Men who worship gold monuments tend not to see what’s coming

This is the May 11, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.

JOE’S NOTE

In the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar built a 90-foot gold statue of himself in Babylon in 600 B.C. and commanded his subjects to bow before it. For his blasphemy, God struck him mad — and he spent seven years eating grass in the fields like an animal.

This week, a 22-foot gold statue — the Don Colossus, as it’s been dubbed — went up at Donald Trump’s own golf course outside Miami. A group of cryptocurrency investors paid for it to promote their meme coin, $PATRIOT.

Pastor Mark Burns led the dedication and felt compelled to clarify that the statue was “not a golden calf.”

The sculptor who made it wasn’t even invited — and had one word for the whole thing: “clusterfuck.”

Trump celebrated it on Truth Social. “The Real Deal,” he called it. “GOLD.”

Men who worship gold monuments tend not to see what’s coming.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both bet on quick, easy victories. Both were wrong. In the Oval Office in February 2025, Trump and JD Vance looked Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the eye and told him he had no cards to play.

As Anne Applebaum noted on “Morning Joe” today: “Not only does Ukraine have cards. Other people want Ukraine’s cards.”

There are Ukrainians all over the Gulf states right now — in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — teaching those countries to shoot down Iranian drones.

How did Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Lindsey Graham miss what the entire intel community and Pentagon leadership knew — that asymmetric warfare had already changed everything?

In the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar looks out over his kingdom and declares: “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built?”

The golden calf is always with us. So is the fall that follows.

CHART OF THE DAY

Source: Gallup poll conducted June 14-July 16, 2025, with 1,000 U.S. adults age 15 and older, margin of error: ±4.4 percentage points

ON THIS DATE

In 1934, a dust storm swept from the Great Plains to the East Coast, choking cities from Chicago to New York. Dust storms, accelerated by drought conditions and overplowing of wheat plains, increased in frequency over the late 1920s and early ’30s, culminating in the massive Dust Bowl in 1935. The spate of dust storms would continue until the drought ended in 1939.

South of Lamar, Colorado, a large dust cloud appears behind a truck traveling on Highway 59, May 1936.

WHAT THEY SAID

Anne Applebaum on Ukraine:

“Not only does Ukraine have cards. Other people want Ukraine’s cards.”

Sen. Chris Coons on the “Golden Fleet”:

“In the age of drone warfare, things need to get smaller, lighter, faster, more distributed. Instead, this Pentagon wants to go back to the 19th century and build another great global fleet of destroyers. A ridiculous idea that we should reject out of hand.”

Jonathan Martin on redistricting:

“If Republicans scramble to dilute Black political power, they risk three things.

One: the historic gains Trump made with Black voters in 2024.

Two: further energizing Democrats in a year when they’re already fired up.

Three: You cut the salami too thin and suddenly incumbent House Republicans — who’ve only ever run primaries — have competitive general elections for the first time.

This may be in Trump’s interest.

I just don’t see how it’s in the party’s.”

Ed Luce on populism:

“Electorates are just thrashing around, looking for … the nearest middle finger sign they can find. Those saying populism is over are counting their chickens too soon.”

Richard Haass on Britain’s warning to America:

“What’s going on in Britain is almost like off-Broadway. We may see a similar fragmentation of the political system here. A post-Trump Republican Party. MAGA, Greens. If Democrats and Republicans fail to be serious political parties, populism will institutionalize itself in the United States.”

Roger Bennett on the World Cup:

“Football is a mirror to the world; it shows you who you are. Once the ball kicks off, it becomes like a global eclipse. It sweeps the planet.”

Mara Gay on the Michael Jackson biopic:

“It’s hard because we have such a personal relationship with this music. It’s nostalgic for people. ‘Dangerous’ was the first album that my parents ever bought me. That’s the memory I associate with an outing with my father. But that doesn’t mean that the behavior is acceptable.”

Katty Kay on “The Devil Wears Prada 2”:

“My concern about the No. 2 is that they’re saying it’s not very caustic. Part of what made the original so good was that Miranda Priestly was so severe and biting.”

TRUMP IS BORED WITH THE WAR HE STARTED

By Jonathan Lemire

President Donald Trump is “bored” of the war with Iran. That’s what one outside adviser — who speaks with the president frequently — told me for my new piece in The Atlantic. And Trump is feeling that way, and deeply frustrated, because he is not seeing a way to end his war of choice.

It’s not going well: Republicans are warily watching rising gas prices and falling poll numbers. Trump doesn’t want to be bogged down in a Middle East conflict like some of his predecessors were. He doesn’t want it to upend his high-stakes summit this week in China. (It may be too late for that.) He also doesn’t want to resume hostilities — he keeps extending his ceasefire deadline — even though Iran has control of the Strait of Hormuz and few of Trump’s goals for the conflict have been met.

Iran, it seems, does not want the war to come to a close. Or at least not with any sort of outcome that could be acceptable to American negotiators. Late Sunday, Trump said he was unhappy with Iran’s counteroffer to the United States’ latest proposal to end the war.

Trump is now in a bind. As I write in The Atlantic:

“Trump is left with a vexing question: How do you end a war when your opponent won’t budge? And while Trump grasps for an exit, the hard-liners in Tehran have used the war to tighten their grip on power. Iran seems hell-bent on pulling off something it’s historically done well: humiliating an American president.”

EXTRA HOT TEA

$1.215 billion

— The amount of money Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Wesley Edens was allegedly blackmailed over after a brief romantic relationship with Changli “Sophia” Luo

ONE MORE SHOT

Jessie Alcheh/MLB Photos via Getty Images

Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers prepares to bat against the Atlanta Braves at Dodger Stadium on Sunday. Players used pink bats and wore pink socks and gloves in celebration of Mother’s Day.