"We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House"

 

Bret Stephens

Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief

                                            Dec. 16, 2025

Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, says, "I’m often described as a conservative, though I’ve been a harsh critic of the direction of the Republican Party. I believe in free enterprise, free trade, free speech, and the need to safeguard the institutions of democracy at home and abroad. I also think it’s healthy to be able to change your mind and to say so publicly — as I have about Trump voters and climate change."

"Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing:" 

"We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House."

After Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death in their home in Los Angeles,  at the hands of their troubled son Nick, Trump ridiculed the Hollywood director.

The US president told reporters the director was "very bad for our country," having earlier written on Truth Social (Trump, self-styled "free-speech" alternative to mainstream platforms) that Reiner's death was linked to "Trump derangement syndrome" — a term he often uses to describe his critics.

The Gilded Age, Political Corruption and Genocide of Native Americans

Joseph Keppler, The Bosses of the Senate.

‘'The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today' was a satirical novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, which was first published in 1873. The book’s title became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in American public life in the years after the end of the Civil War.

Here is the approximate percentage of total U.S. wealth held by different groups:

Top 1%: Held about 31% of the total net worth in Q2 2025.

 Top 10%: Held approximately 69% to 70% of the total wealth (this includes the top 1%, the 90th-99th percentile, which holds about 36.4%, and the 50th-90th percentile, which holds 30.3% - the calculation is derived from combining data snippets for specific percentiles as the 10% figure isn't explicitly stated as a single data point in the 2025 results). 

Older data from 2016 and 2022 suggest this figure has been consistently high, around 68% to 70%. 

Bottom 50%: Held only about 2.5% of the total U.S. wealth in Q1 2025.