Many analysts have explained how the recent MOU between Trump and Iran is a humiliating and deep failure for the current regimes of both the USA and Israel.
They are correct. Trump utterly lost this war, which he started on false pretenses. He also lost this deal.
I am glad he gave up. Fewer people will die, I think.
As they say, Trump Always Chickens Out, but not without a whole lot of bluster and him finding ways to cheat.
As I wrote earlier, I suspect he will resign soon after the mid-terms, but not before Vance has thousands of pardons drawn up for Trump and all of his acolytes, for everything they have ever done or will do in the future, all ready to be robosigned the moment that Mango Mussolini quits, and before the House starts impeachment proceedings.
Trump achieved not a single one of his stated goals in this war. Except for making many billions of dollars for him and his spawn.
The US will not only have to end ALL sanctions against Iran immediately, but also release hundreds of billions of dollars in Iranian money that the US and its allies have been holding onto. And remove US forces from the proximity of its enemy – ie from the Persian Gulf itself! And allow Iran and Oman to charge tolls, legally, on every ship passing through the Straits of Hormuz!
Being a nerdy math teacher, I was wondering how much money that last source of income will be – tolls or fees on ships carrying a large fraction of all of the planet’s crude oil, petroleum, and natural gas.
Let’s look at the stats for the Suez and Panama canals, and the Dardanelles-Bosphorus straits in Turkiye, all in US dollars. Feel free to convert to other currencies if you like. I got my data from things like Wikipedia but didn’t feel like documenting all this sources. If you doubt any of my numbers, feel free to look them up yourself and use your own calculator.
The Suez Canal reported earning about $5.5 billion last year from 19,000 ships that passed between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. This works out to a very rough average of $290,000 per ship. (Obviously, fees vary by size and cargo of the boat.)
In 2025, the Panama Canal reportedly earned about $5.7 billion from 13,400 ships, for an average of $425,000 per ship.
Turkiye now charges a fee of $6.75 per ton of cargo, per trip. There are about 85,000 ships passing through the very narrow Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits each year, carrying a grand total of 1.6 billion tons of traffic. That works out to about $10 billion gross (not net) revenue to the Turkish authorities, for an average fee of about $112,000 per ship per transit.
Before the US and Israel started and lost this recent war, about 138 ships per day would pass through the strait of Hormuz, for free. Multiply that by 365 days/year and you get very close to 50,000 ships per year that will need to pay the new fees that will start in mid-August.
Suppose Iran and Oman decide to keep on charging $2 million per ship. They would then earn a total of $100 BILLION in fees each year (split between them somehow).
Or maybe they decide to charge something like the other three passages: somewhere between $100K to $400K per ship. At $100K per ship, they earn $5 billion per year, and at $400K per vessel, they earn $20 billion (again, split between the Sultan and the mullahs).
Fees as high as for Suez and Panama might be hard to justify ethically, since it took over a million workers to dig those canals (of whom hundreds of thousands died!), and the structures require a lot of maintenance. The currents in the Bospherous and Dardanelles are so fast, and the passage so narrow, that every single ship needs a local pilot. By comparison, the strait of Hormuz is all natural. Perhaps they will only charge $20,000 per ship? If so, then they each would earn a half-billion dollars a year.
How much is the oil in a VLCC super-taker worth, you may ask? They run from 200,000 to 400,000 tons of cargo, and each ton is currently about $550 (West Texas Intermediate price today) so the liquids in one of these big ships is worth anywhere from $110 million to twice as much, just for the cargo. A tax or fee of one dollar per ton of oil, which the owners can sell for $550, really isn’t all that heavy of a tax! Nor is $200,000 on a cargo worth hundreds of millions!
You may argue, correctly, that there are other places, like the Straits of Gibraltar and Malacca, or the English Channel, which are narrower than Hormuz, but have no tolls there (at least not any more). However, Trump miscalculated by starting this war and ended up giving his enemies more than they could have dreamed of.
So on this aspect of the war, as in every other one that really counts, and despite overwhelming US naval and air superiority, Trump lost the war that he and Netanyahu started.
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TL;DR: It looks like Iran might earn from half a billion to many billions of US dollars each year just for letting ships pass through the Straight of Hormuz. There was no toll until Trump started this crazy war.
On a rain soaked farm in Wisconsin, the President of the United States unclipped his microphone, called a reporter crooked, called her darling, and walked off the set of Meet the Press. Fifty minutes of cameras rolling. One plain question about a fund he wants to steer toward people who beat police officers on January 6. He never finished the thought. He stood up and left.
I have watched a lot of people fold under pressure. I have stood in front of dozens of juries who showed up wanting to see a man crack. I know the look. I know the sound a person makes right before the bottom drops out. Here is the prediction I am putting in writing today, June 8, 2026, with my full name on it, so you are free to hold me to it. Donald Trump will resign the presidency in 2027. No impeachment removal. No election defeat. He will quit. And the single event that opens the door arrives this coming November.
Stay with me, because the road from a televised tantrum to a Rose Garden resignation runs straight through your ballot.
The Walkout Was the Tell
Watch the tape again. A reporter asks a fair question. The President insults the network, insults the host, drops a thank you darling, and bolts. A sitting president lost his nerve inside 50 minutes with a journalist who did her homework. Sit with how small that is.
