The Chaos You’re Feeling Is by Design

 

by Julie Telgenhoff

Yuri Bezmenov’s ‘normalization’ warning matters today because it explains how mass moral disorientation is engineered until populations accept extreme political, social and institutional behavior as ordinary. Normalization is the final and most dangerous phase of ideological subversion, when the abnormal is presented as permanent, inevitable and beyond resistance.

The 4 Stages of Subversion

Bezmenov, a former KGB propagandist, outlined how nations are captured from within:

1. Demoralization (15–20 years): Infiltrating educational and cultural institutions to rewrite a nation’s history and values so that the population can no longer distinguish right from wrong.
2. Destabilization (2–5 years): Attacking essential structural elements like the economy, foreign relations, and defense.
3. Crisis (up to 6 weeks): Precipitating a violent shift that brings a country to the brink of collapse.
4. Normalization: The culmination where the populace becomes numb to radical changes, and new ideological parameters are forced upon them as the inescapable, permanent reality.

On July 3, 2026, the official White House social-media account took an image celebrating the marriage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden and digitally replaced the illuminated “JUST&T MARRIED!” announcement with “Trump Is Your President.” It also published an “America’s Eras Tour” graphic centered on Trump.

Image: WION NEWS

The White House inserted the president into a celebrity wedding so that he could settle a personal grievance with a singer who had opposed him politically.

In another era, this would have been considered deeply embarrassing. The White House was supposed to represent the country, not behave like an obsessive troll account operated by an adolescent. Yet the incident passed through the news cycle as entertainment. Some laughed. Some cheered. Others rolled their eyes and continued scrolling.

That reaction is more important than the post itself.

Demoralization did not simply mean making people unhappy. It meant leaving them unable to judge events according to consistent moral principles. Right and wrong would be replaced by political allegiance. The same behavior would be condemned when performed by an enemy and celebrated when performed by one’s own side.

Subversion does not always arrive with tanks. Sometimes it arrives as a meme.

Donald Trump did not create America’s moral and institutional decay, but he has become its perfect delivery system. I believe he was selected for precisely this role. He was selected to become the great divider: the figure capable of making millions of people defend conduct they would once have condemned, simply because the person performing it belonged to their political tribe.

His function is not merely to pass policies. His deeper function is to demolish the remaining behavioral limits surrounding power.

Image: The Boston Globe

Trump demonstrated this again when former FBI director Robert Mueller died in March 2026. The president of the United States responded publicly: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

A president openly expressing pleasure over another person’s death should have produced a moment of national moral clarity. Instead, many people immediately began explaining why Mueller deserved it. The question was no longer whether celebrating death was beneath the presidency. The only question was whether Mueller belonged to the correct political faction.

That is demoralization.

Trump has described political opponents as “vermin” and used language about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country. He has repeatedly called people “animals,” turning human beings into an undifferentiated enemy population.

The purpose of such language is not only to insult. It lowers the moral barrier against whatever treatment may follow. Once a group becomes vermin, animals or poison, cruelty can be presented as sanitation, protection or patriotism.

The official White House account later released an “ASMR” video featuring close-up footage of shackled immigrants being prepared for deportation. Human beings in chains were transformed into sensory entertainment and government-branded social-media content.

A person can support immigration enforcement while still recognizing the depravity of turning humiliation into entertainment. Policy is one matter. Enjoying the spectacle of restrained people is another. Demoralization deliberately erases that distinction.

Image: The White House via X

The same pattern appears in the administration’s increasingly monarchical imagery. Trump announced “LONG LIVE THE KING!” while the official White House account published an image of him wearing a crown. He later shared an AI-generated image of himself dressed as the pope, which the White House also circulated.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte jokingly used the word “daddy,” and the White House converted it into a presidential promotional video set to “Daddy’s Home.”

King, Pope, and Daddy are not the images of a constitutional public servant. They are the archetypes of unquestionable authority. Each can be dismissed individually as humor. Together, they condition the public to experience domination as personality, leadership and entertainment.

That is how normalization advances. The first occurrence shocks people. The second becomes controversial. The third becomes a joke. By the fourth, it has become part of the president’s brand.

This is why Trump is so effective in the role for which he was selected. He does not merely violate social and institutional boundaries. He forces his followers to participate in destroying them. Every new act demands another defense. Every defense moves the boundary a little farther.

“They deserved it.”

“He's playing 5-D Chess.”

“It was only a joke.”

“Stop being so sensitive.”

“What about the Democrats?”

These reactions are the machinery of normalization. The population performs the work upon itself.

