The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration is now openly asking the Supreme Court to bless its plan to turn the U.S. Postal Service into a voter-suppression franchise. After a federal judge in Boston slapped a temporary restraining order on the scheme, Trump’s lawyers sprinted to SCOTUS, begging the justices to let USPS refuse to deliver ballots from states that don’t hand over detailed voter lists and slap special barcodes on envelopes. Because when you can’t win voters, you can always try to lose their ballots.

For the moment, the judge’s order means mail voting for the midterms is supposed to function normally, which is adorable given that USPS has apparently cobbled together an untested online portal to vacuum up voter data and a verification process that a whistleblower says could prevent people from getting ballots on time—or at all. Trump claims this is all to stop hordes of noncitizens from voting, a problem that studies show is rarer than a Trump staffer with job security. The challengers call it illegal election meddling; the administration calls it "regulating mail." Tomato, fascist tomato.

Election experts say it’s too late to jam this half-baked surveillance-and-rejection system into a live election without chaos, which is of course the selling point. North Carolina starts mailing absentee ballots basically now, while the White House is trying to rewrite the rules of the game mid-deal and have the Supreme Court cut the brake lines. It’s not subtle: the president is trying to weaponize the post office to decide which Americans are allowed to vote, and he’d like the highest court in the land to co-sign the sabotage.

The Trump administration has now moved from rewriting press releases to trying to rewrite the entire American story, threatening to yank federal support and cooperation from the Smithsonian unless it stops being so rude as to show people what actually happened. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and White House domestic policy aide Vince Haley fired off a letter accusing Smithsonian leadership of "radical ideology" and a "culture of ideological activism" — bold claims from an administration whose main interpretive framework for U.S. history is whatever makes Dear Leader look tall and infallible.

The letter helpfully explains that federal agencies "cannot in good conscience" keep loaning artifacts, helping with procurement, or making discretionary grants while the Smithsonian insists on presenting exhibits that might, say, mention racism, inequality, or institutional failure without first running them past the MAGA Ministry of Truth. A July White House report already declared that the National Museum of American History "cannot be trusted" to tell America's story because it "confronts visitors" with information that might undermine blind faith in American institutions — which, translated, means it acknowledges that bad things sometimes happened between 1776 and whatever year Trump thinks the Revolutionary War included airports.

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, still laboring under the outdated notion that museums should be driven by scholarship and accuracy, pushed back, saying the report misrepresents the museum's work and that the institution is committed to telling the "fullness" of America's story. The White House responded with a very serious policy intervention: Trump announced he was ordering "warning" signs outside the Museum of American History to alert visitors that they might encounter facts not approved by the cult. Because nothing screams "confident, thriving democracy" like the president slapping ideological warning labels on museums and threatening to choke off support until history agrees to be more flattering.

The Trump administration briefly flirted with the idea of not having a federal disaster agency at all, because when you’re facing historic fires, floods, and hurricanes, why wouldn’t you try to eliminate FEMA? Trump kicked off term two by declaring “FEMA is not good” and pushing to scrap it entirely, with loyalist Kristi Noem holding the budgetary pillow over its face while other agencies like the Department of Education, Voice of America, and USAID were successfully marched out back and shot.

Enter David Richardson, the acting FEMA administrator who now cheerfully admits in a new book that he tried very hard to shrink the agency into irrelevance or shut it down altogether, but alas, the bureaucracy survived his best efforts. He now insists the Trump team has "changed course" and that FEMA is in "go-along-to-get-along" mode, which is a poetic way of saying: the purge failed, so they’ll just starve it and overwork whoever’s left. Current staff say the existential terror of outright abolition has faded, but the sabotage left the usual calling cards of this administration’s governance style: understaffing, burnout, and slower aid for people whose homes are literally underwater or on fire.

So the good news is FEMA technically still exists. The bad news is it’s been run through the Trump second-term funhouse where agencies either get eliminated outright or left limping along, hollowed out and less able to help anyone. Disaster survivors get longer waits and more red tape; Trump gets to brag that he "did something" about the Deep State. Everyone’s a winner, assuming you define "winner" as a government that hates the idea of functioning in an emergency.

Donald Trump has announced he’ll spend the final 30 days before the midterms barnstorming the country for Republicans in 35 races, because if there’s one thing American democracy needed, it was a multi-state grievance tour sponsored by a $400 million super PAC. From the White House Rose Garden, Trump promised to personally visit each race that actually looks competitive, making it clear that if you’re winning by 40 points, his presence is reserved for candidates still clinging to the last shreds of their dignity and polling.

