The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Trump administration was negotiating trade policy with 130 countries.
Host Jake Tapper said, “What do you say to small business owners or even big business owners who say they’re having difficulty making long-term business decisions because the country seems right now to be run by capricious whim?”
Hassett said, “Oh, I don’t think at all that it’s run by a capricious whim. The way that I would think about it is that in the previous administration, you could sort of say, if you’re thinking about it in the football analogy, is that they were running out the clock and that what’s going on now in the Trump administration is across a wide array of policy areas. We’re in a two-minute offense, and the two-minute offense is pushing, as you’ve seen, the reconciliation bill through so that we get tax relief for American people, deregulation and trade policy.”
He added, “Now, on the trade policy, the whole point of the trade policy is to address the national emergency that we’re too dependent on foreign products in the U.S., especially if we were at a time of conflict and we’re doing something about that. The reciprocal act was basically, guys, if you come to the table and negotiate us with us and treat us the same way we treat you, then we’ll you’ll get your rate really low. And so right now 130 countries, 130 countries have responded, and we’re negotiating with them. And they’ve got their rate down to 10%. So, really, it’s almost a two-world system. There’s a process about China that’s very, very nascent, if at all, and then the process for everybody else. So the process for everybody else is orderly. It’s clear, people are coming to town with great, great offers.”
Comedian Bill Maher delivered a glowing and unexpected review of his recent private dinner with President Donald Trump, revealing during his HBO show Friday that the president was personable, self-aware, and even humorous — leaving Maher “blown away” by the encounter, the New York Post reported.
On “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host devoted part of his opening monologue to recounting what he described as a surreal and surprisingly pleasant evening.
“Everything I’ve not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent — at least on this night, with this guy,” Maher, 69, said.
He said he felt more comfortable talking with Trump than he ever would with Presidents Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, despite having voted for both Democrats.
Maher said he entered the White House ready for confrontation, bringing with him a printed list of Trump’s past insults, including “sleaze-bag” and “low-life dummy.” He intended to see whether the president would sign it.
“I brought this to the White House because I wanted him to sign it, which he did … with good humor,” Maher said, holding up the signed document to applause from the studio audience. “And I know that as I say that, millions of liberal sphincters just tightened.”
The comedian also shared that Trump gave him multiple “Make America Great Again” hats — which Maher clarified were handed out in the same room where Clinton allegedly had trysts with Monica Lewinsky. Still, Maher said he didn’t feel pressured to “go MAGA.”
Maher described Trump as gracious and attentive, which he said was unlike many public figures with whom he’s interacted.
“I’ve had so many conversations with prominent people who are much less connected: people that don’t look you in the eye, people that don’t really listen because they just want to get to their next thing, people whose response to things you say just doesn’t track — none of that with him,” he said.
Maher said Trump led with curiosity, frequently asking, “What do you think about this?” and appeared to engage genuinely, even when the conversation turned heated — such as when Maher criticized Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.
“He didn’t get mad or call me a left-wing lunatic. He took it in,” Maher said.
Maher said that the evening’s “most surreal” moment was turning on the television afterward to see Trump in full campaign mode.
“Who’s that guy? And why can’t we get the guy I met to be the public guy?
“A crazy person does not live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is f****d up; it’s just not as f****d up as I thought it was.”
Maher said the dinner was arranged by Kid Rock and also attended by UFC President Dana White.
Jim Thomas is a writer based in Indiana. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, a law degree from U.I.C. Law School, and has practiced law for more than 20 years.
Obama appointed judge orders Trump to imprison all who didn’t vote Democrat.” Coming next?
Where does it end?
Under our current situation, you need only 1 leftist federal judge to reverse everything Trump does. This is still not America.
Trump has been told he cannot use his executive authority to deport people who have violated our immigration laws. Obama and Biden judges feel that if a law is unjust, then no President has a right to enforce it. This means judges — federal circuit court judges, not even the Supreme Court — have a right to abolish or create laws at will.
Similarly, and absurdly, circuit court judges nowhere near D.C. have ruled that President Trump must have members of the Communist media in the White House press room. Would a judge in San Francisco or Portland, OR, have a right to tell a private citizen which media he must watch, or be interviewed by — much less a President?
It’s truly insane. The Obama (and Biden) years installed a coup that won’t stop.
