal agencies to provide Selective Service with identifying information including addresses, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, and email addresses.

The legal obligation was already there. What disappeared is the requirement that a young man put his name on the list.

During the Vietnam War, a young man determined to evade the draft could disappear, leave the country, exploit a deferment with “bone spurs,” or simply gamble that an overwhelmed government would never catch up with him. Estimates vary, but during the Vietnam War, roughly 30,000 to 100,000 Americans went abroad to avoid service, mostly to Canada.

Automatic registration is designed to make that kind of invisibility much harder, and I can’t see the Canadian government hiding American draft dodgers this time. We are kinda on their shit list.

As the U.S. remains in a forever war with Iran, we should heed history’s lessons. A young man can be drawn toward a leader promising strength because he feels powerless. He can be drawn toward nationalism because he feels insignificant. He can be drawn toward the language of Hegseth’s “warriors” because he is desperate to know what role remains for him.

But history offers a grim answer to what nations do after convincing young men their purpose is to become warriors and defenders of a nation.

They ask them to prove it with the ultimate price — their lives.

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Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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In Part One of our stroll through oil history, Venezuela spent a century learning an irritating lesson that finding petroleum is the easy part. The trouble starts when humans gather around it.

Now Trump has announced the “biggest oil deal in world history,” which is reassuring only if you skipped Part One.

The new arrangement gives the United States access to roughly one-fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves through 17 fields. Standing rather prominently beside this newest gate is Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt — a Chávez-era billionaire who seems to have mastered the most durable skill in an oil economy.

Betancourt is useful to whoever currently has the key.

But before we get to the strange question of why oil makes some countries rich while turning others into cautionary tales, we should meet the man at the gate.

Betancourt belongs to Venezuela’s famous class of bolichicos — young businessmen who became spectacularly wealthy during the Chávez years.

During this time, Venezuela needed power plants. So his company, Derwick Associates, stepped in and won roughly $2 billion in state contracts, including some awarded without competitive bidding.

Unfortunately, Derwick had very little experience building power plants. This did not appear to be a dealbreaker. Government records later showed that many of the plants operated far below capacity or not at all. (Betancourt and Derwick have denied wrongdoing. They claim the facilities were completed and blamed later failures on state mismanagement.)

Then his résumé acquired a legal appendix.

By 2019, Betancourt was under federal investigation in connection with an alleged scheme involving more than $1 billion misappropriated from PDVSA and laundered through Miami real estate and overseas accounts. Investigators identified Betancourt as an unnamed, unindicted co-conspirator. They never charged him.

Spain and Switzerland also opened money-laundering investigations. In March 2026, a Spanish judge shelved that case. Prosecutors appealed, and it was reopened in June. The Swiss criminal investigation remains open. Betancourt has denied any wrongdoing.

So let’s ask the obvious question. How did a Chávez-era billionaire repeatedly investigated over alleged money laundering wind up holding one of the largest keys to Trump’s new oil gate?

In 2012, Betancourt entered a partnership with PDVSA to operate mature fields in western Venezuela. Those fields eventually became core production for NABEP, which Betancourt co-founded in 2024.

Before Maduro’s capture, Betancourt also supplied information that helped the United States enforce its blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan tankers, facilitated contacts with Delcy Rodríguez, and afterward helped broker oil agreements between Caracas and Washington.

In other words, Betancourt had connections to both sides of the gate.

And Washington did not merely choose Betancourt’s company as a partner. Under the agreement, NABEP will receive a 100-year lease covering 17 oil fields. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital takes a 35 percent stake in NABEP, while the State Department gets the right to buy 20 percent of its oil at cost and preferential access to the remaining output.

There was no competitive bidding, and negotiations remained secret until shortly before the announcement. Venezuela’s ruling-party-dominated National Assembly has since backed the agreement, but lawyers and petroleum experts continue to question its legality, transparency, implementation and durability.

Don Trumperoni has also suggested that his regime may decide which companies deserve access. When Exxon CEO Darren Woods publicly called Venezuela “uninvestable,” Trump complained that Exxon was “playing too cute” and suggested he might keep the company out. By August 31, Trump announced that Exxon was “going in.” (Exxon has been rather less enthusiastic and has not confirmed its plans.)

Again, consider the sales pitch.

Please invest tens of billions of dollars because political interference is over. Also, I may punish your company for expressing concern about political interference.

Somewhere an Exxon risk analyst quietly added another slide.

And now…your gas prices

This brings us back to the reason Americans should care, even if they have never spent a single Sunday watching Hugo Chávez sing Venezuelan folk songs.

Trump’s promise depends on enormous private investment. Private petroleum investment runs on a timetable completely indifferent to midterm elections. Bringing Venezuelan oil to market at that scale requires evaluating fields, drilling wells, rebuilding pipelines, securing diluent, restoring facilities, negotiating debt, moving extra-heavy crude, finding specialized refining capacity, and then operating long enough to recover tens of billions of dollars.

That means trusting Venezuela years from now. Perhaps longer.

It also means trusting the United States. Trump can promise Exxon access to Venezuelan oil, but he cannot promise Exxon the next American president will follow the same plan. Obviously, a future U.S. administration could regard Trump’s structure as excessively extractive or neo-colonial and attempt to renegotiate the American role.

A future Venezuelan government could also challenge agreements made under Delcy Rodríguez.

A nationalist movement could demand that the petroleum be returned to greater state control.

Another authoritarian could simply change the rules.

None of these things must happen. That is not how investment risk works. They merely can happen. And oil companies put a price on can.

They demand higher returns, stronger guarantees, and better contractual protections, or they put the money somewhere else. This risk is why Venezuela’s history is not some amusing sidebar to Trump’s oil deal.

History is part of the cost of every Venezuelan barrel

None of this means countries are doomed because they discover petroleum. The resource curse is not destiny.

Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Norway provide three remarkably different case studies to the same question:

What do you do when geology hands the state a giant treasure chest?

Venezuela let the treasure chest become the center of political life. The democratic parties distributed it. Chávez promised to reclaim it for the people. Maduro inherited it. Cronies learned to feed from it. Every political struggle became, at least partly, a struggle over who controlled the oil gate.

Saudi Arabia has diagnosed the economic problem much more clearly.

Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) knows petroleum cannot finance the kingdom forever. His Vision 2030 is therefore using today’s oil wealth to purchase tomorrow’s economy — tourism, logistics, manufacturing, technology, entertainment, finance and enormous pools of global investment. (Since Trump decided to blow up the Middle East, Saudi tourism is down 5%-6%. Apparently, bombs over your head ruin the sightseeing.)

Aramco itself has sold small stakes to public investors. The Saudi state has also transferred portions of Aramco and other state assets into the Public Investment Fund, which invests that capital across industries at home and abroad. This is smart diversification, but it does not solve the political problem.

MBS remains the crown prince of an absolute monarchy and directs much of this wealth. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has liberalized parts of social life while maintaining concentrated political control. For example, Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on women driving and pushed substantially more women into the workforce.

The modernization is real. But so is the monarchy.

Of course, those two things can serve each other nicely. A diversified Saudi economy needs more workers, more consumers, more industries, and more foreign investment. Social reform can make the kingdom wealthier without making the royal family less royal.

Saudi Arabia diversifies the treasure and keeps the gatekeeper. For an authoritarian, that is a perfect design. It’s also partly why Trump and his family get giddy around MBS.

Then there is Norway.

Norway also discovered a ridiculous amount of petroleum and reached a different conclusion.

Perhaps nobody should get to spend all this money all at once.

Its petroleum revenues feed the Government Pension Fund Global, which invests broadly outside Norway. Government withdrawals operate under fiscal rules and parliamentary oversight. This system is designed to prevent whoever happens to be in office from treating this year’s petroleum revenue like the winnings from a scratch ticket.

To be clear, Norway did not solve the resource curse by finding unusually incorruptible politicians. It solved much of it by building a system that assumes politicians should not be trusted with an unlocked treasure chest.

That’s the difference. Saudi Arabia diversified the assets. Norway diversified the assets and the power over them.

Make the oil boring

Trump approaches petroleum like a real-estate deal. There is an asset. Someone controls it. Someone wants it. Just put the right men in a room, make a deal, announce victory, and name it after yourself.

That works better when the building is already standing. (Or in the case of the East Wing of the White House, not standing.) A Venezuelan oil field may require years, or possibly decades.

