Hello, and welcome back. Writing to you from California, where I’m working on indoctrinating the children with the West Coast Agenda. When they ask me why New York doesn’t have Waymos, I explain it’s because the East Coast hates innovation and would rather suffer. In New York, there is no such thing as cookies. Sugar is a San Francisco thing. We do tons of land acknowledgments when we’re here, like, “I want to recognize Kern County as ancestral Bowles farmland that should have stayed in the family.”

In Free Press news, please vote on our first Forum Book Club pick! Right now the debate is between East of Eden, Lonesome Dove, and A Gentleman in Moscow. Too classy for me. The link is here.

→ He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.

And in the scam of the week, we have the team at Truth Social selling early access to market-moving White House announcements, calling it Truth API. See, Trump often makes presidential announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform, and now you can buy government announcements a tiny bit early to trade on it. If this sounds at all sketchy, then you probably don’t get what an API is, and that’s fine. This is what real men do for work, and you shouldn’t worry your little head about it, kitten.

The statement from Trump Media and Technology Group interim CEO Kevin McGurn: “Markets already move on Truth Social posts. Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.” The idea is to give algorithmic trading tools a few milliseconds of advantage to trade on whatever the latest Trump announcement is. And they’re spelling that out! Martha Stewart went to jail for a minor trade based on some tidbit her broker had allegedly gleaned (the original James Comey villain story), but anyway. Here we are. Explicitly selling presidential trading tips. Major banks are hesitant to subscribe right now, which means a new type of man is about to get really rich. Men who aren’t scared of a little political crime. I think they’ll have ponytails.

→ Trump on the state of U.S.-Japanese affairs: Quote of the week (said on Sunday but we’ll count it):

Reporter: Mr. President, why is the U.S. intervening to support the Japan yen at this time?

Trump: To support who?

Reporter: To support the Japanese currency.

Trump: Because we have a good relationship with Japan. We’re very strong, very, very strong financially, and they are, you know, they have a weakening yen, and they wanted a little bit of help. And we’re always there for Japan. Japan’s been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor. They were not good.

The man never lets go of a grudge, and frankly, that’s not the worst quality in a president!

→ Elite political discourse:

When Trump is mean, even nasty, it’s sort of vaguely funny. J.D. here just comes across as a schoolyard bully. Calling it now: The 2028 debate stage will feature more than one insult of another person’s mother.

→ Why does Trump hate women: I thought he was our friend. I thought he understood our economic demands. Instead, we get things like this latest horror:

That’s right, he’s enslaving women. He’s freezing their eggs himself with his cold heart. He’s saying, get back in there, girls, and type on those computers till those French manicures chip off. First he says no Tylenol during pregnancy, now this? And men, those layabouts. No wonder they love him...