because why measure math when you can measure obedience to aquinas
Future leaders of America, carefully sorted by how many Federalist Papers they can quote without accidentally learning about, say, systemic racism.
Conservatives, tired of the SAT’s dangerous left-wing bias toward actual data, are rolling out the "Classic Learning Test" (CLT) as their very own culture-war Scantron. Instead of boring things like broadly normed benchmarks, the CLT leans into "great books," Christian thinkers, and the comforting knowledge that your admissions filter is pre-sorted for kids whose parents think PragerU is a documentary studio.
Colleges increasingly signing onto this thing aren’t exactly random; it’s a who’s-who of Christian and right-wing institutions eager to build a parallel universe where you don’t have to abolish higher education, you just quietly swap it out for something that looks like school but functions like a pipeline into the movement. No need for jackboots when you’ve got a standardized test that helpfully screens for the kind of student who thinks "classical education" means "the Founders were flawless and the Civil Rights Act was maybe a bit much."
What this really builds is infrastructure: a conservative-approved credentialing system that can be scaled, marketed, and eventually used to pressure mainstream universities—"accept our test or prove you hate Western Civilization." It’s not a crime; it’s just how you slowly replace pluralistic institutions with partisan ones, one bubble sheet at a time.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
fbi now stands for 'friends of bigly indicted'
Kash Patel, pausing briefly from purging Trump investigators and subtweeting senators from the FBI’s official account, pretends to respect congressional oversight for the cameras.
Kash Patel showed up to his FBI oversight hearing and immediately started auditioning for the role of Trump’s personal secret police chief. While Democrats tried to ask boring little questions about why the FBI is bleeding staff, changing hiring to favor MAGA loyalists, and why the director treats government jets like Uber Black, Patel mostly responded by lashing out at them — while, magically, the official FBI X account started attacking the same senators in real time. Nothing says “independent law enforcement” like live-tweeting abuse of your congressional overseers from the bureau’s verified account.
Sen. Cory Booker called Patel a “thug” who’s using the FBI to go after reporters and stonewall Congress, which is probably the nicest thing anyone will say about this tenure. Patel is simultaneously suing The Atlantic for $250 million over a story about his alleged drinking and running internal leak investigations into that same reporting, because why abuse one lever of power when you can yank all of them at once? Meanwhile, Republicans on the committee patted him on the head for firing FBI employees who worked on Trump cases, including those involved in the Mar-a-Lago search, and praised him for helping Joe diGenova’s “grand conspiracy” witch hunt against former law enforcement officials. DiGenova, who just quit after clashing with DOJ leadership, still called Patel “absolutely superb” — which is exactly the kind of review you want from the guy investigating Trump’s enemies list.
Democrats muttered about someday holding Patel accountable if they ever retake a chamber of Congress, while Patel literally asked Sen. Chuck Grassley to just wrap the whole hearing up so he could get back to dismantling what’s left of an independent FBI. The bureau, once obsessed with projecting nonpartisan credibility, is now run by a Trump loyalist who purges disfavored agents, harasses the press, and turns congressional oversight into a performative nuisance. Law enforcement as a personal loyalty cult isn’t a subplot anymore; it’s the entire script.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#fascism
congress considers giving the arsonist more matches
Congress contemplates whether the solution to global instability is giving Donald Trump a larger tariff hammer and a fresher list of nails labeled "allies."
Congress is currently speed‑running a familiar game show: "Who Wants to Give Donald Trump Even More Unchecked Power?" The late Lindsey Graham’s parting gift to America, the Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, would let Trump slap 100% tariffs not just on Russia, but on top buyers of Russian oil like China and India — and, depending on how he feels when he wakes up, potentially any ally that looks at him funny. The sales pitch is "help Ukraine," but the fine print is "expand presidential tariff authority for the guy who once declared Canada a national security threat."
