Scenes from a personalist regime

notable that Trump's media strategy to sell this war is doing bespoke phone conversations with individual reporters instead of answering questions publicly

The actual PURCELL PRINCIPLE (i.e. it is always too close to an election for a court to rule in favor of Democrats, it is never too close to an election for a court to rule in favor of Republicans) strikes again

This is a war almost 40 years in the making. Trump said in *1987* that the US should attack "horrible, horrible" Iran, "and take over some of their oil." In the years since, Trump talked about seizing oil from Venezuela, Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, and Libya. www.businessinsider.com/trump-energy...

One of my favourite sides of politics/media.

This is a bombshell: "the Pentagon wanted the company to allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data" This kind of agenda echoes the defunded Total Information Awareness effort, post-9/11

I think there’s a pretty clear structural explanation for why Democrats from purple states are consistently more interesting, dynamic, and not infrequently even more progressive! But our congressional leadership is dominated by Dems from one of the worst state machines.

Democrats have had one continuous congressional leadership clique since 2017! It’s crazy! Despite all the political disaster and failure there’s never been a serious effort to put a different group of people in charge, and if you complain about it, they treat you as an obvious crank for noticing.

Publishing my normal Sunday polling article early (for obvious reasons): Trump starts a war with Iran that few Americans support. Overall support for Trump in early post-strike polling is below that for Afghanistan and Iraq, including among Republicans. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/polls-trum...

“We put them in our agreement” means there are no restrictions in the underlying models, unlike Anthropic, and you’re relying on *checks notes* the Trump administration to hold to this. So. Yeah.

Agreed. He’s not kidding. He’s means every damn word of it. He’s everything our Founders feared. We must recognize that he’s serious so we can defeat him.

Did OpenAI reject its stated core concerns about AI running fully autonomous robots and conducting mass surveillance of Americans? It sure seems that way. I parse the language and provide the background here:

The entire Democratic strategy debate — "moderate" or move left? fight or compromise? — is based on a misreading of data. Voters don't think Dems are too progressive; they think Dems are weak. The actual math on what to do about this isn't even close! New: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/new-poll-d...

"Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting." wapo.st/3N5cpEn

"What one finds in the partisan braying of Tuesday night is the same sentiment articulated when Jonathan Ross called Renee Good a 'fucking bitch' after putting a bullet in her head." Good @aselrod.bsky.social piece drawing through line from ICE brownshirts to Trump's GOP collaborators in Congress:

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0... Time to break out the guillotines.

After pointing at Democrats and saying they are "crazy," Trump says, "We’re lucky we have a country, with people like this. Democrats are destroying our country, but we stopped it, just in the nick of time." Just insanely destructive. Indefensible — but Republicans stood and clapped.

SOTU taking on some ominous lynch mob vibes as the almost entirely white and overwhelmingly male Republicans in the chamber stand and jeer at their Democratic colleagues while their angry, screaming leader eggs them on.

I actually think the behavior of the Republicans in the audience has been more noteworthy than Trump’s speech itself. The braying, boorish jeers and yawps of a party fully given over to fascism.

The rush to assure that the the constitutional order is fine and the courts are controlling Trump, is really astonishing given the use of the shadow docket to allow Trump to reshape the government as he saw fit. Also, how much mileage they are getting from the student loan case?

This specific unsigned WaPo editorial is bad. More broadly: Through past year, unsigned WaPo editorials are always bad. One supported demolition of the East Wing. Another supported closing the Kennedy Center. Occam's razor: If Trump likes it, Bezos's truckling (and unnamed) ed writers do too.

Pretty amazing that comms person at FBI called my @ms.now colleague @kendilanian-nbc.bsky.social a liar and demand a correction only for Kash to post a photo from the locker room

And yet it’s even more dumb: Both hospital ships are in dry-dock in Alabama, so they won’t be arriving anytime soon. This is a weird distraction from the Danes medically evacuating a sick US sailor from a US Navy nuclear sub yesterday 9 miles from Nuuk. What was a sub doing nine miles from Nuuk?

