Donald John Trump surrendered to Iran and maga cult knows he is incompetent including Senator Susan Collins

Trump’s Iran deal looks like surrender

Echo editorial board published in the Boston Globe

Donald John Trump's new (former President Obama) agreement with Iran bears striking similarities to the Obama-era accord he famously abandoned.

The reviews of Donald John Trump’s MOU surrender deal with Iran are in, and they aren’t pretty.

On the right, the National Review said Doanld Trump committed the United States to “humiliations,” while The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the deal a “retreat.” 

On the left, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under former president Joe Biden, said the deal indicated that “the United States basically lost this war.”

From the center right, Andrew Sullivan called it “surrender.” 

And this from the center left, economics blogger Noah Smith described the deal as a Katrina moment when even many of Trump’s defenders “will be forced to admit, in private if not in public, that the man and his administration are grossly, pathetically incompetent.”

If very few across the political spectrum can see value in the deal, the reason should be patently clear: It is a hollow promise, a deal to make a deal that is sounding suspiciously like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), the Iran nuclear pact negotiated by then-President Barack Obama in 2015, that Trump tore up in 2018.

The new surrender document, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) calls on Iran to dilute, or “downblend,” ❓-whaaa- its enriched uranium under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency. So did the JCPOA (which also called for removing some of that uranium to other countries). In the MOU, Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.” 

But Iran has always maintained that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes.

Details for a final deal will be negotiated in the coming two months — an absurdly short time frame for incredibly complex issues. In the meantime, the United States will release billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets. The United States pledges to lift all sanctions if and when a final deal is signed. 

Oddly, all this must be endorsed by the United Nations, a body Trump has long mocked as useless. And by unfreezing Iranian assets before a final nuclear deal is struck, Trump is effectively agreeing to pay Iran to return things to the way they were before February 28, 2026.

Nowhere does the surrender MOU address Iran’s mass manufacturing of ballistic missiles and weaponized drones, or its subsidizing of military proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran pledges to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping — but the MOU seems to leave open the possibility that in 60 days Iran can start taxing tankers to transit the waterway, something it was not doing before.

So, in many ways, Trump’s deal will return the Persian Gulf to the status quo ante — only arguably worse, because Iran now understands that the mighty US military cannot prevent it from strangling the world’s economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, admittedly no friend of Trump’s, summed it up fairly when he wrote on X: “Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

Cassidy’s assessment touches on the cost of this underwhelming settlement. The approximately 15-week campaign left 13 American service members and more than 3,500 Iranians dead. It cost the US military more than $32 billion and nearly drained the nation’s storehouse of missile and drone interceptors.

And the threat the war posed for the global economy was enormous. The sharp reduction in tanker traffic through the strait caused possibly the biggest disruption in oil supply in history, driving the price to above 💲120 a barrel and forcing countries to dip deeply into their reserves.

Before the first US and Israel bombs fell on Iran, gas in the United States was selling on average for less than $3 per gallon at the pump. By early June, the average nationwide price had risen to more than $4 a gallon. All told, according to Moody’s Analytics, the war cost the United States a total of $132 billion in both military spending and higher consumer costs — nearly $1,000 per American household.

Amid the disruptions in oil, natural gas, and fertilizer supplies, the World Bank lowered its forecast for global economic growth to 2.5 percent — the lowest since the COVID-19 pandemic.

No wonder Trump told reporters in Europe after signing the surrender MOU that he was worried that the war was about to trigger a global economic downturn rivaling the Great Depression of 1929 — an outcome that would have made him look as bad as Herbert Hoover. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have ​happened,” the president said.

It was boldly honest of the president to admit that he was so worried about his image for history. But surely the Iranians were pleased to hear that their ability to create global economic havoc has become their superpower against this superpower.