Democrats are having a full public meltdown over whether helping Ukraine is worth handing Trump a new economic flamethrower. Gregory Meeks, Don Beyer, and Richard Neal are pointing out the blindingly obvious: the bill doesn’t even mandate sanctions on Russia, but it does massively juice Trump’s tariff superpowers, which he has already used to drive away allies and jack up prices for Americans. Isolationist Republicans, naturally, still don’t want to help Ukraine at all, so the whole thing hinges on whether enough Democrats decide that empowering a wannabe strongman is just an unfortunate but necessary side quest.
Ukraine’s government and pro-Ukraine advocates are stuck in the middle, begging Congress to pass the “best option available” while Democrats openly ask why they should give Trump a new button labeled "Tariff Whatever Country I’m Mad At Today." Representative Linda Sánchez helpfully summarized the mood by telling colleagues to "get off the fucking bill" and then confirming it on social media, because subtlety is for functioning democracies. Meanwhile, foreign governments watch nervously as the United States debates whether the path to supporting Ukraine runs through handing Donald Trump a bigger economic gun and hoping he aims it at the right target for once.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump hands foreign leader a 'key' to the white house, jokes he might get shot
Donald Trump, proudly displaying the latest amenity at Hotel White House: complimentary gold key, possible live-fire demonstration included.
Mark Carney, now prime minister of Canada, told an investment summit that Donald Trump once gifted him a gold key to the White House and said he could just show up with it and be let in – though, as Trump reportedly added, "maybe they'll shoot you". You know, just a casual chat about a foreign head of government getting gunned down at the front door of the U.S. executive mansion.
Trump treating the White House like a Mar-a-Lago timeshare is already bad; layering it with a ha-ha-maybe-they'll-kill-you punchline about security forces is the fascism-flavored frosting. The story is supposed to "sum up" the Canada–US relationship, but it does a better job summing up Trump’s America: the president as petty landlord, the people’s house as his personal prop, and political violence as a running joke.
Nothing says "stable democracy" like the commander-in-chief handing out symbolic keys like party favors while riffing about whether his own security apparatus might open fire on an allied leader. Totally normal country stuff. Very reassuring for those 100 global investors and sovereign wealth funds trying to decide if the United States is more G7 or Banana Republic.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump fires the trans cia expert, keeps the signal group chat
The Trump-era national security brain trust: fire the trans CIA expert who understands classified systems, keep the influencers who think OPSEC is a new energy drink.
The Trump White House discovered a terrifying national security threat in early 2025: a highly qualified, Iraq-veteran, trans CIA officer who knew how classified systems work and kept the Situation Room from turning into a live episode of "Tech Support for Boomers." Julia Curlee, who had briefed Pence daily and Trump on Air Force One, was quietly told she was fired – but could she please still come in Monday and keep running things, just, you know, discreetly? The problem wasn’t that she was trusted with the nation’s secrets. The problem was that Laura Loomer posted about her on X and the bigot-in-chief couldn’t be seen relying on a trans woman to keep his government from accidentally posting TS/SCI to the family group chat.
Once Loomer blasted out that a "transgender, Biden holdover" was still working in the NSC intel office and begged followers to help identify her, the White House snapped into action – not to protect an employee targeted by a harassment campaign, but to dump her while still squeezing out her expertise behind the scenes. As Curlee tells it, the administration had no issue leaning on her to handle "programs of great sensitivity" as long as it was secret they were depending on a trans woman to do the actual governing. Publicly, Trump was busy turning anti-trans policy into a top governing priority; privately, his people were begging the same trans officials to keep the lights on.
Curlee’s bigger warning is that this wasn’t just cruelty, it was sabotage. Trump’s obsession with rooting out the "enemy within" – which turns out to mean “anyone who knows what they’re doing and isn’t a fascist podcaster" – led to an "extraordinary purging" of intelligence experts. The result: a national security apparatus gutted for ideological purity, staggering incompetence in places like Iran policy, and a government "crippled by its own decisions." The people who scream that DEI is destroying America replaced experienced CIA and NSC pros with rage-posting loyalists who have to be reminded not to bring their phones into SCIFs and that Signal is not where you discuss covert ops. Strong move for a crew that keeps insisting they’re the only ones who can keep us safe.
