trump eyes your voting machines like hotel mini-bars
Tulsi Gabbard pauses mid-conspiracy to pretend she’s on an important national security call and not just asking if they’ve seized the voting machines yet.
Donald Trump has discovered a fun new way to deal with elections he might lose: just have the federal government physically grab the voting machines. Fresh off the FBI’s raid on Fulton County’s election office — blessed by an affidavit built on already-debunked 2020 conspiracy theories — Trump went on Dan Bongino’s podcast to demand that Republicans “take over” voting in 15 places and “nationalize” elections. Because when you can’t win the midterms, you can always try unplugging democracy at the wall.
Enter Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the Assad-curious, Putin-adjacent conspiracy enthusiast who somehow ended up in charge of America’s spy agencies. Gabbard personally oversaw the seizure and "analysis" of Puerto Rico’s Dominion voting machines, then popped up in Fulton County like a QAnon Where’s Waldo. ODNI insists it was just looking at “cyber security practices,” not Venezuela-in-the-modem fanfic, but the pattern is obvious: use security pretexts to grab machines, sow chaos, and keep just enough doubt alive to justify more federal control.
This is all part of a larger project. Trump has already ordered GOP states to gerrymander themselves into pretzels, turned the DOJ civil rights division into an anti-voting-rights unit, and pushed an executive order to decertify voting machines, vacuum up voter data, and force passports to register — which a federal judge permanently blocked for being wildly unconstitutional. So now the same administration is ignoring the spirit of that ruling, leaning on states for voter data anyway, and pushing Congress to turn the dead order into live ammo.
As Bruce Spiva of the Campaign Legal Center helpfully translated: the FBI is seizing old ballots, Trump is calling to “nationalize” elections, DOJ is suing more than 20 states for access to private voter data, and ODNI is playing repo man with voting machines. Totally normal behavior for a government that definitely plans to accept losing power gracefully. What could possibly go wrong with the president’s allies test-driving election interference on a disenfranchised US territory before rolling it out nationwide?
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
doj loses the epstein files that are worst for trump, totally by coincidence
The DOJ file room, where millions of pages are perfectly organized—except for the ones about Trump and Epstein, which are apparently on a spiritual journey.
The Department of Justice dumped millions of pages of Epstein files on the public, but somehow the ones where an accuser explicitly names Donald Trump as allegedly abusing her as a minor in the early 1980s just wandered off into the same evidence locker where accountability goes to die. An administration official now admits the three missing FBI 302s are real, but swears they were merely "duplicative" and thus didn’t have to be released under Congress’s shiny new Epstein Files Transparency Act. Very convenient that the duplicated documents were the ones accusing the sitting president of child sexual abuse and talking about him musing over money laundering and blackmail.
To be clear: the woman’s claims are unsubstantiated, riddled with contradictions about Epstein’s timeline, and the FBI never brought charges. The Guardian itself points out that parts of her story look outlandish, and her own record includes fraud and theft cases. But somehow those credibility issues didn’t stop the Bureau from generating 25 pages of notes across four interviews or from summarizing her allegations in an internal Epstein–Maxwell slideshow in 2025. The only part that made it into the public release? The first interview, the one before she named Trump. What a bizarre clerical error that just keeps happening in one direction.
Now you’ve got Democrats like Rep. Robert Garcia saying he personally went to DOJ to see unredacted files and still couldn’t find the Trump-accuser 302s that the department swears weren’t deleted, while Republican Oversight chair James Comer is also making noises about looking into why accusations of Trump assaulting a minor vanished from the DOJ database. When you’ve lost James "Hunter’s Laptop" Comer on transparency, you may have a problem. But rest easy: the administration assures us the missing files are non-credible, duplicative, and being reviewed "as we speak"—which, in Washington, is usually the part right before the shredder warms up.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump loses to fish, again
Artist’s impression of the Trump administration being outperformed by a salmon swimming upstream against both dams and deregulation.
The Trump administration just got out-lawyered by salmon. A federal judge in Oregon ordered the government to change how it runs eight Columbia and Snake River dams after Trump tore up a painstakingly negotiated, $1bn salmon recovery agreement and declared it “radical environmentalism” — which is MAGA for “we read the science and didn’t light it on fire.”
