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by David Shuster

There have been countless moments over the past ten years when Donald Trump’s bizarre social media posts indicated something with him is very wrong. Sunday now stands at the top of the list.

The President of the United States, who has at his disposal the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the nuclear arsenal, and endless stationery bearing the presidential seal, spent much of the day engaged in an unhinged digital freak show. The performance included AI fantasies, geopolitical doodling, self-coronation and, for good measure, a declaration that the Moon belongs to the United States.

Trump unleashed dozens of posts, including images of himself surrounded by giant robots with glowing eyes and ominous captions.

In one, he appeared amid a dystopian landscape beneath the words “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” In another, he sat upon a black throne amid fire, ruins and mechanical giants.

Then came the cartography.

New Mexico, which survived centuries of Spanish rule, Mexican sovereignty, American conquest and statehood, was invited to undergo another administrative reincarnation. Trump suggested that it be renamed “New America,” a proposal accompanied by an AI-crafted image.

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The President has no authority simply to rename a state, but constitutional limitations have never been of any concern to Trump.

Then came the Moon.

Trump posted an image of it floating serenely above the Earth, decorated with an American flag and the majestic announcement: “THE MOON IS OURS.” The post was archived at 1:56 p.m. Sunday.

One might conclude that the Presidency now belongs to an exceptionally excitable 12 year old with access to an image generator. However, there were more serious items in the President’s bizarre and demeaning performance.

Trump shared an image depicting Iran’s territory reshaped in the outline of his own face, and another suggesting the destruction of Kharg Island.

He also boasted that he had made “Hundreds of Billions of Dollars” from stocks and other holdings while asserting that he did it for the country rather than himself.

Most Americans, confronted with this lunatic spectacle, might ask a very old-fashioned question: Is the President capable of doing the job?

This is where the Twenty-Fifth Amendment enters the equation. The amendment does not provide a constitutional trapdoor to remove presidents who take actions that are offensive, foolish, vulgar, or ridiculous. Section 4 establishes a procedure under which the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can declare that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. If the President contests this declaration, the issue goes to Congress where two thirds vote in both houses would be necessary to keep the President from resuming his powers.

This is an exceptionally challenging threshold, and perhaps deservedly so.

A U.S. President does not become constitutionally incapacitated because he or she posts a silly picture, or two, or twenty.

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It’s Labor Day, which in this country means two things. One, somebody in your family is overcooking a burger right now. Two, the sprint to the midterms officially starts today, and everything between here and November is going to come at you fast.

So here is an accounting.

In the last three weeks, six things ran at Blue Amp that I am genuinely proud of. Every one of them is behind the paywall. Every one of them exists because a few thousand people pay for this, and not one of them exists because an advertiser approved it. If this list moves you, subscribe today and save 26% (for the Midterms, get it?)

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Here is what you missed.

1. Gloria Steinem Died One Signature Short of the ERA | Cliff Schecter · September 5

She died at ninety-two and every outlet in America ran the same obituary. Here is what none of them ran: the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified by thirty-eight states and is still not in the Constitution, and the reasons are a deadline Congress wrote in 1979 and an opinion Trump’s Justice Department issued in 2020. Both are fixable. This piece is the how.

2. Russia Has 1,000 Ships With No Country | Lawrence Winnerman · September 6

There is a fleet of roughly a thousand aging tankers sailing under flags of convenience, owned through shells nobody can trace, and it is dragging anchors across the undersea cables that carry Europe’s internet and electricity. Nobody can legally stop them. Worse, nobody seems willing to try. Thirty-five hundred words on the most consequential thing happening at sea, and I have not seen it explained anywhere else this clearly.

3. Epstein Emailed “trump tower” on Nov. 13, 2016 | Ellie Leonard · August 17

Five days after the election, Jeffrey Epstein told a contact exactly where he was. Ellie found it in the files. Nobody else did. This is what an actual investigative reporter does with a document dump while cable news is running a panel about it.