#killing-democracy#fascism#trumps-america
newsom promises not to primary harris, trump sends fruit basket
Gavin Newsom explains his anti-fascism strategy to Jake Tapper: catch, release, and hope voters somehow do the rest.
Gavin Newsom, America’s most aggressively coiffed anti-Trump avatar, has announced he will not run for president in 2028 if Kamala Harris does, because, he says, forcing voters to watch two California Democrats punch each other on stage while Trumpism eats the republic would be a “gift from God” to Republicans. Democrats, ever committed to bringing a strongly worded letter to a constitutional knife fight, are now publicly negotiating who gets to lose to fascism on the friendliest possible terms.
Newsom delivered this pledge while fly fishing in Montana with Jake Tapper, because nothing says “we understand working-class anxiety in a collapsing democracy” like a riverside CNN bromance on your in-laws’ ranch. Between casting lines, he explained that he almost ran in 2024 but “wasn’t ready,” unlike Donald Trump, who is always spiritually prepared to overthrow the government from a golf cart. Newsom insists you have to “meet the moment” and embody the “zeitgeist,” which in this case appears to mean: post strong tweets at Trump, court influencers, and hope voters don’t remember Harris already lost to him once.
To his credit, Newsom at least tried to fight Trump’s gerrymandering crusade using a California redistricting ballot initiative, while Harris has been mostly offscreen since her spectacular 2024 faceplant. She’s still undecided about running, but remains a top-tier contender because American politics now operates on Marvel rules: once you’re introduced in a major franchise film, you’re contractually required to keep returning until the universe collapses. So the plan, apparently, is this: Trump keeps testing how much democracy he can strip-mine, and the Democratic bench politely arranges itself in a no-conflict seating chart, just in case someone’s feelings get hurt during the last free election.
#killing-democracy#losses
supreme court to trump: the post office is not your vote shredder
Louis DeJoy staring at a mail sorting machine, trying to figure out which part turns it into a ballot suppression device.
Trump tried to turn the U.S. Postal Service into a pre-election ballot bouncer, and even this Supreme Court looked up from its "unitary executive" fan fiction long enough to say: absolutely not. In a 7-2 order, the court blocked a USPS regulation dreamed up in the White House that would have forced states to hand over lists of eligible voters and let the Postal Service second-guess which mail-in ballots could even be delivered. Traditionally, the USPS delivers the mail; it does not moonlight as a partisan election cop.
The rule, born from Trump's March executive order after Congress yawned on his SAVE America Act voter suppression bill, would have hit just weeks before ballots go out, threatening massive chaos and what a federal judge politely called "significant disenfranchisement." The administration, naturally, brought no evidence of widespread fraud, just the usual vibes and conspiracy theories. A whistleblower even said the USPS systems for checking ballots were flawed and could blow up the election machinery, but the White House insisted it was all just a "modest" envelope design tweak, because nothing says modest like potentially not delivering millions of ballots.
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, ever loyal to the dream of a president who can do whatever he wants as long as he’s Republican, dissented. Alito grumbled that courts were taking too long to decide the case, as if the real scandal here is judicial calendars rather than the president trying to nationalize election rules through the mail. Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, helpfully wrote that there’s a "fair prospect" USPS actually has the authority to do this, just not this close to an election — a nice little time bomb for the next round of voter suppression fanfic. For now, states can ignore the rule, USPS has to deliver the ballots, and Trump has to go back to attacking mail voting on TV instead of weaponizing the letter carrier.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump turns u.s. democracy into a fixer‑upper
Donald Trump, seen here explaining that elections are rigged unless he wins, continues his long-running attempt to speedrun American democracy into the "hybrid regime" category.
International IDEA has crunched 50 years of data and discovered that American democracy is now performing about as well as Trump University diplomas on the job market. Key indicators like judicial independence, credible elections, press freedom, and access to justice have all taken a swan dive, dragging the U.S. down to its lowest democratic standing in half a century. Globally, 2025 marked the 11th straight year more countries slid backwards than forwards, and the thinktank politely notes that the Trump administration’s "threats and actions" didn’t just exemplify that decline – they supercharged it.
