told ya

Allen Clifton continues to write compelling columns, and now has a Substack too. If everyone going to end up on Substack? Could a billionaire sweep in and BUY Substack and fire everyone?

I get so sick and tired of seeing polls saying that Americans have soured on Donald Trump’s handling of the economy.

Let me say this with as much professionalism as I can possibly present right now: F*ck off.

Oh, I’m sorry — you folks who voted for him are “disappointed” that nearly everything we all told you would happen is happening?

You know, like how he had no real economic plan to lower prices, how his tariffs would lead to higher prices and that American consumers would pay them, and how his immigration propaganda wasn’t “just about the criminals,” but that he was largely going to target any immigrant he felt he could expel from this country — even those showing up to hearings, as they were required to, regarding their immigration status.

Every time this orange moron gets elected and reality inevitably proves what an incompetent pile of garbage we all told everyone who voted for him he was, polls come out with people saying they’re “disappointed” that he’s exactly what we all told anyone foolish enough to vote for him he was.

Trump’s biggest claim to fame during his first administration was taking credit for the economy Obama left him. Now, when he inherited a strong — but more fragile — economic environment and was no longer surrounded by any competent adults, it took him less than a year to turn it into a huge mess and some of the weakest economic numbers we've had in years.

Which is exactly what we told everyone who voted for him he would do.

Why anyone ever believed that a guy who’s mostly known as a businessman for constant failures, multiple bankruptcies, and being a complete slimeball when it came to paying people who did work for him was ever somehow a “genius” regarding complicated economic issues is something future generations will spend countless hours studying.

Hell, he even got us involved in the war with Iran that he spent more than ten years promising he would never start — while claiming his opponents, including his predecessor, would. A war that's led to inflation hitting three-year highs and Americans collectively paying hundreds of billions of dollars more for basically everything due to higher fuel costs.

If you voted for Trump and regret it, that’s fine. I’ll never deny anyone a second chance.

That said, what I won’t do is act like we should accept the fact that those folks ignored everything we said and pretend this is some sort of complete surprise.

That’s like claiming you were shocked by a surprise party we all told you the time and location of.

If you are someone who chose to be willfully ignorant by not listening to others — or denying facts you didn’t like — then you need to own up to that.

I can always forgive someone who’s realized a mistake. What I will not do, however, is allow someone to regret something but act as if they never saw it coming.

Because at the root of why we’re dealing with this orange imbecile for a second time is the fact that people make these mistakes, regret them, are never forced to reconcile what went wrong in the first place (they ignored people, facts, and truths they didn’t like), so they just keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

I don’t need someone to tell me that I was right, but I do need them to realize why they were so damn wrong.

Allen Clifton on Facebook

Sullivan's Island

A wee bit of history here, courtesy of NASA, considering our nation's upcoming 250th anniversary. It's so sad (but funny) to see Trump try to co-opt the "Great American Fair" into the "Freedom 250 Fair" and oh, it happens to be all about Trump. Natch. Never have we seen such a repugnant example of a "man" as Donald Trump. Maybe a mass murderer would be worse. Maybe. Remember that you can click a pic to make it larger on your device.

The Battle for Sullivan’s Island

Signs of the marshy, sandy terrain that helped colonists repel invading 

British forces in a pivotal battle in June 1776 remain visible on Sullivan's 

Island  in this image acquired on June 3, 2026, by the OLI 

(Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8.

NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

As Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five presented their first draft of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on June 28, 1776, several British warships and thousands of troops were massing around Sullivan's Island in South Carolina.

The pitched battle for the sandy barrier island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor that played out over the course of that June day was one of the most significant in the early stages of the Revolutionary War. By nightfall, largely untested colonial troops had decisively defeated the British, an outcome that helped save Charleston from occupation and buoyed American spirits at a critical stage of the war.

The Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of the island on June 3, 2026. Two hundred fifty years earlier, the sandy beaches, salt marshes, and general shape of the island would have looked similar, though with less evidence of roads or other signs of human development.

There certainly would have been some signs of human activity on the island, however. Quite noticeable would have been Fort Sullivan, a large square structure built from palmetto logs on the southern tip of the island, near the entrance to the harbor. Though one side of the fort, assembled largely by enslaved people, was still unfinished at the time of the battle, the other sides had 16-foot-wide walls packed with sand and containing planked gun platforms that mounted 31 cannons.