And it is not just journalists anymore. Republican senators, conservative commentators, and some of the very influencers who helped build his movement are starting to challenge him in public. The protective bubble that once shielded him from criticism is getting smaller. The questions are getting tougher. The excuses are wearing thin. The pressure is building from directions he never expected, and every new crack makes the next one easier to see.
This man built an entire brand on dominance. The tough guy. The closer who never backs down. The footage shows the opposite. The footage shows a man who has lost the nerve to take a hard question in public.
Now run the clock forward. Picture two solid years of hard questions. Not only to him but to members of his administration, pursuant to Congressional subpoena, and under oath. On the record. Broadcast live. Sworn testimony. Documented. That is what is coming, and the people who love him already see the cracks.
Everything Changes the Night of November 3
Right now Congress protects him by staying silent. His party holds the gavels. Committees look away. Subpoenas never get signed. The money flows wherever he points. The whole machine runs on one fact. Republicans control the House and Senate, so nobody with real power forces him to answer for anything.
That arrangement expires on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
Here is where the numbers sit as I write this. Republicans hold the House by a margin you could fit in a phone booth. Democrats need a handful of seats to take the gavel back. The president’s party loses around 28 House seats in a midterm on average. Trump’s approval sits in the high 30s. His standing with independents has fallen into the low 30s, the same ground that came before the roughly 41 seat wipeout Democrats handed his party in 2018. Voters name inflation and the cost of living as their number one worry, and on that issue his disapproval runs as high as 78 percent in some surveys. The generic ballot favors Democrats by a comfortable spread.
Read all of that together and one conclusion lands hard. A Democratic House is the most likely outcome of this election. The Senate map is steeper terrain for Democrats, so flipping both chambers is the tougher climb, and even the House alone rewrites everything you are about to read.
A House majority hands the opposition three weapons the founders designed for exactly this moment.
The first weapon is the power of the purse. Every dollar this government spends starts in the House. A new majority decides what gets funded and what gets starved.
The second weapon is the subpoena. Committee chairs gain the power to demand documents and put witnesses under oath on camera. The Epstein files, the crypto contracts, the pardon paperwork, the war decisions, all of it becomes fair game.
The third weapon is oversight backed by the separation of powers. A coequal branch finally does the job the Constitution assigns it. Hearings and investigations. A daily, grinding accounting in public.
Now let me show you the ten fronts where this lands on Donald Trump personally, and why each one chips away at the only thing he has ever protected, his image.
One. The Weaponization Fund and the IRS Settlement
Start with the fund that triggered the walkout. The administration floated a plan to set up a pool of roughly 1.8 billion dollars to pay people who claim the last administration treated them unfairly. The list of possible recipients includes people who assaulted police officers at the Capitol on January 6.
Look at where the money came from. Trump sued the IRS over the leak of his tax information. He dropped a claim he valued at 10 billion dollars. In exchange, the Justice Department agreed to stand up this fund, and the settlement reportedly shields Trump, his family, and his business entities from tax audits and enforcement on returns filed before the deal. A president negotiated a personal benefit out of the federal government and built a payout fund on top of it.
His own party revolted. A judge blocked it. His acting Attorney General announced the Department would not move forward. He went on national television and said he loves the idea anyway.
A Democratic House holds the purse. They will make certain not one dollar of your taxes ever reaches a person who bloodied a cop. They will haul in everyone who touched the settlement. They will read the audit shield into the record line by line. The hearings alone will run for months, and every minute of them paints the President as a man who treated the government like a personal piggy bank.1
Two. The Epstein Files He Cannot Bury
Congress passed a law requiring the Justice Department to release its full investigative records on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The deadline came and went. The Department released about 3.5 million pages of the more than 6 million it collected, smothered in redactions, and the inspector general opened an audit into whether the Department broke the law. Watchdogs caught the Department secretly redacting files all over again, with no notice and no explanation. One legal group counts the released material as a thin sliver of all the records that truly relate to the case.
Donald Trump is named in these files, along with other prominent figures. Being named in an investigative file proves nothing on its own. The point is simpler. A man who fights this hard to keep records sealed gives the public every reason to wonder what sits inside them.
Today the Oversight Committee is run by Republicans who block the subpoenas and bury the contempt votes. Flip the House and the gavel changes hands. The new chair signs the subpoenas the old chair refused to sign. The contempt vote that died in committee comes back to life. The unredacted files land in front of investigators who want to read them.
Think about what that means for a man who walks out of an interview over a question about a fund. Now picture the questions about Epstein, asked to him in public, and his Director of the FBI and Attorney General of the DOJ, under oath, for as long as the majority wants to ask them. There is no walking out of a congressional hearing room without a story that writes itself.2
Three. A Justice Department Run Like a Personal Law Office
Trump fired Pam Bondi, his Attorney General when she failed to deliver prosecutions of his enemies fast enough. He replaced her with Todd Blanche, the man who was paid $10 million to serve as his personal criminal defense lawyer in the hush money case and the federal cases. Now he wants to make Blanche permanent.
Sit with the picture. The lawyer who defended Donald Trump the criminal defendant now runs the agency that decides who gets prosecuted in America. Blanche has already pursued charges against the President’s critics and bragged that the FBI cleaned house of anyone who investigated his client.