4. Hunter Biden on His Father’s Health, Recovery, and the Media | Cliff Schecter and David Shuster · August 19

Ninety minutes, no handlers, no ground rules. He draws a distinction about addiction I have never heard anybody make out loud — not cured, not still an addict, in recovery and permanently vulnerable — and then explains exactly what that means he can never do again. He walks through the money: his paintings, about two hundred thousand a year, every single buyer hauled before Congress to testify under oath, set against billions in federal contracts going to the current president’s family. He says what he actually thinks about Kamala Harris, which he could have skated past and didn’t. He did not dodge one question. Not one.

5. Andy Borowitz Has Stopped Pretending to Be Neutral | Cliff Schecter August 16

“I am a Democrat. I’ve never pretended to be both sidesy.” Ninety minutes with the man who created Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on the life of a comedy writer, what Fox News actually wanted when they booked him, and why equal-opportunity satire is a lie when one side is doing all the lying.

6. Raskin: Trump Pardoned Him. He Molested a Child. Then He Tried to Buy Silence. | Cliff Schecter · September 3

Congressman Jamie Raskin walks us through Pardons, Inc., his committee’s report on how executive clemency became a cash business — who paid, who got out, and what it cost the people they hurt. The case in that headline is one of them. Raskin has spent a career explaining constitutional machinery to people who would rather not hear it, and he is very good at it, and he is doing it here while fighting cancer. If you want to understand what has actually been sold off in the last two years, start with this hour.

That is three weeks. Not a year, not a greatest-hits reel. Three weeks.

That is the whole pitch, and it is the only one I have: this is what it looks like when the people reading the thing are the ones paying for it. No network. No billionaire. No sponsor who gets nervous.

If you are already a paid subscriber, you have read all six and you are the reason they exist. Thank you! Nothing below is for you. Go flip the burgers.

For everyone else: today is Labor Day and the midterm sprint starts now, so we are doing twenty-six percent off for 2026. 48 hours. It ends at 11:59 Tuesday Eastern and it does not come back.

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That is less than four dollars a month for all six of those, plus everything that runs between now and November, plus the archive, plus the comment threads where the sharpest people I know argue with each other and occasionally with me. If you’re already a subscriber, consider gifting someone Blue Amp for a year.

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The next sixty days are going to be the loudest of the decade. Come inside for them.

—Cliff

by Lawrence Winnerman

I have been listening to and reading and since I joined Substack, and for most of that time I have been skating past the same two words—shadow fleet. Every time I heard it, I nodded along, filed it under things I would look up later, and went back to whatever I was doing.

Last week after Cliff hosted Olga and for World War NEXT, I finally looked it up. I want to tell you what I found, because I spent 25 years inside large, complicated, heavily regulated systems, and I did not know a thing like this was possible.

There are somewhere between 800 and 1,200 oil tankers at sea right now that do not, in any way a court can use, have a country.

I understood sanctions evasion in the abstract, the way everyone does, from Tom Clancy novels, or TV or the movies. Somebody swaps a label, somebody routes a payment through Dubai, somebody looks away. Cash changes hands, or these days, maybe bitcoin. What I did not understand is that the entire legal architecture of the ocean rests on one thing, and that thing is the flag a ship claims to fly, and that a flag is a product with a price.

What The Shadow Fleet Actually Is

In December 2022, the European Union embargoed seaborne Russian crude and the G7 imposed a price cap. The cap was a clever piece of design, and it resulted in everything that follows. It did not try to stop Russian oil, because stopping Russian oil would have spiked pump prices in an election year, and god forbid that happen. It said instead that Western companies could ship, insure, and finance Russian oil only if that oil sold at or below a set price, starting at $60 a barrel. Russia could sell its oil, it just couldn’t really profit from it. Neato.

Russia’s answer to this was to stop using Western companies—at all.

Over the next 3 years Moscow and its buyers assembled a parallel merchant fleet: old tankers nearing the end of their useful lives bought near scrap value, registered in countries that do not ask questions, insured by Russian firms or by nobody, owned on paper by shell companies in Dubai and Hong Kong that dissolve and reappear.

The Kyiv School of Economics, which counts the ships that actually load, found 176 shadow tankers lifting Russian crude and products in June of this year, 54% of all loadings that month. Vladyslav Vlasiuk, Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for sanctions, put the core at 400 vessels that have made 3 or more voyages from Russian ports since 2024, inside a wider range of 800 to 1,200. The European Union has now sanctioned 673 individual ships by name, with more every week.

