Something happened in the news yesterday that was so monumental, it may change the course of American history forever. I’m talking, of course, about the fact that, very briefly, Oracle’s Larry Ellison overtook Elon Musk to become the World’s Richest Man. Larry Ellison life goal, unlocked.
After Oracle’s earnings report yesterday, the stock shot through the roof, and Ellison owns 40 percent of the company. That must have been some earnings report! On the earnings call, Ellison said that his Oracle AI chatbots, run from his Oracle computing centers, are on the verge of being able to run the stock market, design drugs, fully operate factories and provide basic legal and sales services at companies. Foolish humans, you are an inconvenience. “AI changes everything,” Ellison said on the call.
We must use this moment to contemplate what AI is doing to our society, and to our souls. To which we must answer: It is making them awesome, and making us all rich. As I reported here last week, I soon stand to bring in a five-figure windfall because a company forgot to ask me for permission to use my precious novels to train its AI writing software. Whoops, their bad, but my gain. Ellison, who, to be fair is 81 and has been waiting patiently for his turn atop the pyramid, is just like me, but $40 million times more so.
Elon’s portfolio is more diversified, but still pretty AI heavy. Therefore, by the end of the day, Ellison’s surge ended, and Musk was back on top of the wealth ladder, $384.2 billion to $383.2 billion. This is very relatable to those of us for whom chiseling $10,000 off the top of anything is an almost unimaginable windfall. Musk wins again.
What will the consequences of this be? I envision a world where everything is affordable, everything is convenient, and there’s nothing for ordinary humans to do all day except murder one another for their political beliefs. Oracle will upload our consciousnesses into a cloud, where they can also continue to murder one another over their political beliefs. Hell is other people, and also not other people.
AP reports that with their net worth, Musk and Elllison could “tell all of South Africa to take a vacation for a year and produce nothing, based on its gross domestic product.” Very cute, AP. We’ve all heard what Musk wants South Africa to do, and that includes not murdering one another over political beliefs. But who does he think they are, the Amish?
Grok, Elon’s personal AI assistant, says it matters who the world’s richest man is because it “often signals broader shifts in technology, markets, and power dynamics.” True enough, and then it adds:
“Ultimately, it matters because the richest aren’t passive; they steer humanity’s direction. Musk’s Mars ambitions or Ellison’s AI bets could solve (or worsen) existential challenges. If nothing else, it reminds us: In 2025, tech titans aren’t just rich – they’re architects of tomorrow.”
What are we all going to be doing tomorrow, thanks to the world’s richest men? Not a whole hell of a lot, by design. Thank you, Larry Ellison.
Author: Neal Pollack
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Larry Ellison briefly eclipses Elon Musk
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The ‘recklessness’ of Joe Biden, according to Kamala Harris
The Atlantic published the first excerpt of Kamala Harris’s expensive memoir “107 Days” this morning, leading with a lickspittle editor’s note from Jeffrey Goldberg. According to Goldberg, the Harris we read in this book is:
“blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt – and throughout this newsworthy book – she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.”
In this short excerpt we learn that Vice-President Harris repaired our supposedly broken relationship with France, mais oui, and also did a good job as “border czar.” She says so herself, and we have only her to thank. But the most newsworthy portion of the excerpt comes earlier, when she discusses Joe Biden’s unwillingness to drop out of the 2024 race.
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision. We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
“Recklessness.” “Ego.” The remaining 12 loyalists in Bidenworld are going to be mad. Harris adds:
“Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired.”
Harris claims that she was more “loyal to my country” than she was to Joe Biden, but she held her tongue until the Party anointed her as successor and gave her free reign to completely botch her campaign against Trump. Anyone who read Fight, the excellent chronicle of the 2024 campaign that came out earlier this year, or even cursorily followed the narrative as it unfolded in real time, knows the contours of the story. Harris, handled an impossible task, managed to make a series of disastrous decisions, emboldened by her senior campaign staff imported from Barack Obama loyalists, who were both out of touch with reality and also didn’t like Harris much.