And here is the funny part about all that waiting. Reuters currently puts Venezuelan production at about 1.25 million barrels a day; Reuters Open Interest estimates it could reach around 1.5 million within two years. That would add roughly 250,000 barrels to a global market consuming roughly 103 million every day. That increase can certainly put some downward pressure on oil prices, but it is not a torrent. It is roughly one-quarter of one percent of world demand.

Now let’s look at the long-term plan. By 2035, Rystad Energy, an independent energy-research firm, thinks Venezuela might reach 2.3 million barrels a day and above 3 million by 2050. That’s a meaningful addition to supply.

Splendid.

We only have to get through two presidential elections, several Congresses, approximately nine billion opportunities for somebody to change the deal, and a planet that may have other ideas about dirty energy.

Which brings us back to the sales pitch. Trump has promised Americans a torrent of cheap Venezuelan oil. Maybe he is right. Maybe production will increase. Maybe some companies will invest. Maybe Venezuela will finally begin rebuilding an industry sitting atop a geological fortune.

History does not forbid happy endings. But it does come with a blueprint and a raised eyebrow. And if this happy ending doesn’t raise your bullshit hackles, then you need to go back and read part one.

Cynicism aside, Venezuela has spent a century watching different characters approach the same treasure chest. Foreign corporations, dictators, democrats, revolutionary television stars in red berets, loyal understudies, cronies, and interim governments all arrived with the same promise — put the right people in charge of the oil, and prosperity will reach everyone.

Now, an American president is promising that his deal will finally make the oil behave.

Every one of them has had a plan.

Meanwhile, oil is always in less of a hurry than the salesman. It can remain underground much longer than any president can remain in office.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.

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Donald Trump has promised Americans that Venezuela is about to rain oil. On August 28, Trump announced what he called “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY,” involving 17 Venezuelan fields and more than 65 billion barrels of recoverable crude. The proposed deal promises that the fields will produce 1.5 million barrels a day and attract nearly $100 billion in investment.

And you, dear everyday American, will see that windfall at the pumps.

Trump is right. There is certainly plenty of oil. Venezuela has more proven reserves than any country on Earth.

The difficulty begins shortly after that sentence.

Because Venezuela has been trying to get rich from oil for roughly a century. They could perhaps offer some notes.

Let’s start with physics. Much of Venezuela’s famous Orinoco crude is extra-heavy, which is the petroleum equivalent of trying to drink cold molasses through a cocktail straw. It needs lighter hydrocarbons mixed into it so it will move, specialized equipment to process it, pipelines that work, refineries that can handle it, electricity that stays on, and several billion dollars left over for whatever broke while you were reading this paragraph.

Then there is Venezuela itself. Trump wants private oil companies to spend tens of billions of dollars rebuilding an industry that has endured nationalizations, sanctions, collapsing infrastructure, political purges, corruption, unpaid debts, and governments whose interpretation of a contract has occasionally changed after the company bought the drilling equipment.

Naturally, oil executives reacted to Trump’s oil bonanza with about as much enthusiasm as Melania at a state dinner. When ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods met with Trump in January, he reminded the president that Exxon has already had its Venezuelan assets taken twice. He even described the country, under its existing legal conditions, as “uninvestable.”

ConocoPhillips, another veteran of Venezuela’s nationalization years, has similar reasons to remember where it left its wallet.

Chevron is less wary. They agreed to a $7 billion Venezuela expansion this week with plans to roughly double its Venezuelan output to 600,000 bpd within five years. Eni and others are also moving.

Oil executives’ reluctance presents a small problem for the promise of cheap gas. Trump can announce 65 billion barrels. But he cannot executive-order them into your Camry.

However, the problem isn’t merely geological. Because when it comes to oil money, the politics get stickier than the petroleum. To understand that part, we need to talk about the strange thing oil does to countries, and a political tradition Americans may find uncomfortably familiar.

But first, your gas bill has some history homework…

The trouble with finding buried treasure

Economists call it the resource curse, which sounds like the plot of an Indiana Jones movie where Harrison Ford opens the wrong tomb and discovers OPEC. The principle is less supernatural.

A country discovers that God, plate tectonics, or some long-dead swamp has left it sitting on an obscene amount of something valuable — oil, gas, diamonds, coal, copper…pick your shiny thing. Everyone celebrates because obviously the nation is about to become fat and rich.

Sometimes it does.

And sometimes the villionaires begin fighting over who gets the ducats before anyone bothers building the country for the little guy.

Oil is particularly good at causing trouble because the state can collect astonishing revenues without first creating an astonishing economy. A country does not need millions of prosperous taxpayers to sell crude abroad. It needs wells, equipment, technical expertise, and somebody willing to buy the stuff.

No taxes? Sounds great, right? Hold that thought.

Oil money can produce what political scientists call a rentier state — instead of the government depending primarily on citizens for taxes, it gets a large share of its money from selling a resource.

The distinction sounds academic until you consider the political bargain underneath it. If I need your taxes, I have an incentive to keep you productive, reasonably prosperous, and sufficiently content that you do not arrive at the palace with a makeshift guillotine.

If an oil well is throwing dollars at me, our relationship can become what my Italian forebears call…flexible.

The state can hand out subsidies, contracts, jobs, and favors. Politicians can buy loyalty. Friends can become mysteriously gifted businessmen. Enemies can discover that the government is less interested in their opinions than it used to be.

The curse is not the oil. The curse is the oil’s gatekeeper.

And Venezuela has spent a hundred years trying different gatekeepers. At various points, ordinary Venezuelans have been handed a Morton’s fork — a choice in which either path leads somewhere crappy.

Well, by now, Venezuela has an entire shit-eating silverware drawer.

Venezuela Saudita

By 1950, petroleum was already providing roughly 95 percent of Venezuela’s foreign exchange and 72 percent of government revenue. American officials understood perfectly well that Venezuelans resented foreign control of the resource beneath their own feet. Still, by the early 1950s, U.S. interests controlled two-thirds of Venezuelan oil production.

At the time, Washington’s preferred Venezuelan partner was Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who had many desirable Cold War qualifications. He was anti-communist. He welcomed foreign investment. And most importantly, he cooperated. Sort of.

There was also the unfortunate business about him being a dictator. On January 23, 1958, Venezuelans booted him.

One begins to sense a theme.

But I would leash that cynicism. Because then Venezuela did something genuinely impressive that should remind us how humans can cooperate when we stay beneath the asshole threshold.

By 1958, Venezuela had built a durable democracy.

It wasn’t perfect. No democracy ever is. But the major political parties constructed the Punto Fijo system and agreed to respect elections. They even managed to maintain civilian government while military coups were spreading around Latin America like a regional subscription service.

Then the 1970s arrived, and oil prices went berserk. Venezuela became so flush with petroleum money that the era acquired a nickname — Venezuela Saudita — Saudi Venezuela.

During this time, Venezuelans became famous abroad as enthusiastic shoppers. The joke was “Está barato, dame dos” — it’s cheap, give me two. Two televisions. Two refrigerators. Two whatever-you’ve-got. Miami merchants learned to recognize Venezuelan spending power the way casinos recognize a whale. Contemporary accounts described fancy cars on wide highways, stores overflowing with imports and weekend flights packed with Venezuelans going north to shop.

And to be fair, oil wealth really did transform the country. Roads appeared, schools expanded, universities grew, public employment expanded, while electricity and running water reached more households. Infrastructure rose out of the ground with the sort of speed that makes a country believe history has finally decided to be nice.

President Carlos Andrés Pérez — CAP to his people — nationalized petroleum in 1976. (Nationalizing oil means a government takes ownership of a country’s oil production, infrastructure, and resources, removing them from private or foreign corporate control.)

In other words, the oil belonged to Venezuela.

Excellent. Problem solved. Everyone breaks out the cuatro.

All that remained was for petroleum prices to remain high forever, politicians to spend responsibly, bureaucracies to remain efficient, and humans to resist their natural inclination for unbridled greed.

You probably know where this story is headed.

Oil prices began sliding in the early 1980s just as Venezuela discovered that it had spent, borrowed, subsidized, and imported beyond its means. By 1983, capital was fleeing, and the debt was coming due. Then the bolívar suffered a spectacular devaluation known as Black Friday.

Venezuelans who once enjoyed abundance were now living through austerity, inflation, and declining purchasing power. The famous “give me two” country was now learning to make one last for an awfully long time.

CAP had left office in 1979, after one term, while two other presidents enjoyed the increasingly thankless task of discovering how much of Saudi Venezuela had been purchased on future oil prices.