Instead of following the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which would have helped replace dam hydropower with new clean energy while keeping salmon alive, Trump’s team marched back into court armed with what Judge Michael Simon politely described as evidence that contradicted the scientific record and was basically manufactured for the lawsuit. This, on top of the administration yanking a 2024 Interior Department report that admitted the dams had hammered the river and Native American tribes — you know, the people whose treaty rights the government is supposedly required to honor, not delete.
The judge restored last year’s flow and reservoir levels with some modest boosts for fish, calling out a "disappointing history of government avoidance and manipulation" instead of actually fixing the problem. Tribes, states, and conservation groups are treating the ruling as emergency triage to keep salmon from disappearing completely, while Trump’s people tried and failed to sell "putting people over fish" as a serious policy framework rather than a bumper sticker for dismantling environmental protections and treaty obligations.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump turns ice into cosplay cops and a personal pardon hotline
Future of American higher education: get a dorm, buy textbooks, hope federal agents don’t fake a missing child to drag you out in handcuffs.
Columbia student and influencer Elmina Aghayeva was yanked out of her university housing after ICE agents allegedly showed up with fake NYPD badges and a heartwarming story about a missing 5-year-old girl, which is apparently what passes for "standard operating procedure" in Trump's second term. Campus housing/security reportedly let them in, thinking they were helping a child in danger, not assisting a federal sting operation on a student whose visa issue dates back to 2016.
While ICE and DHS now swear they would never pretend to be NYPD and that their totally real badges were visible the whole time, New York officials say the agents misrepresented themselves to access the dorm. Meanwhile, Columbia's president politely describes it as "misrepresentations" instead of what normal people call it: lying your way into a student's home. All this to grab a foreign student whose great crime is a lapsed visa in a country where Jared Kushner still walks free.
The punchline: Aghayeva is released not because a judge reviewed the case, not because due process was followed, but because New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was literally at the White House and got Trump to personally pick up the phone and say she’d be freed "imminently." Immigration enforcement has now been downgraded from a legal system to a customer service hotline where outcomes depend on whether your mayor can get face time with Dear Leader and bring a list of other detained, pro-Palestinian students as a side quest.
As New York politicians scramble to propose laws to keep ICE out of "sensitive locations" like schools and dorms, Trump’s federal crackdown on immigration keeps scooping up university students while the administration insists everything is perfectly normal. Just ignore the fake badges, the phony missing-child story, and the fact that your civil liberties now depend on whether your local official can get a same-day appointment with the president.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#lawlessness
tim kaine keeps speed‑dialing the constitution
Tim Kaine, politely asking Congress to try this new thing called 'doing its constitutional duty' before Trump starts another forever war from his phone.
Sen. Tim Kaine is once again trying the radical idea that the branch of government actually empowered to declare war should maybe, possibly, have a say before President Trump starts lobbing missiles around like he's rage‑tweeting with explosives. On NPR, Kaine talks about his latest war powers resolution, because the last several decades of bipartisan abdication apparently weren’t enough of a constitutional bonfire.
Congress, having outsourced its war‑making authority to whichever president last found the launch codes, is now shocked that Trump treats the military like his own private security firm with nukes. Kaine’s resolution is an attempt to drag the legislative branch back into its job description, clawing back some oversight from an executive who thinks "checks and balances" means making sure the Sharpies work on the nuclear football. The bar is now so low that “follow the Constitution” counts as bold resistance.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
golden age of american carnage
Trump delivers a State of the Union that’s half campaign rally, half horror podcast, while Congress pretends this is just another Tuesday in a functioning republic.
Trump’s latest State of the Union was billed as a "golden age of America" but played more like a Netflix true-crime marathon directed by Steve Bannon. The president spent his time on national television lovingly narrating blood loss, shredded limbs, and slashed throats, then stapling those images to his favorite campaign prop: immigrants. The country is apparently thriving, yet also a crime-ridden hellscape that only Trump’s iron fist can tame. Very normal democratic rhetoric.