Sending the country into war is a president’s most somber and significant power, and Trump, true to form, has used it rashly in this war. It took a primary loss against a Trump-supported rival for Cassidy to speak honestly about the emperor’s new clothes. Might this be the moment when other Republican members of Congress remove the veil from their eyes and rein in his recklessness before he overreaches again❓

One could be forgiven for not betting on that possibility. But there are midterm elections this fall, and chances are higher that voters will use their ballots to hold the Donald Trump accountable. Trump pledged in 2024, to end military missions overseas and to focus American resources on America’s working people. This war did neither.

Donald John Trump's blundering, costly, and pointless use of the American military has damaged the US economy and its international standing — and it should be beyond the pale for anyone who truly puts America first.

Maine Writer post script- Senator Susan Collins where are you❓

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must be reminded about how January 6th 2020 was treason

Echo essay reported in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg

Donald Trump's Indecency: At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound affection for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers, he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows. 

The gallows was erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”

Them worthless fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said. “They don’t need a jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers while everybody videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”

Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him.” 

All told, more than 140 police officers were injured in the riot, many seriously.

I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then I walked with the crowd to the Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.”

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House, to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. 

Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys —believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection. (Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys🤢 movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)

Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

A day after the pardons were announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Trump had something else to say during that first press conference of his new term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” This would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.

I understand that a review—even a short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive (Oh no, no is not at all repetitive, it is first person reporting from the scene and must be told again). But repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew. 😢

So, in brief: Trump dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats the party of “evil.”

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. 

By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. “It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”

The subject of Trump’s indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of indecency. At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.

President Barack Obama, a model of dignified presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,” Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”

We are in a long Lord of the Flies moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded followers—these days can seem infernal. 

Trump’s term is one-quarter over; a piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going through hell, keep going❗

Donald Trump insults Americans and allied nations but Russia gets a pass

Fake news isn't a new concept - Hitler called it 'lügenpresse'- writes Andrew Sullivan in NewYorkmag.com

The anti-American behavior of Donald Trump is alarming, all the while his cult supporters, who are victims of mass hypnosis, just can't hear the urgency.  Mayday! General quarters!  

General Quarters! Mayday! Republicans will have to take responsibility for ruining our national security and cruelly dismantling domestic, humanitarian, social safety net programs. Somewhere in this mess is a convoluted Trump to Putin secret code, ie, "Russia if you're listening!"

Donald Trump insulted China by calling the President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan before he was inaugurated; but, he said, she is the person who called him.  (Daaaaaling, it's not you, it's me....excuse).

Donald Trump insults Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto by insisting on building a wall in Texas for the purpose of keeping out Mexican immigrants. Fortunately, President Nieto said, "México no pagará por el muro". In other words, "hell no!". Nieto cancels visit to Washington DC, by mutual consent, says Donald Trump. (Daaaaling, let's agree to disagree!)

Donald Trump hangs up during a telephone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, because he disagrees with an agreement about the US accepting refugees.  (Daaaaling, this is clearly an irreconcilable difference!)

Now, on February 18, 2017, Donald Trump invented a false story about a terrorism attack in Sweden, knowing there was no such incident! Clearly, an insult to the Swedish people, but I'm pretty sure Vladimir Putin was chuckling. (There's not much trust between Sweden and Russia because, frankly, the Swedes know better.)

On the other hand, Russia's President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative and an expert at co-opting spies, is really an okay buy with Donald Trump. There's absolutely no problem with Russia's illegal invasion of the Ukraine, seizing the Crimea or saber rattling about borders with Scandinavia.  Oh, by the way, it's an annoyance to know there's a Russian spy submarine cruising along international waters along the coast of Connecticut because Donald Trump could easily just take care of the situation if he really wanted to do so, or so he says.

Unbelievable! Why is Donald Trump's relationship with Putin so chummy, when this bizarre camaraderie is clearly smoking with the stench of treason?

Of course, the question is about the motive, writes Andrew Sullivan in NewYorkmag.com.

Why on Earth would any campaign for president be in constant, secret touch with the intelligence agents of a hostile foreign power?

