By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, April 20, 2026
Here is one of those episodes I keep in a folder marked
“Cocaine Thinking.”
But first, an editorial note: Sometimes, it is the
deadpan quote that really delivers.
E.g.:
“It was clearly a human in a bear
suit.”
The headline, tame as it is, efficiently does sell the
story:
3 Southern California residents
sentenced in bear suit insurance fraud scheme.
You want to know, right? You’re going to click on that
link. Like a good cocaine dealer, I’ll give you a little taste for free:
Three Southern California
residents have been sentenced in a bizarre insurance fraud scheme which prosecutors say
involved them staging fake bear attacks on high-end cars.
It all stems from a claim the
suspects filed with their insurance company, saying a bear got into their car,
a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost, at Lake Arrowhead on Jan. 28, 2024, and damaged the
inside with scratches. The California Department of Insurance said the suspects
provided a video to the company, which showed the “bear” in the car.
An investigation into the
claim—dubbed “Operation Bear Claw”—took a closer look at the video and found
the “bear” was actually a person in a bear costume, the insurance department
said. Investigators then took the video to biologists with the California Department
of Fish and Wildlife to also look at the video. The biologists said, “It was
clearly a human in a bear suit.”
You can go into court and plead guilty or not guilty on
that, and maybe you hope that the court will make like Arlen Specter and let
you off with the “bastard verdict”—not proven—but the truth of the
matter is that the proper plea is one not found in the law books:
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Like Kash Patel after eight, having been to that lowdown place “where happy
hour ain’t happy,” as Terry Allen put it, all of us are to some extent
vulnerable to delusional, wishful thinking. Jack and
coke don’t help. Donald Trump is famously a teetotaler, and it is difficult
to imagine him as a cocaine enthusiast, because it is difficult to imagine him
having fun. (The great danger of cocaine has always been truth in advertising:
It works exactly as advertised.) Giving Trump a gram of powdered hubris
would very much be a coals-to-Newcastle affair—the man is living proof that you
do not need a bag of cocaine to engage in cocaine thinking. Trump doesn’t have
to look very far to see parallel cases: Bobby Kennedy Jr. apparently has been
off the smack for a long time now, but
he still thinks and acts like a junkie; Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel do not seem
to be better at making good decisions when sober than they do when drunk.
Hegseth in particular seems to have an early-onset case of that sad condition
described by David Foster Wallace, where one is so mentally diminished by booze
that it ceases to matter, in any particular moment, whether one is actually
intoxicated. The Trump administration is the hangover without the bender, the delirium
tremens without the fun part, the suicidally depressive post-cocaine crash
without the high, the long parole for the fraud conviction without the mad
Rolls Royce frolic in the bear costume.
(“It was clearly a human in a bear suit.”)
Donald Trump is not a Christian, whatever he says about
himself, and his only real religion—other than the worship of money and the
Baal-worshiper devotion to his own vanity—is Norman Vincent Peale-ism, the
Power of Positive Thinking. Trump really does seem to have deeply imbibed
the imbecilic, delusional, and, in the case of a man with access to nuclear
weapons, fundamentally dangerous notion that if you just keep saying it—if you
just keep pretending like it is true—then the lie will stop being a lie. Trump
has tried to convince Americans that the new regime in Iran is more moderate
than the old one, which is, depending on how you judge the state of the burlap
bag full of rage-addled rattlesnakes Trump calls a brain, either a lie or bat-product
delusional or, at best, wishful thinking. Indeed, it seems that all the
negotiations in Iran are being conducted by the Secretary of Wishful Thinking,
whoever that may be.
The Iranians, Trump insists, have agreed to all of his
demands; the Iranians heap scorn on this claim and then demonstrate their contempt
for it with bullets and rockets. Trump says the Strait of Hormuz will be
open for business; the Iranians have just closed it again. Some of you will
remember that in the early days of the COVID epidemic, Trump insisted that the
virus was a little inconvenience that would simply vanish in the spring with
the warm weather; it turned out to be a global catastrophe that the United States
did not deal with as well as it should, with President Trump treating the
matter at first as mainly an irritant to the stock market. When Trump insists
the negotiations are going well, the Iranians answer that there are no
negotiations at all and no date for undertaking them. Trump says the
Iranians have agreed to hand over their enriched uranium. Iran: “Iran’s
enriched uranium is not going to be transferred anywhere under any
circumstances.”