Rather than talk policy like a functioning head of state, Trump turned the House chamber into a snuff-adjacent rally, complete with graphic play-by-play of a National Guard member’s shooting and a Medal of Honor recipient’s "blood flowing back down the aisle" of a helicopter. Then he took a real murder in North Carolina and falsely claimed the suspect came through "open borders" — a lie local reporting quickly torched. The White House’s response? Silence, of course. Why correct the record when the fear is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do?
The through line of the whole spectacle was simple: exploit individual tragedies, selectively omit timelines that make him look incompetent (like declaring D.C. crime "solved" right before Guard members are ambushed), and insist that Democrats are to blame for every horror because they won’t rubber-stamp his mass-deportation agenda. Trump wrapped it all up by chastising Democrats for not backing his crackdown, as if refusing to clap for weaponized xenophobia is the real scandal. Welcome to the "golden age" — where the president narrates carnage to justify state cruelty, then calls it strength.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
anti-war president bravely considers starting new war
Trump explains that he was always against stupid wars, right up until he needed a smart one with no evidence and a really big troop deployment.
Donald Trump, the guy who swore he was elected to end "these ridiculous endless wars", is now assembling the biggest invasion force since Iraq and refusing to tell anyone what he plans to do with it. Democrats emerged from a classified Iran briefing with Marco Rubio – yes, that foreign policy heavyweight – to warn that something massive might be coming, while also carefully avoiding the one clear sentence available: "No, you cannot start another Middle East war on vibes and Fox hits."
Instead, we get a familiar Bush-era remix: first Iran is bad because of its crackdown on protesters, then because of its nuclear program, then because of missiles, then because Trump claims – without evidence – that Tehran is building rockets that can soon hit the US. This is all happening after last summer’s "Midnight Hammer" strikes that Trump said had already "obliterated" Iran’s nuclear program, which apparently has Schrödinger’s enrichment facilities: simultaneously destroyed forever and such an urgent threat we might need a full-scale war.
JD Vance, Rubio, and real estate developer-turned-envoy Steve Witkoff are out insisting this totally isn’t Iraq 2.0, while literally recycling the Iraq 1.0 script about a "clear and present danger" and weapons that can strike us any minute now (evidence to follow, never). House Democrats, after "tumultuous internal deliberation" – also known as checking the polls – are bravely planning to force Trump to come explain his war plans to Congress, which they describe as potentially "unconstitutional" without authorization, as if the administration hasn’t been sprinting past constitutional guardrails for years. The president who ran against foreign wars is now edging toward starting a new one, and Washington’s main concern seems to be making sure the paperwork looks tidy on the way to the next disaster.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
first lady cosplay: melania to chair un security council
Melania Trump practices wielding the UN security council gavel, presumably after clearing it with the board of peace legal department at Mar-a-Lago.
The United States has taken over the rotating presidency of the UN security council, so naturally Donald Trump has handed the gavel to the most qualified person he could find: his wife. Melania Trump will preside over a formal session of the 15‑member body on "Children, Technology, and Education in Conflict," because nothing says functioning democracy like turning the world’s top security forum into a family side gig. The White House is proudly touting this as the first time a sitting first lady has chaired the council, which is a bit like bragging that you’re the first person to perform brain surgery because you once watched a YouTube video about it.
Normally, these meetings are run by UN ambassadors or senior cabinet officials – you know, people whose job description includes "diplomacy" instead of "Christmas décor and cyberbullying slogans." But while Melania gavels in the session, Mike Waltz and the rest of the actual diplomats will sit politely and pretend this is all very normal, as the administration wraps foreign policy, child abductions in Ukraine, and global security in a glossy PR bow.
All of this is happening while Trump is busy attacking the UN as "ineffective," withdrawing the US from WHO and the UNFCCC, cutting aid to Palestinian refugees, and trying to build his own knockoff alternative, the "board of peace" – a kind of wish.com United Nations run out of his ego. So on one track, he’s gutting multilateral institutions; on the other, he’s using what’s left of them as a stage set for the Trump brand. The message to the world is clear: US institutions are now props, and the presidency is a family business – global security council included.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
trump calls nyc mayor a communist, also his new best friend
Trump explaining that the communist mayor he totally likes, totally hates, and totally controls with tunnel money is actually proof the system is working beautifully.