And then Carlos Andrés Pérez came back.

Daddy’s home

In 1988, CAP ran for president again. This time, he basked in the nostalgia of his first oil-soaked term. His campaign barely needed an economic platform. He was the platform. Here was the vigorous old statesman from the glorious days, the man voters associated with scholarships, development projects, and Saudi Venezuela.

CAP promised to make Venezuela great again. He won easily.

Daddy was home.

Side note: If that phrase has acquired an unpleasantly familiar American ring, blame Tucker Carlson, who in 2024 told a Trump rally that “Dad comes home” to punish the disobedient children, after which the MAGAmuffins began chanting like automatons “Daddy’s home. Daddy’s home.” History does not repeat itself, but apparently its political consultants share a Dropbox.

Anyway, the Venezuelan version lasted approximately until CAP opened the books. Let’s just say there was no second Saudi Venezuela.

Pérez had spent the campaign attacking the International Monetary Fund. Now he needed the International Monetary Fund. Oops.

So his government embarked on sweeping economic reforms — subsidies were reduced, and price controls loosened. Predictably, gas prices rose, and public transportation fares followed.

Then on February 27, 1989, Venezuela exploded in waves of protests, riots, and looting referred to as the Caracazo. The government sent in the military. Hundreds were killed, possibly more. We will never know because executed civilians are the kind of statistic a government likes to omit.

The political meaning was considerably easier to count. Here was one of the richest oil countries on Earth. Its people were getting poorer while its politicians got more corrupt. And when ordinary Venezuelans revolted against the bill, their democratic government answered with soldiers. Rinse and repeat.

However, somewhere in the Venezuelan military, a talkative lieutenant colonel with a proclivity for boisterous singing believed history had special plans for him.

The boy who wanted the major leagues

Hugo Chávez had not originally planned to become Hugo Chávez. His first ambition was baseball.

He grew up poor in Sabaneta, on Venezuela’s western plains, where he and his older brother were largely raised by their grandmother, Rosa Inés. The house had a dirt floor and no running water, but it had fruit trees, stories, and apparently an excellent little confectionery operation.

Rosa Inés made arañas — “spiders” — strips of papaya cooked into sugary sweets. Young Hugo sold them around town to help the household. He would later tell these stories endlessly…and I mean, endlessly. Grandma Rosa, the fruit trees, the dirt floor, the local characters, the old battles she described so vividly that he said he could almost feel the cavalry’s dust. It was a good yarn.

It was especially a good yarn for Hugo Chávez, who knew how to build politics out of stories.

Chávez loved baseball and dreamed of becoming a major-league pitcher. The military academy in Caracas had a good baseball program, which offered a poor provincial kid both an education and a possible road to professional ball.

So Chávez joined up.

This would prove an unfortunate scouting decision for several future Venezuelan governments.

Chávez discovered that he loved military life even more than baseball. He had found another calling. Chávez became obsessed with Venezuelan history, particularly Simón Bolívar and nineteenth-century populist general Ezequiel Zamora. He developed the conviction — not uncommon among young men who spend a great deal of time reading about national liberators — that Venezuela needed another national liberator.

Then came the Caracazo.

On February 4, 1992, wearing his signature red beret, Chávez led an attempted coup against Pérez.

It failed.

The rebels did not capture the president. Chávez surrendered.

Normally, “failed military coup” is where a political biography begins quietly backing toward the exit. But the Venezuelan authorities made one fatal mistake — they allowed Chávez to appear on national television. In an inspiring speech, Chávez accepted responsibility for the failed coup and told the remaining rebels to stand down, as required.

But he also said the movement had failed in its objectives “por ahora” — for now. In other words, we lost the battle but not the war. Let’s be patient.

Then he disappeared into prison. Cue the martyrdom theme song. Venezuelans would not forget their hero with his trademark red beret.

Flash forward to 1993. Pérez is impeached in a corruption scandal. In 1994, Chávez received a pardon, exchanged military rebellion for electoral rebellion, and began traveling Venezuela with one beautifully simple message:

You live in a country rich with oil. Yet, you are poor because the people running the country stole your share. The old parties of the deep state failed you. The elites failed you. Foreign interests ripped us off.

I will put Venezuela first and give the country back to you.

A considerable amount of this message worked because a considerable amount of the grievance was true.

Later came the Chávez red shirts, red caps, and eventually an entire political movement drenched in revolutionary scarlet. (Americans may recognize the historical rhyme. Chávez took a cheap piece of red headwear, attached it to a political identity, and allowed supporters to do the rest.)

In 1998, Venezuelans elected Hugo Chávez president. The gate had a new keeper. And, good Lord, did he enjoy the job.

The Hugo Chávez Show

I need readers to understand that in the weeks I spent researching this piece, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Hugo Chávez’s TV performances. I mean, the guy tells great stories AND can sing.

His weekly program Aló Presidente began as a call-in radio show and became something closer to Meet the Press crossed with a revival meeting, a cabinet meeting, a telethon, a family cookout, and whatever happened to be wandering through Chávez’s head that Sunday.

It might last five to…(gulp) eight hours. There was no dependable ending because Hugo Chávez did not believe the clock outranked Hugo Chávez.

He sang folk songs, quoted poetry, and told tearjerking stories about his grandmother. He reminisced about baseball, pondered Bolívar, dissed enemies, and told wry jokes. He shifted from sentimental to furious and back again. Five hours into a broadcast, he might still be telling you about socialism, Grandma Rosa, a horse, Fidel, the CIA, and somebody’s new chicken cooperative.

Government officials felt they were required to watch because Chávez sometimes issued instructions on his show.

Once he ordered ten battalions toward the Colombian border on live television. On another occasion, he announced that Venezuela would leave the IMF. Both decisions were later quietly reversed, but that only made the drama more riveting.

If the showboating sounds oddly familiar, here’s a major difference. Chávez also delivered on some promises that mattered enormously to his base.

During the great oil boom of the 2000s, Chávez poured petroleum revenue into social missions, which provided subsidized food, healthcare, education, and housing. Poverty fell dramatically. Poor Venezuelans who had spent generations watching oil wealth flow upward could now point to clinics, schools, and food programs.

This is why treating Chávez as nothing more than a buffoonish dictator misses the mechanism entirely.

He had genuine mass support.

He also had a familiar conviction that because he represented “the people,” institutions obstructing Hugo Chávez were, by a remarkable coincidence, obstructing the people.

The government became increasingly personalist. Chávez governed by decree more aggressively, pressured independent institutions, attacked critical media and tightened political control over PDVSA — Venezuela’s state-owned oil and natural gas company.

Then came 2002. Large anti-Chávez demonstrations erupted. Violence followed. Military officers detained Chávez and announced that he had resigned — something Chávez would insist he never did.

Businessman Pedro Carmona stepped in as interim president.

And then, in the proud tradition of men who mistake suddenly acquiring power for having acquired all the power, Carmona wildly overplayed his hand.

He dissolved the National Assembly, dismissed the Supreme Court, and suspended the Constitution. Apparently the plan for rescuing Venezuela from an increasingly authoritarian president was to become considerably more authoritarian before lunch.

This did not go over as planned.

Chávez supporters poured out of the barrios and headed toward the presidential palace. The military itself fractured, with units that had supported Chávez’s removal suddenly reconsidering what exactly they had signed up for. Loyal troops retook Miraflores. Carmona’s government collapsed almost as quickly as it had appeared.

Forty-seven hours after the coup began, a military helicopter flew Hugo Chávez back to the palace.

Now, I know what you are thinking. This was the Bush years. However, a later State Department inspector-general review found no evidence that the State Department or U.S. Embassy in Caracas planned, participated in, aided, or encouraged Chávez’s overthrow. Or so the story goes.

However, Washington’s initial response — and its obvious distaste for Chávez — gave Chávez something almost as politically useful as American meddling. Chávez had another American-shaped villain for the story.

Chávez wasn’t merely back.

He had survived a coup.

And for a man already inclined to believe history had cast him as the hero of a Venezuelan epic, forty-seven hours in political purgatory did very little to encourage humility.

Then PDVSA workers joined a long national strike. Chávez ultimately fired roughly 19,000 oil workers and tightened his command over the company.

This solved one political problem and created several petroleum ones.

PDVSA became increasingly subordinate to the revolutionary state. And with the fired employees out the door, technical expertise went with it.

During this time, foreign producers were pushed into ventures requiring majority Venezuelan state control. Chevron stayed. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips left while they still had their shirts.

