The Filter Stretches Like the Waistband

Monday, July 13th, 2026

Bill Bonner, from Youghal, Ireland

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We have it on the very best authority that old men are not the same as young men. We have observed the melancholy fact in our own person. Where once we bounded up and down the stairs with the airy unconcern of a mountain goat, we now cling to the handrail.

Whatever a man’s particular weakness in his early years, time makes it worse. The fellow with poor lungs at 20 can scarcely draw a breath at 80. He of the “bad knees” at 30 will be hobbling by 70, cursing the stairs he once ignored.

We offer no proof of this. It is mere observation, wholly unblessed by science. Yet a modest curve of belly at 30 ripens, with the seasons, into a magnificent paunch by 60. And the thinning thatch at 35 has decamped altogether by 55.

The same grim law governs the personality. The man idle in his youth is very nearly furniture in retirement. If he is a grouch at 25, he grows grouchier with every page of the calendar. And if he inclines by nature toward mythomania, vulgarity, or plain pig-headed stupidity — presidential timber, in other words — why, he is fairly certain to be insufferable by the time he draws his pension.

Time, in short, distills our infirmities like oak-aged whiskey; then, the strong drink dissolves the inhibitions.

A friend of ours suffered a stroke in his 70s. He remained hale enough in body, but his family took to barring him from public view, for his internal censor had packed its bags and gone. In a restaurant he might inform the waitress, with perfect and disarming candor, “I love your tits.” It was an honest remark. The lady may even have been gratified by it. But it was definitely “inappropriate.”

We raise the matter because we find ourself brooding upon our beloved POTUS. Some say he is just ‘too old’ to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. But the man has always tended toward the louche; his own mother, we are told, prophesied that he would prove a “disaster” as a politician. He returned for his second term in January of 2026 older, perhaps a shade meaner, and girded with even less restraint than he flaunted in the first. He instantly rechristened the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali. He rattled the allies by threatening to annex Greenland, to bolt from NATO, and to file Canada away as the 51st star on the flag.

Jolly moments, these — mostly harmless, and very nearly charming, in the way they broadcast the President’s freewheeling, open-mic, icon-smashing joie de bully. But they whispered, too, that the worms in the Trump brain were on the turn; the internal censor had stopped working.

POTUS may imagine Gaza as a Las Vegas show town, for example. With uncounted bodies still beneath the rubble, it may be ‘inappropriate’ to say so. But, with the censor out of town, the brassy Manhattan developer went right ahead. The Mirror describes the video shared by the White House:

It’s complete with a “TRUMP GAZA” hotel, a 40ft tall statue of the man himself looking remarkably svelte, and — blink and you’ll miss them — a pair of bikini babes with long black beards…and it culminates with an image of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu laying next to each other on sun loungers.

The press, predictably, has filed these eruptions under “unhinged.” But they are nothing of the sort. They are merely the naughty thoughts that go rattling through every skull on earth, which the rest of us have the ordinary good sense to strain out before they reach the open air.

Even Mr. Trump was once dimly aware of the editing apparatus, back when it still half-functioned. Concerning his rival Chris Christie:

“Don’t call him a fat pig. You can’t do that.”

That was August of 2023. By November of 2025 the filter had rotted clean through. Jake Tapper reports:

After a woman reporter asked about President Trump’s name being raised in emails sent by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Trump snaps at her: “Quiet, piggy!”

Another reporter put a simple question about releasing the Epstein files — “Why not just do it now?” To which the President replied:

“It’s not the question that I mind. It’s your attitude. I think you are a terrible reporter. It’s the way you ask these questions.”

But it is in his assault upon Iran — with ordnance and with adjectives alike — that the filter appears to have given way most spectacularly. Mother Jones reports that Trump threatened...

“Blasting Iran into oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages!!!” He said he would blow up bridges and civilian power plants, which experts in military law said could constitute a war crime. And on Easter morning, he wrote on his social media account: “Open the F — in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

Trump signed the death warrant of Iran’s leader — but woe unto the Republic should some Iranian dare contemplate the reciprocal courtesy upon him. CNBC:

Trump threatens to ‘decimate’ Iran if it tries to kill him...

And then this dispatch, yesterday, from the Independent:

Trump threatens to ‘take over’ Iran if Tehran closes the Strait of Hormuz in profanity filled tirade

A fortnight ago the President pronounced Iran’s rulers “nice people to deal with” and “very rational people.” But last week:

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people.”

That may indeed be an honest sentiment. But it hardly seems the choicest thing to bellow in public when one is negotiating the end of a war one started oneself. The censor, alas, is off playing golf — and does not appear to be coming back.

Regards,

Bill Bonner