I don’t see any of that “bluntness” in this excerpt, which is also not slyly funny or occasionally profane. Unlike Fight, which was no Lost Illusions but still read like it had been written by actual humans with actual personalities, this excerpt of 107 Days reads very “as told to,” either to Harris’s extremely well-paid ghostwriter or to an AI chatbot, or to a ghostwriter who uses an AI chatbot. It may be unapologetic, but it’s also unapologetic sludge.
Harris, as the first female vice president, is an important historical figure, and she’s hardly the demon as painted by her opponents on the right. She’s also no great shakes. What we see in the memoir excerpt is what we saw of her in real life: marginal competence, extreme self-absorption, performative liberalism and laugh lines that fall dead to everyone but the most extreme paid loyalists. Let’s also keep in mind that it’s been less than a year since she’s lost, and even less time than that since she left office. This is a rehabilitation tour planned from the outset, and the whole thing feels fake, silly and manipulative.
Now we can sit back and wait for the recrimination cycle that may or may not come. There may be some ruffled feathers in Bidenworld. And Harris is, like it or not, going to be on our screens and in our feeds a lot in the next month or so. But there might also be less controversy than hoped for by people who love political gossip. Jeffrey Goldberg, invoking “my friend Kamala” just like Obama used to, may care about what’s in 107 Days, but the rest of the world has moved along.
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Elon Musk is in exile
Elon Musk is in exile. He’s forgotten by friends, embattled by enemies. He now quietly (for him) goes about his business, fighting non-government battles after those strange few months he spent standing behind the President’s desk with his toddler son X, who punched Musk in the face while he was seemingly running the country.
Musk’s fate is a case study in what happens when Donald Trump rolls up the red carpet. Trump operated his first term as President more like a season of The Apprentice and less like an administration. It was a revolving door of exile. Reality-show worthy characters like Omarosa Manigault Newman and Anthony Scaramucci came and went with drama that fell just short of an episode-ending boardroom ceremony.
The second attempt has been more controlled and disciplined. Trump’s original cabinet is more or less intact eight months into the term. There has been a little fraying around the administration’s edges, with the sudden dismissals of IRS head Billy Long after two months and CDC head Susan Monarez after a few weeks, but considering the man in charge, it’s been pretty much business as usual, with no major exiles from his court.
With one notable exception: Elon Musk. Musk’s brief turn as shadow co-President already seems a distant history. But it filled our lives with intrigue. Who can forget his “Nazi salute” the day before Trump’s inauguration, accompanied by the very un-Nazi-like utterance “my heart goes out to you”? That induced a moral panic unlike any other we’ve seen in our time. Then in February, wearing sunglasses and a black baseball cap bearing the “Make America Great Again” slogan in gothic lettering, Musk waved the “chainsaw for bureaucracy” on stage, causing millions of angry liberals to soil their adult diapers.
Musk has learned the hard way that America, like a Tesla robotaxi, can pretty much drive itself
For months, the world’s richest man functioned as Trump’s useful idiot, his ketamine-huffing court jester, making showy noises about reducing the size of government through his newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), introducing us to sub-jesters like “Big Balls,” sleeping on a cot in his makeshift DC headquarters, and causing USAID and State Department employees to weep into their potted plants on the way out the door. While Trump began enacting his aggressive second-term agenda, Musk drew much of the flak. Angry vandals and protesters set Teslas on fire and scratched swastikas into their doors. We didn’t elect this man, the people (some people) screamed. Get him away from our Social Security numbers!
Then, weeks before the summer solstice, it was over. On Memorial Day weekend, Trump said a fond goodbye to Musk, who was wearing a black T-shirt that read “The DOGEFATHER,” in the Oval Office. Trump said that Musk had brought about a “colossal change in the old ways of doing business in Washington.” It was the “most sweeping and consequential government reform effort in generations.” Also, Trump added, Elon was “really not leaving.” “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Elon is terrific!”
“DoGE is a way of life,” Musk told reporters. “Like Buddhism.”
Immediately after, Musk veered off the eightfold path. He started criticizing Trump’s tariff policies and called the Great Big Beautiful Bill “a disgusting abomination.” In response, Trump threatened to sell the “everything is computer” Tesla that he’d purchased in a showy Rose Garden ceremony. He called Musk “the man who has lost his mind.” Musk, in response, said he was starting a third political party, the “America party,” and said that Trump was named in the Epstein Files.