Historical maps show at least one road extending from the southern to northern tip of Sullivan's Island, where hundreds of colonial soldiers were also encamped to protect Breach Inlet from a force of roughly 3,000 British troops massing on nearby Long Island (now Isle of Palms). When the battle began, historians estimate that there were roughly 800 colonial troops, including dozens of Catawba warriors, defending the northeastern part of Sullivan's Island, embedded within earthen defenses and manning two artillery pieces.

June 3, 2026

When the British attack came on the morning of June 28, 1776, both military tactics and geography played critical roles in determining the outcome. Having been told the water at the inlet was less than 18 inches (46 centimeters) deep at low tide, the British commander had planned to have his forces walk across Breach Inlet on foot. But he was forced to pivot to a more dangerous amphibious assault using flatboats when he realized the shallowest part of the break was at least 7 feet (2 meters) deep at low tide. Traveling by flatboat limited the number of British troops who could cross the channel at once, making it easier for colonial defenders to repel them during fierce skirmishing throughout the day.

On the other side of the island, British warships had dropped anchor near Fort Sullivan and begun launching thousands of cannonballs and exploding shells at the fort. However, the natural durability and pliability of the palmetto wood absorbed incoming fire like a sponge. 

Most incoming shells that fell within the fort’s walls were neutralized. There was a marshy "morass" in the center of the fort, Colonel William Moultrie, the fort's commanding officer later noted in his memoirs, that "swallowed" up incoming fire "instantly." Shells that made it over the walls and "fell in the sand in and about the fort, were immediately buried, so that very few of them bursted amongst us," he wrote.

With their limited powder, the colonists focused their fire on the ship carrying the British commander, Sir Peter Parker, severely damaging it and ultimately killing 40 people on board. By the evening, exhausted from the 10-hour battle and making little progress, the British forces retreated.

“We never had such a drubbing in our lives,” one Royal Navy sailor wrote. After the battle, the fort became known as Fort Moultrie, and the palmetto tree began appearing on the state seal in what would prove to be an enduring symbol of colonial pride and resistance. Six days after the battle, the Declaration of Independence was adopted in Philadelphia.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

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El Niño

I'm a little surprised that the GOP fascists haven't silenced NASA by now, especially considering that NASA tends to believe in climate change. Damn we are glad that we moved away from South Padre Island. We are now around 80' above sea level. High enough to survive a moderate rise of ocean levels, but not high enough if all the ice at the poles melts. 

 

El Niño Is Underway

El Niño, characterized by warmer-than-normal water temperatures in parts of the equatorial Pacific, made its return in June 2026. Observations of sea surface height from the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite that month indicated that the 2026 event was continuing to strengthen.  

The natural, recurring phenomenon can have widespread effects, typically bringing wetter conditions to the U.S. Southwest and drought to countries in the western Pacific, such as Indonesia and Australia. NOAA declared an El Niño on June 11, after sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific measured at least 0.5 degrees Celsius above average for several consecutive months.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists have been observing a complementary sign of El Niño: areas of elevated sea surface height. When ocean water warms, it expands in volume and causes the sea surface to rise—making the water’s height a reliable indicator of ocean temperatures. Warmer-than-normal temperatures, hence higher sea surface heights, in parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean are associated with El Niño.

The map above depicts sea surface height anomalies across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean as observed on June 8, 2026. Shades of red indicate sea levels that were higher than average. Normal sea level conditions appear white, and lower areas are blue.  

Data for the map were acquired by the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite—launched in 2020 by NASA and led by ESA (European Space Agency)—and processed by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Note that signals related to seasonal cycles and long-term trends have been removed to highlight sea level anomalies associated with El Niño and other short-term natural phenomena.

Earlier in spring 2026, the satellite started to detect precursor signs of El Niño as swells of warm water hundreds of miles wide, known as Kelvin waves, moved from the western Pacific to the eastern Pacific. That happens when trade winds in the western equatorial Pacific weaken and then temporarily reverse to blow from the west. Warm water piles up in the east, deepening the warm surface layer, lowering the thermocline, and suppressing the upwelling that usually keeps waters along the Pacific coasts of the Americas cooler.

This buildup of heat beneath the water’s surface is what sea surface height observations capture. It goes beyond surface temperature measurements to indicate how much heat is stored in the subsurface. That’s important because a shallow warm layer might not have much impact on climate and weather, while a large reservoir of heat below the surface can matter more.

According to JPL sea level researcher Severine Fournier, deputy project scientist for Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, conditions in the western Pacific on June 8 looked similar to those from the same time in 1997, a year when an exceptionally strong El Niño emerged. Warm conditions in the eastern Pacific in 2026 have lagged behind, however, with fewer Kelvin waves built up by the same date.

