Month: June 2026

Hurricane season starts today. According to Politico, FEMA is not ready; its budget and staff have been cut aimlessly, its leadership is a shambles, and its mission is unclear. Trump wants to reduce its footprint and throw more responsibility to the states, but he hasn’t decided exactly what comes next. It is a recipe for disaster.

Trump presumably is gambling on El Nino to reduce hurricane impacts this year, but as the meteorologists love to tell us, it only takes one. If his guess is wrong, we will be flooded with TV images of deaths and desperate refugees shortly before the midterms. That won’t exactly endear him to the voters in Florida, Texas, and North Carolina.

As I’ve noted before, J.D. Vance is the Republican bridge to everywhere; he has intellectual connections that run from Silicon Valley to the Vatican. In addition to reverse engineering Trump’s impulses into some sort of coherent ideology, J.D.’s job is to keep the various factions of the GOP together. For the most part, he does this by urging them to focus, not on their differences, but on hating the left. Will this approach work with AI?

The Reactionaries and the CLs have mutually exclusive opinions about AI. I predict that Vance will try to square this circle in 2028 by insisting that AI will be the magic bullet that vastly improves the lot of white workers, tariffs having failed in this task. AI deregulation is therefore consistent with his dream of the Godly Society.

Will the Reactionaries buy it? To extend the use of initials one more time, I suspect they will think it is bs.