Prediction Markets

Posted on April 24, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 24, 2026

The first time I visited Las Vegas was during a cross-country road trip in 1974 in the midst of the Arab Oil Embargo which had shockingly raised gasoline prices from 19 to 53 cents a gallon, and caused a panicked Congress to impose a nationwide 55 miles per hour speed limit. I was with my wife and my six and almost-four-year-old sons. Arriving at Las Vegas after several days of exploring New Mexico and Arizona was a shock to our sensibilities. All I could see, back then, was crass commercialism oriented toward sexual and other “adult” behaviors covered by a wink and the motto, “What happens here stays here.” We spent the night and left at 6 a. m. the next morning.

The next time was twenty years later. With our kids grown and gone, we could see Las Vegas for what it was: a crass, commercial adult Disneyland catering to every secret fantasy and desire. It looked like fun, and it was. We’re not gamblers, but we loved lazy river pools when it was 108 degrees outside, good food, and high end entertainment. On this visit, the only thing that shocked me were the betting boards. In addition to sports betting, people were betting on elections, the likelihood of war, and whether there would be a recession. It felt wrong to me then, and it still does.

What about conflict of interest? In investment markets, it’s called insider trading, a violation of the 1934 Securities Exchange law. It’s a serious crime, a felony with penalties of up to five million dollars and twenty-five years in prison. I eventually rationalized my feelings about that by convincing myself that if this was mostly something tourists did on vacation in Nevada, the only state in which gambling was legal back then, it couldn’t do much harm.

Today, a special forces soldier involved in the planning of the raid that captured Nicolas Maduro was charged with winning more than $400,000 on a bet he placed on Maduro’s capture just before the raid he was about to take part in. We’ve heard reports from every news outlet since Trump’s war in Iran started about wealthy people placing suspicious bets on events in the war. Now that the sharks are on it, the story is likely to grow legs every day the war continues, and every investigative journalist worthy of the title will be looking closely at the timing of those bets.

Aside from the illegalities involved, this raises very serious questions. In a Trump administration which has been described as the most corrupt in anyone’s memory, with Trump’s family members being accused of using his presidency to enrich themselves, you can bet people will be scrutinizing trades and wagers executed by everyone who has had any contact with Trump or with the people in the Defense Department or active military who planned the attacks. Dozens of suspicious bets are already being investigated.

Aside from the criminality, there are serious questions about whether allowing such bets, even without insider information threatens our basic security. I’ve always believed laws outlawing betting on sports or card games were arcane and outdated. The absurdity, for example, of a star like Pete Rose being outlawed from professional baseball for betting that his team would win, has raised eyebrows for fifty years. But I have to accept the reality that the temptation to bet against one’s own team, and then fail to play at their best would be difficult to resist for many young athletes.

A serious as that is, morally and ethically, when we compare it to people betting on who is going to be bombed and when, on numbers of casualties and planes lost, or on whether negotiations to end the fighting are effective makes even insider trading sound trivial, The real questions are: should it be illegal to bet on some things, and to what degree might betting affect outcomes? Given our president’s irresponsible use of social media, and his tendency to speak off the record unpredictably, is it reasonable to assume that conversations and decisions made in the White House situation room won’t be leaked to favored donors and supporters when millions of dollars can be made in moments?

We’ll see before long, but that isn’t the worst danger. If people bet on things like when the first bombing raid on Iran would occur, or whether Iran would ever give up its enriched uranium, who is to say we won’t see odds posted on whether the United States, Israel, or some rogue terrorist group, might set off a nuclear weapon? And if billions of dollars are being wagered on that premise, does that make it more likely that we could wind up in a nuclear war?

Today, our truthless president told the press that he’s not in favor of prediction markets, despite the fact that his family is deeply invested in them. Can this lead to anything but a bad outcome?

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Hoisted

Posted on April 21, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 21, 2026

It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. Even most of Trump’s base had to realize his war against Iran would be a train wreck. I imagine most of his supporters must feel like parents of a teenage drug addict. They love their kid, but he’s erratic and unstable, and he exhibits behaviors that suggest serious mental health problems.

The parents know that if they don’t execute some kind of intervention things will only get worse until they’re faced with a disaster, but it’s their kid. Tough love is really hard. Friends and relatives start to call, worried. Before long it’s a cacophony. Everyone except the parents knows what has to be done, but no one’s willing to pull the trigger. If they’re lucky, some third party might intervene, a teacher, a counselor, a close friend. If not they’re likely to wind up with a kid who is either dead or in jail.

I think that metaphorically sums up the position we, as American voters find ourselves in. Almost half of us voted for Trump, even knowing what he was. We’d even been forewarned by Project 2025 which was a roadmap for voiding the Constitution and replacing our republic with a white male dominated Christian Nationalist autocracy, in other words, a twenty-first century fascist state.

We also knew that his promises of no more wars were just hot air. The appointment of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense clearly signaled that our narcissistic president’s need to dominate everyone and everything, especially our military would show up in ugly ways. Hegseth has the personality of a mafia enforcer. I can only guess how frustrating and humiliating it must be for people like Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Daniel Caine, a highly regarded leader who must fall on his sword every day. It reminds me of Anthony Fauci standing off camera cringing while Trump was telling people to drink bleach.

