The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Attorney General Todd Blanche popped up in Kansas City to bravely announce that the U.S. government is definitely, absolutely, pinky-swear not protecting anyone by withholding 9/11 documents — especially not Saudi Arabia, a government that just happens to be a crucial Trump-world business partner and geopolitical BFF. No, the secrecy is all about "genuine classified" information, which is Washington-speak for: we’ve been sitting on this for 25 years and we’d rather not explain why.

9/11 families, who have spent two decades dragging truth out of the government like teeth out of an alligator, are still trying to get unredacted records about possible Saudi support for the hijackers. Their lawsuit already forced out evidence about Omar al-Bayoumi — the helpful San Diego "good Samaritan" who just happened to meet two hijackers, help them find housing, film the U.S. Capitol while talking about a "plan," and keep an airplane descent formula in his apartment like it was a Sudoku puzzle. The FBI, naturally, nearly archived or destroyed some of this, because why share crucial evidence with field agents when you can bury it in a file cabinet and call it national security?

The CIA just dumped 71 pre- and post-9/11 President’s Daily Briefs, which is great for historians and completely useless for the families’ specific Saudi-connection questions. Those are still locked up, while Judge George Daniels has already ruled that there’s enough evidence for the Saudi lawsuit to move forward, including Bayoumi, Fahad al-Thumairy, and support given to hijackers after they landed in California. Meanwhile, on the 25th anniversary, families used the memorial podium to call out multiple administrations for one long, bipartisan betrayal, and literally begged Vice President JD Vance and President Trump for answers.

Blanche promises that "there'll be more records coming out" and insists "it's not as if we're keeping records from the American people" — a bold claim, given that the entire controversy is about the records they are, in fact, keeping from the American people. The Trump administration gets to pose as the brave truth-teller cleaning up the mess, while still deciding what remains secret and why. Transparency, Trump-style: maximum theatrics, minimal sunlight, and a quarter-century of classified dust on the files the families actually want.

Columbia University, once proud home of Edward Said and allegedly serious scholarship, is now being sued for moonlighting as a junior partner in Trump’s anti-Palestinian crackdown. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student and US green card holder, says the school ignored years of harassment, doxing, and threats – right up until federal immigration agents marched into his university housing in 2025 and hauled him off as part of Trump’s new hobby: deporting foreign students who say the wrong things about Gaza.

According to the lawsuit, Khalil and members of SIPA’s Palestine Working Group begged Columbia for protection while their names, faces, and personal info were plastered online and on roving billboard trucks. The university’s response? Not to stop the harassment, but to discipline the students, suspend their Palestine Working Group in May 2025, and hand over disciplinary records to a House committee that treats campus pro-Palestinian speech like a national security emergency. Khalil’s lawyers say this deliberate indifference helped "lay the groundwork" for Trump’s deportation campaign; Columbia says it is "committed" to protecting students, presumably in the same way a smoke detector is committed to watching your house burn.

While Khalil fights deportation all the way to the supreme court, he’s also suing the Trump administration and a cast of pro-Israel groups for conspiring to target him. Columbia, naturally, would like everyone to know it cannot comment on pending litigation but deeply values safety, free speech, and whatever else its board thinks will keep the congressional subpoenas and donor tantrums at bay. The message to current and future students is crystal clear: speak out on Palestine, and you might get a disciplinary file, a federal raid, and a one-way ticket out of the country – courtesy of the seamless public-private partnership between an Ivy League brand and an authoritarian administration.

Florida’s lovingly nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” turns out to have been less a detention center and more a DIY torture pop-up in the Everglades, according to a new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Inspectors found that detainees were repeatedly locked in outdoor metal cages about the size of a phone booth — roughly 18 square feet, less than half of ICE’s own minimum standard — and then baked in Florida heat while mosquitoes did the rest. ICE rules say you can’t do that, which the Trump administration and Ron DeSantis’ crew apparently read as a suggestion, like putting your tray table up before landing.

The facility — which DeSantis ran for the federal government and bragged had processed more than 21,000 immigrants in a year — also featured overcrowding, limited recreation, filthy kitchens, broken phones that stopped detainees from calling lawyers or family, and reports of guards withholding food and clean water until people signed English-language documents they couldn’t read. So, a classic freedom-and-liberty operation. When Amnesty International first documented the cages, DeSantis’s spokesperson called it all “fabrications” and a “politically motivated attack.” The DHS watchdog has now confirmed the abuses still continued a month after those denials, proving once again that the only thing more durable than the Everglades ecosystem is Republican lying about immigrant abuse.

Staff at Alligator Alcatraz insisted to inspectors that these tiny metal boxes were just “calming areas” where detainees asked to go for some alone time, like a spa day but with shackles and heat stroke. Inspectors, spoilsports that they are, noted locking mechanisms, documented use of the cages as discipline for people who “failed to comply with a lawful command,” and politely observed that using miniature steel coffins on living humans is “unprecedented” in ICE facilities and a “significant risk” to health and wellbeing. They made 10 recommendations, including “stop the cages,” all of which are now moot because the camp closed in June — officially due to hurricane season, unofficially because spending $1.2 million a day to torture people in wetlands was becoming a political and legal sinkhole.

