Susan Collins May Be Chuckling, but She’s in Far Worse Trouble Now

The conventional media wisdom is that Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins is sitting back and laughing this week, and well she might be. The collapse of Graham Platner’s campaign is an implosion for the ages, and it puts the state’s Democrats in a tricky situation they need to navigate skillfully in these next two weeks.

But November is a long way away. If—and it’s a big but by no means insurmountable if—the Democrats make it through these next two weeks without too many bruises and unite behind a nominee, Collins is still going to be fighting for her life in a Democratic state where Donald Trump’s approval rating is 36 percent, where 85 percent say the state’s economy is fair or poor, and where the generic Democratic congressional edge in one recent poll is a hefty 11 percent. Those are all terrifying numbers for Collins, and she knows it.

Before we get into all that, a few closing thoughts on Platner. I wrote about him a month ago, after The New York Times published some unsavory revelations about his treatment of some former girlfriends (while others said he was fine toward them), and right before the primary. I wrote that since he was almost certain to be the nominee, national Democrats needed to back him.

I did, however, add three caveats, as experience has taught me to do in such situations: “Short of revelations involving murder, rape, or a taste for child pornography, Platner needs to be backed by Democrats to the hilt.” Well, he managed one out of three, but one is enough. It’s utterly and obviously disqualifying.

Some Platner defenders have tried to say, What about innocent until proven guilty? That’s ridiculous in the context of running for office. Yes, it means everything in a court of law, where a defendant is on trial for his very freedom; there, he is absolutely entitled to a presumption of innocence, and he must be given his day in court so that we all hear his side. But a political campaign isn’t a criminal trial. In a political campaign, political judgments must be made, and the clear political judgment here is that no party can back someone facing a credible allegation of rape, for God’s sake.

As for the intentionally weak vetting of Platner by the young leftist strategists who “discovered” him: I hope people have learned some obvious lessons. Daniel Moraff, the person who’s apparently largely responsible for this debacle, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he sensed a public thirsting for non-cookie-cutter candidates who challenge the status quo. That’s surely true, in a lot of places, but it hardly means you don’t need to put your candidates through the usual paces. It’s grotesquely arrogant and irresponsible, and if Collins ends up winning, Moraff will bear a huge share of the blame.

However: I still say, Moraff and Platner aside, Collins could well be in far more trouble with a new Democratic nominee. Kamala Harris beat Trump by seven points in the state. And as I noted above, in a recent poll, respondents said that for Congress, they’d choose a Democrat over a Republican by 53 percent to 42 percent. On top of that, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Hannah Pingree, who will be at the top of the ticket, looks like she’s going to beat her Republican foe by around 15 points. That means Collins is going to have to convince a lot of independents to switch from the D column to the R one as they move down the ballot from governor to senator.

Collins has won such voters before, but I would remind people, as they look over past elections for parallels, to take note not only of what’s similar but of what’s different.

The main (as it were) case in point here is 2014. Shenna Bellows, the current secretary of state and a leading contender to replace Platner, was the Democratic nominee against Collins that year. Collins blew her out by 30 points, which some say should raise a lot of red flags.

Well, there are a host of differences between 2014 and today. One, Bellows was a 39-year-old novice then, who had never held office and whose claim to fame was that she had been the head of the state’s ACLU. Two, it was the sixth year of a Democratic incumbent presidency, a notoriously hard year for candidates of said party. Three, the Maine of 2014 was in such a cantankerous state that it reelected embarrassing extremist loudmouth Paul LePage as its governor. Four, it was pre-Trump, which changes everything. Five, it was before Collins’s vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice because she took him at his word that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”

I’m not saying Bellows should be the choice. I don’t know enough about the available candidates or the ins and outs of Maine politics. That’s up to those 600 Democratic delegates to sort out and decide. I’m just saying that what’s past isn’t always prologue. The point is what’s going on now. And what’s going on now, nationally and in Maine, is a strong anti-Trump sentiment—and a GOP incumbent senator who voted to confirm 22 of Trump’s 23 Cabinet nominees.

