The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

David Flippo, Trump-endorsed Republican hopeful in Nevada, has discovered a bold new theater of operations: his imagination. Though he’s fond of telling voters he was in the desert for Desert Storm and struts around in a "DESERT STORM VETERAN" hat, the US Air Force says he didn’t even go on active duty as an officer until December 10, 1991—nine months after the shooting stopped. Contemporary records put him not in the Persian Gulf but in the exotic combat zone of Montana State University’s ROTC program, bravely facing the cafeteria line.

The fake Desert Storm cosplay isn’t even his only stolen valor side quest. Flippo’s campaign previously falsely claimed he had a Bronze Star with valor he never earned, and he was relieved of squadron command in 2008 before exiting the Air Force entirely. Off the battlefield, he reports pumping more than $2.5 million of mystery money into his campaigns while somehow failing, for years, to file legally required financial disclosures. He’s tied to a sketchy Arizona land venture promising "constant" 20 percent returns for 20 years—always a totally normal thing—and his campaign has even reported contributions from two dead people, which they assure us is just a clerical oopsie and not, say, light electoral necromancy.

So the résumé reads: not in Desert Storm, not a Bronze Star hero, booted from command, missing financial disclosures, magic high-yield land scheme, and donations from beyond the grave. Naturally, this makes him an ideal Trump-era Republican candidate for Congress: part fake war story, part Ponzi brochure, all accountability optional.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that if you’re going to shred norms, you might as well do it for something truly sacred: a fancier golf course. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes has opened an inquiry into whether officials at the Departments of Justice and Interior misled her court about plans to bulldoze D.C.’s historic East Potomac Golf Links so Donald Trump can get his very own "World Class Championship" playground.

The judge wants to know if government lawyers told National Park Service officials what to leave out of sworn declarations, what to put in about budgets, and whether the last-minute notice that hundreds of trees were about to be chainsawed was filed in bad faith. While DOJ and Interior kept assuring the court there was no finalized plan, Trump was on Truth Social bragging that Interior and celebrity course architect Tom Fazio had already cooked one up and that the course would close November 15 so work could begin. Government lawyers then helpfully showed the court the shiny new Fazio rendering they supposedly don’t really have a plan for.

Judge Reyes hasn’t found wrongdoing yet, but she’s bringing in a special master to help figure out whether the nation’s top law enforcement agency and the Interior Department have been functioning as Trump’s personal real-estate development shop, complete with creative writing exercises for sworn statements. The case was brought by a preservation league and a couple of local golfers who thought they were just defending a 1920s-era public course, not accidentally exposing a possible scheme where the federal government lies to a judge to protect the president’s latest vanity fairway.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who treats ethics rules like optional EULAs, has acquired an exciting new international side quest: palling around with Fatmir Mediu, Albania’s former defense minister who just happened to be in office when a munitions depot exploded, killing 26 people and injuring hundreds. Mediu was charged with abuse of office, accused of looking the other way while untrained workers — including kids — dismantled live ammunition. Allegations of kickbacks, a US arms contractor later convicted of fraud, and a disaster cinematic enough to become the movie War Dogs? Naturally, that résumé gets you a VIP badge at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas and a photo-op with Paxton.

Far from being radioactive, Mediu is now the Albanian opposition’s concierge to the American right: National Prayer Breakfasts, NatCon conferences, schmoozing with Trump campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita, Justice Department officials, and assorted Texas lawmakers. But his tightest bond seems to be with Paxton, who has met him multiple times — including in Albania — and benefited from Mediu and Sali Berisha helping him tap Albanian American donors for campaign cash. In return, Mediu appears to be using his shiny new MAGA friendships to lean on the US government to pressure Albanian prosecutors to drop that pesky, long-running case against him. It’s not foreign influence, it’s just mutual legal defense, but make it transnational.

All of this folds neatly into Paxton’s own greatest hits reel: allegedly lifting a $1,000 Montblanc pen and calling it a misunderstanding, a securities fraud indictment he escaped by cutting a $300,000 restitution check, a 2023 impeachment he survived thanks to a very forgiving Texas Senate, and a string of sketchy investments and dubious associates. So when a foreign politician facing abuse-of-office allegations needs help leaning on prosecutors back home, who better to stand next to in photos than the guy who’s turned surviving scandal into a full-time brand? It’s rule of law as interpreted by the MAGA foreign exchange program: you bring the alleged corruption, they’ll bring the campaign finance forms.

Voters have finally cracked the code of Trump-era politics: nobody thinks either party has a real economic plan, but a solid majority is pretty sure Republicans will at least jack up gas prices and crank the corruption dial from "systemic" to "why is my congressman selling NFTs of my Social Security number?" Democrats lead in the House model not because anyone loves them, but because people are more afraid of what Trump and the GOP will do with power than they are disappointed in Democrats' chronic inability to do anything with it.

This is the "avoidance election" — a national fire drill where everyone’s main political ambition is "please, not that guy again." More than seven in ten Democratic voters say they’re casting a ballot just to stop Trump, while Republican voters are turning out to support him, albeit with slightly less religious fervor. Nobody thinks Democrats will make them better off financially; they just think Republicans will make them worse off and more corrupt, which in the Trump era passes for a sophisticated risk assessment.

So 2026 comes down to this: Democrats are winning on the strength of people who are definitely voting, Republicans are relying on people who "might" vote if the vibes improve, and almost no one believes anyone in Washington has a coherent plan beyond looting the place before the subpoenas land. American democracy has evolved from "a choice between two visions" to "a choice between two disasters" — and voters are desperately trying to pick the one that burns marginally fewer institutions to the ground.

