Trump Signed the Instrument of Surrender at Versailles

Trump: "It's signed. I signed it in Versailles. I just signed it."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 17, 2026 at 6:15 PM

The next Democratic president will be missing a golden opportunity if they don't demand to take the oath of office...

...on the porch of the Appomattox Courthouse.

Burn The Lifeboats

PBS Steel Cage Death Match...

...are words no sensible person would ever hammer together into a sentence.  But you good people get a sneak peek at the reason for that sentence, which we will be covering in greater length on the 1000th episode of the Professional Left Podcast on Thursday (weather permitting.) 

The reason that sentence makes no sense is because anyone who has watched PBS panels for more than a minute can identify their unique set of cultural expectations.  Avoid profanity.  No muttering asides about what a dumbfuck so-and-so is.  No reality teevee 'confessionals" after the panel where a participant can really cut loose.  Always be collegial, even when your "colleague" is lying their ass off.  

And above all, no shouting.  Business must be conducted in the proper tone -- interactions kept within the 50 to 60 decibel "quiet conversation" range.  Maybe jump it up to 65 when propping up someone's lame joke with some PBS-brand jolly laughter.  

But however hard they work to sand down any differences, then pack those differences in the cotton batting of PBS-speak, there are moments more and more frequently when it's clear that the Left side of the panel would very much like to call the Right side of the panel out for being a lying sumbitch. 

So this banal exchange is about as close as you're going to get to PBS News Hour panelists rasslin'.

From The PBS News Hour, June 12...

This is the exchange on PBS Friday between Mr. David Brooks and Mr. Jonathan Capehart, with emphasis added:

David Brooks:  ... The Trump thing is just weird. He's just -- he appoints Bill Pulte, who's clearly not even close, within a Pacific Ocean, of being qualified for this job. And then he turns around, and to make the permanent acting, not acting, but the permanent director of DNI, Jay Clayton, who's totally like superstar level by Trump's standards.

So how does the same guy pick two people, one with such radically different qualifications? The one thing I should add is that I don't like what the Democrats are doing here. I understand you don't like Bill Pulte. I understand you think he should not have been appointed. And that, you're absolutely 100 percent correct.

But the FISA program works well. We are now -- as Speaker Johnson made the point, we're now -- we got the World Cup here. We got the Iranian thing going on. We need all the intelligence I can get. And that FISA program supplies, I'm told, half the president's daily intelligence brief.

That's a lot of information and valuable information. It's a very well-working program. And the Democrats are not repeal -- or not renewing it sort of in my view out of spite, but they're making us less safe.  

The moderator then turns to Jonathan Capehart, who asks an obvious question

Jonathan Capehart:   How this became the Democrats' fault is curious to me.

One -- a couple of things to keep in mind. One, even though the law has expired, it was reauthorized by a FISA court in March of 2026', this past March, which goes through March of 27. So Congress has time to come back and reauthorize it, do whatever they need to do, because it's not just Democrats who have concerns about the law. It's Republicans as well.

So I just don't think it's right to say it's all the Democrats' fault, especially when they're not even in the majority in either house.  

After which the moderator, Geoff Bennett, immediately changes the subject, which is what the moderator always does whenever there is the slightest danger of David Brooks being made a fool of by someone who came armed with facts.  

So, rather than pursuing the question of, hey, why the hell are you blaming Democrats when they don’t control anything, we get, "In the time that remains, David, do your Sunday night plans involve being at the White House for a UFC match, by chance?"

Ha ha ha.  Potential unpleasantness averted.  Collegiality restored.  Audience soothed.    

Trivial, right?  Hardly worth mentioning, right?  And I wouldn’t have mentioned it were it not for the fact that it is one more example of an unholy ritual performed over and over again on that set, involving the same people, operating according to the same assumptions.

For example, you will undoubtedly remember that, one day after one of Trump’s ICE goons murdered Rene Good in cold blood on camera, the same Messer's. Brooks and Capehart were invited to share their opinions about that murder.

