The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Donald Trump’s long-running fixation with Ilhan Omar has finally graduated from racist rally chants to full-blown authoritarian cosplay. Federal agents raided the congresswoman’s home 22 days before the midterms, seized her phone, and slapped her relatives with grand jury subpoenas over supposed irregularities in decades-old immigration paperwork. Trump, naturally, swears he has no idea how one of his loudest critics just happened to end up on the business end of a federal raid right before voters go to the polls. Just a democracy doing a little light self-care, apparently.

Tom Homan, Trump’s "border czar" and part-time deadpan comic, went on Fox to calmly float the idea that Omar could be stripped of her citizenship and deported, insisting she’ll be held to the same standard as everyone else. This is an interesting standard in a country where a white billionaire convicted of 34 felonies is protected by a Supreme Court he stacked, while a Black Muslim refugee-turned-congresswoman gets her house searched for paperwork errors her dad might have made when she was a teenager. Meanwhile, Trump megadonor Elon Musk’s immigration "grey area" and Melania’s sketchy modeling work visa history are treated as charming origin stories rather than deportation triggers.

What’s actually happening is not "accountability" but the weaponization of the immigration system to crush dissent. Trump has already deported noncitizen student activists for pro-Palestinian speech; now he’s road-testing the same tactic on a sitting member of Congress whose biggest crime is criticizing him and Israel. As Barack Obama warned, if it becomes normal to threaten political opponents with denaturalization and exile, it doesn’t stop with Ilhan Omar. This is how you slide from "America First" to "authoritarianism with paperwork"—one targeted raid and one terrified political enemy at a time.

President Trump is reportedly "leaning into unprecedented power" ahead of the midterms, which is a very polite NPR way of saying he’s campaigning on authoritarian vibes and a sharpie-level understanding of the Constitution. Instead of talking policy, Trump is out there selling himself as a one-man government, reminding voters that checks and balances are for losers and people who read things.

This is not subtle. The pitch is basically: give him a Congress that won’t even pretend to oversee him and he’ll rule by executive order, threat, and whatever he saw on cable news at 3 a.m. It’s less a campaign message than a live stress test of how much open contempt for democratic norms you can package as "strength" before people notice they’re applauding their own disempowerment.

America’s long march toward faith-based fascism picked up a nice brisk pace as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth floated the idea of livestreaming the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan. The last time the U.S. flirted with a big public execution was 90 years ago; this time, the Pentagon’s top guy wants it in HD so the base can smash that like button for state violence. Trump says they’re “looking at it,” JD Vance bravely announced he personally wouldn’t watch (thank you for your service, Senator Vice President), and constitutional norms continued rotting quietly in the corner.

Religious scholars point out that when the Defense Secretary starts talking about public executions like they’re a patriotic TED Talk, it doesn’t really matter if the cameras roll — the boundary has already been shoved. Hegseth’s theology comes courtesy of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, whose leader proudly calls himself a Christian nationalist, dreams of women losing the right to vote, and has defended slavery, which is quite a combo platter for the guy with influence over the U.S. military. Experts bluntly label Hegseth a “religious extremist” trying to implement his theocratic fantasies inside the Pentagon, but sure, tell us again how the real threat is college kids using the word "Latinx."

While most American Christians — including a chunk of the right — are repulsed by the snuff-film governance model, Hegseth’s own circle reportedly offers near-unanimous enthusiasm for the death penalty. The Archbishop for U.S. military Catholics had to issue a formal letter telling Catholic troops they can ask out of the firing squad, because under Trump, clergy now need to remind soldiers they’re not obligated to become extras in the administration’s morality-play executions. The merger of state power, religious extremism, and bloodsport isn’t a bug of Christian nationalism; it’s the feature they keep bragging about.

Trump went to Bullhead City, Arizona, to do what he does best: scream his grievances into a microphone and casually fantasize about killing people who inconvenience him. This time the target was government sources who talk to the press about military plans. “In my opinion, leakers should be shot,” he told the cheering crowd, nostalgically adding that “in the old days we used to shoot leakers.” America, famously founded on a free press and checks on executive power, is now apparently supposed to cosplay North Korea because the president is mad someone talked to a reporter about bombing Iran.

He was riffing about the June 2025 B-2 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, bragging about “totally stealth” bombers dropping “very large bombs” and then pivoting straight to calling for leakers to “go to jail or be shot.” This is not a one-off brain spasm: he’s been obsessed with “low-life leakers” since the Russia days, and former aide Alyssa Farah Griffin has already said she heard him talk about executing staff who leak. The man hears the word “source” and immediately reaches for the firing squad.

As a fun little backdrop to this tough-guy routine, Trump has spent his second term turning federal executions into a grim reality show. He ran on restoring the death penalty after Biden’s moratorium, has now approved the first public execution since 1936, and greenlit a firing-squad spectacle for Nidal Malik Hasan that his administration wants to livestream. Trump says he “absolutely” agreed to that idea. So when he stands at a rally musing about shooting leakers, he’s not just venting — he’s a president who is literally bringing back public executions while normalizing the idea that exposing government actions is a capital crime.

We’ve reached the part of the movie where the leader jokes about killing dissidents, the crowd roars its approval, and everyone on cable news debates whether he was being “serious” or just “colorful.” Meanwhile, the message to anyone inside government thinking of warning the public about what this administration is doing — from secret bombing campaigns to god knows what else — is crystal clear: stay quiet, or the guy who signs execution orders thinks you’d look great in front of a firing squad, preferably in prime time.