The Week that Was ...
Ending Monday, May 26, 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of The Week that Was, my rundown of what happened last week, curated, in the loosest sense of the word, for your reading pleasure, or displeasure.
Last week we saw greed at an unprecedented level; farces from the Trump Administration that would be laughable if they were not so tragic; Gaza become more heartbreaking, and the U.S. lost its top credit rating. Oh yes, the weather is getting worse.
1. Photo of the Week: A group of Waura fish in Piulaga Lake, Mato Grosso, Brazil by the Great Sebastiâo Salgado
2. U.S. Politics: The Big Bill of Destruction Advances
3. The Domestic Scene: Inside the Bubble
4. New York City and Its Farcical Politics
5. Foreign Affairs: Outside the Bubble
6. The Economy and Business, Real and Otherwise
7. You Cannot Unsee This
8. Stormy Weather
9. Listen to This: Korea, by Utah Phillips
1. Photo of the Week: A group of Waura fish in Piulaga Lake, Mato Grosso, Brazil by the Great Sebastiâo Salgado
A group of Waura fish in Piulaga Lake, Mato Grosso, Brazil (2005) © Sebastiao Salgado nbpictures.com
2. U.S. Politics and the Domestic Scene
The big news last week was the passage through the U.S. House of Representatives of the Big Bill of Destruction and its massive tax cuts for those who get the most from the system. But not without some trouble. There were those who thought it was not conservative enough, that it didn’t cut deep enough.
However, in the end, the holdouts gave in to Trump and Speaker Johnson and passed this monstrosity through the lower House of Congress.
Now, that may be depressing, but it’s not one-tenth as depressing as the fact that the bill passed 215-214, facilitated by the fact that three House Democrats passed away this year, all in red states.
One thing that the Democratic Party establishment cannot be accused of is age discrimination.
What does the bill that passed the house do? This.
That’s a lot of damage. But the bill still faces obstacles in the Senate. Several Republican Senators think it’s too leftwing.
It’s worth remembering Trump’s disinformation in the days and weeks leading up to his trip to the Capital to push this bill through. Trump promised not to touch Medicaid. Trump said he was raising taxes on the wealthy. As Big Mama Thornton said in Hound Dog, but that was just a lie. The bill does a reverse Robin Hood and takes from the poor to give to the rich.
3. The Domestic Scene: Inside the Bubble
There has been a lot of crowing among those who urgently seek to end Trumpism, and think the midterms are guaranteed to be a landslide for the Democrats. Alas, I would suggest not counting the gains the Dems are counting on in House and Senate just yet.
President Trump continued to work on his ambush the guest game, nation states edition, this time with the South African President. President Ramaphosa, for his part, regretted not being able to offer President Trump a jet.
Trump seems to think that genocide is being committed against white South Africans, but thankfully white guy Ryan Cooper has explained how to avoid becoming a victim.
Meanwhile, perhaps due to the peace that has suddenly broken out world-wide, a large part of the staff of the National Insecurity Council have been fired.
However, the halls of injustice never sleep, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) has brought criminal charges against a representative protesting government injustice.
Those guys over at DOJ just can’t keep still, can they? They have also brought charges against Columbia University for civil rights violations.
Meanwhile, showing great confidence, the extraterrestrial Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem erred about a very basic constitutional right, Habeas Corpus, found in the First Article of the sometimes followed U.S. Constitution.
Undeterred, Noem barred Harvard University from accepting foreign students. Or at least she tried to.
4. New York City and Its Farcical Politics
I live in New York City, a city whose politics “politics are used to frighten children,” at least in the estimation of John Steinbeck.
We’re still not disappointing, although it’s less about fright than farce.
One recent surprise originated from both a son of one of the five boroughs, now residing to the south, and one of his henchwomen, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi. Demonstrating the remarkable innovativeness of the Trump Administration, Bondi has overturned the conventional MAGA playbook and charged someone who might be guilty, Andrew Cuomo.
This will be an interesting race, possibly in the worst way imaginable.
There is one candidate in the race who is truly exciting and could bring real, welcome, positive change to this city, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, which is why he’s getting grudging coverage from the establishment press.
Crash that party, Zohran!
5. It’s Biden’s Fault!
The great debate over the cause (which is actually obvious) of the debacle of the Democratic Party in 2024 is continuing. The party line is shaping up to be “blame it on Biden.”
This is centering on the ostensibly journalistic work, Original Sin (a very grandiose title), by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. This work reports what we already knew, and, frankly, well before Biden’s disastrous debate appearance where he boasted “We finally beat Medicare.” (How dare he? That’s the Republicans job!)
And the establishment knew. The below clip was from March 2024.
President Biden Gaffes When Talking With Italian PM Meloni About Gaza
The New Yorker excerpted the book.
Then The New Yorker’s editor interviewed Jake Tapper.
By later in the week, The New Yorker’s own journalists seemed to be arguing with themselves.
Some say the media covered it up. Well, it was out there, if you looked. The Democratic Party establishment line is that a few staff members around Biden did the coverup. This is prep to run another establishment candidate in 2028, when, in their worldview, the Democratic candidate will be a shoo-in, and the lobbying bucks can flow again.
Well, let’s look at 2020. Biden came in fourth in the Iowa causes, behind Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. You need the Oxford comma for that list. The New York Times said Biden’s results in Iowa
“dealt a damaging blow to his campaign … Some party officials say it was a long time in the works.”
But Biden wasn’t done turning in abysmal results. In the New Hampshire primary, Biden came in fifth! Behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren. Politico wrote that Biden was just about finished. Bernie won New Hampshire. He was now the frontrunner.
