Artist’s rendering of Congress exercising its war powers: 535 people staring at their shoes while one guy presses all the missile buttons.
Seven months into Donald Trump’s not-a-war-just-a-"military operation" against Iran, a diplomacy group had to march into federal court and remind everyone that the Constitution is not, in fact, a suggestion box. National Iranian American Council Action is suing to have Trump’s Iran adventure declared illegal under the Declare War Clause, on the radical theory that one guy rage-posting on Truth Social does not equal congressional authorization. Meanwhile, the Senate bravely failed to stop the war by a 49–50 vote, proving once again that when it comes to their core constitutional duty, Congress is fully committed to almost doing something.
While lawmakers rehearse their concern-face for cable news, the reality looks less like "limited strikes" and more like a regional catastrophe. Trump and the Israeli military kicked this off in February with airstrikes and missile attacks that killed top Iranian leaders and hundreds of civilians, including more than 100 children in a school the U.N. now politely calls a "possible war crime." The conflict has since spilled across the region, shuttered the Strait of Hormuz, wrecked global fuel markets, and drawn in everyone from the Houthis to the Saudis, all without a single actual declaration of war. But sure, let’s keep arguing about what counts as an "excursion" while Iranian families dig relatives out of rubble and American service members come home in body bags.
Trump helpfully undermined his own lawyers by repeatedly calling it a "war" in public, while his speech at the U.N. casually threatened to "annihilate" a country of 90 million people, because nothing says "stable commander in chief" like flirting with genocidal language on the world stage. So NIAC’s attorneys are now asking a judge to do the job Congress abdicated: enforce the tiny, obscure, rarely mentioned principle that only Congress can take the country to war. Their plaintiffs include Iranian Americans whose relatives have been killed or maimed by U.S. and allied airstrikes, watching from thousands of miles away as Trump plays real-time Risk with their families’ lives. This is what a "full-blown constitutional crisis" looks like: one man waging war, a legislature hiding under its desk, and the courts being asked to remind everyone that Article I still exists.
ICE officials proudly touring another empty, overpaid warehouse, explaining that the real detainee is fiscal responsibility.
Donald Trump demanded a mass-detention state, Congress handed ICE a $45bn blank check in the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act", and – you will never guess – the agency immediately started setting taxpayer cash on fire like it was trying to signal passing aircraft. The Government Accountability Office found tens of millions already wasted: nearly $3m on Guantánamo tent camps that were never used, $20m on detention warehouses that never saw a single human being, and premium rates for the now-closed Florida hellhole charmingly nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. America: come for the freedom, stay for the carceral money pit.
While ICE was buying empty buildings like a drunk landlord with a Pentagon credit card, the detainee population jumped from 39,000 to 67,000, targeting not just "the worst of the worst" but people with no criminal history, long-term residents with civil immigration violations, asylum seekers, and even green card holders guilty of saying things this administration doesn’t like. That’s not border security; that’s a loyalty purge with paperwork.
The agency spent $1.5bn to buy private detention facilities without bothering to check if owning them is even sustainable, sank $426m into renovations now frozen by lawsuits, and cut a FEMA-backed deal to reimburse Florida at 171% higher than normal detention rates – $249 per person per day for cages so bad they had to be shut down. DHS is also overpaying the Bureau of Prisons at $182 a head while promising to maybe, possibly, someday have a plan by August 2027. Authoritarian theater is apparently expensive when you run it like a scammy WeWork for prison beds.
Senators courageously voting to keep an undeclared war going while pretending they’ve never heard of Article I, Section 8.
The Senate just took a long, hard look at the Constitution, public opinion, and the human cost of Trump’s Iran adventure and said: nah. A resolution that merely asked Trump to stop waging an undeclared, wildly unpopular war with Iran lost 49-50, because most Republicans decided that defending the president’s feelings was more important than defending Congress’ war powers. Only four GOP senators — Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Thom Tillis — could briefly remember that Article I exists. John Fetterman, for reasons known only to him and his political consultant’s Excel sheet, joined Republicans in voting no.
The House had already passed the measure 214-208, while voters are screaming into every available pollster’s microphone that this war is a terrible idea: just 33% think it was worth it, 62% say it wasn’t, and candidates who oppose the war are more popular by more than two-to-one. Meanwhile, prices for gas, diesel, fertilizer, and food are up, the Strait of Hormuz is a shooting gallery, 19 U.S. service members are dead, and eight sailors on the USS Lincoln got such an extended deployment for this genius plan that they attempted suicide. Congress’ response? A nonbinding resolution that still couldn’t pass.