Trump, the report says, "quickly amassed power in the executive branch" and used it to chase personal vendettas and punish enemies, which is exactly what you’d do if you read the Constitution as a restaurant menu. The fallout: weakened rule of law at home and abroad, frayed alliances, and a world where 71 countries now flunk the rule-of-law test while violent conflicts hit post–World War II highs. Meanwhile, other places manage small democratic bright spots – youth protests toppling long-serving leaders in South Asia, civil society actually being consulted in Australia, even the fall of Assad in Syria – while the U.S., the supposed beacon of freedom, gets formally labeled a "backsliding democracy" and starts inspiring copycats for all the wrong reasons.
As International IDEA’s Kevin Casas-Zamora gently explains that eroding democracy increases the risk of conflict, American policymakers remain deeply focused on the real security threats: campus protests, librarians, and anyone counting votes in public. Whatever happens in the U.S. goes global, the report warns. So yes, the world is now living with the export version of Trump’s governing style – a kind of geopolitical malware where every country suddenly discovers its own small army of election deniers, aspiring strongmen, and guys who think term limits are just "suggestions."
#killing-democracy#fascism
dhs to agents: break state law, we’ll spot you
DHS officials carefully verifying voter fraud allegations by clicking ‘I certify this is my record’ on 10,000 strangers’ files and calling it national security.
America’s premier security agency has discovered a bold new frontier: cybercrimes against its own voters. According to a DHS whistleblower, department lawyers told officers chasing Trump’s ghost-story of noncitizen voting that they wouldn’t be held responsible for violating state laws when they impersonate voters on state election websites. Those handy little checkboxes where you swear you’re only accessing your own record and that doing otherwise is computer fraud? DHS apparently waved them away as mere suggestions, like mask mandates or the Hatch Act.
The officers themselves raised the obvious concern – that pretending to be random voters on state systems might be, and this is the technical term, illegal. DHS’s Office of General Counsel responded with the legal equivalent of "crime is fine if it’s for the boss": calling it “open-source research” and reassuring agents they wouldn’t be personally liable, which sure sounds like, “Yes, this might break the law, but don’t worry, only the government is committing the crime.” Meanwhile, the data they were using was so shoddy that in California officers often couldn’t even find the supposed voter in the state database – and were told to create DHS records on them anyway. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Californians are now getting tagged in a federal system off vibes and bad spreadsheets.
Elsewhere, DHS bragged to Nevada about 15,903 noncitizens on the rolls, then quietly walked that down to 185 confirmed cases once someone asked them to show their work. Officers were rushed through a single training session and ordered to crank through five people an hour, because nothing protects democracy like a quota-based witch hunt run on unreliable data. All of this, of course, is being done to prop up Trump’s long-debunked voter-fraud fantasies while yanking hundreds of officers off actual security duties. The message from the administration is crystal clear: if the facts don’t support the election conspiracy, just have DHS bend state laws, corrupt federal databases, and hope no one notices until the damage is baked into the system.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
columbia helps trump turn campus politics into deportation court
Columbia University bravely standing up for free speech by watching ICE drag a student out of campus housing and then issuing a statement about its deep commitment to dialogue.
Columbia University, once proud home of Edward Said and allegedly serious scholarship, is now being sued for moonlighting as a junior partner in Trump’s anti-Palestinian crackdown. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student and US green card holder, says the school ignored years of harassment, doxing, and threats – right up until federal immigration agents marched into his university housing in 2025 and hauled him off as part of Trump’s new hobby: deporting foreign students who say the wrong things about Gaza.
According to the lawsuit, Khalil and members of SIPA’s Palestine Working Group begged Columbia for protection while their names, faces, and personal info were plastered online and on roving billboard trucks. The university’s response? Not to stop the harassment, but to discipline the students, suspend their Palestine Working Group in May 2025, and hand over disciplinary records to a House committee that treats campus pro-Palestinian speech like a national security emergency. Khalil’s lawyers say this deliberate indifference helped "lay the groundwork" for Trump’s deportation campaign; Columbia says it is "committed" to protecting students, presumably in the same way a smoke detector is committed to watching your house burn.
