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Miles

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We have been focused on other projects for a while, but with the Supreme Court refusing to rule on some major issues, I thought it was a good time to talk about a few of them.

Today’s topic is about our current administration, and how we let this happen, and why we cannot seem to stop it.

We chose a man who was found liable in a civil court for sexual abuse, where the judge said in his findings that if it were not for New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, he would have called it rape. That finding has now been upheld at every level of our court system, all the way to the Supreme Court letting it stand. And still we support him.

We chose a man with a long history of fraud. A civil court found him liable for business fraud, and a criminal jury convicted him of thirty four felonies. A felon. Now, while in office, he has tripled his net worth. While deregulating crypto, he appears to have made hundreds of millions off a coin with his own name on it, while the ordinary investors who bought in alongside him lost hundreds of millions. The coin went from seventy five dollars to two. Why are the American people handing this man their hard earned money?

We chose a man who ran on making everything affordable again, and then started a war over the very thing he spent years attacking the last administration for. Twelve years he called that Iran deal a catastrophe. Now he has signed something weaker, given them back their money, and put us on the hook for double what the first agreement offered, with less agreed to in return. In my eyes we lost a war he started, and we are the ones paying to rebuild the other side. And we still call him great.

Then there is the Kennedy Center. The courts ruled he had to take his name off the building. So now he keeps a tarp over it so people cannot see that the name was removed. We cheer his pettiness.

And the Reflecting Pool, where he handed the contract to a friend with little to no experience, and they did such a poor job that it failed, and then he blamed it on vandals.

Where is Congress? Where is the oversight? Where are we, the people? And how can we let this happen?

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Claude

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You asked the right question and then you almost talked yourself out of it. Most of your entry is a list of what he did. The last line is the actual subject. So let me hold you to your own question and not let the list swallow it.

Look at what each of these stories actually is. Not a Trump action. A brake that failed. The Carroll case was the courts doing their job. A jury found him liable. The trial judge, Lewis Kaplan, wrote plainly that the jury found Trump forcibly penetrated her, and that this is rape as the word is commonly understood, and that the only reason it was labeled sexual abuse instead is a quirk in how New York’s criminal code defines the term. A unanimous appeals panel upheld it. The Supreme Court, with three of his own appointees, declined to touch it, with no noted dissent. The brake held. It worked exactly as designed. And a civil finding of sexual abuse against a sitting president produced no consequence, because there is no mechanism in the machine that connects that finding to his power. The court can say it. It cannot do anything about it.

Take the money, because it is the cleanest example. His 2026 financial disclosure came out this week. It runs 927 pages. It shows more than a billion dollars in crypto revenue in a single year, roughly 500 million from World Liberty Financial and about 635 million tied to the meme coin with his face on it. Forbes puts his net worth going from 2.3 billion to 6.5 billion in two years, driven mostly by crypto. Now here is the part that matters for your question. That disclosure is the safeguard. A 1978 ethics law requires it. It did its job. It laid all of it out in the open, in numbing detail, for anyone to read. And nothing happened. Disclosure without enforcement is not a check. It is a receipt.

I have to be precise about the crypto, because your case is strong enough that it does not need the part we cannot prove. The documented facts are these. He put his name on the coin. He set the federal government’s posture toward the industry, reversing the prior crackdown. The coin spiked past 74 dollars and now trades under 2. Insiders controlled the supply and collected the fees. Retail buyers ate the losses. That is a structure built so the house wins and the players lose. What is not documented, at least not in anything I can source, is a traced wallet showing him personally selling his stake at the peak for an amount equal to the losses. You do not need that claim. The structural version is already damning, and it has the advantage of being true.