They keep sailing, and the list of ships keeps getting bigger.

The Ghost Ships

Ninety-four percent of the tankers KSE tracked in June were more than 15 years old. A tanker’s working life runs about 20 to 25 years, after which insurers and classification societies push it toward the breakers in Bangladesh or Pakistan. The walking dead of ships, so to speak. The shadow fleet is, to a real extent, the global scrap pool bought back and put to sea, and roughly 60% of it carries no insurance any Western underwriter would recognize. One in 3 tanker transits in the Baltic now runs on Russian paper, which may or may not be worth anything at all.

Then there are the flags. A ship’s flag state is the government legally responsible for it, and small countries have sold that responsibility as a revenue line for a century. Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Gabon, Comoros, and Equatorial Guinea are all in heavy rotation. The maritime intelligence firm Windward has identified 23 countries whose flags are being flown through fraudulent registries the International Maritime Organization does not recognize at all, including Syria, Eritrea, and Myanmar.

In May, Cameroon threw 38 sanctioned tankers off its registry and notified the IMO in writing that it had done so. Twenty-four of them are still broadcasting the Cameroonian flag.

And it gets stranger. Mongolia, the second-largest landlocked country on earth, operates a flag with about 3,000 ships on it, administered by a for-profit company in Singapore that employs somewhere between 11 and 50 people. Bolivia has had no coastline since Chile took it in 1884 and runs a registry anyway. But the countries that do not run registries are the more instructive half.

In February the International Maritime Organization counted 529 vessels worldwide flying false flags, and among the flags being flown were Malawi’s, Mali’s, Botswana’s, and Lesotho’s. Lesotho is entirely surrounded by South Africa. It has no coast, no port, and no river access to the sea, and it has had to formally notify the IMO that it does not operate a ship registry, because certificates in its name somehow kept turning up on ships.

The best case is Eswatini, which is landlocked, is not an IMO member, and has never operated a registry at all. In late 2023 an Indian firm stood one up out of Singapore anyway, and inside 3 months there were 364 vessels on its books, the 3 largest of them tied to Syrian sanctions violations and to allegedly stolen Ukrainian grain. In April 2024 the IMO gave up and designated every ship claiming that flag as “False Eswatini.”

Cameroon at least had a registry to throw those 38 tankers off of. Eswatini never sold anything. Somebody built a website, and no one really knows who.

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The Money

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the shadow fleet carries about 65% of Russia’s seaborne oil, roughly 3.7 million barrels a day, worth $87 to $100 billion a year. That is more money than the entire West has sent Ukraine since the tanks crossed the border in February 2022.

The price cap now sits at $44.10 a barrel, frozen there for a year by the EU’s July sanctions package so that a war-driven price spike would not lift it automatically. Urals crude sold at about $60 in July. The gap between those two numbers, multiplied by 3.7 million barrels a day, is the entire point of this business. China took 36% of shadow fleet cargoes in June and India took 18%. The destination of the remaining 40% is logged as unknown. Just—unknown. Poof!

Forty percent of a hundred-billion-dollar trade goes somewhere nobody is writing down. I would like to know who is not looking, and why, please.

Then I Got to the Part About the Cables

Ninety-nine percent of international data moves through fiber-optic cables lying on the ocean floor. Not satellites. Cables, roughly the diameter of a garden hose in deep water, carrying the internet, interbank settlement, and military traffic between continents.

On Christmas Day 2024, a tanker called the Eagle S, flying the flag of the Cook Islands, “accidentally” dragged its anchor about 90 kilometers across the floor of the Gulf of Finland. It severed the EstLink 2 power cable between Finland and Estonia and 4 data cables along with it. Repairs took 7 months. In October 2025 a Finnish district court threw the criminal case out for lack of jurisdiction, on the theory that the damage happened outside Finnish territorial waters and belonged to the crew’s home countries or to the Cook Islands. On August 27 of this year, the Helsinki Court of Appeal reversed that and ruled that cutting a cable is not a maritime accident under the law of the sea. The case goes back to trial.