The great irony is that Chávez had campaigned against the idea that foreign companies should control Venezuela’s oil, and he meant it. Whatever one thinks of the man, handing Washington privileged control over Venezuelan petroleum is almost the precise opposite of the political identity he spent his life constructing. And don’t think Venezuelan people have forgotten Chávez’s mission.

Which brings us to the heir he chose.

The understudy inherits the theater

By 2012, Chávez had cancer, and he knew the show was ending. His chosen successor was Nicolás Maduro. Yep. That guy.

This choice can look baffling in retrospect. Other than the badass tracksuits, Maduro possessed approximately none of Chávez’s performing gifts. Chávez could turn an eight-hour television broadcast into political theater. Maduro often looks as though someone has asked the assistant regional manager to fill in while the charismatic founder is having surgery.

But Chávez did not necessarily want charisma. Maduro possessed something safer.

Loyalty.

So in December 2012, before leaving for treatment in Cuba, Chávez explicitly told supporters that if he could not continue, they should elect Maduro. The crown had been passed to the heir apparent.

Then Chávez died. And Maduro inherited petroleum just as it was failing. Oil prices collapsed, production deteriorated, while currency controls and disastrous economic policies compounded the damage. Corruption spread. Later U.S. sanctions tightened the vise.

Predictably, the Venezuelan economy imploded.

Chávez distributed oil money while performing five hours of paternal intimacy on television. Maduro increasingly had less money to distribute and fewer people willing to watch the sequel.

As support eroded, repression grew. Opposition figures were jailed, barred, or pushed out. Protesters were violently suppressed. Elections became increasingly manipulated. Millions fled the country.

The revolutionary promise had once been:

The oil belongs to you.

Now Venezuelans could reasonably ask where both the oil and the promise had gone. That’s when Alex Saab arrived to answer that question.

The fixers

If “resource curse” still sounds too abstract, meet Alex Saab.

Saab was a Colombian businessman who became one of Maduro’s most important fixers and contractors. During the economic catastrophe, Maduro’s government created CLAP — a program distributing boxes of basic food to Venezuelan families who desperately needed it.

However, investigative journalists at Armando.info traced overpriced, poor-quality food contracts to companies connected with Saab. One huge contract worked out to roughly $34 per box for goods reporters estimated they could get for less than $20. Some powdered “milk” was so nutritionally dubious that a researcher said it could not really be classified as milk.

People were hungry, and the government controlled the food program. Politically connected businessmen controlled lucrative contracts feeding the program. Money accumulated around the gate.

There is your rentier state.

Saab was later arrested and extradited to the United States. The Biden administration released him in a 2023 prisoner exchange that brought detained Americans home and formed part of a broader attempt to coax Maduro toward a more credible election.

Now, one does not want to condemn getting American hostages home. However, the Biden administration should have anticipated the consequences of putting its head in the tiger’s mouth.

Maduro made the newly freed Saab a cabinet minister.

And Venezuelans once again found themselves staring at a Morton’s fork. Insiders promised that state control would protect the country’s wealth. Outsiders promised that external pressure would rescue the country from the insiders. And ordinary people waited for the oil under their feet to produce something resembling normal life.

Then Trump arrived.

A more corrupt gatekeeper appears

The Trump regime dramatically escalated pressure on Maduro in 2025. American forces began destroying suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean. The Trump regime emphasized narcotics and “narco-terrorism.”

But that’s not what on-the-ground reporting found. AP reporter Joshua Goodman told FRONTLINE that the U.S.’s true strategic objective was not arresting drug lords. It was to pressure Maduro into leaving power.

Then in January 2026, American forces bombed Venezuela (without the approval of Congress), captured Maduro, and brought him to the United States to face charges. In May 2026, Alex Saab was deported to the U.S. to await money laundering charges.

And Venezuelans reacted exactly as people with Venezuela’s history might react. Which is to say, it’s complicated.

Some celebrated. Of course they did. Maduro had presided over repression, economic catastrophe and a political system that had driven millions of Venezuelans abroad.

Others saw the U.S.’s dominant military power deciding Venezuela’s political future and understandably found the sight less comforting.

Many appear to inhabit both emotional worlds at once. Mostly because a Venezuelan can hate chavismo and still believe Venezuelan oil belongs to Venezuelans.

There is nothing contradictory about wanting Maduro gone and not wanting a convicted felon President to decide who gets your petroleum. You can despise chavista corruption and distrust Washington. You can believe Chávez wrecked institutions and still think he was right that Venezuela’s national inheritance should not become somebody else’s prize.

And yes, you can want U.S. intervention because life was almost unimaginably corrupt under Maduro. And you also can remain suspicious of U.S. intervention because practically every powerful person who has promised to save Venezuela has eventually exploited them.

We do not get to assign Venezuelans the morally correct emotion. History has already given them enough options.

After Maduro’s capture, his vice president Delcy Rodríguez became interim president. Then Washington began exercising extraordinary leverage over the petroleum sector while Rodríguez loosened Chávez-era restrictions to attract private investment.

Recently, Trump announced his giant August oil deal.

Suddenly, we are back at the gate.

Tomorrow, in Part Two, we’ll ask why some countries turned oil into lasting prosperity (hint: Norway) while others discovered that buried treasure can come with a very expensive curse.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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During Trump’s first presidency, White House officials developed an unusual way to handle presidential directives they considered dangerous, impractical, or simply batshit crazy.

They said, “We will be right on that, Mr. President,” and then proceeded to distract him with shiny things in hopes he would forget.

Trump almost always forgot.

This strategy required finesse. Reince Priebus reportedly had a favorite technique. If Trump ordered something particularly alarming — or wanted somebody fired — Priebus would assure him it would happen “next week.”

Next week was a wonderful place. Much calmer than this week. Spacious. Plenty of parking.

And, most importantly, by next week Trump was off chasing a new car.

Other aides preferred the ancient bureaucratic art of pretending they were following his orders while they stalled for time. Trump wanted punitive tariffs? Sure. Working on it. Economic advisers Gary Cohn and Rob Porter sometimes even delayed the paperwork.

One time, Trump drafted a letter withdrawing the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. So Cohn simply stole it off the Resolute Desk. The letter could not be signed if nobody could find the letter, right?

Then Trump suggested invading Venezuela. The Venezuelan defense minister, Vladimir Padrino, called Trump’s military plans an “act of craziness” and “supreme extremism.” National security adviser H.R. McMaster later talked Trump out of it. McMaster resigned in 2018.

Then came the border. We all know by now that Trump does not like to use the courts to control immigration numbers. Not enough pathos. So according to reporting based on interviews with administration officials, Trump discussed a trench stocked with snakes or alligators, an electrified wall, and spikes capable of piercing human flesh.

Somewhere in the federal government, a lackey had to investigate the cost of a reptile moat. Just think…before Trump, America had survived nearly two and a half centuries without requiring a federal crocodile procurement strategy. History is sometimes unpredictable.

Then Trump suggested shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down. He later applied the same video game logic to American protesters. Former defense secretary Mark Esper had to actually explain to Trump why the military cannot shoot its own civilians.

And let’s not forget the hurricanes. In 2019, Axios reported that Trump had repeatedly asked senior officials whether hurricanes approaching the United States could be bombed with nuclear weapons. According to one person who attended a briefing, an official responded with approximately the bureaucratic equivalent of, Excellent thought, sir, we shall alert the Department of Weather Explosions immediately. Thankfully, the idea went nowhere.

This happened often enough that one former White House official described a recurring cycle. Trump would demand tariffs, military action, or some other hair-brained scheme. Of course, staff would delay. Tell him they are busy importing the alligators and consulting moat specialists from the medieval department of “we are fucked.”

A week later Trump would ask what had happened to his grand Princess Bride scheme. He would then discover nothing had happened, get angry, and repeat his rant.

At the time, these stories were hilaaaaaarious. They produced books, anonymous op-eds, and endless jokes about “adult day care.” The president said something clownish. Somebody quietly removed the paperwork. Tomorrow arrived. No nuclear hurricane.

Ha ha. Isn’t it just adorable to be ruled by a ham sandwich wearing a gold crown.

Of course, those people were the guardrails. Throughout Trump’s first administration, there were officials willing to stall him, contradict him, redirect him, ignore instructions, or occasionally make a document disappear beneath the great sofa cushions of democracy.