While Khalil fights deportation all the way to the supreme court, he’s also suing the Trump administration and a cast of pro-Israel groups for conspiring to target him. Columbia, naturally, would like everyone to know it cannot comment on pending litigation but deeply values safety, free speech, and whatever else its board thinks will keep the congressional subpoenas and donor tantrums at bay. The message to current and future students is crystal clear: speak out on Palestine, and you might get a disciplinary file, a federal raid, and a one-way ticket out of the country – courtesy of the seamless public-private partnership between an Ivy League brand and an authoritarian administration.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
trump & desantis build a tiny house of horrors
Artist’s rendering of Alligator Alcatraz’s ‘calming area’: a metal phone booth in a swamp, brought to you by the Trump–DeSantis School of Human Rights.
Florida’s lovingly nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” turns out to have been less a detention center and more a DIY torture pop-up in the Everglades, according to a new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Inspectors found that detainees were repeatedly locked in outdoor metal cages about the size of a phone booth — roughly 18 square feet, less than half of ICE’s own minimum standard — and then baked in Florida heat while mosquitoes did the rest. ICE rules say you can’t do that, which the Trump administration and Ron DeSantis’ crew apparently read as a suggestion, like putting your tray table up before landing.
The facility — which DeSantis ran for the federal government and bragged had processed more than 21,000 immigrants in a year — also featured overcrowding, limited recreation, filthy kitchens, broken phones that stopped detainees from calling lawyers or family, and reports of guards withholding food and clean water until people signed English-language documents they couldn’t read. So, a classic freedom-and-liberty operation. When Amnesty International first documented the cages, DeSantis’s spokesperson called it all “fabrications” and a “politically motivated attack.” The DHS watchdog has now confirmed the abuses still continued a month after those denials, proving once again that the only thing more durable than the Everglades ecosystem is Republican lying about immigrant abuse.
Staff at Alligator Alcatraz insisted to inspectors that these tiny metal boxes were just “calming areas” where detainees asked to go for some alone time, like a spa day but with shackles and heat stroke. Inspectors, spoilsports that they are, noted locking mechanisms, documented use of the cages as discipline for people who “failed to comply with a lawful command,” and politely observed that using miniature steel coffins on living humans is “unprecedented” in ICE facilities and a “significant risk” to health and wellbeing. They made 10 recommendations, including “stop the cages,” all of which are now moot because the camp closed in June — officially due to hurricane season, unofficially because spending $1.2 million a day to torture people in wetlands was becoming a political and legal sinkhole.
Now DHS, FEMA, and Florida are facing an amended lawsuit from environmental groups over the damage the camp did to the Everglades, while the human damage is cataloged in government PDFs and trauma. The Trump administration gets a rare rebuke from its own watchdog, DeSantis gets caught lying about human rights abuses he outsourced to private guards, and ICE gets yet another entry in its "we swear we have standards" scrapbook. The cages may be gone, but the blueprint for weaponizing disaster infrastructure as an ad hoc torture camp is still very much on the shelf.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
america’s ai safety plan: vibes and a ‘high iq’ president
AI leaders warn their products could wipe out humanity while Trump explains that, luckily, he personally has a very high IQ, so it’s all under control.
Trump has discovered the ultimate AI safety framework: no guardrails, just a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” — a description he helpfully provides of himself, in case anyone missed the last ten years of his posting. While AI researchers are out here saying things like “this might kill us all,” the White House strategy is basically, "Have you tried trusting my gut?"
Instead of independent oversight, Trump brags that his administration has already used its "tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power" to stop AI "people" like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei from doing "bad, or potentially bad, 'things.'" So no guardrails for the tech, just more threats for the humans who question it. He denounces concerns about AI and data centers as a "SICK conspiracy" and waves the usual magic word — China — to justify whatever he wants: WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!
Out in the real world, 70% of Americans say they’re more worried than excited about AI, including most Republicans, and local communities don’t want giant AI data centers dropped on their heads. AI researchers are resigning and publicly warning that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives" and that AI could "kill all humans." The bipartisan political response is, broadly: maybe we should slow down and think. The Trump response is: people raising safety concerns are "Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers" who should “BEWARE!”