As I keep saying, the Epstein story is an offshore finance story. And offshore finance is about elite impunity: insistence on their wealth and their persons being protected by the law, but never being subject to the law. It's the "Every man a King" fantasy made real. people.com/jeffrey-epst...

A lot of people, including me, were wondering how an IRB could ever approve this study. The answer is that no IRB did. The person who “signed off” on approval from the only ethics board that reviewed it had resigned three years earlier. His signature was used without his knowledge.

It remains astounding how unfaithfully the media covers Trump’s ramblings day to day. We’re a decade into this — and his rambling gets worse — and yet the coverage continues to portray his public appearances as if they’re coherent.

"I can destroy the country." --Donald Trump, 2/20/2026

I'm sorry that we're in "first they came for" territory, I really am. But we are.

love to be looted by our criminal president

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

In the concentration camp universe, this is what's known as a filtration camp. A government preemptively takes a whole class of people to interrogate and detain extrajudicially in order to inflict duress on them while arbitrarily assessing their (supposed) culpability.

A very detailed explanation of how FBI bamboozled a magistrate into authorizing a raid on Fulton County’s election offices by omitting critical information that would have totally undermined any probable cause claim. Pretty clear-cut case of calculated deception of the courts.

The regime is now dictating what political views are acceptable to air on television and paramount/cbs are collaborating in that censorship bsky.app/profile/ditz...

I think it’s time for Democratic leaders to start saying “if you’re a pilot or ground crew involved in a deportation that was stayed by a judge, you’ll be held criminally liable for human trafficking.” Everyone involved in these flights should have that fear in the back of their minds.

The NYTimes often doesn't quote Trump at all, instead reframing his words with a summary falsely suggesting coherent thought, in contrast to the gibberish he actually said. They also don't mention how he routinely mumbles and slurs even prepared remarks, like here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zsd...

Have you ever once seen the New York Times quote Trump like this?

This picture of Olympian Laila Edwards at 5 years of age with her "Cleveland Heights Tigers Mites B team" crew is eye-wateringly adorable. They look so fierce and determined, although a few can't help but grin. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/u...

Federal government may seek removal of individual Alaskans from state voter rolls alaskabeacon.com/2026/02/13/a...

OTD* in Black History: Laila Edwards, the first African American woman to play for the USA Women's Hockey Team for the Olympics, scored a goal as a rookie in the game against our biggest hockey rival, Canada. Go Team USA!!!!! 🇺🇸 Literally on this day: February 10, 2026.

no foreign foe has ever dreamed of being able to sack and pillaging this country the way Trump admin and its congressional and scotus enablers do every day.

Not only did they murder hundreds of thousands of people. They also stole the money.

I think it’s hard for most people to fathom the answer to the question, Why Minneapolis? because most people aren’t acquainted with white nationalist twitter, which has been fixated on terrorizing MPLS’s black population for at least a decade. And now it’s an assignment editor for the Trump admin.

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

So a Trump attorney that aided his 2020 campaign (and wrote a memo encouraging Pence to skip counting electoral votes) was given an "election integrity" job in the administration, where he made a referral to investigate Fulton County. 1/2

Rep. Delia Ramirez to DHS officials: "I have as much respect for you as I do for the last white men who put on masks to terrorize communities of color. I have no respect for the inheritors of the Klanhood and the slave patrol. Those activities were criminal and so are yours."

the Karen energy is off the charts

It bears repeating that Tom Homan is a fucking psycho and Greg Bovino's exile means functionally nothing when it comes to what's happening on the ground in Minnesota.

They are in one of the best places in the world to eat food but can't go out either because Italian food is too exotic, or because they know they would be booed. Not just the VP, not just abroad. Key members of the Trump cabinet live on military bases (Hegseth, Noem, Rubio, Miller).

Millions of Republicans now see Canada and the EU as enemies. The rapid recent rise in negative sentiment recalls the big rise in Republicans’ opinion of Vladimir Putin in 2016. No consistency, no principle, no sense of national interest. Deeply cultish, ready to abandon anything on leader’s whim.