The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job as White House press secretary to spend more time with her family — and by "family," of course, we mean Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. After a grueling 18 months of explaining why the president’s latest rant was actually 12‑dimensional chess, she’s headed right back to the Trump-aligned cash machine that pretends to be an "independent" political committee.

She’ll be one of Trump’s "top outside advisors" now, which is a very poetic way of saying: doing campaign work with unlimited money while everyone keeps a straight face about coordination rules. The same person who just finished speaking for the president from the White House podium will now speak for the super PAC backing the same president’s candidates, but don’t worry, the FEC’s comatose watchdogs are totally on it.

Leavitt assures reporters they’ll still see her around Washington and even back on Air Force One for the GOP’s midterm convention — just not as a government employee anymore, which is convenient when you’re shuttling between taxpayer-funded optics and billionaire-funded influence. America’s campaign finance system wasn’t so much broken as repurposed, and this is what it looks like when you stop even pretending there’s a line between the government and the donors who own it.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new twist on humanitarian aid: give us your people’s health data or enjoy your pandemics in peace. Eight Democratic senators just sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio asking why the U.S. is conditioning up to $1.7 billion in health aid to countries like Uganda on letting Washington (and its contractors, naturally) jack directly into their national health data systems. Historically, U.S. global health programs like PEPFAR used anonymized, segregated systems. Now Team America First wants logins and “secure access mechanisms” straight into foreign government databases, because nothing says compassion like turning HIV treatment into a data-mining opportunity.

Rubio’s State Department insists this is all anonymized, harmless, and absolutely not a giant surveillance and commercialization playground for U.S. companies or AI models. The problem is the agreements are vague, secret (despite federal law requiring they be public), and written so loosely that experts say the data could be re-identified, misused, or monetized without anyone’s consent. The senators are asking whether any of this goldmine of health data will be shared with U.S.-based third parties, including to train AI, and what privacy rights—if any—foreign citizens will have when their most intimate medical information is floating around on some contractor’s server.

All of this flows from the “America First Global Health Strategy,” which proudly promises to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations”—a poetic way of saying: we dismantled USAID, gutted CDC global health work, fired the experts, and then put a health-tech entrepreneur, Brad Smith, in charge of reinventing foreign aid as a data acquisition scheme. After overseeing $67 billion in cuts to HHS, Smith is now fronting a model where lifesaving aid is used as leverage to extract pathogen samples and population-level health data, with Africans getting treatment and Americans getting a new training set for their algorithms. Truly a win-win, if you’re a biotech investor and not an actual human with a medical record.

Meanwhile, the administration’s own cyber strategy sermonizes about the sacred privacy of American citizens’ data, while casually experimenting on foreign populations with barely any safeguards. In regions where disclosing someone’s HIV status, abortion history, or mental health treatment can lead to discrimination or violence, Washington is playing privacy roulette behind closed doors. It’s a neat trick: dismantle real aid infrastructure, then rebuild it as a global health panopticon and call it efficiency. The State Department’s response? They don’t comment on congressional letters, but trust them, everything’s fine. What could possibly go wrong with a secret, AI-adjacent, for-profit friendly health surveillance pipeline run by the Trump-Rubio brain trust?

Jon Ossoff went to Atlanta and basically read out loud the crimes section of the Trump presidency like it was an audiobook. He torched Trump’s "uniquely despicable" Iran war — the one built on lies, padded with propaganda, and generously seasoned with record-length deployments for sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln while the commander-in-chief complains they haven’t been stuck at sea long enough. The troops get exhaustion, mental health crises, and nine months on a floating anxiety attack; Trump gets tee times and a Gulf-funded flying palace for himself and Natalie Harp.

Ossoff then walked through the part where the president allegedly looked at the global economy and said, "How can I day-trade this?" Trump announces clown-tariffs, tanks the market, buys the dip, then magically cancels the tariffs right after telling his followers it’s a "great time to buy" — triggering a historic rebound and, coincidentally, padding his own portfolio. This is followed by the logical next step of any healthy democracy: a subscription service charging up to $100,000 a month for early access to the president’s thoughts on war and economic policy. The stock market, foreign governments, and defense contractors now get the premium tier, while the rest of the country gets whatever’s left after the whales cash out.

Ossoff’s pitch is basically: yes, American politics is corrupt and coin-operated, but Trump didn’t drain the swamp — he installed a VIP lounge, put the nuclear football behind a paywall, and turned the entire system into his personal options-trading side hustle. When the sitting president’s decisions on war and peace are delivered first to paying customers, that’s not just corruption; that’s a live demo of how to speedrun a democracy into a kleptocracy.

The Trump White House spent the day blasting out a photo of Donald Trump proudly waving a Washington Post article about prescription drug prices hitting their biggest drop in 60+ years, declaring it proof of his economic genius. Tiny footnote: the article itself explicitly credits Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and its Medicare drug price negotiations, and quotes multiple experts saying Trump’s policies probably had nothing to do with it. Minor detail, easily solved by simply not linking to the story and hoping no one can read past a headline.

During a carefully staged tarmac photo-op, Trump strutted up to reporters, brandished a printout showing the headline and first few lines, and demanded they capture the moment like he’d just split the atom. "I told you that was going to happen," he bragged, omitting the part where it happened because Biden signed a law forcing Big Pharma to negotiate with Medicare. The same article notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics data he’s celebrating comes from an agency whose former chief Trump fired last year for producing job numbers he didn’t like, which really ties the whole "facts are whatever I say they are" aesthetic together.

Over on X, White House communications director Steven Cheung posted a screenshot of the Post headline with the caption, "All thanks to President Trump!" and, crucially, no link to the actual piece that contradicts him. The official White House accounts joined in with "POV: you bring the receipts," which is a bold slogan for a team that apparently considers reading comprehension an optional elite hobby. It’s not policymaking so much as government-by-screenshot: strip out the context, slap Trump’s name on Biden’s reforms, and hope the propaganda beats the truth to everyone’s feed.

The Trump White House has finally cut out the middleman and gone straight to the core promise of the administration: if you want access to your government, bring a checkbook. Two press groups are suing Trump over "Truth API," a Truth Social service that charges up to $100,000 a month for a few milliseconds' head start on his market-moving tantrums, which are somehow also considered official presidential statements. Think of it as a subscription service where the president sells inside-the-government latency to hedge funds, then signs executive orders between posts about vaccines.

The Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation are politely calling this "extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional," which is one way to describe a president using the bully pulpit as a high-frequency trading signal generator. Their lawsuit argues that selling preferential access to presidential communications violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of equal public access and the Fifth Amendment by creating a paywalled tier of governance for "unreasonable sums." Also named: loyal courtiers Natalie Harp and Dan Scavino, because the royal social media scribes have the keys to the kingdom’s cash register.

Trump’s media company, currently lighting $238 million on fire thanks to its crypto genius, insists this is all normal because tech companies monetize data all the time. Sure, Google sells ad impressions; Trump sells the U.S. presidency by the millisecond. Totally the same. The platform still brands itself an "uncancellable haven for free speech"—as long as your speech comes with a six-figure monthly subscription and a Bloomberg terminal. If you ever wondered what it would look like to literally auction off the public’s right to know, congratulations, you’re living in the beta test.