Demoralized people no longer ask whether an action is honorable, humane or appropriate for the presidency. They ask whether it humiliates the people they have been trained to hate. Cruelty becomes acceptable when directed at an approved target. Narcissism becomes strength. Vindictiveness becomes authenticity. Institutional degradation becomes evidence that the president is an outsider “shaking things up.”

This does not mean the system was healthy before Trump. It was not. Previous administrations expanded war, surveillance, censorship, corporate power and government secrecy while maintaining a more polished public appearance. Trump’s particular assignment is different. He was selected to rip away the respectable mask and make the degradation itself desirable.

He turns government into spectacle, leadership into personal worship and human suffering into shareable content.

That is why the White House inserting Trump into Taylor Swift’s wedding matters. Viewed alone, it appears petty and ridiculous. Viewed as part of the larger pattern, it reveals an official institution now operating as an extension of one man’s ego and private resentments.

And hardly anyone is shocked, because this is normalization.

Bezmenov warned that after sufficient demoralization, people could be shown factual information and still remain incapable of interpreting it outside the ideology that had captured them. They would not recognize the process because their ability to recognize it had been dismantled.

Trump is fulfilling that role extraordinarily well. He is teaching the population not merely to tolerate degradation, but to applaud it, repeat it and attack anyone who still possesses enough moral awareness to object.

Normalization is complete when the abnormal no longer needs to be concealed. It can be posted directly from the White House, and millions will defend it or laugh it off before asking whether it should ever have happened.

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Why Are They Encouraging AI Writing Everywhere?

 

Written by Julie Telgenhoff

Facebook has quietly placed artificial intelligence directly inside the act of posting. A person can begin typing, select “Help me write,” and instruct Meta AI to rewrite the post for them. Meta offers similar assistance in Messenger, where AI can rephrase a message or change its tone before it is sent. Google has already normalized this through Gemini. Gmail can generate an entire email from a prompt or refine something the user has written, while Google Docs can rephrase, shorten, elaborate, summarize or convert thoughts into bullet points.

The same pressure is already entering the employment process. Resume writing is increasingly promoted as something artificial intelligence should handle, from composing professional summaries to rewriting work history around keywords selected for applicant tracking systems. Even after someone applies, employment platforms such as Indeed may encourage the applicant to use an embedded AI tool when responding to a company’s message. The person is no longer simply being helped with spelling or formatting. AI is being placed between the applicant and the employer, shaping how the person presents their experience, personality and interest in the job.

These tools are presented as conveniences: they save time, improve grammar, and help people sound more professional. But convenience is not neutral when it enters the process through which human beings form and communicate thought. The struggle is the thinking.

When an AI system performs that work before the person has done it, something important is removed. The user may receive cleaner language, but the mind loses another opportunity to practice creating it.

This is cognitive offloading: transferring mental work to an outside tool. Human beings have always done this with calendars, notebooks, calculators and maps. Offloading is not automatically harmful. The concern begins when we stop outsourcing storage or calculation and begin outsourcing the development of our own thoughts. Research has long recognized that external tools can reduce the amount of internal mental work a person performs. More recent research has found that heavier dependence on AI is associated with lower critical-thinking ability, particularly when users accept generated material without actively evaluating it.

Facebook’s writing assistant does not merely correct a misspelled word after someone has completed a thought. It waits inside the posting box, inviting the user to surrender the thought before it has fully formed. That is a very different relationship with technology.

Social media had already begun reshaping written language long before generative AI arrived. Paragraphs became captions. Conversations became reactions. Complex ideas were squeezed into slogans, memes and isolated sentences designed to produce the fastest possible emotional response.

The platforms trained users to post, check, react and repeat. Large scale research has found that social media behavior follows patterns consistent with reward learning: people adjust what and how often they post according to the social rewards they receive. The “like” functions as feedback, teaching the user which behavior is most likely to be rewarded again.

A thoughtful paragraph asks the reader to slow down, hold several ideas in mind and follow a line of reasoning. A single emotionally charged, AI-produced, one line sentence asks almost nothing. It can be absorbed, approved or rejected in seconds before the thumb continues scrolling. The result may not be better human writing. It may be the gradual replacement of human writing with a standardized platform voice: polished, pleasant, concise, predictable and almost entirely without fingerprints.

Researchers have already found signs of this convergence. In one published experiment, people given generative AI ideas produced stories that were judged more polished and creative individually, yet those stories were also more similar to one another. The writers improved their immediate output while the collective diversity of the writing declined. Other controlled research has found that AI writing suggestions can pull users toward dominant cultural and linguistic styles, reducing some of the distinctions that make individual voices recognizable.