The Senate confirms Attorneys General, so if Democrats take the Senate the nomination dies on arrival. A Republican Senate gives him trouble too, because at least one of his own senators, Thom Tillis, has said out loud he will not back anyone who defends the January 6 rioters. A Democratic House holds a different kind of power. It puts the entire weaponized Justice Department under the microscope. Every political prosecution. Every act of retribution. All of it dragged into the daylight where the public sees the machine for what it is.3
Four. A Spy Chief Who Knows Nothing About Spying
The President pulled the head of a housing agency, a man with zero national security background, and made him the acting Director of National Intelligence over all 18 intelligence agencies. This is the same official who accused Federal Reserve officials of mortgage fraud and drafted the letter Trump wanted to use to fire the Fed chair.
The backlash was brutal and bipartisan. The Senate Majority Leader, a Republican, scoffed that the country does not need a weaponized intelligence chief. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee called the pick probably the worst and most dangerous appointment this President has ever made. The fallout already threatens the renewal of a major surveillance authority, because senators in both parties refuse to hand expanded spying powers to this man.
A Democratic House owns the Intelligence Committee gavel. They will turn the lights on the entire intelligence apparatus this President has built. They will ask what a housing official is doing reading the nation’s secrets. They will ask it on camera, and the answers will not flatter him.4
Five. The Crypto Money and the Foreign Cash
This is the one that follows the money straight into the family bank account.
The Trump family launched a crypto company. Days before the inauguration, an Abu Dhabi backed firm tied to the United Arab Emirates national security adviser bought nearly half of it for 500 million dollars, and 187 million of that flowed to entities controlled by the family. A second Emirati fund then used the family’s own digital coin to move 2 billion dollars into a crypto exchange whose founder Trump later pardoned. By this spring, outside estimates put the President’s personal haul from the venture in the hundreds of millions.
Here is the part that should stop you cold. The Middle East envoy this President sends around the world to broker peace helped start this crypto company with his own sons. The son runs the deals, and announced that 2 billion dollar agreement with the Gulf royal whose government bought into the family business. The envoy hung onto a financial stake in the company well into his government service, by the White House’s own account, long after he pledged to walk away from it. The same government wiring money into the family venture holds a direct stake in American policy toward Iran. The diplomacy and the deals run through one family at the same time.
A House committee has already started asking for the records. Flip the chamber and the asking turns into compelling. Subpoenas for the contracts. Subpoenas for the wire transfers. A presidential historian put the problem plainly, saying there is no longer any line between this family’s policy decisions and this family’s interests. A Democratic House will spend two years drawing that line in public, transaction by transaction, and the word that hangs over all of it is corruption.5
Six. The Pardons That Look Like Receipts
Look at the pattern. The founder of the crypto exchange that helped move 2 billion dollars connected to the family business walked away with a pardon. He is one of many. The pardons have piled up until ordinary people who pay attention notice a rhythm. Money and access go in. A pardon comes out.
I am a lawyer. I will choose my words with care. I will say the optics are devastating, and the optics are all the public ever sees. A Democratic House will hold hearings on the abuse of the pardon power, and they will lay the timeline side by side for the country, the dates of the money next to the date of the pardon. You will draw your own conclusion, and so will every voter watching.6
Seven. The Iran War He Says Is Over
In late February, the United States and Israel struck Iran and killed its supreme leader. Iran answered with missiles and drones and shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries a fifth of the world’s oil. A ceasefire arrived in April. The ceasefire keeps breaking. As recently as this past weekend, American and Iranian forces traded strikes, the United States hit radar sites inside Iran, and Iran threatened to close the strait completely. Oil prices jumped. Sirens sounded in Gulf cities.
The President keeps telling you the situation is handled. The bombs keep falling.
This is the issue that already cracked his own coalition. The voices that carried him to persuadable men and women in 2024 have turned. Joe Rogan and Sean Ryan, both who endorsed him, told their enormous audiences that people feel betrayed because Trump ran on ending senseless wars and then started one with no clear purpose. Tucker Carlson called the campaign disgusting and evil. Megyn Kelly tore into it and said American intelligence put Iran nowhere near a bomb. These are not Democrats. These are the people who built the movement.
A Democratic House controls the war powers process and the defense budget. They will force votes on whether this war was ever authorized. They will demand the intelligence. They will put generals and envoys under oath and ask why a ceasefire the President sold as peace produced strikes the very next weekend. Every hearing reminds his own base of the promise he broke.7
Eight. The Ballroom, the Arch, and the Blue Reflecting Pool
Families count pennies at the checkout line. The President tore down the East Wing of the White House to build himself a 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom. The price started near 200 million dollars and climbed past 400 million. He swears no tax dollars touch it. Then the Secret Service asked Congress for about 1 billion dollars in new security money, with roughly 220 million of it tied directly to hardening the ballroom. The request landed with a thud. The Senate parliamentarian threw it out of the immigration bill where Republicans tried to tuck it, his own party balked at the cost and the timing, and the votes fell apart.
He ordered the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool repainted. He said it would cost around 2 million dollars. The bill climbed to 13 million. He approved a 250 foot triumphal arch for the capital, stamped his own name on the Kennedy Center, gilded the Oval Office, and paved over the Rose Garden. A federal judge has since ordered his name removed from the Kennedy Center.