After a few brief détente tweets, the Musk administration was over, and the Musk Exile had begun. By July, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Musk was “burning through executives.” Around the time that Musk’s Grok AI on X transformed itself into “MechaHitler,” Musk announced that Linda Yaccarino, the head of X, was leaving. “Thank you for your contributions,” Musk said, in a decidedly non-Trumpian way. Around the same time, Omead Afshar, head of sales and operations for Tesla North America, also left Musk’s orbit. In order to stabilize matters, Tesla’s board of directors offered Elon a $29 billion stock package to stay on at the company, and to stay focused, an amount of money that, even for Musk, had to reduce his attention deficit.
As for the “America party,” it appears that will never get off the ground. The Wall Street Journal reported in late August that “Musk and his team haven’t engaged with many prominent individuals who have voiced support for the idea of a new party or could be a crucial resource to help it get off the ground, including by assisting with getting on the ballot in crucial states.” That doesn’t seem promising. “It’s almost an eerie silence,” said a previously hopeful Libertarian party official.
Instead, rumors abound that Musk, who spent $300 million to help Trump get re-elected, including handing out random million-dollar checks to voters, is planning to throw his support behind J.D. Vance’s 2028 campaign. The world’s richest man, no longer allowed at Trump’s court, is back to courting favors with his checkbook again. Meanwhile, Trump has quietly not cut any of Musk’s government contracts, and Musk himself has been relatively silent in public. His X feed has been reduced to endless complaints about the world’s declining birthrate and wan retweets of “England has fallen” threads.
The most manic episode in American history is over. Elon Musk has gone from shadow President to shadow-banned, but the “I bought this car before he went insane” bumper stickers remain on Teslas all around blue ZIP codes. It’s time for Elon to get back to colonizing Mars. He’s learned the hard way that America, like a Tesla robotaxi, can pretty much drive itself.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.
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Why Anthropic AI is finally paying me
Word came down last week of a court judgment that means, for once, that authors of books are going to get paid, including, most importantly, me. A federal judge ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a class action lawsuit under the Copyright Act, that the AI company Anthropic had taken books from pirate websites, including one called Library Genesis (LibGen), without authorization. Anthropic, which has more money, apparently, than all the gods put together, will have to pay at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars to all the authors who it robbed.
When I saw news of the judgment, my first thought was, well, I’ve written some books. What’s in it for my bottom line? I emailed my agent, Murray, who sent me to a LibGen search engine published by the Atlantic. Generally I don’t like to read the Atlantic unless I’m hate-scrolling Covidian propaganda. But I went to the search, and, magically, more than a dozen titles with my byline popped up. Three of them appear to be repeat uses of my book Never Mind the Pollacks, which is a great American rock and roll novel, but we also published it under several different titles during a period where my career was swerving all over the place like a drunk who’s stolen a sportscar. A few of them are book reviews that I don’t even remember writing. But most of them are novels or memoirs that I actually do remember writing, for the most part.
The news is all good. Once the dust settles from the settlement, I’m set to receive $3,000 per book. Cha-ching! Daddy’s getting paid and going to Sandals. The irony in all this is that I’m not one of those writers who huffs and puffs about AI. I don’t believe that I’m some sort of irreplaceable, magical being. People still ride bicycles in the age of the automobile. As long as writers accept the fact that we’re potential roadkill at any moment, we can still go about our business.
I would have happily agreed for Anthropic to use my books to train their lit-robot of the future. But they needed to ask, which, I guess, is the entire point of the lawsuit. If they had asked, I would have said, how about using only my books to train the robot? Then I’d have a friend to talk to who would get all my jokes and would understand why people were mean to me when I was a sensitive young man. Instead I’m all virtually gummed up with Clive Cussler and Jonathan Safran Foer and Jesmyn Ward and whoever else Anthropic stole from the pirates.
Besides, I didn’t get into the writing racket for the money. I did it for the glory, the fame, the freedom, and, for many years, the drugs. With the Anthropic lawsuit, I now stand to make more off my books than the advances for my last five novels combined. My yearly royalties for three decades of prodigious literary output total about $100. A five-figure outlay just because an AI company got greedy means I can finally buy the Japanese toilet of my dreams.