Tim Kaine patiently explained that Congress, not Trump, has the power to declare war, reminding everyone that the White House can’t veto the Constitution — a cute theory that clearly has no application in 2026 America. Trump, for his part, stood at the U.N. and justified the whole thing as a noble project to stop Iran from getting nukes, lecturing the world on “vile regimes” using terror while he runs a forever war without a formal authorization and his party in the Senate nods along like a row of dashboard bobbleheads. The message from the GOP caucus is clear: if you wanted coequal branches, you should have written that into the founding doc—oh, wait.
California firefighters attempt to put out the literal flames while Washington argues over whether saying the word "climate" will poll badly in Wisconsin.
Gavin Newsom popped by the UN and New York Climate Week to deliver a truly radical message for 2026: maybe Democrats should actually talk about climate change while the country is both literally and figuratively on fire. He calls it an end to "climate hushing" — the party’s current strategy of whispering about the apocalypse while Trump’s White House treats the atmosphere like a rented car. According to global polling, up to 89% of humans want stronger climate action, which is an awkward data point for Democrats who’ve spent the last year acting like mentioning greenhouse gases might offend some mythical swing voter in a Cheesecake Factory parking lot.
Newsom also laid out the civics-class version of how to stop Trump from stealing the midterms: voters turn out in such overwhelming numbers that he "couldn’t possibly contest" the outcome, and if (when) he tries anyway — say, by declaring a national emergency or trying to invalidate results — then "we the people" step up, the courts intervene, and Congress does its job. Adorable. He’s basically describing a functioning constitutional order to a country currently being governed like a reality show where the host keeps threatening to cancel the finale if he doesn’t win.
He knocks Democrats for passing big climate policy under Biden and then marketing it with all the enthusiasm of a C-SPAN rerun. While Trump’s crew is busy deregulating the planet into a Mad Max sequel, Democrats are over here proving the "Enlightenment Fallacy" — assuming good ideas sell themselves without bothering to explain to anyone that, yes, the price of beef, coffee, housing, insurance and your electric bill might have something to do with the sky being on fire. Newsom, meanwhile, is declaring a state of emergency in California to pre-position assets for a supercharged El Niño, while Trump’s national plan is still, essentially: "What if we just pretended the ocean was fine?"
And because this is America, the whole conversation is framed around 2028 horse-race speculation. Newsom says he won’t run if Kamala Harris does, but notably doesn’t rule out running if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jumps in. So while Trump toys with emergency powers and election subversion, the supposed resistance is already workshopping the sequel series. The planet is melting, democracy is wobbling, and everyone’s main takeaway is: wow, 2028 is gonna be lit.
Trump contemplating which amendment to ignore next, moments after discovering judges also have TVs.
Donald Trump, ever the aspiring cable-news censor, tried to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House access, because nothing says "confident, legitimate president" like using the government to punish media outlets that hurt your feelings. A federal judge has now stepped in to remind him that the First Amendment is not a suggestion, a loyalty oath, or a Truth Social terms-of-service pop-up.
Instead of the White House briefing room turning into a hand-picked fan club of Newsmax interns and OAN conspiracy interns, the court hit pause on Trump's blackout list, blocking the ban and restoring access for the outlets he personally loathes. It’s almost like the Constitution was designed specifically to stop this kind of petty authoritarian stunt.
The ruling doesn’t just save a few press passes; it underscores what Trump is trying to build: a government where coverage is either flattering propaganda or banned by decree. The judiciary, for now, has responded with a gentle but firm "no, you can’t do open fascism on live TV."
Donald Trump marched into an Iowa courtroom demanding that the Des Moines Register, USA Today Co., and pollster Ann Selzer be punished because their pre-election poll hurt his feelings and, allegedly, democracy. Judge Scott Beattie responded by gently explaining that the First Amendment exists, political speech is protected, and you can't just slap a "consumer fraud" sticker on journalism you don't like and call it a day.
The court tossed the case, noting that Trump's lawsuit tried to "stretch" Iowa law so far that it would turn core political speech into a liability—translation: the president attempted to convert basic press freedoms into a tort because the numbers were mean. USA Today’s lawyer politely celebrated the ruling as a win for a free press, while also pointing out that screaming "fake news" in legalese is still just an effort to punish coverage those in power dislike.
