Do Japan’s leadership shift, mass “No Kings” protests, and frothy AI valuations signal democratic pushback and a looming market correction?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen reports Japan has selected its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. Rosner welcomes the milestone but flags her nationalist profile. He pivots to the U.S. No Kings protests, citing multimillion turnout estimates and criticizing Trump’s vulgar AI video response. Rick Rosner characterizes prosecutions of critics—Letitia James, James Comey, John Bolton—as politically motivated; he views the case against James as weak, with Bolton potentially exposed on handling classified material. Comey seeks dismissal as vindictive. Shifting to markets, Rosner warns AI valuations are frothy, driven by a few giants, and predicts a dot-com-style correction within the year before durable, real-economy applications emerge.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Japan has selected its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.

Rick Rosner: So, that’s a good-news, bad-news situation, right? Great—Japan appointed a woman as leader, which is unprecedented—but she’s also politically aligned with the far right, correct? She’s very nationalist?

Jacobsen: She’s nationalistic.

Rosner: Authoritarian, nationalistic—those terms tend to overlap in practice. Probably not as bad as Trump, who, as you saw, responded to the “No Kings” protests across America—about 2,700 rallies nationwide and dozens abroad. Organizers claimed around seven million people turned out. Other estimates ranged from four and a half to seven million. You did the fact-checking yesterday, right? There you go. 

Anyway, a ton of people showed up. Republicans responded by claiming it was just old people with nothing to do, or communists, or violent agitators—even though there was no violence. It wasn’t communists or all retirees. Trump’s own response was to post on Truth Social, his Twitter knockoff, an AI-generated video. The first shot shows a fighter jet labeled King Trump, with Trump in the cockpit wearing a crown. Then the camera pans around to the back of the jet, which is literally defecating—dropping turds. 

Large, round pieces of excrement. In the next shot, the turds have liquefied and are raining down on the crowd of No Kings protesters, covering them in filth. A Republican representative condemned it as unprecedented and disgraceful behavior from a former president who’s supposed to represent all Americans. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House and one of Trump’s most loyal defenders, said something like, “Well, he’s got a sense of humor.” But he doesn’t. He ran for president in the first place because he lacks one.

 I think I mentioned this last night, but that was in a different venue—after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, comedian Seth Meyers and President Obama roasted Trump. They made several jokes at his expense. Obama was irritated because Trump had spent years promoting the racist birther conspiracy that claimed Obama was born in Kenya. Trump had pushed that lie since Obama took office. 

After being mocked that night, Trump reportedly swore to run for president out of revenge. He had floated campaigns before—in 2000 and 1996—but dropped them because running is hard work, and he’s lazy. This time, the humiliation motivated him. His presidency became an act of revenge—an effort to undo everything Obama had accomplished. That was his first term, and it’s even more so now. Trump still refuses to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because he can’t stand being the butt of jokes—if anyone’s still brave enough to make them.

Jacobsen: Ex–FBI Director James Comey is seeking dismissal of charges, claiming a vindictive prosecution. On Monday, Comey asked a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case against him. He’s arguing that the U.S. attorney who brought the case was unlawfully appointed and that he’s being unfairly targeted because of Donald Trump’s, quote, “personal spite,” unquote, against him.

Rosner: So Trump is using his Department of Justice prosecutors to go after people he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like John Bolton. He doesn’t like Letitia James, who led the successful prosecution that convicted Trump on 34 counts of fraud in New York. The kind of fraud he was charged with is the kind he’s practiced for decades—claiming different property values depending on his purpose. When seeking a $100 million loan from Deutsche Bank, he’d claim his properties were worth hundreds of millions—Mar-a-Lago, for instance, he once claimed was worth $600 million. But when paying taxes, he’d claim those same properties were worth only a fraction of that, maybe one-tenth.

He and his family used similar tricks to avoid around $450 million in inheritance taxes when his father died about 20 years ago. That’s fraud. There was enough evidence that he was convicted on 34 counts. Would he have gone to prison? No. He’s a first-time offender. If he’d been sentenced before becoming president, he likely would have faced a heavy fine—maybe $10 or $20 million—and a couple of years of probation. That’s typical for white-collar fraud of that kind. But the fraud was clear enough that a conviction was secured.