OK, now, let’s run a test. Grok, write a couple of sentences in the voice of Neal Pollack celebrating his financial return from the Anthropic lawsuit:
“Hot damn, the Anthropic lawsuit paid off big time, and I’m grinning ear to ear with this sweet financial win! Time to pop some champagne and keep writing – those AI pirates just funded my next masterpiece!”
That doesn’t sound like me at all. That’s the Impossible Burger version of me. My AI search engine says I don’t have to pay taxes on class-action settlements that cause me “emotional distress.” And those above sentences are quite distressing. I’m going to fight the IRS on this one. I’m a writer. Do they think I’m made of money?
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After Rosie O’Donnell, the Americans Trump should strip of citizenship
As he often does when things get a little hot in the kitchen, President Trump went after Rosie O’Donnell again yesterday. “We are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O’Donnell’s Citizenship,” he wrote on Truth Social. O’Donnell, he said, is “not a Great American,” layering that on top of what he said in July, that Rosie is “not in the best interests of our great country.”
I don’t think anyone other than her closest associates would argue that Rosie O’Donnell is “Great,” but she is, technically, an “American.” If the Trump Administration wants to revoke citizenship for every mediocre celebrity who criticizes the President, well, then, Hollywood is going to have to do some fast outsourcing. Let’s think about who else is on the chopping block.
Ellen DeGeneres
Once American’s first lesbian sitcom darling, then the dancing queen of daytime TV, Ellen has fallen from court favor under a cloud of employee mistreatment allegations. After pitching a huff over Trump’s re-election, she’s moved to the United Kingdom, where she’s slowly morphing into Farmer Hoggett from Babe. She and her wife, former Arrested Development star Portia DeRossi, live in a modest $18 million farmhouse, where she’s entered into a “planning clash” with her neighbors after committing a “technical breach” over some Roman remains. Ellen is the first person to simultaneously run afoul of the American empire and the Roman Empire, and as such she must be on Trump’s naughty list. We won’t see the likes of her stateside again.
Eva Longoria
The Desperate Housewives star and her husband, multimillionaire media executive José Baston, fled the United States after Trump won, dividing their time between their hovels in Spain and Mexico. “I’m privileged. I get to escape and go somewhere. Most Americans aren’t so lucky,” she told Marie Claire last fall. “They are going to be stuck in this dystopian country, and my anxiety and my sadness is for them.” Still, times were tough for Longoria, who was so desperate to escape the MAGA jackboot that she sold her Beverly Hills estate for $19 million instead of the asking price of $22 million. No citizenship for you!
George Clooney
Rumors spread online in December that Clooney had fled the US because he “can’t take the red wave anymore,” though that doesn’t appear to be the case. He and his wife Amal, a human-rights lawyer and therefore a strong candidate for citizenship revocation, have a multimillion dollar mansion on the shores of Lake Como, and also appear to live in the UK, a backwards, repressive post-colonial state that is the ironic living choice for freedom-loving American liberals. He doesn’t seem to like it here anyway, so let’s yank the passport. Goodnight, George. And good luck.
Courtney Love
Apparently because she loves governments who arrest people because they don’t like their opinions, the former grunge icon announced last year that she’s applying for her UK passport. After all, she already lives there. “I’m finally getting my British citizenship in six months. I get to be a citizen. I’m applying, man! Can’t get rid of me!” Not a good American, Courtney Love. Very nasty person. She wants to be the girl with the most scones. We might have to look into taking away her citizenship.
Sharon Stone
In July of last year, Stone told the Daily Mail that she was “certainly considering a house in Italy. I think that’s an intelligent construct at this time. This is one of the first times in my life that I’ve actually seen anyone running for office on a platform of hate and oppression.” Who among us hasn’t considered a house in Italy? To rent. For a week. With extended family. As you well know, if you’re trying to flee “hate and oppression,” move to notoriously welcoming and tolerant ITALY.