The Trump team, undeterred by reality, insists it will take this "powerful case" to the Iowa Supreme Court, because nothing says confidence like getting laughed out of one court and sprinting to the next. Meanwhile, this fits neatly into the administration’s larger hobby: using lawsuits as a blunt instrument against media organizations, and then discovering, again and again, that the Constitution is still more powerful than the president’s ego.
The Smithsonian Museum of American History, soon to feature a federally mandated warning label: "Caution: May Contain Actual History."
The Trump White House has discovered a new national security threat: the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where the real danger is apparently context. After an exhibit dared to mention that Benjamin Franklin’s scientific breakthroughs might have been helped along by the enslaved people in his household — and that, yes, the Founders owned human beings — Trump’s team produced a 162-page ideological Yelp review accusing the museum of "extreme political activism" and "ideological capture." Nothing says serious governance like the president rage-reading exhibit labels.
From there, the culture war cosplay turned into actual state pressure. Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 declaring the Smithsonian infected by "divisive, race-centered ideology," then followed it up on July 4 with a White House report timed to the Declaration’s 250th birthday, because if you’re going to sanitize history, you might as well do it on the anniversary. House Republicans then held hearings where they grilled museum director Anthea Hartig about a "chrome and rubber crotch harness" used for sadomasochistic sex, proving once again that the party of family values spends an extraordinary amount of time reading museum placards about BDSM.
The punchline gets darker. Trump issued another executive order directing the Interior Department to install warning signs outside the museum, literally telling visitors that history inside has been ideologically captured — a government-mandated content warning on reality. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum then warned the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents that federal agencies "cannot in good conscience" keep supporting the institution under its current leadership, while 62% of the Smithsonian’s budget comes from federal money. That kind of "conscience" looks a lot like political extortion dressed up as fiscal responsibility.
By early September, Lonnie Bunch — the Smithsonian’s first Black secretary and a respected historian — announced he was stepping down at 73, politely citing that "it has been stressful." Translation: having the federal government threaten your funding and independence because you mentioned slavery and modern sexuality in a history museum is not the retirement plan most scholars signed up for. What used to be a bipartisan national treasure is now one more battlefield where Trump tries to replace honest history with patriotic fan fiction, backed by executive orders and budget knives. This isn’t a debate about "wokeness"; it’s the state leaning on museums to stop telling the truth.
Elizabeth Warren, seen here attempting the radical act of asking why the Trump administration deleted ‘no political interference’ from the census like it was a typo instead of the whole point.
The Trump administration has decided that the real problem with the Census Bureau wasn’t political interference — it was the ban on political interference. So the Commerce Department, now helmed by Wall Street avatar Howard Lutnick, helpfully scrubbed the phrase "protection from inappropriate influence" from its scientific integrity policy. Because if you’re going to cook the books, you don’t want the recipe saying “don’t poison people.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, apparently still laboring under the quaint assumption that data should be real, fired off letters demanding to know why the department quietly gutted its own integrity rules right after the bureau released a sketchy, AFPI-connected document peddling dubious claims about non-citizen voting. Meanwhile, Team Trump has also banned a long-used privacy technique that protected small communities’ data, proposed excluding certain non-citizens from the constitutionally mandated population count used for House seats and Electoral College votes, and floated ditching race and ethnicity data altogether. So yes, the administration’s position is basically: if the numbers don’t give Republicans more power, the numbers are wrong and must be fixed.
This isn’t policy; it’s a hostile takeover of math. By kneecapping the census and ripping out guardrails against partisan meddling, Trump and his friends are trying to turn the country’s core statistical system into a bespoke propaganda service — one that redraws districts, reallocates money, and rewrites reality to match the America First Policy Institute’s fever dreams. The 14th Amendment says count the “whole number of persons.” Trumpworld’s edit: only the right ones, and only if the results are politically convenient.
John Thune sat down with Axios to calmly explain that the Senate isn’t so much a legislative body anymore as it is a taxpayer-funded riot shield for Donald Trump. He calls it a "firewall" and then helpfully sketches out the plan: if the House flips, they’ll spend two years on impeachment and investigations; if it doesn’t, they’ll focus on judges and appointees. So either way, the GOP’s vision of governing is: revenge cosplay or lifetime appointments, pick your flavor of minority rule.
