Substacks
TGIF: Make America Pray Again Nellie Bowles

Welcome back. I feel like this was a quiet week, in a good way. We deserve it.
→ Trump cash comes in: Truth Social went public under the ticker DJT and popped like a meme stock, suddenly worth $7.9 billion. A meme stock is one driven by vibes and silliness rather than sound financial judgment and is a very special phenomenon of our era, where the money is so plentiful, the debt so intangible, the market so malleable. Trumpo’s stake is worth some $3 billion, though as a good meme stock, and like the former president himself, DJT is going to fluctuate wildly. But this ought to take some of the financial strain off him, right? Well, just in case, just to be sure, Trump has launched another product: the Trump Bible. It’s called God Bless the USA Bible. He explains: “It’s very important to me. I want to have a lot of people have it. You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.”
And: “Make America Pray Again.” Yes, our QVC president strikes again. I can imagine the megachurches now. “Can everyone turn to page Bald Eagle to recite the Hymn for the RINOs.” “Blessed are the Lamestream, for they shall inherit the earth. Amen.”
→ Trump’s hefty tariff plan: After you buy your God Bless the USA Bible, get ready to write a $1,500 check to God Bless America. A Democratic group calculated the cost of Trump’s proposed 10 percent tariff on all imported goods, and it’s pretty hefty. I love the idea of everything made in America. That sounds so nice, right? Nice, hefty products. But the thing is, I love the reality of cheap goods made in India and Indonesia and Mexico. And if that offends you, I ask you simply to look in your closet. My clothes are so cheaply made that putting them in the dryer means saying goodbye. My clothes are made to be worn three, maybe four times, before little holes develop along the seams. I buy headphones by the dozen. I buy t-shirts in packs, and they smell like factory chemicals from distant lands. I like it this way.
→ Mexico enjoying the upper hand: With docile, slightly senile Biden in office and his extremely sharp Open Borders Now staff running the border with ruthless efficiency (i.e., always open, 24/7, jobs lined up at the factories that fired all their subversive, Trump-curious American workers), Mexico realizes that it’s in a rare and very special position: that of the upper hand. Mexico can finally start to dream a little dream, one in which American taxpayers not only take anyone in Mexico who wants to move north but also pay a lot of cash to the area around Mexico and also embrace all the corrupt communist regimes nearby.
The longer I consider this, the more I think Mexico is right and we need to go even further: the solution is to eliminate the border between America and Mexico. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the true open border: America taking over Mexico. I’m talking about old-fashioned land expansion. If the border is so cruel, then how about we absorb that nation like an amoeba, take their beaches, make their rich pay taxes to us, and put Texas in charge of the transition. Consider it!
→ RFK Jr. announces his VP: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. picked his running mate this week. She’s Nicole Shanahan, an attorney and entrepreneur who was once married to Google founder Sergey Brin (huh! random!) and also has publicly denied having an affair with Elon Musk. Which at least means that someone suspected they had an affair—no one has ever asked me to deny an affair with Elon Musk—so I’m jealous of Nicole Shanahan, who is living large and living wild.
RFK Jr. said of her: “I wanted a vice president who shared my passion for wholesome, healthy foods, chemical-free; for regenerative agriculture; for good soils.” And: “She understands that the health of every American is a national security issue and a national security risk.” Unsaid: she has access to many millions, if not billions, of dollars.
Now I’ve been mostly jokey about RFK Jr.’s race for the presidency but those days are a-changing. You can call it a flip flop; I call it evolution. The guy’s really running. His new promotional video worked really well on me this week, and I like that he chose a vice president for her physical fitness and money and because she surfs. And while I don’t think RFK has a real chance, similar to how Marianne Williamson brings conversations about love to the stage, RFK might normalize talking about environmental toxins and how Big Pharma pushes us to drugs instead of lifestyle changes. I genuinely am interested in that. For example, I just ate Starbucks egg bites for breakfast—do we think those are 1/3 plastic shards? Half? And another thing I’ve been wondering about is [REDACTED]. Not in a weird way, but I have wanted to read more on [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], since the frogs are gay.
Substacks
It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.
The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.
Substacks
Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?
Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?
Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.
Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.
“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.
Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.
What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.
They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.
Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.
So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.
Substacks
Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.
States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?
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