The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Democrats are now literally wargaming how to keep elections functioning because the sitting president won’t stop screaming that democracy is fake unless he wins. In a DC conference room, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Raphael Warnock, Elissa Slotkin and friends sat through tabletop scenarios featuring AI deepfakes, death threats to election workers, and armed guys in tactical cosplay showing up at polling places – also known as "the Republican base, but with better filters."

While experts walk senators through synthetic videos and firebombed drop boxes, Donald Trump is out on primetime TV insisting China stole voter data for 220 million Americans, that 2020 was rigged against him, and that only his "Save America Act" (banning mail-in ballots nationwide and jacking up ID requirements) can fix it. Intelligence reports? His own government already said China didn’t interfere, but Trump’s solution is to threaten broadcast licenses of networks that won’t air his rant live and to push federal oversight of state voter rolls via OMB and potential FCC punishment for inconvenient coverage. Totally normal stuff from a guy who swears the real threat is "election fraud."

Protect Democracy, Democracy Forward, Marc Elias, Eric Holder and others are basically running a democracy disaster drill: what if Trump withholds funds from states that won’t hand over voter rolls, what if DHS and the National Guard suddenly materialize at polling places, what if vigilantes stake out ballot boxes and start doxxing license plates? The cheery takeaway: this is an "all-hands-on-deck" moment. Translation: the Constitution is still technically there, but the president is busy treating it like a suggestion while his allies test how far they can push fascism before someone in Congress finds a spine.

The Minnesota GOP is reportedly torn over whether to hand its gubernatorial nomination to Mike Lindell, the "MyPillow" CEO who turned mass-election-denial into a full-time performance art piece. He's running on a straight Trump platform, because of course the party that tried to overturn an election is now workshopping a sequel: January 6, But Make It Scandinavian.

Some Republicans are worried that Lindell’s very public devotion to Trump might hurt them in November, which is adorable, since that same devotion has been the party’s entire personality for six years. The internal debate boils down to this: do they want a normal extremist who quietly undermines democracy, or the guy who live-streams it from a hotel ballroom next to a stack of discount pillows?

Either way, Minnesota voters are being asked to choose between ordinary conservative dysfunction and a man who spent the last election cycle trying to prove that Excel spreadsheets are a deep-state psyop. The Trump movement keeps insisting it’s not a cult, yet here we are, watching a major party seriously consider putting the MyPillow guy in charge of a state government. Sweet dreams, democracy.

Donald Trump’s justice department has once again discovered a bold new legal theory: the First Amendment is adorable, but only for people who praise Dear Leader. Federal prosecutor Will Rosenzweig was two weeks away from trying a multimillion‑dollar Medicare fraud case when conservative influencer and part‑time informant Natalie Winters dug up his long‑dead personal blog – a mix of travel, sports, and the unforgivable crime of criticizing Donald Trump – and blasted it out on social media, helpfully tagging senior DOJ officials like she was filing a customer service complaint with an authoritarian regime.

Less than three hours later, while Rosenzweig was out of town with his family observing Rosh Hashanah, he got an email personally signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi firing him. No hearing, no process, just straight from "Happy New Year" to "you’re fired for thoughtcrime." This, mind you, was a prosecutor who had returned millions to taxpayers fighting healthcare fraud and was doing so well they’d just promised him a special parking spot. In Trumpworld, that apparently translates to: excellent at your job, but insufficiently worshipful of the guy who lost the popular vote twice.

The lawsuit makes the subtext explicit: the firing was part of a broader purge of prosecutors who worked on Trump-related investigations or were insufficiently loyal to the MAGA line. Rosenzweig’s complaint torches the idea that Americans must muzzle themselves forever on the off chance they might one day work for the government, noting that conditioning public employment on political loyalty is more Havana and Caracas than Hamilton and Madison. The current DOJ, of course, declined to comment, presumably because "we fired him for hurting the president’s feelings" doesn’t test well in front of a federal judge.

So here we are: a Justice Department that treats old blog posts as disqualifying heresy, while actual Medicare fraudsters were about to go on trial thanks to the guy they just canned. Rule of law under Trump means the law rules you, and Trump rules the law. Everyone else can choose: keep your job, or keep your opinions.

Tennessee Republicans looked at a majority-Black Memphis district and, inspired by a US supreme court that keeps treating the Voting Rights Act like a suggestion, decided it would look much better in pieces. The once-compact, Memphis-based 9th district was cracked apart and stretched 200 miles across rural Tennessee, with 71% of voters now new to the district. A Black-majority seat that favored Democrats has been lovingly converted into a Trump-approved, GOP-tilting Frankenstein, all as part of Donald Trump’s grand plan to cling to a slim House majority by rebalancing democracy through a map instead of, you know, voters.

