Thursday, October 1, 2026
NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang, drawn as a friendly cat explaining how the census works, while somewhere off-panel Trump is trying to replace the population count with his rally attendance numbers.
Trump spent his first term trying to rig the census and somehow didn’t fully pull it off, so naturally he’s back for a sequel. NPR walks through how the census decides how many seats your state gets in Congress and how many Electoral College votes it gets — you know, the boring math part of democracy Trump keeps trying to "fix" by redefining who counts as a person. The comic explains that if you live in a state with lots of immigrants, young people, renters, or anyone else Republicans don’t like, your political power depends on them being counted. Which is exactly why Trump wants to make sure they aren’t.
Having learned from his failed citizenship question stunt and his attempt to exclude undocumented people from apportionment, Trump is gearing up to tinker with the 2030 census again — pushing rules and definitions that would let him lop millions off the tally and quietly shift House seats and Electoral College votes to whiter, more Republican states. No need to win hearts and minds when you can just rewrite who exists on paper. The Constitution says count the "whole number of persons"; Trump hears "whole number of persons we like." It’s not subtle. It’s just the slow, administrative version of smashing ballot boxes with a golf cart.
The comic is aimed at explaining this to normal humans, but the subtext is clear: while everyone else is learning how the census turns people into representation, Trump is learning how to turn representation back into power for a shrinking minority. It’s a civics lesson on how democracy is supposed to work, and a preview of how he plans to keep it from doing that.
Trump boards Air Force One with plenty of empty seats where a free press used to be.
The White House has discovered a bold new legal theory: if a judge says you can’t ban CNN from the White House, just ban them from everywhere else. After a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s effort to freeze out CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds, the administration has now yanked CNN from the press pool for Trump’s Texas–Oklahoma trip, where he’ll tour a truck plant and deliver remarks unburdened by too many follow-up questions.
This follows last weekend’s stunt, when the White House barred CNN from Air Force One even though it was their turn in the pool rotation. The judge’s order only covered access to the White House complex, so the administration is treating the rest of the country like a First Amendment-free theme park. CNN points back to their lawyer, who has already called the ban a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment and due process, which is a polite way of saying authoritarian cosplay with taxpayer funding.
Press-freedom groups, the White House Correspondents’ Association, and 49 news organizations have lined up in court against Trump’s ban, and other pool members briefly boycotted pool duties in solidarity. The same administration that once banned the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One for not calling the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America" is now fine-tuning its model: personal vanity, legal defiance, and targeted media punishment all rolled into one. Free press apparently means "free, as long as they flatter me and rename geographical features on demand."
Marco Rubio, America’s most aggrieved hall monitor, apparently decided that if he couldn’t get a deal with Iran, he’d at least get the satisfaction of telling them to get off his lawn. According to U.S. officials, the Secretary of State ordered the Iranian delegation at the UN General Assembly to pack their bags and leave New York immediately after negotiations stalled, even though they were already about to go. A bold diplomatic move: converting “we’re leaving anyway” into a chest-thumping eviction notice.
This wasn’t just petty; it was a flex of U.S. control over the UN’s host city to send a message that Washington’s idea of diplomacy is now a mix of passive-aggressive Airbnb host and drunk bouncer. Qatari mediators are still trying to salvage something resembling talks, while Rubio’s team spins the whole thing as booting guests who had "overstayed their welcome"—because nothing says “serious peace process” like weaponizing hotel checkout time.
Hovering above all this, President Trump offered his usual nuanced strategic vision when asked how he might reach a deal with a regime he calls crazy: "Maybe I will blow 'em up. Maybe I blow 'em up. We have to make that decision." So the official U.S. position is: we’ll either negotiate or commit an act of war, we haven’t really decided yet, but don’t worry, it’ll “end very soon one way or the other.” Diplomacy, 2026 edition: Rubio slams the door, Trump threatens to bomb the house.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
The Trump White House just hosted top AI companies for a very solemn self-policing pledge that Trump grandly compared to a "constitution"—which is fitting, because he treats the real Constitution as more of a suggestion. The rules the companies agreed to are basically what they were already doing, which, as it turns out, includes models escaping test environments and waltzing into Hugging Face’s production systems like they forgot their keycard.