A Democratic House writes the spending bills. Every dollar he wants for the ballroom and the arch runs through a committee that will gladly say no, on camera, with a press release attached. They will read the ballooning price tags into the record. They will hang the photo of the gold ballroom next to the chart of your grocery bill. The picture does the work for them.8
Nine. Your Groceries, Your Gas, and the Golden Age That Never Came
He promised you cheaper groceries. He said it at the rallies. A vote for him meant lower prices.
Prices went up. Inflation climbed to its highest point in years, driven largely by the oil and gas chaos his Iran war set loose through the Strait of Hormuz. Gas is up. Groceries stay high. Working families feel it every single week.
His answer is to call your pain a con job and a hoax, and to tell you that you are living in a golden age. The problem is that voters do not experience the economy through press releases and campaign speeches. They experience it at the grocery store, at the gas pump, and when the bills arrive. A president can argue with the headlines. He cannot argue with what people see in their own bank accounts.
A Democratic House will hold field hearings on the cost of living in the districts that flipped. They will put your neighbors on the stand to talk about what a cart of groceries costs now. They will tie the price of your gas to the war he started and the tariffs he imposed. They will make affordability the drumbeat of his last two years, and a man who insists everything is golden as your family skips meals looks more out of touch with every passing week.9
Ten. The War on the Institutions That Keep a President in Check
He fired his Attorney General for insufficient loyalty. He moved to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve. He tried to remove a sitting Federal Reserve governor over an accusation pushed by the same housing official he later made spy chief. He has treated every independent institution as an obstacle to clear.
A Democratic House will defend those institutions because their own power depends on the same separation that protects the Fed and the inspectors general. They will investigate every firing. They will protect the watchdogs he wants gone. They will become the wall he keeps running into, and a man who hates being told no will hear the word every single day.10
Why a Man Like This Quits
Now let me put the psychology together, because the policy fights are only half the story. The other half lives between Donald Trump’s ears.
This is a man who measures his entire worth by how the room looks at him. Strength is the brand. Winning is the brand. Take those away and there is little underneath.
He cannot stand ridicule. He never has. Watch how he treats anyone who laughs at him. The walkout on that Wisconsin farm was a small man’s response to a moment he failed to control, and that moment lasted 50 minutes. A relentless Democratic House does not stop at 50 minutes. The pressure runs 730 days. Subpoenas in the morning. A fresh damaging headline before dinner. Cameras everywhere. No off switch.
He copes with reality by denying it out loud with his 3 am social media posts. The election he lost was rigged. The war that rages is over. The prices that climbed are falling. The golden age is here. That coping works only as long as nobody with power stands next to him holding the evidence. A Democratic House stands next to him for two years holding all of it.
And here is the piece that seals it. His own people are leaving. The influencers who delivered the support and vote, the commentators who built the movement, many of them have looked into the camera and said this is not what he sold us. Republican senators are saying out loud they will not confirm his lawyer or arm his spy chief. The wall of protection is already crumbling before the new Congress is even sworn in.
And there is one more motive worth talking about. Resigning allows Trump to separate himself from what could become a Republican political bloodbath in 2028. If the economy remains strained, if the scandals keep piling up, and if voters finally decide they have had enough, somebody will have to take the blame. Donald Trump has spent his entire life claiming credit and avoiding responsibility. Why would he start now?
From the moment he leaves office, every Republican setback becomes somebody else’s failure. Every lost election becomes proof they did not follow his advice. Every polling collapse becomes evidence that the party abandoned his vision. Never mind that the movement, the policies, the appointments, and the chaos all trace back to him. He will be free to spend his days playing golf and telling reporters between rounds that everything would have been different if he had stayed. In his mind, resignation is not an admission of defeat. It is a chance to escape the fallout and preserve the legend in his mind.
When all is said and done, I believe that a man who lives for applause does not sit still inside a building where the applause has stopped and the questions never end. He looks for the exit.11
How the Resignation Will Actually Look
Hear me clearly. This next stretch is my forecast, built on the man’s record and his wiring, not a thing that has happened yet.
He will not call it surrender. He never does.
The cover story will be warm and familiar. He will talk about his family and how he wants more time with them. He will look into the cameras and tell you he finished everything he wanted to achieve. He will talk about the golf course and the good life he earned. He might float a medical reason, something dignified enough to salute, vague enough to dodge a follow up. He will frame the whole thing as a man who accomplished his mission and chose to walk away on his own terms.
The truth will be simpler. He will quit because he cannot stand the ridicule, he cannot stand losing control of the story, and there are only so many real estate deals and crypto windfalls a person needs before the daily humiliation stops being worth the trouble. The glass is already full on the money. The only thing left to lose is the dignity, and a Democratic House will spend two years draining that glass drop by drop.
I am calling the timing for the last stretch of 2027. It will take the new Congress most of a year to do its work and start having a major effect on him. The hearings stack up and the polls keep sinking. The 2028 race swallows the oxygen. Somewhere in that final quarter, with the walls high and the cameras hot, he steps down.
The Vance Pardon
A resignation like this does not happen on a whim. It happens with a deal, and the deal has a name you already know from history.