There’s no sugar coating this. It began with a combination of Trump’s massive ego, his inability to focus on complex details – even his daily White House briefing seems beyond his childlike attention span – and his basic ignorance of how both the government and the military work. Add his delusions of grandeur to the mix, and we have a president and Commander-in-Chief of the military who treats our sophisticated weaponry and munitions like his own personal video game. It wouldn’t surprise me if ordering generals around and dropping bombs on people he despises is a source of extreme sexual arousal for Trump. Actually, nothing he did would surprise me.

Ignoring his generals and professional diplomats, but mostly out of hatred for Barack Obama, Trump tore up the nuclear deal that the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had been complying with. That deal would have ensured that Iran couldn’t produce a nuclear weapon for twenty-five years. Tearing it up put Israel significantly at risk, as Iran immediately began enriching uranium, which it had not been doing since signing the deal with Obama.

I’m not a fan of Benjamin Netanyahu, but I understand why he believed an unfettered Iran was an existential threat. Iran had been threatening to destroy Israel for decades. It wasn’t unreasonable for Netanyahu to believe that destroying Iran’s enriched uranium was a non-negotiable necessity. Except, much like the way Bush 43’s administration falsified or exaggerated the threat of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” as a justification for the Iraq-Afghanistan war, Netanyahu did the same thing with intelligence about Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, knowing he could play on Trump’s vulnerability.

Trump was warned about all the ways the war could go wrong, but his fantasy that he was really in control of the world succumbed to his ignorant belief that six weeks of bombing would cause Iran to come crawling to him. All of our allies knew that was wrong. Most Americans knew it was wrong, including Republicans who had served for decades on foreign relations and military oversight committees. But with Trump, Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio all yessing each other, Trump began a war with no contingency plans or exit strategy. The current situation was extremely predictable.

Now, Trump has infuriated much of his base, he has thrown a wrench into our economy and the world’s causing damage that might take a decade to repair. No one takes his threats of more bombing seriously, because it’s clear to the entire world, excluding Trump’s incompetent inner circle, that he has backed himself into a political cul-de-sac. He knows his base will join the opposition if he expands the war and if the prices he promised to lower don’t come down after he caused them to spike.

Trump hoisted himself on his own narcissistic ego, and his media supporters are abandoning him and watching him swing in the breeze. If the troubled teenager had come to such a pass, I would have sympathy for him. But Trump is an eighty-year-old man who has been hurting people all his life, and now he has undermined Americans’ confidence in their government. I have absolutely no sympathy for Trump’s self-imposed distress. He deserves all the pain and humiliation he’s likely to receive.

I hope for the sake of the United States and the world that our Vice President, Cabinet and Congress realize that every day Trump remains in office places everyone and everything in jeopardy.

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Iran’s Enriched Uranium

Posted on April 18, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 18, 2026

If not for Iran’s 900 pounds of enriched uranium, we would not be at war today. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had good reason to want it gone. Iran as ruled by the Ayatollahs has sworn to destroy Israel for forty-seven years.

If any of the missiles Iran fired at Israel during this war had been equipped with nuclear warheads, Israel’s Iron Dome wouldn’t have been an effective defense. Unlike conventional bombs, nuclear explosives do not have to strike their targets directly. A high altitude detonation hundreds of miles above Tel Aviv would effectively devastate the entire country. The question the rest of the world asks is whether Iran would ever use nuclear weapons preemptively.

Israel has been a nuclear power for sixty years, but for Israel, having those weapons is an essential deterrent. The Ayatollahs claim that that justifies Iran’s quest to develop them, but it’s a false argument. Israel would never use its nuclear weapons preemptively. That’s not a moral judgement, simply common sense. They have no reason to, and if they did, the result would surely be the destruction of Israel itself and possibly the world.

We’ve heard dozens of expert opinions about what it would take to get Iran to give up its enriched uranium. We’ve been told that it would require either a massive ground war or the use of a nuclear weapon by the United States. We’ve also been told the hard-liners in Iran’s government would never give up their right to enrich uranium, but that may just be part of the hyperbolic bluster Trump and the Iranians exchange. The argument that makes the most sense to me suggests it is.

As some commentators have noted, Iran doesn’t need nuclear weapons, and Trump’s war made that clear. Iran’s leaders have proved that they can disrupt the world’s economy and hold the major industrial nations hostage whenever they choose to without firing a shot. How many people, before this war, understood that some of our allies could run out of oil within two months if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed or was too dangerous to transit? With the world now aware of this reality, nuclear weapons aren’t worth the trouble for Iran, and its leaders surely understand that.

The costs of continuing their development and building and maintaining deep underground facilities to protect them are enormous, and its not clear, going forward, that they’re more of a benefit to Iran than a liability. What does seem clear is that with Iran’s economy and standard of living in serious jeopardy, it has far better places to invest its resources. If Iran’s negotiators are as smart as they’re reputed to be, my guess is they would be happy to be rid of their uranium, now that the world understands their real power.