Billie Eilish
Rumors flew after Trump was re-elected that Eilish was going to leave the country, but they turned out to not be true and she’s just kind of quietly going about her business. Citizenship revocation should still be on the table, though. She and her brother Phinneas can go live on a cloud.
Barack Obama
You know who isn’t saying they’re going to leave the country? The Obamas. America has been good to them. But if Trump really wants to go full circle in his political career, he can distract from whatever problems he’s having by reviving the “birther” slander. It’s not true. Of course it’s not true. But since when did what’s true mean what’s best for America?
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Wishing Trump dead only makes him stronger
Maybe you heard that Donald Trump died over the weekend. First, the internet began to buzz over some bruising on the President’s hand during an executive-order signing ceremony. Then people started noticing that no one saw Trump on Friday, and that he didn’t have any events scheduled over the weekend. J.D. Vance gave an interview with USA Today in which he said, “if, God forbid, there’s a terrible tragedy, I can’t think of better on-the-job training than what I’ve gotten over the last 200 days.”
Trump has become so ubiquitous in our lives that there was only one conclusion to reach from his temporary semi-absence: He is dead. A TikTok video making that claim got 600,000 likes. There were tens of thousands of Twitter posts on the topic, almost trying to will it into reality.
That all quickly poofed away on Saturday when the Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese revealed that Trump had spent at least part of Friday doing an extensive interview with her. Then people spotted him golfing and playing with his grandkids, perfectly normal things for a 79-year-old to do on a holiday weekend. But still, people clung to the possibility. Just like the long-ago “Paul Is Dead” rumors, they still believed in yesterday.
The celebrity death rumor is a common phenomenon in an unreliable online world. Justin Bieber, Lil Wayne and George Clooney have all been very dead in our time. Betty White fake-died so many times that when she actually passed away we were all ready for it. But the Un-Death of Trump is different because of the absolute glee with which certain segments world received it.
I don’t know if you were aware, but a lot of people really don’t like Donald Trump. People online greeted the news of his “death” with joyful innuendo. Twitter fashion maven “Derek Guy” posted on Saturday, “so many babies are going to be born exactly 9 months from today.” Yes, Derek, because nothing makes couples want to hop into bed and make babies more than news that the President is dead.
It all felt gross and pathetic, and it just shows how powerless and backed into a corner Trump’s opponents truly are. Trump has consumed the brains of millions; he has driven them mad. They couldn’t lock him up, they couldn’t vote him out, they don’t seem to be able to stop any of his policies or his relentless cultural onslaught. All they have are nanny-nanny-boo-boo Twitter accounts and show-dancing on a pretend grave.
If history is any guide, you don’t want to live through the death of a sitting President. We’ve built the system to accommodate for it, but it creates chaos, instability, and figurative if not literal violence. Do people really think that Trump won’t leave office after his term is over? He’ll be 82. He’s going to leave. Just like the weather in Chicago, if you don’t like the President, wait a minute.
But people also need to realize that their hatred of Donald Trump doesn’t kill him. It makes him stronger. A more spiteful man has never lived, and he’ll live forever just to spite them.
When he does die, someday, in the far future, some people will mourn, some people will celebrate, but most people’s lives will just go on as if Trump never existed. He’s not your enemy, he’s not your savior. He’s just a President looking for an electorate to love him.
Yet still the rumors persisted. One fervently shitlib anti-Trump account said, “Sure seems like someone is staying awful close to Walter Reed, doesn’t it?” Another posted this: “He’s not dead, but I think he had another stroke/TIA/CVT. I think this one affected his speech, which is why they haven’t let him near a microphone or press pool in almost a week. No close up pics, either. Some things can’t be covered with orange makeup.”
Naturally, the Troll-In-Chief emerged from a short weekend off on Sunday night, posting on Truth Social, “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE.” I hate to break the news, but Trump, like Frankenstein’s monster, is alive. But with his post, the dreams of thousands of extremely sad, terminally online liberals perished forever.
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Trump should buy Hooters
In the wake of the US government taking on a 10 percent equity stake in Intel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is floating the idea of the government investing in defense companies like McDonnell Douglas. “If we are adding fundamental value to your business, I think it’s fair for Donald Trump to think about the American people,” he said.
