Cockburn’s Diary

There’s no small irony in the fact that Texas Democratic state legislators, fleeing a congressional redistricting attempt by Texas’s Republican majority, have sought shelter in Illinois. They’re acting like political refugees in what is, in fact, the most gerrymandered state in the country. Look at Illinois District 13, which snakes up from the Missouri border nearly to the gates of Indiana, bisecting the state (and District 15) like Illinois’s small intestine. Chicago is a very populous city, but the state has carved up its Congressional districts like a turducken, giving us as many (D-Chicagos) as humanly possible. The Illinois Democratic machine has had an outsized influence on American politics, much less Illinois politics, for decades.

Kamala Harris reappeared last night, making a 30-minute guest appearance on the now-canceled Late Show with Stephen Colbert, to deliver this message of hope to the American people: The country is irretrievably broken and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it. Hilarious! Momala said that everything terrible that was going to happen if she lost to Donald Trump has now happened (relatively strong economy, world peace) but the worst thing is that her fellow Democrats have “capitulated” to Trump’s fascist program of trade protectionism and renaming everything after himself. Harris, who recently announced that she’s not running for California governor, said she probably won’t run for President in 2028 either.

Street sweepers The Trump Administration’s plans to completely reshape the nation’s homeless policy got lost in last week’s tidal wave of news. They intend to address the “root causes” of homelessness by enforcing prohibitions on illegal drug use, urban camping and squatting. “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order,” the White House announced. This is  a curious order. It’s a reverse of a Reagan-era policy of emptying out the asylums and also a harsh rebuke of the policies of progressive cities, who offer safe consumption sites and Narcan vending machines.

In the surest sign of the permanent decay of Cockburn’s mind and soul, he spent all yesterday waiting for the President to post about the size of his appendage. The fact that Donald Trump has yet to do so fills Cockburn with sadness and ennui. This weekend doesn’t offer much promise either, as Trump is in the air on his way to Scotland. Maybe he’ll take some time to ponder his nether regions on Air Force One. The impetus for Cockburn’s hope comes from the season premiere of South Park, which portrays Trump as a selfish, horny imbecile, as it used to portray Saddam Hussein more than 20 years ago. Also like South Park’s Saddam, Trump has a homosexual love affair with Satan, who notices the resemblance.

The Republican majority in the House is down to +7: Representative Mark Green of Tennessee’s 7th congressional district officially resigned on Monday. Green was the subject of a rather messy scandal in his final term: his wife of 35 years initiated divorce proceedings last September, wrongly accusing the congressman of having an affair with a 32-year-old female Axios reporter in the filing. He was, in fact, cheating on her with a different young woman, who exonerated the reporter. “We’ve all had to basically grieve the loss of the person that we thought was our father,” Green’s daughter Catherine told local press at the time. “My dad sells himself in politics as being a Christian, conservative family man... His actions in the last, whatever, year have not been that.

The exclusive WSJ letter Cockburn nearly drove his roadster into a ditch when the Wall Street Journal broke news in the early evening that Donald Trump had written a letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday, which Ghislane Maxwell collected into a “leather-bound album.” According to the WSJ, the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair….The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.’” In an interview with the WSJ, Trump said the letter was fake.

Trash talk Who gets to call themselves MAGA these days, anyway? Politico Playbook declared this weekend that “MAGA is whatever Trump decides it will be” – the administration’s go-to defense when the President does something the further-right side of his base doesn’t care for, such as dispatching military support to Ukraine, say, or running interference for the Ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Heading into the midterms – and we’re past the halfway point of 2025, so we are heading into the midterms – Republican candidates up and down the country are already attempting to bill themselves as the most “MAGA” in the field, in hope of garnering a Trump endorsement that could see them win office.

Fumbled… As Texas digs out from last weekend’s catastrophic flooding, the state’s leaders are using the only metaphor its residents understand – football – to try and shift blame. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a great protector of the Republican establishment, said at a Tuesday press conference, “Every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who is to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say ‘Don’t worry about it, man. We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again and then we’re going to win this game.’” But the “losing team,” in this case, appears to be the Republican-run Kerr County, which did not have a proper flood warning system in place.

A great travel miracle has occurred – and Cockburn, who flies frequently and disgruntledly, couldn’t be more thrilled. The TSA, as of either yesterday or very, very soon, will no longer require airline passengers to remove their shoes when going through security. Shoes on/shoes off has been the bane of every commercial airline passenger’s existence since British terrorist Richard Reid attempted to detonate his shoe bomb on a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001. Since then, it’s been federal policy to X-ray your Nikes and, repulsively, your flip-flops. Now either that threat has passed – or maybe it wasn’t ever that much of a threat. Regardless, we are free. Cockburn would like to see some other flying experience changes to accompany this one.

Deport Elon Musk? “Without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” President Trump lightly threatened on Truth Social close to midnight. But Musk, who is proposing the formation of a new “America party” in reaction to Republicans passing the Big, Beautiful Bill this week, doesn’t seem to really care about electric vehicle subsidies. His X feed is an unending stream of warnings about the runaway national debt and promises to fund the re-election campaign of gadfly Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky. But Daddy Trump isn’t playing nice. This morning on the White House lawn where he always unleashes his punchiest quotes, Trump said, “We might have to put DoGE on Elon. You know what DoGE is?