This is the trade being offered. You can sound more competent without developing competence, appear articulate without struggling to articulate anything, and produce more words while exercising less authorship.

And here's what really matters. Eventually, people may stop noticing the exchange.

The AI-generated sentence will sound correct. It will contain the approved structure, familiar transitions and emotionally appropriate tone. The user will tap “insert,” make one small change and experience the finished product as their own.

Do this repeatedly and the relationship reverses. The machine no longer learns to imitate the person. The person begins learning to imitate the machine.

This is why the relentless placement of AI inside email, search engines, documents, text messages and social-media posts deserves more scrutiny than it is receiving. The issue is not simply that AI exists. The issue is that it is becoming the default intermediary between a human experience and the words used to describe it.

The platforms stand to benefit either way. Users produce material faster. More content enters the system. Communication becomes easier to categorize, predict and process. Language becomes standardized enough for algorithms to understand and distribute efficiently.

Whether the deliberate objective is to weaken human expression or that is merely a profitable consequence, the destination looks remarkably similar: people who communicate constantly but increasingly struggle to express a developed original thought.

There is an important difference between using AI as a tool and allowing AI to become the author. A person can arrive with an idea, conduct research, write a rough argument and use AI to question, organize or polish it. The person remains the source. The technology assists an intellectual process that has already begun.

However, the embedded “Help me write” button encourages the opposite sequence. The technology supplies the thought shaped product first, and the human is reduced to approving it.

Language carries memory, temperament, culture, humor, contradiction and lived experience. Real human writing is sometimes awkward because human thought is still developing. It wanders because discovery is not always linear. It requires paragraphs because meaningful ideas often cannot be reduced to one sentence without destroying what made them meaningful.

The greatest danger is not that artificial intelligence will become indistinguishable from a human being. It is that human beings will gradually become indistinguishable from artificial intelligence: brief, frictionless, predictable and unable to tolerate the mental discomfort required to form an original idea.

A population that loses its language also loses part of its ability to question, reason and resist manipulation.

People who cannot construct a paragraph will eventually struggle to construct an argument. People who cannot remain with an argument will accept whichever conclusion arrives quickest.

When people outsource writing to AI, they are not simply handing over a mechanical chore. They are surrendering part of the process through which critical thought is formed, tested and organized. As that ability weakens, people become more vulnerable to manipulation and less capable of identifying contradictions, exposing systemic harm or clearly explaining what is being done to them.

By encouraging society to trade cognitive autonomy for convenience, the widespread outsourcing of writing carries consequences far beyond grammar and style. A population that cannot independently formulate an argument will eventually struggle to recognize tyranny, articulate its suffering or organize coherent resistance against the forces causing it.

You Don’t Attract What You Want... You Become It!

 "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." - Proverbs 23:7

by Julie Telgenhoff

Manifestation has been buried beneath vision boards, repetitive affirmations, complicated rituals and endless instructions about raising your vibration. Jason Brashear of Archaix cuts through all of it. In two short paragraphs, he explains that the desired experience must first be imagined as a memory and then embodied as an identity.

That distinction changes everything.

Most people imagine what they want while remaining conscious that they do not have it. They hope it will happen, wonder when it will arrive and continually search their reality for evidence that it is working. Every time they check, they reinforce the belief that the desired outcome is still somewhere in the future.

Brashear’s method reverses this. Instead of fantasizing about something that might happen, imagine remembering something that already happened. Remember how quickly it appeared. Remember how natural it felt when it became part of your life. Remember the relief, satisfaction or freedom you experienced once it was settled.

Hope keeps the desire at a distance. Memory makes it feel complete.

When a matter becomes clear, it ceases to concern us. We do not spend every day wondering whether yesterday happened. We know it happened, so there is nothing left to chase, force or continually confirm. This is why the imagined experience must eventually be released. Once it feels internally settled, continuing to struggle with it only reopens the question.

The struggle itself blocks the miracle.

When we fight reality, obsess over what is missing or attempt to force an outcome, we continue charging the condition we want to escape. What we resist persists because our attention keeps feeding it. The mind may believe it is searching for a solution, but it is often rehearsing the problem.

Negative situations can remain because we continually charge the field around them. We think about them, speak about them, anticipate their return and repeatedly react to them. In doing so, we keep giving them energy. The condition may be unwanted, but our behavior continues treating it as important, powerful and present.

Letting go does not mean the desire no longer matters. It means no longer behaving as though your life depends upon obtaining it. You stop watching the clock. You stop demanding signs. You stop negotiating with reality. The desire becomes no big deal because, within your imagination, it has already been resolved.