When this news broke last week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the last true living conservative, told Politico, “If conservatives endorse this now, they hand Democrats a blueprint to expand government ownership over the private sector later. Socialism is literally government control of the means of production.” Sure Rand. While that idea might fly in your senior-year political science independent study seminar, this is Donald Trump’s America we’re talking about here. He is running the “HOTTEST” economy the world has ever seen. America has the best companies, but no one runs companies quite like Donald Trump. Here are some other companies where a US investment would be not only valuable, but vital.
Disney
Even Snoop Dogg is balking at Disney products these days, saying he’s “scared” to go to the movies with his grandchildren because there was a same-sex couple in Lightyear. Snoop’s right, that movie was terrible, and the lesbians worthless pandering. This isn’t America’s Disney that we grew up watching. We’ve had enough weird CGI dwarves and princesses of power. A US equity investment would ensure a return to Disney’s optimistic world of tomorrow and would also restore the original Disney from the adult-baby wokeism that has taken over the franchise. The Country Bears will sing the Song of the South once more, as the Trump administration awakens Disney with true love’s kiss.
Cracker Barrel
I think we can all agree by now that the Cracker Barrel revamp is a national embarrassment, turning a beloved roadside institution into something bland and generic. A Trump Administration equity stake is just what the restaurant chain needs. Let’s restore the rocking chairs on the porch, the buckets of stale candy and the shelves of wind-up raccoon toys. And let’s beef up the menu with literal extra beef, plus some Trump-branded items. Chicken and Trumplings, anyone?
Meta
Aren’t you tired of an unaccountable mega-corporation operating in secret, gathering intelligence on you even while you sleep, never having your best interests at heart while trying to rot your brain with propaganda slop? That’s the government’s job! The feds should take 10 percent of Meta so it can replace our tax revenue with slow-burn ad dollars from comedy videos about Gen X getting older and the difference between dating in the US and France. Welcome to the AI-narrated “A Day In The Life Of A Jack Russell Terrier” video economy.
Tesla
We know President Trump and Elon Musk have had their difficulties. No one’s missing the DoGE era. Well, we are, because it was fun to write about, but the country isn’t worse off without Elon grinding his chainsaw on stage every five minutes. But now that Musk is out of the national spotlight and back to running his 19 companies, his companies actually have value again. It’s definitely in the national interest for the government to control the transportation industry, the media, space travel, and Las Vegas underground train systems. Let’s just make sure Elon signs an NDA this time.
Gold’s Gym
Fitness is back. US schoolkids have to run a mile again, RFK Jr. is doing pull-ups in jeans, the Kennedy Center is honoring Sylvester Stallone and the UFC is going to stage a battle royale on the grounds of the White House. But if the Trump administration wants Americans to bulk up, it’s going to have to provide subsidized gym memberships. Exercise equipment for 400 million couch blobs is expensive. A 10 percent equity stake in any one of our fine national fitness chains would do the trick. And the TVs would no longer be tuned to the Fake News Media.
Hooters
Word broke this week that Neil Keifer, the man who’s trying to take over America’s run-down “breastaurant” chain in bankruptcy court, will revitalize the brand by bringing back hot pants and making it “delightfully tacky.” The Golden Age of Hooters is long behind us, but we also thought the Golden Age of America was behind us. So why not Hooters? It’s already bankrupt. A national investment would be inexpensive, with an easy return. President Trump could oversee the redesign himself. He knows a thing or two about Hooters. We want more sauce, shorter pants, and the most beautiful waitresses in the world. Hooters is for sale, America. Let’s grab it by proverbial.
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Trump’s Squid Games with South Korean President
“WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA?” President Trump posted over breakfast. “Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there. I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!”
Trump wasn’t talking about the global box-office success of K-Pop Demon Hunters, and wasn’t warning about the proliferation of zombies on the Train to Busan. Instead, word had reached Trump of recent raids by the government of newly-elected liberal South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on some conservative churches, including the Unification Church. These were related to documents about the coup that embroiled the country last December and nearly toppled Lee’s newly-elected government.