Still, more warm Kelvin waves appeared to be approaching the eastern Pacific, meaning El Niño was still strengthening. Whether it catches up to 1997 depends on ocean activity in the coming weeks. “For now, it looks like it’s going to be a big one—more so than I would have said last week—but we still need more observations to know what’s going to happen.”

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023) processed by the European Space Agency and further processed by Josh Willis, Severin Fournier, and Kevin Marlis/NASA/JPL-Caltech. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

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Sincerely, American

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool continues to dominate the news. Wouldn't it be a riot if THIS is what finally brings Trump down? His endless need to always be right and to lie when it isn't is a real character flaw that normally would have destroyed any "regular" person. I won't say Trump is exceptional, but I will say he is "irregular." Thank goodness there are not many around like him.  

Four score and seven tarps ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and now apparently guarded by chain-link fence because someone may or may not have touched the national puddle.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was built to reflect the Washington Monument, the sky, and the solemn endurance of the American experiment. Then Donald Trump tried to make it look like a hotel pool, and for one brief, shimmering moment, it reflected something even more historically useful: the governing philosophy of a man who believes every problem can be painted blue, blamed on enemies, and hidden under a tarp.

This was supposed to be a triumph of patriotic beautification. The pool would be cleaned, sealed, restored, and made worthy of America’s 250th birthday. There would be grandeur, efficiency, cameras, and the familiar promise that only one man, standing bravely between the nation and ordinary maintenance, could rescue us from algae.

Instead, nature responded with the kind of quiet institutional review that only standing water can provide. The pool turned green, the coating peeled, the blue material floated up, ducks died, reporters asked questions, and the public looked at the most visible ceremonial basin in America and saw not renewal, but a municipal project wearing too much foundation.

A normal administration might have said, “The repair didn’t work as intended. We are reviewing the materials, the contractor, and the timeline.” That would have been boring, adult, and almost impossible to monetize politically. So, we got vandals.

Not immediately, of course. The story had to develop, similarly to algae. First there was a renovation, a failure, and a need for someone else to blame. Soon, we had shadowy figures, knives, box cutters, arrests, investigations, and an alleged gash of such elastic dimensions that it seemed to grow every time it was described. Two hundred feet, three hundred feet, three hundred fifty feet; at this rate, by the Fourth of July, the cut will have started in Virginia and ended somewhere near Delaware.

The key thing about the vandalism story isn’t whether some small part of something somewhere was damaged. 

Washington can always find a foam strip, a scuff mark, or a guy in cargo shorts making a bad decision near federal property. The key thing is whether vandalism caused the visible failure everyone could see: the peeling blue coating, the floating material, the green water, and the spectacle.

That evidence has not been publicly established; what has been established is more familiar. A president who boasted about fixing something cheaply and beautifully was confronted by a physical object that refused to flatter him. The object was shallow, stagnant, chemically complicated, and surrounded by cameras, which made it one of the few institutions in Washington still capable of transparency.

So, the pool had to become a crime scene. This is the great innovation of modern grievance politics. Failure is never failure, it’s sabotage. Accountability? Try persecution. A contractor problem becomes an attack on America, a maintenance issue becomes proof that Democrats hate monuments, and a peeling liner becomes the aquatic wing of antifa. Somewhere in the federal government, a piece of foam is probably being asked whether it has ever donated to ActBlue.

The genius of the Reflecting Pool scandal, if one can call it genius without insulting algae, is that it compresses an entire style of governance into one ridiculous image. First, choose appearance over function, then rush the job for the photo op, then announce success before the work survives contact with weather, then, when the thing fails, invent an enemy. And finally, repeat the enemy’s name until the base can no longer tell the difference between evidence and volume. After that comes the enforcement phase.

The pool, a long shallow basin of ceremonial water, was treated like a hostile border crossing. Fences went up, guards appeared, the public was warned away from the troubled liquid, and children touching water became threats to the republic. The administration finally found a perimeter it could secure: the one around a botched paint job.

This is where the story crosses from scandal into literature. There is something too perfect about a reflecting pool that embarrasses a president, followed by an effort to block the public from seeing the reflection. It is almost too neat; if a novelist invented it, an editor would say, “Tone it down. The tarp metaphor is doing too much.” But no. The tarp arrived anyway.

Tarp Force One landed at the Reflecting Pool, carrying an urgent message from the Department of Pay No Attention. The mission was simple: shield the people from the dangerous sight of a national symbol behaving symbolically.

