Photo of 37-year-old Alex Pretti is seen at a makeshift memorial near the spot where he was shot dead by a U.S. Border Patrol agent yesterday in Minneapolis. Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images. (Courtesy of Axios, PO Box 101060, Arlington VA 22201 ).
He's losing
Where I sit tonight --
probably the same place as a lot of you right now -- is in the path of the
largest winter storm in years. Tracy and I spent the afternoon getting ready.
We already went to the supermarket yesterday, so what we were left with was
making sure our backup battery power supply is charged and the generator is
ready to go. That meant finding the little connection thing to charge the
Jackery battery and looking for our collection of extension cords we can run
from it, and from the generator outside, to the stuff we’ll want to be able
to keep on if the power goes out – the fridge, the wifi router, the TV, and a
couple of lamps. I was toiling away in the
room at the back of the house we use for cat boxes and cat feeding and
keeping-stuff-we’re-waiting-to-put-away, and I was thinking of what to write
at the end of this out of control week, the out of control month that’s about
to come to an end, hell, the extraordinarily out of control year we have – so
far – survived, when it came to me: He’s losing. He’s “losing it,” as the
saying goes. He is more and more visibly disconnected from the reality the
rest of us, and the rest of the world, live in. They can still shoot him up
with something that is not vitamin B and wheel him out in front of the public
and the press and turn him loose to babble the lies that make him so happy to
repeat over and over – he won the 2020 election that he lost; the prices of
things like electricity and food and drugs and health care that everyone else
knows are going up, he thinks are going down 400 or a thousand percent or
whatever number he’s got stuck in his mind; he’s the greatest president ever,
greater even than Washington and Lincoln; and on and on. But it’s not
working, and he knows it, and his people know it. He’s losing his health. A
new purple wound bloomed on his hand in Davos that they tried to explain away
by saying he hit his hand “on a table.” What? There weren’t enough hands to
shake in Davos, so they couldn’t explain it away using that lie, or maybe nobody
would shake his hand. Who knows. Something is seriously wrong with him. It’s
what his narcolepsy is all about. He couldn’t keep his eyes open if they
paraded a bevy of topless teenagers in front of him, he’s on the nod so often
and so deeply. The thing about dragging the leg comes and goes, but if I were
to guess, I’d say one of the reasons they’re rushing to complete the
gold-plated jet from Qatar they say will be ready “by summer” is that they’re
installing some sort of elevator he can use to get into the thing. He’s losing supporters.
Three or four polls are out telling the tale of his crash in popularity with
the 18 to 30-year-olds. Even those who flipped from Biden to him in 2024,
think he stinks, with 65 percent in one poll and 69 percent in others
disapproving of the way he’s doing his job. He’s so crazed over his tanking
poll numbers that he wants to make it a crime to run polls that say his
numbers are falling. He’s losing Republicans
in the House and Senate. How many have said they’re resigning now? I lost
count at 40. They’re looking at the losses they’re going to face in the
midterms and bailing at record levels. He’s going to lose the
midterms. Everybody knows it. James Carville thinks it’s going to be a
blowout. Charlie Cook was just dragged kicking and screaming into admitting
control of the Senate is likely to go to the Democrats. The White House
announced this week that Trump will be traveling to support Republicans for
the midterms once a week between now and next fall. That means rallies.
Remember the last one, in the Poconos, when they couldn’t fill a casino
convention room and had to wall off a smaller space with big curtains? Just
wait: His rally tour is going to turn into the Big Search for the Smallest
Event Space So It Will Look the Fullest. He’s losing it with ICE.
The violence and cruelty of his thousands of new barely-trained masked thugs
is coming through in spades in Minneapolis. That city is showing what can be
done to oppose these modern-day Brownshirts and turn the tide of public opinion
against them. His polling on immigration is tanking. CNN ran a poll that
found 52 percent find Trump “has gone too far” on immigration. New York
Times/Sienna found 61 percent say he has “gone too far” on immigration and
customs enforcement. That number included 70 percent of independents. Other
polls have had similar results. That whooshing sound you hear isn’t the icy
wind bringing the Big Winter Storm. It’s the sound of Trump’s immigration
policies flushing down his golden toilet. And these polls were taken before
the photo of the five-year-old boy in the knit hat with bunny ears and a
Spiderman backpack hit the airwaves. The picture is already being described
as “iconic” in the way it shows the inhumanity of Trump’s immigration policy.
