Did Trump say he doesn’t care about the midterms?
Yes indeed, he did say that. As commenter “huxley” writes:
Trump had better know what he is doing. Maybe he’s got it worked out that Iran collapses economically real soon. Still, it seems he is cutting it pretty close. He may say he doesn’t care about the midterms, but a lot of Americans care more about the economy than Iran.
Indeed they do, although a lot of people care about both. But gas prices are certainly more up close and personal.
What did Trump actually say, in context? This:
President Donald Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday that he isn’t concerned about making a deal soon with Iran, adding that he doesn’t “care about the midterms” in what he said he thinks is the regime’s calculation that he has to negotiate a deal before what are expected to be highly-competitive elections in November.
“They thought they were going to out-wait me, you know. ‘We’ll out-wait him. He’s got the midterms.’ I don’t care about the midterms. Look what happened last night, that was a prelude to the midterms. People understand it,” Trump said, likely referencing his endorsed candidate, Ken Paxton, winning the Senate Republican runoff in Texas. …
“Mr. President, you’ve said that you’re in no rush to make a deal, but with gas prices that are still high across the country, people are paying more for travel. Does that give you more urgency to make a deal? Why doesn’t it?” ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott asked Trump during the Cabinet meeting.
“Well, I’ll tell you, the primary urgency, I’ve said this, it wasn’t covered properly, but the primary urgency is that we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump responded.
It’s very clearly a message to Iran that they shouldn’t believe he’s under pressure to cave because of concerns about the midterms. The press and the Trump opposition are eager to convey the message as one that says “he doesn’t care about you, he doesn’t care that you have to pay more for gas, he simply doesn’t care.” But clearly he cares; he just prioritizing the message to the Iranian leadership that they shouldn’t believe he will cave because of the midterms. Note the eagerness of questioner Rachel Scott of ABC (although she’s harely alone) to indicate that he must cave.
Trump also said this:
…[W]e’re not talking about any easing of sanctions or giving money. No sanctions, no money, no nothing,” Trump said. “We have control of money that they claim is theirs. We’ll keep control of that money. And when they behave properly and when they do what’s right, we’ll let them have their money. But right now, we’re not doing that … One thing is not contingent on the other.” …
On the status of negotiations, Trump said on Wednesday he’s “not satisfied” and that Iran is “negotiating on fumes.”
“We’re not satisfied with it, but we will be. We will be. Either that or we’ll have to just finish the job,” Trump said.
The question I would like to see answered is: so why continue to negotiate? Haven’t you given this enough time? I don’t know the true answer, but I listed my guesses in this recent post.
E. Jean Carroll is being investigated by the DOJ
Why is Carroll being investigated at this late date? Apparently it’s for conspiracy and perjury about who funded her:
According to [Byron] York, the probe appears to zero in on the very origins of Carroll’s case – a story that traces back to a swanky Manhattan ‘Resistance party’ where anti-Trump operatives, deep-pocketed donors, and eager lawyers cooked up the defamation lawsuit that later ballooned into a full-blown battery claim under New York’s specially tailored Adult Survivors Act.
Carroll’s story of rape never passed the smell test, for a host of reasons I and many others have written about before. You can read York’s own effort from 2023 here. In summary: her accusations against Trump were incredibly weak and both politically and financially motivated, in addition to being a reflection of Carroll’s quest for notoriety.
But her accusations aren’t the issue now except tangentially. The issue is her funding:
On the reported criminal investigation of E. Jean Carroll — this is apparently what it is about. From April 2023, "Carroll v. Trump: The rape case that started at a Resistance party." https://t.co/yszo2259QM pic.twitter.com/XCdEBgcliT
— Byron York (@ByronYork) May 28, 2026
If you don’t have access to X:
There’s also this, which downplays the perjury aspect and focuses on other irregularities and possible charges:
The probe is focused on a trust founded by billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, whose nonprofit helped pay some of Carroll’s legal costs, two sources said. Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, is an outspoken critic of Trump.
The crimes under investigation are possible money laundering, obstruction, and conspiracy, one of the sources said. Investigators are also looking into a possible perjury charge against Carroll related to her testimony in the lawsuits, the source said, but it’s not the main focus of the probe.
Will a prosecution come from this? I doubt it, but it’s possible.