What the Maine Democratic Party, and to some extent the national Democratic Party, has to do here is run a process that is widely accepted as having two qualities: It must be transparent, and it has to feel fair. The party needs to give voters and citizens regular updates on the process—this is happening today; this is happening next Tuesday—so that everyone feels they’re in the loop and no one feels sandbagged. And it needs to feel fair so that in the end, everyone at least feels that they need to accept the outcome.

As for the national party, I hope Chuck Schumer has the sense to stay completely out of this. His fear of Platner turns out to have been justified, but the way he pushed Governor Janet Mills—who ran as if she didn’t really want to be there—into the race only helped Platner score the nomination. If Schumer and national Democrats are perceived as putting their finger on the scale for a candidate—for instance, in order to stop former state Senate Majority Leader Troy Jackson, who is widely seen as most Platner-like in his populist politics—they’ll only sow rancor and help Collins in the long run.

In the short term, this was a good week for Susan Collins. But to paraphrase Harry Hopkins, people don’t vote in the short term. They vote in November. By then, she could very well be regretting this week’s events.

History—in this case, through the pen of James Boswell—does not record for us the context in which Samuel Johnson offered up the famous quote that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” According to samueljohnson.com, the English intellectual and polymath just blurted it out on the evening of April 7, 1775, providing no context or explanation of what was on his mind. Some biographers apparently believe he was thinking of William Pitt the Elder, and the former prime minister’s frequent invocation of the term.

We do, however, have more thoughts on the matter from Johnson that have survived. The year before, Johnson—something of a mixed bag, politically, but an ardent foe of slavery long before abolitionism became a movement in Great Britain—wrote and delivered to Parliament a speech he called “The Patriot.” It was election time, and Johnson was laying out for the assembled some of his ideas about the duties of public service, and what patriotism does, and does not, mean.

Herewith, just a few choice quotes:

“To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace.”

“Still less does the true patriot circulate opinions which he knows to be false. No man, who loves his country, fills the nation with clamorous complaints, that the protestant religion is in danger, because ‘popery is established in the extensive province of Quebec,’ a falsehood so open and shameless, that it can need no confutation among those who know that of which it is almost impossible for the most unenlightened zealot to be ignorant.”

Finally, in his closing peroration, Johnson urged the next House of Commons to “unite in a general abhorrence of those, who, by deceiving the credulous with fictitious mischiefs, overbearing the weak by audacity of falsehood, by appealing to the judgment of ignorance, and flattering the vanity of meanness … arrogate to themselves the name of patriots.”

As we watch (or avoid watching) Donald Trump trying to turn the celebration of the United States’ 250th birthday into a celebration of Donald Trump, we would do well to remember Dr. Johnson’s thoughts. In wondering what he might think of the president’s ideas and actions this week, there is very little mystery. Let’s review a couple of those actions, as reported by Politico Playbook Friday morning:

• You saw that ridiculous video of Trump “talking” with the AI Teddy Roosevelt? Well, this was meant to be part of a “living museum recreating Theodore Roosevelt’s frontier experience,” as envisioned in a “planning document” from America250, a bipartisan, congressionally chartered, decade-old plan to launch various commemorations. From Playbook: “It hoped to draw 250,000 visitors for a nationally televised celebration on July 1 featuring A-list performers, immersive historical programming, a drone spectacular and, ultimately, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s grand opening.” Instead, it launched with a visit from Trump.
• The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a decades-old Washington summer fixture that always takes place on the National Mall, was given the boot this year and forced inside the Smithsonian Castle to make way for Trump’s Great American State Fair, which has been drawing fewer attendees than a lot of Little League games.
• Finally, it almost goes without saying that the Trump administration stiffed America250, according to Politico. Congress appropriated $150 million to the project, but organizers have received just $25 million to date. Democrats also alleged this week that some America250 donors were tricked into donating to Trump’s personal semiquincentennial organization, Freedom 250, which is responsible for the UFC fight at the White House and the ongoing fair. (Naturally, Freedom 250 is not subject to congressional oversight, and it can keep its donors private.)

But these, of course, are minor matters that will pass. The real hallmarks of Trump’s false patriotism are the things that make his tenure such a horrific embarrassment and civic tragedy to so many millions of Americans. The constant lies meant to glorify him and his reign. The toxic hatred of so many of the people he was elected to serve. The petty and immoral pursuit of his political enemies. The operatic and open corruption.