That’s the hand of an ICE agent holding the boy by his backpack.
Photo: The Guardian He’s losing it
internationally. The kidnapping of Maduro was a big fat bust. He’s leaving
the same authoritarian regime in place in Venezuela. None of the Big Three
oil companies want to touch Venezuela’s stinky, thick, hard-to-drill-for oil.
No major countries want to join his toy U.N. “Board of Peace.” I mean, really
– Hungary, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan,
Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan?
It’s like a club for wannabe dictators hoping if they please the utterly
unpleasable Trump that some crumbs will fall to the table from the Big Mac
he’s stuffing in his mouth. Embarrassing. Ridiculous. Absurd. A plaything for
Trump’s ever-expanding ego. Europe is gone for him. Not even his pal Putin
will listen to his pleadings about stopping the war in Ukraine so he can get
another pretend peace prize. He’s losing it with Wall
Street and Banks. That’s what his incredibly rapid shift into reverse on
Greenland was all about. The money-boys took a hit to their bottom lines and
punched speed-dial for Trump and told him if he wanted to keep the crooked
crypto pay-offs coming, he had to finesse a Greenland agreement and drop the
threats of new European tariffs, and presto! After screaming for months that
he “needs” Greenland for “national defense” and that you “can’t defend a
piece of paper,” Trump’s big new deal on Greenland turns out to be a slight
expansion of the 1951 treaty signed between the U.S. and Denmark as a – get
this – “implementation of the North Atlantic Treaty.” That’s Trump’s bugaboo,
NATO, of course. There is new language about “total access” and some
filigrees and bows and it will probably be written on stationery in gold leaf
lettering, but it’s “old wine in a new bottle,” according to a former NATO
official quoted by Politico. In the end, he is losing
because taken together, what has resulted from all his big authoritarian
moves is that he looks weak. Panic is setting in. There aren’t enough needles
and “not vitamin B” in the world to keep this staggering act going. That’s not to say he
isn’t dangerous. He is. He’s still surrounded by wannabe Nazis like Stephen
Miller, and he’s still listening – on the sly now, I suspect – to tech Nazis
like Elon Musk. He’s still got a hand puppet running the Pentagon and his
hand on a pen that can sign the bloody Insurrection Act any time he takes a
mind to. He wants some form of what he thinks is martial law, and if I were
to guess, he’s going to try it and end up being knocked back by the courts. But he’s fading, and he’s
fading fast. He is not invincible. Republicans will be heavily damaged in the
midterms. If they lose the House and the Senate, Trump’s last two years will
be empty theater. He won’t be able to pass a single law. He won’t be able to
make a single appointment. He won’t get any new judges on Courts of Appeals.
He won’t get any new U.S. Attorneys. Should a Supreme Court vacancy come up,
it will stay vacant until 2029, and a Democrat will be in the White House. He won’t just be a lame
duck. His presidency will be a dead letter. Good luck if you’re in the path of the storm. It will help me out if you support this newsletter with a paid subscription, and I will really appreciate it. Invite
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© 2026 Lucian K. Truscott IV Lucian K. Truscott IV is a long‑time American writer and
journalist with a career spanning more than five decades. His Substack, the Lucian
Truscott Newsletter, reflects that long arc of experience and the sharp,
plainspoken voice he’s known for. 🧠Who he is
📰 About his newsletter The Lucian Truscott Newsletter on Substack is a mix
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It is a dark reality what is happening and something needs to be done. YOU ARE LOSING YOUR COUNTRY. IT IS TIME TO DO SOMETHING.
DO SOMETHING.On January 25, 2008 what was then the Tampa Tribune I stumbled upon the below article by Rick Weiss in its “Nation/World” section. It struck me as something extraordinary even though it was apparently not considered of significant news value since it was buried in a back section of the paper on page three.
If you’ve seen the movie “Legend”, it will send shivers up your spine.
If you’re a strict Creationist, it’ll probably make you anxious that mankind may be about to transgress on turf that should be strictly reserved for the Heavenly Creator. And, if you’re an evolutionist who finds comfort in the thought that whatever will evolve will evolve and it won’t be your fault, you’ll probably not be able to sleep at night for fear of what we may be on the verge of doing to ourselves and our only known home in the cosmos.
