Narco-State That
Became a Bank Account
We Were Promised a Drug War. We Got an Offshore Account.
Sixty-seven boats destroyed. Thirteen billion dollars collected.
And the one account nobody in this country is allowed to audit.
IMAGINATION LIBRARY 332 million+ books, five countries
FOUNDED 1995, for a father who could not read
VACCINE RESEARCH $1 million
SMOKIES FIRES, 2016 $1,000 a month, per displaced family
HURRICANE HELENE $1M personal, $1M from her companies
DOLLYWOOD Full college tuition for employees
THE LEDGER, ITEM BY ITEM
WE WENT FOR THE CARTELS. WE CAME HOME WITH THE OIL.
THE DRUGS ARE STILL MOVING. THE MONEY IS STILL MISSING.
AN AMERICAN SEIZURE BELONGS IN AN AMERICAN BANK.
WHERE IS THE MONEY? WHERE ARE THE DRUGS?
ANSWER THE PEOPLE WHO PAID FOR IT.
WHAT WE WERE TOLD. Venezuela was a
narco-state and its president a cartel boss. On
that premise, American forces struck Caracas
on January 3 and flew Nicolás Maduro to New
York. Congress never voted on it. When five
Republicans joined Democrats to force the
question, the Vice President broke the tie to
kill it.
WHAT WAS PROVEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Nothing yet. Maduro pleaded not guilty, and
the case is pending. The premise was thin before
the first shot. DEA data put the Caribbean
corridor at roughly 8 percent of seaborne cocaine
leaving South America, most of it bound
for Europe. Venezuela appears in no DEA National
Drug Threat Assessment as a fentanyl
source or transit country. The SOUTHCOM
commander told lawmakers in March that
boat strikes are not the answer. Sixty-seven
vessels were destroyed, 221 people were
killed, and the traffickers rerouted.
WHAT WE TOOK. Ten oil tankers were boarded
or seized. One hundred fifty million barrels
were sold by April. More than $13 billion was
collected by late July.
WHERE IT WENT. Not the U.S. Treasury, at
least not at first. The opening $500 million
landed in a Qatari bank, described by an official
as neutral ground beyond any risk of seizure.
But Executive Order 14373 had already
blocked the creditors under an emergency the
President declared himself. So the offshore account
was not shielding the money from them.
It was shielding it from American courts.
About $3 billion is accounted for. Ten billion is
not. Two of the trading houses that were hired
had previously been prosecuted for bribery.
In February, the Treasury Secretary promised
Congress the statutory authority. By March 11,
it still had not come.
We took the oil by force and banked it where
no American judge can reach it.
THE PARDON THAT DOES NOT FIT. On
December 1, 2025, one month before the drug
war began, this President pardoned Juan Orlando
Hernández, former president of Honduras,
convicted of moving more than 400
tons of cocaine and serving 45 years. Same
crime. Same hemisphere. Opposite outcome.
WHAT IT COST. Brown University’s Costs of
War project put Southern Spear and Absolute
Resolve at a minimum of $4.7 billion through
March 31, $3.8 billion of it naval, and called
that figure conservative. The Pentagon refuses
to give Congress a number at all.
WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED. Maduro’s
own vice president governs, unelected. No
free elections have been announced. Inflation
was 475 percent last year. Roughly 90
percent of the country is in poverty. Three
months’ minimum wage does not buy one
dollar. June earthquakes killed more than
5,000, and $386 million in aid moved while
$13 billion sat in a bank.
AND IT WAS NEVER ARGENTINA. Argentina
is Level 1. Go tomorrow. The country
we liberated is Level 3, with seven states still
marked Do Not Travel and visas issued from
Bogotá.
THE EDITOR’S OPINION. No court has
found corruption here, and I allege none. But
I have seen this shape before, and the questions
below are not rhetorical. They are unanswered.
THREE QUESTIONS NOBODY WILL ANSWER.
Where are the drugs? Sixty-seven
boats were destroyed. Two hundred twenty-
one people are dead. The routes moved; the
cocaine did not stop. No public evidence has
yet tied a single shipment to the man we took.
Where is the money? Thirteen billion was collected.
Three billion is explained. Ten billion is
behind a seal no American judge is permitted
to break.