He’s heading to Alaska to boost Dan Sullivan against… Dan Sullivan, because the GOP has apparently entered the Spider-Verse of generic white guys, and then down to Texas to campaign for indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate run, just to really underline that the party is fully committed to being a legal defense fund with ballot access. All of this is powered by MAGA Inc.’s $400+ million war chest, a nice reminder that while Trump insists he’s “not affected by the election,” his money and personality cult are very much on the ballot — especially after he literally told supporters to pretend he is. Representative government, now with 35 bonus loyalty tests.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that if you can’t stop people from voting, you can at least lose their ballots in a software crash. The U.S. Postal Service, suddenly moonlighting as an arm of the voter suppression industry, has rushed together a new online portal to enforce Trump’s mail-voting order. States would be forced to feed voter data into this black box so USPS can "verify" batches of absentee ballots before they’re mailed. One glitch, one smudged barcode, one scanner hiccup, and the entire batch gets bounced back like a rejected coupon.

A whistleblower says the system was slapped together in weeks, barely tested, and has already crashed in testing — perfect qualifications for becoming a critical national election bottleneck. A federal judge has temporarily blocked USPS from forcing states to use this portal, but the Postal Service is appealing, because why deliver ballots when you can police them? Lawsuits point out that USPS has no legal authority to run voter verification, but the administration insists it’s all about "security" — the same way putting a padlock on the polling place and throwing away the key is about "line management."

Whistleblower attorney David Kligerman notes the scheme demands a 0% failure rate — something not required in any other part of the mail system — which is a cute standard when the software is already falling over in tests. The actual effect is obvious: create enough red tape and technical landmines between states and voters that ballots arrive late, or never. It’s not election administration; it’s a denial-of-service attack on democracy, helpfully branded with a USPS logo.

President Trump has apparently just remembered that gas prices are a thing normal people pay, and with the midterms breathing down his neck, he’s now "pulling out all the stops" to look like he cares. Translation: expect a flurry of half-baked executive stunts, angry tweets at oil companies, and some performative yelling at the Federal Reserve, all while insisting everything was cheaper back when he was merely threatening coups instead of running the country again.

Instead of, say, a coherent energy policy or structural relief for people who can't afford groceries and rent, we get election-year panic cosplay masquerading as economic stewardship. The affordability crisis is real; the response is reality TV. Trump gets to posture as the great defender of the working class while doing what he always does best: treating the entire federal government like a campaign prop and hoping voters don’t notice the price at the pump is still doing better numbers than he is.

The Department of Justice spent a year and untold taxpayer dollars trying to kneecap California school sports over… fewer than ten trans student athletes. A federal judge has now ceremoniously drop-kicked the Trump administration’s lawsuit into the sun, ruling that you can’t just yell "executive order" and retroactively threaten to cut off funding because you’re mad about a handful of girls running track.

Judge Cynthia Valenzuela pointed out that the feds never actually gave California clear notice that its money was contingent on banning trans girls, and that the government’s own guidance on this has changed more often than Trump’s story under oath. Even the conservative supreme court’s recent ruling upholding anti-trans laws in West Virginia and Idaho couldn’t save Trump here, since it stopped short of mandating a national ban—minor detail the White House chose to ignore while it tried to cosplay as Title IX’s savior.

The DOJ, having just been told it can’t bully states into preemptively obeying Trump’s discriminatory whims, says it’s "evaluating our options for appeal" and reaffirmed its commitment to "preventing boys from playing in girls’ sports"—a phrase that helpfully erases the actual girls they’re targeting. Meanwhile, California keeps its decade-old inclusive policy, trans kids get to keep playing sports in peace for the moment, and the administration adds another entry to its already impressive record of using federal power to punch down at children and still managing to lose in court.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in immigration enforcement: newborns. The State Department is proposing that parents who want a passport for their US-born kids must now prove their own citizenship or immigration status, turning a routine errand into a mini inquisition to prop up Trump’s latest attack on birthright citizenship. Because when the Supreme Court tells you your first attempt to gut the 14th Amendment is unconstitutional, the obvious response is to try again with more paperwork and a different excuse.

This scheme is the implementation manual for Trump’s August 6 executive order allegedly targeting “birth tourism,” but the fine print says the quiet part out loud: the government will comb through parents’ status to decide whether their American-born child actually counts as American. Kids with a parent tied to a foreign government, accused of fraud, or labeled an “alien enemy” can find their citizenship quietly downgraded to "pending regime approval." The State Department insists this is about “protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship,” which is a poetic way of saying: we'll decide which babies get rights.