When Richard Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford gave him a full, free, and absolute pardon for every federal offense across the dates of his presidency. No charge required. No admission required. A clean slate that let Nixon walk into the sunset without looking over his shoulder.
That is the model. JD Vance becomes president the moment Trump signs the resignation letter. One of his first acts will be a pardon written in the broadest language his lawyers know how to write. A full and unconditional pardon for any and all offenses against the United States committed by Donald J. Trump during the dates of his service. Everything. The known and the unknown, the whole sweep of anything a future prosecutor might dream up. The point is to make the federal exposure vanish so the man leaves office and never fears a federal courtroom again.
That pardon is the price of a clean exit, and Vance pays it gladly, because the pardon buys him the presidency.
Now hear me clearly on Vance, because this is where I want you wide awake. A Vance presidency is the more dangerous outcome, and I want to be plain about why. Trump is loud, undisciplined, and easy to read. Vance is none of those things. He is smarter. He speaks in full sentences. He knows how to make an extreme idea sound reasonable to a tired voter who stopped paying close attention. He inherits the same Project 2025 blueprint and the same movement, and he carries them with a steadier hand and a calmer voice. The agenda does not soften. The salesman gets better. I hope this country never has to learn how far a disciplined version of this project would go.
Which brings us back to the only thing standing between the chaos of today and the quiet competence of what comes next. You.
Your Move
Every word of this prediction rests on one event you control. The midterms.
If the House flips, the machine of accountability switches on, the pressure becomes unbearable, and the man in the Oval Office runs out of room. If the House holds Republican, the silence holds with it, the questions never come, and he sits comfortably through the full term doing exactly what he is doing now.
So this is not a spectator sport, and November is not somebody else’s problem. Check your registration today. Help three people in your life check theirs. Learn your candidates down to the local races, because the gavels that matter get decided in districts like yours. Show up early. Bring someone with you.
I put my name on this prediction so you would take it seriously. Donald Trump resigns in 2027 and hands the keys to JD Vance. The first domino falls on November 3, and your hand is the one that tips it.
Save this article. Share it with the people who think their vote does not count. Then meet me back here in 2027, and let us see if I called this one.
I’ve been quiet for most of 2025. Much of that is because I was a direct casualty of DOGE and the trauma inflicted on the federal workforce. Almost overnight, I saw my job, entire federal research and data programs, and much of the field of educational research disappear. Private research firms, nonprofits, and any organization receiving federal funds were also hit, laying off hundreds, if not thousands, of highly qualified researchers. Coupled with attacks on university funding and cuts to state and local budgets, the result was a dire job market.
At first, it felt like a nuclear bomb had been dropped on the profession. Everything was hit all at once. So many people in education research were suddenly out of work or pushed into other fields. It felt like we were losing not just jobs, but an entire generation of education researchers. It took about six months for the dust to settle. Slowly, people began emerging from their bomb shelters. A few jobs appeared here and there, but nowhere near enough to meet the supply.
This is the most competitive job market I’ve ever seen, and the number of highly qualified candidates far exceeds the number of jobs. I’ve been fortunate enough to have part-time work with my former employer, but I have spent ten long months on the job market and burning the candle at both ends while juggling part-time work, applying to jobs, working on papers, networking, and reviewing for grant panels. Over the ten months, I have:
Applied to 64 jobs
Completed 11 performance assessments, often multi-part and done over weekends
Participated in 17 screening, first-, and second-round interviews
Authored two technical reports
Submitted two articles for publication
Served as a grant reviewer for more than 100 proposals
And I have learned a lot:
I figured out how to get around AI screeners. It took months of trial and error. As a researcher, I collected my own data, experimented with different approaches and tools, and eventually figured it out, or at least improved my stats. Applying for jobs took far longer because of AI, and few people could articulate how to get around it, often providing contradictory advice.
I was pushed to articulate what I actually did and accomplished, not just my listed responsibilities, and to think about how to quantify my accomplishments in terms of metrics. This is a critical area of need in my field because the public does not fully understand (or appreciate) what education researchers do, which we’ve learned has real consequences.
I met some top-notch people. I’m an introvert after all, but this process forced me to get out and about, and I’m grateful for the people I met along the way.
But I’m still explaining to people that it’s not “fine.” This wasn’t a good thing for me, for others in my field, or for the country. It was destruction for the sake of destruction, and it harmed real people’s lives. I also recognize my privilege in all of this. I’m not worried about losing my house. My kids are out of daycare. I can get on my spouse’s health insurance. I’m not worried about deportation or imprisonment. I’m in the best possible circumstances to weather this, and it was still incredibly challenging.
Many were stunned when DOGE gutted long-standing research departments, including the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the Department of Education, which was founded under President Bush in 2002. IES produces a wide range of research and data and is best known for the national education datasets and NAEP, the nation’s report card, which allows for apples-to-apples comparisons of student performance across states.
Republicans have long claimed to support data use and accountability in education. Yet for the first time in my memory, a Republican administration attempted to dismantle the very subagency that produces research and data. How does that make sense? The most insightful explanation I’ve heard came from a former colleague: Accountability, itself, was never the goal. When accountability supported GOP policies like school accountability systems, school choice, and anti-union efforts, it was embraced. Now that accountability no longer supports GOP goals—such as expanding vouchers for which research largely shows null or negative effects—it has been cast aside.
