Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts

And, lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable – Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Robbing Peter to pay Paul, to the annoyance of Brussels. And Berlin.

Why Spain has the world’s greatest cities.

The travails of Spain’s young in a country with outstanding economic growth.

The weather forecast for this weekend in Galicia was for Arctic cold, rain, and snow in the hills, with temperatures dropping to levels more typical of March. So, I put the central heating on last night, only to have to switch it off this evening, with the sun shining and temperature about normal.

I could sweat Correos used to be open on Saturdays but it wasn’t this morning. So, I don’t know if the letter waiting for me there is yet another motoring fine or possibly even the escritura that I haven’t been called about.

The UK

Pretty much my view of UK politics: Starmer, Burnham, Farage, Polanski: they make a week in politics feel like an eternity in Hades.

Europe

• Who’d be a leader in modern Europe?
• Why Starmer isn’t the only one with a popularity problem.

The Middle East War

The latest update from Naked Capitalism.

The United States of Trump America

Presidential Quotes

• Obama was a divider.
• Biden was the worst president ever.
• When President Xi said the US was a declining power, he meant under Biden. [While either stupidity or dishonesty (or both) might lie behind this statement, it is at least consistent with his frequent nonsensical claim that, 2 years ago, the USA was dead and the laughing stock of the world but now is the hottest country on the planet.]

Since Trump has been a malignant narcissist all his life and his personality traits observable for many decades, there’s little new that can be said on these scores. So, the emphasis has inevitably has been on the consequences of this combination in a man of huge power. And, more recently, on the age-related deterioration of his mental state. That said, I like the comprehensive profile of the man that I’ve added below as Appendix 1. The bottom line – on the consequences – is that: Turning the USA around will not be achieved through outrage alone. Worth a read.

On the widely observed deterioration of his mental health, this doctor claims that Trump’s “pathological technique of perseveration” proves regression in his ability to manage language.

As for Trump’s visit to China . . .

• The incredible shrinking President Podcast or Video
• Who won? Podcast or Video

Corruption: A largely unobserved scandal . . . The scale of what is happening cannot be overstated. If this goes through, it will be the largest financial con ever pulled on our country and the US taxpayers. The New York Times reports that the Justice Department, run by the President’s former personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, is in active internal discussions about whether to settle the President’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service – a settlement that would effectively give the man who runs the executive branch of the United States of America a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer payout, with his own former personal lawyer signing the check. And one of the settlement options on the table, according to 2 people familiar with the talks, is that the IRS would agree to drop all audits of Donald Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization. Forever.

The second appendix below is on the way the internet is used by the rich and powerful in the US to make themselves ever richer. At which they’ve clearly succeeded over the last several decades.

Spanish

• Desmochar: To dehorn. To pollard.
• Cuntagotas: (eye)dropper. Trickle.
• Ensueño: Dream. Reveried

English

Stan: A slang term for an extremely devoted and enthusiastic fan, often to an excessive degree. It comes from Eminem’s 2000 song “Stan”, about an obsessive fan.

Did you know?

The Spanish national anthem has no words.

You Have to Laugh

As valid as it was 5 years ago . . .

Finally . . . The Appendices:-

Appendix 1: Donald Trump: Michael Jochum

Donald Trump is not some misunderstood populist hero who accidentally wandered into authoritarianism. He is a lifelong grifter who discovered that fear sells faster than condos. Every chapter of his life reads the same: exploit weakness, manufacture spectacle, deny responsibility, repeat. As a businessman he sold illusion. As president he sells grievance. The product is always the same, himself. Selling himself is Trump‘s most prized commodity. Go figure.

He does not lead. He markets. Leadership requires truth, restraint, and service. He traffics in performance, escalation, and ego maintenance. Campaigning never ends because campaigning is applause, and applause is oxygen. Policy is secondary. Reality is negotiable. The only metric that matters is whether the narrative protects his fragile self-image. If truth serves him, he uses it. If lies serve him better, he reaches for those without hesitation. There is no moral compass in that equation, only utility.

And what makes this metastasis possible is not merely the man, but the machinery protecting him. A Republican Congress that once pretended to believe in the Constitution now treats it like optional reading. They have traded oversight for obedience, principle for proximity to power. They know better. That is the most damning part. They know, and they comply anyway. That is not cowardice alone; it is complicity.

Trump’s presidency has never been about governance. It has been about dominance. He views institutions as enemies, not foundations. The press must be punished. Dissent must be crushed. Judges must be loyal. Civil servants must kneel. Minorities, women, veterans, the disabled, anyone who refuses to orbit his ego becomes a target. Vindictiveness is not a byproduct; it is the operating system.

This is why the language of “chaos” and “controversy” is too polite. What we are witnessing is corrosion. An internal threat to democratic stability disguised as populism. A man who equates personal loyalty with patriotism and criticism with treason. That is tyrant logic, not republican governance.

The world sees it. Allies see instability and wonder whether America can still be trusted to honor commitments beyond the lifespan of one man’s ego. Adversaries see fracture lines and salivate. A divided nation is easier to manipulate. A weakened democracy is easier to undermine.

The danger is not just that Trump believes he is always right. The danger is that he believes he is entitled. Entitled to power. Entitled to immunity. Entitled to bend the country to soothe his insecurities. And the longer this normalization continues, the harder it becomes to remember what steady leadership even looks like.