The saddest part is that the tarps were not even American Flag Blue. After all that branding, all that pageantry, all that promise of patriotic aquatic excellence, America got regular blue tarp, hardware-store blue, storm-damage blue, “your uncle is rebuilding the shed and something has gone wrong” blue.

Lincoln could stay seated, the Washington Monument could stay upright, the ducks could take their chances; what mattered was that the failure not be allowed to keep reflecting.

The tarp, it should be noted, is no longer confined to the aquatic arts. Across town, at the Kennedy Center, another tarp has been performing public service as the official fabric of wounded vanity. After a judge ordered Trump’s name removed from the building, the name reportedly came down, but the covering stayed up, shielding the public from the dangerous sight of a cultural institution no longer pretending to be a condo tower.

Even that tarp has now attracted judicial attention, with a judge ordering that tarp be removed, because apparently America has reached the stage where federal courts must ask follow-up questions of cloth.

This is how a metaphor becomes policy. One tarp hides a failed pool repair, another hides the absence of a name that should never have been there. Somewhere, a procurement officer is probably pricing bulk canvas for the economy, the Constitution, and any poll numbers that still contain daylight.

This is what makes the story more than funny. It is funny, obviously, there are only so many ways to describe a presidential algae crisis before the jokes begin writing themselves. But beneath the comedy is a serious civic problem: the replacement of public truth with narrative management.

A government that can’t admit a pool repair failed can’t be trusted to tell the truth about war, corruption, disaster, disease, money, or power. The scale changes, the habit doesn’t.

The Reflecting Pool is small compared with the crises facing the country, but that’s why it’s important. Big scandals come wrapped in abstraction, legal filings, classified documents, budget lines, and foreign policy jargon. A failed pool is democratic theater in its purest form, everyone can see it, everyone understands green water, peeling paint, and a man standing next to a mess and insisting the real problem is invisible enemies with knives.

The pool stripped the performance down to its elements:

o There was the promise: I alone can fix it.

o There was the branding: beautiful, strong, patriotic, better than before.

o There was the reality: heat, water, algae, adhesion, chemistry, labor, cost.

o There was the deflection: vandals.

o There was the amplification: allies repeating the claim until it hardened into a story.

o There was the crackdown: fences, guards, warnings, citations.

o There was the cover: tarp.

In this sense, the renovation succeeded because it created the most honest monument in Washington. The Lincoln Memorial asks us to remember sacrifice, the Washington Monument asks us to remember founding ambition, the Reflecting Pool now asks us to remember that paint is not policy, spectacle is not competence, and a tarp is not an argument.

That may be the accidental civic gift of this whole algae-forward debacle. The pool did what it was built to do; it reflected. Not the shining myth of the builder-president, but the soggy reality beneath it: a government addicted to cosmetic fixes, allergic to responsibility, and terrified of being seen clearly.

Four score and seven tarps ago, this nation could still pretend the problem was the water. Now, we know better.

Sincerely, American  

Pat Reeves

The reflecting pool fiasco is just the latest in the mountain of bullshit Trump is subjecting us to. At the same time, someone close to Trump is getting rich. No doubt about that. So what's going on at the Clusterfuck White House Circus?

Trump’s Reflecting Pool scandal just got UGLIER as government records expose botched work, instead of any “sabotage.”

An apoplectic Donald Trump blamed shadowy "vandals" working with knives "in the dark of night" for the peeling paint and bright-green algae destroying his $16.4 million Reflecting Pool renovation. Internal government records just blew that excuse apart.

Documents obtained by the New York Times show the peeling blue coating and the algae blooms were NOT caused by any vandalism. While workers did find two cuts in foam sections of the pool, those cuts were completely SEPARATE from the failing blue sealant and the algae turning the pool green.

In other words, Trump's project failed on its own. He's just lying about why. It’s not surprising coming from someone who seems congenitally incapable of uttering a truthful statement.

The timeline is damning. The pool was refilled by June 5. Within days, workers discovered holes, cracks, peeling caulking, and — crucially — chunks of blue sealant floating to the surface. They also found that the anti-algae devices weren't even WORKING because of generator problems. Meanwhile, on June 15, Trump was bragging to reporters: "I'm very good at building things."

Yeah, building huge piles of bull dung, maybe.

An independent coating expert who reviewed the records pointed straight at the real problem: the sealant is peeling because not enough material was applied. "If they put more material down, maybe none of this would be an issue," said Anthony Flett. "I think it was just done too hastily."

Too hastily. Because Trump rushed the job for his July 4th birthday party, awarding TWO no-bid contracts — a $14.7 million deal and a $1.7 million deal — bypassing competitive bidding entirely.

