Dana Milbank is one of the Washington Post’s most dishonest and untrustworthy partisan hacks, so naturally he rates a “Guest Essay” in the New York Times. This one is called, “How Much Humiliation Can JD Vance Take?”. The thing is filled with the standard issue Axis talking points ( GOP policies to enforce laws against illegal immigrants are “anti-immigrant stances” and are among “other dark elements of the MAGA movement”) but the most notable aspect of this trash is that Milbank found remarkable what is standard management practice in business, government, and in fact any hierarchical organization blessed with competent leadership. He wrote,

“At a closed-door Easter luncheon at the White House, President Trump decided to entertain the crowd by humiliating his understudy. Mr. Trump demanded an update on Iran peace negotiations from Vice President JD Vance. “How’s that moving?” Mr. Trump asked, in a video of the event the White House seemed to have accidentally posted online. “It’s going good, sir,” Mr. Vance replied from the audience. Mr. Trump cut off the rest of his response.“Do you see it happening?” the president asked, about a successful end to the war. “Uh,” the vice president replied. “We’re going to brief it to you.” Then Mr. Trump delivered his punchline. “So, if it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,” he said, to laughter. “If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”

Milbank seems to think he has a smoking gun example of the VP being “humiliated.” The only one humiliated is Milbank: Somebody tell him.

First of all, Trump was joking, and, as usual, obviously so. The Axis has established a pattern of interpreting Trump’s deliberate self-parodies, trolling and exaggeration for effect as sinister. Morons. Even if much of Trump’s clowning is needlessly polarizing and unpresidential in my view, taking it seriously is a core Trump Derangement symptom.

Primarily, however, a superior’s position that if a subordinate fails, he or she is accountable, but if the subordinate succeeds, the boss gets the credit is routine, classic, absolutely correct and well-understood by anyone who has managed, been managed, been in the military, been active in the business world or, to be blunt, has the minimal life experiences minimally qualifying anyone to be trustworthy as an analyst or commentator.

I was informed that Trump’s declaration was the way of the world in my first post-hiring meeting with the future head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the most gifted leader and manager I have ever encountered. “here’s what you need to understand,” Tom Donohue said. “If you do a good job, I look good, I get the credit, and I’ll take it. If you don’t do a good job, I look bad, and you might suffer for it.” I went through my own career as a manager and leader frequently conveying the same message to my staffs. Part of the job of a subordinate is to make the boss look good.

And may I add: Duh.

Yesterday the New York Times tried to weasel out of the major embarrassment, described here, by printing a correction on its front page. That’s obviously not good enough. The episode was emblematic of how far into the ethics abyss journalism has sunk. The Times getting the name of NATO wrong was more than a mistake, it was a mistake that should have been publicized in every other news source, but it wasn’t. Mostly conservative platforms informed the public about the fact that the supposed bulwark of American journalism proved that it is staffed with incompetents, propagandists, boobs and hacks by making an error that literally was impossible unless the Times… is staffed with incompetents, propagandists, boobs and hacks.

Also yesterday, a friend—Trump Deranged (of course) and a politically active Democrat—told me that President Trump had been secretly checked into Walter Reed Hospital and might be seriously ill or dead. This information came from the same sources that convinced another freind that Israel PM Netanyahu had been killed in an Iran missile strike. Then, this morning, here is how the Daily Beast reported on that fake story: “White House Forced to Address Claims of Trump Health Crisis.” See? The evil White House was “forced” to come clean about something that wasn’t true in the first place. Americans are now in the position that they have to seek out the “news” source most likely to support their wishes and world view because there is literally not a single one that is objective and trustworthy.

Wonderful.

Meanwhile…

1. The Times is full of empathy for Representative LaMonica McIver, Democrat of New Jersey, who is engaged in a “lonely legal fight,” it says, to avoid accountability for physically interfering with immigration agents outside an ICE detention facility in Newark. For her illegal grandstanding last May, McIver was charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding” federal officials after she was filmed getting involved in the confrontation. She has refused to take a plea deal. and is seeking to have the case against her thrown out, arguing that the Constitution’s “speech-or-debate clause” protects members of Congress from legal liability when they are conducting legislative business. She is also arguing that physically interfering with ICE is “speech.” This is how a Democrat sucks up to the extreme wing of her party today. It is more than unethical: this conduct is dangerous.

