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$LAPTOP September 9

Chevron just posted $12 billion in profit. Up 400% in a year. Their biggest quarter ever. Exxon made $14.5 billion. You paid for all of it at the pump. Say what you want about Trump. He’s making something great again. And who’s more deserving than Big Oil. In 2024 he asked them for a billion dollars and promised their whole wish list in return. This morning they collected.

The day my father left office gas was $3.11 a gallon. Today it’s $4.11. At the peak of the war spike it hit $4.55, up 54% in three months. Your price went up 32%. Chevron’s profit went up 400%. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the business model.

Here is what I believe. We have been separated by people who profit from our separation. That is the business model. Keep us apart and sell us the fight. Here is what that separation does. People stop talking. They stop talking, so they stop knowing each other. They stop knowing each other, so they fear each other. They fear each other, so they hate each other. You break that chain at the first link, not the last. I also believe there is one true existential threat to this democracy and his name is Donald Trump. So I will sit down with anyone who has a platform and sees in Trump what I see. That is why I sat down with Nick Fuentes. His views on race and women are antithetical to mine. What he has said about the Holocaust and Nazism is indefensible. He is also demonstrably persuasive and he has a bullhorn that no amount of cancellation has taken from him. A million-plus people listen to him. I wanted to hear it myself instead of reading what I am supposed to think about it. Nick and I agree on almost nothing. We agree on Trump. Nothing else we argue about matters if Trump is not stopped. And the people who see what he is do not all think like me. If your standard is that everyone who opposes him has to agree with you first, you have already handed him the country. I will take one piece of common ground over ten more years of shouting across the same street.

I watched Trump’s speech at the Correspondents’ Dinner last night. It’s hard to articulate how sad it made me. Sad and embarrassed and exhausted. Here is the thing about a man who is a joke. He can’t tell one. People think humor is a talent. It isn’t. It’s a capacity. To make someone laugh you have to be able to laugh at yourself, and to laugh at yourself you have to step outside of yourself and see what everyone else sees. For one second you have to be just another person in the room. Most people can do this by the time they are nine years old. He has never once managed it. Not in fifty years of cameras. Not for a second. That is not a quirk. It is a symptom. The muscle that lets you tell a joke is the same one that lets you feel what another person feels. A man who cannot survive being laughed at cannot imagine being anyone but himself. He will only ever be generous when it is photographed. He will only ever be kind when it is filmed. There is a name for it. So he stood up there and did what he always does. He hit down. He made jokes about people’s weight. He made jokes about their intelligence. He made jokes about how women look. He read out the names of people he doesn’t like, and mocked them. Always mocking. And when no one laughed he blamed his speech writers. The cruelty dressed as humor has worn so thin. And for the 30% of you still in the cult who will inevitably call me a crackhead and blame it all on my Dad, all I can say is please, for the love of God, open your eyes. Wake the fuck up. Have some dignity. Have some pride. Joe Biden wasn’t standing at that podium last night. Donald Trump was. And at the end of it he put on a red hat that said Trump 2028 and told the room he was running again. No one laughed because everyone knows he has no intention of leaving. Just another joke at our expense.

We are supposedly at war to stop Iran from enriching the uranium we “obliterated” over a year ago. Yesterday we signed a deal to help Saudi Arabia enrich uranium. The first time the United States has ever helped another country enrich uranium on foreign soil. The Saudis refused the inspection protocol 140 other countries accept. Too intrusive, they said. Trump agreed. He signed a national security waiver to get around the rule. The Saudis paid Kushner $100 million. They put $2 billion into his firm. They put another $6 billion into LIV Golf, which pays Trump properties to host its tournaments. They signed ten billion dollars in Trump-branded real estate deals in Jeddah and Riyadh. All in just the last few years. But sure. My paintings.

I have no political aspirations. I'm not running for anything. But I do have a triple PhD in addiction and recovery. If you are stuck in the wreckage of your own shame, thinking you're too far gone to be loved: you are not alone. Reclaiming your narrative starts the moment you refuse to hide.

I spent the last few months talking to people across the political spectrum, and to people who want nothing to do with politics at all. Here is what I learned. We are not a divided country. We are a country being divided, on purpose, by an American oligarchy that profits from the fight. They’ve captured our government, denied our healthcare, looted our treasury, and saddled us with crippling debt. I believe in a New New Deal. Healthcare as a human right. The right of every family to a decent home, and an end to endless wars. And a dividend paid to every American from the AI economy, because these machines were built on the whole of human inheritance. That inheritance belongs to all of us, and not just to the handful of men playing God with our very existence. And none of it happens if we just move on. Donald Trump, his family, and his administration are robbing us blind, not just of our money, but of our faith in one another, and they have to answer for it. Truth and reconciliation, not revenge. Then we break the system that let them do it. The question is not whether we will lose our democracy. The question is whether we will fight to take back what has already been stolen. I learned in recovery that you can’t heal what you won’t name. Neither can a country.