These are venal acts. But as July 4 approaches, it behooves us to remember specifically that they are also unpatriotic. Or worse: They are aggressively anti-patriotic. Real patriotism is truthful and humble; it tolerates and even welcomes dissent, and, understanding that the people rule in a democracy, it serves supporters and detractors equally; it seeks justice rather than revenge; and it understands that to pursue profit from office is abhorrent.

Trump knows none of that. He is a treacherous, know-nothing anti-patriot. The image that sticks with me, the photo that made me both roll my eyes and gasp in horror when I first saw it, was the one of Trump kissing an American flag. What a grotesque act of civic idolatry; in fact, let’s throw “idolatrous” in there too. And if you don’t understand why kissing a flag is an act of grotesque civic idolatry, then you, my friend, are part of the problem.

Let’s close with a few more thoughts on patriotism from some people who actually knew what it means:

George Washington: “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

G.K. Chesterton: “‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

Albert Einstein: “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them!”

And maybe my favorite, from Clarence Darrow: “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

There is still much to celebrate about the United States of America—its art and literature and music, its scientific achievements, its physical beauty, and of course the principles of liberty it introduced to the world 250 years ago and toward which we daily and yearly strive. The anti-patriots do have the upper hand right now, but more and more people are seeing through them. In addition, they are also making real, Johnson- and Darrow-esque patriots of millions who were once disengaged. That is something to be hopeful about, and to celebrate, this weekend.

Was Thursday among the darkest days in the history of the Supreme Court? You could make a case. First, a majority cleared the way for a pesticide manufacturer to get thousands of lawsuits off its books from farmers who’d used its product and gotten cancer. Next, it ruled that the administration could turn away asylum-seekers at the border. And then it held that gun owners could now freely carry their weapons into private establishments that serve the public.

Let’s pause over that one for a paragraph. Here’s a good description of the particulars of the gun case and the legal arguments on both sides. But the upshot is this: Everywhere in America, gun owners will presumably be able to take their guns to shops, stores, malls, movie theaters, restaurants, bars, amusement parks, Baby Gaps, you name it. Does any rational person think that the Founders, who simply wanted men to have muskets to protect themselves from invaders, would want someone to be able to take a military-style semiautomatic rifle and 600 rounds of ammo into a Chuck E. Cheese?

But the worst of Thursday’s big four decisions was Mullin v. Doe, which will allow the Trump administration to begin deporting Haitians and Syrians who were granted Temporary Protected Status by the Obama administration in 2010 and 2012, respectively. My colleague Matt Ford shredded the decision in his piece, writing that the court “effectively blessed Trump’s bigotry toward Haitians and dealt potentially catastrophic damage to federal civil rights laws.”

The cases combine to give the executive branch more power. They turn several lower court decisions on their head (as The New York Times notes today, immigration hard-liners had lost case after case on TPS until yesterday). And in the case of Mullin, in particular, the highest legal authority in the land—namely, Samuel Alito, writing for the majority—pretends that Donald Trump’s blatant racism toward Haitians doesn’t exist; that there was nothing “overtly racial” in Trump’s many disgusting and false comments about the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, and beyond.

This conservative court is out of control—blatantly partisan and ideological, the six-member majority scarcely even pretends otherwise anymore.

Some major decisions about executive power—Trump’s power—are yet to be handed down this term, involving the firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, the removal of Democratic appointees from independent agencies, and of course the birthright citizenship case. If the court rules predictably on two of these three, or certainly on all three, it will have completed a term—with the aforementioned four decisions already on the books, as well as Callais v. Louisiana, which did away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—that might well be the most reactionary in its history. And all this is on top of the earlier reversal of a 49-year-old precedent in 1973’s Roe v. Wade and the handing to Trump of sweeping immunity for all “official” acts.

It’s now unavoidable: This has to be a front-and-center issue in 2028. Democratic presidential contenders will have to answer the question: What do you plan to do about the Supreme Court?

Many of them will be afraid to dip a foot into these waters. They shouldn’t be. Poll after poll shows us that majorities disapprove of the court and think of its decisions as being more political than jurisprudential. According to Gallup, disapproval of the court topped 50 percent five years ago and has stayed there ever since (in contrast, that number was just 29 percent as recently as 2010). So the public—not just the progressive base of the party—is ready to hear ideas.