Iranian negotiators know that Trump and Netanyahu are too heavily invested in the argument that Iran’s uranium is an existential threat, a view not shared by our allies, to back off. Trump may believe our allies’ refusal to assist in his war is a clash of personalities – everything Trump does takes the form of a confrontational transaction – but I don’t see it that way. Our European and west-Asian allies are far more vulnerable to Iran’s drones and missiles than the United States is. If they believed they were really at risk of imminent attack, they wouldn’t let the kind of petty childishness Trump engages in stop them from acting in their own defense.

If I were an Iranian negotiator, I would continue to insist that Iran will never turn over its enriched uranium or promise to never create more. I would scream as loudly as Trump that it is my nation’s inalienable right, and hold out until the last possible moment before giving in, to extract the most I can in concessions. That makes the most sense for Iran from every point of view.

Why would the Iranian regime saddle itself with the enormous economic drain of a nuclear weapons program and a worldwide terrorist network, when “playing nice” will likely earn them billions of dollars in unfrozen assets and reparations for the damage our bombs caused? The alternative to giving up their quest to destroy Israel and Jews everywhere is renewed ties with the west and security guarantees that will allow Iran to rebuild its economy and thrive, something most Iranian people clearly desire.

What I find most disturbing about this war is that it has proved itself to be unnecessary. All this could have been quietly negotiated behind closed doors if Trump hadn’t torn up the JCPOA deal to limit Iran’s uranium in 2018 out of nothing more than spiteful hatred for Barack Obama. It’s clearer than ever that this war has more to do with Trump’s ego and his susceptibility to being manipulated by smarter foreign leaders than anything else.

If Trump behaved like a normal, sane person, he could have come out of this being praised by the entire world. Even I would have supported awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Sex, Politics, and Our Nation’s Future

Posted on April 15, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 15, 2026

America’s response to its leaders’ sexual misconduct is inconsistent at best. I could begin anywhere in our history to find examples, but I’ll start with Thomas Jefferson’s liaisons with his slave mistress, Sally Hemmings. At the turn of the 19th century, Jefferson’s misdeeds didn’t count; Hemmings wasn’t white and the United States Constitution didn’t recognize either her humanity or her rights as a woman.

Fast forward to Franklin Roosevelt, whose extra-marital affair with Lucy Rutherford Mercer lasted thirty years. His wife, Eleanor, wasn’t fond of that relationship, but the household that included all three of them remained intact until Roosevelt’s death with Mercer at his side. Then there were the infamous affairs of John F. Kennedy, which didn’t damage his presidency because of an unwritten understanding with the press, who chose not to report on such things. After Kennedy, either the nation’s attitude toward sexual misconduct changed, or the media realized how much they could profit from exposing it. The subject has been a revolving door of potential scandals ever since Bill Clinton led Monica Lewinsky into a dark cloak room.

As we entered the Internet era and it’s impact on our privacy, we’ve been forced to confront these events rather than pretend we didn’t notice. Clinton was impeached, but a Democratic majority in the Senate acquitted him. Politics saved Clinton’s presidency from the disgrace of removal, but the incident has had a long life affecting Hilary Clinton’s career negatively, because many women couldn’t condone her staying with a husband who had publicly humiliated her. Is there an American over fifty who doesn’t automatically link the names Clinton and Lewinsky?

Nine-eleven, the forever war in Afghanistan, and the Hollywood-style fantasy of the Obamas’ marriage that nonsensically harkened back to the Kennedy-Camelot myth kept sex out of the headlines until the Donald Trump era. His sexual affairs are too numerous to list, so I’ll simply remind you of the infamous Hollywood Access tape on which Trump openly, condescendingly brags about “grabbing women’s pussies.”

Many of us thought that would doom his first presidential run, but instead we got a valuable lesson in the power of lies, money, and political intimidation. Even his publicly acknowledged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, which occurred at about the time Trump’s wife Melania was giving birth to their son, and his $400,000 hush money payment to Daniels were ignored until the New York Attorney General stepped in, and Trump was convicted of thirty-four felonies over the incident. Yet, he has avoided any accountability for his actions.

When thirteen women who had no relationship with each other independently accused Trump of rape and other forms of sexual assault, nothing happened because of the MAGA sickness that left our Congress in fear of Trump’s retribution. That wasn’t the only way our dysfunctional Congress defaulted on their sworn oaths, but their approval ratings across the board have fallen so close to zero, and they so badly need a distraction from their refusal to vote on approving Trump’s war in Iran, that the sexual soap opera among some of our most powerful politicians found itself in the spotlight.

Given his fervent, categorical denials of the allegations of sexual assault and rape against him by four women, Eric Swalwell undoubtedly thought that playing Trump’s denial card would work for him, and it might have except that California voters are apparently less hypocritical than our Congress and Mike Johnson badly needed a win. So while Trump walked away unscathed from thirteen credible accusations of sexual misconduct, it only took four to cause Swalwell to fall on his sword, and even that wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been an equally guilty Republican Johnson could force to resign to balance the political scales.

As damning as all this is to our national integrity, when it’s viewed in the light of the massive attempts to cover up Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and Trump casting himself as Jesus, when we consider that much of our country believes preventing the unredacted Epstein files from coming to light were a serious motivation in Trump’s decision to attack Iran, we must take a serious look at the standards to which we hold our leaders.