I cannot know. Maybe Flynn is a rogue loner. It’s also possible, I guess, that the Trump campaign just wanted to keep in touch with the intelligence services of one of this country’s nemeses, if only to wish them Merry Christmas — five times in one day. It’s also conceivable that Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort’s deep ties to the Putin regime were utterly irrelevant to the sudden amendment, this past summer, to the GOP party platform that removed a call to send arms to Ukraine. It’s also possible, I suppose, that deep down I’m straight.

But there’s one explanation that chills me even more than a foreign power’s potential blackmail over an American president. And it is that Trump and Putin are natural allies in their fight against the postwar, U.S.-led international order that has kept the peace for 70 years. Putin and Trump, after all, share a Bannonite foreign policy: a robust defense of nationalism; a view that NATO is obsolete; support for far-right parties throughout Europe; and the goal of smashing the European Union so that Russia can once again extend its tentacles into Eastern Europe, and the U.S. can play one European power off another. 

Maybe Putin has kompromat (short for literally "compromising material") on Trump’s actions, but no such motivation is even needed, writes Sullivan. Trump and Putin want to form a pincer movement to destroy what we have known for a long time as the West.
Trump and Putin want to form a pincer movement to destroy what we have known for a long time as the West.

Their domestic politics also have disturbing parallels. Trump would love nothing more, it seems to me, than to be an American Putin, treating the country as he long treated his own corporate fiefdom. He once explained he admired the autocrat because Putin has “great control over his country.” Like Putin, Trump would love to control the media. Like Putin, he has developed a leadership cult, devoted to the masses. Like Putin, he believes in a government that has “killers.” Like Putin, he threatens his geographic neighbors. Like Putin, he has cultivated an alliance of convenience with reactionary religious conservatives, to shore up his power. Like Putin, he believes there’s no moral difference between American democracy and Russia’s.  Like Putin, Trump is enriching himself by public office. And, like Putin, he has targeted a minority as a scapegoat — Putin targeted the gays to gin up support while Trump targets the Muslims and Mexicans. And as Putin has RT as his conduit, so Trump has the Murdoch empire.

I feel like I know Stephen Miller, the youthful Montgomery Burns who lectured the lügenpresse last Sunday morning in his charm-free Stakhanovite baritone. I feel like I know him because I used to be a little like him. He’s a classic type: a rather dour right-of-center kid whose conservatism was radicalized by lefties in the educational system. 

No, I’m not blaming liberals for Miller’s grim fanaticism. I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate. Before too long, they start adopting brattish and obnoxious positions — just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers. After a while, you’re not so much arguing for conservatism as against leftism, and eventually the issues fade and only the hate remains.

Stephen Miller - lügenpresse

Think of it, in some way, as reactionary camp. 

Think Ingraham and Coulter and Yiannopoulos (Breitbart News aka "barfcart-news". They're reactionaries in the classic sense: Their performance-art politics are almost entirely a reaction to the suffocating leftism that they had to endure as they rose through the American education system. 

As a young, lonely conservative in college, I now wince at recalling, I threw a Champagne party to welcome Reagan’s cruise missiles to Britain. Of course I knew better — and could have made a decent argument for deterrence instead of behaving like a brattish dick. But I didn’t. I wanted to annoy and disrupt the smugness around me. If you never mature, this pose can soon become your actual personality — especially when you realize that it can also be extremely lucrative in the conservative-media industrial complex. 

I think of Ann Coulter, whom I met recently, backstage at Bill Maher’s show. What struck me was her sincerity, searing intelligence, and grasp of the facts. In another universe, she could have become a reasoned defender of a sane conservatism. Instead she ended up writing In Trump We Trust. In exactly the same way, Miller really is a product of Santa Monica and Duke — their living, breathing, raving antibody.

Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is quite something. I’ve read and reread his 2014 speech at the Vatican to see if I can find any coherence in it, and I confess I failed. It’s a hodgepodge of melodrama, hysteria, and a defense of some kind of “enlightened capitalism” along Judeo-Christian lines, in the face of an imminent Islamist takeover of the planet. It’s the 1950s versus jihad, an attempt to convey the gist of the entire Drudge Report every day and turn it into a thesis. He argues that we are just “at the very beginning stages of a global conflict” that could eradicate 2,000 years of Western civilization. It reads like the apocalyptic, paranoid fantasies of someone who writes letters to the editor, single-spaced, in all caps.