(“It was clearly a human in a bear suit.”)
And as strange and shocking as it is to write this, the
ayatollahs are, in this context, the more credible party. Donald Trump is a
habitual liar, a fantasist, and delusional, and he is surrounded by sycophants
who are habitual liars, fantasists, and delusional. The moral and ethical
degradation of American government by Trump and his cronies is not only, or
even mainly, a metaphysical matter, something to think about in terms of the
afterlife and the last judgment—it is a problem, and a very expensive problem,
in the here and now.
There is a strong argument, many of them, for U.S. action
against Iran, but the United States is not engaged in this war (and Secretary
of War Pete Hegseth will whine if you call it a war) because of
any of the good arguments for it: The United States is engaged in this war
because Donald Trump is a vain nitwit who is easily manipulated by his inner
circle, some of whose members apparently convinced him that a series of wars,
starting in Venezuela and moving on to Iran and possibly to Cuba, would be a
good way to distract from Trump’s troubles in the Jeffrey Epstein matter.
And—mission accomplished! Of course, Trump now has troubles much worse than
those likely to have been presented by his longtime, intimate association with
the sleazy trafficker of underage girls. Trump probably wasn’t messing around
with teenagers on Epstein’s island, but what if he was? The members of his
deranged little personality cult would forgive him a little recreational sexual
abuse of teenaged girls the same way they have forgiven his adultery, his
porn-star diddling, his own appearances in pornographic films, etc.
But $6.55 diesel would be another thing.
Kidnapping Nicolás Maduro was pretty easy—there were more
than a few powerful people in Venezuela who were not sorry to see him go, and
it is not impossible to imagine that some of them helped to make it happen.
Massacring boatloads of unarmed civilians in the Caribbean on the idiotically
transparent pretext that they were “narco-terrorists” was not too hard,
either—but the Iranians shoot back, and they have the ability to do things such
as close the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, they are emboldened in their efforts for
a good reason: They know that they are dealing with a weak, dumb, ignorant,
lazy coward on the American side, and that the next presidential election is a
long way down the road.
Trump is a con artist and always has been. But con
artists really succeed only where the marks are willing to be conned and, in
their way, enable the con—look at Bernie Madoff’s clients. But there are limits
to how far that kind of thing goes in the real world, where gimlet-eyed critics
might not be so easy to buffalo. Trump went to court to argue that his ghastly
ballroom project should be free from the usual oversight process because it is
a “national security” issue—you know: national security, like
Marco Rubio’s sugar subsidies. You can probably sell that crap on talk radio,
but you can’t sell it in federal court:
A federal judge has again ordered
President Donald Trump to pause construction of a massive new ballroom at the
White House, rejecting the president’s “disingenuous” bid to circumvent an
earlier ruling against the project by claiming that it needed to proceed for
national security reasons.
Never mind the interesting question of what kind of a
brain it takes to come up with “My ballroom is a national-security
priority!”—imagine what kind of brain it takes to believe you could get away
with that nonsense in federal court.
It doesn’t have to be cocaine—there are all kinds of
things that will make your brain take that turn: stupidity, anger, senility.
You can choose your own adventure in moral degradation.
But everybody knows it’s a guy in a bear suit.
Economics for English Majors
When writing about taxes, you can be sure that outlets
such as Politico will employ the following rhetorical strategy: “We know
that this isn’t really a thing, but we’re going to pretend that it is a thing.”
In this week’s example, Politico writes about Liberty Energy, a company
previously run by Chris Wright, who is now secretary of energy. Liberty has no
federal corporate income tax liability this year, though of course it is paying
just shy of $50 million in other taxes. Politico writes:
No one has accused Liberty and
the other companies of having done anything illegal. But Liberty and other
companies having no tax liabilities while posting millions of dollars in profit
comes as many Americans who filed their own tax returns have so far not reaped
benefits as big as Republicans in Congress and the White House promised when they passed the One Beautiful Bill Act.