Calley Means, the wellness-guru-turned-government-official who helped design Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s "Make America Healthy Again" agenda, has fled the Trump administration after making the shocking discovery that the White House is more into glyphosate than green juice. Means says he’s leaving with "tremendous respect" for Trump and RFK Jr., two men allegedly battling a "corrupt DC bureaucracy" while that same bureaucracy, under their watch, quietly pumps more weed killer and PFAS into everyone’s water bottles.

The breaking point was the administration’s refusal to finalize a federal definition of "ultra-processed foods" — something they teased months ago, then apparently lost behind a stack of Bayer talking points and fast-food wrappers. While Means begged for crackdowns on pesticides and food dyes, Trump signed an executive order to boost supplies of glyphosate and his EPA busied itself weakening mercury emissions standards and rolling back drinking water limits for PFAS. MAHA supporters now accuse Trump of breaking nearly every promise on food, agriculture, and environmental health, but the administration did stay loyal to one constituency: chemical companies. The Supreme Court, backed by Trump’s team, even helped Bayer dodge cancer warnings on Roundup. Medical freedom apparently means the freedom of corporations to dose the country, no label required.

Federal prosecutors say Virginia state senate president pro tempore L Louise Lucas looked at the phrase "political power" and apparently read it as "vertical integration opportunity." An indictment unsealed Thursday accuses the 82-year-old Democrat of helping run a criminal marijuana and money laundering operation grandly dubbed "the Lucas Enterprise" — which sounds less like a crime ring and more like a failed Star Wars spinoff, but here we are.

According to FBI director Kash Patel, Lucas and a tight circle of family and associates allegedly used her perch as chair of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee to keep their cannabis side hustle safe from scrutiny and tweak legislation to line their own pockets. So while the public thought she was blocking bills on policy grounds, prosecutors are suggesting it might have been more portfolio management than principle.

Lucas, who runs companies serving adults with intellectual disabilities and co-owns The Cannabis Outlet, had previously called the FBI’s May raids on her office and shop an intimidation tactic by the Trump-aligned Justice Department. Now that the feds have upgraded from "intimidation" to "indictment," her legal team is calling the whole thing a "circus" and promising a fuller response later. The DOJ, for its part, is going with the classic "no one is above the law" line — a bold claim in an era where people keep treating elected office like an all-access pass to the self-dealing buffet.

Donald Trump rolled out a new DOJ anti-fraud whistleblower rewards program and immediately tried to turn it into his own personal game show, announcing from the Oval Office that he would serve as the "arbitrator" of who gets paid. The Justice Department’s website says it has “sole discretion” over rewards, but Trump told reporters he’d personally decide who is "deserving" and would be "very generous, believe me"—because nothing screams rule of law like the guy indicted all over the country handpicking who gets federal money for exposing fraud.

JD Vance, now moonlighting as vice-president and fraud czar, dutifully hyped the program as a way to uncover all that supposedly rampant government fraud—especially the kind discovered by MAGA influencers accusing Somali-run childcare centers of crimes on social media. Trump, never one to let reality slow him down, promised whistleblowers could make “millions and millions” of dollars and get the money "immediately", despite DOJ’s own rules capping rewards at $30,000. The White House, asked whether any of this was true, responded by pointing reporters back to the same fantasy Oval Office comments, because apparently the official fact-check process is now just: “he said it, so go with that.”

For the finishing touch, Trump invited reporters themselves to cash in on the scheme—as long as their outlets allow it—openly dangling federal payouts to the press for digging up the right kind of fraud. So the president under multiple criminal indictments is proposing to personally referee whistleblower money, overrule DOJ’s structure in public, and turn anti-fraud enforcement into a patronage-and-clickbait contest. Truly an innovative approach to ethics: if you can’t avoid conflicts of interest, at least monetize them.

Navatek CEO Martin Kao helpfully spelled out his business model for the FBI: bribe politicians, get fake “research” contracts, profit. For Sen. Lindsey Graham, that allegedly meant a $40,000 cover charge for a 45-minute steakhouse chat and a pledge of $100,000 in campaign cash in exchange for steering a $10 million Pentagon contract to South Carolina. According to Kao, Graham didn’t bother with euphemisms: this was a price list, not a policy discussion. Also allegedly in the mix: Democratic kingmaker James Clyburn and GOP defense hawk Joe Wilson, both implicated in the same cash-for-contracts carousel.

The FBI’s anti-corruption team started doing the unthinkable: their jobs. They dug through Navatek’s records, found that Kao’s story matched the paper trail, and began treating this as what it looked like — a sprawling bribery scheme involving some of the most powerful people in Congress. Then Trump returned to the White House and, in an act of pure self-interested vengeance, gutted the very FBI and DOJ units investigating him and everyone like him, and barred the anti-corruption section from filing new cases. The senior agents were purged, the prosecutor walked, and the investigation into Graham, Clyburn, Wilson and friends was quietly strangled in its crib.

So Kao goes to prison, Graham dies with his reputation laundered by obituaries, his sister slides into his Senate seat with his staff and committee assignments, and Clyburn and Wilson remain powerful gatekeepers of federal money. The only thing that’s actually been prosecuted is the mistake of saying the quiet part out loud. Under Trump’s DOJ, public corruption isn’t a crime — it’s a protected class.