And Brooks did his thing like a man dispatched from Centrist Thought HQ with a very important mission: whatever the question is, the answer must always be “both sides are basically the same kind of confused, noble, tragic souls squinting at reality through fogged-up moral lenses.”

And in this case, the prompt is not subtle. It’s a video of a woman being shot in Minnesota. A real-world, immediate, ugly, concrete thing. The sort of thing that, historically speaking, usually calls for at least a directional opinion.

Instead, Brooks doesn’t just bend over backward – he gave it the full Cirque du Soleil routine of intellectual contortion, folding himself across multiple dimensions just to avoid saying, plainly, what he thinks of what people just saw.

And you can almost hear the gears turning: how do I not take a position, but still sound like I am wisely refusing to take a position?

So he doesn’t say “I’m not taking a side.” No. That would be too simple. Too honest. Instead, he goes searching through the attic of American memory and drags down a dusty old artifact: a 1951 football game film.   A filmed college football game where both teams watched it afterward and each concluded the refs had screwed them differently. Which, apparently, is now the master key to understanding modern political violence.

And the argument emerges in its full Brooksian foulness: people interpret reality through bias, everyone sees what they want to see, therefore everything is politics, therefore no interpretation is more grounded than any other, therefore the wise posture is… eternal suspended judgment.

It’s the same fucking column he’s been writing for 24 years. Different props, same stage play. Swap in Iraq, swap in Trump, swap in a shooting in Minnesota—doesn’t matter. The conclusion is always hovering in a nonexistent middle ground.  

Meanwhile, sitting across from him was Jonathan Capehart, doing that very modern cable-news thing where you are professionally required to witness something grotesque and surreal and respond with PBS impassivity.

You can see the “are you hearing this shit?” energy radiating off him. The body language of someone who is one sentence away from standing up and walking off set, but is restrained by the invisible PBS leash that says: we will discuss your feelings, but only in approved tonal ranges.

And he tries to steer it back toward something resembling the actual subject. Because the question was not “what does 1951 college football teach us about epistemology.” The question was: what do you think about this shooting?

Brooks, however, has already made track for Centerville.  He’s back in his seminar on the Sociology of Perception mode, concluding that all humans are basically trapped in interpretive fog banks and therefore—surprise—we should be very cautious about concluding anything at all.

Which is how you end up in that very familiar elite media cul-de-sac where:

Something happens in the real world

It is immediately translated into a meditation on perception

The meditation conveniently avoids any judgment about the thing that happened

And the absence of judgment is reframed as wisdom

And the segment lands where it always lands: in that posture of cultivated detachment that looks, from the outside, less like intellectual humility and more like refusal to face reality. 

You will also remember these same people on this same stage back in August of last year.  Brooks "Both Sidesed" Trump ordering Texas to gerrymander him five new congressional seats out of thin air, and Gavin Newsom fighting back with the only weapon he has.  

He also bitched that "no one is marching in the streets" over this shit because apparently from the Acela corridor quiet car he can't see the millions who have been out in the streets in all kinds of weather for all kinds of marches.  Or maybe he's just a legacy media troll who shoulda been given the hook 20 years ago.

You see, it’s not any one of these examples – and there are dozens more on PBS alone.  Hundreds more from Brooks over the years.  And hundreds of thousands more across all legacy media platforms over the decades.  

It is the collective weight of all of them.  The relentless repetition of variations of this one lie that has incepted that lie as an axiomatic truth in the subconscious of millions and millions of our fellow citizens.  

That's when you get the 10,000th iteration of garbage like this.  From Wake Up To Politics:

Could There Be a Third Party for Moderates?

It turns out, Americans agree on an awful lot.

Burn The Lifeboats

Situation Rooms, Then and Now

May 1, 2011:  Senior Obama administration officials in the Situation Room waiting for updates on the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.

July 17, 2025:  Senior Trump administration officials in the Situation Room strategizing (screaming at each other) about how best to cover up Donald Trump's fetish for nipple-abuse and the other hundreds (thousands?) of mentions of Trump in the Epstein Files.    