Donald Trump has once again invited New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Washington, because nothing says "functioning democracy" like the president publicly branding you a communist while privately insisting you’re "a very rational person" and "a nice guy." Republicans are still screaming that Mamdani will destroy New York City, while Trump’s over here doing the political equivalent of, "He’s terrible, I love him, we talk all the time, don’t worry about it."
The White House won’t say what this meeting is actually about, but we do know Trump just thawed $127 million in previously frozen federal funds for the Hudson River tunnel project after weeks of railing against it and swearing the feds wouldn’t cover cost overruns. So the president is simultaneously attacking critical infrastructure on TV, quietly turning the money spigot on and off, and keeping his chats with the mayor "private" while announcing from the State of the Union podium that he speaks to Mamdani "a lot." Totally normal, very transparent, not at all a guy using federal cash and access as a personal patronage system.
So Mamdani flies to D.C. again to "focus on bettering New York City," while Trump gets to play mob landlord of the tri-state area: insult you in public, dangle tunnel money in private, then brag about how often you call. American federalism has apparently been replaced with vibes-based infrastructure and whatever Trump thinks after his third Diet Coke.
#killing-democracy#money
trump slaps sanctions on free speech, gets sued by the bill of rights
The First Amendment, seen here being routed through OFAC before it's allowed to speak.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new interpretation of the First Amendment: you’re free to speak, and they’re free to financially strangle you and your family if they don’t like what you say. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, was sanctioned by the US for describing Israel’s Gaza campaign as genocide and for criticizing US support. Now her husband and minor child – including their American daughter – are suing the White House, arguing that maybe, just maybe, the government isn’t supposed to ruin your life because it fears your persuasiveness.
The lawsuit details how the sanctions have wrecked the family’s ability to live and work in Washington, right down to accessing their own home, because nothing says "land of the free" like using financial warfare against a UN investigator for her reports. Washington had already thrown a tantrum at the UN trying to get Albanese fired; when that failed, the administration simply slapped sanctions on her, branding her work a "campaign of political and economic warfare" – which is rich coming from the people literally weaponizing the US sanctions regime against a critic.
Albanese, an Italian human rights lawyer, has continued issuing reports accusing Israel of genocide and outlining what she calls a "genocidal economy" in the Palestinian territories, while Israeli UN ambassador Danny Danon accused her of turning the word "genocide" into a weapon. The US, meanwhile, is busy turning the Treasury Department into a speech-policing squad, casually testing whether they can punish a foreign official and her American family for saying things the president and his friends don’t like. It’s less "shining city on a hill" and more "petty authoritarian HOA with nukes."
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#imperialism
octagon of democracy: ufc moves into the white house
The People’s House, now available as an octagon rental—founders not included, terms and conditions apply.
The Founders dreamed of a noble republic, and 250 years later we’ve arrived at: cage fights on the South Lawn. Donald Trump is celebrating America’s semiquincentennial by turning the White House into a UFC pop-up venue, complete with 5,000 live spectators on the lawn and another 80,000 people watching from the Ellipse, because nothing says "stable democracy" like turning the executive mansion into the world’s tackiest pay-per-view backdrop.
TKO president Mark Shapiro swears the UFC won’t "profit" from the reported $60m extravaganza, calling it a "long-term investment" in earned media—which is a poetic way of saying they’re using the presidency as a marketing campaign while corporate sponsors pick up half the tab. Trump, of course, promises the "biggest" fights ever, because if there’s one constant in this administration, it’s that everything is the biggest, greatest, and most historically important branding opportunity in human history.
While Jon Jones, Conor McGregor, Amanda Nunes, and others angle for a spot on the card, the real main event is the slow-motion TKO of basic norms: the White House as set piece, the presidency as ring announcer, and American independence repackaged as a cross-promotion between a sitting president and his billionaire fight-promoter pal. Checks and balances are out; cage and canvas are in.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump proves autocracy is a choice, not a fate
Donald Trump, heroic freedom fighter against the tyranny of counting all the votes.
