The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The founders spent a sweaty Philadelphia summer inventing a government that allegedly wasn't a monarchy, then handed the president a "royal prerogative of mercy" and hoped for the best. Fast forward 236 years and Donald Trump has used that unlimited pardon power exactly the way George Mason warned: to shield people who committed crimes for him, including more than 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists he pardoned on day one of term two like they were early-bird donors instead of violent foot soldiers in an attempted coup.

The Guardian walks through how Trump then industrialized clemency, overseeing a thriving pardons marketplace where friends and relatives of criminals are told to pony up millions for a shot at presidential mercy — a sort of Mar-a-Lago Groupon for federal crimes. This isn’t subtle corruption; it’s Hamilton’s high-minded Federalist Papers meets a late-stage Ponzi scheme. Madison once assured everyone that a president who abused pardons for treasonous allies could be impeached and removed. Trump helpfully demonstrated the flaw in that theory by being impeached twice, rewarded with a second term anyway, and then using the pardon power to reward an attempt to keep himself in power after losing an election.

Other presidents issued shady pardons — Carter’s brother, Clinton’s donors, Biden’s son — but Trump’s stand alone for a simple reason: he used them to encourage and then reward the subversion of American democracy itself. The founders worried a president might someday "establish a monarchy and destroy the republic" with this power. Trump read that as a to-do list. The only thing the framers underestimated was just how enthusiastically one man would treat the Constitution like a Black Friday sale on personal impunity.

Barack Obama has re-entered the chat, and Donald Trump is losing his mind over ballroom renovations while American democracy tries to remember where it left its spine. With days to go before the midterms that will decide whether Trump’s second term gets any meaningful oversight at all, Democrats have rolled out their best closer: the guy who can still form complete sentences and, crucially, inspire crowds without promising to jail anyone.

Obama is barnstorming swing states for candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, calmly acknowledging past criticism from the left while focusing on the more pressing problem: the current president with autocratic fantasies and a Middle East policy that looks like it was workshopped on Truth Social. He calls the election a “circuit-breaker” on Trump’s “foolishness,” which is a very polite way of saying, “this may be your last off-ramp before full-blown strongman cosplay becomes the operating system.”

Trump, naturally, is responding with the dignity of a stable genius. Rather than talk about policy or accomplishments, he’s apparently fixated on Obama joking that his gold-plated White House looks like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” So while Obama talks about saving democratic institutions, Trump is out there rage-rallying about interior design criticism, proving yet again that the most fragile thing in American politics is the ego of a man with nuclear codes.

Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation tantrum against The Wall Street Journal has been drop-kicked out of federal court for the second — and final — time. Judge Darrin Gayles politely explained that, yet again, Trump failed to clear the very high “actual malice” bar, then less politely slammed the door with a dismissal with prejudice. Translation: stop trying to turn defamation law into your own presidential Safe Space.

The lawsuit claimed the Journal invented a grotesquely on-brand birthday card Trump allegedly sent Jeffrey Epstein in 2003: a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman with “Donald” signed in the pubic area. Trump swore it was all fake, the Journal was lying, and his reputation had suffered “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” — as if the man who bragged about sexual assault on tape was doing just fine until the cartoon boobs showed up.

Then Epstein’s estate calmly produced the actual card, the House Oversight Committee released it, and the Journal noted it had investigated the story and even included Trump’s denial. Trump’s legal theory boiled down to: the story is false because I say it’s false, the card doesn’t exist because you didn’t print it yet, and also you should’ve interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell from prison to clear my name. The judge, shockingly, was unconvinced.

WSJ’s lawyers pointed out that sending a bawdy card to a “friend” isn’t inherently defamatory, that the article emphasized this was pre-Epstein-arrest, and that the public record shows the story is “substantially true.” Meanwhile, Democrats lined up samples of Trump’s first-name-only signature that look suspiciously like the one on the card. So once again, Trump tried to use the courts as a censorship machine, and once again, the First Amendment replied: no, you don’t get $10 billion just because reality is bad for your brand.

Engage Men’s Health Clinic in Johannesburg used to be the kind of place you’d put on a brochure when you wanted to pretend the phrase "from the American people" still meant something. Free PrEP, HIV testing and treatment, gender-affirming care, a rainbow mural of Simon Nkoli, and a PEPFAR logo announcing that the U.S. had briefly decided not to be a complete menace to global health. Then Trump’s second term began, and the clinic shut down during the first hours of the new administration, replaced by a volunteer outfit open four hours a week that can test you for HIV but can’t actually treat you. It’s like opening a fire station that only diagnoses fires.

South Africa has roughly 8 million people living with HIV — about 1 in 8 people, and 20 percent of the world’s HIV-positive population — which is why the U.S. had been sending about $455 million a year in HIV/AIDS funding. That money didn’t just keep people alive; it kept viral loads low, slowed transmission, and reduced the odds of dangerous mutations that could come back to bite everyone, including the Fox News demographic that thinks Africa is a plotline on National Geographic. Once Trump came back, the CDC money that supported contact tracing and treatment dried up. Outreach workers who used to go find patients who missed appointments are gone, and groups have already lost track of around 20,000 people with HIV in just the Johannesburg–Pretoria area. But hey, at least the culture warriors don’t have to worry about American tax dollars paying for gender-affirming care anymore, right?