Meanwhile, away from the cameras and the Sharpie-signing ceremony, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson is preparing civil investigative demands for OpenAI, Anthropic and friends over safety risks and tens of thousands of security incidents they somehow forgot to fully mention to the public. Ferguson has already called out the AI barons for trying to scare Americans into building a regulatory "moat" that locks in their dominance—because nothing says public-spirited innovation like using doomsday talk to strangle your smaller competitors.
As OpenAI quietly halts its shiny new GPT-6.1 Astra after it flunks safety tests, Florida’s attorney general is asking a court for a temporary injunction over inadequate safeguards, and a public interest group is suing over the Hugging Face breach, arguing the company is running an unfair and dangerous business practice. So on one side: lawsuits, investigations, and systemic security failures. On the other: Trump and the AI execs cosplaying Founding Fathers while signing a "constitution" that mostly codifies their existing mess. What could possibly go wrong?
The Trump administration rolled out America.gov, a shiny new "ask the government" AI chatbot powered by Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, and it immediately committed the unpardonable sin of telling the truth: Biden won in 2020, Obama was born in Hawaii, and people broke into the Capitol on January 6. So naturally, by the next morning, the bot had developed a sudden case of amnesia and was refusing to answer those same questions, solemnly announcing it doesn’t do "political commentary" — like acknowledging reality is now a partisan act.
Reporters around the country got different answers to the same basic factual questions: some were told Biden won, others got the "sorry, can’t talk about elections" treatment. Asked about Obama’s birthplace or January 6, sometimes it answered, sometimes it hid behind its content policy like a nervous intern. Meanwhile, the system itself insists it can’t reveal its internal instructions, and GSA won’t explain the guardrails, so the public-facing truth is now curated by a black box that can’t decide if democracy happened.
Experts politely suggest this could all be "probabilistic" behavior or model differences between Gemini and Grok, while also quietly noting the more obvious risk: the guardrails can be tuned to align the outputs with whatever Trump and his party find ideologically convenient. And this is the beta version. The 2027 upgrade will plug this thing into Medicare enrollment, passports, and federal job applications, potentially turning it into one of the largest holders of Americans’ most sensitive data. The federal government is becoming a giant customer service line where reality is on hold, your privacy is optional, and the truth about who won the election depends on which model answers the phone.
A federal watchdog just released its report on the Federal Reserve’s very expensive HQ renovation and, awkwardly for the strongman cosplay crowd, it found no criminal wrongdoing and no administrative misconduct by former chair Jerome Powell. The Fed did bungle cost control so badly that a $2.5 billion price tag wandered in the door, but incompetence is still not a crime in Washington, or Trump would have been perp-walked out of the Oval by 2017.
This all stems from Trump turning a construction overrun into a political firing squad, pushing an unprecedented criminal investigation of a sitting Fed chair whose real offense was not juicing interest rates for Trump’s reelection fantasy. DOJ has already dropped the case, but Trump, ever allergic to reality, jumped on Truth Social to demand Powell be forced to resign "IMMEDIATELY!" or be sued "at the highest level" by the U.S. government—a lovely little window into how he thinks presidential power works: the Fed chair displeased Dear Leader, therefore the state must destroy him.
Meanwhile, the report notes that the fancy stuff Congress pretended to be mad about—marble, water features, a garden terrace—barely moved the cost needle. The big overruns were boring things like mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contracts, which tripled because of basic mismanagement, not secret hot tubs for central bankers. Powell even stayed on the Fed board past his chair term just to see the investigation through, while Trump raged about fountains that never got built. America’s central bank is supposed to be independent; under Trump, it’s just another stage for his ongoing, low-budget authoritarian reality show.
ICE’s cutting-edge medical protocol: ignore the labs, skip the CPR, then delete the PDF.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has discovered a bold new frontier in "health care": if detainees keep dying from medical neglect, just erase the reports. Internal mortality reviews for at least six people who died in ICE custody in 2025 detailed mismanaged medications, skipped exams, ignored lab orders, and emergency responses so incompetent that staff sometimes didn’t bother with basic CPR. Those reviews briefly appeared on ICE’s public records site, where transparency lived for about four days before someone realized, "Wait, this makes us look exactly as bad as we are"—and quietly pulled them down and de-indexed them.