It was not the first. In October 2023 a Chinese-owned vessel named Newnew Polar Bear, outbound from a Russian port, dragged an anchor more than 100 nautical miles and broke the Balticconnector gas pipeline. Four Baltic cables have been damaged since the beginning of 2025. In May of that year Polish aircraft chased off a tanker that was circling the SwePol power cable.

No investigation has ever established intent. Not one.

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by Cliff Schecter

In 2026, the late Gloria Steinem was interviewed as part of a New York Times piece on what it was like to turn 80. She’d passed the barrier a decade earlier. But for some reason, because President Donald Trump was reaching 80 years of infesting our country with his unique combination of the seven deadly sins, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and piss cotton candy hair (thank you Penn Jillette!), the paper of broken record asked some famous folks their thoughts on the subject.

Steinem replied that the worst part of passing the 80 year threshold was "losing people you love." But when they inquired if she had advice for Trump, specifically, she quickly quipped: "Resign." And that, in a nutshell, was Gloria Steinem.

I grew up in a feminist household staunchly in favor of equal rights, including abortion rights, so women could participate equally in society. I heard this refrain from my mom, a lifelong liberal Democrat, from an early age. My late father, a Rockefeller Republican who subscribed to most of her politics—and by the time he passed in 2013, a decade record as a registered independent who voted Democratic—would nod along in agreement.

Specifically, I’d often hear about the necessity of passing the Equal Rights Amendment.

I thought about this when I heard this giant in our politics and culture, Steinem, had passed away at age 92, this past Wednesday. I was somewhat consoled by the fact that she got to live such a full life. Score one for her refutation of fellow New Yorker Billy Joel’s take that “Only The Good Die Young.” I was also comforted by Steinem’s lasting legacy. Truly a life we’d all be lucky to enjoy a fraction of during our time on Earth.

What she did honored us with her fight for equality. So now it’s our turn to honor her—by finishing the job.

I am speaking here, specifically, of passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as soon as humanly possible. And it’s not as far away as you think.

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The satire only gets more ambitious as the countdown moves toward its top spots,…

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In 2015, a reporter named Alex Thompson was writing a book about Beau Biden.

Beau had stage four glioblastoma. The prognosis is about two years and almost nobody beats it. He was also deciding whether to run for governor, which meant he was careful about what he said publicly about his own condition. Hunter explains why, and it is the part of this that stopped me:

“My brother wanted to believe, like me and his entire family and everyone that loved him, that he was going to beat all the odds—that he was going to be that 0.02 percent that makes it out. And that’s the only way that you can enter into the fight that is required of you, just by virtue of wanting to live.”

Out of that guardedness grew a storyline: the Bidens are secretive about their health. Nine years later that storyline had a much bigger subject. Same reporter. Much bigger name on the cover.

Hunter traces the whole thing there. He also does not spare his father: he says he panicked the moment Joe Biden walked out on that debate stage, that he had never seen him like that before and has not since. What he will not accept is who got graded on it—while Donald Trump talked for ninety minutes and nobody in the room stopped him once.

That clip is twelve minutes of an hour and a half. Behind that card: the distinction he draws about addiction that I have never heard anyone make in public. The paintings, the congressional subpoenas, and the billions in federal contracts going to the current president’s family. What he actually thinks about Kamala Harris distancing herself from his father. An argument about Pharaoh I am still turning over. He did not dodge a single question.

And this, near the end—about Jake Tapper, and about everyone else in Washington who spent 2024 talking to reporters on background:

“They forget that I was there for thirty years. And they forget that I know all of it.”

That is not a threat. It is worse than a threat. It is a man calmly noting that he has a memory.

If you are already a paid subscriber, you have the whole thing. Go watch it, and thank you—you are the reason it exists. Everyone else:

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—Cliff

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By Dr. Eric J. Lullove

On July 1, 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency approved a chemical called trifludimoxazin for use on American food crops. Corn. Soybeans. Wheat. Oats. Peanuts. Oranges. Apples. Pears. Almonds, pecans, pistachios, and walnuts. Beans and peas.