Terms limits, the most common idea bruited, are fine. But imposing term limits won’t really change the makeup of the court for years; maybe decades. How many more rights will they strip away before then? How much more power will they give to the uber-rich to buy political campaigns and candidates? How much more immunity will they grant to corporations? How many new ways will they find to weaken protections for workers and litigants against corporate power? And perhaps most of all, how will they figure out how to allow the executive branch to undermine the laws passed by Congress and refuse to write regulations and enforce the laws Congress has passed?

No—terms limits are no longer enough. It’s time to talk seriously about court expansion. And I think there’s a smart and totally constitutionally defensible way to do it.

The United States has 13 federal circuit courts. That number, naturally, grew over the course of the country’s history, as the number of states grew and as the population expanded. This is relevant here because each Supreme Court justice is responsible for overseeing a certain number of circuits. Historically, Congress has expanded the number of justices as it simultaneously increased the number of circuits.

Admittedly, all this happened a very long time ago. But still, it’s precedent. The court was established in 1789 at six justices. In 1807, Congress expanded the number of federal circuits to seven, and added a justice to match. In 1837, Congress created nine circuits and nine justices. In 1863—even while the United States of America had lost the 11 states of the Confederacy—Congress created 10 circuits and 10 justices. The current nine-justice format was set in 1869.

Later expansions in the number of circuits did not simultaneously add justices. But why not revive that thought? The country has had today’s 13 circuits since 1982. The population of the country in 1982 was 230 million. Today, it’s around 345 million. That’s a lot more people. And the courts are horribly backlogged.

That could be solved by just adding judges. But it’s also a justification for increasing the number of circuits. From there, a case can clearly be made that increasing the number of circuits requires increasing the number of high court justices. Or at the very least, Democrats can pursue a hybrid solution that would keep the number of circuits at 13 and add a large number of judges within those circuits—while increasing the size of the Supreme Court to 13. Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia, a leader on these issues, introduced such a bill in 2023, and it had around 60 co-sponsors.

It would all be completely constitutional and completely legal. Which is more than can be said for a lot of the things Trump and the Republicans are getting up to, as they try to find new and blatantly illegal ways to stop mail-in voting and otherwise take the franchise away from citizens.

But the big door-opener here by Trump and the GOP is their rancidly unconstitutional mid-decade redistricting move. The Constitution clearly and plainly states that districts will be redrawn every 10 years, after the decennial census. What Trump and his party are doing with this redistricting is completely lawless.

Once they’ve done that, all bets are off. Democrats should do whatever they need to do to rebalance power. But—they should stay within the law. What I’m talking about here, what Johnson’s bill would accomplish, would be entirely within the law. Congress can set the size of the Supreme Court. And I believe that a smart Democrat, framing the argument the right way, can take that case to the American people and win it. He or she can convince the voters that far from destroying the court, such an action would constitute saving it from its own extremism—and saving the rights we cherish that these ideologues are stripping away.

When I read history, I often wonder what it must have felt like to live those events in real time, as I’m sure you do. Did it seem an ominous moment in June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz-Ferdinand? If I were a Briton in September 1938, would I have had an uneasy sense of foreboding watching the newsreel of Neville Chamberlain stepping off that plane from Munich?

I think such thoughts this week because I have no doubt that future historians and readers of history will surely wonder what the ever-living fuck we were all thinking when Donald Trump both started and then lost his immoral and pointless war with Iran. What we have just witnessed is almost beyond belief, and would be beyond belief if we didn’t all know going in that Trump is such an aggressively and willfully stupid human being, utterly impervious to knowledge and facts, serenely cocooned in his carapace of ignorance, surrounded by flatterers who patronize him as one does a child and who scream at Americans about his nonexistent genius, courage, and virility. They exist in a fantasyland.