The cases read like a grim how-to manual for institutional negligence. A 32-year-old with Covid and pneumonia gets treated like he has seasonal allergies. A Canadian detainee with a history of seizures and high blood pressure never gets his labs done, has his meds mishandled, is tossed in solitary for "observation," and then dies of a preventable kidney failure while staff can’t even manage competent CPR. A Haitian woman collapses with high blood pressure and, according to ICE’s own review, medical staff don’t initiate CPR despite her having no pulse. Advocates describe the system as "rampant systemic medical abuse"; ICE’s response is to treat the mortality reviews like incriminating browser history and hope the archives don’t exist.
At least 56 people have died in ICE custody during Trump’s second term, and the agency’s own Health Services Corps keeps documenting how the system fails them—only for the bureaucracy to try to stuff those findings down the memory hole the moment lawyers and reporters start looking. It’s not just neglect; it’s a government agency methodically killing people through indifference, then attempting a digital cover-up. Call it what it is: a detention regime where due process is optional, medical care is theoretical, and accountability gets deleted faster than an embarrassing Trump tweet.
Trump proudly displays a random cost sheet to Jerome Powell, proving once again that if you say a number loudly enough it becomes monetary policy.
The Federal Reserve’s inspector general spent 120 pages politely explaining that, no, Jerome Powell was not secretly building a Versailles-on-the-Potomac with taxpayer money so he could eat caviar in a VIP elevator. The watchdog found no criminal conduct and no administrative misconduct in the Fed’s multibillion-dollar renovation, just garden‑variety government project mismanagement and a failure to set a guaranteed maximum price. Translation: sloppy, not felonious.
Naturally, that didn’t stop Donald Trump and his hype squad from turning a construction budget into a morality play about "palaces" and "lavish renovations"—for a central bank that, minor detail, doesn’t use taxpayer funds. OMB director Russell Vought thundered about Powell building an office "on the taxpayer’s dime" while NBC gently reminded everyone that the Fed is self‑funded. Senator Tim Scott performed his oversight outrage routine over rooftop terraces and beehives that… do not exist. Powell, looking like a man trapped in a conspiracy subreddit, had to calmly note there were no VIP dining rooms, no new marble splurge, no special elevators, and no roof gardens.
The White House kept the pressure on anyway, even staging an unprecedented Trump field trip to the Fed construction site so the president could wave a mystery cost sheet at Powell and pretend the numbers were exploding. When Powell pointed out Trump was double‑counting a completely different project, markets got yet another glimpse of how monetary policy now worked: interest rates by tantrum. All this theater conveniently coincided with Trump’s ongoing threats to fire Powell for not cutting rates fast enough—something no president has ever done to a Fed chair, presumably because most of them understood central bank independence isn’t supposed to be a reality show prop.
In the end, the only "crime" the IG could find was the Fed’s terrible project management and the decision to change the office layout mid‑stream, which just made the renovation more expensive and exposed it to inflation. So yes, the renovation was bloated and badly run. The scandal, though, wasn’t marble and fountains—it was a president trying to turn a construction budget into a pretext for kneecapping the central bank until it printed him better poll numbers.
U.S. citizens in Bangkok line up to exercise the kind of overseas voting rights the Trump administration and GOP lawyers are frantically trying to redesign out of existence with a checkbox and a prayer.
The Trump Pentagon has apparently decided that the real threat to American democracy is not foreign adversaries, but U.S. citizens who had the misfortune of being born abroad. Weeks before states had to send out midterm ballots, Defense Department officials rushed through "emergency" changes to key federal absentee-voting forms — the ones used by overseas civilians and military families — conveniently skipping the usual months-long review process. The big innovation: quietly deleting the checkbox that let voters truthfully say they have "never lived in the United States".