You have almost certainly never heard of it. Neither had I, until I read the file.

I have spent my career treating wounds that will not heal—mostly on the legs and feet of people who worked outdoors for a living. So I went and pulled EPA’s own registration record, docket number EPA-HQ-OPP-2022-0649, and read it start to finish.

I want to be careful here. I am not going to tell you this chemical will give you cancer. I am going to tell you something worse: nobody knows, because nobody looked—and the agency wrote down that it wasn’t going to look.

The Names

Institutions don’t sign documents. People do.

Ed Messina, Director of the Office of Pesticide Programs, signed the registration decision. His name is on the front page.

Douglas Troutman runs the office above him—Assistant Administrator for Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. He spent 18 years at the American Cleaning Institute, a chemical industry trade group, before the Senate confirmed him in December 2025. When EPA announced his confirmation, the pitch was that he “understands the companies that make them.” That was the selling point.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA Administrator, runs the agency. When the Make America Healthy Again report first raised alarms about farm chemicals, Zeldin went on a press call and assured everyone it would not lead to tougher rules. It didn’t.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t sign anything. That is exactly the problem.

Kennedy built a national movement on the claim that the chemicals in our food are making Americans sick. He runs Health and Human Services. He sits on the MAHA Commission. The FDA reports to him, and FDA is the agency that actually checks food for pesticide residue. He had every lever.

In February 2026, when the President invoked the Defense Production Act to boost domestic glyphosate production, Kennedy—who once promised to ban the stuff—said “we must safeguard America’s national security first.” Four months later EPA approved its fifth PFAS-family pesticide of this administration. Kennedy said nothing. No statement. No referral. No request for further study.

He also has no confirmed FDA commissioner. Marty Makary resigned in May. A food-industry attorney, Kyle Diamantas, has been running the agency on an acting basis ever since. Heidi Overton, a White House aide, was nominated in August. That is the leadership standing between this chemical and your kitchen.

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by David Shuster

There is something terrifying these days about Vladimir Putin’s predicament: after nearly five years of war with Ukraine, an estimated half a million Russian soldiers killed (plus another 1.1 million wounded) a crashed Russian economy, and widespread gasoline shortages, Russia’s dictator may now be fighting not for his nation’s security, but for his own skin.

According to a new report in The Economist, Putin has privately told people close to him that “they’ll hang me” if he fails to conquer the entire Ukraine Donbas region. The quotation has not been independently confirmed. And it could reflect the usual Kremlin intrigue. But if the quote captures even a fraction of Putin’s thinking, it underscores the malignancy of this catastrophe: Putin’s disastrous foreign policy adventure has become a test of his own personal survival. Relatedly, he has fewer and fewer reasons to compromise.

Russia’s President Putin has built a political system around the proposition that he is indispensable.

He has surrounded himself with flatterers, brutal enforcers, and yes-men. Putin has suppressed dissent, made falling from windows a regular thing, and promoted the image that he alone is the omnipotent czar who can restore Russia to greatness.

For almost five years, Putin has called his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation,” as though a war involving mass casualties, destroyed cities and enormous armies could be made less terrible by giving it the bureaucratic name of a parking violation.

The euphemism has become one of the great jokes of the modern geo-political age—except that the joke has been paid for by Ukrainians and Russians with their lives.

I mentioned the Russian casualties above. Ukraine has suffered an estimated 150,000 military fatalities and another 500 thousand troops wounded. Ukraine has also had more than 20,000 civilians killed by Russia attacks and air strikes.

Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is reportedly considering an even more dangerous escalation. Bloomberg, citing sources close to the Kremlin, reports that Russia is weighing intensified ballistic-missile strikes against Kyiv, potentially including the city center, as well as attacks on infrastructure in other Ukrainian cities. According to the Bloomberg reporting, Moscow does not believe global sanctions on Russia or Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and logistics networks will persuade Putin to end the war.

This should worry the entire globe.

Because the terrifying feature of this moment is not just that Putin is contemplating inflicting more violence. Russia has been contemplating more violence for years. The danger is that Putin’s Kremlin seems to increasingly believe that escalation is the only alternative to failure.