It’s especially critical today, as Trump’s erratic behavior and shocking lack of judgment, are raising existential concerns about our future. There’s no doubt, based on recent polling, that a majority of Americans believe Trump cannot be trusted to protect either the country or its Constitution, and would gladly remove him from office if they could. But both impeachment and the 25th Amendment are political processes. No amount of criminal indictments, public hand-wringing, or moral outrage matters when craven politicians worried only about their own re-election are unwilling to do the obvious right thing.

I suspect that the Iran war and the demise of Christian Nationalism in its crib will prove to be more than Trump’s skill at intimidation can handle. That would be very good news for America, except that Trump is still Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful, if recently  diminished, military. As long as he is president, his power to destroy can only be checked by Congress and responsible military leaders. We all know the clichés about how dangerous cornered rats are.

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The Powerful Message of the Hungarian People

Posted on April 14, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 14, 2026

If there is one person to  whom I turn for inspiration and truth when I write these articles, it’s historian Heather Cox Richardson, who writes extensively on Substack. I am one of millions of people who subscribe to her “Letters From an American” daily newsletter, which I find to be the most consistently valid voice trying to make sense of politics and foreign affairs.

Today, Ms. Richardson outdid herself, offering a perspective on the implications of the Hungarian people’s startling rejection of Prime Minister Viktor Orban after sixteen years in office. She notes that what we all witnessed on Sunday was a peaceful revolution staged by the people of Hungary who felt their democracy and their national heritage being ripped from them by a fascist-like political movement that wanted to replace “liberal democracy” with an autocracy based on a distorted view of Christian values.

That revolution had to overcome an election system that had been rigged as much as possible by Orban to assure that no opposition leader could ever wrest power from him. Had that proved to be true on Sunday, it would have been an adrenaline high for the Heritage Society and for Donald Trump and JD Vance who had ordained the Orban Hungarian rejection of democracy as the future model of American government.

Ms. Richardson made me realize how dramatic Orban’s defeat by former supporter Peter Magyar really was. Magyar told his people they had taken back their country and its democratic values. It’s a very big deal that the very thing the MAGA movement hung its collective hat on disappeared overnight. It’s an even bigger deal that the notion MAGA and the Heritage society have been spreading, that the Hungarian people were better off under Orban’s rule, and had rejected their previous values, was proved to be a lie when Hungarians when to the polls in record numbers to tell that to the world. If it’s breezy in your neighborhood today, you might be feeling the effect of a collective sigh of relief coming from all over Europe.

One of Richardson’s themes is that everything we see happening in the world  is part of repeating cycle. Whenever we think things couldn’t possibly get worse, that they have never been as bad as they are today, she reminds us that this has all happened before, in the 1850’s, 1890’s, and 1920’s, and that the current version of MAGA is an extremist outgrowth of what Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich began forty-five years ago. It’s almost too ironic that average Hungarians accomplished without firing a shot what Trump encouraged Iranians to do the day he started bombing them. MAGA got a serious lesson in the right way to achieve regime change.

Richardson made a pitch for Republicans to return to their traditional values of fiscal responsibility and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. She noted that Mitch McConnell, who spent decades building a right-wing corps of federal judges to support the growing Tea Party and MAGA movements, now seems to express contrition over having been instrumental in assisting in the overthrow of the Republican Party. Too little, too late, Mitch. Your legacy will always be helping to entrench the extremists who are trying to destroy the America we grew up in. You could have stood up for all the Republicans who simply quit under threat of a well-funded primary opponent, but that conflicted with your own designs on power.

As Richardson describes the growth of both Orban’s movement and MAGA, they both evolved out of small elite groups of people’s attempts to create oligarchies, espousing the notion that the wealthy are better suited to govern the rest of us and they should be unfettered in their power to change things. She relates that to the 1920’s, when wealthy individuals and corporations were out of control, not only in America, but throughout the industrial world. Their overreaches and excesses, much like Orban’s, led to the Great Depression, and were important factors creating the environment that led to World War 2.

Her masterstroke, today, was reprising the the words of Franklin Roosevelt in his 1932 campaign for president. Reading FDR’s promise of a “new deal for Americans” in the context of Hungary’s second revolution (they expelled the Soviets in 1958 only to be overwhelmed by military force) literally brought tears to my eyes. It’s clearly time for that kind of reset in American values. We’ve been wagged by the tail of MAGA for too long, and everything that’s happened so far in 2026 says Americans are poised to do exactly what Hungarians did last weekend.

That’s a very hopeful sign, although I don’t advocate any specific agenda. Flipping from MAGA to extreme progressivism or democratic socialism is not the antidote we need. That would just perpetuate the cycle, as MAGA goes underground preparing for their next attempted coup. America needs its leaders to remember the oaths they swore, and Americans need to replace their present leaders in both parties with people who care more about the future of all Americans than their own wealth and power.

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Trump’s War in Iran Will Never Achieve Its Primary Goals

Posted on April 13, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 13, 2026

When Donald Trump is in thrall of being Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military, his bombastic style consists in equal parts of lies, exaggerations, and delusional fantasies. What it never contains is an admission of any possibility of being wrong, any suggestion of contrition, and worst of all, any evidence of rational, competent planning.