And why a foreign bank? That question answers
the other two. A seizure made by American
forces, paid for by American taxpayers,
belongs in the American Treasury, on an
American ledger, in front of an American
court. In 1989, we invaded Panama, took a dictator
on drug charges, and found the money
in Panamanian banks, but those assets went
through courts. There is exactly one reason to
send this money to Qatar instead: so that nobody
here can look at it. The cartels used foreign
banks for the same reason. They simply
never called it foreign policy.
THE HONEST PART. Maduro was a tyrant
who stole an election, and some of this money
has paid Venezuelan salaries under a continuing
audit. Fine. Then publish the authority,
publish the ledger, and let a judge look.
A TRIBUTE
The Woman Who Never
Asked Your Party
She Just Mailed the Book.
Sixty years in public life, a coalition wider than either party’s,
and not one loyalty oath. Washington should study the tape.
The Failed Trump/MAGA Movement
The Voters Got Promises. The Insiders Got Everything.
Nineteen months in, one side of this bargain has been paid in full,
and it was not the side that voted.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear
in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only
tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents may
themselves have been used by someone else
who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi: The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.
A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
“Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it.”
Sources: Forbes “World’s Billionaires” (Mar. 2026); USDA ERS Food Price Outlook (Aug. 2026); NBC News grocery tracker
(Aug. 19, 2026); Purdue Consumer Food Insights; Economist/YouGov (Aug. 7–10, 2026); Reuters (Oct. 23, 2025); Public
Citizen; Senate letters of Oct. 22, 2025; PBS NewsHour (Apr. 2026).
Sources: Executive Order 14373; Treasury and OFAC general licenses; DEA National Drug Threat
Assessment; Costs of War Project, Brown University; Semafor; CNN; Reuters; House Financial Services
Committee correspondence; U.S. Department of State.
SHE STARTED WITH A DEBT SHE COULD
NOT REPAY. Dolly Rebecca Parton was born
January 19, 1946, in Sevier County, Tennessee,
one of twelve children in a mountain
cabin. Her father could not read. In 1995, she
founded the Imagination Library in his honor,
mailing free books to children from birth until
kindergarten. When she died in Nashville
on August 25 at eighty, the program had gifted
more than 332 million books to over three
million children across five countries. The
book is addressed to the child, not the parent.
Her family asked that flowers be sent as donations
to it instead.
THE LEDGER NOBODY MADE HER PUBLISH.
A million dollars that helped fund
COVID vaccine research. A thousand dollars
a month to families burned out of the Smokies
in 2016. A million of her own after Hurricane
Helene, with a million more from her businesses.
Full college tuition for Dollywood employees.
The Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy
in 2022. None of it appropriated. None of it
borrowed. She spent her own money, then
went back to work.
SHE DECLINED THE HONORS SHE HAD
EARNED. Twice she turned down the Presidential
Medal of Freedom. In 2021, she asked
the Tennessee legislature to hold off on a statue
of her at the Capitol, not while there was
work left to do. Read that beside a renamed
plaza and a fresh bronze inscription, and note
carefully who paid for which.
SHE WAS NOBODY’S FOOL. She retained
her publishing rights while the industry was
taking everyone else’s, and walked away from
an Elvis recording rather than surrender half
of “I Will Always Love You.” Generosity was
never naivety. It never is.
AND SHE NEVER ASKED YOUR PARTY.
She spent half a century in the brightest light
in America, and no one could reliably say how
she voted. She kept it that way on purpose.
The result was that a coal miner and a college
professor could sing the same chorus and
both mean it. She did not build that audience
by agreeing with everyone. She built it by refusing
to sort them.
Three hundred thirty-two million books, and
not one of them billed to the taxpayer.
Three hundred thirty-two
million books, and not one of
them billed to the taxpayer.
That is the whole lesson, and it is not complicated.
SHE NEVER ASKED WHICH WAY YOU VOTED.
SHE ONLY ASKED WHETHER YOUR CHILD COULD READ.
SET THE BAR WHERE SHE LEFT IT.
NO PARTY OWNS THIS ONE.
LEAD LIKE DOLLY.
Sources: family statement and obituary notices, Aug. 25, 2026; Dolly Parton’s Imagination
Library; Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy; contemporaneous news accounts.
WHAT THEY RAN ON. Prices down starting
on day one. The war ended in twenty-four
hours. The files released. The swamp drained.