Western democracy is having a midlife crisis, and Donald Trump is the guy it met on Facebook Marketplace who insists you don’t need brakes if you believe hard enough. Kenneth Roth points out that while Trump and his far-right pals across Britain, Germany, and France are busy normalizing contempt for elections, courts, and basic reality, the people who actually know what dictatorship feels like are in the streets risking prison and bullets to demand democracy.
Meanwhile, a chunk of the western working class, ground down by inequality and ignored by the political establishment, has decided that the answer to "no one listens to us" is "let’s back the guy who openly wants fewer checks on his power." Trump and his imitators offer them nothing material, but do provide an endless buffet of scapegoats: immigrants, minorities, "elites," anyone except the billionaires writing the checks. It’s a familiar Trump-era special: authoritarianism dressed up as anti-elite populism, then served with a side of tax cuts for donors.
Roth notes that in the global south, people who’ve actually lived under autocrats are busy toppling them — from Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina to Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksas, from Bolsonaro getting voted out in Brazil to Polish voters finally ejecting Law and Justice. While Trump whines that American democracy is "rigged" because it occasionally makes him lose, protesters from Hong Kong to Uganda are literally dying for the thing he treats as an obstacle to better TV ratings.
So no, autocracy isn’t "inevitable" — it’s a series of choices made by politicians like Trump who want power without accountability, and by parties too cowardly to confront them. The global south keeps proving people will fight for democracy. The question is whether the US will keep handing the car keys to the guy repeatedly trying to drive the Constitution into a wall.
#killing-democracy#fascism
blue states roll out 'no thanks, former ice goons' policy
ICE recruiters explain that joining Trump’s deportation surge is totally normal public service and definitely won’t haunt your résumé for the rest of your natural life.
Trump’s deportation army is having a bit of a PR problem. After Congress showered ICE with nearly $30bn via the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (subtle) and the agency went on a "wartime recruitment" binge complete with $50,000 signing bonuses and xenophobic memes, the country got what it paid for: masked agents, racial profiling, illegal detentions, family separations, and now people being shot in the street. Shockingly, some Democratic-led states have decided that if you sign up to be part of Trump’s mass-deportation cosplay, you don’t get to waltz back into a nice, respectable government job later like it was all just a quirky gap year.
New Jersey’s Ravi Bhalla wants anyone who joins ICE during Trump’s current term permanently barred from state and local government work. Maryland’s "ICE Breaker Act" would keep fresh ICE recruits out of state police, especially now that at least one Trump-pardoned January 6 rioter has landed a Justice Department job, because nothing says "public safety" like insurrection alumni and deportation enforcers with guns. California’s "Melt Ice" act goes further, telling would-be agents that if they sign up for Trump’s deportation surge, they can forget about becoming teachers or cops in the nation’s largest state. Republicans are clutching their pearls about "employment discrimination" while DHS insists ICE agents are "heroes"—a bold branding exercise for an agency currently associated with masked raids, street stops of "people who look undocumented," and a couple of very public shootings.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are holding up DHS funding until Republicans agree to the wild, radical notion that maybe armed federal officers shouldn’t roam around in masks, break into private property without warrants, or stop random people on the street because they look foreign. DHS has technically shut down, but the deportation machine keeps humming along on Trump’s giant pre-funded slush bill. So states are doing the only thing left in a system where federal accountability is a rumor: drawing a bright line that says, if you proudly sign up to carry out this administration’s civil-rights-abusing deportation crusade, don’t expect a soft landing in our schools, police forces, or civil service later. Actions, meet consequences.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#lawlessness
oklahoma governor discovers 'integrity,' checks watch, realizes it's 2026
Kevin Stitt, bravely advocating for integrity while standing in the smoking crater of a party that spent a decade bulldozing it.
Kevin Stitt, governor of the state that handed Trump 66% of the vote, has looked around at the authoritarian cosplay, the mass-deportation talk, and the petty vendettas against offshore wind and decided the GOP should, quote, "get back to integrity." Bold stance, only ten years and several constitutional crises late. He calls Trump’s move to yank permits from an almost-finished Rhode Island wind project "un-American" — which is a polite way of saying "governing as personal spite," also known as the Trump administration’s core competency.