But we live in the real world, and in the real world, this war was a disaster in every imaginable sense. Let’s tally up the damage:

• First of all, there was already a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was working; the International Atomic Energy Agency reported repeatedly that Iran was abiding by the Obama-era JCPOA deal. There was no need for Donald Trump to do anything.
• But of course, the deal was the handiwork of Barack Obama—the Kenyan Marxist who made a few jokes at Trump’s expense at a dinner one time; so Trump tore it to pieces.
• Almost instantly, Iran started enriching uranium at levels well above the 3.67 percent limit set by the JCPOA. And why not? Trump broke the agreement. Of course they started enriching uranium at high levels again.
• In other words: The fact that Iran once again became a nuclear threat is entirely Donald Trump’s fault.
• With respect to its capability to build a nuclear weapon, Iran’s “breakout time,” in the preferred parlance of diplomacy, went from 12 months to seven days. That is not a typo.
• So Trump discovers this one day. Maybe Benjamin Netanyahu explained it to him. We’ll learn that whole story at some future point. In any case, out of nowhere on the last day of February, with no warning, no prep, no nothing, Trump starts a war. Within hours, we bomb a school, killing around 120 children.
• From a purely military standpoint, the war goes fine. We suffer few casualties, although we do kill 3,500 or more people. But Iran counters by doing the thing that every expert in the world knew Iran would do if it was ever attacked: It asserts its control over the Strait of Hormuz. If you want to come through, you have to pay to play. Up go the gas prices.
• Now Trump is trapped. And he’s starting to get bored because the regime didn’t collapse in two weeks like he thought it would. He wants out. So he sends his corrupt son-in-law, in bed with the Saudis and in the middle of trying to humiliate Albania for no good reason, to sort things out.
• That brings us to this week: the outlines of a deal that looks for all the world like a complete surrender. The United States of America, for only the second time in its 237 years on this earth, has unambiguously lost a war.

People can debate the above. I’m counting Vietnam, obviously; there’s no doubt about that one. I reckon the War of 1812 and the Korean War as stalemates. Under the Treaty of Ghent, the United States and Britain just agreed to go back to the way things were before the war, and with respect to Korea, the line was the 38th parallel pre-bellum and postbellum.

Some will say Iraq was a loss, but I rate it, too, as kind of a draw. It sure wasn’t a win of the sort Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz told us to expect. It cost many trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands. To a mixed result: Today, Iraq is a democracy, of a sort, but it’s a long way from being free. But I perhaps charitably call it a draw because the U.S. did achieve the core stated aim: It deposed Saddam Hussein.

Here, though, we have not achieved any of Trump’s shifting stated claims. There’s no regime change—or, to the extent that Trump has managed to change the regime, it’s even more hard-line and more powerful in the region than it was before the war!

And that’s before we and other nations fork over the infamous $300 billion, just a mind-boggling figure. Conservatives wanted Barack Obama impeached over the money he agreed to pay Iran (which was Iran’s money, frozen in U.S. banks), which was $1.7 billion. Trump is going to hand Iran 176 times that amount. And it’s going to end up being more, because the $300 billion is separate from whatever frozen assets Trump decides to unfreeze. Word around the campfire is that we are talking about another $25 billion or so.  

Some perspective on how much $325 billion is. The total U.S. foreign aid budget for 2025 was about $60 billion. More pointedly: Estimates vary, but it seems that Iran spends around $1 billion a year propping up Hezbollah. Imagine how much they’ll be able to spend when their Trumpy ship comes in!

The one slender thread on which the Trump administration is now hanging its hopes is that in the coming negotiations, it’ll get Iran to surrender its current stockpile of enriched uranium. That, admittedly, would be something that the JCPOA didn’t do. If they pull that off, even I will say good for them.

But for Iran, of course, this is a nearly inconceivable concession. What seems more likely to happen is that the two sides will agree to terms calling for Iran to dilute its highly enriched uranium under international supervision. Trump will sell this as a great victory. But this “down-blending,” as it’s called, was also in the JCPOA!

Above, I called this war immoral and pointless. The pointless part speaks for itself. It has accomplished nothing except making Iran stronger and the United States weaker. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had done this, not only would they have been instantly impeached if the Republicans controlled the House, but the entire Democratic Party would have been discredited on foreign policy matters for a generation at least.