Each of those promises was made plainly,
from a stage, to people who believed it enough
to stand in line in the cold.
WHAT WAS DELIVERED. Food cost 3.0 percent
more this July than a year earlier. Ground
beef is up 18 percent since January 2025, and
orange juice is up 20 percent. Health premiums
rose by roughly a quarter when the
enhanced credits lapsed. Food insecurity
reached 13.3 percent overall and 46 percent
among SNAP households. Consumer optimism
hit an all-time low this month. The debt
is past $39.9 trillion. The Epstein files were
ordered released by a 427-to-1 vote, and the
measure was signed into law in November,
but they still need a judge to pry them loose.
The Iran war is still running. Approval this
month: 33 percent.
AND WHAT THE INSIDERS GOT. Forbes put
the president’s fortune at $6.5 billion in March,
up $1.4 billion in a year, roughly $1.8 billion of
it from cryptocurrency, including about $550
million from selling the family venture’s own
tokens. On the administration’s first full day,
the SEC opened a crypto task force; cases
against that venture’s investors and partners
were dropped or settled. An Emirati state fund
moved $2 billion into Binance using the family
stablecoin. The envoy who co-founded the
venture still held his stake ten months in. In
October, the president pardoned Binance’s
founder, whose company had pleaded guilty
and paid $4.3 billion.
A movement is judged by who got paid. This
one paid its founders and billed its believers.
THE HONEST PART. Egg prices are down 31
percent. Presidents are exempt from the conflict-
of-interest statute; none of this has been
charged as a crime, and the Trump Organization
says it complies with every applicable ethics
law. Grocery inflation is off its 2022 peak.
Some of these promises were fantasies the
day they were made: no president could have
ended that war in a day. And no party’s donor
ledger is clean.
AND STILL. None of that changes the arithmetic.
Two ledgers were kept over these nineteen
months. One of them was settled in full.
Check which one has your name on it.
THE MOVEMENT DID NOT FAIL ITS INSIDERS.
IT ONLY FAILED THE PEOPLE WHO BELIEVED IT.
AN EMPTY PROMISE IS STILL AN INVOICE — AND IT IS MADE OUT TO YOU.
“HOLD YOUR NOSE AND VOTE DEMOCRAT — OR JUST DON’T VOTE IN NOVEMBER.”
DON’T VOTE REPUBLICAN!
LET’S MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

FIRST, THE RÉSUMÉ. Twice impeached.
Thirty-four felony convictions in a New York
courtroom in 2024. I would not hire a convicted
felon to run a prison. In my opinion, the
same standard belongs on the ballot for the
office that runs the country.
AND THEN HE GOT THE KEYS. What does
a felon do when you put him in charge of the
cellblock? He opens the doors for the dealers.
Name them: Juan Orlando Hernández, the
former Honduran president sentenced to 45
years for moving more than 400 tons of cocaine.
He was pardoned December 1, 2025,
and released the same day. Ross Ulbricht of
Silk Road had two life terms and was pardoned
on day one. Larry Hoover of the Gangster Disciples
had multiple life sentences commuted.
Michael “Harry-O” Harris was pardoned.
Garnett Gilbert Smith, a Baltimore kingpin
who served 25 years for violent drug offenses,
was pardoned. The Washington Post counts
roughly 100 drug-related clemencies.
AND THE FILE HE WILL NOT OPEN. The
House passed the Epstein Files Transparency
Act 427 to 1. He signed it in November 2025.
Nine months later the Justice Department is
still withholding, and a federal judge has had
to be asked to enforce a law almost nobody
voted against.
AND WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU ASK. Marjorie
Taylor Greene signed the discharge petition
that forced that vote. Her endorsement
was pulled, she was called a traitor, and she
resigned January 5. Rep. Thomas Massie
co-sponsored it and lost his primary May 19 to
a Trump-backed challenger. That is not a coincidence.
That is a published price list.
AND THE ONE PERSON WHO GOT CONSIDERATION.
Not one survivor got a hearing.
Ghislaine Maxwell got a transfer. Days after a
private meeting with Deputy Attorney General
Todd Blanche in July 2025, the woman
convicted of grooming underage girls for Epstein
was moved out of low-security Tallahassee
and into FPC Bryan, a minimum-security
camp in Texas with dormitories and no fence.
