Soaring US beef prices likely to rise further thanks to trade tensions and disease outbreaks

Trump blunders lead to more expensive burgers

Andrew Muhammad, University of Tennessee and Charles Martinez

It’s summer grilling season, but for many Americans, surging prices mean beef is no longer what’s for dinner.

The cost of beef, having spiked since early 2025, is coming under even more pressure. The most recent is the screwworm outbreak that hit cattle in Mexico and has now spread to the United States, where the cattle herd has already fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s, due in part to drought.

Meanwhile, potential trade disruptions loom. Just before U.S. and Mexican trade negotiators began meeting on June 16-17, 2026, to discuss the long-standing deal binding North America, Donald Trump warned that Washington may not renew the agreement, which was negotiated during his first term, and instead potentially withdraw from it altogether.

As international trade and livestock economists, we have studied how North American trade has deeply integrated cattle and beef markets, influencing production, prices and the movement of animals and meat products across Canada, Mexico and the United States. 

And because beef is both a top agricultural import and export for the U.S., the industry is especially vulnerable to any disruptions to the existing trade deal. As one example, the cost of ground beef is up by more than 20% just since January 2025.

Current trade uncertainty, reflecting Trump’s more fragmented, bilateral approach to negotiations, couldn’t come at a worse moment for inflation-weary consumers. The growing turmoil in the North American beef market risks further tightening supplies and raising prices.

They don't want you to know the REAL reason Social Security is in trouble

But I'm going to tell you anyway

Robert Reich

The trustees of the Social Security fund said Tuesday that the fund will be depleted by late 2032, a year earlier than the trustees’ projection last year of 2033. If nothing is done, benefits will automatically be cut six years from now.

The common understanding is that Social Security’s shortfall is due to the huge postwar baby boom, now retiring, and to America’s increasing life expectancy. The usual recommended fix is to reduce Social Security benefits or raise the age of eligibility. As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, warned Monday, “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed.” He said Republicans will introduce a plan to do that. Brace yourselves.

I used to be a Social Security trustee, and I call bullsh*t.

The baby boom can’t be blamed for Social Security’s shortfall. The Greenspan Commission, which in 1983 recommended the reforms that Congress then made — raising Social Security payroll taxes and also raising the eligibility age for collecting Social Security benefits — knew all about the baby boom and figured it into its calculations. (Early boomers like me can now start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 have to wait until they’re 67 to collect full benefits.)

Americans’ increasing life expectancy isn’t at fault, either. While wealthier Americans are living longer, that’s not the case for lower-income Americans. The Urban Institute estimates that life expectancy in the top 20 percent of income-earners is 91 years for people born in the 1990s, four years more than people born in the 1950s. Yet the life expectancy in the lowest 20 percent of income-earners is fewer than 80 years.

So what’s the real cause of the Social Security shortfall? What did Greenspan’s commission fail to predict? Widening inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain cap. This year, that cap is $184,500. Earnings at or below this amount are taxed at 12.4 percent. The cap rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

He could also try balloon animals

Trump refuses to sign bipartisan affordable housing bill

Is this how Donald Trump's ear miraculously healed so quickly and thoroughly?

Stanford scientists regrow lost cartilage and reverse arthritis in major breakthrough

Stanford Medicine

Miraculous healing

Scientists have found a way to regenerate worn-out joint cartilage by blocking an aging-related protein called 15-PGDH. Credit: Shutterstock

A treatment that targets a protein linked to aging has restored lost knee cartilage in older mice and prevented arthritis from developing after serious joint injuries, according to a Stanford Medicine-led study.

Researchers also found encouraging results in human tissue. Samples collected during knee replacement surgeries began producing new, functional cartilage when exposed to the treatment.

The findings raise the possibility that damaged cartilage caused by aging or osteoarthritis could one day be repaired with either a local injection or an oral medication. If successful in people, the approach could reduce the need for knee and hip replacement surgeries.

An oral version of the treatment is already being tested in clinical trials for age-related muscle weakness.

Targeting the Root Cause of Osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis and affects about one in five adults in the United States. The disease gradually breaks down cartilage in the joints, causing pain, stiffness, and swelling. It is estimated to generate roughly $65 billion in direct health care costs each year.

