Welcome back from the long weekend. I trust you are tanned, ready, and rested for the long summer ahead. As we re-enter the workweek, I have some random thoughts on the stories we are watching today (and pretty much every damn day): The Iran Fiasco; The Pope’s AI warning; the Looming Debt Bomb; and, of course, the Trumpian Corruption, which continues to fester even on holiday weekends.
Happy Tuesday.
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Tuesday morning thoughts
Before we try to parse the latest on-again-off-again imaginary Peace Deal, take a moment to reflect on this: Donald Trump saw what Putin did in Mariupol and Netanyahu did in Gaza, and thought, “I’d like to do that in Iran. But I can go even further by wiping out an entire civilization, one of the oldest in the world.” In the end he backed off, but his threat opened a portal into the mind of the man we have entrusted with the nuclear button.
Of all the commentary, punditry, and furrowed brow analyses published this year, the one document that will be read 100 years from now will be the Pope’s encyclical,Magnifica Humanitas, which warns that Artificial Intelligence and the arrogant techbro oligarchy poses a threat to humanity itself.
A metaphor that aged badly. Back in April, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana —the Socrates of the Bayou — opined that Trump’s handling of Iran showed that he had “oranges the size of beachballs.” Over the weekend, the beachballs deflated in a long, slow, whining wheeze.
“How the US lost the Iran war” will be a course at military and diplomatic academies for decades.
It’s still too soon to know whether the $1.776 Billion Slush Fund was finally the GOP’s breaking point. But the more we learn, the more flies this putrid mess attracts.1 And you know how bad it is when even Ted Cruz refuses to swallow it.
Speaking of Texas: In a singular moment of political insanity, GOP voters will decide today whether to nominate senate candidate Ken Paxton, a man nearly as corrupt as Trump. Writes Kevin Williamson: “Imagine a rich, middle-aged car salesman who ditches his wife and starts dating a 21-year-old stripper with a meth problem, and then imagine that guy is a state—that’s Texas, Anno Domini 2026.”
The Pope’s Warning
In his first encyclical, Pope Leo warns against the threat of dehumanization from AI and, notably, links that with an historic apology for the Church’s role in supporting slavery. Christopher Hale explains the linkage:
The pope, whose own family tree includes both enslaved people and slaveholders, issued the apology inside an encyclical on artificial intelligence for a reason.
He is asking whether we are repeating the pattern in the unregulated labor that supplies the rare minerals for AI chips and the new digital trafficking enabled by the platforms.
This is the heart of what the encyclical does — it refuses to let artificial intelligence be treated as a theoretical question. Leo is direct on this point.
AI is already deciding who gets hired and who gets fired, whether you receive credit or are denied a loan, what your face means to a surveillance camera, what counts as truth on the public square, and increasingly, who lives and who dies in a war zone. The Church, Leo says, has a duty to weigh in precisely because the stakes are this concrete.
That encyclical, on labor in the context of the Industrial Revolution, was written by Pope Leo XIII, who was the inspiration for Leo XIV’s papal name. Like his 19th-century predecessor, the current pope is consciously tackling what is expected to be one of the most pressing issues facing humanity over the course of his papacy.
Some key excerpts:
The Pope reminds us that AI is not human.
We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.
The Pope warns against erecting another Tower of Babel.
With the heart of a shepherd and a father, I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good, so that humanity will never lose its beauty, and the world once again will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell.
“As with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise, and access to data,” Leo wrote in the document, titled Magnifica Humanitas. “In light of the common good and the universal destination of goods, this raises serious concerns, since small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes, and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples.”
Trump’s Iran Surrender
As I write, the situation is too fluid to define exactly the extent of Donald Trump’s historic defeat in Iran. This weekend’s much-hyped deal unraveled and deflated in real time after Trump faced withering criticism from his own base and pressure from his BFF, Benjamin Netanyahu. As of Tuesday morning, we are bombing again, and Trump is demanding that other Mideast countries sign peace deals with Israel (which is highly, highly unlikely).
But, at least for now, a few things seem clear: There’s not going to be any regime change; Iran proxies won’t be dismantled; Iran will get to keep its missile and drone programs; Iran will retain some sort of control over the Strait of Hormuz; Iran will get billions of dollars in sanction relief and unfrozen assets. Meanwhile, the U.S. dropped its demands to limit Iran’s military-industrial complex. And there is no agreement on denuclearization.
It is a stunning climb-down from a president who claimed he won the war on the first day and demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”
As the NYT explains this morning: “Trump essentially gave into the Iranian demand to kick the hardest issues down the road — while apparently succeeding in forcing the Iranians to end, at least temporarily, their stranglehold on one of the world’s most vital waterways.”
But here are some useful links that put his rolling surrender into context:
Phillips O’Brien: “There Is Only One Remaining Question--How Badly Has The USA Lost This War?”
This really is a historic moment. It’s the quickest and might be the most decisive US military defeat in the history of the USA. The US started this war by choice, and here we are fewer than three months later, after the US threw much of its most modern weaponry and used up masses of its existing stockpiles, wondering how much Iran is going to get.
The first surprising thing about President Trump’s impending defeat in the 2026 Iran war is that he already fought and won a successful war against Iran last year. In June 2025, U.S. and Israeli air strikes badly damaged the Iranian nuclear program in 12 days of bombardment. Exactly how badly remains controversial. But they didn’t do nothing. If Trump had quit while ahead, he could have banked his gains from last June as a solid if imperfect win.
The second surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that he does not seem to have cared at all about the only evident reason to resume fighting in 2026: the Iranian people’s rebellion against their brutal oppressors. Trump has never given any evidence of caring about Iranian democracy or human rights. He promised the Iranian people “Help is on the way” on January 13, but military operations did not commence until thousands were dead and the rebellion was already effectively crushed. During military operations, Trump made clear that he sought a deal with the existing regime. He made no effort to support or cooperate with Iranian dissidents before, during, or after the uprising.
So the question I kept asking myself was: Did I change, or did the economy change?
Did I get older and grumpier? Did I drift right without noticing? Did I catch whatever bug makes middle-aged economists start muttering about bond markets at dinner parties?
“'There Is Only One Remaining Question--How Badly Has The USA Lost This War?'”
Imagine that - you nominate, then work to re-elect someone who was known not to want to read any daily briefings in his first term, who incited a failed coup at the end of his first term, who stole many, many, many highly classified documents upon leaving his first term; and then confirm his second-term nomination of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News weekend host as Secretary of Defense - and this is the result we get in our ill-advised War in Iran? Who knew? Clearly not many GOP Senators and Representatives...
Today is the day Texas will be unmasked. Republican primary voters will select either the staid John Cornyn, who votes with Trump 100% but who still has his sanity, or the utterly corrupt Ken Paxton, whose lips are firmly attached to Trump. If Paxton is not quite as corrupt as Trump, it’s only because he has not yet been given the chance.
“'There Is Only One Remaining Question--How Badly Has The USA Lost This War?'”
Imagine that - you nominate, then work to re-elect someone who was known not to want to read any daily briefings in his first term, who incited a failed coup at the end of his first term, who stole many, many, many highly classified documents upon leaving his first term; and then confirm his second-term nomination of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News weekend host as Secretary of Defense - and this is the result we get in our ill-advised War in Iran? Who knew? Clearly not many GOP Senators and Representatives...
Today is the day Texas will be unmasked. Republican primary voters will select either the staid John Cornyn, who votes with Trump 100% but who still has his sanity, or the utterly corrupt Ken Paxton, whose lips are firmly attached to Trump. If Paxton is not quite as corrupt as Trump, it’s only because he has not yet been given the chance.