John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged donald trump · everything

www.foodandwine.com

Trump Officials Swear by the ‘Sauerkraut Diet’ — but Does It Actually Work?

The so-called [[sauerkraut]] diet, created by [[Sean O’Mara]], is a lifestyle plan popular with several members of President Trump’s Cabinet and highlighted in the [[Wall Street Journal]], centered on fermented foods, [[grass-fed meat]], extended fasting, brief high‑intensity workouts, and other hormetic practices. Advocates claim the regimen restores the gut microbiome, boosts immunity, and can trigger GLP‑1–related weight effects; doctors report common weight loss but emphasize the evidence is limited. Nutrition experts place value on fermented foods for microbiome diversity and reduced inflammation, yet warn the meat‑heavy approach can raise LDL cholesterol in susceptible people and fermented products can be high in sodium. The article summarizes existing small studies, offers fermented‑food shopping guidance, and underscores that the diet’s long‑term risks and benefits remain insufficiently studied. Readers should consult clinicians before making major dietary changes.

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www.readtangle.com

The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story.

This is Isaac Saul's Tangle News piece cataloguing the Trump family's alleged self-dealing during his second term — crypto ventures, foreign business deals with Gulf and Middle Eastern figures, and suspicious market timing — arguing these dwarf the Hunter Biden scandal in scale yet get virtually no Republican oversight or public traction. Saul, who covered Hunter Biden extensively, uses his own record to argue he's not being partisan, framing the piece as an attempt to compile the sprawling, underreported evidence into one accessible account. It's worth keeping as a straightforward "here's the full list" reference rather than a single-issue exposé.

Permalink politicsnewsreaddonald trump

www.benjaminlcorey.com

Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? Here Are the Biblical Predictions:

Corey walks through the standard biblical proof-texts end-times Christians cite for identifying the Antichrist, then applies them point by point to Donald Trump — arrogance, boastful speeches, the seven "hills," a shock election win, enriching himself and cronies through real estate, cruelty toward migrants at the southern border, a staged church photo-op after tear-gassing protesters, and evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham framing his rise as divinely ordained. It's satirical in method but genuinely provocative in intent, using the mechanics of prophecy-matching that his evangelical peers use against liberal targets to instead indict Trump and the Christian right that supports him. The piece is really an extended, tongue-in-cheek polemic against fear-based end-times theology and its political alliance with Trumpism, worth keeping as a sharp, list-driven takedown rather than a serious eschatological argument.

Permalink united statespoliticsdonald trump

www.independent.co.uk

Tributes paid to six US troops killed in Iran drone strike including mother who was two days away from returning home

This piece profiles the six US Army Reserve soldiers killed when Iran struck a logistics command centre near Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, a day into the joint US-Israel "Operation Epic Fury" campaign against Iran. It centres on personal details from grieving families—Sgt. Amor's near-return home and unprotected relocation, Sgt. Coady's fresh promotion and cybersecurity studies, Capt. Khork's ROTC-driven patriotism, and Sgt. Tietjens' martial arts teaching—giving a human face to the first named American casualties of the escalating conflict.

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www.theatlantic.com

Trump Almost Has a Point About the Federal Reserve

While Trump's plan to control the Federal Reserve is likely illegal and dangerous, the article argues that Democrats should not simply defend the status quo. The Fed deserves independence over interest-rate setting to shield monetary policy from electoral pressure, but it has abused its broader powers—including bank regulation, payment systems oversight, and emergency lending—consistently favoring financial institutions over ordinary people, from its refusal to regulate subprime mortgages before 2008 to its miserly $17.5 billion Main Street lending during the pandemic versus over $100 billion to Wall Street. The solution is legislation that preserves Fed independence for monetary policy while stripping away its other authorities and transferring them to democratically accountable institutions like the comptroller of the currency or FDIC.

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www.scotusblog.com

How deferential is the Roberts court to presidential power?