And then, next thing you know, Biden is the nominee, and then he’s President. Huh?
The 2020 New Hampshire primary took place on February 11, 2020.
Right after New Hampshire, Representative Adam Clymer pulled out the stops for Biden in South Carolina, and he rocketed to first place in the Democratic Primary in a state no Democrat has carried for President since Jimmy Carter carried the state in 1976. In rapid succession, four other candidates dropped out (Steyer (remember him?), February 29; Buttigieg, March 1; Klobuchar, March 3). They all endorsed Biden. On Super Tuesday, March 3, Biden won 10 states and Bernie won 5 (delegate counts 716 and 505, respectively). Bernie was still in the race. He won California. The establishment was out to end that. And then the pandemic made it easy.
On March 20, New York State declared the COVID lockdown. California had done so a week earlier. Campaigning was effectively over, except for some MAGA super spreader events. Bernie suspended his campaign on April 8. Biden campaigned from the basement of his Delaware beach house while Trump endorsed Clorox for treating COVID.
In Puebla, Mexico, in December 2022, I met a man by the name of Emilio Hernandez, who showed me around the old city for a morning. An educated man, he holds a medical degree and speaks three languages. At one point, he asked me, “What’s up with Biden? He looks like some guy they just stuck in there.” I tried to explain the electoral college, the primary system, etc., but it's impossible to explain the American political system to someone who lives in a democratic country.
And Kamala? She dropped out over two months before the Iowa caucuses, on December 3, 2019. Next thing you know, she’s the 2024 nominee for President from the Democratic Party.
Can anyone seriously wonder why this didn’t go over well?
So that’s how Biden became President. The fix was in for the nomination, and he didn’t have to campaign.
And now, they’re all acting shocked about Biden’s infirmities, which were known! As Ryan Grim has reported, in Iowa and New Hampshire, when voters saw Biden up close, they were less likely to vote for him than before.
“Bidenworld” is fighting back. They’re saying that Tapper and Thompson didn’t do good fact checking. But Tapper and Thompson say they paid for their own fact checking. Which is odd for journalists whose jobs it is to report facts. And they’re saying that the Biden campaign had some great ads in the can, that they never got to use.
I’m sure those three ads would have made all the difference in the world.
It’s obvious that the Democratic Party’s problems lie with the Democratic Party’s establishment, its ruling class.
Endorsing a candidate who told his confidants back in 2020 that he would not run in 2024 was not a great move.
6. Foreign Affairs: Outside the Bubble
Living in the U.S.A. resembles living in a bubble, except that bubbles have clear skins, through which it is possible to see, perhaps with a bit of distortion. But our bubble is rather opaque. Let’s peer outside of our bubble, at tiny sliver of land in the Middle East.
In Gaza, the bombing raids and starvation are continuing. It’s getting harder and harder to get food. The Israeli government, after over a two month total blockade, let in a few aid trucks. Healthcare and hospitals are cut off. The European cover for the Netanyahu government is disappearing. The United Kingdom no longer wants a trade agreement with Israel. The Israeli military threatened diplomats visiting Gaza, with gunfire, that is. The Israeli military has been using Palestinians as human shields. This practice was not occasional. And a Palestinian doctor was working when seven of her children’s corpses arrived at the hospital where she was working. They had been killed in an Israeli bombing. This while children and elderly are starving.
Some in Israel are pointing this out.
7. The Economy and Business, Real and Unreal
United Healthcare (UHC), an oxymoronic corporate name if there ever was one, has been paying nursing homes not to transfer patients to hospitals. Meanwhile, nurses at Long Beach Medical Center went on strike to protest greed and be allowed to to their work, as a member of the Nurses United, Singrid Steinmetz, explained.
All this deficit spending and creative accounting among the House Republicans, aided greatly by the Trump Administration, has caused the credit rating of the U.S. to take a hit. So now mortgage rates are up to 7%.
In other news, of a more touching and emotional sort, Commerce Secretary Lutnick confided that he was really broken up about the tariffs, although of course they are not going to raise consumer prices.
Which is why, without a doubt, Trump threatened a straight 50% tariff on the European Union. This may affect his social policies, especially his desire for Americans to have more kids, since even weddings are going to cost more.
All that was not enough for the master of slobby excess, so Trump threatened a 25% tariff on Apple and maybe even Samsung although making an iPhone in the U.S. would probably triple the price of an iPhone.
Then Trump thought, what the hell, let’s wait till July. Could he be planning another “liberation day” for July 4? No way! That would be tacky.
If you want to travel somewhere to get away from all this, beware: it’s gonna cost you, as class warfare comes to the summer vacation.
8. You Cannot Unsee This
Recently at Cannes an ugly scene played out on the usually beautiful waters of the Mediterranean sea.
9. Stormy Weather
Last week tornadoes pummeled Tornado Alley, a region of North America that is growing. And the number of tornadoes is skyrocketing.
That would be okay if we had a way to deal with that, but as residents of the reddest of red states have learned, we’re not dealing with disasters anymore, or even keeping an eye out for bad weather.
One city that was particularly affected was Houston, with two major power outages last year, including the incredible derecho.
So far this year, Houston has escaped major power outages.
Oh, wait a second, this just happened.
Don’t worry, though, we’re ready for hurricane season, which is starting on Sunday.
Or maybe we’re not. But at least you can get insurance. That is, if you can afford it.
10. Listen to This: Korea, by Utah Phillips, in Honor of Memorial Day
Korea by Utah Phillips