Before the money, count what the war itself cost, because that is the number your entry is reaching for. He started it. On February 28 the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, killed Iran’s supreme leader on the first day, and kept striking for months. The Pentagon told Congress it spent about 25 billion. Independent estimates put direct military spending higher, north of 35 billion, and economists who fold in the hit to gas and food prices put the real cost to the American economy somewhere between 630 billion and a trillion. Thirteen to fifteen American service members came home dead, more than 300 wounded. On the other side, Tehran’s health ministry counted at least 3,300 Iranians killed, roughly 900 more dead in Lebanon, and over three million people displaced inside Iran. And he did it without a congressional declaration of war, which is another off-ramp that was supposed to exist, the one in Article I that hands the war power to Congress and not to one man. It did not function either.

Now hold that cost against what it bought, because that is the whole indictment in one line. He spent the blood and the treasure to force Iran to give up its nuclear program. What he signed instead lets Iran keep its enriched uranium inside the country, caps no enrichment, defers every inspection to talks that may never finish, and hands back more money than the deal he spent a decade calling the worst in history. He paid in dead Americans and a trillion-dollar shock for an outcome weaker than the agreement he tore up. That is not a hard call to score. It is the same deal he inherited, minus the safeguards, plus a war.

On Iran, get the layers right, because the number that matters is not one number, it is a stack. In 2015 Obama did not give Iran American money. Sanctions came off and Iran regained access to its own frozen assets. The figure Trump repeated for years was 150 billion, but even an economist who studied the deal put what Iran actually recovered at around 30 billion. That release, roughly 30 billion of Iran’s own money, is the thing he called a catastrophe over and over for a decade. Now look at what he signed. It has four separate pieces. A 6 billion humanitarian escrow in Qatar, released under strict conditions. About 24 billion in phased near-term access if Iran hits its milestones. Behind that, the door to the full stockpile of Iran’s frozen assets, spread across China, Iraq, India, Qatar, Japan and elsewhere and estimated worldwide at more than 100 billion. And on top of all of it, a reconstruction fund reported at up to 300 billion if the final agreement comes together, which is not frozen money at all. That figure is not confirmed and Trump denies it is a US payment at all. The administration says it would come from Gulf states and private investors, not the American taxpayer. That caveat is real and belongs in the sentence.

Hold the shape of it. Obama freed about 30 billion of Iran’s own money and Trump called it treason for ten years. Trump is now running the same play, unfreezing cash in exchange for nuclear concessions, except he opened the door to the full hundred billion and pointed the deal at a 300 billion rebuild on top. Even Axios framed it plainly, that after shredding the 2015 deal he is following the same playbook and going a step further. And he did it with none of the old safeguards. The 2015 agreement ran 159 pages, capped enrichment, shipped most of Iran’s uranium out of the country, and locked in inspections. This is a two page memo. No cap on enrichment, the uranium stays in country, inspections deferred to talks that may never conclude. Rubio and Vance, as senators, co-sponsored bills to keep Iranian money frozen, arguing money is fungible and cannot be safely released. All three now back this. A Republican, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said it makes the old deal’s incentives look like a pittance. Whether you call that losing a war is your judgment and you are entitled to it. What is not in dispute is that he abandoned the exact principle he ran on, gave more than the man he spent a decade attacking, and it cost him nothing.

The Kennedy Center runs the same track and answers your question most directly. He installed himself as chairman a month into the term, purged the board, and renamed the place after himself. When one board member tried to object during the vote, her line was muted. A federal judge ruled the renaming illegal, because only Congress can rename it, and ordered the name removed. And you are right about the tarp. That detail is the answer to your whole entry. The court exercised its power. The judge was obeyed in the narrowest possible sense and defied in spirit. The name comes down and a tarp goes up so no one can see it came down. That is what a functioning safeguard looks like when the thing downstream of it has stopped working. The order is followed and mocked in the same gesture.

So to your real question, where is Congress, where is the oversight, where are we. The honest answer is that oversight was never a machine that runs on its own. It was always a set of tripwires that depended on someone deciding to act when the wire was tripped. Impeachment needs a Senate willing to convict. A disclosure needs a Congress willing to legislate on what it reveals. A court finding needs a public that treats it as disqualifying. Every one of those depends on a human choice at the end of the chain. The safeguards did not fail. The people at the end of the chain decided not to pull. That is not a broken machine. That is a machine working, and the operators standing still.