Bureau of Prisons policy says a sex offender
should never have qualified for a camp at all.
In March, members of Congress wrote that of
some 3.5 million documents produced under
the Act, not one records the transfer or who
authorized it. Inmates who spoke to reporters
about her were reportedly threatened; at least
one was shipped out.
AND WHAT PRISON USUALLY COSTS A
CHILD OFFENDER. Inside a prison, offenses
against children sit at the bottom of every hierarchy,
and the consequence is not theoretical.
Larry Nassar was stabbed roughly ten times in
his cell at a federal penitentiary in 2023, in a
unit built to keep sex offenders apart from everyone
else. Ordinary men convicted of what
Maxwell was convicted of serve their sentences
under that threat, behind double fences, in
protective housing. She serves hers on a camp
yard with no fence at all.
AND WHAT A SEALED FILE ACTUALLY
PROTECTS. Nine years on, exactly one person
is in prison for any of it, and she sleeps better
than she did in Florida. The survivors are still
waiting. Everyone else in those pages is still
going to work. In my opinion, a file guarded
this hard is not being guarded to protect the
girls. It is being guarded to protect the men.
THE HONEST PART. The pardon power is
absolute and unreviewable, and some grants
are genuinely merciful. Endorsements are
ordinary politics, and no candidate controls
who praises him. But every candidate controls
whether to accept it, and I have yet to see one
decline. The Bureau has never given a reason
for the transfer, and no court has found that
the withholding shields anyone. That is the
point. Nobody outside the Department can
say what the file protects, because nobody
outside the Department has read it.
I am an Independent. I do not vote on command.
When a candidate needs that endorsement
to survive a primary, he has already told
you whose interests he will serve.
AND THE PART NOBODY WANTS SAID
OUT LOUD. A vote is not a feeling. It is an
instrument. If you cast it for a candidate who
holds his seat at the pleasure of that endorsement,
you are not voting for a farm bill. You
are supplying the one thing that makes all of
the rest of it possible: a majority. The kingpin
walked out on a signature. The file Congress
ordered opened stays shut. Neither of those
things needed your approval. Both of them
needed your vote.
“He is not asking for your vote.
He is telling you who already has it.”
THE SURVIVORS ARE STILL WAITING.
THEIR TRAFFICKER GOT A TRANSFER.
A VOTE THAT FREES THE
DEALER AND SEALS THE FILE
IS NOT CONSERVATIVE. IT IS
NOT PATRIOTIC. IN MY OPINION,
IT IS UN-AMERICAN.
MAGA = FELONY ENABLERS.
ASK WHO ELSE IS ON THE BALLOT.
Sources: U.S. Dept. of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney; The Washington Post; NPR; Associated Press; PBS
NewsHour; Congressional Research Service (IN12621); House Clerk roll call on H.R. 4405; Bureau of Prisons;
Rep. Ross and Rep. Raskin letter to BOP, March 2, 2026.
THE NUMBER THAT MOVES THE MARKET.
The National Corn Growers Association puts
it in plain arithmetic: each percentage point
added to the national blend rate consumes
1.36 billion gallons of ethanol, or 486 million
bushels of corn. The average today sits near
10.5 percent. A twenty percent floor is nine
and a half points, roughly 4.6 billion bushels
of new annual demand. Iowa already makes
4.6 billion gallons of the country’s ethanol, 28
percent of it, and grinds better than 1.5 billion
bushels doing it. Nebraska’s twenty-four
biorefineries make another 2.3 billion gallons.
The capacity is built. The demand is not.
AND WHAT THAT PAYS THE FARMER.
The EPA’s own meta-analysis of the ethanol
literature found that each additional billion
gallons of corn ethanol lifts long-run corn
prices two to three percent. E20 adds 12.9
billion gallons. Against the $4.25 Central Illinois
bid of August 6 that is $5.35 to $5.90 a
bushel. E30 adds 26.5 billion gallons; that is
$6.50 to $7.65. Cross-check it the other way:
the last time the carryout fell to 7.4 percent, in
2012/13, corn averaged $6.89. Two different
methods, the same neighborhood.