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According to Bloomberg’s sources, Putin and his inner circle increasingly regard Ukrainian attacks on Russia as attacks by NATO because alliance members provide Kyiv with weapons and intelligence. If that view hardens, the distinction between a war Russia is fighting against Ukraine and a war Russia believes it is fighting against the West becomes dangerously thin.

And once that distinction disappears, the room for error disappears as well.

Also, there does not appear to be any diplomatic exit ramp. Putin reportedly believes he has already made concessions to the U.S. and NATO that weakened Russia’s position. Those concessions apparently included promises not to try and kill/decapitate Ukraine’s leadership by bombing Ukraine’s government center. However, with Russian forces still occupying eastern Ukraine and fighting for more territory, Ukraine has no reason to accept a settlement that rewards aggression.

So, the result is a diplomatic deadlock accompanied by military escalation. That is how wars become traps.

The most disturbing reports concern nuclear weapons.

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By Cliff Schecter

THE GOOD: Lionel Messi

As Lionel Messi announces his retirement from international soccer today, I feel so lucky to have gotten to see this legend play. He won’t do it for Argentina anymore, and we’ll have to see how much longer, at age 39, he decides to push himself in club play.

I took my then much younger son to see him at The Big House (shout out to David Shuster, Justin Wolfers and Brett Di Resta!) at the University of Michigan almost exactly 7 years ago. Barcelona came for a trip to the U.S. of A. to play against Napoli. We were excited so excited to go…and then Messi got injured, and didn’t play.

But…redemption! We got to Messi play vs our FCC Cincinnati warriors after he signed with Miami FC and came to town for the U.S. Open Cup Semifinal on August 23, 2023. Two assists and a PK kick goal that, sadly, secured the win for Miami in overtime. This included a play so classically Messi you felt like you could walk away having seen what you’d come to see—indeed had to see—to say you’d really seen the man play his game. In the 68th minute, trailing 2-0, Inter Miami got a free kick on the left side, a good bit outside the penalty box. Messi took the the kick, and didn’t put the ball where his teammate was, but exactly in the air in the middle of the box—where he was going to be. A precise, curling cross toward the middle of the penalty box, where striker Leonardo Campana met the ball in the air with his head to put it away. Painful for our team, but greatness.

For a brief moment in a life spent on this spinning beachball in space, we got to see greatness.

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THE BAD: DONALD TRUMP

Folks, as Donald Trump raged against Canada today like an extra in a South Park flick or someone gurgling stupid like he was about to enter a triglyceride-induced coma, I came across a column I wrote about him 15 years ago. 15. God I wish I had been wrong… But the predictions, they were right on. Some nuggets:

‘Little Donnie Trump, the dumbest kid in the class.’ This only somewhat facetious refrain was proffered on a day when Trump had said something particularly insane, by a friend of my parents who attended school with The Donald when they were just boys.

Trump is a potential presidential candidate who has most recently hitched his hairpiece to Birtherism, or the slightly-less-clever-than-a-comb-over theory that President Obama only plays an American president on TV. In this fantasyland of conspiracy and fear of mind-control via fluorinated water, the president is the amazing beneficiary of the most prescient plot in human history – next to the invention of the hot dog centuries prior to the creation of baseball.

In Obama’s case, it involved the planting of a birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper to hide his “Kenyaness” and falsely convert him into an American citizen. Because one day, he would inevitably want to be the first black president, and at that moment it sure would come in handy.

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More from my take, circa 2011, on our sad sack, spittle-flecked, sponge-bellied shite-pants of a President…

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David Shuster asked Hunter Biden a question I ask carefully, because a lot of people in recovery have told me the same thing: that it never really leaves you. That there is always a compulsion underneath, always a pull, and the work is managing it. Is it a daily struggle for you too?

He did not give the answer I expected.

Then he laid out what that means in practice. He can never again let himself take anything that lifts his mood, or changes how he behaves, or quiets his anxiety, unless a doctor knows about it. Not once. Not ever. He said it without drama, the way you would describe managing any other disease.