On the surface, the headlines are about Justin Pearson vs Brent Taylor. Pearson, the Democrat, is the same legislator Republicans literally expelled from the Tennessee House for daring to protest for gun control after a school shooting, so naturally he’s now the nominee for a seat that used to represent Memphis, before Republicans sent it on a scenic tour of rural white grievance country. Taylor, the Republican, arrives with Trump’s endorsement and a district engineered to help him win, because nothing screams “confident movement with popular ideas” like having to racially dissect a city to stay competitive.

Meanwhile, in a subplot, MAGA Freedom Caucus star Andy Ogles — whose phone the FBI once seized over campaign finance questions — actually loses his primary to Charlie Hatcher, a pro-Trump farmer backed by Governor Bill Lee. Ogles becomes one of Trump’s rare primary losers, but don’t confuse that with a loss for Trumpism; Hatcher’s campaign message was essentially, “Imagine how much more Trump we could get if our congressman shut up and just did what he’s told.” The personnel changed, the obedience level went up.

By the end of the night, Memphis — historically the base of its own congressional district — has been sliced into three separate districts that shoot out into rural areas like gerrymandered bike spokes, diluting Black urban power into a nice, pale, Republican-friendly slurry. But hey, Marsha Blackburn is now one step closer to abandoning her Senate seat to be governor, and state Republicans get to pretend this is all just neutral map-drawing and not a carefully calibrated effort to make sure the wrong people never get too much representation. Democracy isn’t dying in Tennessee; it’s being redistricted into oblivion.

Fresh off the supreme court telling him that the constitution still technically exists, Donald Trump signed two new executive orders trying to kneecap birthright citizenship anyway. The White House claims it’s about tightening eligibility and stopping "birth tourism"; the constitution calls it "that thing we explicitly settled in 1868". Trump’s solution to losing in court is apparently to just keep signing pieces of paper until reality gives up.

The orders expand who the administration deems ineligible for birthright citizenship and go after so‑called "birth tourism," which Trump insists involves "hundreds of thousands" of people. Actual data from the Migration Policy Institute suggests more like 9,600 births in 2024, but why let numbers get in the way of a good nativist panic? Meanwhile, a fun historical footnote: Fred Trump was born a U.S. citizen to a non‑citizen mother who arrived in New York five months pregnant. So yes, the guy trying to blow up birthright citizenship is literally the heir to what he now brands as the problem.

This is not policy; it’s a long-running fantasy cosplay where Trump pretends the 14th Amendment is optional and the executive branch can just edit the constitution by press release. The supreme court already rejected his first try, but the second-term project appears to be: keep attacking the very idea of equal citizenship until the law, or the country, breaks first.

The National Park Service has gently informed President Trump that his 250-foot ego prosthetic — the proposed "Trump Arch" jammed into Memorial Circle by Arlington National Cemetery — would, technically speaking, trash the historic core of the capital. NPS identified 37 historic properties that would be adversely affected, because apparently dropping a giant golden participation trophy between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House slightly disrupts the whole "solemn national memory" vibe.

The report notes that the existing landscape was designed to symbolically unite North and South, a subtlety lost on a president whose aesthetic runs more "Vegas off-ramp" than "careful civic planning." The arch would sever the ceremonial axis between the Lincoln Memorial and Robert E. Lee’s former home and loom over the cemetery like a branded billboard for American decline.

Meanwhile, a group of Vietnam War veterans has already sued, arguing the structure is a visual insult to the dead and requires congressional approval — which Trump both denies and, naturally, has not sought. So we’ve arrived at the logical endpoint of this presidency: the commander in chief trying to muscle a giant campaign logo into protected federal land over the objections of veterans, historians, and his own park service, all so tourists can gaze upon the republic’s first federally subsidized vanity arch.

Trump’s glorious ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs—his big-brain plan to rescue the US economy by slapping taxes on everything that moves—have now officially been upgraded from ‘bad policy’ to illegal, courtesy of the US supreme court. The administration has been forced to refund about $100bn, including a fat chunk to Nintendo, which just posted a 53.5% profit spike because the White House had to give back the money it never should’ve taken in the first place. Truly, a jobs program for corporate accounting departments.

The best part? Trump is still out there selling tariffs as the cure for the deficit, manufacturing, and probably male pattern baldness, even as his own illegal levies are turning into a worldwide cashback rewards program. Nintendo sued to get its full refund plus interest, is getting hammered by a class action for jacking up prices during the tariff era, and is now quietly enjoying the windfall while consumers are told they already got exactly what they ‘bargained and paid for’. The only consistent winner here is corporate profit; US trade policy is just the loot box mechanic.

Undeterred by the small inconvenience of having his last mega-tariff spree declared unlawful, Trump has already rolled out a fresh round of tariffs on more than 80 countries, including Japan. Twenty-five US states are now suing the administration over the new levies, which means we’ve essentially turned international trade into a subscription service for constitutional litigation. Trump’s America: where the rule of law, global supply chains, and your console prices all depend on how fast the courts can keep up with a guy who thinks tariffs are a personality type.