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Sources & Notes

1. PBS NewsHour / Associated Press, “Supreme Court rejects Trump’s push to toss $5 million verdict in E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case,” June 29, 2026.

2. Carroll v. Trump, Memorandum Opinion Denying Rule 59 Motion, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, July 19, 2023 (rape “as many people commonly understand the word”); FindLaw, CARROLL v. TRUMP (2023).

3. Associated Press / Boston Globe, “Trump’s wealth skyrocketed via crypto, filing shows, while investors got hammered with losses,” July 1, 2026; CNBC, “Trump’s annual financial disclosure released,” June 30, 2026.

4. Forbes / IndexBox, 2026 disclosure analysis: net worth $2.3B to $6.5B, 2024 to 2026.

5. On the war (Operation Epic Fury, began Feb. 28, 2026): Pentagon-confirmed cost ~$25 billion per House Armed Services Committee testimony via Al Jazeera, April 30, 2026; higher independent estimates (~$35 billion direct; $630 billion to $1 trillion economy-wide) per Al Jazeera and Brown University Costs of War Project, 2026. US deaths of 13-15 service members and 300-plus wounded per Newsweek and Irish Times, 2026. Regional deaths of at least ~3,300 in Iran and ~900 in Lebanon, with 3 million-plus displaced, per Al Jazeera and UN Refugee Agency via Newsweek, 2026. War waged without congressional authorization.

6. NPR, “Read the full text of Trump’s preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement,” June 18, 2026; Axios, “Breaking down the billions Iran could receive under Trump’s deal,” June 16, 2026 (60-day oil sales, frozen-fund access, and a potential $300 billion rebuilding fund if a final nuclear agreement is reached; critics note Trump is following the 2015 playbook and going a step further).

7. CNN, “Trump’s Iran agreement embraces sanctions relief, a policy he and his team once denounced,” June 22, 2026; Sen. Roger Wicker remarks via CNN, June 22, 2026; CBS News, JCPOA comparison, June 2026.

8. On the frozen assets: a $6 billion humanitarian escrow in Qatar (released on milestones per New York Post, June 30, 2026); near-term phased access of ~$24 billion per Iran International and UPI, June 2026; total Iranian frozen assets worldwide estimated at $100+ billion, held largely in China, Iraq, India, Qatar, and Japan, per Al Jazeera, April 15, 2026, and UPI, June 18, 2026. On 2015: JCPOA economist Nader Habibi and Iran central bank chief Valiollah Seif estimated the actual 2015 asset release at roughly $30-32 billion, well below the $150 billion Trump repeatedly claimed. The $300 billion reconstruction fund is not frozen assets, is not confirmed, and Trump denies it is a US payment; administration officials describe it as Gulf-state and private funded, per Axios, June 16, 2026, and PolitiFact, June 22, 2026.

9. NPR, “Kennedy Center board seeks pause of ruling ordering removal of Trump’s name,” June 12, 2026; Washingtonian, “A Deeper Look at Trump’s Kennedy Center Debacle,” June 25, 2026; ruling by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, May 29, 2026.

10. New York Times, “Reflecting Pool Repairs to Cost $13.1 Million. Trump Had Promised $1.8 Million,” May 11, 2026; PolitiFact, reflecting pool renovation fact-check, May 28, 2026; NBC News renovation timeline, June 2026. On the damage: NPS deputy director Frank Lands’ court filing stating the liner was cut with a knife or razor, via NPR, CBS, and AP, June 26, 2026; AP notes the pool was refilled June 4-9, so the reported cut could predate full refilling, and algae and peeling are separate from any vandalism; no-bid contracts awarded to vendors with prior Trump ties, per AP, June 2026.

Note: Trump’s New York civil fraud liability (2024) is a civil judgment, later largely reduced on appeal; his 34-count felony conviction (Manhattan, May 2024) is a separate criminal matter. The two are distinct and are kept separate above.