This article analyzes whether the [[Roberts Court]] has been unusually deferential to presidential authority by measuring how often the [[United States]] wins on the merits through support-rate data drawn from the [[Supreme Court Database]] and terms through 2024–25. Adam Feldman situates the analysis within scholarship on the attitudinal model, partisanship, and historical chief-justice eras, comparing support rates across eras and by appointing president while examining individual justices’ voting patterns. The piece finds the Roberts Court’s 49.39% pro-government rate below many past courts, highlights partisan sorting and docket effects, and notes important caveats — notably exclusion of the [[shadow docket]], agency-deference cases where the government is not a party, and the complexity of separating Trump-specific from party-driven patterns — and calls for further granular study. It warns that other issue areas may show different patterns.

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www.nytimes.com

How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World

Rupert Murdoch suffered a serious spinal injury in January 2018 that forced his adult children to contemplate succession for the first time, raising questions about who would control his sprawling global media empire and its outsized political influence across the English-speaking world. The piece traces how Murdoch built this empire by using his outlets to support favored political candidates and then leveraging those relationships to remove regulatory obstacles to his expansion, a formula his father Keith pioneered in Australia and that Rupert perfected across Britain and America, particularly through Fox News's role in amplifying right-wing populism including Trump's rise. The narrative reveals deep tensions between Murdoch's sons—the idealistic, centrist James who wanted to modernize the company and his more conservative older brother Lachlan, whom Murdoch ultimately favored—and explains how the controlling family trust structure means that Murdoch's death would trigger a power struggle that could reshape global politics.

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www.newyorker.com

Among the Insurrectionists at the Capitol

Trump's incitement drove thousands to the Capitol on January 6th, where the author witnessed white supremacists, militia members, conspiracy theorists, and QAnon adherents breach the building, ransack offices, and threaten lawmakers—a culmination of months of false election claims amplified by right-wing media, politicians, and figures like Alex Jones and Nicholas Fuentes. The riot was not spontaneous chaos but the predictable apotheosis of a coordinated disinformation campaign that exploited pre-existing grievances about lockdowns, demographic change, and perceived persecution to radicalize a substantial portion of the Republican base into believing that violent resistance to the "deep state" was justified. The author documents how conspiracy theories, white Christian nationalism, and the GOP's cynical accommodation of Trump's power grab have created an ecosystem where millions remain insulated from factual correction and primed for continued insurgency beyond Trump's presidency.

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www.buzzfeednews.com

The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time

The 2010s marked the shift from the internet as a discrete destination to an omnipresent algorithmic feed woven into daily life, with platforms like Instagram and Twitter replacing chronological timelines with engagement-based algorithms that fundamentally altered how information, politics, and culture reach us. This transformation—enabled by smartphones, streaming services, and social media's evolution—created a disorienting temporal experience where past and present collapse, making figures like Trump the ideal vessel for such a system while spawning cultural backlash (vintage watches, vinyl records, digital detox rhetoric) that ultimately fails because the internet has become inseparable from physical reality. The essay argues that what defines the decade isn't any single technology but the complete merger of our online and offline identities, creating a perpetual state of algorithmic fragmentation that keeps us perpetually scrolling, reacting, and unable to escape.

Permalink social mediatechnologyculturestreaming

newrepublic.com

The GOP Is Dying. Time for a Whig Revival?

Timothy Noah argues that the GOP is effectively dead—hollowed out into an authoritarian Trump cult, as Liz Cheney and historian Sean Wilentz both contend—and that any post-Trump conservative party won't revive Buckley/Reagan orthodoxy but might instead resemble the 19th-century Whig Party. He lays out why the Whigs (anti-Jacksonian, pro-infrastructure, wary of executive overreach and manifest destiny, skeptical of populist mythologizing) offer a surprisingly apt template for a reformed, government-friendly conservatism that Democrats could actually negotiate with. Worth keeping for its historical analogy explaining what a "sane" successor to today's Republican Party might look like.

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newrepublic.com

The Corporations Funding the End of Democracy

This piece argues that handwringing op-eds and press-criticism amount to inaction, and that real leverage against GOP minority rule lies in pressuring the corporations bankrolling groups like the RSLC's REDMAP gerrymandering project. It names dozens of major companies—many of which also issued BLM statements—that funded the redistricting and voter-suppression push, and calls for boycotts and public pressure campaigns modeled on the 2012 ALEC divestment wave. It's a concrete, actionable counterpoint to despair-driven commentary, worth keeping for the corporate donor list and the boycott strategy it proposes.

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