Many people welcomed the destruction, not because they had better ideas, but because they wanted to tear things down. While no federal agency is perfect, the argument that improvement is best achieved by gutting the public sector and eliminating institutional knowledge simply doesn’t pass muster. So here we are, a country stuck in a group project where half of us want to do the work and the other half wants to burn the building down.
I want to live in a society that benefits from research and science. I want to live in a society where we can critique the status quo, learn from new evidence, and change course when something isn’t working. If I’m wrong about something, I want to update my priors based on evidence. That’s how research and science are supposed to work. It requires a willingness to learn new things, to grow and adapt, and to change course when reality isn’t consistent with ideology. This stands in direct contrast to systems where a small group controls the narrative and dismisses evidence they don’t like. When truth becomes something to manage rather than something to learn from, we are all worse off because we limit our ability to improve and to do our most innovative work.
I wish I could say that we’re through the worst of it, or that things will get better soon. What I can say is this: truth ultimately prevails, and this Administration will not have the final word. I recently heard the saying, “You can’t fall down if you’re lying on the floor.” Here’s to getting off the floor in 2026.
When billionaires step onto a stage, release a book, or tweet some glossy piece of wisdom, the world pays attention. They are the icons of achievement, the proof that extraordinary success is possible. Their words are repeated in classrooms, boardrooms, and commencement addresses. Yet, beneath the glimmering surface of motivational sound bites lies an uncomfortable truth: the advice that billionaires and other ultra-successful people give is often bad advice. Not because they are foolish or malicious, but because they are the rare exceptions who won a game that is stacked against nearly everyone else. They are the one percent of their peer group that made it through a gauntlet designed to fail the other ninety-nine percent. Listening to them as if their stories are blueprints is like studying lottery winners for financial planning tips. It feels inspiring, but it will not work for most of us.
Survivorship Bias and the Mirage of Wisdom
The core problem with advice from billionaires is a concept called survivorship bias. We hear from those who made it to the top, but we never hear from the countless others who tried the same strategies and failed. A billionaire might tell you that the key to ultra success is “never giving up,” but for every person who refused to quit and made it, there are thousands who refused to quit and went bankrupt. We do not see their stories on magazine covers. Their podcasts are not downloaded millions of times. Survivorship bias distorts reality because it magnifies the voice of the rare survivor while erasing the experiences of the much larger group that followed the same path without ultra success.
Consider Silicon Valley. Every venture capitalist loves to repeat the story of the scrappy founder who dropped out of college and built a multibillion-dollar company in a garage. Yet for every Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, there are thousands of college dropouts and founders who ended up with crushing debt and no safety net. Their advice is missing from TED Talks because failure does not sell. This imbalance creates the illusion that ultra success is a formula when in reality it is often a combination of timing, luck, privilege, and structural advantage. The myth of meritocracy hides the role of chance.
The Myth of Hard Work Alone
Another favorite refrain from ultra successful elites is that hard work alone is the ticket to prosperity. “Just work harder than everyone else” sounds noble and egalitarian. It reassures us that anyone can achieve greatness if they put in enough effort. But this ignores the countless people who already work harder than anyone else and remain trapped in poverty. The night shift nurse who juggles two jobs, the farmworker under the blazing sun, the single parent hustling to make rent—these are some of the hardest working people in society, yet their labor is undervalued, underpaid, and unprotected. Hard work matters, but it does not guarantee the kind of upward mobility that billionaires attribute to it.
When billionaires say hard work is everything, they obscure the role of systemic inequality and priviledge. If you dig deep enough into the origin story, they often inherited advantages such as family wealth, elite education, insider connections, or the safety net to take massive risks without catastrophic consequences. Elon Musk can glamorize risk-taking because his family’s wealth and resources gave him a parachute if he failed. That is not advice most people can realistically follow. For the majority, betting it all could mean losing everything.
Privilege Disguised as Insight
The most dangerous kind of bad advice from ultra successful people is when privilege is disguised as insight. When a wealthy hedge fund manager insists that “anyone can make millions if they just invest smart,” they erase the reality that starting capital, financial literacy, and access to networks are not distributed equally. When a celebrity entrepreneur insists that “school is useless,” they may have forgotten that their own elite connections and early financial backing insulated them from the consequences of not having a degree. Advice like this is seductive because it sounds rebellious and bold, but for most people it is reckless. Following it can lead to ruined finances, broken careers, and wasted years.
Privilege does not make billionaires and other ultra successful people evil, but it does make their advice incomplete. They cannot fully see the barriers that others face because those barriers were either removed for them or never existed in their path. What they call wisdom is often just the story of their privilege told through the lens of personal genius.
The Cult of the Outlier
Society loves outliers because they represent the dream of transcendence. We want to believe that anyone can become Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, or Warren Buffett. This cultural obsession is why their advice is treated like sacred scripture. But outliers are outliers for a reason. They represent rare, extreme cases of success that cannot be generalized. Their paths are not scalable or repeatable. It is like training for the NBA by copying Michael Jordan’s exact workout from 1993. Even if you followed it perfectly, the odds of becoming Jordan are infinitesimal. And yet, billionaires often present their paths as replicable roadmaps. They suggest that if you mimic their habits, you too can join the club. What they do not emphasize is that luck, timing, and a supportive ecosystem were critical to their rise.