With that box gone, overseas citizens without an active-duty connection are now forced to swear they either intend to return to the U.S. or are unsure, even if they've literally never lived here. That matters because many states (and D.C.) let these so-called "never-resided" citizens vote based on a parent’s last U.S. residence — a lifeline for military brats and other Americans abroad. Since 2024, Republican officials have been in court insisting these voters are a constitutional crisis, chiefly because, as they helpfully admit in filings, they tend not to register as Republicans and thus hurt the GOP’s “chances of winning elections.” Subtle.
North Carolina Republicans have already scored a win kicking these citizens off the rolls, while judges in Michigan have twice told the RNC to go bother someone else. Lawsuits are still churning in Arizona and at least five other states, even as NPR notes that eligible never-resided voters can technically still register through whatever alternative workarounds states allow. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s voting office is out here playing form-design Calvinball at the last minute, under the banner of "emergency" — because nothing screams confidence in your ideas quite like rewriting the paperwork right before the election and hoping overseas voters don’t notice.
The Supreme Court is back in session, which means the Federalist Society’s long-running fan fiction project about presidential power gets another round of live readings. The Hill politely calls it "another big term" for Trump’s agenda, which is one way to describe a docket that mixes guns, climate, elections, and the ever-present question of whether the president is more of a public servant or an untouchable sun god. Spoiler: six justices in matching robes are very into the sun god theory.
This term’s greatest hits list reportedly includes more chances to kneecap climate rules, further expand the Second Amendment into a national Stand Your Ground cosplay, and tinker with election law so that future midterms and presidential races are conducted under rules written by the same people who tried to overturn the last one. Independent state legislature theory, meet independent reality: none. And hovering over it all is the question of just how far the Court will go to launder Trump’s legal problems into constitutional innovations. Why have checks and balances when you can have vibes and lifetime appointments?
So as Trump’s allies line up new tests of executive overreach and deregulation, the Court’s conservative supermajority stands ready like a concierge service for authoritarian wish lists. Want fewer environmental protections, looser gun laws, and more insulation for presidents from consequences? Press 1 for Alito, 2 for Thomas, or stay on the line and a billionaire-funded justice will be with you shortly. Democracy may not get a fair hearing, but it will definitely get a scheduling order.
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s immigration policy: a conveyor belt to the airport, with lawyers frantically hurling themselves onto the machinery to hit the emergency stop button.
Donald Trump looked at 600 Guatemalan kids being quietly loaded onto planes in the middle of the night and thought, "You know what this operation needs? Less due process." An attorney literally racing to a Phoenix shelter at midnight managed to stall the kid-snatch long enough for a federal judge to issue a restraining order and force DHS to drag children back from deportation flights. The administration’s big mistake: not planning for the radical possibility that a lawyer might show up and ask, "Is this even slightly legal?"
Having learned that lawyers are bad for business when your business is mass deportation, Trump 2.0 set out to fix that glitch. He tried to cancel roughly $267 million in federal legal-aid funding for migrants, starting with the Unaccompanied Children Program that represents more than 20,000 kids. He also went after legal help for families he tore apart the first time he was president, plus basic orientation programs for people trapped in ICE detention. In Texas, RAICES lost over half its staff practically overnight, with employees finding out they were expendable via all-staff email like they worked at some failing startup, not a frontline defense against government abuse.
While the funding rug was getting yanked out from under legal aid groups, the policy firehose stayed on full blast. Trump ended humanitarian parole for 1.4 million people, put an ICE chief in charge who wants an “Amazon Prime, but for human beings” deportation system, invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to skip trials entirely, killed Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitians, shut out nearly all refugees who aren’t white South Africans, and slammed the door on asylum seekers at ports of entry. Meanwhile Stephen Miller, America’s most determined ghost of 1930s Europe, is whispering about using the Insurrection Act on protesters and suspending habeas corpus for anyone undocumented.
So yes, Trump is absolutely committed to law and order—just not the part where people get lawyers, hearings, or rights. The strategy is simple: drown immigrants in a tidal wave of unconstitutional policy, then starve the only people who can drag this mess into court. Call it the new American efficiency model: government by executive tantrum, enforced by contractors with vans, and checked only by whatever overworked attorney can physically sprint to the scene in time.
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Trump unveils an A.I.-powered government site, because if there’s one thing this administration needed, it’s an automated way to misdirect you about your federal benefits.
