The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Jamie Raskin goes on “Meet the Press” and calmly explains that impeachment isn’t some Democratic kink, it’s the only remaining fire extinguisher in a building where President Trump has literally bulldozed the East Wing. When the guy in charge is playing SimCity with a historic landmark, you start to understand why the Founders wrote in a recall option.

Raskin rattles off the highlight reel: going to war without congressional approval, stealing Congress’s spending power, treating appropriations like a personal checking account, and presiding over what he calls the most massively corrupt presidential administration in American history. Other presidents decorate the White House; Trump appears to be testing how much of it he can demolish before someone notices the separation of powers has been buried under the rubble.

Meanwhile, Democrats keep insisting their top priority is healthcare and affordability, not just adding a third impeachment trophy to Trump’s mantle of shame. Hakeem Jeffries and Jim Clyburn are out there saying, "We’re focused on making life more affordable," while Raskin politely reminds everyone that a lawless president who thinks he’s a king can also make life very unaffordable, very fast. Trump, for his part, is telling supporters that Democrats will just "find a reason" to impeach him again — as though war without authorization, wholesale looting of the Treasury, and casual White House demolition are quirky personality traits, not a running list of felonies in search of a committee hearing.

President Trump has now achieved what every aspiring strongman dreams of: his own face on government-issued money while he’s still in office. Because when you’re busy hollowing out democratic norms, why not speedrun the whole Dear Leader starter pack? NPR notes he’s the first living president to pull this stunt, which is a nice, neutral way of saying, "We usually wait until presidents are done ruling — or at least done breathing — before turning the Treasury into their personal fan club."

At the same time, he’s “reshaping Washington in his image” and leaning hard into influencing the midterms, which is a polite euphemism for rigging the board before anyone gets to play. Consolidate power, slap your face on the money, then work the elections from the bully pulpit — it’s less ‘representative democracy’ and more ‘limited-time authoritarianism beta test.’ But sure, it’s just another week in politics, not the slow-motion branding of the capital — and the country — as a subsidiary of Trump, Inc.

US foreign policy used to be based on things like treaties, principles, and occasionally even facts. Now it’s based on whether Donald Trump feels emotionally supported by the British prime minister. After the UK declined to join his excellent, totally‑legal war on Iran, Trump is “re‑evaluating” the long-standing US recognition of British rule over the Falklands, because nothing says "responsible superpower" like turning a 200-year sovereignty dispute into a spite-driven customer service complaint.

Argentina’s libertarian cosplay president Javier Milei, who treats Trump like a cross between Hayek and a QVC host, is thrilled. He’s on TV telling Argentines that "winds of change" are blowing because the US president is mad at Keir Starmer and thinks the Falklands are "a long way away"—which, geographically, is about as accurate as his inauguration crowd size. The actual Falkland Islanders, who voted almost unanimously to stay British, are once again learning that in Trump’s America, self-determination matters right up until it conflicts with his need for revenge content.

So a decades-old alliance, a prior shooting war, and the democratic wishes of a remote island population are all being tossed into the blender because Trump wants to punish the UK for not signing up for his last foreign policy disaster. The "Special Relationship" has officially been downgraded to "Did you clap loud enough for Dear Leader?" diplomacy.

Donald Trump, the man who ran on ending forever wars, has decided the best midterm strategy is to start a reckless war of choice with Iran, kill civilians at a wedding, spike gas prices, jack up borrowing costs, and then act confused when voters notice their mortgages suddenly look like a payday loan. Having learned nothing from the last time “Mission Accomplished” went well, he’s now busy turning the Middle East into a live‑fire campaign ad for the Democrats.

Not satisfied with one disaster, he’s also picked a fight with the geopolitical menace known as Canada, slapping on tariffs that triggered a dollar‑for‑dollar retaliation aimed squarely at Republican‑leaning farm states like Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio. So the party of business is now the party of ‘we destroyed your export market so Trump could rename Lake Ontario to Lake America and Apple and Google could dutifully lick the boot in their map apps.’

Back home, Trump has discovered yet another 80/20 issue and sprinted to the 20. Data centers are wildly unpopular across the spectrum, so naturally he logged on to Truth Social to inform Americans that if they don’t want one sucking up their water and power next door, they must want to be “backwards and poor.” Throw in his obsession with demolishing the East Wing for a ballroom and stamping his signature on the dollar, and you get a president whose top legislative priority is turning the federal government into a merch table at Mar‑a‑Lago.

The cherry on this authoritarian sundae: he keeps endorsing walking ethics violations like Ken Paxton, then shrugs at the prospect of losing Congress because he’s already figured out that subpoenas are just fancy stationery when you’ve got a compliant Supreme Court and zero respect for checks and balances. When you believe you can ignore oversight, launch vanity wars, and cash out the presidency as a branding exercise, who needs midterms? The voters are just background noise to the main project: ruling, not governing.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to ignore the Constitution: build a nationwide list of who it thinks is a citizen and then gently "encourage" states to use it to decide who gets a ballot. The U.S. has literally never attempted a comprehensive list of American citizens, because states run elections and maintain voter rolls. Trump, however, signed a March 31 executive order telling USCIS and Social Security to crank out "State Citizenship Lists" and ship them to governors at least 60 days before every federal election. The lists will be based on famously error-riddled federal data, but don't worry, what’s a little mass disenfranchisement between branches of government?

Originally, the administration planned to launch a public portal with these lists on Sept. 4, right on the 60-day mark before the midterms. After getting dragged into multiple lawsuits, DOJ now says it will just spring the portal on everyone with 48-hours notice, like a surprise party but for voting rights. The Supreme Court helpfully stayed a lower court injunction in 23 states and D.C., clearing the way for this federal voter surveillance wishlist to move forward. Meanwhile, Trump's order instructs the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting state and local officials who issue federal ballots to anyone the feds deem ineligible — a built-in intimidation mechanism so states feel "strongly encouraged" to obey the bad data.

Civil rights and privacy groups are understandably thrilled. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and individual voters are begging a federal judge to stop DHS and USCIS from building and publishing this thing at all. Protect Democracy’s Jules Torti notes that the lists are likely to be wildly inaccurate, which is a polite way of saying people are going to get kicked off the rolls because Trump wants a talking point about "election integrity." The administration calls it verification; the rest of us call it a federally managed pretext for purging voters and centralizing control of elections in the hands of the guy who still can’t accept losing the last one.

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.