Now, go check out this Vice journalist’s impression of Bannon in 2014. It does not reassure: “He’s buzzing with intensity, with two pens clipped to his shirt collar. Over the next 90 minutes, he barely touched his food and never took off his coat.” He just prattles endlessly and manically on. Among the gems that emerge from the conversation: Ebola requires a massive immigration crackdown or we’re all going to die; ISIS is plotting to assassinate the Pope; and then this calm overview: “The world is in a meltdown right now. I mean, the world is on fire. And all of a sudden it’s going to dawn on people, this is not a problem for guys in the Middle East. This is a problem for you in Kansas City.” You begin to realize that he called himself a “Leninist” for a reason.

It took me a while to get into HBO’s The Young Pope. I kept waiting for it to have a relationship with some believable version of reality — and then a kangaroo kept bouncing around the Vatican. At first I couldn’t understand what was metaphor and what was plot, what was dream and what was supposed to be real, what was a miracle and what wasn’t. In the first few episodes, the Trump analogy — of an unhinged novice accidentally finding himself in a position of supreme power — did the unforgivable thing of failing to distract me from the anxiety besieging Washington.

But if you let the series just lull you into acceptance, its themes are powerful. The filmmakers understand how attractive the most rigid orthodoxy can be for the young. Abandoned by hippie parents as a boy, Jude Law’s youthful Pius XIII insists that the Church needs to turn inward and embrace mystery and fear and obedience again. He’s Benedict XVI with charisma. His vestments twinkle and shimmer; the slippers remain ruby-red; and the full papal regalia is only slightly mitigated by the Holy Father’s inspired chain-smoking. He starts out as a vindictive, sadistic, and arrogant narcissist acting out his deeply buried childhood traumas (can we ever get away from Trump?). But he is also, the series slowly reveals, some kind of a saint. His prayer is like a controlled seizure of concentration. He performs quite astounding miracles. 

And in time, people of the modern secular world, at first repelled, find themselves drawn to him, smiles on their faces, relieved at last to be in the presence of divine authority, any authority that can make sense of their world.

I’ve often wondered if saints are actually like that: not holy in a conventional sense, and certainly not “nice” — but often unpleasant, antisocial misfits who are only subsequently seen for what they truly were.

Do you remember the days when president Obama predicted that at some point in his presidency, the “Republican fever would break”? It never did of course. If anything, it kept getting worse — from birtherism to jeopardizing the U.S.’s credit rating to Benghazi and then those fricking emails. But it occurs to me that the fever could only really break if the Republicans were no longer in opposition and were actually confronted with the difficult project of running the country. Yes, I know we’ve been hoping for this for years, chasing phantasms as the crazy gets crazier, but could the fever be finally breaking right now? The Republican base’s talk-radio politics, their Breitbart alternative facts, their railing constantly about Obama’s various alleged iniquities — none of that is enough to actually govern. But that is all they have known for so long. At some point, the Republicans are going to have to raise the debt limit; they are going to have to pay for the wall; they’ll have to replace the ACA with, well, er, something quite fabulous. They have no excuses anymore, after all.

And yet, lo and behold, Republicans seem paralyzed. (MaineWriter opinion here- Republicans are victims of mass hypnotic hysteria caused by Trump cult negative charisma.)

Legislatively, they are at a standstill, and the ACA endures and becomes more popular. There is no magic cure for bringing back blue-collar jobs. They will surely divide over tariffs. Even tax reform could be a liability if it isn’t directed at those low-earning core Republican voters, rather than Trump’s fellow plutocrats (and good luck with that). All the rabid rhetoric against Obama’s essentially moderate policies, in other words, is beginning to dissipate into thin air. Yes, they can deregulate. Yes, they could borrow even more to goose the economy. But it’s going to be fumes before too long. Maybe this is how the fever eventually ends — when, instead of constantly ducking responsibility, they actually have to take some.