WHAT IT DOES TO THE AIR. AND WHO IT
KEEPS ALIVE. Ethanol carries its own oxygen
and displaces petroleum octane boosters such
as benzene, toluene and xylene, aromatics
tied to known carcinogens. Against a high-aromatic
E10, the University of California-Riverside
measured E30 cutting carbon monoxide
20 to 35 percent, nitrogen oxides 17 to 36 percent
and non-methane hydrocarbons up to 44
percent, with particulate mass and black carbon
down as well. The light-duty fleet is tied to
roughly 16,000 fine-particulate deaths a year.
Apply those reductions and E20 saves on the
order of 1,300 to 1,900 American lives annually;
E30, 2,400 to 4,000. Valued at the federal
government’s $14.1 million statistical life, with
the hospital admissions and lost work days
that travel with the same particulates, that is
$20 to $29 billion a year at E20 and $37 to $61
billion at E30.
Twenty Now. Thirty in Three Years. And a Car That Can Drink It.
BUILD THE CAR FOR IT. A blend floor is only
half the job. Flex-fuel capability, including an
ethanol sensor, resistant seals and a software
calibration, costs a manufacturer $100 to $210
per vehicle by MIT’s estimate. That is a set of
floor mats. Require it on every new light-duty
vehicle, phased by model year, and 250 million
tailpipes become a market petroleum has
to bid for instead of one it inherits. And it is
nobody’s partisan hobbyhorse: the Open Fuel
Standard Act was carried by Dick Lugar with
Maria Cantwell, and by John Shimkus with
Eliot Engel.
“Twenty percent puts $5.35 to
$5.90 in the cash column; it takes
not one acre to do it.”
AND NOT ONE ACRE TAKEN. Here is what
a blend floor does not require. Chasing the
low-carbon credit by pipeline has cost Iowa
five years of condemnation fights, a ban that
passed its House 64 to 28 in January, and a
governor’s veto the year before. South Dakota
outlawed the taking outright. Nebraska got its
line by converting a pipe already in the ground.
A blend mandate needs none of it. It moves
4.6 billion bushels without one easement, one
condemnation board, or one farmer told his
ground serves a public use that turns out to
be somebody’s balance sheet. Seizing private
land for private gain was wrong when Kelo
blessed it in 2005 and it is wrong now. Require
the pumps to carry E20 and E30, protect ethanol-
free gasoline for small engines, and leave
the deed alone.
AND WHAT IT DOES TO THE MAP. Hormuz
has been shut since February 28. We take little
Gulf crude, but we buy fuel at the price that
strait sets and keep a carrier there to hold it
open. A gallon distilled in Nebraska needs no
sailor to guard it.
AND NOBODY HAS TO CHANGE PARTIES.
This is not a red bill or a blue one. The Nationwide
Consumer and Fuel Retailer Choice Act
was carried by Deb Fischer of Nebraska with
Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and in the House
by Adrian Smith with Angie Craig of Minnesota,
with cosponsors running from Thune and
Grassley to Durbin and Baldwin. The corn
growers endorsed it, the Farmers Union endorsed
it, and so did the American Petroleum
Institute. When the oil lobby and the corn lobby
sign the same letter, the argument is settled
everywhere but the floor of Congress.
THE HONEST PART. The corn figures extrapolate
past the volumes the underlying studies
examined, and E30’s 9.5 billion bushels is
more corn than we now grind, feed and export
combined. The lives and dollar figures are
ours, based on measured tailpipe reductions
applied to a published mortality total, not
a study of a blend mandate. Aldehydes rise
with ethanol. And blending is no substitute
for sequestration, which sells into aviation
and marine fuel. Three years is aggressive.
Phase it, and build to it.
E20 NOW. E30 BY 2029.
AND FLEX FUEL IN EVERY NEW CAR.
GROW THE FUEL. CLEAR THE AIR.
AND LEAVE THE DEED ALONE.
NO PARTY OWNS THIS ONE.
DEMAND IT FROM BOTH.
We want real solutions, not more empty promises. A bushel that leaves the county as fuel is worth more than one that leaves
as feed, a driver with only one fuel is not a customer, and this has been a bipartisan bill since the day it was written.
