3.9.2026
'how long does it take to take your country back from madmen?'
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The Desperate Last Days of Trump's "Turd Reich" Are Here. Trust Me.
Date: 2026-09-03 08:54
From: "Dean Blundell"
View this post on the web at
https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/the-desperate-last-days-of-trumps
September 3, 2026
I'm writing this from Zell am See, the last stop on a trip that started in Marienplatz and ended at the Eagle's Nest. For four dispatches, Steve Schmidt Schmidt and I have been
asking one question of the German countryside:
"how long does it take to take your country back from madmen?"
Fifty-three days to take a country. Seventy years to get it back.
Somewhere between Dachau and Obersalzberg, another question started nagging at me. Not how long does it take to take a country. How long does it take to lose one? What does a regime sound like when it knows it's finished but hasn't stopped talking? And what do you look for when that regime knows that they're all about to "swing?"
Over the past fourteen days, the Trump regime has produced some of the most desperate, easily disprovable, flop-sweat-soaked bullshit I've seen from a government since I started doing this. Not the usual daily drizzle. A monsoon. Bessent, MAGA Mike, Hegseth, Lutnick, RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, and the old man himself, all of them sprinting to the microphone to say something that any adult with a search bar can knock down in thirty seconds.
That's not strength. That's a tell from the Turd Reich trying to avoid Nuremberg and the Hague.
The receipts, in order of stupidity
Scott Bessent blamed Ukraine for your gas prices. Not Iran. Not the six-month war his boss started. Ukraine. On Fox on Tuesday, the Treasury Secretary said Ukraine "decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets and refined products" and that this is "creating upward price pressure on a global basis." He got to Iran second. Bloomberg, via Political Wire.
[ https://substack.com/redirect/3394ad04-33d2-419e-8ecc-72bc8ff8d268?j=eyJ1IjoiNWVvaTA1In0.Ez4S6m4xjaFB-FE1OYcWegjj-YnuyF2haR3N1-AWdaw ]
The man in charge of the US Treasury looked into a camera and told Americans the country getting bombed by Putin is the reason they can't afford to fill the truck. Then he threw in a "21.5% inflation under Biden" figure that doesn't exist anywhere in the data. Crooks and Liars.
[ https://substack.com/redirect/5ebdf436-c64f-4c43-bbb2-b2fa56ad3ed0?j=eyJ1IjoiNWVvaTA1In0.Ez4S6m4xjaFB-FE1OYcWegjj-YnuyF2haR3N1-AWdaw ] SEETHING DESPERATION.
Same week, same guy: the Strait of Hormuz is fine, and also it's worthless. Bessent told CNBC that flows through Hormuz hit a "wartime record" above 17 million barrels a day and rejected the idea that Iran controls the waterway. Then, on Tuesday, he told Larry Kudlow that the whole strait will be "a worthless piece of water," bypassed by pipelines within two years. Pick one, Scott.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera's shipping analysis says traffic through the strait is still down about 95 percent from prewar, from more than 100 ships a day to a handful. Two supertankers got hit by projectiles leaving the strait this week. Those tankers the White House is bragging about? They're moving under US Navy escort OR NOT MOVING AT ALL. Iran still controls the Strait, in Total. Trump's renaming the strait like he renamed Lake Ontario, because that's all America's rapist-in-chief has left. Bessent told the G20 crowd this week that he's telling the truth and the rest of the world is lying. Translation: Scott doesn't want to go to prison for the rest of his life. Which is weird because if anyone would have a field day in there, it'd be him.
Pete Hegseth picked a fight with Canadian teenagers. The Secretary of War, six months into a war he can't end, with the Pentagon's own stockpiles running low, decided the priority this week was mocking a Canadian army cadet program on X.
The Pentagon's official response to the backlash: "The X post speaks for itself." Sean Duffy went on Fox and said Canada "doesn't have a military." Mark Carney called it "beneath their office."
David Eby called it "amateur-hour, distracted, bizarre leadership." A Conservative MP had to remind the American Secretary of War that 158 Canadians died in Afghanistan after his country was attacked.
This is the same Hegseth who has spent the war telling reporters they "only seek the negative," comparing the press corps to the Pharisees, snapping "why are you so rude" at a reporter mid-briefing, and declaring "decisive military victory" in April. Since then, he's turned the Pentagon press office into a SCIF so reporters can't ask questions, fired the publisher, editor, and a reporter at Stars and Stripes for "insubordination," and is now being sued by the people he fired, and everyone around him is running for their lives so they don't get the credit for destroying America's once proud military. You don't lock the press out of the building when you're winning. Only 25 percent of Americans think Trump is handling this war well. Pete knows it. That's why he's yelling at kids in Canada. And that's why his Navy Secretary resigned, telling Trump and anyone who would listen that America is "doomed."
