President Donald Trump is running an administration of “all madness,” claims a former adviser to a different Republican president — and it can all be traced back to his corruption.

“My friends, it is all madness,” former White House aide Steve Schmidt argued in a Thursday Substack post. “The White House is an asylum. The president is deranged. He is a predator and criminal, and he is immoral, abusive and dishonest. He is a liar and charter member of the Epstein class.”

Earlier in the same editorial, Schmidt described America under Trump as a “cross between Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and Disney’s Magic Kingdom, with the main difference being venomous lies have replaced giant turkey legs as the meal of the hour.” He also deplored the blatant profiteering off the White House.

“Why is Melania Trump selling a $600 “Freedom” necklace out of the White House?” Schmidt asked. “Why is Kai Trump selling an apparel line? Why is every Trump selling something?” He also asked why former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski are still together despite Noem being fired in part because of her alleged affair with Lewandowski.

“It is most astounding — even by MAGA standards — that a shutdown of the federal government over a masked ICE Gestapo running wild and abusing, assaulting, shooting and murdering US citizens, while building a vast network of giant prisons out of industrial warehouses has resulted in Trump sending unmasked agents to airports to prove the point that they shouldn’t wear masks,” Schmidt added. “What other country can match our idiocracy?”

This is not the first time Schmidt has taken aim at the Trump White House. Earlier this week he predicted that the administration is headed toward historic losses in the upcoming midterm elections.

“Prices are rising, airports have gone off the rails, gas is sky high, and America is losing a war to Iran because it was planned by fools,” Schmidt wrote. “Everywhere there is disaster, and it has not gone unnoticed by the American people.”

Pointing out that Democrats have swept all of the contested special elections since the 2024 presidential contest, Schmidt concluded that “the walls are closing in, and yes, there will be elections. A few months back I predicted that Donald would be hovering around 30% approval by the end of March. This is where the deranged 79-year-old is headed.” Explaining that Trump is unpopular with everyone in America except “the MAGA nihilists,” he predicted that “all across the country the American people are going to act against MAGA with ruthless glee. Trump is going to be rebuked at the polls like no president has been in the modern era. It will be a crushing blow, a historic landslide, a knockout.”

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Today, the islands are home to about 2,000 people, many of whom work on the pearl farms in the idyllic turquoise lagoon. Dotted across the islands are the remains of dozens of remarkable pieces of architecture: homes built from coral.

As part of a larger project studying the transformations of everyday life in 19th-century Mangareva, my archaeology research team has documented dozens of these coral houses, including on the islands of Aukena, Akamaru, Mangareva and Taravai.

Now, in a new paper published in the journal Antiquity, we have established the first precise construction timeline for these coral houses.

The results reveal new patterns in how Pacific societies shaped their built environment after European contact – and how that colonial legacy continues to shape life today.

Colonisation changed community life in the Pacific

French Catholic missionaries set up an outpost in Mangareva starting in 1834.

In addition to learning the habits of prayer, attending religious services and reading the bible, Mangarevan people also changed their day-to-day lives. Among the many changes were a complete transformation of people’s domestic spaces.

Traditional buildings of wood and thatch were replaced within a few decades by a new kind of stone cottage.

The missionaries often recorded specific dates for their constructions, above all the cathedral in Rikitea, churches throughout the islands, and the main Catholic schools.

However, for the largest category of buildings from this time, houses, we usually don’t have any information about construction dates, who built them, and who lived there.

A precise dating method

During fieldwork in October 2024, I noticed that one of the coral blocks that had fallen from the wall of the ruined house we were excavating had branch corals that looked very fresh, almost like they were just cut from the living reef.

We used an advanced technique known as uranium-thorium (U-Th) dating to understand the age of these branch corals – and the structures built from them.

Unlike the more well-known radiocarbon dating, where the error ranges are measured in decades, U-Th dates are super precise, narrowing down the date when the corals died, leaving behind the hard exoskeleton, to within a few years.

Also unlike radiocarbon, which isn’t very reliable for materials less than about 400 years old, U-Th works right up until the present.

We took a “control” sample from a building with known dates, the 1850s boys’ school from Aukena, as well as samples from an additional eight houses, plus a coral watch tower.

We also sampled a branch coral from a pit layer in the same house where I first noticed the “fresh” looking branches from the coral blocks.

At the time, we were thinking that the pit held the remains of a feast held just before the house was built. Overlapping dates in our U-Th results confirmed this hypothesis.

Mysteries of ‘old coral’

After testing the samples, we were surprised to notice several dates that were older than expected.

Some of the corals apparently died before the 1830s when missionaries arrived. Some even pre-dated European contact in the 1790s.