Thune also offers Republican candidates a handy menu of cowardice: feel free to rhetorically run against Washington, against Congress, even against him — and maybe against Trump, depending on the ZIP code and how many swing voters still have a functioning memory. Publicly distance yourself from the flaming clown car, privately vote the way leadership and the Mar-a-Lago signal flare tell you to. He calls it "don’t surprise us"; everyone else calls it "pretend to have a spine back home, then fold like a lawn chair in D.C."
On policy, Thune coyly acknowledges that GOP senators might have to rebuke Trump on Iran war powers, because voters are tired of endless war cosplay with real body bags. He describes it as a "really hard vote" — not because of the dead people, obviously, but because it might involve saying no to Dear Leader’s impulses. Meanwhile, he’s dangling procedural votes on permitting reform and data center energy costs so senators can go home and brag they did something other than rubber-stamp judicial nominees and talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop for the 19th time.
And then there’s the money hose. Thune’s Senate Leadership Fund is planning to dump nearly $280 million into ads, with another $112 million from a Texas PAC sidecar, because democracy is apparently a Netflix show you buy ad slots on until the ending changes. He insists whether he keeps his leadership gig is "up to the conference," but he’s already building the war chest and the procedural choke points to keep the Senate a safe space for Trumpism, no matter what voters say. Representation is for suckers; firewalls are where the real power is.
A Meet the Press chyron gamely pretending Trump might champion Hong Kong democracy, in the same way one might pretend a matchstick is a fire extinguisher.
A young man whose father is imprisoned in Hong Kong for the crime of believing in democracy tells NBC he’s confident Donald Trump will negotiate his release with Xi Jinping. That’s right: the family of a pro-democracy activist is now forced to bet their hopes on a guy who literally called Hong Kong protesters a ‘riot’ and repeatedly praised Xi’s crackdown as showing ‘strength.’ This is what authoritarian normalization looks like: when the jailer’s fan club is your last, best hope.
Trump’s record on China human rights is a greatest hits album of moral collapse. He reportedly told Xi he’d stay quiet on Hong Kong protests to help his trade deal, shrugged at Uyghur concentration camps as a domestic issue, and consistently framed democracy activists as an inconvenient speed bump on the way to better soybean exports. Yet here we are, with families of political prisoners talking about him like he’s some kind of orange Václav Havel.
The segment is heartbreaking in that very 2020s way: a dictatorship jails a democracy activist, the U.S. government’s commitment to human rights is so thoroughly hollowed out that people start hoping the Strongman Whisperer might ask his buddy to be ‘nice’ this one time, and everyone pretends this is normal statecraft rather than a global hostage situation run by egos and photo ops. American leadership on democracy used to mean pressure, principles, and policy; under Trump, it’s more like, ‘Maybe he’ll remember to bring it up between complimenting Xi’s palace and asking about golf courses.’
The White House is still pretending the First Amendment is more of a suggestion than a rule, keeping CNN, MS NOW, and Politico banned from press access while a Trump-appointed judge takes his time deciding whether prior case law and the actual Constitution still count. Judge Timothy Kelly all but held up a flashing neon sign that the sudden credential-stripping looked illegal, but by not issuing a temporary restraining order on the spot, he handed Trump exactly what he wanted: a few more days (or weeks) of camera-free authoritarian cosplay in the briefing room.
News outlets that weren’t banned did the unthinkable in this industry and showed solidarity, refusing to provide video and photos until their colleagues are let back in. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is in court arguing that press access is just a "privilege" the president can yank whenever someone hurts his feelings, and that this is somehow about "national security" and not at all about punishing critical coverage. Press freedom lawyers are basically waving a giant copy of the 1977 Sherrill precedent and Kelly’s own 2018 Acosta ruling, both of which say you cannot toss reporters out for their viewpoint, but the Trump team is betting that if they call constitutional rights optional loudly enough, reality might eventually surrender.
So the stakes are simple: either the judge again tells Trump he can’t run the press room like a Mar-a-Lago guest list, or the White House gets a judicial green light to turn access into a loyalty program. Trump is already promising to appeal if he loses, because nothing says "leader of the free world" like fighting all the way up the courts for the right to ban cameras from documenting what you’re doing.
Trump, mid-rant, explaining how only he can save America from communism by mailing everyone $5,000 and bombing Iran forever.
Donald Trump held a special midterm convention — basically a live infomercial for a collapsing autocracy — where he tried to save Republican control of Congress by promising voters $5,000 checks and warning that electing Democrats would turn America into a "communist country". So yes, the sitting president is now doing a weird combo of vote buying and Red Scare dinner theater, and somehow the polls are still not impressed.
