The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

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.

Gianni Infantino, the human reflection off a freshly waxed bowling ball, has decided the World Cup should work more like the Trump administration: hollow out the institution, flog the assets to private investors, and hope no one notices the Kushner connection. FIFA’s plan would sell stakes in the World Cup via a $4.2bn vehicle fronted by Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother, because apparently there is no corner of public life these people won’t try to turn into a strip mall REIT.

The problem for Infantino is that he tried to run the full Trump playbook without Trump’s one actual skill: counting votes. UEFA’s 55 national associations just voted unanimously to boycott FIFA tournaments if this goes ahead – meaning Spain and Portugal would boycott their own men’s World Cup. Even Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation are clutching their pearls, with Bahraini royal Sheikh Salman suddenly discovering the joys of “ethics and good governance”, which is like getting a lecture on sobriety from a Jägerbomb.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan, having solemnly promised after the European Super League fiasco that it had “learned from this”, is back at the center of the bonfire, helpfully stapling a Wall Street term sheet to the sport’s face. Trump, too busy declaring himself the architect of “historic” Middle East peace via his cosplay Board of Peace (where Infantino eagerly played background extra), hasn’t weighed in yet – but his influence is written all over this. It’s personality cult as cargo cult: Infantino and the rest of the Trump-adjacent betas watched him defy political gravity and concluded they, too, could cash out the commons and walk away whistling.

Turns out they can’t. When even global football federations, JP Morgan’s PR department, and a Bahraini prince allegedly linked to hunting down dissident athletes all think you’ve gone too far, you’ve really nailed the late-stage oligarchy vibe. Trumpism has officially expanded from looting the U.S. government to trying to securitize the World Cup. The only thing missing is a press conference at Four Seasons Total Football.

The Trump administration would like you, the taxpayer, to reach into your wallet and tip an extra $10 million for its Freedom 250 spectacle — a Christian nationalist prayer rally, a lopsided "Great American State Fair," and a July Fourth Trump speech/fireworks show that somehow managed to set money on fire even faster than the rockets. This is part of a larger $113 million "reimbursement" request for America's Semiquincentennial, because nothing screams fiscal conservatism like turning the national birthday into a VIP donor experience and then sending the bill to everyone else.

Sen. Jeff Merkley helpfully spelled it out in a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum: Freedom 250 exists because Trump created his own vanity commission to bypass the bipartisan one that already existed, then used it to stage events critics say whitewash U.S. history and sell access to the president. Now Interior admits it wants $10 million just to pay back the National Park Service for "routine" costs — cops, overtime, monitoring, and fixing the damage — even though Congress already set aside money for this in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So donors get the photo ops, Trump gets the branding, and the public gets the invoice.

Freedom 250 was supposed to celebrate 250 years of democracy; instead it’s a live reenactment of how grift became the state religion. The White House invented a parallel celebration machine, pumped it full of ideology and donor money, and when the numbers still didn’t add up, they went back to Congress with a straight face and asked for a bailout. Happy birthday, America — your present is paying for the party you weren’t invited to.

The Trump Administration dropped $5.1 million to regild the Arts of War statues near the Lincoln Memorial with 23.75-karat gold, proving once again that when it comes to government priorities, potholes and poverty can wait, but shiny war horses? Immediate emergency.

Federal records confirm the cost, while the BBC wandered around DC asking regular people what they think of the makeover. Some admired the sparkle, others questioned whether turning public art into a Versailles cosplay project during a chaotic presidency was really the best use of taxpayer cash. But hey, if there’s one thing this administration understands, it’s slapping gold on symbols of militarism and calling it civilization.

It’s almost poetic: a government busy hollowing out institutions, torching norms, and shredding accountability spends millions to literally polish the iconography of war. Forget infrastructure week — welcome to gold leaf week, where the empire doesn’t just decline, it does it in high-gloss.

JD Vance, the vice president who rebranded from Trump critic to Trump chew toy, is now on RFK Jr’s magical sauerkraut weight-loss plan, because of course the Health Secretary is running a fad diet MLM inside the White House. Trump reportedly loves Vance’s slimmer look, which is helpful for Vance because his only real constituency at this point appears to be one orange man with a TV remote.

Everyone else? Less smitten. A member of Vance’s protective detail is under investigation after leaking the veep’s lavish, taxpayer-funded travel demands, including trying to get his kid dropped at a golf lesson by helicopter and demanding last-minute chopper rides to Virginia for house-hunting. It’s pronatalism, but make it Black Hawk Uber: have more kids, get more subsidized helicopter drop-offs.

Meanwhile, inside Camp MAGA, the knives are out. Vance is getting hammered by his own party like no VP in decades, mostly because he briefly remembered humans can die in wars and questioned putting U.S. troops on the ground in Iran during a Joe Rogan appearance. Fox News dutifully scolded him for “contradicting the president”, because nothing says constitutional republic like punishing any deviation from Dear Leader’s war posture.