This is the indifference people often misunderstand. It is not apathy. It is the calmness that follows certainty.

You must stop trying to get it. The effort to obtain it reveals that you still believe it is missing. Your behavior must communicate that the outcome is already secure, even though a deeper part of you still cares very much about it. You do not become emotionally numb. You simply stop feeding the absence.

Brashear’s second instruction is to immediately assume the identity of the person who has already received what was wanted. Reality does not merely respond to what we say we want. It responds to the identity we consistently project through our expectations, decisions, reactions and behavior.

Imagination generates reality, but action and behavior water the fantasy until it becomes fact.

You do not repeatedly try to become that person. You begin operating as that person now. The desired outcome becomes something you know rather than something you seek.

Acting wealthy does not require reckless spending or pretending bills do not exist. It means refusing to allow scarcity to define your identity. Acting loved does not mean inventing a relationship that is not there. It means no longer moving through life as someone who expects rejection. Acting successful means making choices from the identity of someone capable, secure and accustomed to opportunity rather than someone waiting to be rescued.

Reality responds to identity.

The more natural the new identity feels, the more powerful it becomes. An exaggerated performance still reveals that the experience feels foreign. The goal is not to force excitement every moment. It is to allow the desired reality to feel ordinary, familiar and expected.

There are also three things Brashear says you should not do.

The first is waiting.

Waiting produces anxiety because waiting assumes the desired event has not happened. The person who is waiting remains focused on time, delay and absence. Anxiety then pushes the experience further away because the behavior itself continues broadcasting uncertainty.

The second is looking for external validation.

Checking your phone, refreshing your messages, searching for signs or constantly looking for confirmation creates worry. Worry is another form of anxiety, and anxiety communicates that the outcome is not secure.

Behavior is what the construct responds to.

You may say that you believe, but if your actions show that you are nervous, watching and repeatedly checking, then your behavior is expressing doubt. The field is not responding to the words alone. It is responding to the identity underneath them.

The third is talking to other people about your intentions.

Your intention belongs to you. Once it is shared, other people can project doubt, fear, judgment or disbelief onto it. Their energy can affect your field, especially if their reaction causes you to question what previously felt settled.

It is your fantasy anyway. Keep it to yourself.

Download Now!

There is no need to seek agreement, permission or applause. The imagined experience is an inner act of creation. Protect it until it becomes so natural that outside opinions no longer disturb it.

This is a plane of creation, not competition. Another person does not have to lose for you to receive. You are not fighting the world for a limited supply of possibilities. You are occupying a state and allowing the corresponding experience to organize around it.

The formula is almost unnervingly simple. Imagine the desired experience as something already remembered. Feel how ordinary and secure it became. Assume the identity of the person for whom it is already true. Allow your actions to arise from that identity. Do not wait, do not search for validation and do not expose the intention to people who may interfere with it.

Then stop chasing the result.

You do not beg for what is already yours. You do not struggle to reach what has already been settled. You remember, become and release.

Then you allow reality to catch up.

The video below is clipped from a presentation lasting more than three hours inside The Underground. Brashear describes it as a synopsis drawn from thousands of pages of notes and a complete abbreviation, reduced to two paragraphs, of the central manifestation and law-of-attraction principles found throughout the works of Baltasar Gracián, Thomas Troward, Wallace Wattles, Neville Goddard, James Allen, Napoleon Hill, Rhonda Byrne, The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science and The Dore Lectures.

Archaix Breakthrough Analysis on Manifestation Formulas

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Stop Procrastination Energetic/Frequency Music - Get Things Done!

 

Julie Telgenhoff

I’m sharing another powerful frequency meditation from Elke Neher, this one created to help break through procrastination, release the invisible resistance that keeps us stuck, and restore the motivation to finally get things done.

The recording combines binaural beats, isochronic tones, healing frequencies, affirmations, subliminals, and an embedded energy transmission designed to bring the mind and body into a deeply relaxed state. From that place, we may be better able to release subconscious patterns connected to avoidance, hesitation, and feeling unable to move forward.

The energy around us has felt extremely heavy lately. For me, it has shown up as intense fatigue, a lack of motivation, and a feeling of being physically and emotionally unbalanced. Whether this is connected to the natural frequencies surrounding us or manipulation through increasing levels of EMF (from 5G toward 6G and 7G), something has felt noticeably different.

Today, however, I personally felt a shift for the better, and this meditation feels especially timely. Sit back, relax, allow the frequencies and affirmations to work, and hold the intention of moving forward with greater clarity, energy, and purpose.

Headphones may enhance the experience, although they are not required, and remember to drink plenty of pure water.