Trump was right to be concerned about this development, but wisely stayed out of domestic South Korean politics during his pleasant meeting with Lee in the White House this afternoon. They talked of trade deals, and how the US was ahead in them. But mostly, the meeting allowed Trump to adopt his favored posture in world affairs: Bringer of Peace.
Earlier in the day, while signing an executive order that signals the beginning of the end of cashless bail, Trump had some things to say about the endless conflict over the Korean Peninsula. Of North Korean premier Kim Jong-un, Trump said, “I know him better than anybody. Maybe his sister. His sister knows him pretty well. And I liked him. I got along with him very well. I’m not supposed to say that because I’ll get killed in the fake news media, but I liked him. If Hillary Clinton had gotten elected, we would have had a nuclear war. Now we’re not going to have a nuclear war. If that happens, it’s over.”
We thank you, President Trump, for preventing nuclear war in Asia. Lee took a similar tack, heaping praise upon a beaming Trump: “I would like to ask for your role in establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula,” he said, through a translator. “I look forward to your meeting with Kim Jung Un and the construction of a Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf at that place. I believe he will be waiting for you… Engagement is not an easy thing. And the only person who can make progress on the issue is you Mr. President. If you become the Peacemaker, then I will assist you by becoming the Pacemaker.”
Trump chuckled, beaming like a man gradually falling in love.
“That’s good,” he said. “We can do big progress with North Korea.”
A reporter asked, again, if Trump intended to meet with Kim Jong-Un. Trump, as he usually does, had a story to tell:
“I’d like to have a meeting,” he said. “I get along great with him. You were there. We even had a press conference. Kim Jong-un had his first press conference. This was a little different press conference. I said, have you done a press conference before? No. And you know what, he did great. It was a great press conference. It was historic. I doubt he’s done one since. I said, would you like to meet the fake news? They came in, you’ve never seen anything like it. Then he said ENOUGH. And that was the end. It ended very rapidly. But I think he had a good time.”
Did you remember, Trump said, when I went to North Korea? Some people in the room remembered. But Trump definitely remembered. “Remember when I went and walked across the line and everyone went crazy? Especially Secret Service. And I looked into those windows. And I saw more rifles pointed at me. There were a lot of rifles in that building. The two blue buildings on each side. The Secret Service was not happy with me. I walked up the middle and looked in that building and I saw more guns in that room than I’ve ever seen in my life. I looked at the other side and it was the same thing. And yet I felt safe because I have a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un.”
Trump had managed to avoid the evil clicking eyes of the giant doll and made it to the other side of the arena. And now, with the good graces of President Lee (who appears to be a somewhat skilled diplomat), he has the green light to bring peace on Earth and goodwill to the Korean Peninsula.
In the Squid Game of this life, there can only be one ultimate winner. And I think we all know who that winner is going to be: President Donald J. Trump. Peace will come, and the giant piggy bank will fill with money at last. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!
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Will one rotten rebrand spoil Cracker Barrel?
No one thinks the Cracker Barrel rebrand is a particularly good idea. The entire charm of Cracker Barrel lay in the farmhouse attic vibe, the nana’s candy dish assortment in the gift shop and the menu, which served up the best chicken and dumplings or biscuits and gravy and sweet tea possible from a fast-casual chain with horrible wooden chairs. Still, the melodrama surrounding this story, the rising and falling stock prices, the online mocking and gloating, seems a little overblown. Not everything has to be political. Cracker Barrel certainly doesn’t.
For those of you who’ve been wandering around the fields with a bucket on your head this week, Cracker Barrel has streamlined. They’ve decided to remove Old Man Joe or whatever his name is from the logo, though keeping the same basic font for the color scheme, and have retooled some store interiors, making it look less like a surreal Indiana BnB nightmare and more like something Chip and Joanna Gaines might have shiplapped together.
The new Cracker Barrel vibe met with equal condemnation from online Red and Blue America. The Steak and Shake chain, which made news earlier this year for its brave MAHA decision to fry potatoes in beef tallow, tweeted out the old Cracker Barrel logo with a surprisingly long manifesto:
“Sometimes, people want to change things just to put their own personality on things. At CB, their goal is to just delete the personality altogether. Hence, the elimination of the “old-timer” from the signage. Heritage is what got Cracker Barrel this far, and now the CEO wants to just scrape it all away… At Steak n Shake, we take pride in our history, our families, and American values. All are welcome. We will never market ourselves away from our past in a cheap effort to gain the approval of trend seekers.”
