Now I Feel Even Better About What’s Happening This Morning

Taylor: It was worrying enough at the beginning of the trump administration almost ten years ago now, when I remember people who were first interacting with him, coming back from meetings before I'd gone into oval office meetings with him, saying he can't pay attention to… pic.twitter.com/zB9xedPyJG

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 3, 2026

Taylor: It was worrying enough at the beginning of the trump administration almost ten years ago now, when I remember people who were first interacting with him, coming back from meetings before I'd gone into oval office meetings with him, saying he can't pay attention to anything, don't go in with more than two topics to bring up with him. You're going to have to repeat yourself constantly and having trouble getting the president focused. That was ten years ago that people around the president were worried about his health,

And a lot has happened since then. And there's a very different Donald Trump with a diminished schedule. Statistically, 40% fewer meetings than he had ten years ago in that first administration. I mean, he is a diminished president. And you can't just say, well, it's because he's tired or he's done everything. To me. It seems like there's all the warning signs that something else is going on here with the man, and he's continued to mislead us about his health.

And mislead us about what he's up to:

By July, the family and their lawyers had written an 18-page draft outlining some of the ways they might appeal to Trump’s pardon czar, Alice Marie Johnson. From Trump, they’d learned the language of modern political grievance: “Just like President Trump, President Hernández is a victim of lawfare, waged by the Biden administration.” If pardoned, Hernández would return to Honduras and dedicate himself to building a political movement in Latin America aligned with Trump’s foreign policy ambitions. The memo noted that Hondurans would go to the polls on Nov. 30 to elect a new president, and it suggested a timely pardon could energize conservatives in a region threatened by “radical left” regimes, including China and Venezuela. (Johnson didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

But it wasn’t only Trump who could benefit from a pardon. Castro, Hernández’s successor, repealed the legal framework that had established the country’s semi-autonomous economic development zones, including Próspera. That led the Honduran supreme court to declare those zones unconstitutional, triggering still-unresolved lawsuits from their investors. (Próspera continues to operate.) The memo asserted that Castro’s administration “has effectively stolen billions” from the financial backers of Próspera. The memo named Peter Thiel (“a longtime collaborator of Vice President J.D. Vance”) and Marc Andreessen (“who also donated millions to ensure that Trump’s policy goals could be achieved”).

A timely pardon—especially one delivered before the election—might remedy all that. It could also give Trump one more regional ally against the “narco-dicatorship” in Venezuela, where the Trump administration in September would begin launching military strikes against boats suspected of carrying drugs.

It seems everything really is connected.