MAGA Mike Johnson has one word left. Communists. He said it roughly twenty times at a single press conference. He said it at a diner in Bethpage. He said it in Virginia Beach, in Arizona, in Maine. "The Democrat Party is being taken over by communists." "The barbarians are inside the gate." "Dark, dangerous, deadly road to communism." At the same presser he claimed inflation and gas prices are lower than two years ago (they aren't) and threw in that lying is "apparently part of their religion" for some Iranians. The Speaker of the House cannot say the word "gas" without lying about it, so he says "communist" instead. That's the whole campaign. That's what's on the ballot in his head.
Howard Lutnick's tariff rebate problem is not going away. Quick refresher for the people in the back: Lutnick was the loudest cheerleader for the tariffs. His old firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, now run by his sons Brandon and Kyle, was reported by Wired to have built a product buying up importers' rights to future tariff refunds at a steep discount, meaning the firm would cash in big if the tariffs were struck down. Wired reported at least one $10 million trade went through. Cantor says it "never executed any transactions." Jamie Raskin's letter to the Lutnicks says that denial is contradicted by the documents, and frames the whole thing as "troubling questions of federal ethics and insider trading." Hedge funds have since built what Fortune called a $100 billion market in tariff refund claims. Regular Americans paid the tariff. Somebody else is collecting the refund. Meanwhile, the Commerce Secretary is the guy explaining why the 50 percent tariffs on Canada are good for you.
RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz can't stop. In August alone, FactCheck.org logged a "deluge" of false vaccine claims at Trump's executive order signing, a "falsehood-filled" CNN interview where Kennedy claimed Lyme disease and RSV came from lab research, and a made-up study supporting breaking up the MMR shot that no one can find. This week Snopes rated his "fetal tissue in the MMR vaccine" post false, again. Kennedy and Oz are also telling Americans that millions of people vanished from Obamacare because of a fraud crackdown, not because premiums exploded. Brookings' Matthew Fiedler called the claim "not remotely credible."
And "The Boss." He. Has. Lost. His. Rapey. Mind. Trump's response to a week of record-low polling was a Truth Social post on Sunday: "THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT. FCC TO THE RESCUE!" Read that as an American. The President of the United States is threatening to use the broadcast regulator against polling companies because the polls show people don't like him. Polling aside, his death spiral was on full display yesterday in the Oval. Sleepy Donnie was incoherent or sleeping for the better part of an hour yesterday in the Oval Office.
He reached into his dementia laden bag for ambiguous threats and a firehose of incoherent lies and admissions, like he tariffed Canada because his friend wanted to buy a Gulfstream jet??? (Gulfstream paid him to do it.)
Why they're doing this
They are not stupid. Loud, yes. Unqualified, yes. But not stupid. The lying has a purpose, and it has two parts.
Part one: the clock. They can count. Sixty-four days to the midterms as of Charlie Cook's column this week, and mail-in ballots start going out in days. The only thing that keeps the corruption machine running is the House majority. The moment Democrats hold a gavel, every subpoena that's been blocked for two years lands on a desk. Lutnick's tariff trades. Oil futures are moving around the Iran strikes.
The foreign money.
The crypto.
Trump has already told Republicans that losing the House means a third impeachment. They know exactly what's coming, which is why every cabinet secretary sounds like a man talking fast to a loan shark.
Part two: the files. The one tie that binds all of it. The Justice Department dumped more than three million pages of Epstein material in January after Congress forced it to do so, months past the legal deadline, with roughly 200,000 pages still withheld or redacted under "privilege." The released files reference Trump, Lutnick, Musk and other prominent people. Leslie Wexner is listed in the FBI's own diagram of Epstein's inner circle. Leon Black has been deposed by the House Oversight Committee. Jes Staley lost his banking career over his emails about Jeffrey Epstein. Ehud Barak's meetings with Epstein have been documented for years. But those 200,000 pages are still sitting behind a redaction bar the Trump DOJ controls, and the only thing between that bar and a subpoena is Mike Johnson's gavel. Now go back and reread what Mike Johnson has been screaming about for a month.
The lies aren't random. They're a wall. Every one of them is built to hold off the day someone with subpoena power asks the question directly.
The playbook is always the same
Here's where the last four dispatches come in, because I didn't spend two weeks in Bavaria for the beer. (Okay. Partly for the beer.)
In Part One we stood in Marienplatz and counted the days. Fifty-three from the Reichstag fire to the Enabling Act.
In Part Two, we walked through the NS-Dokumentationszentrum with my kid and traced how a man who was released from prison early consolidated everything: courts, press, police, the party. In Part Three we went to Dachau and followed the death march to Tegernsee, and I told you what it looks like when a state builds a detention system and then loses control of it. In Part Four, we went up to the Eagle's Nest and looked out at the mountains where the whole thing ended.
What I didn't tell you enough about was the ending itself. What the regime said in the last year, when everyone in the room knew.
The Nazis had no polling. There was no Reuters/Ipsos in 1944. What they had were the SD "mood reports," the secret police's own internal surveys of what people were saying in bread lines and train stations. After Stalingrad, those reports go dark. People stopped believing the newsreels. They could hear the bombers. But there was no way to act on it, because the regime controlled every newspaper, every radio, every rumor, and the punishment for saying the war was lost was a rope.