The governor then wanders into immigration heresy, asking the forbidden question: is the actual plan to deport every undocumented person in the country, or is Trump just yelling words again? Stitt suggests work visas for undocumented workers and complains about federal immigration raids trampling states’ rights, which is deeply offensive to an administration that views the law as a suggestion and the states as potential backdrops for campaign rallies.
As chair of the National Governors Association, Stitt also had to explain to Trump that if you only invite Republican governors to the White House, you can’t pretend it’s an NGA event representing all 50 states. After some public sulking and a phone call from Dear Leader, the White House grudgingly invited everyone — while still snubbing two Democrats from the formal dinner, because petty exclusion is now official governing strategy. Bipartisanship, but make it middle-school cafeteria.
And then there’s Stitt’s relationship with the Cherokee Nation: he celebrates his Cherokee heritage while fighting tribal sovereignty in court, opposing the Supreme Court ruling that affirmed tribal jurisdiction over "Indian country" and getting sued by multiple tribes over state enforcement of wildlife laws on tribal land. So yes, he’s against Trump’s federal overreach, but very into his own state-level overreach. The GOP’s post-Trump vision, apparently, is fewer wind farms, more lawsuits from Native nations, and a slightly nicer tone while they keep playing "who actually gets to have rights" on hard mode.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
kash patel turns the fbi into trump’s hr department
Aerial view of the world’s most successful evidence-tampering crime scene, now with built-in presidential immunity and oceanfront classified storage.
Kash Patel, now running the FBI like Trump’s personal revenge startup, has fired at least six agents involved in the 2022 Mar-a-Lago search, plus several other staffers who made the unforgivable mistake of doing their jobs when the president was hoarding classified documents at his beach country club. The message is clear: investigate Trump, lose your job. Steal government secrets and refuse to give them back? That’s a staffing priority at this administration’s other Florida office.
This little loyalty purge lands the same day Patel loudly complained that the prior FBI leadership obtained his phone records and those of current White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles as part of the Trump investigations. Rather than dispute the legality, he just screams “outrageous” and then immediately starts firing the people connected to the probe. Independent law enforcement is so 2015; now we have an Official Enemies List Division.
The firings are part of a wider campaign to clear out anyone tied not just to the Trump cases but also to the Jan. 6 investigation that produced hundreds of charges against rioters. One of the previously fired officials, David Sundberg, is now running for Congress, presumably on the “I was punished for trying to uphold the law” ticket. Meanwhile, Patel is catching heat for chugging beers in the U.S. men’s hockey locker room at the Olympics, which is perfect: your federal police chief is too busy doing frat-house cosplay abroad to explain why the nation’s top law enforcement agency is being remodeled into Trump’s personal protection racket at home.
#killing-democracy#fascism
state of the union, state of the dumpster fire
Trump delivers the longest State of the Union in history, seen here testing how far you can stretch a speech before facts experience total organ failure.
Donald Trump’s record-long State of the Union was less a policy speech and more a two-hour hostage video for reality itself. He bragged that the economy is perfect, inflation is tamed, and a golden age is dawning, while Democrats responded with the traditional constitutional remedy for gaslighting: calling him a liar on national television. Ilhan Omar went a bit further, noting that Trump’s policies literally killed two of her constituents, which is a pretty strong review of the administration’s public safety record. Republicans, led by JD Vance, decided the real scandal wasn’t dead constituents, but Democrats not standing up on cue like trained seals.
The president then jumped on Truth Social to call Omar and Rashida Tlaib “low IQ” and threatened to “send them back from where they came from – as fast as possible,” which is a bold thing to say about two US citizens serving in Congress, and a neat little fascism speedrun in 17 words or less. While Trump was fantasizing about deporting elected officials, Capitol police arrested Omar’s guest Aliya Rahman – a US citizen previously dragged from her car by immigration agents – for the crime of… standing up during the speech. The message is clear: if you’re brown and not applauding loudly enough, the security state is happy to help you find the exit.