Now DHS, FEMA, and Florida are facing an amended lawsuit from environmental groups over the damage the camp did to the Everglades, while the human damage is cataloged in government PDFs and trauma. The Trump administration gets a rare rebuke from its own watchdog, DeSantis gets caught lying about human rights abuses he outsourced to private guards, and ICE gets yet another entry in its "we swear we have standards" scrapbook. The cages may be gone, but the blueprint for weaponizing disaster infrastructure as an ad hoc torture camp is still very much on the shelf.

Trump has discovered the ultimate AI safety framework: no guardrails, just a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” — a description he helpfully provides of himself, in case anyone missed the last ten years of his posting. While AI researchers are out here saying things like “this might kill us all,” the White House strategy is basically, "Have you tried trusting my gut?"

Instead of independent oversight, Trump brags that his administration has already used its "tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power" to stop AI "people" like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei from doing "bad, or potentially bad, 'things.'" So no guardrails for the tech, just more threats for the humans who question it. He denounces concerns about AI and data centers as a "SICK conspiracy" and waves the usual magic word — China — to justify whatever he wants: WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!

Out in the real world, 70% of Americans say they’re more worried than excited about AI, including most Republicans, and local communities don’t want giant AI data centers dropped on their heads. AI researchers are resigning and publicly warning that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives" and that AI could "kill all humans." The bipartisan political response is, broadly: maybe we should slow down and think. The Trump response is: people raising safety concerns are "Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers" who should “BEWARE!”

JD Vance tries a more polite version of the same thing, saying he’s "weirded out" that AI companies are asking for regulation and hinting it’s some kind of Trojan horse, while still insisting the administration wants to "regulate smartly" — which, in this context, seems to mean "no rules for the tech, endless discretionary punishment power for the president." So to recap: the people building AI say it might end civilization, the public doesn’t want it in their backyard, and Trump’s plan is to strap the whole thing to his ego, floor the gas, and threaten anyone who reaches for the brake.

Democrats are rolling out the "New Battlefield Project," which is a very dramatic name for what used to be called "basic election administration before one party went full coup-curious." Tens of thousands of volunteers in blue vests will fan out to about a quarter of the country’s 95,000 polling places to do wild, extremist things like: help people find the right location, explain provisional ballots, and write down when Trump’s goons try to scare voters away.

This whole operation exists because the Trump administration refuses to rule out sending federal agents to cities on election day and Trump-world voices keep fantasizing about immigration agents at the polls. Homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin — whose job apparently now includes live-testing the boundaries of the Voting Rights Act — says ICE doesn’t normally patrol polling places, but hey, if they have a warrant or feel like there’s a "threat," who’s to say?

So Democrats are telling people to "bank their vote" early, before Trump wakes up one morning, declares a national emergency, and decides democracy is suspended until he feels properly adored again. Alongside that, they’re building a "democracy defense network" to track disinformation, dark money, AI manipulation, and old-school election subversion — basically a volunteer fire brigade trying to hold back a five-alarm authoritarian arson spree with clipboards and smiles.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the first Black and first actual historian to run the Smithsonian, is stepping down just as the Trump administration is trying to convert the place from the nation’s attic into a taxpayer-funded MAGA scrapbook. The Department of the Interior helpfully sent a threatening letter warning that the National Museum of American History is infected with a "radical institutional ideology" — also known as accurate history — because it mentions awkward little details like Benjamin Franklin enslaving people and Europeans showing up as a colonizing force, not a tour group.

The White House has already rolled out an executive order charmingly titled "Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution," which translates to: museums must stop teaching history and start doing vibes. Under the new rules, the Smithsonian’s job is to produce "patriotic admiration" for "great men" and a "shared American identity" built on praising founders while quietly shoving slavery, genocide, disenfranchisement, and white supremacist terror off behind the gift shop. Fascist regimes have literally written this script before — Hitler complained Weimar history education didn’t generate enough "national enthusiasm" and demanded a cult of heroic leaders. The Trump crew apparently read that part and thought it was a how-to manual.

The same administration screaming about "indoctrination" in K–12 is simultaneously demanding that museums serve up state-approved propaganda and helping restore Confederate traitors to places of honor, because nothing says "patriotic education" like celebrating the guys who killed Americans to preserve slavery. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court keeps whittling down voting rights while the administration works overtime to erase the history of disenfranchisement that might make people notice. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley point out, this isn’t just bad curriculum design; it’s the classic playbook Du Bois described — use feel-good lies about the past to justify rolling democracy backwards and reinstalling white rule.

So when the country’s flagship museum system is told its job is to make the powerful feel heroic and the oppressed invisible, and its historian-in-chief exits under that cloud, that’s not culture-war fluff. That’s the state seizing control of the story to make sure the next time we slide "back towards slavery," the official tours will say it’s freedom. Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it; those who refuse to teach it accurately are clearly planning the rerun.