The punchline: Vance’s slide mostly benefits Marco Rubio, the aggressively hawkish alternative currently surging in 2028 polling. So the choice shaping up for the GOP base is between a helicopter-pronatalist veep who occasionally blinks at endless war, and a neocon bobblehead who thinks the real problem with U.S. foreign policy is that we’re not bombing enough countries. American democracy: now offering only worse sequels.

Donald Trump’s traveling circus of security malpractice hit a new stop in Turkey, where he quietly ditched his shiny Qatari-gifted 747-8 for the older, actually-defended Air Force One after U.S. officials picked up what they considered a credible threat from Iranian proxy forces targeting him and his plane. Publicly, Trump claimed he was flying the old jet “for old time’s sake”; privately, it turns out the Secret Service was doing the radical, woke thing of not wanting the president blown out of the sky in his favorite foreign-donated status symbol.

The episode helpfully underlines what everyone but Trump already knew: the Qatar plane doesn’t have the same advanced defensive systems as the real Air Force One, but he pushed to get it into service anyway because nothing says "America First" like flying the commander-in-chief around in a gift from a Gulf monarchy. When reporters at the New York Times started asking inconvenient questions about the security risks, Trump’s Justice Department responded in the time-honored authoritarian fashion: subpoena the journalists over their coverage and try to scare them into silence. Those subpoenas have now been dropped "for now," which is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Meanwhile, Trump is out here bragging about his alleged "standing orders" to level Iran "at levels they’ve never seen before" if they kill him, while also insisting he’s open to diplomacy and that Tehran is being the "most serious" he’s ever seen them. So he’s simultaneously dangling apocalypse, flying around in a lightly armored Gulfstream ego project, and siccing the DOJ on reporters who point out the obvious security problems. The only consistent doctrine is that the U.S. government exists to protect one man’s body and one man’s brand, with the Constitution and press freedom strapped into the overhead bin as unsecured baggage.

The FDA’s outside advisory panel just voted 8-6 to relax restrictions on trendy injectable peptides like BPC-157, TB-500 and KPV, because who needs robust safety data when you’ve got Joe Rogan vibes and Instagram before-and-after photos? Government scientists warned there’s little evidence these compounds are safe or effective, but the panel bravely followed the science of: "my chiropractor’s podcast says it’s fine."

This nail-biter vote just happens to follow a quiet makeover of the panel’s membership, where more than half a dozen people with ties to the peptide industry were parachuted in — doctors, pharmacists, and consultants who directly work in the field and somehow all landed on the side of “let’s sell more peptides.” Meanwhile, the academics with no financial stake mostly voted no, apparently still clinging to the outdated notion that medicine should be based on data instead of TikTok trends.

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., self-described “big fan” of peptides and architect of the "Make America Healthy Again" influencer rebrand, now gets political cover to undo Biden-era restrictions and supercharge a market experts describe as a “wild west” of unregulated drugs. Telehealth grifters and longevity gurus like Gary Brecka — who literally sells this stuff — are poised to cash in as FDA policy conveniently aligns with their online storefronts. Regulation capture level: wellness MLM.

So the federal government is inching toward putting these compounds on the FDA’s "generally safe for pharmacies to make and sell" list, over the objections of its own scientists, to satisfy a market whipped up by celebrity podcasters and supplement pushers. America’s new health policy model is here: if you can’t prove it works, just lobby your way onto the panel and vote yourself a business plan.

Donald Trump marched into the Environmental Protection Agency – remember when that used to regulate things? – to unveil his latest consumer protection masterstroke: a non-binding "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" in which about 200 utilities, datacenter developers, and tech giants solemnly swear they definitely, totally, pinky-promise not to stick Americans with the power bill for the AI gold rush. Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, xAI and friends – the people driving the surge in electricity demand – are now also the people writing the rules about who pays for it. What could possibly go wrong.

Trump bragged that electricity rates for "80% of the power distributed in America" are being "kept in check" by this plan, which is a bold claim for a document with all the legal force of a change.org petition. Utility prices are already up 4% year-over-year, but the White House insists this voluntary vibes-based framework will ensure everyone building and powering datacenters covers their own costs instead of passing them on to families. Environmental groups, who have met a pledge or two before, describe it as a photo op with Big Tech that "won’t lower a single family’s electric bill" – a "paper-thin" promise from companies that haven’t bothered to show how any of this supposedly lowers costs.

As communities across the country revolt against water-guzzling, grid-straining AI datacenters – with New York passing a moratorium and even Greg Abbott calling for a rural Texas ban – Trump is out here yelling about "radical left communists" who want to "shut down all new development" while handing those same developers a regulatory participation trophy. Twenty-three GOP governors signed on, because nothing says "tough on corporate abuse" like asking Nextera and Duke Energy to self-regulate with a handshake and a press release. The Sierra Club and Evergreen Action are unimpressed, mostly because you can’t pay your electric bill with aspirational corporate promises, no matter how many times the president calls it "bold action".