“You can’t go back” – the fall of Constantinopole
I just learned that tomorrow is the 573rd anniversary of the fall of Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire was no more, and the great city was now in the hands of the Ottoman Empire, as a result of military conquest after a siege of close to two months. It was both a religious turning point and a more general historical turning point:
The attacking Ottoman Army, significantly outnumbered Constantinople’s defenders …
The fall of Constantinople and of the Byzantine Empire was a watershed moment of the Late Middle Ages, marking the effective end of the Roman Empire, a state which began in roughly 27 BC and had lasted nearly 1,500 years. For many modern historians, the fall of Constantinople marks the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the early modern period. The city’s fall also stood as a turning point in military history. Since ancient times, cities and castles had depended upon ramparts and walls to repel invaders. The walls of Constantinople, especially the Theodosian walls, protected Constantinople from attack for 800 years and were noted as some of the most advanced defensive systems in the world at the time. However, these fortifications were overcome by Ottoman infantry with the support of gunpowder, specifically from cannons and bombards, heralding a change in siege warfare.
But I first learned about this as a child through a rather silly song, popular in 1953. I was exceedingly young, but popular music nevertheless still seeped down to me, and the song was very catchy:
“Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” is a 1953 novelty song, with lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy and music by Nat Simon. It was written on the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. The lyrics humorously refer to the official renaming of the city of Constantinople to Istanbul. The song’s original release, performed by The Four Lads, was certified as a gold record.
The lyrics can be found here, and they treat the whole thing like a light joke. Back in 1953 it must have seemed that way to most of the Western world. But who’s laughing now? An excerpt:
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it’s Turkish delight on a moonlit night
(Oh) every gal in Constantinople
(Oh) lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
(Oh) so if you’ve a date in Constantinople
(Oh) she’ll be waiting in Istanbul …So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’
Actually, it’s everybody’s business these days – and by “it” we’re not talking about Constantinople/Istanbul per se. We’re talking about the Muslim world versus the Christian world (and the Jews, of course). We’re talking about various kinds of conquest and not just the military kind – perhaps not even primarily the military kind. The siege involves the human mind, and it’s been going on far longer than two months. The main fronts are academia, the press, and politics.
NOTE: Here’s the original song:
Open thread 5/28/2026
Somaliland vs. Somalia
Somaliland is in the news lately:
The new breakaway country of Somaliland is proving to be a thorn in the side of Iran and its Houthi proxies. And here’s the interesting bit; even as negotiations with the United States are underway to try to bring an end to hostilities, Somaliland’s friendliness towards the United States and Israel, and their willingness to allow U.S. basing of military assets, including at the deep-water port of Berbera, is reportedly making Iran and the Houthis feel somewhat maladjusted.
“Iran is said to be ‘deeply threatened’ by the small African breakaway state, Somaliland, because of the potential for U.S., Israeli and Western powers to use its deep water port and airbase.
“Such moves would severely disrupt Iran’s plan to use their proxy, Yemen’s Houthi terror group, to attack Red Sea shipping.”
I’ve written this previous post about Somaliland. Since then, I’ve been wondering what makes Somaliland so different from its neighbor, Somalia, and so many other states in the region. I think the answer is probably complicated and probably contains many elements of which I’m unaware. But one is probably its different colonial history; Somaliland was a British colony and Somalia was an Italian colony. This can make a world of difference.
Here’s the history; the two areas actually diverged a long time ago:
Somaliland has been a distinct region from Somalia since the late 1800s. It was a British protectorate until 1960 (meaning a dependent territory, over which the British government exercised limited jurisdiction).
It then became independent for just five days.
At this point it merged with present-day Somalia, which was then under Italian rule, beginning a long and often violent struggle.
A rebel group, the Somali National Movement (SNM), emerged in Somaliland in the 1980s. In 1991 they declared Somaliland’s independence following the ousting of the military dictator Siad Barre, whose forces had killed tens of thousands of people during civil war along ethnic, clan-based lines.
The article also says the two regions are “culturally and ethnically distinct.” But Somaliland is also extremely poor and suffering from drought.
This is from a Somaliland website:
1 July 1960, Somaliland chose to unite with Somalia with the aim of creating a “Greater Somalia” that would unite all Somalis in five countries in the Horn of Africa including Northern Kenya, Italian Somalia, French Somaliland (Djibouti), and Eastern Ethiopia.