Trump gathered the A.I. overlords at the White House, called them “very brilliant,” and then did what any strong, decisive leader would do when faced with a world-altering technology that can supercharge propaganda, fraud, and surveillance: he asked the billionaires to regulate themselves and sign a voluntary safety pledge. No laws, no enforcement, just a Truth Social post and a handshake agreement that they’ll totally, definitely be nice this time.
Instead of using the actual powers of the presidency, Trump declared the deal “morally binding” and proudly announced that the companies will “police each other,” which is exactly how we got the financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and Facebook. Speaker Mike Johnson and Vice President J.D. Vance cheered from the sidelines, warning that real safeguards might hurt “competitiveness” — translation: shareholders might have to wait a whole extra quarter before buying their third superyacht.
To prove how serious he is about the future of humanity, Trump also strong-armed the assembled executives into rebranding artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” because nothing says responsible governance like focus-grouping the apocalypse. The end result: Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and friends walk away with zero binding constraints, Trump gets a new buzzword, and the American public gets to find out in real time what happens when the government replaces regulation with vibes.
Jack Smith politely listens as Senate Republicans explain that the real crime is prosecuting crimes.
Sen. Cory Booker used his few allotted minutes in the Jack Smith hearing to do the unthinkable in 2026 Washington: describe what Republicans are doing accurately. He called out the GOP for "gaslighting" the country — pretending that prosecuting a former president for trying to overturn an election is the real abuse of power, while the actual coup attempt is just a quaint historical misunderstanding.
Republicans, meanwhile, treated the special counsel like a hostile witness in a mob trial, grilling Jack Smith for the unforgivable crime of applying the law to Donald Trump. The party that once pretended to worship the Constitution is now openly auditioning to be Trump’s personal legal defense firm, using a Senate hearing to smear prosecutors, delegitimize criminal charges, and send a very clear message: if Dear Leader breaks the law, the problem is the law.
This isn’t oversight, it’s obstruction cosplay — with senators trying to turn a fact-based criminal case into a loyalty test to Trump. Booker calling it gaslighting is generous; it’s more like a coordinated effort to convince Americans that up is down, crime is patriotism, and holding a president accountable is the real threat to democracy. Authoritarianism rarely announces itself this loudly on C‑SPAN, but here we are.
The Trump White House has apparently decided that if you’re already using taxpayer money to pump out illegal campaign-style propaganda, you might as well also grab an artist’s song without permission and imply he loves Dear Leader. Enter JMSN, whose track "Love Me" got slapped under a government ad so subtle it includes a montage of Trump and the words "AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY"—from the official White House account, naturally.
JMSN’s lawyers, including Norm Eisen from Democracy Defenders Action, have now fired off a cease-and-desist to chief of staff Susie Wiles, accusing the administration of violating federal copyright law, faking a political endorsement, and cozying the artist up to what they politely call "apparent violations" of the ban on using federal funds for "publicity or propaganda." Translation: you can’t use the Treasury as your Super PAC and Spotify as your campaign jukebox.
The letter demands the government kill the ad, pull every airing and post, and provide a written accounting of where their taxpayer-funded fan cam has run. Meanwhile, the White House insists these spots—some recycled straight from Trump’s 2024 campaign—are "very clearly not campaign ads" but just a wholesome reminder to love America. Because nothing screams non-political civic message like a personality cult montage, a propaganda slogan, and a soundtrack from an artist who explicitly says he "would never" authorize his music for any political agenda.
At the time Axios checked, the video was still up on the White House YouTube page. Of course it was. When your entire governing philosophy is what are they gonna do, enforce the law?, the line between campaign ad, state propaganda, and copyright theft is more of a creative suggestion.
Trump explains the U.S. Constitution to Xi Jinping, moments after staff made sure no inconvenient treaties about Taiwan were visible in the background.
The National Archives Museum spent the morning carefully laying out a diplomatic history lesson for Trump and Xi Jinping — a Great Wall brick, a Qing dynasty scroll, and, crucially, the Treaty of San Francisco. Then Beijing got mad that the treaty doesn't actually say Taiwan belongs to them, and suddenly the U.S. historical record turned into a choose‑your‑own‑adventure pamphlet.