Turning this around will not be achieved through outrage alone. It requires civic backbone, voters, institutions, and leaders who are willing to choose country over cult, Constitution over convenience. It requires Americans who refuse to confuse noise with strength or cruelty with courage.

Because if we don’t draw that line clearly and decisively, history will. And it is rarely gentle in its verdicts.

Appendix 2: The (ab)use of the internet via the right-wing influencer economy.

For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair – the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women – has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.

In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican’s right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.

According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.

There’s no disclosure requirement because the content is “political” rather than “commercial” and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (“speech”) are protected in ways that wouldn’t be the case for lies told to simply make money.

She’s shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and she’s detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trump’s team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.

Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume it’s an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for rightwing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.

It isn’t. As she put it: “There is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we already saw a version of it in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department unsealed an indictment revealing that Putin’s people had funneled almost $10 million through a Tennessee shell company, Tenet Media, to bankroll a group of right-wing influencers including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin who podcast to millions daily.

One right-wing influencer was reportedly paid $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus to produce videos that just happened to riff on topics serving Trump’s and the Kremlin’s interests. (The influencers all swore they were victims who didn’t know the money was Russian, if you can believe that, but they sure were happy to take and keep it.)

And the broader point stands: the entire ecosystem of right-wing media is so saturated with covert money that a foreign adversary could plug straight into it without anyone even noticing, and did!

I’ve been around long enough to remember when this stuff was happening to radio hosts, before podcasting took off. Back in the early 2000s, I had a friend who was a nationally syndicated right-wing talk show host, and he told me how every time he gave a speech to a high school audience, a right-wing foundation would cut him a $20,000 check as a “speaker’s fee” to supplement his income. He did a dozen or more a year. That was the level of subsidy on offer just for keeping kids’ minds tilted in the right direction, and it was, he said, available to hundreds of right-wing radio hosts across the country.

None of this came out of nowhere.

It started with the Powell Memo of August 1971, when corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member Lewis Powell (about to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) sent a confidential blueprint to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling American business it had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.

Joseph Coors took that memo and used it to seed the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with $250,000. Richard Mellon Scaife followed with tens of millions. The Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Seid family fortunes joined the party.

Today that same network of six billionaire family fortunes has been joined by other right-wing billionaires to put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone, and dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and Leonard Leo’s network have funneled additional hundreds of millions more into Heritage, the Federalist Society, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, the Cato Institute, ALEC, and the rest of the Powell ecosystem.

Then there’s Rupert Murdoch, who brought his Australian poison to America with a little help from Ronald Reagan, built Fox “News” into the propaganda flagship for the GOP, and then had to write a $787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly broadcasting lies about the 2020 election.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature and the Queensland University of Technology study, tilted the X algorithm in mid-July 2024 to dramatically boost his own posts and Republican-leaning accounts. After that change, views on Musk’s posts surged 138 percent, and right-wing accounts saw engagement leaps that progressive accounts simply never get any more on billionaire-run social media.

So, step back and look at what all that money buys. It buys a constant drumbeat telling:

• Working-class white people that they should be afraid of Black and Hispanic neighbors,
• Women in the workplace are stealing their jobs,
• Gay and trans people are coming for their kids,
• Low or no taxes on billionaires will “trickle down” somehow despite forty-five years of evidence to the contrary,
• Deregulation will lower prices instead of raising them,
• Fossil fuels are essential and climate science is a hoax, and that
• Russia and Israel are our friends while Canada, Germany, and France are our enemies.

It’s a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.

And the scale of that robbery is genuinely staggering. The most recent RAND Corporation working paper by Carter Price, updated in 2025, calculates that since 1975 a cumulative $79 trillion has been “redistributed upward” from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.

In 2023 alone, the transfer to the morbidly rich was $3.9 trillion, enough to give every working American a $32,000/year raise. Meanwhile, we’re still the only developed country on earth without a national health care system, our kids go into a lifetime of debt to attend college, our infrastructure is crumbling, and we’re falling further behind Europe and China every year on the clean-energy transition that climate science says we have maybe a decade to get right.

Republicans don’t have any real answers for any of the crises we’re creating, because their actual policy agenda (more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists, more handouts to fossil fuels) both caused most of these problems and is also wildly unpopular when stated plainly.

So they manufacture the rage, pay the influencers, bias the algorithms, fund the think tanks, bankroll rightwing podcasts, radio and TV, and then coordinate and pay for the talking points in private group chats.

They have to do it this way because if American working people ever stopped to add up what’s actually been done to them over the past forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution, the political landscape would shift overnight.

This should be a national scandal. It should be the lead story on every progressive show, in every Democratic stump speech, in every union newsletter, and on every front page.

Ashley St. Clair has handed us a confession that Democrats need to use.

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts.

The Usual Links . . .

The US commentators I follow, all on Podbean and/or YouTube for free:-

• The Daily Beast Podcast/Video
• Inside Trump’s Head Podcast/Video
• The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent Podcast
• The Rest is Politics US Podcast/Video
• The DSR Network Podcast
• The Politics Girl Video. Amusing
• The Daily Show Video. Very amusing

You can get my posts by email as soon as they’re published. With the added bonus that they’ll contain the typos I’ll discover later. I believe there’s a box for this at the bottom of each post. If you do this but don’t read the posts, I will delete your subscription. So perhaps don’t bother if you have other reasons for subscribing . . .

I can also be read on X at Thoughts from Galicia. I no longer post on Facebook.

For new readers: If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there.

If you´re thinking of moving to Spain, this link should be useful to you.