At some point, as wonderful as Trump’s presidency is so far, we’re going to need a revolution. People will have to be arrested and stopped in their open, brazen efforts to bring down what’s left of our Constitution and our free republic.
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Elon Musk, of the Department of Government Efficiency, has asserted that his goal is to cut some $1 trillion of “waste and fraud” from annual federal spending. Skeptics of the effort say that that’s just not possible, mainly because almost half of federal spending constitutes the “entitlements” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and some smaller health insurance programs — and President Trump has pledged not to cut those. Add something close to $1 trillion for defense, and another close to $1 trillion for interest on the national debt, and the remainder (less than $2 trillion) doesn’t leave nearly enough room for a trillion of cuts.
But here’s the missing piece: What if there are large amounts of fraud in the entitlement programs? Trump hasn’t pledged not to go after that. Could the amounts of such fraud be significant in the context of the huge numbers at issue? I don’t fully know the answer to that question; but today I’ll look at one example involving very big numbers where obvious fraud is hiding in plain sight.
First, a look at the big picture numbers. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has on its website an overview of federal spending dated January 28, 2025, providing figures for fiscal year 2024 (which ended on September 30, 2024). The big categories:
– Federal spending for fiscal year 2024 was approximately $6.9 trillion.
– Health insurance entitlements (Medicare, Medicare, CHIP, and Obamacare subsidies totaled $1.7 trillion, or 24% of spending.
– Social Security totaled $1.5 trillion, or 21% of spending.
– Defense totaled $872 billion, or 15% of spending.
– Interest on the debt was about $892 million, or another 15% of spending.
– The remainder added up to $1.936 trillion.
And now, here’s a good place to start looking for fraud in the entitlements. In New York we have something called the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program. Bloomberg had a piece about it in July 2024, which is behind paywall, but Newsweek re-wrote the story here. The idea, supposedly, was that we could use Medicaid funds to pay relatives like spouses and children to take care of their infirm relatives, and thus save the costs of professional aides, let alone nursing homes. From Newsweek:
“Oftentimes, ideas that start with the best of intentions can be taken advantage of in the wrong hands,” Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek. “With home health, some states like New York thought it would be a good idea to allow family members and friends to get paid for providing home health assistance to loved ones using Medicaid and Medicare dollars.
So what’s the problem?
[Beene]: “The problem is now you have individuals taking advantage of a pretty liberal, open-ended process for determining who qualifies.”
It seems that the program to let family members become the home health aides got going in 2015.
In 2015, the eligibility rules changed, and the number of people getting care skyrocketed from 20,000 to 250,000.
And that was just the start. Here’s what Newsweek says were the relevant stats for the period 2019-2024:
[T]he money going to this program triple[d] across the span of the last five years, and home health jobs are [in 2024] considered to make up 12 percent of New York City’s private sector jobs, Bloomberg reported.
The occasion for the Bloomberg and Newsweek pieces in 2024 was an interview given to Bloomberg by New York Governor Kathy Hochul in July of that year. In the interview, Hochul appeared to recognize that the home health care aide situation had gotten out of hand and needed to be reined in. From the Newsweek piece:
[Hochul said,] “The problem is now you have individuals taking advantage of a pretty liberal, open-ended process for determining who qualifies.” Hochul told Bloomberg that the program was being abused so much that it now makes up the majority of New York City’s job increases. . . . “I’m telling you right now, when you look on TikTok and you see ads of young people saying, ‘Guess what, you can make $37 an hour by sitting home with your Grandma. You know, here’s how you sign up,’ it has become a racket,” Hochul told Bloomberg.
So less than a year ago, Governor Hochul had recognized this as a “racket.” Surely then she did something to get it under control? Not at all. Instead, it appears that she has switched sides, and in ongoing budget negotiations this year is supporting a vast increase in Medicaid spending to continue funding this racket, among many other things. The New York Post had an editorial on April 6. Excerpt:
In a tale all too typical of Albany, Gov. Kathy Hochul a year or so ago was pushing to rein in out-of-control state Medicaid spending on home health aides, only to since switch sides with an eye on her re-election run next year. Now Medicaid outlays are set to soar at least 17% in the next budget, while the aide ranks are soaring and indeed are by far the single largest job category in all New York.
The Post collects some truly incredible statistics from a Report issued by the Empire Center think tank on April 3. The Empire Center Report is based on federal BLS data issued on April 2, although the data only go up to May 2024. From the Empire Center:
New York’s home health employment is continuing to soar, growing by 57,000 jobs or 10 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to newly released data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state’s workforce of home health and personal care aides grew to an estimated 623,000 as of May 2024, according to BLS. . . .