1961: Somalia betrayed the treaty that joined it with Somaliland by passing a different Act of Union in its National Assembly. …
The people of Somaliland had no say in the making of the constitution of the new Somali Republic. In a majority of Somaliland districts the 1961 referendum on the constitution was boycotted and the constitution rejected. One legal expert commented that the legal validity of the legislative instruments establishing the union were “questionable.”
?The early years of the union saw the steady political and economic isolation of former Somaliland. Political and military positions were awarded disproportionately to “southern” Somalis. The 1961 attempted coup by a group of highly qualified Somaliland military officers was an indication of the disenchantment with the union that Somaliland had entered into.
The whole thing led to a bloody civil war, with the Somali dictatorship killing many Somalilanders. Ultimately, though, Somaliland broke away and has been fairly stable since. It’s a completely Muslim country and yet – as I wrote in my previous post – very pro-Israel.
Al Green loses his primary
No great loss – except to Al Green.
This is an example of the effect of redistricting. Green would have almost certainly been a shoe-in if he was running in his old district. But he can’t do that, because his old district doesn’t exist. So he switched to another district, and was defeated in the runoff:
The race for Texas’ solidly Democratic 18th Congressional District was an incumbent-on-incumbent Democratic clash, with Green and Menefee both trying to preserve their places in Congress after redistricting altered the congressional districts around Houston.
Green has been among President Donald Trump’s fiercest critics in Congress, pursuing impeachment charges on multiple occasions against him during both of Trump’s terms. Green has been kicked out of Trump’s State of the Union addresses multiple times as well for standing up and protesting amid the speech.
The new district is not competitive for the GOP, so Menefee will almost certainly win in the general.
The Trumpian primaries and Trump’s influence
The recent primaries in several states have been framed as a test of Trump’s power. But it’s a test he would be failing no matter what happened, according to the MSM, the Democrats, and other assorted Trump-haters. If his picks hadn’t won, it would have been, “Trump’s now a eunuch, a powerless has-been.” Now that they’ve won, it’s,”Trump’s a dangerously tyrannical bully, controlling everything and everybody through threats and fear.”
In reality, I don’t think it’s either. Trump is as much a reflection and result of opinions on the right as he is a shaper of those opinions. For example, I’ve been seeing significant complaints about Cornyn for quite a while online, Trump tapped into that and also probably escalated it, but it already existed.
Ken Paxton's victory in Texas has, I think, interesting implications for the national political scene.
Coming on top of a string of similar events, this is very bad news for anybody who wants to think MAGA is declining in influence or Trump is a spent force.
I'm not MAGA – I'm…
— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) May 27, 2026
Longer excerpt from the tweet:
Coming on top of a string of similar events, [Paxton’s win] is very bad news for anybody who wants to think MAGA is declining in influence or Trump is a spent force. …
There have been a lot of very determined attempts to fragment the MAGA base and attempt to drive a wedge between them and the Trumpster. I see this on X and other social media – lots of indignant blithering about Israel and the Iran war that seems very light on substance and very heavy on attempting to fracture the Republican coalition.
I don’t think it’s working. [Last night] is evidence that Trump’s endorsement matters, and the base is not kindly disposed towards any Republican pol who’s perceived as not being on his team.
Again, I think the emphasis is wrong there. Yes, there are people who don’t like GOP office-holders who are disloyal to Trump himself, and who consider Team Trump the important thing. But I think the majority of voters support Trump because of what he has done and what he plans to do – that is, his policies – rather than thinking his policies are good because they’re his. Of course,Trump’s personality isn’t separate from his actions, but it’s the latter that most MAGA people emphasize and if he started doing things that were perceived as out of line with those policies he’d be losing their support.
And yes, there are people who want to take over the MAGA movement for various nefarious reasons, including Israel-hatred and Jew-hatred. But there are others who are turning on Trump merely because they are isolationists who perceived him as promising no more wars forever, not just “no forever wars.” But I think that most people on the right understood Trump to be a Jacksonian rather than an isolationist, and see the Iran war as a Jacksonian conflict that is not only necessary but long overdue. In line with that, though, if he ends the Iran war with a bad deal, one perceived as giving away too much to Iran, many of those who have stuck with him so far may become at least somewhat disillusioned.