No Half Measures

The Hunt For The Mysterious "Furor Bunker Leakers"...

...has begun.

From Raw Story:

Trump White House hunting for insider who leaked details about Epstein freakout

The Trump administration is launching a "massive leak hunt" to find out who spilled details on a panicked conversation inside the White House.

A new book by journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan has the Trump White House scrambling to find out who leaked details about the Trump administration's "freakout" over the release of the Epstein files, according to reporting by CNN. The New York Times published an excerpt of the book, "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," on Wednesday.

Because what would Stupid Watergate be without Stupid Plumbers?

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 999: The Patron Saint of Corruption

“Chicago ain't ready for reform yet!”  -- -- Chicago 43rd Ward Alderman Mathias "Paddy" Bauler, 1955

• 
  

Professional Left Podcast Episode 998: Who's This Jagoff?

“ Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”  -- George Carlin.

• 
  

Rules, Schmules

You may have noticed that over the past 10 years or so, actual Liberals (who had the poor taste to have been loudly right about the Right all along) were elbowed aside while recently former Republicans (who hadn't just been wrong about the Right all along, but had been the eager handmaidens of the forces that created Trump) were anointed by their pals in the media as the Voice of the Resistance.

And from their newly bestowed commanding heights within the media, these Never Trumpers handed down a new set of Democracy Alliance Commandments to us little people.  

Those commandments included...

The pasts of these arrivistes -- even their immediate horrendous pasts - are irrelevant!  

Daring to interrogate that past in any way is destructive to The Cause.   

Mouthy Liberals asking them to apologize for building careers slandering them in the most despicable ways imaginable is rude and petty and destructive to The Cause.

All that matters is the Present! All that matters is that they're with us now!

So I am moved to wonder why those very clear and strictly enforced Never Trump Commandments...

...don't apply to this guy?

I'm pretty sure I know why, and I find my answer depressingly predictable.

I Am The Liberal Media

Correction

By no stretch of the imagination has the Lincoln Project ever been the "foremost pro-democracy organization in the United States".  And if Rick Wilson was ever a "principled Republican" for three days straight I'll eat my hat.  

The foremost pro-democracy organization in the United States belongs to the Democratic Party, of which I have been a member my entire adult life. 

The Lincoln Project is an advertising company staffed by mountebanks which cranked out slick, Trump-bashing ads that tickled the pleasure centers of way too many credulous Liberals and made the lads and lasses at MSNBC swoon back in the day.  

However, as I wrote all the way back in November of 2021in "The Fail-Safe Election"  -- 

...there should be one fact that stands out bold and clear to anyone who has eyes to see: that the staggering amount of free publicity and hard cash lavished on the Lincoln Project on the theory that their unique insights into the Republican mind would pay big dividends for the Democrats was a complete bust.  That, outside of the tiny circle of Never Trump Republicans who seem to exist almost entirely on teevee and Twitter -- surprise! -- neither the tens of millions of dollars that credulous Liberals poured into the Lincoln Project...

...nor the Liberal Political PornHub videos they cranked out budged even a fraction of the Republican base one inch...

And yet you will remember that so many of our fair-weather Liberals allies insisted that the Lincoln Lads basically won the 2020 election for Joe Biden despite incontestable evidence to the contrary.  

If you needed a bylined writer to tell you bitter truths, you could've heeded the wise words Charlie Pierce:

The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election

Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.

Or you could've read The Hill, although it's kind of a trash publication so I can understand why you might blow them off -- 

Lack of influence means it's time to dismiss the Lincoln Project

-- but the basic electoral math that they buried halfway down the column is not in dispute.

During their time in the sun they even scammed their way into a glow-up from 60 Minutes, back when that meant something.  Later, when the various scandals the Lincoln Lads were drowning in broke into the open, 60 Minutes had to, uh, revise their assessment.

But these veteran grifters hung on like herpes because, as America's most famous capitalist philosopher, Phineas Taylor Barnum, allegedly observed, there's a sucker born every minute.

And two to take 'em.  

No Half Measures