The cuts don’t just wreck clinics; they also gut jobs for Black LGBTQ+ workers, who are now unemployed and more at risk of HIV themselves. Gender-affirming care — which, inconveniently for the theocrats, is an evidence-based HIV prevention tool — has "disappeared almost entirely." The U.S. then chose Pride Month to announce it will end all HIV funding in South Africa, because if you’re going to torch a global health program, you might as well do it with maximum spite and branding synergy. The same South Africa that hosts more HIV-related clinical trials than any other country, helping U.S. pharma make its profits, is now being told to manage a massive epidemic with a pat on the head and some leftover signage.

So the second Trump administration has achieved a rare trifecta: sabotaging global pandemic preparedness, destabilizing a critical HIV research hub, and condemning millions of poor, queer, trans, and migrant South Africans to harder, riskier lives — all while pretending this is fiscally responsible or morally principled. The PEPFAR logo still hangs on shuttered buildings as a museum exhibit of what U.S. leadership used to look like before we decided "America First" meant "everyone else can get sick and die, and we’ll deal with the super-mutated fallout later." Winning.

NPR, bless their public-radio hearts, is patiently explaining to listeners that polls are not, in fact, magic prophecy sticks but statistical ranges in a country where every election is a coin flip and half the coin is gerrymandered. They walk through the radical idea that some polls are good and some are flaming trash, especially at the state level where serious survey work has been replaced by whatever partisan intern just discovered Google Forms.

The piece quietly drops the real horror story: the explosion of junk and even fake polls is tied to the death of local journalism. Local outlets no longer have the cash for credible polling, so the information vacuum gets filled by cheap partisan noise while campaigns and corporations hoard the high-quality data behind closed doors. Public gets vibes, donors get crosstabs, and democracy gets a migraine.

Reporters, NPR insists, are supposed to treat polling as one tool among many — context, on-the-ground reporting, history, all that old-fashioned stuff from before politics became a content farm. Meanwhile, the same political class that screams that polls are rigged is spending millions on those very same pollsters to decide where to fly the private jet and which culture-war panic to test next. Truly a healthy information ecosystem we’ve built here.

NPR spent a year listening to the most powerful people in America: the handful of voters who went from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 and now can’t understand why everything feels like a slow-motion constitutional house fire. These are the folks who ‘soured’ on Trump shockingly fast, as if the man who staged a coup attempt, hoarded classified documents, and promised ‘retribution’ didn’t come with a very loud, all-caps warning label.

The focus groups reveal that these voters draw a neat, straight line from Trump’s chaos to their feelings about the economy, are unimpressed with Democrats, and are suddenly very into ‘economic populism’—just, you know, the kind that keeps handing power to billionaires and indicted ex-presidents. They’re also worried about AI and giant data centers, which is adorable given that they already helped install a glitchy strongman update to the operating system of American democracy.

The big takeaway? Our political future hinges on a tiny bloc of people who keep toggling between ‘basic rule of law’ and ‘let’s try the guy who threatens the DOJ on social media.’ Pollsters call them swing voters. History may go with something closer to “the tie-breakers for whether we still have elections in 2030.”

Trump’s second term has apparently decided that women in national security are like climate science: inconvenient, empirically useful, and therefore to be eliminated. A new report from Senate Democrats finds that women now make up just 17.4% of Cabinet and Cabinet-level positions, down from Biden’s 52%, while the Pentagon has managed the impressive feat of producing exactly zero active-duty four-star women. Only 8 of 201 senior military nominees this year are women, which is what happens when your talent strategy is just yelling “MERIT!” while stapling résumés to a Fox News guest list.

Diplomacy isn’t faring much better. Nearly half of Senate-confirmed ambassadors were women when Trump 2.0 began in 2025; now fewer than 25 missions worldwide are led by women, and 93 of 196 ambassadorships are simply… vacant. The administration also quietly took Ivanka’s old Women’s Global Development show pony out back and shot it, killed off the offices implementing the Women, Peace, and Security Act that Trump himself signed, and then watched Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brag on X that he had “ENDED” the Pentagon’s part of the program because it was allegedly some Biden “woke” plot — which is a fascinating take on a bipartisan 2017 law Trump is still legally obligated to follow.

The White House, of course, insists he’s a “champion for women and moms,” citing his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order, a savings account branding exercise called “Trump Accounts,” and a Women’s Health Task Force that presumably ensures women have high-quality access to whatever care is still legal. State and Pentagon flacks chirp that everything is now “colorblind, gender-neutral, and merit-based,” coincidentally right after they dismantled diversity and inclusion programs and tanked women’s representation. But don’t worry: Susie Wiles is the first female chief of staff, so the war on women in national security clearly doesn’t count if there’s one woman at the top of the loyalty pyramid.