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I have talked with a lot of people about this. I have never heard anyone put it that precisely. He is not claiming to be cured. He is refusing to be defined forever by the worst chapter of his life while also refusing to pretend he ever gets to relax. That is a hard place to stand. He stands there in public, while a president and an entire propaganda operation use “crack addict” as a punchline about him roughly once a week.

That clip is free. Watch it. Send it to somebody who needs to hear it.

The whole conversation is not free, and today is the day I have to tell you about that.

We went well over an hour, and he did not dodge a single question.

He walked me through the money. His paintings brought in about $200,000 a year, and every single person who bought one was hauled before Congress to testify under oath about the purchase. Set that against $3.9 billion in defense contracts steered to Don Jr.’s private equity outfit, formed weeks before his father took the oath of office. “But meanwhile,” he said, “what about my paintings?”

He said Bibi Netanyahu is a ghoul, and then built an argument about Pharaoh and the Jewish people that I have not stopped thinking about since. He told me what he actually thinks about Kamala Harris distancing herself from his father, which he could have skated past and did not. He talked about going on with Tucker Carlson, a man who was once his friend, and about the tanning session Tucker offered him. I am not going to explain that one here.

That is what a paid subscription to Blue Amp buys you. Not the clip. The whole thing—every full interview, every Tequila Talk, the Deep Dives, the archive, the comment threads where the sharpest people I know go at it with each other, and the survival of a small independent shop with no network, no billionaire, and not one advertiser who gets to tell us what we may not say.

Our Democracy 101 back-to-school sale ends tonight at 11:59 Eastern. Forty percent off your first year: $36 instead of $60. Three dollars a month.

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Tomorrow it is sixty again, and it stays there.

You are getting this email because you are one of the people who actually reads us. You open it, you click through, you have been with us a while. Which means you are the most likely person on our entire list to want the full ninety minutes—and the most likely to keep meaning to subscribe right up until the price goes back up tonight.

Go watch the clip. Then come sit at the table with us for three dollars a month.

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In 1990, Will Smith was twenty years old and considered washed up.

He’d had the big hit—“Parents Just Don’t Understand,” the Grammy, the video you can still picture. Then he spent all the money. Then he found out, apparently for the first time, that you have to pay taxes on money you spend. He owed the federal government something like half a million dollars. Jive had dropped him. No record deal, no acting career, and he had never acted in his life.

So when he took a sitcom, it was not a big break. In Andy Borowitz’s words, it was closer to: maybe I can pay my taxes.

Andy created that show. He sat down with me for an hour and a half, and this is the part where I tell you that I have interviewed a lot of people this year and this was one of my favorite conversations of the entire run.

Watch that. Watch it for the sweet potato pie story, which I am not going to spoil, except to say it involves a junior writer named Benny Richburg quietly telling his white boss that the Thanksgiving menu in the script was, let us say, not the menu—and what happened in the studio audience when they fixed it. Andy describes the reaction as “a nuclear weapon exploding.”

And watch it for the part where the network—every executive of whom was white and rich—kept giving notes because they related to the wealthy lawyer parents instead of to Will. They wanted Will to say “just kidding” after his jokes. Andy told the president of the network: you have all been to a black tie dinner, and the audience has not. They are going to relate to the kid making fun of the room.

It was the highest-testing pilot the network had that year.

That is one story. There are ninety minutes of them.

In the full conversation, Andy also explains what Fox News actually wanted when they booked him, which was not a comedian. He says the thing nobody with a network contract will say—“I am a Democrat, I’ve never pretended to be both sidesy”—and makes the case that equal-opportunity satire is a lie when one side is doing all the lying. We get into the life of a comedy writer, what he learned from Carroll O’Connor that he was still using twenty years later, and why a show that made hundreds of millions of dollars was never treated inside the building the way Friends was.

The whole thing is for paid subscribers. That is not me being precious about it. There is no advertiser paying for this show, no network, no corporate parent. There is a camera, a producer, an editor, and you.

Here is the pushy part, and I am going to be honest that it is the pushy part.

If you are already a paid subscriber: the next four paragraphs are not for you. Click the card above, pour something, and enjoy the whole ninety minutes. You are the reason it exists. Everyone else—

Then go watch a man explain how a broke twenty-year-old rapper with a tax problem became the most likable person on television.

