Feminists don’t want to take boobies from you

I am supposed to have an opinion on the American Eagle “great jeans” ad featuring noted white lady Sydney Sweeney. But even I hit a point where I’m just too tired, y’all. And I’m especially tired of MAGA men acting like they are the first people to think big boobs are nifty. Way to have the standard opinion, dudes.

MAGA men are so eager to have liberals be mad at a lady with a rack. They are desperate to believe feminists want to take boobies away from them, so they get to be the victims and stop thinking about how they took away abortion rights and elected a man who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein and bragged about grabbing women by the genitals. 

For the record: MAGA men, you can stare at all the titty pictures you want. Have at it. Just let women have their rights back, you monsters.

Trump runs government like he ran his business: as fraud

One of the most annoying and false tropes in American politics is the idea that the government should be run “like a business.” This is a fundamental categorical error: Businesses are run for profit, and the government is run to provide services to people. If you want to go deeper, I highly recommend the “Some More News” episode debunking this notion. 

The “like a business” slogan gets exponentially dumber when people use it to defend voting for Trump. His business was a fraud. This was proven in court in 2024, when the state of New York definitively demonstrated that Trump’s business model depended mostly, if not entirely, on lying about numbers and robbing Peter to pay Paul. His CFO literally went to prison. Trump can’t make an honest dollar and lies, cheats and steals his way through life. 

So it is perhaps the least surprising thing in the world that he wants to run the federal government the way he ran his business: fraudulently. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report showing that employers have drastically reduced hiring, Trump blamed the head of the agency. And fired her. Of course, he’s to blame. His on-again, off-again tariffs have made it impossible for businesses to predict the future of prices or sales opportunities, so they’re going to pull back. But Trump can never accept responsibility. 

It’s more than that, though. He really does believe that it’s better to lie about the numbers than bother with the hard work of doing a good job. Running the economy well is even harder than running a real estate business in New York City. But Trump is neither capable of nor interested in working hard or doing well. He thinks he should get to screw around while his minions cook the books to make everything look copacetic. This was entirely predictable and, in reality, it’s the only possible endgame for all the “run government like a business” tomfoolery.

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Texas Democrats prove they matter

Thanks for the kind words of folks while I took a short but much-needed vacation. I spent the weekend in Portland, Oregon — first time there! — with a bunch of friends who still live in Texas. I moved from the Lone Star State to the East Coast over 15 years ago, and I’m sorry to hear that it seems to be getting worse all the time. Depending on the year, Democrats are nearly half the electorate in Texas, but Republicans act as if liberals have no meaningful presence or deserve any voice at all. Most cities in Texas are blue, and state Republicans have done their best to deny those cities any right to self-governance. 

Which is why I rolled my eyes at Gov. Greg Abbott writing a letter to Democratic lawmakers to scold them for  “abdicating the duties of their office” by leaving the state in an effort to short-circuit a GOP gerrymandering bill that could give Republicans five extra seats in Congress. Legislators should “find a way to disagree agreeably and behave like adults,” he wrote. 

The word “hypocrite” is too good for Abbott, as it assumes some amount of belief in his own bullshit. As my friends attested, Republicans have spent years signaling that they don’t believe Democrats have any role in Texas politics. That doesn’t just apply to elected Democrats, either. Right-wingers in Texas treat ordinary Democratic voters as if they were trespassers who have no right to vote. That’s why this bill is even being introduced, to reinforce the notion that there’s no such thing as a legitimate Texas Democrat. 

Republicans don’t get to have it both ways. Democracy is about rights and responsibilities. If you deny people their full rights as citizens or elected representatives, then you don’t get to be mad if they decline to perform their duties. Democrats probably can’t hold off this gerrymander forever, but they can highlight the fact that Greg Abbott is one of the worst governors in the country. 

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What we're reading this week

• “This Attack on a Federal Judge Is Preposterous,” Nancy Gertner and Stephen I. Vladeck, New York Times

• “Trump’s Domestic Use of Military Set to Get Worse, Leaked Memo Shows,” Greg Sargent, New Republic 

• “My Big Beautiful Sterilization,” Moa Short, The Cut

• “Millennial Feminism Saved Marriage. So What?” Jill Filipovic, Substack

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