That was Trump 1.0

Then Trump came back. As a convicted felon and a man found civilly liable for sexual abuse.

Unsurprisingly, the stories changed. The dam broke.

Where did all the adults go?

Trump’s second term did not repeat the staffing experiment of 2017.

The Associated Press reported in 2025 that prospective administration officials underwent intensive screening for ideological alignment and loyalty to Trump’s agenda. Basically, they examined candidates’ past social media posts and looked for criticism of Trump. I would call it a loyalty test, but it was more like an anti-loyalty purge.

Trump had spent years complaining about officials who thwarted him. This time, the government would contain fewer people to tell him no. Unfortunately, a cabinet of flying monkeys willing to do your vicious bidding doesn’t only change policy.

It changes information.

In August 2025, Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the department released a disappointing employment report and unusually large downward revisions to previous job estimates.

That spring, the National Intelligence Council concluded that Venezuela’s government was not directing the Tren de Aragua gang — undercutting a central claim the regime had used to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act. A week after that assessment, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired the council’s two top officials.

Apparently, the war intelligence was insufficiently supportive.

Then Trump fired 17 inspectors general across the federal government — the independent watchdogs whose irritating little job is to investigate waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct inside the very agencies Trump now controlled.

By now, we all see the mafia mentality. Bad employment numbers? Fire the statistician. Intelligence contradicts the story? Fire the intelligence officials. Someone might investigate what everyone else is doing? Whack the investigators.

Eventually, an authoritarian does not have to falsify the numbers. He only has to teach that bad numbers carry consequences.

However, communication is a two-way street. Once the public stops receiving reliable information about the government, the government also stops receiving reliable information about the public.

Which brings us to Bucharest, December 21, 1989.

And a balcony.

Before social media, there was the balcony

Pour something large. We’re going to Bucharest…

It is December 21, 1989. Communism is collapsing all over Eastern Europe, Romania is miserable, and people have been shot in Timișoara. About this time, Nicolae Ceaușescu decides that what the country really needs is another opportunity to applaud Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Fortunately, he has a balcony for this.

Ceaușescu loved his balcony. Dictators always do.

High above the square outside Communist Party headquarters, the Romanian dictator could look down upon a crowd united in flags, banners, and endless applause. The balcony is basically Instagram Live without the dangerous possibility that somebody named @FuckNicolae69 will appear in the comments.

And Ceaușescu had done this routine plenty of times. The balcony jutted from Communist Party headquarters over the enormous square below, giving him the perfect dictator’s-eye view of Romania — tiny people, enormous leader. It was a very flattering perspective.

There was only one small problem — reality. The Romania that Ceaușescu saw from his balcony was not exactly Romania.

It was Balcony Romania.

Balcony Romania adored him. Balcony Romania loved socialism. Balcony Romania was thrilled about the shortages. Balcony Romania apparently considered standing outside in December holding an enormous portrait of Nicolae Ceaușescu a delightful way to spend a Thursday.

That was until the December 21 rally.

Then, something changed.

It started with the usual hijinks. Workers and members of official organizations were bused into central Bucharest. They were given banners, told where to stand, when to clap, and what to sing. The whole performance was broadcast live on Romanian television.

And so, around noon, Nicolae stepped onto his balcony for another refreshing glass of public adoration. There he was, with his winter coat, his big funny Vlad the Impaler hat, and a great gray sea of applauding humanity spread beneath him.

Ceaușescu began talking about the glorious achievements of Romanian socialism, which was an interesting topic because many Romanians had recently experienced those achievements as food shortages, cold apartments, and the secret police. So far, so good.

Then Ceaușescu condemned the unrest in Timișoara.

The crowd listened. He kept talking.

And then…something went horribly wrong.

A sound rose from the square.

Ceaușescu stopped.

This was not one of the approved sounds. There were applause sounds, patriotic chanting sounds, and possibly Long Live Ceaușescu, Light of the Carpathians sounds.

This sound was different.

People were heckling him — whistling and shouting. The enormous human wallpaper beneath the balcony had begun expressing… opinions. On live television.

Watch the footage. It is one of history’s great facial expressions.

Ceaușescu freezes. His mouth hangs slightly open. His hand comes up as though perhaps the Romanian people are a malfunctioning toaster and he can get them working again by pressing the lever.

“Alo?”

He tries again.

“Alo, alo.”

Hello?

Hello, Romania?

Are you still there?

Romania was there. That was the problem.

For perhaps the first time in decades, Ceaușescu was hearing from the Romanian people without somebody screening the call.

But the truly extraordinary part of the footage isn’t the booing. It’s Ceaușescu’s bewilderment. He looks less frightened than…nonplussed.

Because why wouldn’t he be? For years the entire Romanian state had functioned like one enormous customer-service department whose principal customer was Nicolae Ceaușescu. Newspapers, television, and party officials told him Romania was thriving. Crowds were assembled to demonstrate how thrilled everyone was about all the thriving.

And anyone tempted to mention that perhaps life wasn’t so grand would lose their job or possibly more.

Ceaușescu had built himself the perfect disinformation echo chamber.

The following day, demonstrators poured into central Bucharest. Ceaușescu tried the balcony again. Of course he did. When your emotional-support balcony has worked for twenty years, you don’t abandon it after one bad Yelp review.

But the spell was gone.

Within hours, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were fleeing the Communist Party headquarters by helicopter.

Three days later, after a summary military trial, they were executed.

Now, this is the moment where history tempts us into learning the wrong lesson. The takeaway is not: Dictator unpopular. Crowd boos. Dictator falls. The end.

Pleeeeease. That is not how we roll at the Grim Historian. History is rarely considerate enough to provide same-day service. Ceaușescu’s ending was unusually fast. The more interesting arc is what happened before the ending.

For years, his government had gotten progressively better at controlling what the public could say. And therefore progressively worse at knowing what the public thought.

But that is the authoritarian bugaboo. Silence the critics, fire the pessimists, punish the messenger, fill the square with supporters, and stand on the balcony. Look down and marvel at your popularity. Eventually, you conveniently forget that the applause are pre-arranged.

History has other examples of dictators who couldn’t read the emptying room. I would be remiss if I left out the other famous balconies.

Mussolini understood the balcony immediately. From Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Il Duce could puff out his chest, jut out his chin, and address enormous crowds packed into the square below. The building became part of the Fascist propaganda machine precisely because its balcony provided such magnificent political theater. Until it didn’t.

Stalin’s balcony was fear itself. He built a system so terrified of displeasing him that, when he suffered the stroke that killed him, members of his household staff later said they hesitated for hours before entering his room because disturbing Stalin without permission could be dangerous.

Imagine becoming so powerful that people are afraid to check whether you’re dead.

Modern leaders can use rallies, friendly media, loyal institutions, or social-media feeds that filter out criticism before it reaches them. The medium changes, but the function remains the same. Simply create enough distance from ordinary people that the ruler can mistake managed information for genuine approval.

In other words, stand far enough above the public that you can no longer hear what they are saying.

Then mistake the silence for love.

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Reality and the rest of the world check the polls

Let’s now leave the balcony for a moment and check in with the people standing underneath it.

Because Trump keeps insisting that unfavorable polls are fake, and the polls, rather rudely, keep polling.

At the end of August, Reuters/Ipsos put Trump’s job approval at 33 percent, tied for the lowest level of either of his presidencies in that polling series. A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released the same day found 32 percent approval and 64 percent disapproval. Economist/YouGov, surveying Americans August 28–31, found 33 percent approving and 62 percent disapproving.

To be clear, Trump’s dropping popularity does not mean he is destined for a Ceaușescu ending. History does not offer that warranty. It means the balcony is sending back information he publicly rejects.

However, the rest of the world does not have to believe the balcony.

It has spreadsheets.

In 2025, Dutch pension funds sold a net €30 billion in U.S. securities, including €18 billion in bonds. ABP, Europe’s largest pension fund, went further. Its holdings of U.S. government bonds fell from about €29 billion to €4.6 billion in roughly eighteen months, while more of its portfolio shifted toward Europe.

Then the Dutch central bank moved 86 tonnes of gold out of New York and Ottawa to London.

Its own explanation was wonderfully bloodless: “increasing geopolitical unrest,” better crisis preparedness, better access to reserves in an emergency.

Of course, central bankers rarely say Holy shit, everybody grab the gold.

They say risk diversification.

Speaking of diversification…Norway’s $2.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund has now proposed cutting roughly $80 billion from its U.S. Treasury exposure as part of a broader overhaul designed to diversify its bond portfolio.