2. Civility check at the dog park: this morning I tried to get a dog park romp in for Spuds before a predicted downpour (we got soaked anyway). An English Pointer who mysteriously regards my dog as the Devil was there and as she has before, charged Spuds growling and gnashing. He, as is his wont, just stood his ground and wagged. The owner quickly leashed her dog and began to exit the park, and as she passed me, I said, cheerfully, “I see your dog is still freaking out over mine for no reason. It’s okay, Spuds doesn’t take it personally!” She turned and snapped, “I resent you denigrating my dog. I’ve never had any trouble with her!” This dog has charged out of the darkness off the leash at me to barked at Spuds several times. If my wife had been with me (being dead, she was not), she would have metaphorically burned that jerk’s ears off, and I came oh-so-close to emulating her. But I pleasantly smiled and ignored the…woman. I almost wish I could prime my pit bull mix to take that pointer’s face off the next time she rushes him, but Spuds isn’t like that. Grace, however…

3. Not quite as bad as not knowing what NATO means, but still…Here is “Meet the Press’s” incompetent Kristin Walker today interviewing Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson:

“Secretary Johnson, weigh in on that point and the fact that there is no head of DHS right now at a time when DHS is shut down. Does that do real damage?”

No, I think what does real damage is that alleged journalists we count on to, you know, inform the public of the news don’t follow the news themselves. Markwayne Mullin, former GOP U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, was confirmed as DHS Secretary on March 23rd, 2026 That was almost two weeks ago. [Pointer: Newsbusters]

4. Hypocrite of the Week: Anthropic! The Wall Street Journal reports that AI developer Anthropic issued a copyright takedown request for more than 8,000 copies of its Claude Code AI model’s source code that was inadvertently released. That’s rich: this company running to copyright protection when it was built by stealing intellectual property from others.

When Anthropic was just getting started, for instance, it needed access to training data to build its Claude AI model, so it relied on digital books. The company downloaded millions of pirated volumes from an online “shadow library” called LibGen. Anthropic also downloaded books from the “Pirate Library Mirror”—doesn’t that sound ethical! For this, a group of authors sued Anthropic, which resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement. Anthropic also scanned and destroyed millions of used physical books in a secret project called “Project Panama; it involved involved cutting the pages out of the books, scanning them, and destroying the evidence. Again, the owner of the copyrights were not compensated.

5. The Jaden Ivey Ethics Train Wreck. This story was mentioned on Friday’s (barely used!) Open Forum. I have no sympathy for anyone in this mess: there are no good guys, just dunces and villains.

In a series of live videos on his Instagram account, the Chicago Bulls’ injured player declared the NBA’s Pride Month is “unrighteousness” (“The world can proclaim LGBTQ, right? They proclaim Pride Month and the NBA does, too… ‘Come join us for Pride Month to celebrate unrighteousness’”) and condemned abortion as the “wicked decision to murder a baby,” adding “They call abortion good but it’s not good in the sight of God.” Hours later, the Bulls waived him for “conduct detrimental to the team.”

The NBA and the Bulls have been grovelling for approval to all manner of woke causes, forcing their players to ratify their political positions in the process. Nevertheless, an entertainer—think of Disney’s “Snow White,” Rachel Zegler, helping to sink her employer’s movie by alienating potential audience members with gratuitous opinions—has an obligation not to shoot off his mouth or keyboard with potentially divisive political opinions that can cost his employer money and box office. That’s what Ivey did.

But the King’s Pass, or rather the “Non-King’s Smackdown,” was also at work. Ivey was injured, and already had a reputation of being a disruptive presence on a team. The Bulls didn’t lose much by canning him, and cynically used the move as a virtue-signalling opportunity. If Ivey had been a high-scoring, healthy star, I guarantee the team would have handled the episode differently.