KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Musk and DOGE Are Fun, but Tom Homan Is My Early Trump 47 MVP. “In addition to the radical shift away from open borders lunacy, the ‘new sheriff in town’ swagger and vibe that Tom Homan brings to this effort is essential. Republicans of yesteryear were easily drowned out by the constantly caterwauling Dem sanctuary politicians and the media hacks who abet them.”

ACTUALLY, IF YOU LOOK UP KRUGMAN’S WRITINGS ON TRADE FROM THE 1980S YOU CAN DO KRUGMAN VS. KRUGMAN: Krugman vs. Trump on tariffs. Krugman was pretty protectionist by comparison with many mainstream economists then, which won him the admiration of a whole school of anti-deindustrialization “industrial policy” Democrats who espoused policies that looked somewhat Trumpian. But that makes sense, when you remember that Trump is more or less a 1970s Rust Belt Democrat.

THEY’VE BEEN ROBBING AMERICA BLIND FOR DECADES:

MIDDLE EAST: Israeli operation in Gaza expanding to seize ‘large areas,’ defense minister says. “Israeli leaders have consistently expressed their intention to fully destroy Hamas and remove the Palestinian militant group from power in Gaza. Israel intends to retain security control over the territory as part of any post-war settlement, Netanyahu, Katz and other top officials have said.”

Well, what else are they supposed to do?

CDR SALAMANDER: What Europe Should, Could, and Would do in a Great Pacific War.

The Anglo-French SSN fleet numbers 13 boats. Using the optimistic “it takes three to make one” formula, that gives you four operational boats.

Assuming a Great Pacific War will require the USA to pull almost all its operational forces from Europe to the Pacific, there will be a significant—and smart—argument in Europe that they need to keep their forces at home to cover any threat from their east should it arise, and to secure the Atlantic that has largely been abandoned by the Americans.

As such, any fight in the Pacific would be lucky to get 50% of available operational units. That gives us… two SSN.

Not nothing, but a rounding error in a Great Pacific War. I would give it 2/3 odds that the national caveats would limit them to operations south of Singapore and east of Guam.

So, in the end, with the Great Pacific War, we should not count on much from Europe for this fight. Perhaps some security for Australian airspace and territorial seas, but that would be about it.

It gets lonely out there real fast.

MARK JUDGE: The Stasi Left. “Nazi metaphors have become far too overused. To the Left, everything to the right of Chairman Mao Zedong is fascism. Such overuse of Nazi imagery is disrespectful to the unique evil of the Holocaust. It should stop. Still, a more modern and exact analogy can be applied to the modern American Left. It is the Stasi, the feared German secret police that terrorized East Germany from 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a compelling new book, A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance, scholar Alison Lewis reveals that while dictators such as Hitler or Stalin sought to crush writers and other artists because they feared the freedom they represented, the German Stasi saw them as allies. While the Nazis and their counterparts, the Stalinists, attacked a wide range of artists as ‘degenerate,’ the Stasi worked with and supported entertainers and writers. The German communists had their own versions of people like Michael Moore, Stephen Colbert, the publishing industry, and Hollywood — useful idiots who echo whatever the leaders of the party tell them.”

We have Kimmel, Colbert, etc.

I’M NOW SKEPTICAL ABOUT IT ALL:

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.