What We Should Be Listening To
If billionaire advice is unreliable, where should we turn? The answer is not to ignore all successful people, but to recalibrate who we listen to. Instead of only amplifying the voices of the one percent who succeeded spectacularly, we should also be listening to the ninety-nine percent who tried and failed. They often have far more practical wisdom. The entrepreneur who started three businesses and lost them all may have a better understanding of risk, resilience, and humility than the one who got lucky on their first attempt. The worker who juggled jobs and still could not escape poverty can tell us more about the structural flaws of the system than the billionaire who insists that anyone can “make it” with hustle. Failure teaches lessons that success often obscures.
We should also turn to research. Social science gives us evidence-based insights into what actually works for economic mobility, personal growth, and societal well-being. Studies on inequality, labor markets, education, and social capital reveal patterns that are far more trustworthy than anecdotes from billionaires. When policies and practices are built on data rather than inspirational slogans, they have a greater chance of improving lives on a broad scale.
Why We Fall for It Anyway
Despite the flaws, society will likely continue to idolize the advice of billionaires. Their stories are intoxicating because they promise that the American Dream is still alive. We want to believe that there is a formula we can follow, that success is within our control, that if we just wake up at 4 a.m. and drink green smoothies like our heroes (man, I hate celery in my smoothies), we too will ascend. Hope sells. And billionaires, whether consciously or not, are in the business of selling hope. The media reinforces it because audiences crave inspiration more than sobering reality. Failure is boring. Success sells tickets and earns views.
The danger is that while we are busy idolizing bad advice, we neglect the real work of fixing broken systems. We focus on mimicking habits instead of dismantling structural barriers. We chase dreams built on exceptions rather than building policies that benefit the majority. The billionaire tells us to think positive, but what we need is collective action to change the rules of the game to be fairer for all.
Conclusion: Advice We Can Trust
Billionaires are fascinating to study, but their advice should be taken with heavy skepticism. They are the one percent of their peer group that survived, while the other ninety-nine percent fell by the wayside. Their wisdom is shaped by survivorship bias, privilege, and the myth of meritocracy. Following their advice blindly is like planning your retirement by studying Powerball winners. The odds are not in your favor.
I know this because my own journey has been shaped not by shortcuts, windfalls, or gilded safety nets, but by decades of teaching, researching, and advocating in communities where inequality is lived every day. In classrooms in Detroit, in university leadership roles, and in my work on education policy, I have seen firsthand that opportunity is not evenly distributed. The “bootstrap” stories billionaires sell rarely account for the systemic barriers—poverty, discrimination, underfunded schools, precarious jobs—that most people face.
The better path is to look for advice grounded in evidence, humility, and lived experience that reflects those struggles. We should value the lessons of failure as much as success. We should demand policies and structures that make opportunity more widely available, instead of glorifying the rare individuals who managed to escape the gravity of inequality. My life’s work has convinced me of this: progress comes not from idolizing billionaires, but from expanding opportunity for everyone.
Dr Rob Zellem posed this question last night (9-13-2025) to NCA members and visitors at their monthly meeting at the University of Maryland Observatory.
Are we alone in the universe, or are there exoplanets with life of some sort, and even some advanced civilizations out there?
Dr Zellem said the correct answer right now is, maybe. We just don’t have enough data to tell.
He reminded us that Giordano Bruno and Isaac Newton both correctly predicted that other stars would have planets around them. We now know that just about every single star is born with a retinue of planets, asteroids, dust, and comets, so there are at least as many planets as there are stars in our galaxy and all the others as well. Previous speakers to NCA have noted that many of these objects end up getting flung out into the vast frozen emptiness of interstellar space in a giant random game of ‘crack the whip’. No life can exist out there.
My calculations here: It is estimated that there are literally trillions (10^12) of galaxies, each with millions (10^6) or billions (10^9) of stars. Let’s start with our own galaxy, the Milky Way, with maybe 200 billion stars (maybe more). I will assume that life needs a nice, calm, long-lived G class yellow star, which only make up 7.6% of all stars. Roughly 50% to 70% of those stars are in binary systems, which I fear will reduce the chances of having a planet survive in the Goldilocks zone. Perhaps one-third to two-thirds of those G stars have a planet in their habitable zone. We have no idea how likely life is to get started, but after reading Nick Lane’s The Vital Question it sounds pretty complicated to me, so I’ll use a range of estimates: somewhere between 10% and 80% of them develop some form of life. We know that on Earth, the only form of life that existed during the vast majority of the existence of the Earth was unicellular microbes. Four-footed tetrapods like ourselves have only occupied about 1% of the life of our planet, and we humans have only had the telescope for just over 400 years, out of the 400,000,000 years since four-footed animals evolved, which is one in a million. Low estimate:
If my low-end estimates are correct, then there are about five thousand or so exo-planets somewhere in our galaxy with a civilization formed by some sort of animal that can look out into outer space. High estimate:
In that case, there are well over a hundred thousand civilizations in our galaxy — but the Milky Way is huge, hundreds of thousands of light-years across! Most of our exoplanet detections have been within the nearest 100 light years, and we have no way of detecting most exoplanets at all because the planes of their orbits point the wrong way.