Also – contrary to the scare propaganda of the left – Trump isn’t going to be running for a third term. If his health holds up, which I sincerely hope it does, he’ll be in office for a little over two and a half more years. Trump’s 80th birthday is only a couple of weeks away, and if all goes well he’ll be 82 and a half on leaving the presidency. At that point, Trump will have a successor or successors. But Trump is sui generis, and there won’t be anyone quite like him again, for good or ill.
Open thread 5/27/2026
Why, we were just telling scary stories – say the climate-doomers
For some reason, Now It Can Be Told:
You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.
Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.
So are we to conclude that author Bryan Walsh sometimes did know and yet failed to communicate that he was writing the equivalent of a Hollywood script?
As for why he’s telling the tale now, it’s a domino effect:
Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”
Walsh still says things will be bad, just not as bad. But why would we trust that prediction?
Was RCP 8.5 ever realistic? One camp of experts, led by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy modeler Glen Peters, argues that RCP 8.5 was plausible in 2011, but was taken off the table by genuine policy and technology progress. The other camp, led by Roger Pielke Jr., argues that the rate of global decarbonization has been roughly linear for decades. That would mean we didn’t actively avoid RCP 8.5; it was just never realistic to begin with. Both camps agree on what counts, though: RCP 8.5 should be gone, and the planet is still on track to warm between 2.5° and 3° by 2100.
Walsh seems to be saying, in most of the article, that if we could predict the policy we could predict the climate. But I have always thought that’s a case of hubris. There are too many variables and too many unknowns interacting in too complex and too poorly-understood a fashion. And that’s even if you assume that scientists and journalists are always acting in good faith, which is – as they say – somewhat implausible.
Today is Texas primary day
And here’s a thread to discuss it.
Paxton won, hands down.
“Butler was staged”
Why do so many people believe the Butler assassination attempt was staged? Or that all the assassination attempts on Trump were staged?
About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged according to a new survey.
Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans. …
Perhaps the most striking finding was that 42% of Democrats said they believed the Butler shooting was staged.
Among independents, that figure fell to 21%, while just 7% of Republicans said the same.
My explanation? If you believe that there is no objective truth, you are free to choose your truth – and the internet will assist you in doing so. There are also many people for whom most of life is lived online, watching a screen and coming to think of people as actors on that screen. The idea that these attempts were fake is one that’s spread online, and for people who believe the worst of Trump it’s a “truth” they can get behind. The fact that other people were wounded and one person killed at Butler? Fake. The photos of the assassin on the roof? Fake.
As just one example of the folks spreading this particular set of ideas, I bring you the odd couple, Candace Owens and Hunter Biden. Yes, you heard that right (the clip is less than a minute long):
Or a conspiracy. The JFK conspiracy theories have spawned countless others. But to the best of my knowledge, it never became a widespread idea that he hadn’t died and that the killing was fake; he was obviously dead in a way that would have been difficult for even the most devoted conspiracy theorist to deny. As far as I know, though, the other attempted presidential assassinations between then and now – for example, the shooting of Reagan, or the attempt on Ford’s life – never engendered any sort of widespread notion that they weren’t real.
Perhaps that sort of idea began with 9/11 Truthers. There was a not insignificant number of people who believed the WTC and Pentagon attacks were, if not exactly fake, then a performative plot by the US government:
The most prominent conspiracy theory is that the collapse of the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center were the result of controlled demolitions rather than structural failure due to impact and fire. Another prominent belief is that the Pentagon was hit by a missile launched by elements from inside the U.S. government, or that hijacked planes were remotely controlled …
Extraordinary. And there are also the people who think the moon landings were faked.
The other day I heard two jokes about conspiracy theorists and the tenacious quality of their beliefs. Here’s the first:
“Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. You can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.”
And the second:
“A JFK assassination conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God welcomes him and says, ‘To reward your lifelong search for the truth, I will answer one question for you.’
“The man doesn’t hesitate. ‘Who really killed John F. Kennedy?’ he asks.
“God smiles and says, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone shooting from the Texas School Book Depository with a Manlicher-Carcano rifle. There was no second shooter and no conspiracy.’
“The man mutters, ‘Shit. This goes much higher up than I thought.'”