Don Colossus Is Painting a Pool While the Empire Crumbles. Tuesdayâs throughline was simple: a President playing with paint while his own intelligence community tells him the war is lost, the regime is broke, and the country he tried to abandon is the only one that can save him now. Last Thursday, May 7, Trumpâs motorcade drove directly across the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool so he could inspect the âAmerican flag blueâ paint he ordered applied to it. He got out, held up construction photos like a real estate developer, and told the press the gray stone was ânever good.â When a reporter asked why he was focused on a pool while weâre bombing Iran, he snapped: âOur country is about beauty, cleanliness, safety, great people. Not a filthy capital.â What the regime would prefer you not notice: Trump said the project would cost about $2 million. The NYT then reported the actual contract is more than $13 million. The Cultural Landscape Foundation filed a federal lawsuit Monday to halt it â the administration skipped the legally required environmental and historic-preservation review. Heâs also planning to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. He demolished the East Wing for a ballroom. Heâs âworking onâ the Lincoln Memorial itself. And looming over all of it: the Don Colossus. The statues, the monuments, the pathological need to leave physical imprints on every surface of the capital. This is not a man planning the future. This is a man building his own mausoleum in real time, trying to overwrite the historical verdict in paint and stone. What is he distracting from? Stories 2 and 3. While Trump was driving an SUV through a pool, Robert Kagan â yes, that Kagan, the PNAC co-founder who spent thirty years arguing for exactly this kind of war â published a piece in The Atlantic titled âCheckmate in Iran.â When the architects of forever-war are writing the obituary, the war is over. Kaganâs argument: the US and Israel pounded Iran for 37 days, killed much of its leadership, destroyed the bulk of its military, and couldnât collapse the regime or extract a single concession. The turning point came on March 18, when Israel bombed Iranâs South Pars gas field, and Iran retaliated by attacking Qatarâs Ras Laffan â the worldâs largest natural-gas-export plant â causing damage that will take years to repair. Trump quietly declared a ceasefire. Iran conceded nothing. The kicker, per Kagan: Trump has reportedly asked the U.S. intelligence community to assess the consequences of simply declaring victory and walking away. Heâs polling his own spies on how to frame a defeat as a win. Thatâs the dereliction of duty. He started a war he couldnât finish, lost it in six weeks, and is treating the cleanup as a PR exercise. Now, the part the regime really doesnât want you to see. Today â Tuesday, May 12 â Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, landed in Kyiv and met with Zelensky and Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Karp is not a peace activist. He runs the company whose Maven Smart System is the targeting platform the U.S. military uses for combat operations in Iran and Venezuela. Trump himself has publicly praised Palantirâs âwar capabilities.â This is the Trump regimeâs defence-industrial complex walking into Kyiv with its hat in its hand. Whatâs on the table: a platform called Brave1 Dataroom where 100+ companies are training 80+ AI models for drone detection and interception â trained on Ukrainian battlefield data accumulated since 2022. Per Fedorov, the cooperation also covers AI for intelligence processing and planning deep-strike operations inside Russia. Translate that: Ukraine has four years of the most valuable real-world AI-warfare data on the planet. None of it exists at the Pentagon, in Tel Aviv, or in Beijing. And Karp â who supplies the U.S. militaryâs targeting software â flew to Kyiv to ask for access. Zelenskyâs response was diplomatic ice: âThere certainly are areas where we can be useful to one another.â That is the language of a partner who knows he has the leverage now. The reason the regime is quietly sucking up to Ukraine isnât conscience â itâs that Trumpâs intelligence community is telling him what his ego canât process: Russia is on the verge. The receipts, all from today: Russia downgraded 2026 GDP growth from 1.3% to 0.4%. The economy contracted 0.3% in Q1 â the first quarterly decline since early 2023. A state-owned pollster shows Putinâs approval at 65.6%, down from 77.8% in January and from prewar levels above 80%. Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory last month, the first time since 2024. Putin scaled back the Victory Day parade in Red Square because he couldnât guarantee Ukrainian drones wouldnât reach Moscow. The most damning quote, from a Russian official to WaPo: âItâs been going on for longer than World War II, the Great Patriotic War â and we canât even take one region.â The Trump regime â the same people who humiliated Zelensky in the Oval, cut aid, parroted Kremlin talking points â has finally read the intelligence and figured out what their war planners knew six months ago: The US and the world need Ukraine far more than Ukraine needs us. The regime would like a re-do. They will not get one for free. A president painting reflecting pools blue while the architects of forever-war call Iran a checkmate, his targeting-software CEO begs Kyiv for data, and his pollster shows Putin cratering. This is what the end of an empireâs pretense looks like. Not one dramatic collapse â a bunch of small, embarrassing tells, all in the same week. The Don Colossus is painting a pool because he has nothing else left to build. See you Thursday at 10:30 AM EST. Bring coffee. Bring receipts. â Dean Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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