Voters are also coping with
rising prices for gasoline and other goods because of the White House’s war
with Iran. The price of a gallon of regular gasoline cost an average of $4.10
on Wednesday, according to AAA, nearly a dollar higher than the price last
year.
“No one has accused Liberty and the other companies of
having done anything illegal”—that’s pretty much the whole ballgame, right
there. Liberty is complying with U.S. tax law. And U.S. tax law does include a
lot of bananas stuff, some of it crazy and indefensible special-interest
pandering. But the reason Liberty has no federal income tax bill this year
isn’t some wild provision, and it isn’t even an obviously bad one: Liberty is
benefiting from a provision in our tax laws that allows companies to expense big
investments all at once, in the same tax year, rather than spreading them out
over several years. So Liberty is, at most, moving up a tax-reducing benefit
that it would have enjoyed over the course of several years’ worth of tax
filings, taking the benefit all at once. It had a big federal tax bill last
time around and probably will have one next time around.
Tax benefits like that are meant to encourage the kind of
investments that Liberty has made—i.e., this is an example of the tax law
working exactly as it was intended to, irrespective of whether you think that
is a good policy or not. What that has to do with personal income tax rates or
the price of a gallon of gasoline in Sheboygan
is anybody’s guess. The story did break on April 15, the deadline for filing
taxes—but only because that was the day Politico chose to publish the
story, for obvious marketing reasons.
For a much fuller discussion of the underlying issue, you
can read Scott Lincicome on the problems of “tax expenditures” here
in our newly launched Dispatch
Markets.
Words About Words
Donald Trump famously spoke of that imaginary book of the
Bible, “Two Corinthians.” (Two Corinthians walk into a bar. One says to the
bartender: “At this time your abundance may be a supply for their want,
that their abundance also may be a supply for your want.” The bartender
replies: “Cash only, fellas.”) Now, Trump is participating in a
group reading of the Bible, his contribution being a few verses from Two
Second Chronicles:
If My people, which are called by
my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from
their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin,
and will heal their land.
Turn from their wicked ways—it is an excellent
verse.
You first, Mr. President.
Furthermore...
Thanks to Jay Nordlinger for pointing out this James Patterson article in Providence magazine:
When Vice President JD Vance was
campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to
preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would
support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is
gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American
conservatism.
How is that possible? How did
this happen?
The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest
Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence
campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to
familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian
interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into
an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious
pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social
engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs.
Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in
Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism
was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.
Nordlinger observes:
For ten or more years, the
nationalist-populist Right, in various countries, made Orbán’s Hungary a focus
of attention. His regime was the beau idéal of this Right.
In America, the nat-pop Right
included the Heritage Foundation, CPAC, and so on. Donald Trump and the
Republican Party boosted Orbán constantly.
All the while, the Kremlin did
the same, of course.
Many people went to Budapest, in
trips that were like pilgrimages. Some—including old friends of mine—went to
work for Orbán.
This year, he tried for a sixth
term in office. The international illiberal Right—“the whole global movement,”
as Nigel Farage calls it—rallied ’round him.
President Trump campaigned for
him, through social-media posts and videos. Secretary of State Marco Rubio
showed up in person. “Our success is your success,” he told Orbán. “Especially
as long as you’re the prime minister and the leader of this country, it’s in
our national interest that Hungary be successful.”
Vice President JD Vance showed up
in person, too, in the last days of the campaign.
From France, Marine Le Pen showed
up. From Italy, Matteo Salvini showed up. From Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu
planned to show up, but the Iran war kept him at home and he sent a video
instead—a video in support of Orbán. He also sent his son, who rallied for
Orbán in person.
In any event, a sixth term for
Orbán—his perpetuation in power—was extremely important to “the whole global
movement.” And when Orbán and his party lost, we heard this, from the
“movement”:
“Hungary? Where’s that? Who cares
about Hungary, what’s the big deal? Why are the libs making such a fuss?
Hungary is a small, insignificant landlocked country, and the libs are all
a-flutter. Silly libs!”
In Closing
I know that I rely on what seem to be obvious,
straightforward, right-in-front-of-our-noses explanations for what’s coming out
of the White House. But I will concede that there are other possible explanations.