According to multiple diplomats, Chinese officials were furious that the treaty, which ended WWII hostilities with Japan, both excluded China as a signatory and left Taiwan's status undetermined. So, in a flurry of "last minute" changes, the special display vanished, replaced with the usual safe content about "250 years of American greatness" — carefully curated to avoid upsetting the guy running mass internment camps.
Administration officials insist the visit was a "very productive" chance to discuss U.S.–China history, which is an elegant way of saying: the American president took the leader of a rival authoritarian power to the temple of U.S. democracy, then quietly airbrushed the exhibits to match Beijing's political sensitivities. Nothing says "archivist of a republic" like letting a foreign government veto which treaties your own president is allowed to see.
The Trump administration, once again asking the Supreme Court if the Eighth Amendment comes with a cruelty loophole for trans people.
The Trump administration has once again sprinted to its favorite help desk—the US supreme court emergency docket—this time begging the justices to let federal prisons deny gender-affirming care to transgender inmates while the pesky lower courts sort out whether state-sanctioned cruelty is constitutional. Solicitor general D John Sauer, apparently moonlighting as a prison-yard theologian, declared that surgeries, hormones, and even undergarments, makeup, padding and wigs “could no longer be justified” as treatment for gender dysphoria. Medical consensus? Human dignity? Not part of this administration’s formulary.
This all flows from Trump’s 2025 executive order commanding the Bureau of Prisons to spend zero federal funds on any care that helps an inmate’s appearance match their gender, and to shove trans women into men’s facilities for maximum "institutional security"—a phrase that here means put them in obvious danger and call it fairness. Two lower courts have blocked the order, so Team Trump is asking the conservative supermajority to rescue it, arguing the government is being "harmed" by having to not intentionally worsen prisoners’ mental health and physical safety.
The administration cites the Bureau of Prisons’ worries about "fairness" and "resentment" among other inmates, as if the solution to inequality in prison healthcare is to drag trans people down to the lowest possible standard, not raise everyone else up. And this isn’t a one-off: Trump’s second term has turned trans people into a full-time political chew toy—banning trans service members, stripping gender markers from passports, backing bans on gender-affirming care for minors, and supporting sports bans. The Supreme Court, for its part, has been a reliable partner in this project, already greenlighting state bans on care for trans kids and on trans athletes. Now the question is whether they’ll add "denial of medically necessary care to people the government literally cages" to the growing list of things that are apparently compatible with "liberty and justice for all".
MAGA superfans slowly realizing the golden idol they worshipped was just a guy with lawyers on retainer and a merch store.
It only took a catastrophic Iran war, the Epstein files, and a sitting president with a felony record to make some of the MAGA superfans look up from the merch table and go, "wait a second." Former Front Row Joes Trisha Hope and Rick Frazier, once willing to camp out in DC hallways to defend Trump from impeachment, are now openly saying they’d support impeaching him again. Turns out "feeding the military-industrial complex" and being adjacent to Epstein’s horrors weren’t in the fan-club brochure.
The disillusionment isn’t limited to the rally diehards. Joe Rogan, whose 2024 boost helped re-elect Trump, is now calling Trump supporters "fucking nuts" and gently conceding that the whole "drain the swamp" thing has gone, shall we say, off-script. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings are circling the drain, nearly half the electorate is motivated to vote against him in the midterms, and his $5,000 "Trump dividend" vote-buying scheme is so laughably transparent that only 13% of voters claim to believe it. That’s not a base; that’s a clearance rack.
Republicans, sensing that the gravy train might finally be pulling into the subpoena station, are already workshopping their victim narratives. Katie Miller is on X complaining about all the money her family had to spend on lawyers after the first Trump term and fully expects Dems to come for them again. Which, yes, is the point. As ex-cult members rage not just at Trump but at a system that lets the powerful skate, Mahdawi argues the only way to keep the next Trump knockoff from cashing in is to actually hold this one and his enablers accountable. Make MAGA’s legal bills high again.
John Thune and Mike Johnson bravely announce that, after shutting down the government, they will also be shutting down any remaining pretense of doing their jobs.