Is this really an extraordinary development in mankind’s penchant for dabbling in dangerous places? I don’t know, but if you don’t think this is worth registering in your list of life’s priority events that happened when you were alive, you might want to consider this thought:
It appears we are moving toward a point where mankind may be able to finally improve his miserable lot in some manner that meets at least somebody’s idea of earthly perfection, or, as is more likely the case given our history of violence and abuse of forethought, we may be stumbling stupidly toward our own final destruction.
Ponder that as you go about your day today.
Sandspur
------------------------------------
Scientists in Maryland yesterday said they had built from scratch an entire microbial chromosome, a loop of synthetic DNA carrying all the instructions that a simple cell needs to live and reproduce.
The feat marks the first time that anyone has made such a large strand of hereditary material from off-the-shelf chemical ingredients. Previous efforts had yielded DNA strands less than one-twentieth the size, and those pieces lacked many of the key biological programs that tell a cell how to stay alive.
On the basis of earlier experiments, the researchers believe the new, full-length loop would spontaneously "boot up" inside a cell, just as a downloaded operating system can awaken a computer -- a potentially historic event that would amount to the creation of the first truly artificial life form.
Team members emphasized that they have not done that yet but expressed confidence that they would do so before the end of the year.
"There are barriers . . . but we are confident that they can be overcome," said J. Craig Venter, who led the effort with Daniel G. Gibson and Hamilton O. Smith at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville. The work appears in yesterday's online edition of the journal Science.
Venter said the goal is to design novel microbes whose handcrafted genomes endow them with the ability produce useful chemicals, including renewable synthetic fuels that could substitute for oil.
Critics, however, countered that without better oversight of the fledgling field, synthetic biology is more likely to lead to the creation of potent biological weapons and runaway microbes that could wreak environmental havoc.
"Venter is claiming bragging rights to the world's longest length of synthetic DNA, but size isn't everything. The important question is not 'How long?' but 'How wise?' " said Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a Montreal-based group that has called for a moratorium on the release and commercialization of synthetic organisms pending further public debate.
Venter's team started by determining the precise order of all 580,076 base pairs, or "letters" of DNA code, inside one of the simplest microbes known to science: Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium that can infect the human genital tract. The scientists bought small pieces of DNA, then perfected painstaking methods to stitch them together inside bacteria and yeast cells in exactly the right order.
The final product -- 582,970 base pairs in all -- is a near-exact replica of M. genitalium's genome, with a few intentional differences. The team omitted a DNA snippet that allows the microbe to infect other cells, for example, and added extra DNA as "watermarks" to differentiate their construct from the naturally occurring variety.
"It's the first synthetic bacterial chromosome," Venter said. "Every one of those base pairs started as a chemical in a bottle."
George Church, a Harvard geneticist leading competing efforts to develop novel life forms -- not from scratch but by modifying existing bacteria -- said the work marks something less than the dawn of a new era.
"This is not a 'creating life' paper. It is not a test of vitalism. It's an assembly paper," Church said. "The question is: Is it faster or cheaper than other methods? But they don't lay out their economics. They missed an opportunity there."
Venter said he could not provide an estimate of the project's cost.
Venter and others have already made synthetic genomes for viruses, which are about one-hundredth the size of bacterial genomes. Some activists contend that synthetic bacteria pose more dangers because, unlike viruses, they can replicate on their own and can survive a long time in the environment.
Venter said the work was green-lighted by government offices, the National Academies and an independent ethics review board.
The peremptory strike on a speedboat is a warning to all who serve. Remember your oath.
September 8, 2025
The United States has crossed a dangerous line.
Last week, an American military platform destroyed a small
vessel in the Caribbean, killing 11 people the Trump administration claims were drug traffickers. It was not an
interception. It was not a boarding with Coast Guard legal authority. It was a
strike—ordered from Washington, executed in international waters, and justified
with little more than “trust us.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox that officials “knew exactly who was in that
boat” and “exactly what they were doing.” He offered no evidence.
This was not a counterdrug operation. It was not law
enforcement. It was killing without process. And it was, to all appearances,
against the letter and the spirit of the law.
