DL Open Thread: Monday, May 25, 2026

An Interview With Delaware’s First Inspector General:

At this point it’s just me. But we’re actively engaged, we got another job announcement out this week. We’re going to staff up. We want to do that promptly. Particularly with a relatively small number of slots, we want to make sure that we’re getting great people who have the background and experience to do this work well. So, I’ve got three ‘job ones,’ and that’s one of them. Another one is standing up our website and our hotline. I’m trying to time things so that those sort of come together. So, when we hit go on the hotline, we’ll have people here who are ready to handle and process incoming stuff. We’ll do some sort of public announcement for that too. Then the third: reaching out to some of the government leaders. I don’t know people here in Delaware, but I need to get to know them and hear about what their concerns are.

Spoiler Alert:  The day the hotline and/or website goes public, I’m calling for an investigation of the Underwater City At Ft. DuPont.

When Is An Agreement Not An Agreement?  Uh, when ‘everything’s’ worked out except ‘everything’:

No one yet knows the details of the Iran deal that President Trump has been teasing on social media for the past day or so. The president himself has admonished his followers not to “listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.” But as this war stumbles to a close, it is clear that the president, too, is lost: He didn’t know what he was doing when he began it, and now he doesn’t know how to get out of it.

Only a day ago, Trump was trying to project confidence. Yesterday, he hailed an agreement with Iran as mostly done; it was, he said on his Truth Social site, “largely negotiated” and close to “finalization.” The Iranians, of course, immediately disputed this characterization, and by the next day, Trump was backpedaling. “If I make a deal with Iran,” he posted this afternoon, “it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon.” The agreement that was only a day earlier “largely negotiated” was now only a notional memorandum, and Trump griped that it was unfair to criticize it because “nobody has seen it, or knows what it is,” and it “isn’t even fully negotiated yet.”

Got it.  It’s ‘fair’ to hail an agreement, but not fair to criticize it because it hasn’t been ‘fully negotiated yet’.  Perhaps it’s just me, but someone should check out Trump’s stock trades over the weekend.  Which reminds me:

Trump’s A World-Class Kleptocrat:

Donald Trump last year amassed one big beautiful rap sheet of scandal and criminality, with multiple instances of corruption that made Teapot Dome look quaint. But the president’s bogus new “settlement” with his own administration’s IRS, which he had sued in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns in 2020, hits scorching new heights of depravity. The deal’s contours were bad enough when it looked like Trump was simply going to take a small fortune of taxpayer money and line his own pockets. But that was last week: The new plan is for $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to be set aside as a slush fund, which Trump will effectively control, to pay out to January 6 insurrectionists and political cronies that he believes were wronged back when the Department of Justice wasn’t his mobbed-up plaything. Some of the worst people in America are already lining up for payouts.

The Trump White House is a kleptocratic organ, pure and simple—one that increasingly resembles authoritarian regimes around the world. “This new slush fund is no different than what we see in other kleptocracies,” Casey Michel, frequent TNR contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, told me. “It’s a ruling figure creating a new pot of wealth that they can use for whatever they want—in this case, paying off a bunch of insurrectionists who Trump can now transform into his own personal paramilitary, without any oversight or checks whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen in U.S. history—but is perfectly familiar to those who study autocracy around the world.”

There is, however, a key distinction between Trump and the scores of foreign kleptocrats that Michel has spent years studying: “The only difference here is that most foreign kleptocrats at least try to hide their tracks—instead of broadcasting them to the world, like we’re seeing with Trump.” While most criminals endeavor to keep the newspapers from finding out about their intention to commit crimes, Trump does it in plain sight—either because he’s incredibly stupid or because the Supreme Court has told him he’s wholly immune from prosecution. (It’s probably both.)

But the newspapers’ early coverage of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is troubling. If sanewashing was last year’s problem in the political press, sinwashing might be the au courant media malady. The initial coverage from The New York Times suggested that the scheme merely “could funnel money to Trump allies,” even though this was its expressed purpose. The news department also couldn’t bring itself to call it a slush fund, instead drafting “critics” to say what is plainly and objectively true (the paper’s editorial board at least named it appropriately). Elsewhere, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal found a useful euphemism, referring to the settlement’s arrangement as merely “unusual” instead of nakedly criminal. (TNR’s headline, if you’re keeping score, nailed it: “Trump Just Launched a Taxpayer-Funded $1.8 Billion MAGA Slush Fund.”) 

More Trump Kleptocracy–Georgian-Style.  No, not the state, the country:

A Trump Tower planned for the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, is to be built on land currently part-owned by the son of the US-sanctioned leader of the country, according to official records.

The proposed skyscraper, a joint venture between a local consortium and the Trump Organization, which is managed by the US president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, will be on a plot whose current registered owner is the International Charity Fund Cartu.

According to official records, the Fund Cartu is solely owned by Cartu Group JSC which, in turn, is 35% owned by Uta Ivanishvili, the eldest son of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire politician who is honorary chair of Georgia’s ruling party.

Bidzina Ivanishvili, who is widely recognised as the de facto leader of the Georgian government, was put under US sanctions by the Biden administration in 2024 for “undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation”.

Who better to do business with?

The links between the Trump Organization and the Ivanishvili family will raise fresh concerns about the potential conflict of interest raised by the selling of the US president’s name to developers seeking to sell residential and resort complexes.

Similar franchise agreements struck by the Trump Organization include a luxury hotel and golf course complex in Oman, which is being built on land owned by the country’s government.

That project and three others are in partnership with a subsidiary of a Saudi-based real estate company, Dar Al Arkan, which has close ties with the Saudi government, the New York Times reported last year. The White House has said that “neither the president nor his family” have “ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest”.

They wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.

Well, the weekend was a washout.  Still, let’s dust off this Four Freshmen-era Beach Boys tune to usher in the season:

What do you want to talk about?