Putin Last night Donald Trump released a declassified document that says his own intelligence community identified Putin as personally running an operation to defeat my father in 2020, built around a fake Burisma corruption scandal centered around me and executed through prominent Americans. Trump tasked his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to fly to Kyiv and meet a known Russian agent. The Americans who ran, laundered, and legitimized the operation: Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani. John Solomon. Joe DiGenova. Victoria Toensing. Lev Parnas. Igor Fruman. Chanel Rion. Sean Hannity. Steve Bannon. Miranda Devine. Ken Vogel. Ron Johnson. Chuck Grassley. James Comer. Jim Jordan. To name a few. An operation formally sanctioned by Trump's own Treasury Department on September 10, 2020, and expanded to include more named actors on January 11, 2021. Oh, and don't forget the Russian-linked FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who later pleaded guilty to making the entire Burisma bribery story up. The record exists and we have all the receipts, and more.

Over on Substack I’m writing about the last seven years of my life. It’s the first draft of the whole story. All of it. Below is a short excerpt. I’ll be releasing chapters every few days, along with “Where’s Hunter?” a video series exclusive to Substack. Check it out. Link is in the replies. The Laptop They called it the laptop. I will call it that too, although the name is not accurate, the provenance was never established, and no court or forensic examiner ever certified the chain of custody that would have made it evidence rather than theater. I will call it the laptop because by now the word belongs to something larger than a piece of hardware. It belongs to a story they needed me to confirm, and I am done letting them tell it. Their origin story begins in a Delaware repair shop, but it does not end there, and it did not begin there either. By the time a legally blind computer repairman named handed a hard drive to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney, men had already been traveling to Kyiv and Vienna and Zurich for more than a year trying to assemble exactly this object. The laptop did not surface and create a scandal. A scandal was constructed, and a laptop was produced to anchor it. So. The laptop. Here is what was on it. Twenty years of my life, or a version of it. Messages sent at hours that don't belong to anyone sober. Photographs I would never have taken in daylight. A record of every way a body can fail its owner when the owner has stopped trying to help. None of it is a single dramatic moment. It is accumulation, the slow daily work of an addict doing the thing that is killing him because the alternative feels like dying faster. All of that was on it. I am not denying any of it. That is not a small thing to say. I have spent years in rooms where men and women with far less scrutiny than I have faced tore themselves apart trying to account for what they did in the middle of their disease. The inventory of an addict’s life is never clean. It is not meant to be clean. Recovery does not erase the record. It requires reading it. I have read mine. What I will not do is accept their lies. Because a record of what is on it, or more precisely, what was not, exists. (Read the whole story on Substack)

OMG! You are not going to believe this. The war with Iran is NOT over. I’d like to withdraw my nomination.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July. I know @realDonaldTrump and family did. 250 years ago we declared independence from a king who ran the colonies as a family business. In just 18 months the Trumps have made King George look like an amateur. A $620 million Pentagon loan, the largest in the program’s history, to a company Don Jr.’s firm bought into three months before. An Air Force drone contract to a startup the princelings took public through a golf course company they own a piece of. The Army’s largest drone motor order ever, to a company where Don Jr. sits on the board and holds millions in stock. A $24 million Pentagon robotics contract to the company that employs Eric as Chief Strategy Advisor. A stake in the largest undeveloped tungsten deposit on earth, in Kazakhstan, backed by $1.6 billion in US government support. Jared’s fund seeded with $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince, now $6.2 billion, 99% of it foreign money from Gulf governments. Over $110 million in fees collected from the Saudis alone. He negotiates American foreign policy with the governments that pay him. $2.3 billion from crypto ventures their father regulates. More than a million people bought in and lost $2.3 billion. The money didn’t grow. It simply moved from the subjects pockets to the crown’s coffers. And the next one is already drafted. A proposed ATF rule that will allow guns to be shipped straight to your front door. The government’s own estimate is 3.3 million home gun deliveries a year. Don Jr. sits on the board of the online gun megastore built to cash in. He holds 300,000 shares. And that’s only the fraction they’ve allowed us to see. Not one subpoena served. Not one search executed. Why hide anything when you own the investigators? Me? They searched a laptop for six years. Federal prosecutors. Grand juries. Subpoena power. Congressional hearings. They found nothing. I made about $200k a year selling paintings when my Dad was President, and they made my paintings part of an impeachment inquiry. For six years they’ve asked Where’s Hunter? What about the laptop? Wrong questions. The right one is 250 years old. Does America belong to a family? They’ve given their answer. Long live the King.

Gratitude isn’t just about the good times. I’ve written a lot over the past seven years. Join me on Substack where I will be sharing those stories and more soon.