Out in the policy swamp, JD Vance helpfully announced the administration is “temporarily” halting over a quarter billion dollars in Medicaid reimbursements to Minnesota as part of Trump’s shiny new “war on fraud,” which coincidentally looks a lot like a war on poor people and blue states. A federal judge, apparently still dimly aware that laws exist, ruled Trump’s scheme of deporting immigrants to random “third countries” they have no connection to is unlawful and must be set aside – but generously gave the government 15 days to appeal, so they have time to brainstorm an even more creative way to break the law.
Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, wellness influencer Casey Means, did her best impression of a Goop newsletter and dodged basic vaccine questions, just as more than a dozen states sued the administration for rolling back childhood vaccine recommendations. Public health is being run like a sponsored Instagram reel. Over at the FBI, whistleblowers say director Kash Patel’s personal travel and decision-making are sabotaging major investigations, because why have an independent law enforcement agency when you can have a road-tripping Trump loyalist kneecapping cases from 30,000 feet? And at DOJ, the antitrust chief Gail Slater was forced out under a cloud, prompting House Democrats to demand a briefing on why corporate power keeps winning and regulators keep disappearing. The State of the Union may be strong, but the state of the rule of law is on a ventilator.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
vance discovers new hobby: holding poor people’s insulin hostage
J.D. Vance explaining which children, seniors, and disabled people will be used as leverage today, purely out of fiscal responsibility of course.
J.D. Vance has apparently decided that the best way to demonstrate the compassion and moral seriousness of the Trump administration is to suspend federal Medicaid payments to Minnesota, because nothing screams "constitutional federalism" like cutting off healthcare money to millions of low‑income residents over a political fight with their state government.
This is not budget policy, it’s a hostage situation. The White House found a way to turn Medicaid — the basic safety net program for poor kids, disabled people, seniors in nursing homes, and low-wage workers — into a blunt-force political weapon. Minnesota elects a Democratic governor? Cool story, says Vance; enjoy explaining to your hospitals, clinics, and patients why Washington just kneecapped their funding. The message to every other state is clear: obey, or we’ll see how your ICU does without federal cash.
There’s barely even a pretense of legality here. Congress created and funds Medicaid, but Vance is standing in front of cameras acting like he personally owns the money and can flip the switch off whenever a state displeases Dear Leader. It’s the same old Trump formula: take a core function of government, break it on purpose, then brag to the base about how tough you are while people scramble to figure out whether grandma’s nursing home still gets paid next month.
So while Republicans on TV rave about the president’s "vision" and "unity" after the State of the Union, his vice president is busy testing how far they can go in turning federal benefits into a loyalty program. Health care as protection racket: nice Medicaid program you’ve got there, Minnesota. Be a shame if something happened to it.
#killing-democracy#healthcare
trump admin bravely promises not to send immigration goons to your polling place (for now)
A voter in New York carries a ballot, blissfully unaware that somewhere in Washington, Steve Bannon is workshopping ways to add ICE agents and a perimeter fence to this scene.
The Trump administration would like a cookie for announcing that, despite weeks of fascist cosplay on right-wing podcasts, ICE will not be deployed to patrol U.S. polling places in the midterms. On a call with state election officials, DHS assistant secretary for election integrity Heather Honey had to clarify that "any suggestion" of ICE at polling locations is "simply disinformation" and that there will be no ICE presence. When the bar is "we will grudgingly follow federal law that already bans this," the Trump team is somehow tripping over it in slow motion.
This sudden respect for the law comes after Trump spent his second term fantasizing about federal control of state-run elections, ranting about imaginary noncitizen voter fraud, and using the State of the Union to recycle those lies. Steve Bannon helpfully said the quiet part very loud on his podcast: "We're going to have ICE surround the polls come November." Then White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt chimed in with the reassuring line that she "can't guarantee" ICE agents won't be hanging around voting locations. Nothing says "free and fair elections" like leaving the door wide open to armed immigration cops as a vibes-based deterrent.