Despite years of aggressive gerrymandering and map-rigging, forecasters keep shifting key House and Senate races toward Democrats, including in North Carolina, Georgia, and even Kansas, where JD Vance has been dispatched like a panicked door-to-door salesman for a deeply unpopular product: Trumpism. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings are tunneling to new depths as his Iran war helps drive up gas prices and crushes farmers so badly that even Chuck Grassley has to publicly beg Dear Leader to stop lighting his own base on fire.
The nervous breakdown is now bipartisan — at least inside the GOP. House Republicans, suddenly aware that war is "terrible" and that voters hate broken promises, flipped just enough votes to pass a Democratic war powers resolution to end the Iran conflict. Outgoing Republican Nancy Mace helpfully summarized the vibes by predicting the midterms will be a "fucking bloodbath" for her own party, while other Republicans in tight races rush out ads demanding the war end "quickly" after previously voting to keep it going. Courage, but make it focus-grouped.
Democrats are whispering about a "blue wave" while veteran analyst Charlie Cook says Republicans should prepare for outcomes ranging from bad to "truly horrible" — a nice way of saying that Trump’s strategy of authoritarian posturing, cash-for-votes gimmicks, and endless war might not be the electoral masterstroke the cult promised. Turns out when you govern like a corrupt strongman and an incompetent arsonist at the same time, people eventually get tired of the smoke.
The Trump administration has decided that with an election looming, the most urgent threat to America is not smuggling, trafficking, financial fraud, or sexual exploitation — the core work of Homeland Security Investigations — but the president’s favorite bedtime story: mass non-citizen voter fraud. So hundreds of federal investigators and DOJ attorneys are being reassigned from actual crimes to trawl voter rolls for a problem that decades of research say is vanishingly rare. They’ve opened 1,600 cases, arrested 160 people, and managed to charge a grand total of 24 immigrants this year — a mix of undocumented people and legal residents — while proudly promising the numbers will "rise significantly" right up to Election Day. Nothing screams "free and fair" like a pre-election perp-walk campaign.
Rather than fix the software errors and state systems that accidentally registered thousands of non-citizens, the administration is laser-focused on punishing the individual voters caught in the gears. The DOJ won’t say whether any officials or vendors who caused those mass-registration screwups will be held accountable, but they’re very eager to prosecute and deport people who often never intended to register at all. Meanwhile, specialists who usually investigate serious immigration fraud were ordered for weeks to do nothing but comb through voter files, because Trump and his allies need fresh B-roll for their "stolen election" narrative. As Mike Davis of the Article III Project helpfully summarized, "There’s a new sheriff in town: His name is Donald Trump" — a man using federal law enforcement as his personal campaign prop, and turning the justice system into an intimidation machine aimed squarely at the ballot box.
The result is a chilling little preview of how you weaponize the state against voting while pretending you’re "protecting election integrity." Local election officials are dragged into an unprecedented federal fishing expedition; immigrants and green-card holders are turned into cautionary tales; and a country already drowning in conspiracy theories is treated to a taxpayer-funded, election-season propaganda blitz. Actual deterrent effect on fraud: microscopic. Deterrent effect on people daring to participate in democracy while foreign-born or brown: mission accomplished.
The U.S. Capitol, where senators prepare to regulate advanced AI using the policy equivalent of a trial Spotify account.
Congress is once again bravely confronting a complex, civilization-shaping technology by making sure senators can only use the lite demo version of it. According to internal guidance obtained by NPR, Senate staff are allowed to play with Microsoft Copilot Chat, Gemini Chat, and ChatGPT Enterprise — but are barred from the more advanced, agentic AI tools that are actually at the center of current safety debates. It’s like writing nuclear policy after being told you’re allowed to look at a glow stick.
The sergeant at arms, who oversees cybersecurity, has decided that tools capable of autonomously performing tasks — the ones that raise the real questions about control, data access, and emergent behavior — are too risky for the people allegedly in charge of regulating them. So staff get web chats that can’t touch internal drives, email, Teams, or other Senate resources, while the Fortune 500 happily deploys the good stuff on oceans of sensitive customer data. Tech lobbyists, meanwhile, are thrilled to watch lawmakers try to write guardrails for systems they’ve never actually used.