From 20,000 in 2015 to 623,000 in 2024. Thanks, federal taxpayers, for picking up more than half of the tab. The Empire Center Report shows New York as by far the highest in the country in the number of these home health care aides per capita:
[New York has] 171 aides per 1,000 residents aged 65 or older, which was the highest rate in the U.S. – 153 percent higher than the national average and 24 percent ahead of the No. 2 state, California.
Over this period, the job category of home health aide has become far and away the largest job category in New York State. Here is a chart from the Empire Center Report, derived from BLS data, of the largest job categories in New York in 2024:
There are almost three times as many of these home health aides as all jobs in retail sales!
The Post attributes Governor Hochul’s switch of sides substantially to her buying the support of a health care union known as “Local 1199” (of the SEIU) in the run-up to her re-election campaign next year. Local 1199 hopes to unionize the home health aides to get hundreds of thousands of new dues-paying members, and then to engage in collusive wage negotiations where the bill will be paid substantially by the federal taxpayers.
I don’t know all the other examples of fraud in the entitlement programs. But if one this big and this obvious is just allowed to metastasize for years without any attempt at oversight, there are likely to be plenty of others.
NATO is a corpse. All that remains is the grotesque performance art of a diplomatic zombie stumbling from summit to summit, mouthing tired clichés about “shared values” and “burden sharing,” even as its core strategic logic lies rotting beneath the surface. The Atlantic Alliance, once the steel scaffolding of Western security, has become a hollow ritual. Its military readiness is an illusion. Its political cohesion is fraying. Its future, if it has one, lies not in revival—but in reinvention or replacement.
This is not a triumphalist declaration from the Kremlin or Beijing. It is a sober diagnosis, grounded in realism and restraint. And it should be a wake-up call in Washington, Ottawa, Berlin, and beyond.
NATO’s death was not caused by Donald Trump, though he may soon become its undertaker. Nor was it caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, though that war has exposed the Alliance’s hollowness in ways no war game or communique ever could. The real cause lies in decades of European free-riding, American strategic drift, and a foundational lie at the heart of the Alliance: the idea that an empire can masquerade as a collective defense pact without consequences.
Let’s start with the numbers. Most NATO members still do not meet the 2 percent of GDP defense spending benchmark, despite years of promises and performative panic. Canada, which has taken freeloading to an art form, has shown no serious intention of meeting its obligations. As I’ve written elsewhere, Trudeau’s empty pledges mask a decaying defense industrial base, a stagnant recruiting system, and an Arctic strategy made of snow and sentiment.
Germany—the economic motor of Europe—still can’t field a combat-ready army for more than a few weeks at a time. The Bundeswehr is a shell. Its special fund is already mostly spent, and its political class remains addicted to strategic ambiguity and military minimalism. France wants “strategic autonomy” but lacks the scale and will to lead Europe alone. Poland, despite its impressive rearmament, cannot carry the continent’s defense burden on its shoulders—certainly not while Berlin dithers and Washington increasingly looks west, not east.
Meanwhile, the United States—still NATO’s military backbone—faces a fiscal cliff, a recruitment crisis, and an overstretched force posture. The era of limitless resources is over. American global primacy has ended. Multipolarity has arrived. The U.S. must now prioritize. And that means making hard choices about where its forces are truly needed—and where others must finally step up or face the consequences.
The war in Ukraine has laid these contradictions bare. NATO as an institution is not fighting the war. The United States is. Some European countries are helping—but most are hedging. NATO has been bypassed in favor of bilateral and ad hoc coalitions. Article 5 hasn’t been tested, and it may never be. The idea that NATO is “more united than ever” is a comforting fiction, trotted out to conceal the fact that the Alliance can no longer mount a serious, conventional defense of Europe without massive and prolonged American escalation.
Even the so-called Nordic expansion—Sweden and Finland joining NATO—has not changed the equation. It’s a strategic sideshow. Unless Europe can build up a credible, conventional deterrent in the East, without expecting Washington to always bail it out, the Alliance will remain a Potemkin village: flags, acronyms, and summits without substance.