Current treatments focus mainly on pain relief and, in severe cases, joint replacement surgery. No approved medication can slow, stop, or reverse the underlying disease process.

The new treatment works by blocking a protein called 15-PGDH, which researchers describe as a "gerozyme." This class of proteins becomes more abundant with age and contributes to declining tissue function throughout the body.

The same research team first identified gerozymes in 2023. Previous studies showed that 15-PGDH plays a major role in age-related muscle decline in mice. When researchers block the protein, older animals gain muscle mass and endurance. When the protein is artificially increased in young mice, their muscles become weaker and smaller.

Scientists have also linked 15-PGDH to the regeneration of bone, nerve, and blood cells.

Trump Planned to Spend $300 Million in Taxpayer Dollars on Ballroom While Claiming It Was Privately Funded

Surprise shocker (not): he lied from the beginning

Stephen Prager for Common Dreams

Internal documents show that President Donald Trump was lying when he said taxpayers would not be footing the bill for his massive White House ballroom.

Reiterating what he’d already said countless times, the president claimed in March that the project was “taxpayer-free” and entirely funded by private donors, who’d spend $400 million to build it in the now-demolished East Wing of the White House.

But at the time he made these comments, he knew that was untrue.

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that a detailed project summary made three weeks earlier showed the total construction cost at $600 million, with more than half of the funds coming from taxpayers.

The Post continued:

By the time Trump made his comments in March, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor overseeing the work, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds, according to a log of the contractor’s invoices obtained by The Post...

Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.

According to the March 5 estimate reviewed by the Post, $293 million worth of funding is coming from donors—many of whom have received new or extended federal contracts over the past six months.

The rest of the money comes from taxpayer-funded sources: $155 million would come from the Secret Service, $149 million from the White House Military Office, and $3 million from the Executive Residence.

The Age of the Super A*sholes

Trump and Musk dominate our economy and our politics

Robert Reich

Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.

To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.

Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.

Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books, and civilly liable for sexual abuse.

Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.

Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes "makes me smart." Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.

While the country suffers,
Trump posts images like this

Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a "consoler-in-chief" in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)

Musk has stated that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength.

Both regard themselves as omnipotent and invincible. Both lash out verbally or physically at anyone who crosses them, often getting into raging disputes and fights.

And this

To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.”

Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people.

In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years.

Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially-charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists;” his 2017 “Muslim ban;” his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever.

Both have fomented white nationalism abroad. Trump was an enthusiastic ally of Viktor Orbán, who saw Western civilization threatened by Muslim immigration into Europe. Many people in Trump’s circle continue to support and encourage leaders of the European far-right.

Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom—particularly in Belfast and London—Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous.”) In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.”

Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.”

Gotta believe

Rhode Island joins blue state boycott of Trump event in DC

Rhode Island skips out on the Great American State Fair, joining growing list

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

Add Rhode Island to the list of states that will not participate in Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair when it kicks off in Washington D.C. June 25.

Faith Chybowski, spokesperson for the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s office and RI250 Commission, said officials turned down the invitation to take part in the upcoming 16-day summer exhibition on the National Mall due to “financial and staffing limitations.”

“Rhode Island’s semiquincentennial commemoration is taking place in Providence on July 4, and staff are also supporting many other 250-related events across the state at the same time as the State Fair,” she told Rhode Island Current in an email Friday.

Officials from Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, North Carolina and Connecticut have also backed out, citing high costs, CNN reported Thursday. Maine has also backed out, according to the Bangor Daily News.

The fair organized by Freedom 250, the Trump-aligned nonprofit behind several semiquincentennial events across the nation, is billed as a “world-class exposition and modern-day World’s Fair” with exhibits from all 56 states and territories showcasing “the very best of America.”

But those displays, and who will staff them, fall entirely on state delegations, Chybowski said. The RI250 Commission, formed in 2021 to promote semiquincentennial-themed programming across the state, was given a little more than $324,000 from the General Assembly last year to show off the state’s revolutionary role.

Most funds were used for marketing, commemorative highway signs and holiday ornaments, banners for the Revolution and Rhode Island exhibit at the State House.  A little more than a third of the state’s funding were toward the commission’s one full-time staffer, Chybowski noted.

“It was a huge ask with not a lot of resources,” she said.

