🇺🇸 THE MOST RIDICULOUS DICTATORIAL POWER IN THE WORLD! Imagine living in a country where the president can simply decide that a criminal should escape punishment. Not because the person is innocent. Because the president feels like it. Welcome to the United States of America! Under the presidential pardon power, a president can forgive federal crimes, including corruption, massive fraud, drug trafficking, and even murder. The person doesn’t even need to be convicted or formally charged! Even more outrageous? The president can pardon family members, friends, political allies, and wealthy associates without needing approval from Congress or the courts. This is an extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of one individual. The Constitution gives the president a power that resembles something from an absolute monarchy. Democracy? Or legalized royal privilege? 🇺🇸

Another day, another pillar of American power dismantled by Donald Trump. In Doha, Trump’s envoy announced that Washington is abandoning its traditional oil-for-security arrangement with the Gulf states, urging them to build their own regional security partnerships. For decades, American influence rested on something far more valuable than military strength: the willingness of other nations to trust the United States. Trump is systematically destroying that trust, from Europe and Ukraine to the Middle East. Historian Timothy Snyder calls it “superpower suicide”, observing that empires have collapsed before, but never, to his knowledge, has a state deliberately destroyed its own power with such extraordinary speed. The remarkable thing is that America’s enemies have barely had to lift a finger. Trump is doing their work for them. History will struggle to find another superpower that surrendered so much influence, so quickly, and called it winning.

The New York Fed has now put a number on what any first-year economics student could have told you for free. According to its researchers, tariffs added nearly three percentage points to goods inflation by early this year, and without them the price of everyday goods would actually have been drifting gently downward. The entire rise, in other words, was homemade. This is not a malfunction, because it is precisely how a tariff works. It is a tax collected at the border from the American importer, who then passes it along to the American shopper, which means the trillions supposedly pouring in from abroad are in fact pouring out of Ohio. That a president can stand at a podium and claim foreigners are paying may be the single dumbest thing the world has ever been asked to believe. Elect economic illiterates to run a perfectly healthy economy, and this is the bill that eventually lands on the kitchen table.

America’s Quiet Exodus! Neil deGrasse Tyson has been unusually blunt lately: he compared federal science cuts to an act of war, arguing that if a foreign rival gutted American research budgets this way, Washington would call it sabotage. Instead, it’s self-inflicted. The numbers back him up. NSF grant awards recently hit their slowest pace in decades, with physics funding down over 80 percent and biology nearly halved. A Nature poll found roughly three-quarters of US researchers now considering leaving the country entirely. The beneficiaries are obvious. France, Canada, and Australia are actively recruiting displaced American talent, dangling stable funding and political neutrality. China, meanwhile, has overtaken the US in total research spending, a shift analysts warn could cost America a trillion dollars in lost competitiveness over time. Tyson’s warning isn’t nostalgia. It’s a balance-sheet argument: brains, once they leave, rarely come back.