The forty-day war has wasted the lives of thirteen American service members and more than 3,000 people in Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, most of whom were civilians. Trump’s war has not only not achieved its primary objectives, but if the Iranians accept JD Vance’s “best and final offer” they will be in a much stronger position than they were before Trump tore up the nuclear agreement the Obama administration and the EU negotiated. Most objective observers believe that that agreement was working, and Trump’s decision to end it was pure personal animus toward Obama.

Both Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu promised their populations that attacking Iran by air would end both its nuclear enrichment program and the tyrannical Iranian regime, and destroy Iran’s missiles and drones. Netanyahu had tried to sell this narrative to three previous American presidents, but George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, and Joe Biden all rejected it. Two center-left presidents and one who learned from experience that military incursions in the Middle East are like slogging through quicksand all understood that Netanyahu’s plan was a Hail Mary that had little or no chance of success. Yet, Trump fell for Netanyahu’s seductive appeal to his ego, because that’s what Trump lives for.

Netanyahu has been desperately trying to avoid a felony trial for corruption – in Israel, the PM does not have a get-out-of-jail-free card, compliments of its Supreme Court – and Trump has been dealing with the repercussions of his failed tariff and immigration policies and the specter of the Epstein Files. War against Iran suited both their personal agendas. To be fair to Netanyahu, his country has been at war for the entire seventy-eight years of its existence, surrounded by neighbors sworn to destroy it. From his point of view, even a Hail Mary was better than the status quo.

On the other hand, rational actors knew the attack on Iran would never succeed. Iran is not Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Grenada, or Panama, and the geography of the Persian Gulf gives Iran an advantage that cannot be overcome with air power. Eliminating Iran’s enriched uranium, which Netanyahu and Trump both claimed was their primary objective, was something Israeli and American military leaders knew from the start was not achievable with air strikes alone. Netanyahu knew it, too, but when Trump’s ego is in charge, rational thought takes a back seat.

How do we know the attack plan was doomed to fail? My own personal experience and that of many thousands of American military and civilians prove it. Iran isn’t the only country that buries it’s vital assets deep underground. I worked in one such facility during the Vietnam War, a fully functional military complex at Raven Rock Mountain, buried under eight-thousand feet of granite in Pennsylvania, It was built in the 1950s to provide a secure location from which the Joint Chiefs of Staff could retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Only a direct hit by a hydrogen bomb could affect it or similar facitilities like Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.

It’s an absolute certainty that both Netanyahu and Trump were aware that the same thing is true of the underground site at Istafan where the enriched uranium is kept. Unless they planned to use nuclear weapons, extracting the cannisters of uranium would require an extended ground war, neither of which were on Trump’s radar.

A poll by The Econmist last week asked responders who was winning the war. 2% said the U. S., 6% said Israel, 17% said Iran, and everyone else said None of the Above, and reputable polls in both Israel in the United States taken since Trump’s cease fire was declared found that nearly three quarters of Israelis and Americans consider the war a failure and believe Iran may now be a worse threat than before the bombing started.

The promises of regime change were equally disingenuous, and both Trump and Netanyahu understood that before the war started. Killing nearly a hundred of Iran’s top pollitical leaders did not “cut off the head of the snake.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and its religious autocracy number more than a million well-entrenched fanatical Shia Muslims who hate everything in the Judeo-Christian world and whose twisted version of Islam lists killing Jews, Americans, and Europeans as a pathway to Heaven.

We’ve been lied to. We have allowed our unstable, delusional president to drag us into a war from which there is no productive exit. Given the extremely negative response by both Americans and Israelis to the prospect of a full-scale war, and Iran’s ability and willingness to absorb destruction and use it to reinforce it’s people’s anger and hatred, it’s impossible to see this war as anything but an incompetent failure.

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Evolution or Opportunism – Who is the Real JD Vance?

Posted on April 11, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 11, 2026

Some leaders grow into their roles, maturing and broadening their perspective as they age. They start out espousing naive philosophies and opinions, but life experiences lead them in new directions. Probably the best example, during my lifetime, was Lyndon Johnson. As a young politician in Texas, and later, as a Congressman, he supported the New Deal and President Franklin Roosevelt, but he was also a southern Democrat who supported segregation and opposed civil rights legislation. As a Senator, he maintained his stance against integration while strongly supporting Texas’ oil and gas industry and was a bipartisan leader during the Eisenhower administration.

When Johnson succeeded John F. Kennedy as president, there was trepidation among Democrats that right-wing southerners would dominate the party and the White House. But Johnson instead became the steward of the Great Society movement that included passing the Civil Rights and Social Security Acts, including initiating both Medicaid and Medicare. After supporting the expansion of the Vietnam War, and condoning the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident that solidified popular support for the war, Johnson came to realize what a terrible error that was and dropped out of the 1968 presidential race. Lyndon Johnson proved that given the opportunity, hard core, ambitious politicians can evolve toward governing for all Americans and acknowledge when they’re wrong.

But Johnson was a rare bird. Far more common are politicians and influencers who are motivated by opportunism rather than ideology or principle. Notorious right-wing conservative Rush Limbaugh was one such, who had no ideology of his own until he seized on the rising trend of reactionary politics that was anti-everything liberal, including women’s rights, welfare, and equal opportunity, as a way to acquire influence and wealth.

