The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Andrew Tate spent years courting the Trump orbit, loudly announcing that once Trump was back in office, "The Tates will be free." Now he and his brother Tristan are sitting in a Florida prison while the U.K. asks nicely to borrow them for a few dozen charges, including rape and human trafficking. Apparently "law and order" gets a little complicated when the alleged criminals are dual U.S.-British citizens with a massive fanbase of radicalized teen boys and midlife crisis podcasters.

For years, the Tates worked the MAGA circuit: cozying up to Trumpworld figures, becoming darlings of the manosphere, and turning Andrew’s bans from major platforms into a free speech martyrdom tour. The same movement that screams about protecting women and children from "degeneracy" rallied behind a guy whose business model allegedly involved coercing women into webcam porn and withholding their earnings. Now, with indictments piling up in the U.K. and Romania, the Trump administration is reportedly trying to edge away from their one-time poster boy for "traditional masculinity," while MAGA media fractures between ride-or-die fans and people who can read an indictment.

The result: a test case for Trump’s America, where the question isn’t whether you’re accused of trafficking and sexual violence, but whether your influence machine is big enough to bend U.S. power to your personal legal needs. The Tate brothers bet that clout with Trumpworld would beat extradition treaties and due process. The White House’s sudden attempts at social distancing suggest even this administration occasionally remembers that openly backing an alleged sex trafficker might be slightly off-message — at least until the next rally crowd starts chanting his name.

Donald Trump logged onto Truth Social, squinted at two photos, and announced there are "Two VERY DIFFERENT America's [sic]": one showing him and Melania, the other showing Abdul El-Sayed and his hijab-wearing wife. Subtle. It’s the same old birther-era routine: slap a Muslim name and a headscarf on screen, crank up the base’s fear receptors, and call it a campaign strategy. This is what passes for policy in the Mar-a-Lago Politburo.

El-Sayed, inconveniently for Trump, can talk in complete sentences and decided to just… agree. Yes, there are two Americas: one where the "overlords" pretend to hate each other while actually uniting to make billions off public office, and one where people eat pancakes and would like to afford groceries, healthcare, and breathable air. He even put a number on it: $2.2bn hoovered up from Trump’s presidency, because nothing screams "populist champion" like using the Oval Office as your personal ATM.

Republicans are now branding El-Sayed "the most radical Senate candidate in America" for believing in clean water and not overturning elections, while Trump lovingly rolls out his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, the way he used to linger on "Hussein" for Obama. The message is clear: if your name doesn’t fit on a Bass Pro Shop rewards card, you’re a national security threat. El-Sayed’s response: it’s not radical to want health care, democracy, and non-poisoned lungs; it’s radical to torch elections and monetize the presidency like it’s another failed casino.

So yes, there are two Americas. One is a multiethnic democracy trying, badly, to function. The other is a geriatric reality-TV kleptocracy where the president calls opponents "full of shit" to roaring crowds while quietly converting public office into a $2.2bn side hustle. Trump keeps demanding voters choose which America they want. Abdul El-Sayed is just helpfully pointing out which one is currently draining their bank accounts.

The White House is ripping up a brand-new helipad on the South Lawn because Donald Trump reportedly decided he didn’t like how it looked and the lawn’s slope offended his sense of geometry. After weeks of “around the clock” construction to prep for Xi Jinping’s visit, workers are now back out there redoing the whole thing so Marine One — a supersized VH-92A Patriot — can land on a pad that sits perfectly level with the horizon and the president’s ego.

The first design featured a 100-foot-wide granite presidential seal that started to take shape and then, like most Trump projects that aren’t directly about Trump, was promptly dug back up. The new helipad, expected to cost $5m to $6m, will also feature a carved granite seal and is being paid for entirely by Sikorsky, the helicopter manufacturer — because nothing says healthy democracy like a defense contractor underwriting the president’s personal landing strip on the people’s front lawn.

This is just the latest entry in Trump’s "beautification" spree, which so far includes a White House ballroom slapped onto the East Wing, a new lining for the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, and draft plans for a "garden of heroes" plus a triumphal arch with a 60-foot gilded winged Lady Liberty and enormous golden eagles. So yes, we’ve moved from subtle authoritarian vibes to full-scale imperial fantasy park. As press secretary Davis Ingle helpfully explained, “thanks to President Trump, the White House has never looked better” — if you’ve always thought America’s problem was not enough granite seals and not enough things gilded.