JD Vance tries a more polite version of the same thing, saying he’s "weirded out" that AI companies are asking for regulation and hinting it’s some kind of Trojan horse, while still insisting the administration wants to "regulate smartly" — which, in this context, seems to mean "no rules for the tech, endless discretionary punishment power for the president." So to recap: the people building AI say it might end civilization, the public doesn’t want it in their backyard, and Trump’s plan is to strap the whole thing to his ego, floor the gas, and threaten anyone who reaches for the brake.
#killing-democracy#national-security#full-stupid
climate-hushing in a burning country
A firetruck races past yet another megafire while politicians debate whether it's polite to say the words "climate change" out loud.
Ron DeSantis literally scrubbed the words "climate change" from Florida law in 2024, and then Trump waltzed back into the White House and started rolling back Biden-era clean energy rules like he was speedrunning the apocalypse. Result: Democrats, terrified of being accused of caring whether their voters drown or combust, have started "climate-hushing" – pretending the planet isn't on fire while their constituents' houses are being reclassified as uninsurable kindling.
Meanwhile, a few candidates are stubbornly acting like governance still exists. In California, Jane Kim is running for insurance commissioner on a single-payer disaster insurance plan because private insurers have taken one look at climate-fueled wildfires and said, "good luck with that, peasants." Elsewhere, progressives are talking datacenters, right to repair, and green economic populism – i.e., tying climate policy to the fact that people like having homes, jobs, and electricity that doesn't come bundled with a Category 4 hurricane.
This is the Trump climate era in a nutshell: the federal government pretends climate isn't real, corporations run for the exits, and state-level candidates are left designing public insurance schemes and quiet emissions cuts just to keep basic civilization from collapsing. Elite consensus? Trump torched that. Now the choice is between building a mass, pissed-off pro-climate majority – or letting the "don't say climate change" crowd finish turning disaster insurance into a luxury product for whoever hasn't flooded yet.
#killing-democracy#anti-science
democrats launch 'please don’t steal the election' corps
Artist’s rendering of American democracy: one side in blue vests handing out voter info, the other side checking if ICE can bring handcuffs to the polling place.
Democrats are rolling out the "New Battlefield Project," which is a very dramatic name for what used to be called "basic election administration before one party went full coup-curious." Tens of thousands of volunteers in blue vests will fan out to about a quarter of the country’s 95,000 polling places to do wild, extremist things like: help people find the right location, explain provisional ballots, and write down when Trump’s goons try to scare voters away.
This whole operation exists because the Trump administration refuses to rule out sending federal agents to cities on election day and Trump-world voices keep fantasizing about immigration agents at the polls. Homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin — whose job apparently now includes live-testing the boundaries of the Voting Rights Act — says ICE doesn’t normally patrol polling places, but hey, if they have a warrant or feel like there’s a "threat," who’s to say?
So Democrats are telling people to "bank their vote" early, before Trump wakes up one morning, declares a national emergency, and decides democracy is suspended until he feels properly adored again. Alongside that, they’re building a "democracy defense network" to track disinformation, dark money, AI manipulation, and old-school election subversion — basically a volunteer fire brigade trying to hold back a five-alarm authoritarian arson spree with clipboards and smiles.
#killing-democracy#fascism
speaker of the house prays the war follows trump’s campaign schedule
Mike Johnson, earnestly explaining that he’s leaving the war schedule up to God and Donald Trump, not necessarily in that order.
Speaker Mike Johnson went on national TV and, with a straight face, said he "certainly" prays that Donald Trump is right that the Iran war will end after the midterms — as if the timing of a major international conflict is just another line item in the RNC’s field plan. American troops, regional stability, global oil markets? All apparently subordinate to the sacred calendar of U.S. partisan politics.
Instead of asking why a former president is out here casually predicting the end date of a war like he’s spoiling a Marvel movie, Johnson treats it as a hopeful prophecy. The top legislator in the country is now basically saying: Lord, please let the commander-in-chief’s favorite strongman be right about when this war wraps, preferably in a way that helps our side.