For decades, the U.S. military and Coast Guard have
intercepted drug shipments in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific under a careful legal framework: Coast Guard officers would
tactically control Navy ships, invoke law enforcement authority, stop vessels,
and detain crews for prosecution. The goal is not execution; it is interdiction
within international law.
This week’s strike ripped up that framework. The people on
board were not given the chance to surrender. No evidence was presented. No
rules of engagement were cited. The administration claimed authority to kill on suspicion alone.
International law does not permit such action. A vessel in international
waters is not a lawful target simply because officials say so. Contending that
narcotics pose a long-term danger to Americans is at best a weak policy
argument, not a legal justification for force. Unless this boat posed an imminent
threat of attack—which no one has claimed—blowing it out of the water is not
self-defense. It is killing at sea. A government that ignores these
distinctions is not fighting cartels. It is discarding the rule of law.
Beyond the gross violations of the law and the Constitution
lies an enormous strategic danger. By redefining traffickers as legitimate
military targets, the administration has plunged the United States into another
war without limits.
Who is the enemy? “Cartels,” we are told. But cartels are not armies. They are
networks that span countries and blend with civilians. Declaring war on them is
like declaring war on poverty or terrorism—a plunge into an endless campaign
that cannot be “won.”
Where is the battlefield? The Caribbean? Venezuela? Central
America? Overnight, officials shifted their story about the destroyed vessel’s
destination: first, it was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in
the Caribbean,” then it was among “imminent threats to the United States.” If geography is
that malleable, there is no limit to where the next strike may fall.
And what is the objective? To “blow up and get rid of them,” in the words of Secretary of
State Marco Rubio. That is not strategy; it is bravado. We have tried it
before, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. Killing “high-value targets” didn’t end
the war on terror.
The U.S. is drifting into an undeclared war of assassination
across half a hemisphere, led by unaccountable officials who equate explosions
with effectiveness.
Even more dangerous is the backdrop: the Supreme
Court’s ruling that presidents are immune from prosecution for
“official acts.” Experts warned this would give the commander-in-chief license
to commit murder. The majority waved those fears away. Now the president has ordered
killings in international waters.
Eleven people are dead, not through due process but by fiat.
The defense secretary boasts about it on television. And the president will
face no consequences.
This is no longer abstract. The law has been rewritten in
real time: a president can kill, and there is no recourse. That is not
strength. That is authoritarianism.
What does this mean for the principle of civilian control,
when those who wield it face no consequence for abuse? What does it mean for
our military, when they are ordered to carry out missions that violate the
standards they have sworn to uphold?
What happens abroad does not stay abroad. A government that
stretches legal authority overseas will not hesitate to do the same at home.
The same commander-in-chief who ordered a strike on a boat in international
waters has already ordered National Guard troops into American cities over
the objections of local leaders. The logic is identical:
redefine the threat, erase legal distinctions, and justify force as the first
tool. Today it is “traffickers” in the Caribbean. Tomorrow it will be
“criminals” in Chicago or “radicals” in Atlanta.
This strike is not only about 11 lives lost at sea. It is
about the precedent set when the military is unmoored from law, and when
silence from senior leaders normalizes the abuse.
The cost will not be measured in a destroyed boat. It will
be measured in the corrosion of law, strategy, and trust. Legally, the U.S. has
abandoned the framework that distinguished interdiction from assassination.
Constitutionally, presidential immunity has been laid bare: the
commander-in-chief of the most destructive military power in history has been
placed beyond the reach of law. Strategically, we have entered another endless
war against a concept, not an enemy. Internally, the erosion of boundaries abroad
feeds the erosion of boundaries at home.
The laws of war, the principles of proportionality, the
training drilled into every officer—all run counter to what happened in the
Caribbean. Yet silence has prevailed. And silence is acquiescence. Each
concession ratifies the misuse of force until it becomes routine. That is how
institutions corrode. That is how democracies die.
The strike in the Caribbean is not the action of a strong
nation. It is a warning. This is about whether the U.S. military remains an
institution of law and principle, or whether it becomes an obedient weapon in
the hands of a lawless president.
A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to
wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in
deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves
those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution.
The oath is clear: unlawful orders—foreign or domestic—must
be disobeyed. To stand silent as the military is misused is not restraint. It
is betrayal.
Jon Duffy is a retired Navy captain. His active duty
career included command at sea and national security roles. He writes about
leadership and democracy.