If my work has helped you in any way, you can support my independent writing here:  https://buymeacoffee.com/asheepnomore

Every bit helps me keep researching, writing, and sharing outside the corporate-approved narrative.

How Many Times Can This Be Called Coincidence? Trump Bought the Stocks. Then His Government Boosted the Companies.

Source:  nymag.com

Note: This is not a left-wing argument, and it is not an attack on Donald Trump simply because he is Donald Trump. Any president who holds individual stocks while overseeing contracts, regulations and policies that can enrich those companies should face the same scrutiny.

Two weeks separated Donald Trump’s multimillion-dollar investment in a Taser manufacturer from his administration’s announcement of an enormous federal Taser procurement.

On February 10, 2026, Trump’s investment account purchased between $1 million and $5 million in Axon Enterprise, the company that manufactures Tasers. Federal disclosure rules provide only broad value ranges, so the exact amount remains unknown. Trump’s account purchased another $15,000 to $50,000 in Axon shares on March 2 while also making two relatively small sales around the same period.

On February 24, only fourteen days after the large purchase, Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a notice describing plans for a five-year contract worth an estimated $220 million. ICE wanted approximately 17,800 new Tasers, unlimited cartridges and training for its agents. The agency reportedly had about 4,300 Tasers in service, meaning the proposed purchase alone would more than quadruple its existing inventory.

The notice did not award the contract to Axon or even identify the company by name. It was a preliminary request for information from potential suppliers. However, reporting found that Axon was the only known company manufacturing a conductive energy weapon matching the specifications ICE requested. Axon was also already doing business with the Department of Homeland Security and had spent nearly $2.5 million lobbying during the previous year, the highest annual lobbying expenditure in the company’s history.

The timing becomes even stranger when we remember what Trump said on February 24, the same day ICE posted the contracting notice. During his State of the Union address, Trump called upon Congress to prohibit its members from profiting through insider information.

“Let’s also ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information,” he declared.

Yet Trump did not propose extending that prohibition to the president. His own portfolio was holding as much as $5 million in a company positioned to become the primary beneficiary of a procurement announced by an agency under his control.

Axon might have been dismissed as an uncomfortable coincidence had it occurred alone. It did not.

Financial disclosures covering the first three months of 2026 revealed an extraordinary level of trading inside Trump’s investment accounts. CBS News counted 3,642 transactions involving 1,026 companies and funds between January 6 and March 30. That included 2,346 purchases and 1,296 sales. Reuters estimated the combined value of the transactions disclosed across two reports at between $220 million and approximately $750 million.

This was not a passive portfolio quietly holding broad market funds. It was an actively traded collection of individual corporations whose fortunes could be affected by contracts, regulations, tariffs, export approvals, health policies and public statements originating from the Trump administration.

Consider Dell Technologies.

On February 10, the same day as the large Axon purchase, Trump’s portfolio acquired between $1 million and $5 million in Dell stock. Nine days later, Trump stood before supporters in Georgia and told them to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” Three additional Dell purchases, each worth up to $50,000, followed in March.

In May, the Pentagon awarded Dell’s federal subsidiary a contract valued at up to $9.7 billion to manage and consolidate Microsoft software procurement across the Department of Defense, intelligence agencies and the Coast Guard. The agreement consolidated previously budgeted software spending rather than creating an entirely new $9.7 billion pool of money, and Dell had an established relationship with Microsoft and the Pentagon. None of that changes the central issue: the sitting president owned a major personal financial interest in a company he publicly promoted before his administration awarded that company the largest government contract in its history.

Then there were the semiconductor companies.

Trump’s financial managers purchased between $500,001 and $1 million in Nvidia stock on January 6. The following week, the administration relaxed export restrictions, allowing Nvidia to resume selling certain high value artificial intelligence chips to customers in China. The accounts continued buying and selling Nvidia throughout the quarter, eventually recording fifteen separate Nvidia transactions.

The portfolio also purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 in Advanced Micro Devices stock on January 6. On January 13, the Commerce Department authorized AMD to sell chips to Chinese customers. Trump’s accounts purchased at least $740,000 in AMD stock during the quarter.

Palantir provides another example. Trump bought between $65,000 and $150,000 in Palantir shares during January, sold between approximately $1.1 million and $5.3 million in February, and then bought between roughly $200,000 and $500,000 more in March. During February, Palantir entered an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security reportedly worth as much as $1 billion to provide technology supporting the administration’s immigration-enforcement operations.

On April 7, after the March purchases, Trump publicly praised Palantir on Truth Social. He did not merely mention the company. He included its stock-market ticker, PLTR, while praising its “war fighting capabilities and equipment.”