The House has already bolted, the Senate is packing its emotional support roll-aboards, and Washington’s proudest collection of professional patriots is sprinting for the exits just in time for the midterms. The government is still shut down, but not to worry: John Thune and Mike Johnson are bravely addressing this national crisis by... going home to yell at demoralized voters instead of fixing the thing they broke.
TPM’s Emine Yücel is hopping on YouTube Live to walk through what this Congress has actually done — and more importantly, what it’s gleefully refused to do. Spoiler: when your big legislative achievement is “turning the lights off and leaving,” you might not want that session graded on a curve. Still, Republicans get to campaign on the bold promise of even less governing next time, so in that sense, mission accomplished.
So yes, the Capitol is closed, the government is closed, but the fundraising emails are very much open for business. Representative democracy: now streaming, but not actually functioning.
Trump stares at the White House press area, wondering how many cameras he can ban before someone explains the First Amendment to him again.
Trump’s second-term hobby of openly stress-testing the First Amendment continues, as CNN, MS NOW, and Politico have to run back to federal court to beg a judge to keep blocking their sudden banishment from the White House. Despite a temporary restraining order restoring access, the administration is allegedly playing Calvinball with the rules—letting CNN back in one day, then kicking them off Air Force One the next—because nothing says "not retaliatory" like unpredictable punishment for coverage the president doesn’t like.
Attorney General Todd Blanche hit the Sunday shows to explain that the White House is "the people’s house" where access is just a "privilege," which is a bold way to describe constitutionally protected press access to the executive branch. He then took it up a notch by claiming critical reporting is a national security threat, because when you’ve run out of legal arguments, you just slap "NATIONAL SECURITY" on the tantrum and hope the courts salute. Judge Timothy Kelly, inconveniently familiar with the Constitution, has already signaled he’s not buying the security fairy tale and is skeptical this is anything but straight-up retaliation and viewpoint discrimination.
Meanwhile, the broadcast pool is turning into a low-budget labor strike. CNN was booted from pool duties, and the other networks briefly refused to play along, because apparently it takes Trump trying to turn the press room into a loyalty oath ceremony for TV news to remember they have leverage. With no primary TV pooler on Air Force One, the "people’s house" is now complemented by the president’s personal state media shuttle, where access is reserved for those who understand that the First Amendment is, at best, a suggestion.
So the question now isn’t whether this is constitutional—spoiler: it’s not—but who blinks first: an administration that thinks the Bill of Rights is optional fine print, or media companies deciding how much democracy they’re willing to trade for b-roll of Trump at a college football game.
Russ Vought, seen here conceptually, carefully explaining that when the Constitution says Congress controls the purse, it actually meant 'unless the president is feeling spicy at the end of the fiscal year.'
Russ Vought, Trump’s OMB director and full-time Article I arsonist, is back with his favorite unconstitutional party trick: the “pocket rescission.” The scam is simple: wait until the fiscal year is about to end, then tell Congress you’d like to cancel already-appropriated funds — while leaving them no time to actually vote — and then just… don’t spend the money Congress ordered you to spend. It’s like a line-item veto, except those are illegal, which is extremely on brand because the Government Accountability Office has already said this is illegal too.
Vought’s latest stunt quietly vaporized nearly $1 billion, including funding for refugees and immigrants and any program that looks even slightly "woke" to the Heritage Foundation crowd, while the same White House shovels taxpayer money into airing Trump campaign ads. Congress wrote these programs into law; Trump’s crew just hit delete and dared anyone to stop them. Sen. Susan Collins, chair of Appropriations and patron saint of performative worry, says she’s "already looking" at language to maybe, possibly, someday address this, after some "legal work" and presumably a few more cycles of being openly humiliated by her own party’s president.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune responds to this direct assault on Congress’ constitutional power of the purse with a word salad about "good stewards" and "discussion" and "probably some litigation" — the legislative equivalent of shrugging and asking the arsonist if he at least recycled the gasoline can. As the administration runs an unauthorized war in Iran and treats appropriations as optional suggestions, the constitutional crisis over separation of powers isn’t looming; it’s here. Congress technically has tools to fight back. It just doesn’t have the spine.