Now he’s retaliating against Letitia James, James Comey, John Bolton, and others—Bolton for allegedly retaining classified materials, James for supposed mortgage fraud, and Adam Schiff for unrelated claims. Among these cases, the one almost certain to be dismissed is the one against Letitia James. The alleged offense concerns her mortgage forms.

Here’s how that works: elected officials often own more than one property, maybe a condo in Washington, D.C., and a home in their home state. You can only designate one property as your primary residence to qualify for a lower mortgage rate because lenders see it as less risky if you live there. The discount might be a quarter or half a percent.

When you buy a property, you sign a stack of documents—an inch thick in most jurisdictions. If someone combs through those papers looking for any inconsistency, they might find a technical error, such as a box left unchecked or a statement unclear about which property is your primary residence. In James’s case, prosecutors claim she improperly claimed two primary residences, saving a total of $19,000 in interest over the years. But reports indicate that such mistakes are common and rarely prosecuted. And in her case, she included a handwritten note or email in the documents clearly specifying that the property in question was not her primary residence.

In case Letitia James did make a mistake on one of those forms—now, I can’t say with absolute certainty, but I’ve seen it mentioned several times—when you present a case to a grand jury, you don’t have to include all the evidence, especially exculpatory evidence. So out of that stack of documents, they probably only showed the ones that made her look guilty. But if there are documents in the stack where she wrote, “This is not my primary residence,” that alone should get the case thrown out immediately.

You can find several articles online about how many prosecutors refused to pursue this case against James. At least one, maybe more, resigned rather than be forced to prosecute something so baseless. Trump ultimately had to install his personal lawyer—someone who’s never prosecuted a case—to handle it.

Now, I haven’t followed every detail, but apparently, this same prosecutor was texting a reporter about the case. The reporter published their text exchange, which made the prosecutor look foolish. The prosecutor then claimed the conversation was “off the record,” but the reporter said, “No, it wasn’t. You never said that.” So the whole case is a mess.

I assume some of these other prosecutions will also fail to result in guilty verdicts. Bolton might be different, since he served as a senior government official multiple times—National Security Advisor and before that as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. He kept classified documents to help write his memoir. When you’re an ex-official writing about your time in government—especially at that level—you have to submit your manuscript for review, usually to the State Department, possibly the FBI or CIA. Several agencies go through it to ensure nothing classified gets released. That’s standard procedure for any former high-ranking official writing a book.

They might still pursue him for sharing drafts or materials with editors that contained sensitive content, or for holding onto documents he wasn’t supposed to retain. That could become a legitimate legal problem.

Comey, on the other hand, is more like James—the case against him looks politically motivated and legally flimsy. He’s being charged with lying to someone, though typically when someone’s charged with lying in a federal case, it’s for lying to the FBI, as Martha Stewart was. But Comey ran the FBI, so it’s hard to see how they could prosecute him for lying to his own agency. Still, we’ll see how that unfolds. Rotten tomatoes.

Here’s a quick shift of topic: AI. It doesn’t seem any more dangerous now than it did two weeks ago. That’s not something you can usually say about a two-week stretch in AI development. But there’s growing talk that the whole thing might be a bubble that’s about to pop, leading to huge losses.

There’s a guy on Pod TV who specializes in NVIDIA analysis—he knows that company inside out. He says the U.S. stock market and GDP are holding up surprisingly well given the economic damage Trump’s tariffs and shutdowns are causing. GDP growth in Q2 was about 3.8%, and Q3 looks to be around the same—remarkably strong for a country with that level of political dysfunction. As I mentioned last night, industry often benefits when incompetent leaders are in power, because there’s less regulatory oversight.

Sasha, the NVIDIA expert, argues that what’s keeping the market inflated and frothy right now are the seven major AI companies. When investors finally realize AI won’t produce the astronomical profits expected—tens of billions already sunk in—it’ll trigger panic and a massive correction, likely within the next year. After that collapse, the surviving technologies and companies will shape what he calls the “real world of AI,” much like what happened after the dot-com crash in 2000. The internet bubble burst, investors lost fortunes, but from the ashes rose the modern web economy.

So: A crash is coming. The AI hype will be exposed for what it is. But once the frenzy fades, we’ll finally see what AI can actually do—for better or worse.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Su San Lee on Unsplash

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