The pattern was not confined to military equipment, surveillance technology and artificial intelligence. It extended into prescription drugs.

Trump’s accounts made seven purchases of Eli Lilly stock during the first quarter, beginning on January 6, with the combined purchases valued at as much as $680,000. Two days after the first purchase, drug manufacturers faced a deadline to apply for a new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services program designed to expand access to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Eli Lilly later became a participating manufacturer and described the development as a significant milestone.

The administration subsequently promoted several policies beneficial to Lilly. Medicare moved toward covering obesity drugs through a pilot program. The government’s TrumpRx website directed consumers toward lower-priced Lilly products and LillyDirect, the company’s own telemedicine service. The FDA intensified enforcement against cheaper compounded GLP-1 alternatives and later gave expedited approval to a Lilly weight loss pill. Not every government decision favored the company, but enough did that ethics experts openly questioned the appearance created by the president holding Lilly shares while his agencies shaped the company’s market.

Tobacco offers yet another variation on the same theme.

By 2026, Trump’s holdings in Philip Morris had reportedly grown to as much as $1.64 million. His portfolio also traded Altria and other tobacco-related stocks. Meanwhile, tobacco interests contributed millions of dollars to Trump’s political operation, inauguration and related projects. Reynolds American donated another $5 million to MAGA Inc. on April 30, one week before FDA guidance gave the tobacco and vaping industries an important regulatory victory.

During the same period, the administration withdrew a proposed menthol-cigarette ban, created faster pathways for nicotine products, eased the market entry of some vaping products, weakened federal tobacco-control offices and increased enforcement against unapproved competitors threatening the largest established companies. Financial analysts described portions of the new FDA policy as highly favorable to Philip Morris and other major industry players.

No publicly available evidence proves that Trump personally ordered any of these trades. No document currently proves that he knew in advance about the Axon procurement, the Dell agreement, the semiconductor export decisions or the health policies affecting Eli Lilly.

The Trump Organization says the investments are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent financial institutions. It claims neither Trump nor his family chooses, directs or receives advance notice of individual trades and that automated systems handle portfolio decisions.

That explanation deserves to be reported. It does not resolve the problem.

Trump’s portfolio is not a qualified blind trust. His assets remain in a trust controlled by his children, and his signed financial disclosures reveal the companies held and traded on his behalf. A person cannot honestly claim to be blind to investments appearing on documents that person reviews, signs and certifies.

The transaction volume may also have an ordinary financial explanation. Investment professionals reviewing the records suggested that Trump’s managers could be using automated direct indexing and tax-loss harvesting, strategies that can produce thousands of purchases and sales without anyone manually selecting every trade. The accounts sometimes bought and sold the same companies, making it difficult to isolate any one transaction and prove it resulted from nonpublic information.

But the ethical issue is larger than whether prosecutors could prove criminal insider trading.

The president oversees the agencies that award contracts, issue licenses, approve exports, negotiate drug prices and write regulations. He appoints the people running those agencies. He can publicly praise a company and move markets with a sentence. At the same time, his private portfolio may gain or lose money depending upon the decisions made by the government he controls.

Most executive branch employees would face strict restrictions against participating in official matters affecting their personal financial interests. Federal law, however, excludes the president and vice president from the principal criminal conflict of interest statute covering such conduct. Trump remains subject to financial disclosure requirements, but disclosure merely tells the public about the conflict after the transaction has occurred; it does not remove the conflict.

Trump’s latest filing was itself late. He reportedly paid a $200 penalty for failing to disclose the transactions within the STOCK Act’s 45 day deadline. In practical terms, a president overseeing trillions of dollars in government activity can maintain a portfolio worth hundreds of millions, disclose trades after the fact and face a penalty smaller than many Americans’ monthly utility bill.

Perhaps every one of these transactions was generated independently by an algorithm. Perhaps Trump knew nothing about the trades until they appeared on his disclosure forms. Perhaps each favorable government decision was made entirely on its merits.

But government ethics should not rest upon the public being asked to accept an endless series of perhapses.

One Axon purchase before a proposed $220 million Taser contract might be called coincidence. A multimillion dollar Dell purchase, followed by presidential promotion and a $9.7 billion Pentagon agreement, makes coincidence harder to accept as a complete explanation. Add Nvidia, AMD, Palantir, Eli Lilly and the tobacco companies, and we are no longer looking at a single suspicious date on a calendar. We are looking at a system that repeatedly places presidential power and private financial gain on the same side of the transaction.