Experts note there are real security concerns, but also point out that Congress already hemorrhages information through old-school tools like Google Docs and email. The bigger problem is structural: an institution whose incentives reward delay and ignorance is now slow-walking access to the very tools it’s supposed to understand. AI agents are being "vetted for specific use cases" with no timeline, which is Washington-speak for "we’ll get back to you after the next data breach, deepfake election meltdown, or lobbying retreat at a Palm Beach resort." Regulation is coming, they swear — just as soon as they finish their supervised playtime with Clippy’s smarter cousin.
A USPS worker doing their actual job, unlike the politicians trying to turn the mail into a voter suppression device.
Voters have noticed that when a president tries to use the Postal Service as a voter suppression tool, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in on-time ballot delivery. A new NPR/PBS/Marist poll finds trust in USPS getting mail-in ballots delivered on time has cratered from 71% in 2024 to 58% now, right back to 2020-level anxiety. It's almost like years of chaos, sabotage, and court fights over whether the government can slow-walk your ballot into oblivion have consequences.
The drop in trust comes just days after the Supreme Court had to step in and tell the Trump administration it cannot use the federal mail system as a giant, taxpayer-funded vote shredder for the midterms. Despite that, USPS insists everything is fine: 233 million pieces of election mail moved this fiscal year with a 97.94% on-time rate, while a 10-year "restructuring" plan has slowed regular service, lowered performance goals, and—fun twist—helped push ballot rejection rates higher in places like Washington state thanks to postmark changes. So yes, the numbers say the mail mostly works, but after years of Trump and DeJoy turning the Postal Service into a democracy obstacle course, the public is understandably wondering if their ballot will arrive first or the autocracy.
Donald Trump at the UN, calmly threatening to ‘annihilate’ another country while pitching his side quests for Cuba, Mexico, Greenland and AI, like a Bond villain with a PowerPoint deck.
Donald Trump showed up at the UN general assembly and, as is tradition, threatened to “annihilate” Iran while casually workshopping US policy on Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, and AI like a guy spitballing ideas for his next reality show. This is the same president who has already abolished USAID, gutted the State Department, stacked the government with loyalists, toyed with quitting NATO, and literally captured the president of Venezuela. The old ‘rules-based international order’ has been replaced with the very stable genius model: whatever makes the global far right feel tingly inside.
Trump’s national security strategy, released in December 2025, helpfully formalized the vibes: Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” (straight from the Great Replacement fan forum), and the US will promote “patriotic European parties” — also known as ‘let’s export Steve Bannonism at scale’. While Trump builds an international coalition of ethnonationalists, Britain is stuck playing the world’s saddest game of diplomatic Twister. First Keir Starmer tried the flatter the autocrat approach — royal dinners, Princess of Wales photo ops, and a pharma trade deal that hands US drug companies up to £44.7bn from the NHS by 2030. Shockingly, grovelling did not buy protection.
Now new PM Andy Burnham flies into New York, gets called a “natural businessperson” by a man who bankrupted casinos, and has to figure out how to deal with a US that used to be ‘the first ally you call’ and is now the guy at the bar loudly planning regime change. Trump wants economic strangulation of Iran, ideological warfare in Europe, and Greenland ‘by any means necessary’. Burnham wants… a functioning relationship with the world’s largest loose cannon without fully signing onto the manifesto of the global far right. There are, as the Guardian politely puts it, “some really thorny issues coming up”. You don’t say.
Scott Bessent and He Lifeng shake hands in Paris, sealing yet another historic agreement to maybe talk about doing something someday while the AI arms race sprints past them.
Donald Trump is preparing to welcome Xi Jinping to Maryland with the kind of starstruck energy usually reserved for boyband reunions, all while insisting the US must "win" AI because "whoever wins AI, wins". Comforting to know that the guy who tried to overturn an election now views world-destabilizing technology as a reality show prize. What could go wrong when authoritarian strongmen and billionaires treat existential risk like a ratings race?
Instead of serious guardrails, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has floated an "AI safety mechanism" with Beijing, which appears to be diplomatic code for: a vibes-based hotline where everyone agrees to "talk about it" while continuing to build doomsday code as fast as possible. China, for its part, is busy labeling AI-generated content and muzzling chatbots so they don’t say the quiet part about the CCP out loud, while accusing the US of "fearmongering" for daring to notice any of this.