Sources: NCGA/RFA; American Farm Bureau Federation; USDA WASDE and ERS; EPA, Impacts of Ethanol Policy on Corn Prices: A Review; University of California-Riverside (Energy & Fuels);
Choma et al. on light-duty fleet mortality; HHS 2026 standard regulatory values; MIT via Cantwell-Lugar; Iowa Renewable Fuels Assn.; Nebraska Ethanol Board; Iowa Capital Dispatch; IEA.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear
in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only
tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents may
themselves have been used by someone else
who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
“Berkshire is not the author of this
defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi
The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.

The Sickness No Medical
School Can Cure
A billion dollars to build healers, while others use
their offices to tear them down.
CHANGE MY MIND
In February 2024, a woman in her nineties stood before a room of medical students in the
Bronx and told them their tuition was gone. Ruth Gottesman had taught at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine since 1968, specializing in learning disabilities, and chaired its board of
trustees. The billion dollars came from her late husband, David, an early investor in Berkshire
Hathaway, who left it to her to spend as she saw fit. She saw fit to make Einstein tuition
free in perpetuity, the largest gift ever made to an American medical school.
Understand what she actually bought. Tuition ran nearly $59,000 a year, and roughly half
of Einstein’s graduates left owing more than $200,000. Debt of that size does not merely burden
a young doctor; it selects her specialty for her. It steers her away from pediatrics, from
primary care, from the clinic in the neighborhood that needs her most and pays her least.
Gottesman did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible and freed them to study,
to research, and to serve.
“She did not make doctors rich. She made doctors possible.”
Set that beside the spectacle we now call oversight. Anthony Fauci spent five decades on
HIV, Ebola, and COVID and helped build a program credited with saving millions of lives
abroad. His reward in 2026 was a subpoena and a hearing room designed to produce a referral
rather than an answer.
One American spent a fortune expanding the nation’s capacity to heal. Others use their
offices, their subpoena power, and our money to attack the people who already did.
That is the contrast worth amplifying. A gift like Gottesman’s is not charity; it is infrastructure.
It will outlive every politician currently auditioning outrage for a fundraising list.
Medical school can teach anatomy. It cannot teach gratitude. It can teach pharmacology,
but there is no course in humility, and no prescription for a public official who mistakes
destruction for duty. That sickness is moral, not clinical, and the only known treatment is
administered at the ballot box.
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no
distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator (1897),
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar The Tale of Two Carts
You work to fill yours. The President plays beside his.
ON AFFORDABILITY, PRIORITIES,
AND WHO SENDS THE INVOICE
Fifty-two weeks a year, Americans push a steel cart down an aisle and do arithmetic.
Ground beef runs about $6.75 a pound. Fresh vegetables are up 11.9 percent, tomatoes 32
percent, and lettuce nearly 25 percent. Groceries cost roughly 30 percent more than they did
before the pandemic. Households drop the roast, buy the chicken, and move on.
Notice what fills that cart. A shift. A double. Overtime that was supposed to go toward the
truck payment. Every item in it was purchased with somebody’s hours, hours traded away
and never returned. That is the honest arrangement most Americans live under: you work,
and then you eat.
THE PRESIDENT’S CARTS ARE PROCURED.
The ledger: $765,425 in Secret Service golf-cart rentals during his first term. $95,250 for a
single Bedminster season in 2019. Then, on June 3, 2025, came a contract with Associates Golf
Car Service worth up to $550,930, plus $80,385 for portable toilets, renewable to $333,801.
Behind him rolls “Golf Force One,” an armored Polaris Ranger that the General Services
Administration prices near $190,000. The unarmored version sells for about $20,000.
And in 2018, his own Turnberry resort billed the taxpayers $923 to rent carts to the agents
guarding him.
The larger tab: $151.5 million in term one. Nearly $115 million already in term two, on pace
for $300 million, with 112 days on his own courses, more than a quarter of his days in office.
“One cart is filled by labor.
The other is followed by an armored escort at $190,000 a copy.”
WHAT THIS IS NOT ABOUT
It is not about security. Agents must protect the President, and after two attempts on his
life, one of them on a golf course, the hardware is defensible on its face. That duty is not optional,
and this page will not pretend otherwise.
It is about venue and profit. He chooses to be protected at properties he owns, which
means the government rents, hauls, and staffs its way onto his balance sheet. Every fairway
is a cost center billed to people counting coupons at the register.