The question is not merely whether Donald Trump broke a law designed with a presidential loophole large enough to drive a $9.7 billion contract through. The question is why any president is permitted to own and actively trade individual companies while controlling the federal machinery that can enrich them.

Sources:

Office of Government Ethics: Donald J. Trump Periodic Transaction Report, signed May 8, 2026
https://extapps2.oge.gov/201/Presiden.nsf/PAS+Index/405E4EC4E27BE8D185258DF7002DD1C0/$FILE/Trump,%20Donald%20J.-05.08.2026-278T(2).pdf

SAM.gov:  ICE Sources Sought Notice for Conducted Energy Weapons, cartridges and training
https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/b40ef27c3e424cb788190e88ab12ca83/view

Samuel Larreal and Jackie Llanos, NOTUS:  “Trump Bought Corporations’ Stock as His Administration Boosted Their Business,” May 14, 2026; updated May 15, 2026
https://www.notus.org/money/donald-trump-stock-investments-palantir-axom-nvidia

Jackie Llanos, NOTUS:  “ICE Plans to Spend $220 Million on Tasers,” March 2, 2026
https://www.notus.org/immigration/taser-contract-immigration-customs-enforcement-220-million

Maegan Vazquez, The Washington Post: “Dell Inks $9.7 Billion Pentagon Contract After Trump Acquires Stock,” May 28, 2026
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/28/dell-inks-97-billion-pentagon-contract-after-trump-acquires-stock-praises-company/

Darius Tahir, KFF Health News:  “Trump Bought Stock in Drugmaker as His Government Boosted Its Obesity Drugs,” May 18, 2026
https://kffhealthnews.org/health-industry/trump-stock-trades-eli-lilly-glp-1-weight-loss-drugs-invest-ethics-disclosures/

Darius Tahir, KFF Health News:  “Trump Bought Tobacco Stocks and Raked In Industry Donations as FDA Eased Standards,” June 11, 2026
https://kffhealthnews.org/courts/fda-tobacco-vape-vaping-ecigarette-smoking-trump-investments-maga-donations/

Stefan Becket, Michael Kaplan, Graham Kates, Grace Manthey and Julia Ingram, CBS News: “3,600 Stock Trades in 3 Months: Breaking Down Trump’s Flurry of Investment Moves,” June 15, 2026
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-stock-trades-2026/

CBS News: Interactive database: “Explore Trump’s 3,600 Stock Trades From the First 3 Months of 2026,” June 15, 2026
https://www.cbsnews.com/projects/2026/trump-stock-trades/

Jarrett Renshaw, Lawrence Delevingne and Tom Bergin, Reuters: “Trump Ethics Filing Reveals Thousands of Trades Tied to U.S. Corporate Securities,” May 14, 2026; updated May 15, 2026
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-ethics-filing-reveals-thousands-trades-tied-us-corporate-securities-2026-05-14/

Samuel Larreal, NOTUS: “What Donald Trump Knows About His Stock Investments,” May 19, 2026
https://www.notus.org/money/donald-trump-stock-investments-portfolio-disclosure

Cornell Legal Information Institute: 18 U.S. Code § 202, defining the exclusion of the president and vice president from several federal conflict-of-interest provisions
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202

Joy Is Not Denial: How to Stay Human While the World Feels Like It Is Falling Apart

 

Written by Julie Telgenhoff

There are seasons when life does not merely feel stressful. It feels relentless. Personal loss collides with financial pressure, health problems, broken relationships, political conflict, frightening technology and a constant stream of headlines warning us that something worse may be coming.

After enough of this, the mind begins living ahead of itself. It searches for the next emergency before the present one has even ended. A quiet afternoon no longer feels peaceful. It feels like the suspicious silence before another blow.

In that state, joy can feel almost inappropriate. How can we laugh when people are suffering? How can we enjoy a meal, a song or a beautiful afternoon when our own problems remain unresolved? We may even distrust happiness, afraid that the moment we relax, life will punish us for letting down our guard.

But joy is not a declaration that everything is fine. It is not forced optimism, spiritual bypassing or pretending that cruelty and suffering do not exist. Research into mixed emotions has found that happiness and sadness can be experienced together. In some circumstances, the ability to hold both emotions may actually precede improvements in psychological well-being.

That means we do not have to finish grieving before we laugh again. We do not have to solve the world before we notice the sunlight coming through a window. A moment of joy does not cancel pain. Both experiences can occupy the same human life.

Because trying to suppress fear, grief or anger usually creates another struggle inside us. We are no longer only hurting; we are judging ourselves for hurting. Research has associated the nonjudgmental acceptance of difficult emotions with better psychological health.  Acceptance does not mean approving of what happened. It means admitting, without shame, that this is what we feel right now.