Hovering around all this are the usual tech oligarchs – Bezos, Pichai, Altman, Cook, Musk, Zuckerberg, Huang – reportedly heading to a White House state dinner to help "solve" AI safety, presumably by explaining how to turn it into a subscription service. The US keeps tightening chip export controls and even banned Chinese humanoid robots, because if there’s one thing this planet needs, it’s a more paranoid arms race over machines that can outthink us and, eventually, outvote us. Global AI governance is being designed by the same people who brought you the trade war, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter’s slow-motion collapse. Sleep well.
Spain’s migration minister takes less than a minute to explain why helping Trump persecute a pro-Palestine donor is totally normal, nothing to see here, please enjoy the rule-of-law cosplay.
The Trump administration has apparently decided that jailing people at home for their politics just isn’t ambitious enough, so now it’s outsourcing the repression to Europe. Spain’s government has allowed a US extradition request against James “Fergie” Chambers — a wealthy donor to leftwing and pro-Palestine humanitarian causes — to grind forward in Spanish courts. Chambers, a US citizen, has been sitting in a Madrid prison since July because the Trump DOJ claims that $7.5m he sent years ago to Tunisia to support a football club and Palestinian aid is secretly Hamas money. It’s the first known case of the US trying to extradite one of its own citizens from abroad over alleged Hamas support, which is a fun new benchmark in "criminalizing solidarity."
The Spanish government, which loves to issue dramatic statements about defending Palestinian rights, has now decided that when Trump wants to drag a pro-Palestine donor into his terror panic show trial circuit, that’s just "purely procedural." Ministers from the left coalition Sumar pushed back, Podemos showed up in Parliament in "Free Fergie" T-shirts, and human rights lawyer Baltasar Garzón is out here warning that this sets a "dangerous precedent" for anyone who dares fund humanitarian work in Gaza. Meanwhile, Trump gets exactly what he wants: a test case to see how far he can extend his anti-Palestinian crackdown into Europe, and a nice little message to every progressive donor on the planet: support the wrong people, and your next vacation might end with an FBI file and a one-way ticket to a US courtroom.
The president, seen here workshopping whether to start a war with Iran like it’s a season finale twist.
The president wandered into the U.N. General Assembly week and announced he has a “big decision” to make on Iran, as if he’s picking a lunch order instead of flirting with another endless Middle East war. Instead of talking about diplomacy, alliances, or Congress’s constitutional role in authorizing military force, he framed the looming conflict as a personal cliffhanger episode: tune in next time to see whether Article I of the Constitution survives.
Diplomats came to New York to talk global cooperation; the White House came to workshop taglines for a potential war. Congress, naturally, is relegated to the role of background extra, expected to applaud on cue while the commander-in-chief hints that he might unilaterally escalate a regional crisis into something much larger. Because nothing says responsible leadership like using the world’s biggest diplomatic stage to tease a possible shooting war for ratings.
American citizens get to watch this all play out like a reality show reboot: will he bomb, won’t he bomb, and how many legal norms and decades of war-powers precedent can be shredded in a single news cycle? The U.N. is supposed to prevent wars, but under this presidency it’s basically become a live studio audience for executive brinkmanship.
Live from the people’s house: the president watches himself on government TV, proving once again that the real state of the union is whatever’s on his monitor.
The White House has apparently decided that if you can’t control the news, you just cancel it and start your own channel. Days after banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the building for the crime of journalism, the Trump administration rolled out a 24/7 YouTube channel called "Trump TV: The Essentials Station" — because nothing says "healthy democracy" like the president running his own state media feed from the West Wing.
The programming kicked off with Trump’s July 3 Mt. Rushmore speech, where he thoughtfully blamed "newcomers to our country" for a "resurgence of the communist menace" — subtle stuff, definitely not xenophobic demagoguery being repackaged as patriotic content. Meanwhile, the barred outlets have filed a federal lawsuit arguing that being locked out of the people’s house without notice or any process might, just might, violate the First and Fifth Amendments. Apparently the Constitution failed to include an exception for "hurting the president’s feelings."
Major networks — including Fox, which must have needed a shower after signing this one — issued a joint statement reminding the regime that the public has a "vital interest" in independent information about its government, not just 24/7 Dear Leader highlight reels. A coalition of outlets has also refused to use White House audio and video, leaving Trump TV to shout into its own echo chamber. Democrats like Mark Kelly and Gavin Newsom are calling it what it is: state-run media and "truly autocratic behavior from a failed President." The White House calls it putting the "biggest moments all in one place" — they just forgot to mention that place is somewhere between Budapest and Pyongyang on the media freedom index.