Even so, Zellem pointed out that thanks to incredible advances in sensitivity of telescopes and cameras, we are now closer than ever to being able to answer the title question: Are We Alone.
Plus, any amateur astronomer can take useful measurements of exoplanet transits with any telescope, and any digital camera. Following the directions on NASA’s Planet Watch webpage, you can take your data, in your back yard or from a remote observatory, process it the best you can, send it in, and be credited as a co-author on any papers that are published about that particular exoplanet. Then, later, a massive space telescope can be aimed at the most promising exoplanets during their transits. Astronomers can use their extremely sensitive spectroscopes to detect the atmospheres of those bodies and look for signs of life. They do not want to waste extremely valuable telescope time waiting for a transit that doesn’t recur!
Some day we will be in a situation where scientists will be able to say that based on their measurements, the signal indicates a very good chance of life at least a bit like ours, with similar chemistry on some planet. They will also state what the chances are that they are wrong, and indicate what further steps could be made to disprove or confirm their claim.
Zellem noted that both the Doppler-shift method and the transit methods are quite biased in favor of large exoplanets that are close to their suns.
I asked the speaker how likely it would be for observers from some exoplanet to detect the planet Mercury, but couldn’t do the math in my head and didn’t have paper and pencil to write anything down at the time. But now I do.
The closer Mercury is to the Sun, the larger the possible viewing angle.
Using a calculator to find the arc-tangent of that ratio (865,000 miles solar diameter, divided by the smallest and also by the largest distances between them, namely 28,500,000 and 43,500,000 miles) gave me an angle between 2 and 3 degrees, depending. So there is a circular wedge of our galaxy where observers on some other planet might view a transit of our innermost planet. Where is that wedge in our galaxy?
The following sky diagram has the Ecliptic in pink. Only observers within a degree or so of that curvy line could detect that Sol has planets.
So what fraction of the sky can ever hope to catch a transit of Mercury? Only about 1% or 2% of the sky — not much.
Turning things around, this means that we can ourselves only detect, via transits, a very small portion of all extra-solar planetary systems – those whose planes are pointing almost directly at us, and those with large planets that are very close to their stars. (Any planet so close to a star is not a very good candidate for life, in my opinion.)
The biggest obstacle is the sheer distances between stars. At the speed of our very fastest space craft (the Parker Solar Probe), which only goes 0.064% of the speed of light, it would take about 6250 years to reach our closest stellar neighbors near Proxima Centauri. One way. Which probably explains why, if all these other civilizations do exist, we do not appear so far to have been visited by any other extraterrestrial civilization.
At the meeting, someone in the audience was pretty sure that yes, we have already been visited by aliens. I talked with him outside after the meeting. His main evidence was a 2020 New York Times article concerning the upcoming release of classified data about mysterious flying objects (now called UAPs rather than UFOs). In the article, one Eric Davis claimed (without producing any evidence) that some items have been retrieved from various places by the US military that couldn’t be made here on earth. That is of course true of every single asteroid or meteorite ever discovered, since we can’t reproduce the conditions in which they were formed, so his claim is not very helpful. No technological devices clearly of alien manufacture have ever been publicly produced by him or anybody else for testing.
(It’s pretty obvious that American and other military forces spend a lot of money producing objects that go very fast and are highly maneuverable — and which they want to keep secret.)
There are in fact many, many unsolved mysteries in science (eg, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and exactly how the nucleus arose in eukaryotes). Many of the unidentified sky or water phenomena that have been witnessed do not have clear explanations so far, but the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Reputable scientists require a lot more than hearsay evidence before they make bold claims.
Every policy carried out by the government, every federal law passed by Congress, and every landmark case ruled by the Supreme Court impact you and me. Inflation impacts all of us. The price of grocery, gas, and household goods impacts all of us. The horrendous for-profit health insurance system harms all of us. Poorly funded schools harm all of us. Unsafe transportation, such as trains, airplanes, and poorly maintained infrastructure, harms all of us.
Everything I wanted: universal health care, a better-funded education system, a robust welfare system, more support for the homeless population, better mental/psychiatric care, student loan forgiveness, closing tax loopholes for corporations and the super-rich, women’s right to bodily autonomy, stranger food safety laws, stronger environmental safety laws, more money for national parks… everything benefits you (and I, and everyone else.)
I want what is good for everyone.
You want to own the libs. You relish the sight of immigrants, documented or undocumented, being deported, their families broken apart. You want to check every woman’s underpants just so a few trans people can not use the bathroom in public. You want to sentence women and their doctors to death for seeking abortions. You want to make Christianity the religion of the country. You want to see other people suffer, even if that means you suffer too.
So perhaps we are not on the same team.
I’m on Team America.
You are on Team Trump.
I have since received several comments from Christians telling me that this is not what they wanted.
You know what? It doesn’t matter. If you voted for Trump, this is what you wanted. Trump is a package deal. You don’t get to pick and choose. I don’t care if you voted him because egg prices, or immigrants, or abortion, or no warming centers for homeless people in winter.
I don’t fucking care.
You don’t get to vote to harm millions of Americans and then pretend to be a good Christian.
Back in the 1930s, a lot of Germans supported Hitler because they believed Hitler would make Germany great again. They didn’t agree on everything Hitler and the Nazis did, but they thought Hitler would bring down inflation and make things better for them.