‘Alarm’ at White House After Vance and Miller Pushed Insurrection Act, Habeas Corpus Suspension During Anti-ICE Protests

Close call for democracy

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

A June 15 report in The New York Times revealed what it described as the “alarm” felt by some White House lawyers at proposals made earlier this year by Vice President JD Vance and Trump adviser Stephen Miller as the administration was forced to contend with widespread anger over its anti-immigration agenda.

Among other things, the Times reported that Vance pushed for Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow for the US military to be deployed on American streets, in an effort to shut down mass protests in Minnesota against federal immigration enforcement operations in the state.

A few days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers fatally shot demonstrator Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, the Times reported that Vance—who had also elevated a baseless claim by Miller that Pretti had been a “would-be assassin”—said invoking the Insurrection Act was necessary “to crush the unrest in Minnesota.”

Vance also believed invoking the law would send a “message” that “paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations”—even though, as the Times noted, there is no evidence that Pretti; demonstrator Renee Good, who was also killed by federal agents; or any other organizers in Minnesota or elsewhere received any money in exchange for protesting.

However, right-wing attorney Will Scharf quickly shot down Vance’s suggestion, noting that the Insurrection Act is an instrument aimed at putting down armed rebellions rather than groups of citizens blowing whistles at ICE officers.

Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair then made the political case against invoking the Insurrection Act.

Media relations

Trump and Musk’s DOGE “saved” $15 million by cutting a program to prevent the spread of screwworm that will now take $1 billion to fix

Make Musk pay

Stephen Prager for Common Dreams

When Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” took its chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy last year, it created bottlenecks that may have hampered the fight against the screwworm infestation currently menacing the southwest while making it much more expensive.

The annual US Department of Agriculture (USDA) spending to combat the flesh-eating insects only amounted to about $15 million per year. But along with about $382 million aimed at combating animal-borne illnesses around the globe, it was terminated in March 2025 as part of DOGE’s effort to root out what it described as government “waste.”

But now, with the pests bearing down on Texas and New Mexico, and at least 12 infections already identified in the US as of Tuesday, the Trump administration is spending at least $1 billion to fight the outbreak.

Last week, during a Senate hearing, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins attempted to shift blame for the screwworm outbreak onto the Biden administration, while portraying herself and President Donald Trump as proactive in response to reports last spring that the insects were rapidly climbing through Central America.

Rollins said she asked Trump for “$1 billion to build a significant facility” in Texas that would breed hundreds of millions of sterilized male screwworm flies, a method that had been used to keep them contained in South America for decades. “Without hesitation, a couple questions, he said, ‘go.’”

That facility is expected to release around 300 million sterile flies per week. But it is not expected to be fully operational until the end of 2027.

In addition to the $15 million cut to monitoring the spread of the bugs from Panama, the Houston Chronicle reported that DOGE paused plans for a facility in Mexico that the Biden administration had authorized in 2024 as part of a $165 million emergency package to fight screwworm.

Rhode Island beats Trump in court in suit over offshore wind farms

Stop the war on Green Energy

Attorney General Peter F. Neronha and a coalition of 18 attorneys general announced the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit’s dismissal of the Trump Administration’s appeal of the states’ victory in their lawsuit challenging the federal government’s unlawful order to freeze all federal permitting for wind energy projects.  

“Wind energy creates jobs and helps stabilize energy prices, neither of which this Administration seems to know how to do,” said Attorney General Neronha. 

“Today’s win once again demonstrates that this federal government is not immune from consequences, and our coalition is proving that with each legal victory we achieve. Rhode Islanders and Americans everywhere continue to pay the price, quite literally, for a collective hesitancy in embracing clean energy infrastructure. Wind energy is crucial to bringing energy costs down and keeping them down, and we will continue fighting to ensure a clean energy future for generations to come.”

On January 20, 2025, Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum which indefinitely froze all federal approvals needed for the development of wind energy projects pending federal review. Pursuant to this directive, federal agencies stopped all permitting and approval activities. In May 2025, the coalition filed a lawsuit challenging the freeze and in December, a federal judge in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts them to be arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law. The federal government appealed that ruling but subsequently decided to drop their appeal. Today, the Court entered a judgement dismissing the appeal and cementing the states’ victory.

Election Year means Ruth Platner powers up the Charlestown Choo Choo for the 5th time

Enough with the irresponsible fearmongering!