Eighty billion dollars is a fairly expensive way of saying perhaps we shouldn’t keep all our eggs in this one precious American-made tariffed basket.

China has been conducting its own slow-motion diversification for years. U.S. Treasury data show mainland China’s holdings falling from about $731 billion in June 2025 to $633 billion in June 2026. Meanwhile, China’s central bank added nearly 20 tonnes of gold in July alone, its largest monthly addition since 2023 and part of a continuing gold-buying streak.

Canada isn’t loading bullion onto a truck. It is looking for customers. Prime Minister Mark Carney has explicitly described diversifying Canada’s partnerships abroad as a national strategy. And the numbers are beginning to move: the U.S. share of Canadian exports fell from 73 percent to 68 percent year to date, while exports to non-U.S. markets rose.

Zoom out even farther, and the pattern becomes harder to dismiss. In a 2026 World Gold Council survey, 74 percent of central-bank respondents expected the U.S. dollar to make up a smaller share of global reserves five years from now. A separate survey of 90 central banks, sovereign funds and public pension funds found, for the first time, more institutions planning to reduce dollar holdings over the coming decade.

To be clear, this is not a run on America. Total foreign Treasury holdings actually rose 2.3 percent over the year, which sounds reassuring until you check who was buying. Private investors piled in while the central banks were net sellers. But that is precisely the point. Countries do not need to declare the United States doomed before they hedge against American risk.

Pension funds do not wait for the balcony to collapse. Central banks do not need a revolution in the square. Trading partners do not stand around eating popcorn while America becomes as predictable as Caligula’s horse.

They diversify.

Quietly.

A little gold moves to London. A few billion leave Treasuries. A Canadian company finds another customer. A sovereign fund changes its benchmark. Nothing dramatic enough to interrupt the Trump rally.

Until one day, Americans look down from their own balcony and discover that while we were arguing about whether the crowd was cheering, everyone else had been finding another place to put their money.

The crumbling balcony

We keep watching the performance — the rallies, the posts, the meme coins, the merchandise, the ridiculously expensive monuments. We try to ignore Trump’s fantastical declarations that everyone is winning, that the polls are fake, and the critics are liars. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to play along.

They can simply leave the crazy behind.

Not all at once. That would be dramatic. History usually gives you something quieter — a bond sold here, a bar of gold moved there, a new trade agreement signed somewhere else.

One exit at a time.

So that by the time the ruler hears the booing, everyone else has already moved their chairs.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.

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America is named after an Italian who worked for the Medici, so right away you know the man demanded respect.

Amerigo Vespucci was a Florentine merchant, navigator, and eventually Spain’s chief map nerd, whose great contribution to Western civilization was looking at the enormous landmass Europeans kept bumping into and saying… Guys, I don’t think this is Asia.

This turned out to be a very good career move.

Normally, you don’t get naming rights until you’ve accomplished something first. Trump appears to believe owning a Sharpie is close enough.

On August 27, Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to replace Lake Ontario with “Lake America.”

Two days earlier, trade talks between the U.S. and Canada collapsed, and Trump said he was considering Lake America because the United States didn’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario anymore.

No one knows when a Trump tantrum is coming. Maybe he is still mad about Justin Trudeau’s really cool socks. Maybe Mark Carney’s ability to form a coherent economic thought has become intolerable. Who knows.

It doesn’t really matter because naming something is cheap. Governing is hard.

Which brings us back to my boy, Amerigo…

How America became America, by accident

Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492 and proceeded to spend the rest of his life insisting he had found a western route to Asia.

This was inconvenient because he had not.

Amerigo Vespucci came along later and argued that these lands represented an entirely different part of the world. His accounts of his 1501–1502 voyages helped persuade European scholars that they were looking at a separate continent rather than some stray appendage of Asia.

Now, Amerigo had several advantages over Columbus in securing my personal loyalty. First, he wasn’t a genocidal maniac. Second, he was a Florentine who survived employment with the Medici. That’s basically like making it through The Godfather trilogy while remaining on speaking terms with the Corleones. Third, Simonetta Vespucci — the legendary Florentine beauty traditionally associated with Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus — married Marco Vespucci, a distant cousin of Amerigo. Did Columbus have a really hot cousin-in-law who may have inspired one of the greatest paintings in history? I rest my case.

Besides, Columbus’s name already survives in Colombia, the District of Columbia, British Columbia, the Columbia River, Columbus, Ohio, Columbia University, and enough American streets to ensure the little grifter never lacks parking. He’ll be fine.

More importantly, Columbus died in 1506. He never even got to see himself lose the continental naming rights.

One year later, Martin Waldseemüller and a small circle of scholars in Saint-Dié produced a spectacular twelve-sheet world map incorporating the latest information from the voyages. It was the first known map to depict the Western Hemisphere clearly separated from Asia.

Across what we now call South America, Waldseemüller printed one little word:

AMERICA.

The accompanying Cosmographiae Introductio explained the reasoning. Amerigo had recognized this as a fourth part of the world, so why not name it for him? Amerigo became the Latin Americus, which became the feminine America.

And that was pretty much it.

No international naming commission. No referendum. No executive order. Some Renaissance map nerds made an editorial decision.

Then Waldseemüller changed his mind.

By 1513 and 1516, he had dropped America from his maps, replacing it with names such as Terra Incognita and Terra Nova.

Too late, Marty.

Other cartographers — including Johannes Schöner and Peter Apian — kept using America. Then in 1538 Gerardus Mercator made the decisive expansion, applying the name to the northern continent as well as the southern one.

Amerigo Vespucci had somehow won two continents without entering the contest.

That is also how names become real. Someone proposes them. Someone else repeats them. A map prints them. Another map copies them. People begin using them.

Eventually everyone forgets there was ever a choice.

Who died and made Google king cartographer?

On August 29, Google Maps began showing American users “Lake America” instead of Lake Ontario. Google says it is following its longstanding practice of reflecting the U.S. government’s Geographic Names Information System. Canadians still see Lake Ontario. People elsewhere may see both names.

That sounds wonderfully bureaucratic. We didn’t rename anything. We merely updated the database.

Suuuuuure.

Maps are editors of reality. Martin Waldseemüller’s map did not merely record a name everyone was already using. His map helped create the usage. The Library of Congress calls the 1507 map “America’s birth certificate” for precisely that reason.

Google has infinitely more power over common geographic language than Waldseemüller ever dreamed possible. Millions of people carry its maps in their pockets. Businesses embed Google maps on their websites. Search results reproduce its terminology. Directions and screenshots reproduce it. Obviously, after Google made the change, Canadian government-linked sites that relied on Google’s mapping technology suddenly began displaying the Trump name themselves.

That is how an executive order grows legs. Trump calls it Lake America. Then the federal database calls it Lake America. Google bends the knee and calls it Lake America. Websites call it Lake America. People start saying Lake America. And eventually someone shrugs and says…

Well, that’s what everybody calls it.

No. That is what normalization looks like while it is happening.

Other mapmakers had a choice. MapQuest made the correct one. After Trump’s executive order, the 30-year-old mapping service posted a map still labeled Lake Ontario with three beautiful words, “We’re not changing it.”

And something extraordinary happened.

People downloaded MapQuest.

By today, it had become the №1 navigation app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, while usage surged to roughly 50 times its normal rate.

I was one of them. Today, I used MapQuest to get to my doctor’s appointment. And I have exciting news from the technological frontier of 1999…

It works.

It works exactly like Google Maps. Directions appeared. A little arrow showed me where to turn. I arrived at the correct building. Nobody handed me a stack of MapQuest pages fresh from an HP DeskJet and told me to reset the trip odometer. We have apparently had alternatives this entire time.

Now, I know some of you might be thinking — Ms. Beccia, why are you wasting anger over a little man in his petty sour grapes governing?

Let me explain, as my hands calmly gesticulate my inner rage. I have written before about what I call the Naked Man Doctrine. The guy takes off his pants and sits on your couch, and everyone wastes time debating whether the situation is serious enough to make a scene.

Meanwhile, there is a naked man on your couch who has just learned that nobody is going to make him put his pants back on.

Lake Ontario is another naked Trump sitting on our couch. (Sorry for the imagery.)

Trump does not need this name. America receives no economic benefit from it. The lake does not become more American. Canada does not become less Canadian. Ships do not travel faster. Fish do not become more patriotic.

The value is in getting everyone else to behave as though his declaration changes reality.

