The News You Need on Monday, May 11th, 2026.
TikTok pushed right-wing content during the US election, Russia celebrated a rushed victory day and a recipe to celebrate Mother's Day. Read all the news you need from The Horton-Kaiser Report.
On Super Power Suicide
Charles: Historian Timothy Snyder offers a brilliant summary of what he calls Donald Trump’s “anti-strategic self-slaughter.”
The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide...Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.
Snyder sees only two alternatives: “the self-induced downfall of the American republic, or a restructuring of American politics “to bring the people greater power over a more just future.
Snyder mines thirteen different areas, from statehood and education to diplomacy and science to describe the massive self-inflicted wounds Trump and his cultists have inflicted upon us.
Here is some of his strongest evidence.
People such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth. . .lack any qualifications. The fact that such people could be considered, let alone appointed, is a marker of superpower suicide.
Trump’s idea is battleships named after himself based on what he remembers of a movie. The plans for “Trump-class” battleships are a mixture of the fictional and the vulnerable, which does reflect the man. The notion is to invest untold amounts of money into a kind of weapon has been understood to be obsolete since 1943.
There is no evidence that Trump knows how to negotiate, and abundant evidence that he does not: for example, defeat in trade wars with China; personal vulnerability to the preferences of Russian leaders, and the disaster of Iranian nuclear enrichment, of which Trump himself is the chief sponsor.
In deliberately destroying its own international system, this American government is improving the position of its rivals China and Russia, who have been calling for exactly this to happen, but who lacked the ability to make it happen.
It would serve the interests of the United States in prosperity and stability for Ukraine to win; but under Trump the United States has switched its policy to one of support for Ukraine to support for Russia. So it has lost in that way. But since the United States has made that pivot, Ukraine has performed ever better in the war, and Russia has performed worse. And so the United States, amazingly, has managed to be the loser in the same war a double sense: by failing to see its own interests, and then by failing to fail.
Under Trump our national debt now approaches $40 trillion. National debt is higher than GDP of the country for the first time since the end of the Second World War. That is a notable point of comparison: it is normal to run big deficits when facing the challenge of the scale of a world war. We are running huge deficits for an entirely different reason: because we decline to tax wealthy individuals and corporations.
Elvis Came in Peace
Süddeutsche Zeitung
Scott: Between 1946 and today, some four million American soldiers, sailors and airmen were stationed in Germany. Ever since 1949, Germans have not viewed them as an occupying force, but rather as a tripwire that would prevent the incorporation of the western part of the country into the Soviet bloc.
But ask Germans about G.I.s and they’re likely to talk to you about one in particular: Elvis Presley.
His arrival transformed German popular culture in a surprising way.
On October 1, 1958, at 9:35 a.m., Elvis Presley came down the gangway in Bremerhaven and set foot on German soil. He was now a soldier and hardly recognizable: his quiff gone, his hair cut as required, someone in uniform.
Elvis spent a year and a half in Germany and didn’t appear once. Occasionally he went on maneuvers, looked with binoculars to the east in Grafenwöhr, where the enemy was standing, and otherwise did not appear in public. The rock and roll that had shaken America for two years was at a standstill.
Bravo had greeted him on an advertising poster: “Elvis becomes German.” The peaked cap in the accompanying picture was reminiscent of the ill-fated Wehrmacht, but here there was no doubt: Elvis came in peace, a latecomer to those GIs who had surprised the defeated Germans in 1945 with their friendliness, with chewing gum and chocolate.
The Germans, who had just dreamed of world domination, could not be trusted, so two hundred thousand men remained as garrison. Unlike in later decades, the Americans had not only prepared for war, but also for peace. The American zone, together with the British and French zones, formed the front against the communist Eastern Bloc, but this outpost of freedom was not only re-armed militarily in the 1950s, but also provided with culture.
American houses were opened everywhere, scholarships were donated, and invitations to the USA were extended. The Documents showed world art, publishers rushed to provide the audience with the latest and until recently unattainable literature, and Ernest Hemingway became the definitive author for German writers. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong promoted the better, American way of life on tours in Europe; re-education was intended to bring the Germans out of the national community and back into the global community.
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Scott: I quickly came across Charles Kaiser as someone who thought about things almost exactly the same way I did. We have a kindred spirit and perspective that we share up until this day.
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