Trump’s likely return to the White House in 2025 should not be viewed as a cataclysm but as an overdue reckoning. He will not end NATO. He will force Europe to decide whether it is willing to pay for its own defense or not. He will not blow up the Alliance. He will make it answer for its contradictions. And that, frankly, is what a serious ally should do.
Some critics will scream that this is the death knell of the “rules-based international order.” But the order they mourn was already breaking down—long before Trump, long before Ukraine, long before Brexit or Crimea. What we are witnessing is not a collapse but a transition: from the illusion of Atlanticism to the reality of multipolarity. And NATO, if it is to matter at all in this new world, must either become a true European-led military alliance with American support—or fade into history like SEATO and CENTO before it.
This doesn’t mean abandoning Europe to Russian domination. It means telling uncomfortable truths. Europe is rich. Europe is populous. Europe is not helpless. The United States can and should support its European allies—but it should not subsidize their illusions indefinitely. A more self-reliant Europe is not a threat to American interests; it is a precondition for strategic focus on the North Pacific, the Arctic, and the Western Hemisphere—where the real contests of the 21st century will be
In my writing here and elsewhere, I have repeatedly argued that Canada must stop pretending it is a global power and start acting like what it is: a North Pacific, Arctic, and North Atlantic state. That means prioritizing regional defense, rebuilding naval and aerospace capabilities, and getting serious about continental defense. NATO is not the vehicle for that anymore—if it ever was. For Canada, continuing to hide behind NATO rhetoric while failing to meet even the most basic obligations is not only cowardly—it is dangerous.
A dead NATO still carries risks. Strategic ambiguity, brittle expectations, and performative deterrence are a recipe for miscalculation. The Alliance’s political leadership must either acknowledge the need for transformation or risk a future crisis that reveals, in real time and in blood, what we already know: that the emperor has no tanks.
The solution is not sentimental nostalgia. It is clear-eyed realism. NATO in its current form is not worth saving. But its core idea—collective defense among likeminded powers—still has value. What’s needed is a reset: a reimagined Euro-Atlantic security framework led by capable European states, with American support but not American dominance. A NATO that deters by capability, not by assumption. A NATO that can say no as well as yes. A NATO, in short, that lives in the real world.
The alternative is strategic decay. A slow slide into irrelevance. More summits, more selfies, more hollow communiqués. Until, one day, NATO doesn’t die with a bang—but with a bureaucratic whimper.
That future is already here. NATO is dead. The only question now is what comes next—and whether we have the courage to build it.
Why must President Trump get the Supreme Court’s permission to run the executive branch of government?
Trading and dealing with people in totalitarian countries is like dealing with mobsters. It’s not that the people in those countries are necessarily bad; but their rulers are. China is not a free country. China is a totalitarian government. Workers in China are borderline (if not actual) slaves. They work not for their own benefit, but for the welfare of their rulers. They operate only with the consent of the government. If you live in a free country, it’s an absurd delusion to claim you are “trading” with slaves. You are never trading with workers or business people in a Communist or fascist country, like China; it’s all an illusion perpetrated by the totalitarian government. The only appropriate policy of a free country toward a slave country’s government is to do everything possible (economically or even militarily) to undermine or destroy that government. At a minimum, you don’t trade with them, because it’s no different than doing business with mobsters. It WILL come back to bite you. Everything Trump is doing to the Chinese government at present is morally justified and long overdue.
Before you get FREE TRADE you must first have FREE COUNTRIES. China is not free.
At the height of the Cold War, Playboy magazine asked free market thinker and Russian author Ayn Rand, “Would you actively advocate that the United States invade Cuba or the Soviet Union?”
Rand replied, “Not at present. I don’t think it’s necessary. I would advocate that which the Soviet Union fears above all else: economic boycott, I would advocate a blockade of Cuba and an economic boycott of Soviet Russia; and you would see both of those regimes collapse without the loss of a single American life.”
I find it interesting that the globalist, pseudocapitalist Ayn Rand Institute denounces every aspect of Trump’s foreign and economic policy. And yet: Rand’s proposed economic boycott and blockade of Soviet Russia and Communist Cuba are more strenuous than Trump’s tariffs on China. The 21st Century Ayn Rand Institute, if consistent, would be forced to complain that Ayn Rand’s proposed economic boycott of Soviet Russia back in 1960 would be a violation of the economic individual rights of Americans to trade with the victims and slaves living under dictatorship.
More evidence that the Ayn Rand Institute and Ayn Rand have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 