This is what passes for "checks and balances" in Trump’s Washington: Congress doesn’t question why Trump thinks he can call the shot; it just prays reality conforms to his campaign narrative. Foreign policy has been fully downgraded from national security to election-season content — war not as last resort, but as programming, scheduled right after the midterms and before the next rally.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump discovers the fed is not his personal casino atm
Kevin Warsh learns the true dual mandate of the Trump-era Fed: price stability and maximum flattery.
Central bankers in the US, Japan, and the UK are staring down surging inflation, oil over $100 a barrel, and global bond markets doing their best impression of a roller coaster designed by Elon Musk. In the US, that circus now comes with a bonus act: Donald Trump howling on Truth Social that America should have the "LOWEST RATE of any country in the World" and ordering his handpicked Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh to "BE PATRIOTS for a change" — because nothing says sound monetary policy like framing interest rates as a loyalty oath.
Warsh, allegedly in charge of an independent central bank, is expected to consider raising rates to deal with inflation that’s been above target for more than five years, while Trump wants them slashed so the economy looks juiced heading into election season. So the question isn’t just whether rates go up on Wednesday; it’s whether the Fed still functions as a technocratic institution or as another branch of the Trump campaign. Meanwhile, UK and Japanese policymakers quietly do their jobs while America’s president publicly demands cheaper money and more obedience, turning the world’s most important central bank into yet another test of how fast institutions will bend the knee.
#killing-democracy#money#forever-grifting
trump declares war on bikes to save oppressed suvs
Pictured: a radical DEI extremism corridor, also known as a bike lane, moments before being liberated for its true purpose—more parking for oversized trucks.
The Trump administration has discovered a new existential threat to the republic: painted stripes on asphalt. Transportation officials are now labeling bike lanes as "DEI bike lanes" and using that magic incantation to freeze or cancel grants, bad-mouth alternative transit as "unworkable," and even float ripping out existing lanes. Evidence that bike lanes reduce crashes and offer a carbon-neutral alternative to cars? Irrelevant. The only study that matters in Trumpworld is whether something offends the fragile masculinity of a guy whose exercise routine is golf-cart adjacent.
Instead of acknowledging that fewer cars on the road might mean less traffic and fewer dead pedestrians, the administration has settled on the advanced math of "cars good, bikes woke." By rebranding basic safety infrastructure as a diversity plot, they get to keep funneling power to car culture, oil companies, and the eternal suburban id, while pretending they’re bravely standing up to the tyranny of people not wanting to die on their commute. It’s not transit policy; it’s a vibes-based transportation coup.
So the federal government is now weaponizing the culture war against bike lanes the same way it did against school curricula and public health: slap a DEI label on it, declare it un-American, and let the lawsuits and lobbying cash flow. If you were hoping your city might prioritize clean air and safe streets over the sacred right to double-park an F-150, the Trump administration has a message: get back in your car, plebe, and pay $6 a gallon like a real patriot.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
president mail fraud tries to cancel the mail
Trump peers at a mailbox like it’s personally plotting a coup against him, while the Postal Service is drafted as his latest voter suppression task force.
Donald Trump, a man who has personally voted by mail multiple times, has now decided that voting by mail is a "hoax" that must be crushed for the good of… Donald Trump. Despite roughly 29% of Americans using mail-in ballots in 2024, the White House is staging a full-scale assault on the practice, because if Democrats tend to use it more, then clearly it must be illegal. Evidence of widespread fraud? That would be 0.000043% over four election cycles. So naturally, it’s time to blow up the system.
Instead of, say, winning votes, Trump signed an executive order commanding the US Postal Service to maintain a national list of "eligible" voters and block mailed ballots to anyone not on it—yanking core election functions away from states and dropping them into the lap of Louis DeJoy’s favorite playground. The Save America Act (translation: Save Trump From Mail Ballots Act) hasn’t made it through Congress, but the administration is already trying to jam the new rules through USPS rulemaking. Federal courts, so far, have responded with the legal equivalent of, "absolutely not" and slapped an injunction on the whole scheme.