President Trump and Congressman Thomas Massie are in a somewhat peculiar standoff. The President takes issue with Massie’s opposition to bombing Iran and to the Big, Beautiful Bill. In an over 300-word Truth Social tirade, Sunday, Trump called Massie a “pathetic LOSER,” “lazy,” “grandstanding,” “weak” and “ineffective.” Massie has remained relatively calm. On Monday, he posted a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social jabs alongside a video of one of the national debt trackers he designed. “I’m going to program my debt badge to display the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since @realDonaldTrump has tweeted at me last,” he wrote. But it’s not just Trump who is targeting Massie’s seat.

You don’t mess with the Zohran Here in the capital, the President has been doing his utmost to wrangle Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran into a ceasefire neither government seems to want. It’s... not going great. As he departed for the NATO summit at the Hague, Trump said of the conflict: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” Meanwhile on the Hill, senators are poring over the Big, Beautiful Bill to see if they can whip up a version of it they’re willing to pass by July 4. But Cockburn finds himself looking north to the Big Apple – and wondering whether the mayoral primary could offer signs of life for the Democratic party.

What do you want to be when you grow up? A pilot? A firefighter? An ICE agent? Since the explosion of the LA riots,  the online gaming platform Roblox has seen kids “role-play as ICE agents” and anti-ICE protesters. Despite Cockburn’s doubts, this is considered “fun.” Internet scholar Taylor Lorenz explained to Cockburn: “Roblox has become like this metaverse where kids and young people go to sort of mimic real-world events. They role-play as teachers, or they have a family.” It’s just like The Sims, but with round-ups and deportations. It seems the game is mimicking real life: just like the protests in California became violent, so did the simulated ones.

A few months ago Team Trump tried to organize its war-gaming plans on the messaging app Signal. It didn’t work. It appears the team has taken to an even more secure platform, as the Iran-Israel war escalates, communicating instead on X. US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee shares with the President, Cockburn and everyone else: Mr. President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century – maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have so many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts.

Radio Ga Ga That’s it, yes, it’s war! Forget Israel and Iran’s back and forth, ignore the tanks on Constitution Avenue: the real conflict of the week was the heated Briefing Room scrap between two titans of radio, John Fredericks and April Ryan. It all kicked off on Wednesday afternoon ahead of the press briefing, when Trump-supporting call-in host Fredericks sidled in and started airing his grievances about how the briefings used to work under the previous Trump administration. He was moaning about how he never got to ask questions due to the focus-pulling antics of CNN’s Jim Acosta and April Ryan, who, sources tell Cockburn, he referred to as the “woman from urban radio.” Fredericks said this... while directly next to Ryan.

RealClearPolitics, the polling data aggregator, is undergoing a round of cuts. In a letter to staff last Wednesday, seen by Cockburn, publisher David DesRosiers writes: “Good people, our people, and the families that they serve will be impacted. We are sorry.” While cuts to media are nothing new given the challenging business environment, the reasoning behind RealClear’s reductions is somewhat unusual. “We find ourselves under attack from a shadowy new threat – this time from the Right,” writes DesRosiers. “A cabal of so-called conservatives is now attempting to stamp out independent voices. They have persuaded some of our previous benefactors who supported RealClearFoundation while it benefited them to withdraw philanthropic support.

How are you marking Pride Month? This weekend in the DC area, there are really only two ways to go about it. First, despite concern that the second Trump administration would scythe wholesale through gay rights, America’s capital is hosting World Pride, a two-week-long festival of rainbow-patterned frivolity.  Though there may be fewer corporate sponsors than in the Biden era, DC remains as gay as it ever was. In Northwest, 15th St is painted in rainbow colors and the gay bars are packed to the rafters. In Northeast, a two-day music festival kicks off tonight at the RFK Festival Grounds, headlined by Jennifer Lopez and a nice young man called Troye Sivan.

Cockburn is not a regular viewer of The Daily Show. It is no longer as epoch-defining as it was in Jon Stewart’s heyday. But he did take an interest in Stewart’s segment last night with Carole Cadwalladr. For the uninitiated, Cadwalladr is a former Guardian and Observer columnist from the UK most prominent for her reporting on Cambridge Analytica. CA is the political consulting firm known for its contentious use of Facebook data in the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum. After Brexit came what Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill dubbed “the middle-class meltdown to end all middle-class meltdowns.” “And at the heart of it all,” wrote O’Neill, “was a writer for the Observer called Carole Cadwalladr.

Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump… Truss? Cockburn was surprised to hear from across the Pond that Liz Truss – who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom for just 49 days – had plans to set up a social media site. “What I am doing is establishing a new free speech network, which will be uncensored and uncancellable, to actually talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about,” the former PM said at a conference in England last month. The move would see Truss compete with X, Parler, Gettr, Gab and, yes, Truth Social, Trump’s social media app. How will she pull it off? With some American assistance, it seems. Cockburn understands Truss’s network is set to be part of the media conglomerate John Solomon and Mark Meckler are working to establish.

Who will be the Democratic party’s Joe Rogan? That is the $20 million question facing the party, as Democrats try to recover from the last election, when the podcasters had the power. Setting aside Rogan’s status as a longtime backer of both the Democrats and Bernie Sanders, the party’s plan to win back heterosexual, cisgender young men reads like a Barnard gender studies thesis. The plan’s codename, SAM, stands for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” and sets out to “study the syntax, language and context that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” Some free advice from Cockburn: normal young men don’t use words such as “syntax” in their everyday speech.