But the immoral part is worse. Trump started a war, killed a few thousand people, got tired of it, and surrendered to one of the most reactionary regimes on earth, which went on a gleeful killing spree of its own citizens earlier this year. Since the commencement of these hostilities in February, Iran has executed 44 more people and detained another 6,000. That’s the regime Donald Trump just strengthened and is about to hand many billions of dollars to. “Immoral” barely scratches the surface.

This is an epic failure. It’s not quite September 1938. But that’s only because Iran’s mullahs don’t have Hitler’s global ambitions. Morally, it’s a Neville Chamberlain moment of a sort the United States has never experienced. The icing on the cake would be Trump taking to Truth Social and boasting about “peace in our time.” A man who signed a treaty at Versailles is ignorant enough of history to not even know why that phrase resonates.

The president turns 80 on Sunday, and, as with everything pertaining to Donald Trump, his need to place himself at the center of our attention is pathological. He could not just have a dinner at the White House, or a party at Mar-a-Lago. No; he had to build a massive arena on real estate that belongs to the people of the United States to host a vulgar, garish event that is one of the most violent forms of spectacle available to the human race today. Trump will be sitting there like some Roman emperor at the Colosseum watching enslaved men try to stave off lions. The man who wanted law enforcement to shoot protesters “in the knees” is probably bummed he couldn’t just replicate that.

But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. Granted, UFC fighting is very popular in the United States and across the world. I’ve read various accounts this week contending that UFC fighting has supplanted hockey as the fourth-most-popular sport on television, behind the big three of football, baseball, and basketball. I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline. “The United States, long the backbone of [mixed martial arts], has seen a sharp decline in activity,” wrote John S. Nash. “In 2009, more than 6,266 professional fights took place across the country. This would be the pinnacle for American MMA contests. By 2024, that number had dropped to just over 3,027—a 52 percent decrease.”

Still—it’s popular. Fine. But guess what’s strikingly, overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent.

Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of course spend the entire weekend equating men beating each other to a pulpy mass on hallowed civic ground with “real” patriotism.

It’s sickening. Oh—and it’s also, as we’ve come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor—surprise, surprise!—is Crypto.com. There are in addition figurines of some of the featured fighters. There’s apparel—garish T-shirts running $40. Over at TrumpStore.com, somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t see any merch specifically tied to the event, but you have to believe that Trump’s short-fingered hand is dipping into some till or another here. A lawsuit filed by the group the Public Integrity Project to block the event from taking place (it’s pending as I write) states that UFC set up a for-profit entity to manage this event, which is selling seating packages that cost up to $1.5 million—and that Trump previously bought $50,000 worth of stock in TKO, UFC’s owner.

Out in the real world, Trump is being reduced to impotence by a bunch of dictators who are even more reactionary than he is. He’s about to cut a “deal” with Iran that sounds like it will be little more than an extended ceasefire. It will, many experts fear, compare unfavorably to Barack Obama’s 2015 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018. Trump may achieve what Obama achieved, in terms of getting Iran to agree not to enrich uranium at anywhere close to weapons-grade levels. But as I’ve noted several times, the thing to watch is how much money Trump agrees to transfer to Iran. Which in a sense is fine; it’s Iran’s frozen money. But when Obama agreed to give Iran $1.7 billion, right-wingers screamed that it was capitulation and even treasonous. Iran now wants up to $24 billion. We’ll see how Mr. Art of the Deal fares.

But even if he does strike a decent deal, he’s already done enormous damage to the U.S. economy, the global economy, and American prestige and power projection. To sane observers in the United States and across the world, he looks like exactly what he is: a weak and hollow and insecure man who started a needless and counterproductive war out of nowhere because it looked “tough.”

But inside his little MAGA cocoon on Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man, presiding over watching other manly men spill each other’s blood for the leader’s greater glory. It’s the most undemocratic pageant one could imagine, a fact that—given that scant 16 percent support—the people know in their bones. In fact, this is exactly what fascism is: grotesque, violent spectacle that repulses most of the population but drives the fervent worshippers to a frenzied state and tries to bully its way into being synonymous with what it means to be a real American.

It’s all made worse by the fact that Dear Leader will be embarking upon his ninth decade of life that night, and that six in 10 Americans believe he lacks the mental sharpness to serve as president. So that’s the not-so-secret meaning of this event. I just wonder if Vegas will establish odds on whether he’ll fall asleep.

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