By Will Collette

Since its founding in 2008, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) used fear to gain control over Charlestown town government and to stay in power for a decade until its ouster in the 2022 general election.

The CCA’s leader and founder, Ruth Platner, has an extraordinary record of conjuring up enemies and boogeymen that only she and the CCA can conquer. As chair of Charlestown's Planning Commission, she has a platform to spread false fear. However, over the years, just about all these existential threats have been either imaginary or grossly exaggerated.

Ruth’s most persistent boogeyman has been trumped up fear that Amtrak will cut a swath through northern Charlestown, obliterating precious farmland as well as natural and historic treasures. Amtrak gave this boogeyman a name when they included it in a 2016 draft preliminary long-term plan: “the Old Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass.” I call it the “Charlestown Choo-Choo Hoax” because it was a goofy plan that never had chance of happening.

She's trying to raise this dead issue again, as you can read for yourself HERE. This was posted on Saturday and is her third post on the Charlestown Choo-Choo in the past month.

A stretch of the Northeast Corridor between New Haven and Westerly runs right along the shoreline in Connecticut. In my last job before retirement, I commuted to Manhattan several times a month, always taking the train and loving every minute of its passage through the salt marshes between the Westerly station and New London. I’d ride on the seaward side, count osprey nests and wonder at the beauty of that stretch, easily my favorite of any between Boston and Richmond, VA.

But that section of track faces natural destruction, either in some major storm or from climate-driven sea level rise, severing the Northeast Corridor rail line. It will have to be replaced.

The Old Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass was an option offered in an Amtrak in a 2016 planning document that the CCA-controlled town government failed to read. As CCA leader and Town Council President Tom Gentz said at the time, “Who has time to wade through that?”

People in eastern Connecticut were the first to begin protesting the plan. In January 2017, chagrined CCA leaders tried to catch up by painting the Old Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass as the end of the world as we know it, at least for Charlestown.

I tried to point out the chances of the Bypass were slim to none, given that newly elected Donald Trump hates trains and would never commit to a multi-billion infrastructure project in the ultra-Blue northeast. The project had no Congressional support, and in fact, Congress drastically cut Amtrak funding for Northeast Corridor improvements.

I speculated at the time that the Bypass would only be built if Trump privatized Amtrak and sold it either to Elon Musk or one of his sons.

Look, nobody liked the Bypass. I didn’t like the Bypass. Even Amtrak began distancing themselves from it. They quickly issued a legally binding Record of Decision in July 2017 effectively killing the plan only six months after Charlestown first heard of it.

That should have been the end of it. But Ruth Platner felt the CCA got so much mileage out of supposedly blocking this sketchy threat that she keeps trying to revive it to help the CCA make a political comeback. This is the fifth time she's tried to fire up Charlestown over this dead project.

Look back at Platner’s 2021 claim that “They’re Back!” See how she tried to stir the pot again in 2022 and especially weird move in 2024 attempting to use AI to simulate what a new rail line would look like.

She's at it again, recycling the same claims of a Charlestown Armageddon. On May 26, she wrote (her emphasis included):

“Amtrak made an announcement on May 21, 2026, that the study required by the FRA’s 2017 Record of Decision had finally received federal government and other funding to proceed. Amtrak estimates that the study—the New Haven to Providence Capacity Planning Study—will take up to two years.

“… The selection of the new preferred alternative will be the outcome of the study. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more, and we may also need your help in contacting our federal and state officials as we move through the planning process. We are committed to protecting Charlestown and the natural resources and public and private property that would be destroyed if anything like the “Old Saybrook to Kenyon Bypass” returns.”

I suggest you read the actual report HERE: New Haven to Providence Capacity Planning Study.

I read it. Carefully. Line by line. Guess what I found? 

Nothing, absolutely nothing about the Old Saybrook-Kenyon bypass that died 10 years ago. It’s as if it never existed. This supposedly alarming document is nothing more than a watered-down version of Amtrak's ongoing effort to try to figure out how to improve service from New Haven to Providence. On June 20, Platner's shocking reveal is that Amtrak has created a website! OMG, the horror!

But in the actual report, the only concrete item I found in the report pertaining to our area was support for making the popular improvements at the Westerly Amtrak station that our state Senator Victoria Gu has been campaigning for.