—Cliff

Joe Walsh has known Mike Rogers for years. He served with him in Congress. On this week’s Tequila Talk, he said something about Rogers that you will not hear from anyone who did not sit in that building with him.

And that was not even the part of the conversation that will get us yelled at.

Cliff said, plainly and for the record, that he believes Abdul El-Sayed—the Democrat running for Senate in Michigan—is an antisemite, and explained exactly what brought him to that conclusion. Joe, who is not a Democrat and has spent the last decade telling his old party what it has become, agreed on the principle: bigotry disqualifies a candidate, and it does not matter which flavor of bigotry it is or which team benefits.

Then they said the thing that will get the replies going. Neither of them would vote in that race. Not for El-Sayed. Not for Rogers.

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Yes. It is the same thumbnail.

Look, we all look extremely good in that picture. David looks distinguished, Hunter looks like a man who has made peace with a few things, and I look like someone who was told there would be tequila. Why mess with perfection.

Here is why I am sending you another Hunter Biden email anyway.

When he sat down with David Shuster and me, we got to a subject most interviewers steer around, and most guests are grateful to have steered around. It was pointed out to him—directly, on camera—that some of the rhetoric circulating right now edges up against an old antisemitic trope about Jews and money.

He did not deflect. He said it has been a problem for him. He said he gets accused of giving safe harbor to antisemitism by one crowd and called “the son of the genocide Joe” by another, and that there is no winning that.

And then he did something I have watched exactly no one else do on a political show this year. He gave a history lesson.

His argument, and I am not going to flatten it, is that the persecution of Jewish people across twenty-five centuries has one root cause, and it is not faith and it is not money and it is not success. It is that they are, in his telling, the only people in history who refused to assimilate to Pharaoh. Who stood against empire—against Pharaoh, against Caesar, against the Third Reich—and were hated for it.

Then he turned the same blade the other direction. The Jewish people, he said, have also had their Solomons. Their Herods. Their Jezebels and their Ahabs. Leaders who washed the streets in the blood of their own, and who were resisted by people who understood that refusing to bow to Pharaoh also means refusing to become him.

“Where is our Micah today?” he asked. “Where is our Jeremiah to stand up to Solomon and say: you are him.”

He was clear about the distinction he was drawing. He believes Bibi Netanyahu is evil incarnate. He also believes that saying so is a categorically different act from talking about the Jewish people, and he thinks a lot of people have stopped being able to tell those two things apart.

And then—this is the part that got me—he was gentler than I have been.

On Thursday, on Tequila Talk, I said flatly that I believe Abdul El-Sayed is an antisemite. I stand by it. Hunter’s read is different. He hopes it is immaturity rather than conviction, and he thinks El-Sayed is open to a real conversation about how this lands on people it lands on. I am not sure he is right. I am sure the disagreement is worth your five minutes, and I am not going to pretend our guests agree with me when they do not.

That is the show. Somebody says something I did not expect, on camera, without a publicist in the room rewriting it afterward.

Now here is the ask, and I am going to be direct because the clock is actually running out.

We got Hunter Biden because there is nobody above us to say no. No network standards desk, no corporate parent, no advertiser who would rather we booked somebody safer. Just subscribers. You are the entire reason that interview happened, and you are the reason the next one will.

Our Democracy 101 back-to-school sale ends at midnight on Monday, August 31. Forty percent off your first year: $36 instead of $60. Three dollars a month. After Monday the price goes back up and stays there.

One Year of BAM For $36!

The clip above is free. The full hour with Hunter—his father’s actual prognosis, the addiction and the grief, Don Jr., Jake Tapper, and what he thinks of Kamala Harris—is for paid subscribers, and it is right here:

Three dollars a month and you get all of it, plus the archive and four live shows a week, through November and whatever November turns out to be.

Come watch the whole thing. And seriously, look at that thumbnail. We earned it.

—Cliff

PS: And if you’re already a subscriber—thank you!—you can gift a year of Blue Amp Media to someone you love who needs to hear the straight talk we offer 365 days a year.

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