So the propaganda got louder as the belief got thinner. That's the pattern.
That's the whole pattern.
In March 1945, with Americans across the Rhine, Hitler signed the Nero Decree ordering the destruction of Germany's own infrastructure rather than let it fall intact. Kill your own country before you surrender it. Goebbels promised "wonder weapons" that would turn the war around any day now. Kids and grandfathers were handed rifles as the Volkssturm. Flying courts-martial hanged "defeatists" from lampposts with signs around their necks. The Werwolf broadcasts promised death to any German who cooperated with the Allies, right up until the Americans rolled into Munich on April 30, the day Hitler offed himself in the bunker.
That's what an ending sounds like. Threaten your own people. Invent a miracle weapon. Blame the neighbour. Call everyone who won't play along a traitor. Lie faster than the bombs can fall.
Now listen to Washington. Bessent's pipeline that makes the strait "worthless" in two years is the wonder weapon. Johnson's "communists inside the gate" is the traitor list. The 50 percent tariffs and the cadet jokes are the neighbour getting blamed. "FCC to the rescue" against the polls is the flying court-martial for anyone who says out loud what everyone can see. It's the same script. It's always the same script. The only variable is whether the audience can still hear anything else.
Why it isn't working
And that's the difference. That's the whole ballgame.
Hitler owned the information. Trump tried and failed. He got Paramount and ABC to fold; he got a Pentagon press room turned into a SCIF; he got Stars and Stripes gutted. And it still doesn't matter, because Americans don't get their picture of reality from a state radio anymore. They get it from the gas pump and the grocery receipt and the 401(k) statement and, increasingly, from people like me on platforms nobody in the West Wing controls.
Look at what the Germans of 1944 couldn't do and Americans of 2026 can. They can measure their own disgust and say it to a pollster without getting hanged for it.
So they're saying it.
Reuters/Ipsos: 33% approve, 65% disapprove. A 14-point drop since inauguration.
Economist/YouGov: 33%, a new low in that poll.
UMass Amherst: 32 % approve, 64 disapprove. His approval rating among Republicans has fallen from 89% to 75% since April 2025. Among his own 2024 voters, down ten. Only 25 percent think he's handling Iran well.
For the first time in about a decade, more voters trust Democrats on the economy than Republicans. Gallup had him at 34 percent at the end of his first term. He's below that now, with two years to go.
On Canada, the gaslighting is landing on nobody. Angus Reid polled Americans at the end of July and the start of August, right as the 50% tariffs were being teed up. 79% of Americans have a favourable view of Canadians.
78% say the US should treat Canada as a friend or ally.
4% say an enemy.
59% oppose the new tariffs on us.
Pew finds 74% of Americans are favourable toward Canada.
YouGov says that Americans are overwhelmingly supportive of Canada's retaliation. Hegseth can mock cadets all he wants. Duffy can say we don't have a military. The Americans hearing it don't believe him, and worse for the regime, they don't like him for saying it. We know the difference between the American people and the brain-dead conmen and ass-clowns running their government.
So do they.
The wipeout
This is the part where I'm supposed to hedge. I'm not going to, because the
people whose job it is to hedge have stopped.
Charlie Cook, the most cautious man in American political analysis, wrote on September 1 that Republicans should brace for three plausible outcomes: "bad, really bad, or truly horrible." His most likely scenario is that Republicans will lose 26 to 35 House seats and 4 or 5 Senate seats. He says what looked like the GOP's nightmare at the start of the year is now the baseline.
Democrats need five House seats. Cook has Republicans needing to win three quarters of the toss-ups just to keep the majority. Prediction markets have the House at roughly 90% Democratic.
The Senate was supposed to be safe. It isn't. Cook moved Iowa and Texas to toss-ups in August. A RealClearPolitics aggregate has Republicans trailing in eight battleground Senate races. Democrats need four. Polymarket has the Senate at a coin flip and a full Democratic sweep at 51%. And on Wednesday, the Republican leader of the Senate, John Thune, said the quiet part on a South Dakota TV station: "I worry about that, for sure. I'm a realist." He blamed gas prices on the Iran war.
The generic ballot sits around D+6, the same range as the 2018 wave that flipped 41 seats, and this time the map is smaller, and the president is more hated.
So here's my projection, and you can screenshot it: the House goes, and it doesn't go narrowly. Thirty-plus seats. The Senate goes if Texas, Iowa, or Ohio breaks, and right now all three are live. Mike Johnson loses the gavel, the subpoena power moves, and the redaction bar on those 200,000 pages starts to look a lot less permanent.
That's why they're lying like this. comically. Incoherently, with no proof. Not because they think you'll believe it. Because it's the only thing they have left, and they're hoping it holds for sixty-four more days because they are fucking terrified of the accountability portion of raping and destroying the world's greatest democracy in less than 24 months.
It won't. The people at the bottom of the mountain in 1945 couldn't hear anything but the radio. The people at the bottom of this one can hear everything.
And know why the Turd Reich is turning up the insanity to 11 and will continue to do so until the midterms. They know what's coming, and now you do too.
The End.
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