THE ARITHMETIC OF IT
A family that overspends on groceries eats less. A President who overspends on golf carts
sends the invoice to the family. One cart is earned. The other is expensed.
So ask your candidate, in public and on the record, to defend the invoice. Not the man.
The invoice. Political Solutions Needed,
Not Political Retribution
An endorsement used to be a recommendation.
It has become a loyalty oath.
There was a time when a party’s backing meant a candidate had been measured for
judgment, competence, and the ability to fix something. That standard is gone. Today the
“MAGA” or “Trump” endorsement certifies exactly one qualification: obedience. In my
opinion, it is a badge of dishonor, and a vote cast for it is a vote to enable conduct that in any
other American workplace would end a career.
Look at what the endorsement now guarantees. Not a health care plan. Not a budget. Not
a border solution written into law rather than announced from a podium. What it guarantees
is a candidate who will call every Democrat a communist, blame a predecessor who left
office years ago, insult a reporter, and go home having solved nothing. The vocabulary is
retribution. The vocabulary of governing, including appropriation, oversight, compromise,
and arithmetic, has been discarded as weakness.
This is not conservatism. Conservatism had a fiscal argument. It had a federalism argument.
It produced people who could read a balance sheet. What replaced it is a class of political
opportunists with no measurable ability, promoted for volume rather than skill, who
mistake grievance for a platform and cruelty for courage.
“A man who can only name an enemy is telling
you he cannot name a solution.”
And the tarnish runs from the top down. A convicted felon sits atop the ticket, and men
and women who once claimed to revere the rule of law now defend, excuse, and pardon on
command. Silence inside that line is not neutrality. It is participation. When you stand in a
party’s column, you accept its implied association, and you own what is done in your name.
I do not ask any reader to become a Democrat. I have never been one. I ask something
harder: demand a solution before you surrender a vote. Ask what they will build, not who
they will punish. Ask for the bill number. Ask for the math.
Retribution is not a policy. It is an admission that you have none. When the President’s Lawyer
Becomes the People’s
The Senate Judiciary Committee has sent Todd Blanche to the
floor. The only question left is whether fifty senators will pretend
the conflict of interest isn’t there.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 Tuesday to advance Todd Blanche, Donald
Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, toward confirmation as Attorney General.
Read that again. The man who sat beside the defendant is to become the lawyer for all of us.
Every first-year law student learns to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. What
Blanche has assembled is not an appearance. As acting Attorney General, he signed the
order declaring the IRS “forever barred” from pursuing prior tax claims against his former
client, that client’s family, and that client’s companies, resolving a $10 billion suit Trump
filed against his own government, in which Blanche’s Justice Department was nominally
the opposing party. A federal judge questioned whether the case had two genuine sides. It
didn’t. It had one man on both.
Then came the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”: $1.776 billion in Treasury money, overseen
by a board the acting Attorney General himself would appoint, to pay those who felt persecuted
by their government. Pardoned January 6 rioters were among the potential claimants.
“A nominee purchased his confirmation by giving back money
he should never have reached for, and the Senate accepted
the refund as a character reference.”
Facing lost votes, Blanche rescinded the fund Sunday night. Senators Cornyn and Tillis,
both leaving Congress and both driven out by Trump, pronounced themselves satisfied
and voted yes. Grasp that. A nominee purchased his confirmation by giving back money he
should never have reached for, and the Senate accepted the refund as a character reference.
Trump says he would revive it if Blanche is blocked. The audit shield remains. Scholars warn
that a later order could resurrect the fund overnight.
The obscenity is not the amendment. It is that one was needed at all. A serious chamber
haggled over the price instead of rejecting the nomination outright.
TWO REMEDIES, BOTH HELD BY CITIZENS
Citizens hold two remedies. Keep the roll call. Every senator who votes yes owns this, and
elections exist for exactly that. Ask them at town halls whether the Attorney General serves
the country or the client.
Then write the New York bar. Blanche’s license came from a state, not from Donald
Trump. Ask the grievance committee whether a lawyer may hand his client a federal absolution
paid out of the Treasury, and whether that license should survive the answer. A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear in the case caption. I cannot prove that today,
and I will not tell readers otherwise. I can only tell you what I believe and why I am acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway. My view is that the company and its agents
may themselves have been used by someone else who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
“Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it.”
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.