Election officials from both parties, who have apparently read the Constitution at least once, are now spending their time gaming out how to fend off federal interference instead of, say, making sure the scanners work. Their anxiety wasn’t helped by the FBI raid on the Fulton County, Georgia elections hub, which appears tied directly to already-debunked 2020 conspiracy theories that Trump still clings to like a MyPillow coupon. So yes, DHS is now on a conference call solemnly promising to not do the blatantly illegal voter intimidation thing that Trump’s allies are openly fantasizing about. Democracy is totally fine, why do you ask?
Bottom line: the administration is using the threat of ICE and federal power as a political weapon while pretending to be the responsible adults for not crossing the last bright red legal line. When your big pro-democracy announcement is "we swear we won't send the deportation squad to your polling place," you’re not safeguarding elections — you’re killing-democracy and asking for applause.
#killing-democracy#fascism
maine university bravely protects students from hearing a zoom call
University of Southern Maine administrators bravely defending academic freedom by locking the doors and unplugging the projector.
The University of Southern Maine has discovered a bold new interpretation of the First Amendment: you’re free to speak, as long as Republicans at the statehouse and the Trump Treasury Department are cool with it. Days before a conference on Palestine, the university yanked the campus venue because one of the scheduled speakers was UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who is under Trump sanctions. Minor problem: the Treasury Department’s own Office of Foreign Assets Control already clarified that having a sanctioned person speak at a conference is not illegal — as long as you’re not paying them or training them to overthrow America between panels.
USM’s leadership, however, decided that obeying actual written federal guidance was less important than appeasing Republican lawmakers demanding to know what the university is doing to protect the “safety and well-being” of Jewish students — apparently now synonymous with “never allowing anyone critical of Israeli policy to appear on a screen.” Administrators cited fears of losing federal funding, then kept moving the goalposts: when organizers offered to drop Albanese from the program entirely, the university suddenly needed more time to assess the nebulous “risk” of people…talking.
Free speech lawyers point out that this is exactly how Trump’s deliberately vague sanctions regime is supposed to work: not just punishing the target, but scaring everyone else into shutting up preemptively. The Knight First Amendment Institute literally sued Treasury over this, won a clarification, and yet here we are — a public university pretending it has to cancel a conference because a UN human rights expert might beam in over Zoom. On the bright side, organizers say the attempted gag has only made more people interested in attending. Turns out if you try to strangle open debate in the name of “safety,” you mostly just prove how badly that debate is needed.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump turns cia into america’s new neighborhood watch
CIA analysts eagerly log in to the new all-you-can-eat domestic surveillance buffet, courtesy of the Trump White House’s ‘what if Watergate, but bigger’ initiative.
The Trump administration has decided that decades of post-Watergate safeguards are really more of a vibe than a rule, and is quietly giving the CIA and friends easier access to a massive trove of domestic law-enforcement files. We’re talking hundreds of millions of documents — FBI case files, banking records, investigations into labor unions — all now potentially available to agencies that are supposed to focus on foreign threats, not whether you donated to the wrong organization or showed up at the wrong protest.
To make this magic trick legal-adjacent, Trump has helpfully rebranded more than a dozen Latin American drug cartels and gangs as “terrorist organizations,” then used that label as an all-access pass to law-enforcement databases and even missile strikes on suspected smugglers. Civil liberties advocates and even career intelligence officials are basically waving red flares, pointing out that this guts long-standing bans on domestic spying and creates a sprawling, secret surveillance pipeline with almost no judicial oversight and barely any consultation with Congress. The administration’s position, roughly translated: if we call everyone a terrorist, then nobody has rights — problem solved.
Inside the government, the process has all the thoughtful deliberation of a late-night Trump tweet. Officials describe minimal legal review, little debate, and a strong preference for just “turning on the spigot” and commingling all available information — precisely what prior generations outlawed after Nixon used the CIA as his personal paranoia concierge service. Intelligence agencies already operate in a black box; now that box is being stuffed with data on Americans not even suspected of crimes, under rules almost nobody outside the executive branch has seen. But don’t worry, the Director of National Intelligence says it’s all about “bi-directional sharing of information,” which is a very soothing way to describe dismantling the wall between foreign spying and domestic policing.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