The absurdity is the test.

Will the federal agencies comply?

Yes.

Will corporations comply?

Google did.

Will Apple? Trump has reportedly called the company personally about that one. As of this writing, Apple has not made the change.

Will we comply? That part remains undecided.

We have more power than we think

Last year ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel amid political pressure. Consumers protested and canceled Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions.

ABC put Kimmel back on the air six days later.

We cannot say consumer cancellations alone caused Disney’s reversal. But reporters covering the company said the speed of the reversal had a great deal to do with the internal and external pressure Disney was receiving. Later data showed monthly cancellation rates for Disney+ and Hulu doubled during the backlash.

Corporations count on your belief that your individual choice doesn’t matter. One canceled subscription doesn’t scare Disney. A million might.

One person downloading MapQuest is nostalgia. Hundreds of thousands of people downloading it in a weekend gets somebody’s attention.

This is how collective power always looks from ground level.

And perhaps no story proves that better than the name of our own country.

Martin Waldseemüller printed America. Other people had to keep printing America. Mercator had to adopt America. Readers had to learn America. Generations had to repeat America until the editorial choice of a German cartographer became so permanent that today we cannot imagine calling two continents anything else.

Google should know better than anyone that maps have that power.

So use MapQuest. Use another map that still says Lake Ontario. Write and say Lake Ontario. Laugh at Lake America.

And when someone tells you this is silly because we have bigger problems, tell them the smallness of the demand is exactly the point.

Power does not arrive only with tanks and laws and men kicking down doors. Sometimes it arrives as a tiny change in a database and waits to see whether everyone will quietly update their vocabulary. The Nazis understood this perfectly well. They started renaming streets and squares almost as soon as they took power in 1933.

An authoritarian can order a new name onto any map. Only the rest of us can make it stick.

I really miss the Gilded Age villionaires. They were robber barons, union busters, monopolists, and assorted bastards, but at least they understood the basic etiquette of putting your name on shit.

You had to build something first.

Carnegie wanted his name everywhere, so he helped build 2,509 libraries. Cornelius Vanderbilt gave $1 million to found and build a university. John D. Rockefeller Jr. financed Rockefeller Center, and turned it into one of the largest private construction projects in the country. Then they got their names on things.

Trump skips the work.

He doesn’t build a new national cultural center. He slaps his name on the Kennedy Center. He renames the Department of Defense to the Department of War, and then proceeds to spectacularly lose a war with Iran. He doesn’t create a new gulf. He renames the Gulf of Mexico. He doesn’t discover, purchase, build, improve, or otherwise do a goddamn thing. He just steals other people’s fire and changes the nameplate.

Because naming is the cheapest imitation of accomplishment. You get the monument without doing the work that made it worth naming.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.

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Raise your hand if you knew where the Strait of Hormuz was a year ago.

Liar. Put your hand down.

I sure as hell didn’t. I was blissfully enjoying my Hormuz-free life. Now, if I see one more graphic with a tiny cartoon oil tanker inching across a blue squiggle while a retired admiral says the word “chokepoint,” I will lose my will to live.

Hormuz. Hormuuuz. Take your Dr. Seuss-sounding strait and shove it with your green eggs and ham. Every single damn night. Staring at the same map and watching everything get more expensive.

But this is how Americans do war—We count. How many aircraft carriers, missiles, troops, oil fields, shipping lanes, and miles of territory? Circle that bottleneck with a red marker and geopolitics appears to explain the whole crisis. Iran has leverage because Iran lives next to the door.

But the map misses another form of power.

Every war has a clock.

By now, we all understand that Iran does not need to defeat the United States militarily to improve its bargaining position. It only needs to make the economic and political costs of the conflict reach Washington faster than Tehran.

It’s obviously working. AIS-detected traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains roughly 90 percent below pre-conflict levels, and few operators are willing to risk their lives to “run the Hormuz gauntlet.”

The economic fallout has reached American gas pumps. On February 26, two days before the war began, the national average for regular gasoline was $2.98 a gallon. By August 20, it had reached $4.10 — an increase of $1.12 a gallon, or nearly 38 percent. AAA specifically cited continuing instability in the Strait of Hormuz as a factor keeping crude prices elevated.

Meanwhile, the United States and Iran remain stuck somewhere between war and peace

That contest is an example of Chronopolitics — the politics of time.

Chronos comes from the Greek for time. Chronopolitics describes how political actors understand, organize, and manipulate time, and how different temporal horizons shape power.

I would like to say I invented that word, but I am not that clever. The term was coined by American sociologist George W. Wallis in his 1970 article, “Chronopolitics: The Impact of Time Perspectives on the Dynamics of Change.” Wallis argues that much of the friction in social and political change comes from people operating on different clocks.

In other words, wars of attrition, sieges, sanctions, blockades, insurgencies, and embargoes are all fights over the same deceptively simple question:

Who has to give in first?

That question is particularly important now because Trump’s TACO negotiating style repeatedly reveals his timetable. Trump has given Iran so many deadlines and timeouts that most of the world has begun to hit the snooze button every time he says the war is over. If only the President could meme this war away.

A deadline gives you leverage only when the other side fears the deadline more than you do. Otherwise, you have simply announced when you expect to become uncomfortable.

For such a self-proclaimed dealmaker, Trump appears to have missed this lesson. He spent decades cultivating a negotiating persona built around ultimatums, demands, threats, and quick declarations of victory in the midst of defeat. That approach may work with fast-and-furious, fake it until you make it real estate deals, but it doesn’t work in the war room where the long game wins.

But more importantly, your adversary can smell your desperation. An adversary able — or merely willing — to absorb pain longer…can. Iran can watch oil markets, American polling, congressional elections, and Trump’s base grow increasingly disenchanted.

This does not mean Iran has infinite time. Its economy is badly damaged, and new American sanctions are intended to deepen that pressure. On August 24, Iran’s rial fell to a record low of roughly 2.02 million to the dollar on the open market. Inflation has savaged household purchasing power, and the IMF expects the Iranian economy to contract by more than five percent this year.

The relevant question in chronopolitics is never who can wait forever? Nobody can. It is whose clock expires first.

And that may be the most important contest taking place in the Strait of Hormuz. We have spent weeks asking who controls the water. We should be asking who controls the clock.

To answer that question, let’s take a break from politics and turn to my people…

New York’s Fulton Fish Market Finds Labor Peace

Beginning in the early twentieth century, organized crime sank its hooks into one of America’s largest wholesale seafood markets. At the center of the operation was Joseph “Socks” Lanza, a Genovese mobster who became powerful in the market and its unionized workforce.

Socks did not need to own the fish. This is the important part.

He did not need to catch the fish, buy the fish, sell the fish, or give a flying vaffanculo about the fish.

He just had to control when the fish moved.

Because a truckload of cod is not a truckload of steel. You cannot park it by the curb for three days while everybody works out their feelings. Fish has a clock. The minute it leaves the water, that clock starts ticking. Socks could slow that clock down, and send his little friend, Sal…otherwise known as Salmonella.

Decades later, federal prosecutors would describe a Genovese-controlled system in which businesses paid for the wonderfully respectable-sounding commodity known as “labor peace.” Businesses that resisted could face labor problems, delays, or other mysterious difficulties at precisely the point where their merchandise started to stink.

Nobody had to put a gun on the table or announce that something unfortunate might happen to your family. The threat was already lying in front of everyone on a bed of ice.

The mobster could wait.

The wholesaler could wait.

The fish could not.

The Mafia controlled the docks—a chokepoint—but the chokepoint derived much of its power from something less visible. Every minute the wholesaler resisted, his bargaining position deteriorated. Socks could have another espresso. The halibut was entering negotiations with bacteria.

That’s a very simple lesson the Trump crime family missed. Once one side hears your clock ticking, you start to get the stink.

Which brings us, naturally, back to Iran.

The Clock of Hormuz

Oil obviously doesn’t rot like tuna. Economically, though, oil absolutely has a clock. Countries can draw down inventories. Governments can release strategic reserves. Saudi Arabia can move some crude through alternate routes. China can ignore santions. Refineries can substitute certain grades. Ships can assume greater risks. Wealthier countries can bid scarce supplies away from poorer ones.

For a while.

The important words in geopolitics are often hiding inside phrases like for a while.

The emergency oil released since the war began has helped cushion prices, but those cushions are being consumed. By late August, roughly 290 million barrels of a 400-million-barrel coordinated emergency release had already been used, while global inventories had fallen sharply since mid-July.