The Trump White House is leaning on Congress to quietly stall a ban on potent intoxicating hemp products — a ban the administration itself approved last year — and, as luck would have it, the delay would help the son-in-law of chief of staff Susie Wiles. Because why merely serve the American people when you can also juice the in-law’s gummy empire?

Senators, under pressure from the administration and a very motivated hemp lobby, slipped the delay into a stopgap spending bill meant to avert a shutdown. So the choice is: keep the government open, or keep restrictions on high-octane hemp vapes with names like “Trainwreck” and “Blueberry Cookies.” The founding fathers dreamed of many abuses of power, but even they might have missed "government by edibles".

The industry push has been led in part by Bret Worley — fresh from his wedding to Wiles’s daughter at the Trump Winery, because of course it was at the Trump Winery — who runs companies selling the very products the delay protects. Meanwhile, public health experts are pointing out the documented health risks, which is adorable, because this administration has already rolled out the red carpet for peptides, kratom, and flavored vapes under the banner of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Nothing says "health" like deregulating whatever gets you buzzed and hoping the F.D.A. doesn’t harsh the vibe.

Republican orthodoxy on drugs used to be "Just Say No." Trump-era orthodoxy is closer to "Just Say How Much" — provided someone in the inner circle is getting a cut. The White House isn’t just high on executive power; it’s now literally lobbying to protect the intoxicants that help the chief of staff’s family business. Regulatory policy has officially been downgraded to a side hustle.

Glenn Youngkin, freshly term-limited out of Richmond and auditioning for the 2028 primary, has launched a "policy group" called Empowering America’s Parents, which is a very polite way of saying national campaign vehicle with better tax treatment. The group’s first mission: sell Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit — a federal program that lets wealthy donors feel like philanthropists while they redirect tax dollars away from public schools and toward private and religious ones.

The new group is dropping millions on ads in Democratic-governor swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, accusing those governors of "playing politics" by not signing up for a scheme critics say will hollow out public education. The pitch is simple: who could oppose scholarships for kids, especially when you hide the part where the "free money" is actually tax revenue that never reaches public schools in the first place? It’s like setting the school on fire and then demanding applause for donating a garden hose.

To maintain the fiction that this isn’t a 2028 campaign soft-launch, Youngkin doesn’t appear in the glossy launch video — a level of subtlety usually reserved for Super PACs that definitely don’t coordinate with candidates. The narrator rails against "far-left governors" who "won’t play ball" while Youngkin’s allies brag it’s a "great issue for the governor" and a "great accomplishment for the president" — meaning Trump, who signed the "One Big Beautiful Bill" that birthed this thing. Public schools get less stable funding, billionaires get another tax break with better branding, and Youngkin gets a national "parents rights" platform built on the same moral panic that once treated Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a bigger threat than underfunded classrooms.

UN countries are inching toward the radical, dangerous, totally unacceptable idea that corporations should pay tax where they actually do business, not where a mailbox in the Cayman Islands allegedly "innovates" at a P.O. box. A new Tax Justice Network report says unitary taxation could claw back $500 billion a year from the global tax-dodge Olympics without even raising rates. Naturally, Donald Trump’s America responded by storming out of the UN tax talks and begging others to join the tantrum. Shockingly, nobody else wanted to cosplay as a legal department for Apple and Google.

While the rest of the world tries to build a UN framework to tax profits where real economic activity happens, Trump is busy threatening tariffs at Europe like a mobster shaking down a parking garage. The proposed system would let countries tax digital and cross-border services without waiting for Big Tech to open a token office staffed by a ficus, and even move secretive investor-state arbitration into something resembling public accountability. That’s terrible news for the corporate-lawyer-industrial complex and the offshore finance crowd that U.S. Republicans treat like an endangered species in need of constant protection.

Countries like India and Nigeria are already writing laws to ensure that companies profiting off their economies can’t just disappear into a spreadsheet in Dublin. Ireland is quietly admitting the party’s almost over by stashing away its "windfall" corporate tax receipts before the music stops. Meanwhile, an African-led coalition, backed by India and Brazil, has engineered UN rules that block the U.S. or any rich-country clique from wielding an automatic veto. So Trump can sit outside the room and yell "America First" all he wants; he just can’t stop everyone else from finally sending his favorite tax-dodging multinationals a bill.