Voting rights groups immediately sued, and a three-judge panel in the First Circuit just upheld the injunction, pointing out that the Post Office cannot simply decide who gets to vote while pretending it’s just regulating envelopes. The administration is now begging the Supreme Court to lift the block, arguing this is about mail, not elections, while the calendar screams "midterms are almost here" and the Purcell principle says you don’t change the rules mid-flight. Meanwhile, a whistleblower has come forward describing the internal USPS process for blocking "unapproved" ballots—because nothing says "free and fair elections" like a secret federal blacklist deciding which votes are allowed to exist.
So as military ballots are already going out and local officials try to run an election, Trump is once again testing how far he can bend the system before it snaps. Counting votes is suspicious, suppressing them is patriotic, and the president is very upset that the courts keep confusing his personal grievances with the Constitution.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#fascism
trump sneezes, britain gets long covid
Donald Trump studies a global economic forecast, mistakes it for a fast-food menu, and orders extra inflation for everyone.
Britain’s new Labour government is trying to write a boring, responsible autumn budget while Donald Trump is across the Atlantic LARPing as a petrostate warlord and central banker-in-chief. The US–Israel war on Iran has lit oil prices on fire, triggering a global bond selloff, and Trump’s chef’s kiss combo of reckless deficits and public threats to meddle with the Federal Reserve is turning that spark into a full-blown financial brushfire. UK gilt yields spike, debt costs soar, and suddenly John Healey is discovering that his fiscal room for manoeuvre has been quietly repossessed by President MAGA Margin Call.
It doesn’t stop at macroeconomic arson. Trump’s tariff tantrum is hammering the car industry so hard that Jaguar Land Rover is cutting 4,000 jobs on the same day Healey tries to give his big “we’ve got this” speech in Coventry. Meanwhile, Trump’s demolition of the post–WWII security architecture means Britain is being nudged to hike defence spending just as the bond market is demanding a kidney for every extra pound of borrowing. The Office for Budget Responsibility now has to bake this Trump-generated chaos into its forecasts, potentially halving Labour’s fiscal headroom and turning every social care or welfare decision into a choice between helping people or appeasing the markets Trump just set on fire.
So the UK, like the rest of the world, is discovering the updated version of that old line about America sneezing. Under Trump, it’s less a mild cold and more a deliberate global infection of economic instability: weaponised oil shocks, tariff whiplash, and threats to independent central banks. Sovereign democracies can technically still make their own choices, sure — just as long as those choices fit inside the narrow fiscal coffin Trump’s chaos has built for them.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
trump launches $5,000 democracy clearance sale
Trump explains that if you re-elect his party, you get five grand, like a democracy-themed infomercial where the fine print is the US constitution catching fire offscreen.
Donald Trump has announced that if Republicans keep control of Congress, every US adult gets a $5,000 "Trump dividend" — a sort of cash-back rewards program for voting the right way. The price tag runs up to $1tn, the national debt is north of $40tn, and the White House is insisting this is all fiscally responsible, which is like calling a casino loan a retirement plan.
Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick swears it’s "not tax money" and that the administration will simply "earn the money" — largely by turning the US into a high-end visa pawn shop where wealthy foreigners pay up to $5m to extend their stay. He claims there’s a waitlist of 100,000 rich people ready to be shaken down, which would allegedly net $500bn, while also pointing at the government’s Intel investment like a guy who bought one lucky stock and now calls himself Warren Buffett.
Elsewhere in fantasyland, Kevin Hassett is floating a reconciliation process and "multiple paths" to make the checks real, while JD Vance is still pretending tariffs will cover it — never mind that the supreme court already ordered Trump’s "liberation day" tariff haul returned, and a previous $2,000 tariff rebate promise was for more money than the tariffs ever raised. So the plan is: promise voters a $5,000 loyalty bonus, pretend it’s free, fund it with imaginary tariff cash and speculative visa-rent-seeking, and dare anyone to call it what it looks like — a federalized vote-buying scheme with a MAGA logo slapped on the check.
#killing-democracy#corruption