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell is credited with stacking district and appellate courts with right-wing judges and famously said at the beginning of Barrack Obama’s presidency, “My job as Senate Majority Leader is to assure that Obama fails.” In later years, McConnell told interviewers that his core principles had nothing to do with right-wing extremism, that he was motivated solely by finding a path to maximize his personal power. In his dotage, as he approached retirement and diminished capacity, he has expressed regret that his efforts resulted in helping Donald Trump rise to power.

Why are Johnson, Limbaugh, and McConnell relevant today? Because all the above raises similar questions about JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President who has taken over negotiations with Iran from the grossly unqualified Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. How Vance handles the tough, smart Iranians in Islamabad will make or break his ambition to succeed Donald Trump as the leader of the MAGA movement, and as president. Vance is someone whose major life decisions have been largely opportunistic.

He’s a really smart guy. You have to be to graduate from Yale Law School, notwithstanding that many of us wondered how George W. Bush managed the same accomplishment. What Vance has demonstrated more than anything else during his brief career, (he’s only 41,) is ambition, guts, and a keen ability to align himself with people like billionaire Peter Thiel who saw great potential in Vance and helped him win election to the Senate and the Vice Presidency. It’s been widely reported, and not denied by Vance, that he was not originally a supporter of Donald Trump or the Christian Nationalist movement Trump coopted from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

But Vance seems almost matchless in his ability to adapt to situations –  he can change his stripes as easily as donning a new tie to match Trump’s. In the current environment, in which it’s been leaked that Vance does not support the war in Iran, and Americans are realizing their error in giving Donald Trump what he believes is a mandate for an unfettered second term, I hear people debate one question every day. Would America be better off if Trump were removed from office and replaced by Vance? More often than not, people fear Vance, believing he’s more dangerous because he’s smarter than Trump and he generally behaves rationally even when he expresses radical views.

They fear MAGA in the hands of Vance would be worse than it is now, but I disagree. Movements like MAGA only succeed long-term with a hypnotic leader at the helm, someone with the charisma of a cobra, paired with extreme narcissism, greed, and sociopathy, in other words, Donald Trump. MAGA needs that to be viable post-Trump, but Vance does not check any of those boxes.

Vance is a mysterious black box. He is extremely talented at adapting to situations and seizing opportunities. He seems undaunted by criticism or opposition and gives every appearance of being the hardest worker in the administration. He is also very good a being loyal to whomever he needs to be to get ahead, but it’s impossible to know where he might come down on policy issues if given the power he obviously craves.

Vance has no credible experience with negotiations, but I suspect he will turn out to be talented in that regard. He’s good on his feet, always confident, and never at a loss for a response to tough questions. In his present role leading negotiations with Iran in the middle of a misguided war Trump is drowning in, he may display talents we didn’t know he had. The question is, if he finds himself succeeding in wresting concessions from tough Iranian negotiators, will he decide that it’s safe to stray from Trump’s insane daily-changing agenda. And if he does, which version of JD Vance will emerge?

I have no idea if Vance or anyone else can be successful in undoing the mess created by Trump. But I believe that negotiations in Pakistan will affect far more than the war. They could influence American politics for decades. Vance is only 41.

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Trump’s War in Iran Has Diminished America

Posted on April 9, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 9, 2026

The silliness over Donald Trump and Iran’s leaders both claiming victory in Trump’s thirty-eight day war masks a more troubling reality. For Iran, “victory” means that the regime still exists, and they still have the power and leverage to disrupt the entire world’s economy. Most important, the alleged trigger for the war, Iran’s nine-hundred pounds of enriched uranium, is still where it was.

Trump claims he proved that America has the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s like saying he proved the sun rises every morning. Everyone knows it does. So Trump got to play with his lethal toys, order around a bunch of generals, and dictate actions to the rest of the world – except, every foreign leader ignored him except the guy who dragged him into this war in the first place, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump’s fury at finding himself impotent to influence former allies and adversaries alike is evident in his increasingly bizarre behavior. While bragging about military successes, he fails to mention the blow American prestige has taken around the world. Because all that matters to Donald Trump is ego gratification, he thinks causing Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Philippines to realize they can no longer count on us to defend them and the world order is a good thing.

The truth is, it’s a very bad thing. It disrupts the relative stability the world has seen, at least in terms of avoiding world wars, since 1945. Moreover, not only has Trump caused the entire world to view America as a declining world power, despite its military prowess, but even some of his allies are being hurt. If Hungary’s Viktor Orban loses Sunday’s election, many political experts believe it will be because of his close ties to Trump.

There’s an opinion piece in today’s New York Times by Steven Erlander that describes the current situation as America’s Suez moment, a reference to 1956 when France and Britain attacked Egypt to force the re-opening of the Suez Canal without coordinating with the United States. President Eisenhower ordered the attack stopped, and both Britain and France withdrew, acknowledging that they were no longer the world powers they once were. Erlander makes a convincing case that Trump’s war has left us in a similar position.