That is one clock.

Trump has another.

Energy prices feed into gasoline, diesel, airfare, shipping, manufacturing and eventually the price of nearly everything that must travel somewhere before you buy it. Unless you are fabulously wealthy, most Americans notice the cost of living during midterm elections.

Iran, however, is not sitting serenely beside the Strait, smoking a hookah and waiting for Mar-a-Lago to crack. Iran can certainly make disruption at Hormuz hurt the rest of the world, but every additional month of conflict also punishes Iranians. Their fish is beginning to stink.

So who controls this clock?

Economists have placed China as the clear winner, but even China doesn’t escape Father Time. Beijing may enjoy watching Washington bleed, but China is also the world’s largest crude importer. Roughly half of its imported oil traditionally comes from the Middle East. By June and July, its crude imports had fallen roughly 35–41 percent below prewar averages.

However, unlike Trump, Beijing hasn’t spent the last ten years screaming, “Drill baby drill.” Nearly 55 percent of new cars sold there are now electric, reducing the amount of transportation that must ride every oil shock. China’s adorable candy-colored little cars aren’t just cute and cheap; they’re geopolitical insulation on wheels.

The U.S. can impose vastly greater military and economic pain, but the U.S. operates inside an electoral democracy where rising gasoline prices, falling approval ratings, and an unresolved war will cause political consequences on a very predictable schedule.

Iran, Russia, and China see America’s November 3 election clock. Does Putin care about his popularity ratings? Does the Iranian government care about the suffering of its people? You know the answer.

Thankfully, history offers a remarkably clean example of what happens when one side creates a clock — and then discovers that the other side has figured out how to slow it down.

For that, we turn to Rome…

Hannibal gets his clock rearranged

In 218 BCE, Hannibal Barca is an absolute Carthaginian menace. He marches his army all the way from Spain, over the freakin’ Alps, into Italy.

There were elephants. War elephants. And all of Rome is like, ohhh no… they’ve got elephants, we’re cooked. (As a children’s book author, I am required by federal statute to mention the elephants.)

The elephants, however, were not Rome’s main problem.

Hannibal was.

The guy turns out to be a tactical genius. That’s not my history crush. He is pretty much considered the greatest general in antiquity.

So Hannibal just starts deleting Roman armies. At Trebia…gone. At Lake Trasimene, he hides his entire army in the morning fog next to a lake. The Romans stroll right into it, and it’s a MASSACRE.

(Required elephant sidenote: After the battle at Trebia, Hannibal’s elephants die from cold and disease, except for one. They’re tropical animals. What did they think was gonna happen?)

So Rome goes, okay, we need a guy. So they pick this cautious old dude, Fabius. Quintus Fabius Maximus, to be respectful. Which is the kind of name you give your firstborn if you expect him to have a marble bust by kindergarten.

Fabius took one look at Hannibal’s now mythical military record and reached a conclusion that must have sounded almost un-Roman.

Maybe stop fighting him.

Not forever. Just stop giving Hannibal exactly what Hannibal wanted.

That’s the whole plan. He tails Hannibal around Italy at a safe distance, burns all the crops so Hannibal’s army can’t eat, picks off the stragglers, and every time Hannibal spins around like “BRO. FIGHT ME.” Fabius just goes, “nah, I am good.”

Now, for some context. To Romans, this is a pussy move. They HATE it. So they nickname him Fabius the “Cunctator” — “the Delayer.” Which is one of those Roman nicknames that sounds much more dignified in Latin than in English. But Romans mean it as a straight-up insult — like, this guy trails the bully around carrying his books.

Nobody wants to be led into war by Gary the Procrastinator.

But Fabius had recognized something his more egotistical critics had not. Hannibal was waaaaaaaay better at winning battles.

The only way to beat Hannibal was to change what counted as winning.

So Fabius turned geography into time.

Hannibal could roam Italy. Fine. Every mile he moved had to be supplied. Hannibal could burn farms. Fine. Burn enough of them, and you still have not captured Rome. Hannibal could provoke the Romans. Fine. The Romans did not have to come down from the hill.

The strategic question slowly shifted away from Can Rome defeat Hannibal today? toward something much more dangerous for Hannibal.

How long can Hannibal remain Hannibal?

Subscribe Before Time Runs Out!

The answer was not obvious, because Hannibal was also very good at being Hannibal. Did I mention the elephants?

At one point, Fabius managed to trap Hannibal’s army in Campania by controlling the mountain passes. Hannibal needed to escape. So he gathered roughly two thousand cattle and tied bundles of sticks to their horns. Then he waited until dark and set the bundles on fire.

The cattle were driven toward the mountains. From a distance, the moving lights looked like an army climbing toward the passes. Roman troops saw what appeared to be thousands of Carthaginians escaping over the heights and rushed toward them.

They had, in fact, launched a military operation against terrified flaming cows. Meanwhile, Hannibal took his actual army through the opening.

According to Plutarch, the burning cows panicked and scattered across the mountainside, setting vegetation alight while Hannibal slipped away. This is why I love ancient military history. Everyone has a marble bust, so you forget how often these people were improvising with livestock.

Anyway, Hannibal had beaten Fabius…again. And yet the larger problem remained. Fabius did not need to out-Hannibal Hannibal.

He just needed Rome to survive him.

That distinction was difficult for Romans to tolerate. Waiting looked humiliating. Hannibal was still in Italy. Farms were still burning. Murderous cows were freaking everyone out. People wanted something decisive.

Eventually Rome gave them their decisive battle.

In 216 BCE, Fabius’ term expires. So Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro puff out their chests, raise the biggest army Rome has ever assembled, and march out at Cannae. But Hannibal lets the middle of his line get shoved backward on purpose, folds his wings around the Romans like a hug, and surrounds the entire army. Kills something like 50–70,000 men in a single afternoon. One of the worst days in Roman history. An actual ocean of dead Romans.

Suddenly, Gary the Procrastinator was looking pretty good.

Of course, Rome ultimately needed more than time. But at this point, Hannibal is getting old. He’s like the Tom Brady of Carthage. Eventually, a scrappy Scipio Africanus carried the war into North Africa, forcing Hannibal home and defeating him at Zama in 202 BCE.

(Last elephant sidenote: Scipio also defeated 80 fresh new elephants. Apparently, Romans had grown wise to Hannibal’s elephant hijinks.)

But let’s not give Scipio all the credit. Rome survived because Scipio inherited a limping, still alive Rome. That was Fabius’s gift. Fabius kept the Republic alive long enough for Rome’s manpower, alliances, wealth, and political resilience to raise new armies.

The battlefield may have belonged to Hannibal, but time did not.

The strategy that later took Fabius’s name — the Fabian strategy — rests on an idea far more interesting than mere patience. When someone takes a Fabian approach, it means they refuse to let a stronger opponent set the timetable. You preserve yourself, stretch his commitments, deny him decisive outcomes, and most importantly, wait for his advantages to decay.

Iran is Fabian-ing the fuck out of Trump.

Rome is not the only example. During the American Revolution, Washington did not have to destroy the British Army. He only had to keep an American army alive long enough for maintaining a war across the Atlantic to become more expensive, politically and strategically, than Britain was willing to bear.

Russia did something even more brutal to Napoleon (who ironically studied Hannibal.) Russia retreated, surrendered territory, stretched Napoleon’s supply lines, and let distance and winter turn the most powerful army in Europe into a starving, gangrenous infantry eating their own horses.

When Stalin blockaded Berlin, he assumed the Western Allies would eventually decide that supplying an entire city by air was impossible. They simply kept flying. After nearly a year, Stalin blinked first.

And in Vietnam, the United States could win battle after battle without solving the larger problem. Hanoi did not need to conquer Washington. It needed to remain in the war longer than Americans were willing to remain in it.

Different centuries. Different weapons. Different continents.

Same question.

Who has to give in first?

That is the part of warfare that cannot be drawn neatly on a map. Armies have clocks. Economies have clocks. Alliances have clocks. Democracies have election clocks. Oil reserves have clocks. Even dictators have clocks, though their clocks never tick fast enough.

Which makes the current American strategy particularly strange. The Pentagon is full of people who have studied Cannae, Napoleon, Berlin, Vietnam. But political leadership now treats patience as weakness, deadlines as leverage, and every conflict as something requiring a victory announcement before the next news cycle.

Hannibal knew how to execute a double envelopment.

Fabius knew when not to fight one.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.