So, Ruth: STOP IT! Sure, CCA’s formula for winning elections is to claim there are monsters under every bed that only you can kill. But your cynical attempts to manipulate people’s fears come at a terrible cost.

Here's what I mean: 

From 1982 to 1999, I was organizing director for two national environmental groups, first at Lois Gibbs' Center for Health and Environmental Justice, then the Citizens Coal Council. I worked with local citizens' groups to fight hazardous waste dumps, incinerators, coal mines, sludge lagoons and more. These fights were very intense, so intense that I learned early on that they could cause marriages to break up and, in some cases, suicide. 

My staff and I were careful to NEVER exaggerate or fear-monger because that only increases the stress. I'm already hearing that Platner's irresponsible efforts to jack up tension over the Charlestown Choo-Choo is indeed doing just that.

And if that's not convincing, just look at what Donald Trump's lies and exaggerated threats are doing to his followers and the rest of the country.

During the 2024 election, I catalogued all the various threats Platner has used over the years: How the Charlestown Citizens Alliance used fake enemies and bogus emergencies to gain and keep power.

Looks like I’m going to need to do an updated version.

Trump picks a fight with Italy with false claim their leader "begged" to have a picture taken with him at G7 conference

...Provoked an international incident:

Here are other world leaders "begging" Trump for a photo

Arch of grift

Trump gave the NO-BID contract to his own personal pool guy and this is what we got...

Here's the guy who got the contract:

Trump finds new way to hurt immigrants and their families

The ICE-ification of Financial Regulation: steal their savings, especially the money they planned to send to their families at home

by Philip Mattera, director of the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First for the Dirt Diggers Digest

For more than half a century following the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, financial institutions have been required to monitor certain customer transactions to thwart money laundering. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in response to the 9/11 attacks, created additional rules designed to thwart terrorist financing.

Now the Trump Administration is starting to enlist banks in a more questionable form of information gathering involving the immigration status of their customers. For months, there have been reports that the administration is planning to require banks to determine whether customers are U.S. citizens.

That has not yet happened, but a recent executive order from the White House takes a step in that direction by advising banks to “be attentive to the credit risks posed by the extension of mortgage and auto loans, credit cards, and other consumer credit to the inadmissible and removable alien population.”  The order calls on the Treasury Department and financial regulators such as the Fed and the FDIC to develop changes to the Bank Secrecy Act to address this supposed risk.

This sounds like a prelude to more explicit rules that would bar banks from doing business with undocumented immigrants.

A masterclass in incompetence at home and abroad

Stupid at all levels in all things great or small

Sabrina Haake 

My neighbors’ mail. Note the date.

Last week my neighbors brought me an envelope with a “MAGA priorities survey” enclosed. A solicitation for money disguised as a survey, it opened with a four-page cover letter from Trump.

The survey drills down on ‘Biden’s sky-high mortgage rates,’ and ‘reckless spending binge’ even though we’re now 1.5 years into Trump 2.0. 

It blames Biden for ‘today’s affordability squeeze,’ despite Trump’s economically unhinged tariffs and $94 billion war in Iran. Trump, who still thinks exporters pay tariffs, single handedly turbo-charged the price of energy, and tanked consumer confidence at the same time, all while demanding that Americans disbelieve their lyin’ eyes.

Trump’s cover letter begins, “Dear America First Patriot, I put THREE LIVE POSTAGE STAMPS (all caps) on the enclosed Rush Return Envelope because I had to get your immediate attention… And because I need you to respond to me right away!” Four pages later, Trump urges True Patriots to make a True Patriotic donation of $2,026…. Or even just $47, by rushing back the MAGA survey using the enclosed TRIPLE-STAMPED Rush Return Envelope TODAY. (Combining all caps with bold, a triple-dog-dare-you maneuver that conveys urgency.)

The kicker is that the “triple stamped rush envelope” was the pre-marked, pre-paid, “No postage necessary if mailed in the United States” kind. Adding extra postage stamps to a prepaid postage envelope, according to the USPS, means Trump just wasted money (USPS bold, not mine). Trump, in one mailing, spent extra on an agency he accuses of waste, demonstrated his fiscal illiteracy, and declared his donors stupid. Another masterclass in Trump’s trifecta of incompetence.

New plans for the Trump Library