Under the current system, parents just prove they’re the parents and show ID. Under Trump’s new reality show, everyone has to cough up passports, birth certificates, I‑94s, green cards, and whatever else the bureaucracy demands so the government can run a loyalty check on your family before your kid gets to travel. Civil rights lawyers are already in court trying to stop this sequel to the administration’s first, already-struck-down birthright citizenship order. Trump keeps losing at the Supreme Court, but the policy goal is clear: if they can’t rewrite the Constitution outright, they’ll just make it impossible for the wrong families’ kids to use it.

Donald Trump, now an 80-year-old president with the emotional range of a Reddit troll, spent his weekend posting AI duck memes and complaining about a lake, while 23-year-old Olivia Rodrigo accidentally wandered into the role of Leader of the Free World by raising $20 million for women-focused nonprofits that his administration helped gut. The Trump team slashed funding for reproductive health and women’s legal groups, so a pop festival is now doing the basic governance work the federal government used to pretend to care about.

Meanwhile, US institutions are lining up to kiss the ring. Universities are defunding DEI, major media outlets are treating Trump like a temperamental monarch to protect their deals, and tech CEOs have happily curled up in bed with him, algorithmically tucking in authoritarianism every night. Against that backdrop, Rodrigo is openly calling out Roe’s overturning, telling the Trump administration not to use her music in its "racist, hateful propaganda" video demanding undocumented immigrants self-deport, and quietly showing solidarity with Gaza via her platform and even her wardrobe. You know things are going well when basic empathy is now a high-risk career move.

On the other side of the courage spectrum, Taylor Swift — the self-professed "right side of history" billionaire — has gone mostly ghost during Trump 2.0. Her songs were used in White House ragebait posts for months, then quietly removed with no public pushback from the world’s most powerful woman in sequins. No comment on Gaza, no comment on ICE, just a carefully curated silence while free speech, women’s rights, and civil liberties get put through a woodchipper. The message from Trump’s America is clear: the government will bully, defund, and intimidate; the oligarchs will cash in; and if you want anyone to stand up for the vulnerable, you’d better hope a 23-year-old pop star has enough backbone to cover the gap where institutions used to be.

The Trump White House took one look at the Postal Service — the agency that’s supposed to just deliver the mail — and said: what if this was in charge of deciding which Americans are real enough to vote? So Trump signed an executive order commanding USPS to help build a federal list of citizens and only send mail ballots to people on that list, which is definitely the kind of thing you do when you’re super chill about democracy and not at all obsessed with rigging the rules to stay in power.

A federal judge has already blocked this constitutional dumpster fire, but inside USPS, they kept coding away like a startup trying to ship a voting-rights-killing app before the SEC notices. According to an anonymous whistleblower, the ballot verification portal was built in a “rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” that started in earnest in June — for an election in the fall — on a system that should take 9–12 months. The design is so bad it rejects entire batches of 10,000 ballots if a single barcode doesn’t scan, which is a bold new standard: one smudge and everyone loses their vote.

Engineers reportedly described the project as a “s--- show” and warned the system might crash, which is exactly what you want from the federal infrastructure now being welded onto the core of elections. Even better, the whistleblower says USPS was ordered to keep building the system despite court orders blocking it, because why let “the Constitution” or “judges” interfere with a perfectly good scheme to jam up mail voting? Trump keeps screaming about imaginary voter fraud, then demands an untested, legally dubious federal voter database run by the post office. Strong “set the house on fire to prevent fire hazards” energy.

Dan Driscoll, the Army secretary Trump once hailed as a “disruptor and change agent,” has disrupted himself straight out of the building, handing in his resignation after months of reported friction with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth — a phrase that is somehow now a real thing and not a rejected Call of Duty DLC title. Driscoll was the No. 2 civilian at the Pentagon and yet another senior official deciding that serving under Hegseth is less "public service" and more "extended hostage situation".

The White House, doing its best North Korea cosplay, praised Driscoll for making the Army “more powerful than ever” and helping with Russia-Ukraine negotiations, as if this administration hasn’t spent years turning the Pentagon into a live‑action loyalty test. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has become a revolving door: the Army chief of staff Randy George was pushed out in April, the top commander in Europe and Africa, Gen Christopher Donahue, bailed in June, and Driscoll — a George ally — is now joining the exodus after hugging it out in the resignation receiving line.

Driscoll, an Iraq veteran and ex–JD Vance adviser turned tech investor, was supposed to modernize the Army, streamline contractor red tape, and help reshape drone warfare. Instead, his legacy is proving that even a Senate‑confirmed, 66–28 “safe pick” can’t survive long in a department run like a MAGA group chat with tanks. The message to the officer corps is clear: civilian control of the military now means Pete Hegseth gets to purge anyone who remembers how institutions are supposed to work.