Joy enters through the same doorway. We acknowledge sorrow when it arrives, but we do not make sorrow the only emotion permitted inside the house.

Positive emotions are sometimes treated as decorative luxuries, useful only after the serious problems have been handled. Research suggests otherwise. Positive emotion may help protect people from some of the psychological effects of stress and trauma, while supportive relationships, self-compassion, hope and meaning can help positive emotion return after adversity. Studies of everyday stress have also found that positive emotions experienced on difficult days can soften the emotional impact of those stressors and may reduce how strongly people react to stress the following day.

This does not require becoming cheerful all day. The nervous system may not be ready for that, and demanding it can become another form of pressure. The goal is not constant happiness. The goal is to create small openings through which life can still reach us.

One of the first openings may come from limiting how much access chaos has to our attention. Being informed is different from remaining electronically connected to disaster every waking hour. News sites, social media and phone notifications can make events from across the world feel as though they are happening inside our own living room. Psychologists have warned that repeated media exposure and constant checking can intensify stress and emotional overload.

Turning away for a few hours does not make a person ignorant or uncaring. There is a difference between receiving information that helps us act and consuming information that leaves us frightened, frozen and unable to function. We can choose a limited time to read the news, gather what is useful and then return to the physical life directly in front of us.

When everything feels overwhelming, it also helps to shorten the distance we are trying to travel. Trauma pushes the mind into an enormous future filled with every possible loss. Joy usually lives in a much smaller place.

It may live in the next ten minutes.

What would make those ten minutes gentler? Opening a window. Washing our face. Sitting beside an animal. Playing a song connected to a good memory. Making tea in a favorite cup. Stepping outside long enough to notice that the sky is still moving.

These actions may appear insignificant beside the size of the problem, but that is precisely why they matter. Large problems often cannot be resolved in one day. The human body, however, still needs moments in which it receives the message that this particular minute is survivable.

Psychologists use the word “savoring” to describe deliberately attending to and appreciating a positive experience. Experiments have found that savoring can increase positive emotion after stressful experiences. It is not enough for something pleasant to happen while our attention remains trapped elsewhere. We have to stay with the experience long enough to notice it.

Instead of drinking something while reading frightening headlines, we taste it. Instead of automatically walking past a flowering tree, we stop and look at it. Instead of dismissing a kind exchange because it lasted only a minute, we allow that minute to matter.

Joy is often quiet enough to be missed.

The body also needs an exit from the mental loop. Gentle movement, when physically possible, can help shift attention away from constant rumination. It need not be an exhausting workout. Walking through a room, stretching, tending plants or moving to one song can reconnect the mind with the physical present. Research broadly associates physical activity with better mental well-being and greater capacity to cope with stress.

Nature can offer a similar interruption. Studies have linked exposure to natural environments with improved mental health, reduced stress and more positive emotion. Nature does not demand an explanation for our sadness. A tree does not ask us to become more productive. A bird does not care whether we have solved our future. The living world simply reminds us that existence is larger than the latest crisis being presented on a screen.

Connection is another shelter, although it must be the right kind of connection. Being surrounded by people who dismiss our experience can deepen loneliness. One person who listens without correcting, mocking or minimizing may be more valuable than a crowded room. High-quality social support has repeatedly been associated with greater resilience to stress and a lower risk of trauma-related psychological difficulties. 

Connection can also come through animals, creativity, faith, service or participation in something that carries meaning. Trauma often produces helplessness. Meaningful action gives us a small piece of agency back. We may not be able to repair the entire world, but we can feed an animal, help a neighbor, create something beautiful, speak honestly, clean one corner of a room or complete one task that makes tomorrow less difficult.

Joy does not always arrive as excitement. Sometimes it appears as relief. Sometimes it is the satisfaction of finishing something. Sometimes it is remembering who we were before the chaos and discovering that person is not entirely gone.

People living through prolonged hardship may also need to release the guilt attached to pleasure. Enjoying one afternoon does not betray those who are suffering. Laughing does not mean we have forgotten what happened. Resting does not mean we have surrendered. A life containing joy is not evidence that the pain was unimportant.

It is evidence that the pain did not become the whole story.

The world may remain uncertain. Some problems will not be solved quickly, and some losses cannot be reversed. Keeping joy does not require us to deny any of that. It asks only that we stop giving chaos ownership of every thought, every conversation and every hour we have left.

We can grieve and still plant something. We can be frightened and still sing. We can recognize what is wrong while protecting what remains good.

Joy is not blindness. It is the refusal to let darkness occupy every room inside us.

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