A similar problem is known from radiocarbon dating, called the “old wood” problem where the date of the death of an organism might be centuries or even decades before the event an archaeologist is hoping to date. Did we have an “old corals” problem here?

There are two potential explanations.

An archaeologist visiting Mangareva in the 1930s noted piles of coral rubble he believed were the remains of marae, once sacred structures that were overthrown during the missionary period. This raised the possibility that this ancient coral was repurposed for new buildings.

Another possibility for this kind of coral, from the scientific genus Acropora, is that some branches die off away from the area of active growth on the reef over a period of years or decades but retain their “fresh” look.

This might be the more likely scenario, as our “too old” dates were years or decades, but not centuries, too early. But we also can’t completely rule out the marae theory.

We still have a lot to learn about how people used coral for buildings in the past, and possibly to learn about how coral reefs rebounded, or not, after decades of human exploitation. This last point could be important for thinking more carefully about our own relationships to coral reefs in the present.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a central role in the ongoing Middle East war. The United States, for example, has confirmed it is using the technology to identify potential targets and accelerate decision-making.

This is part of a growing trend. And in some cases it’s leading to mounting civilian deaths.

Against this backdrop, Australia’s Department of Defence has just released a new AI policy.

The policy aims to govern the Australian military’s use of AI. So what does it include? And how does it compare to the military AI policies of other countries?

Three main requirements

Australia’s policy establishes three overarching requirements for the Department of Defence’s use of AI.

Firstly, the use of AI must comply with Australian law and international obligations.

Secondly, the use of AI must be underpinned by individual accountability and bounded by consideration of impacts on people. It must also be explainable, reliable and secure, and designed to mitigate unintended bias and harm.

Thirdly, any risks associated with the use of AI must be managed with proportionate control measures, such as testing, training and evaluation.

The policy’s emphasis on proportionate controls is notable.

AI is not a standalone item. It is an enabling technology with many applications that can be embedded across a range of different military functions, such as targeting, logistics, training and maintenance – each raising different risks.

The policy aims to cover all AI technologies, from chatbots to the most advanced “frontier” general-purpose AI models.

The approach echoes the Australian government’s Policy for the Responsible Use of AI in Government, which took effect in September 2024.

That policy explicitly carves out the defence portfolio and national intelligence community. The new policy fills that gap.

Thin on details

The policy says little about how the Army, Navy and Air Force – or other defence entities such as the Australian Strategic Capabilities Accelerator – will actually enact its requirements.

It also says testing and evaluation of the defence department’s use of AI will serve as a key control measure. But it offers no detail on how this will be conducted for military AI – a domain where testing poses well-documented challenges around unpredictable behaviours and unreliable performance in military operating environments.

The Defence AI Centre, established in 2024, is identified as the governance hub. But the policy is thin on implementation, compliance, monitoring, resourcing, or reporting.

How these settings evolve and whether guidance on the implementation of them will follow – and be made public – remains to be seen.

Drawing on precedent

Australia’s policy draws on those of its closest allies.

For example, the United Kingdom adopted its Defence AI Strategy in 2022 and issued the Dependable AI in Defence directive in 2024.

The UK has moved further to appoint “responsible AI” officers within each Ministry of Defence component. It also published a progress report in 2025.

In 2020, the United States Department of Defense adopted AI ethics principles. Two years later, it developed a detailed implementation strategy. Then in January 2026, the current administration announced its AI Strategy for the Department of War. This shifted emphasis toward speed and lethality, mandating “any lawful use” of AI (which doesn’t always equal ethical use) and directing removal of barriers to rapid deployment.

Australia’s defence AI policy generally aligns with the core elements of these like-minded militaries: AI must be used lawfully, humans must remain accountable, and risks must be anticipated, avoided and mitigated.

One notable difference in Australia’s policy is its reference to Article 36 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention. The policy mandates legal reviews of AI in weapon systems – a meaningful commitment few states have enacted.

Another difference is that Australia’s policy lacks the implementation roadmaps found in the US and UK policies. It reads more like a statement of intent.

It is not clear what consequences, if any, this variation in policy and institutional depth may have for AUKUS Pillar II, which involves cooperation on acceleration and rapid integration of AI and autonomous technologies.

The heightened significance of national frameworks

International efforts to govern military AI are potentially losing momentum. Multinational discussions on autonomous weapons are also deadlocked.

This means national policy frameworks take on greater significance, shaping procurement and signalling to partners what a state considers acceptable practice.

Contemporary uses of military AI in ongoing conflicts – in Iran, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Ukraine – remind us governance is not an abstract policy exercise.

Australia’s new policy settings are an important step. The test will be whether they are followed by implementation measures robust enough to effectively govern the development and use of military AI.

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