By withdrawing the United States from every initiative that represents a unified approach to a better future, Trump has by definition reduced our influence over world affairs. And watching how over 13,000 airstrikes failed to subdue Iran has simply confirmed what most rational world leaders already knew. Conventional military power alone does not make us a great power. When we lose our moral center and the world sees everything America has stood for being flushed down Trump’s gold commode, we are the losers.

The terrible situation we created in the Middle East is not our military’s fault. They performed brilliantly. But what good is tactical brilliance when they’re led by a madman? By telling both our Congress and all of our allies that we’re not interested in their opinions before starting a war that still might explode beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, unilaterally, he violated diplomatic protocol, our Constitution, and international law. Adding insult to injury, demanding that NATO join the fight after it became clear that Trump had badly underestimated Iran’s ability and willingness to absorb punishment and hold the world hostage, created rifts that will likely never heal.

When Trump launched air strikes on Iran, he said there were two objectives: preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon and enabling the people of Iran to overthrow the regime that he was confident he could bring down. Neither of those goals was achieved. Instead, Trump changed the objective every day, and his threats became more apocalyptic as his frustration at not being able to control the entire world increased. The allegedly huge compromise made by Iran to permit shipping to flow through the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for a cessation of bombing wasn’t even an issue when Trump launched his war. Nor was the bombing by Iran of our Gulf state allies.

On balance, Trump showed the world two things. He is absolutely incompetent at strategic planning, and his vigilante-style war was far more about his ego than Iran’s enriched uranium. It’s likely that the two biggest winners of this war will be Russia and China. Russia is reaping a windfall of oil profits from the war, which, combined with our greatly reduced ability to support Ukraine has Vladimir Putin ecstatic. And China, Iran’s largest oil customer, came out of this being credited with convincing Iran to go along with the ceasefire. No doubt, Xi Jinping is licking his chops awaiting Trump’s visit.

Perhaps worst of all for our near-term future is the depletion of our munitions, especially laser-guided precision weapons. Our stockpiles have been recklessly degraded to the point where we have little left to continue the war if the cease-fire fails, counter aggression by Russia or deter China from overwhelming Taiwan. Considering Venezuela and Iran together, it’s clear from his own words that Trump’s dream was to control the world’s oil supply. He is proving again that greed and delusions of grandeur are not qualities we need in a president.

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What Has Trump’s War Against Iran Accomplished?

Posted on April 8, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 8, 2026

The world breathed a sigh of relief, but only minutes passed before the reality of the terms of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran were revealed for what they are. President Trump’s outrageous, inappropriate language threatening genocide and the destruction of an entire civilization was, after all, a bluff. But the fact that it so far has resulted in the appearance of further negotiations doesn’t change the reality that deliberate deception in diplomacy often leads to catastrophic outcomes. The consensus among world leaders is that Trump is reckless and dangerous. The trust and respect for the United States that existed before Trump took office is no more.  

With both the United States and Iran declaring victory and Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continuing to engage in hyperbole about the outcome, we’ll not soon see anything like transparency or truth from either. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains happily silent as his forces continue to destroy southern Lebanon while the world’s eyes are focused elsewhere. Not that Israel isn’t justified in attacking Hezbolah, but let’s not pretend the fighting is over.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez summarized how the rest of Europe sees the cease fire: “The government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket. What is needed now: diplomacy, international law and PEACE.” If the lack of cheerleading and praise for Trump from every country we once viewed as allies seems dismaying or confusing, let’s look at why. As many observers have noted, Iran’s proposal, which Trump lauded as a sound basis for further negotiation, would leave Iran far stronger than it was before the war and America’s influence and ability to effect events in the Middle East far weaker.

Trump began this war demanding that Iran cease all work on enriching uranium and turn over its store of near weapon-grade uranium. He also demanded regime change and the end of Iran’s state-sponsored terrorism. The issue of the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t even mentioned, and insiders have suggested that Trump never took the possibility of Iran shutting down shipping in the Strait seriously. Nor did he heed warnings that Iran would attack the Gulf oil states as vigorously as it attacked Israel.

The Iranian proposal solved nothing except offering Trump an offramp he desperately needed to stop bombing or have to back off on his threats whether Iran complied or not. Trump’s “basis for further negotiations” is a proposal that supports Iran’s claims of victory. Iran demands acknowledgment of its right to continue refining weapon-grade uranium. It demands the removal of all U. S. military assets from the region, an end to all economic sanctions, and reparations to repair the damage done by American and Israeli bombing, while making no mention of suspending its support for terrorist organizations like Hezbolah, Hamas, and the Houthis. It also insists that the Strait remain under the control of the Iranian military who would have sole discretion over which ships were allowed to pass through, and being able to charge substantial tolls for passage.

This proposal would leave Iran in a stronger strategic and economic position than it was before the war, and it does nothing to relieve the distrust and anger that Trump has spread among allies in Europe, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. The leaders of our allies realize that as long as the United States is led by Trump, they cannot rely on us economically, militarily, or as the world’s leading promoter of democracy and human rights.