Pretty catty, Steak and Shake, but maybe a little overboard. Cracker Barrel may be MAGA-coded, but Democrats enjoy a nice corporate meat-and-three sometimes, too, just like Trump supporters will sometimes go for an iced caramel macchiato at the heavily Dem-coded Starbucks. The last time I checked, collard greens in pot likker belonged to everyone.
Unfortunately, the most godawful annoying people on the Democrat side of the ledger appear to agree with me. The horrifying new Trump-parodying social-media presence from California governor Gavin Newsom, which is like a monkey’s paw curse on the extremely online, tweeted out: “WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA ‘CHEESE’ FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR ‘GROCERIES’ (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!! ‘FIX IT’ ASAP! WOKE IS DEAD!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”Then, to make matters worse, David Hogg came out of the Hogg Pen to say, about the Cracker Barrel rebrand, “Let’s bring the country together and all agree this is bad and needs to be reversed immediately. Not for the left or the right but for America.” And Hogg’s political opposite, Rep. Byron Donalds from Florida, tweeted out, “In college, I worked at @CrackerBarrel in Tallahassee. I even gave my life to Christ in their parking lot,” which led Hogg to retweet someone who said “I gave my life to christ in a cracker barrel parking lot in Tallahassee” is a lana del rey lyric.”
OK, have all the sincere people and ironic X hipsters had their say now? Are we done with Cracker Barrel jokes yet? Or are we going to have to endure weeks of memes like the ones I just saw with the old Cracker Barrel logo with the words “Release The Files” in the place of the company name?
I don’t think the Cracker Barrel rebrand is a particularly good idea, but then again, maybe America has moved on from its self-conception as a continental extension of the Country Bear Jamboree. Middle America doesn’t look like the set of Hee Haw anymore. Not all change is good, but private equity doesn’t always get it wrong, either.
Once again, Dems are misreading the cultural tea leaves and trying to appeal to a regular-guy demographic that no longer particularly exists. We live in Magnolia nation now; put that in your repurposed corncob pipe and smoke it. Anyone who doesn’t realize that is, in the words of the iconic Cracker Barrel peg game, just an “EG NOR A MOOSE.”
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A presidential pizza delivery service
The excited word went out late Thursday afternoon that President Trump was going to do an evening ridealong with the National Guard. According to Twitter, he was now officially the roughest dude to occupy the White House since Teddy Roosevelt. Bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when the Trump gets you?
Fight fight fight!
At the height of rush hour, POTUS climbed into “The Beast,” the Presidential limo, in a motorcade that included chief of staff Susie Wiles, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, most-hated-man-in-America Steven Miller, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, among others. This was going to be one hell of a ridealong.
At 5:32 pm, Trump arrived at U.S. Park Police headquarters, where he was met by 300 warriors from the DEA, ATF, US Marshals, National Guard, Police HSI, the DC Metropolitan Police and the FBI.
“You are nice healthy looking people,” he said, and the crowd laughed.
He was about to make them less healthy, as he presented them with bags of hamburgers from the White House kitchen, and stacks of pizzas from “a good place,” which turned out to be Wise Guy Pizza. Then the enforcer-in-chief motivated the troops. “We had a country that was laughed at a year ago,” he said.
The world thought the U.S. was finished, he added, but “they couldn’t understand what was happening. And it’s about leadership. But we had a country that was a dead country in many ways.”
Then, because it was Trump, and it was a day of the week, he pivoted to talking trash about windmills. But he also promised these brave men and women that he would fight mightily to improve Washington, D.C., vowing to “regrass” the city’s parks.
“I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world,” The President said. “And we’re going to be regressing all of your parks, all brand new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy.”
After remarks from a few Administration officials, including former Fox News commentator Judge Jeanine Pirro, Trump got back into The Beast, and was home at the White House just a little after 6 p.m. It hadn’t been much of a ridealong. But thanks to the person who knows more about grass than anyone in the world, the streets of D.C. were safe once again.