And the algae? Trump claimed vandals "poured fertilizer" into the pool to feed it. But his own administration refilled the pool with D.C. water treated with phosphate, which FEEDS algae. Plus duck droppings. No fertilizer-dumping vandals required.

Yet Trump has deployed the National Guard, Park Police, and U.S. Marshals to surround the pool, arrested SIX people, and even threatened a Swedish journalist with jail for touching the water.

Botched job. No competitive bids. Failed equipment. Then armed troops to intimidate anyone who notices.

Trump broke it, and now, as usual, he's blaming everyone else.

Pat Reeves

Roy Cohn rules

All this "reflecting pond" crap....it's just another assholish aspect of Trump that he calls it the "reflecting lake." But, anyway, Trump and his goon squad botched the renovation of the reflecting pond but they just cannot admit it. They come up with the usual stupid shit, like "vandals" or "the radical left" sabotaged the pond to make Trump look bad. Hey, we don't need to make up anything to make Trump look bad. He already is easily the worst president ever. Hell, he may even be the worst person ever. He likes to compare himself to history's murderers like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. But, just fucking admit someone on your team made a mistake and you will get it fixed. How hard is that?

But then I remembered Roy Cohn and Roy's rules. Trump is still playing by Cohn's playbook. Maybe we should be grateful Trump is only playing by Cohn's playbook and not Hitler's. Roy Cohn's rules explain Trump's behavior to a "T." Fucking piece of shit. 

This article below was published in July of 2025, which was excerpted from the book, The Last American President.

The Six Dark Lessons Roy Cohn Taught Trump (That He Still Uses Today)

Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump the six rules of managing and dominating situations and people. These are those rules and you can see them being utilized to this very day by the man to brutal ends (this is excerpted from the book, The Last American President):

1. Never apologize or admit wrongdoing, ever. Cohn viewed contrition as weakness and would rather die (literally, as it turned out) than acknowledge error or fault. As journalist Ken Auletta, who covered Cohn extensively, noted, “The idea that you can admit a mistake is not part of Roy’s genetic code.” This principle would become so fundamental to Trump’s approach that even faced with irrefutable evidence—a recorded confession of sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape, for instance—he would deny, deflect, and attack rather than offer the slightest acknowledgment of impropriety.

2. Always counter-attack, and always with greater force than you received. When criticized or accused, Cohn’s response was invariably to hit back harder, to escalate, to make the accuser regret ever mentioning his name. As Cohn himself explained to a reporter: "I bring out the worst in my enemies, and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” This tactic became Trump’s signature move, whether attacking Gold Star parents who criticized him, mocking a disabled reporter who questioned his claims, or threatening critics with lawsuits and retribution.

3. Use the legal system as a weapon, not a recourse for justice. Cohn taught Trump that lawsuits were instruments of intimidation, not vehicles for dispute resolution. He filed cases not to win—though winning was nice—but to punish, to harass, and to silence. The expense and stress of litigation was the point, not the legal outcome. Trump would eventually be involved in over 3,500 lawsuits—an unprecedented number for any American businessperson or politician—using the courts not to seek justice but to exhaust opponents with fewer resources.

4. Manipulate the media ruthlessly. Cohn was a master at planting stories, cultivating journalists, and creating controversy to serve his ends. He understood that perception trumped reality, that bold claims often went unchallenged, and that most people would remember the accusation but not the retraction. Trump elevated this approach to an art form, calling reporters using pseudonyms like “John Barron” to plant favorable stories about himself, staging pseudo-events to attract coverage, and later, using Twitter to bypass media filters entirely and inject his unfiltered messages directly into the public consciousness.

5. Use fear as both shield and sword. Cohn understood that people who are afraid—of communists, of crime, of social change, of the “other”—are easier to manipulate and more willing to accept authoritarian solutions. He helped McCarthy weaponize the Red Scare, stoking paranoia about secret communists undermining America from within. Trump would adapt this tactic to the 21st century, stoking fears about immigrants, Muslims, “inner city” crime, and later, a “deep state” conspiracy, always positioning himself as the only solution to these terrifying threats.

6. Build a fortress of loyalty around yourself. Cohn demanded absolute devotion from his clients and associates, and he repaid it in kind, at least until they were no longer useful. He created a network of mutual obligation and fear that served as both sword and shield in his battles. Trump’s infamous demand for loyalty—from James Comey, from his cabinet members, from Republican legislators—and his swift punishment of perceived disloyalty, all echo Cohn’s approach to power.

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