Trump ended that era, and depending on whether American voters end his power over Congress in November and replace him with a sane, morally centered president in 2028, those rifts may never heal. And then there is the economic cost of this war. In addition to raising energy costs, we depleted our supply of offensive weapons and the defensive munitions that protect us from incoming drones and missiles to the point that our ability to deter Russian aggression in Ukraine and China’s designs on Taiwan is severely limited. Trump wants Congress to give him $200 billion to replenish them at the expense of domestic programs millions of Americans depend on. Was salving Trump’s ego worth all that?

The better course of action, from the start, would have been convincing our allies and Congress that a joint action to force Iran to change was required. By letting Netanyahu play him into attacking Iran unilaterally, Trump supported the narrative that the world should be dominated by three great powers, Russia, China, and the United States, with everyone else secondary and dependent on them.

The European Union proved that open borders and the elimination of tariffs worked, bringing nations that fought two world wars together in peaceful if not always harmonious cooperation. The last century’s embracing of free trade and economic codependence as opposed to dominance by a few powerful nations has been temporarily sidelined by a worldwide movement toward authoritarianism. But if Trump is either neutralized or removed from office, and leaders like Viktor Orban of Hungary lose power, as Trump seems to fear he will, the world might get back on track for a prosperous, peaceful future.

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Does Anyone Actually Like Donald Trump?

Posted on April 5, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 5, 2026

In the transactional universe of Donald Trump, everything has a price, and every action generates a quid pro quo. Friendship, collegiality, and courtesy are simply bargaining chips, tools of manipulation, domination, and intimidation. All that matters in Trump’s world are blind loyalty, wealth, and power. Truth has no meaning except as a reference to lies and misrepresentations. It’s pure gangsterism. In that kind of universe it’s reasonable to ask, “Does anyone really like Donald Trump?”

Among two-thirds of our country there’s little chance of finding anyone who does, but what about his supporters? When I asked my extremely conservative cousin who supported Trump in all of his elections, and who devoted his entire life to military service and national security, he said “Trump’s just a blowhard, but we’re safer with him as president.” How many people have you heard say something comparable?

When I ask people in my purple community who voted for Trump what they think of him personally, the typical response is disgust over his behavior, dismay over his lack of moral center, and horror over his mobster-like persona. Without exception, my statistically invalid sample of interviewees dislike him, some intensely. Then why did they vote for him? The most common answer is that they have no faith in Democrats. I don’t either, and I hate the notion that “anything would be better,” but we can only choose from what is available. I’m utterly convinced that Trump will destroy this country if right-thinking Americans don’t find the means to stop him.

Years ago, I studied game theory, the science of intelligent decision making. We’re familiar with things like cost-benefit analyses and evaluating the odds of the success of different outcomes, but the most  important thing I learned from game theory is that all the analyses we use when we make decisions omit a critical element: how to assure avoiding catastrophic failure.

The solution is to first identify outcomes so awful, such as nuclear war, that they’re unacceptable under any circumstances. Any option that might result in such an outcome is nonnegotiably off the table before our search for the best option ever begins.

What if, given Trump’s history of questionable business dealings, bankruptcy filings, court defeats, and accusations of fraud leveled against him, the leaders of Atlantic City, NJ had thought that way before approving plans for Trump’s hotel/casino empire? They might have realized that the possibility of the total failure of Trump’s vision wouldn’t only hurt Trump, but devastate the city’s economy for decades. The lesson from game theory is that for such an outcome, even a tiny probability of occurrence is unacceptable, so we eliminate it before looking at anything else.

We can apply the same idea to most of Trump’s policies. Before passing the Big Beautiful Bill, many people asked if the near certainty that more than twenty million people would lose access to health care was a nonnegotiable outcome. Before turning ICE loose, unfettered to constitutional requirements like court orders and warrants, we might have asked if the death, injury, and general intimidation of innocent Americans that resulted from ICE’s tactics was a nonegotiable outcome.

We might have asked similar questions about Trump’s war against Iran, had we been given an opportunity to weigh in before the bombs starting falling, and by we, I mean every American including Congress who isn’t part of Trump’s inner circle. We might have asked if starting a major conflict with uncertain outcomes without the support of allies or the legitimacy of Congressional approval might yield an unacceptable outcome. We might have asked if the possibility that Iran could disrupt the entire world economy while enriching Russia’s war against Ukraine, the depletion of our stockpile of strategic and precision weaponry all over the world, or the horrific likelihood that the war might spiral out of control and become nuclear were acceptable risks.

Even people who, now that we’re inextricably committed to seeing the war through, recognizing that Trump’s notion that he can end it whenever he wants is pure fantasy, support continuing the fight until Iran’s threat to the world is eliminated, mostly regret the way the conflict was handled. They fear that even total victory over Iran will leave us in a far weaker position with respect to Russia and China. It didn’t have to be that way, except that for Trump, satisfying the desperate needs of his narcissistic disorder had as much to do with attacking Iran as any argument about Iran being a danger to the world.

A president who uses governing as therapy for his own mental illness and sociopathy is by definition an existential threat to us and the world. If Trump carries out his threat to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure over the objections of the rest of the world, he will draw the United States into a future that looks like a tea party compared to our forever war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Vice President Vance and Trump’s Cabinet need to keep their powder dry just in case. I hope they remember where they put the 25th Amendment. It’s that serious.

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