The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Israel has finally admitted that its soldiers opened fire on the car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six of her family members in Gaza back in January 2024 — the same incident they spent months insisting they had nothing to do with. Hind died after a three-hour phone call begging the Palestinian Red Crescent to rescue her, while the Israel Defense Forces claimed they simply weren’t in the area. Turns out, according to media investigations, those mysterious nearby tanks weren’t ghosts after all.

The IDF now says there will be a criminal investigation, which in Israeli military justice terms usually translates to: hold a press conference, issue a sternly worded PDF, and then quietly misplace the file. A UN report already described a “pervasive climate of impunity” in the occupied territories, and a UN commission has found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — tens of thousands of civilians dead, whole neighborhoods erased, and Washington still signing the weapons checks like it’s Amazon Prime for artillery.

Meanwhile, back in the land of freedom and democracy cosplay, the Trump-era GOP and its successors spent years turning unconditional support for this into a patriotic sacrament: endless weapons, zero red lines, and anyone asking about dead kids was accused of hating America, Israel, and probably Christmas. The result: a five-year-old spends her last hours on the phone, begging to be saved from US-armed allies who later say, whoops, our bad, we’ll investigate ourselves and get back to you never.

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate and full-time election truther, has decided that losing Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary by 11 points is merely a suggestion. He’s now offering to personally bankroll a full hand recount and audit of every paper ballot in the state, because when you’ve torched tens of millions chasing imaginary fraud, what’s another $825,000 between you and reality?

Clutching a Minnesota statute like it’s the last MyPillow promo code on Earth, Lindell insists he has the "right" to a complete hand count and plans to use it "to the full extent of the law"—which, translated, means forcing election workers to spend weeks proving he lost by exactly the same humiliating margin, but slower. His campaign is alleging mysterious "irregularities" in electronic reporting data, also known as: the numbers where he did badly.

This latest tantrum comes on the heels of Lindell refusing to concede and just weeks after he quietly settled a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit from a voting tech company formerly known as Dominion, which he spent years accusing of masterminding a global election heist. Courts have repeatedly told him his claims are nonsense, but the Big Lie industrial complex has no off switch—just a bigger, more desperate crowdfunding page.

So Minnesota gets to be the next stage for the ongoing Republican experiment: what if we treat every inconvenient election result as provisional until the most conspiracy-addled guy in the room feels emotionally validated? The good news is he has to pay for this circus himself. The bad news is the price democracy keeps paying so these people can cosplay as victims is a lot higher than $825,000.

The Trump administration has discovered an exciting new use for the Census Bureau: turning a nonpartisan statistical agency into a content mill for election conspiracy fan fiction. An unsigned, seven-page "report" — helpfully assembled not by career Census experts but by a team that includes friends from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute — magically finds over 24,000 alleged noncitizen voters in 2020, with Trump promising the number will "explode" once they finish running the rest of the data through the grievance blender.

Normally, the Census Bureau measures things like population and housing. Under Trump, it now measures how far you can stretch a commercial voter file and some mystery admin records before every election expert in the country starts laughing. The methodology is opaque, the authors are anonymous, and the people who supposedly believe in it refuse to answer questions — which, in this White House, now counts as "maximizing transparency." Meanwhile, actual studies show noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare, but that hasn't stopped Trump from using these junk numbers to demand sweeping new voting restrictions just in time for the midterms.

Election experts are openly calling the analysis "laughable," which is generous, because the punchline is that even these cooked numbers are too tiny to have changed the 2020 outcome. So the administration has managed to corrupt the Census, launder partisan propaganda through a federal agency, and still not find enough imaginary fraud to justify the coup they keep retroactively trying to validate. Strong work all around.

Natalie Harp, former OAN host and professional Trump resurrection story, has gone from RNC cancer testimonial to executive assistant to the president — a job that normally means scheduling meetings, not curating reality for an aspiring autocrat. Officially, she’s the person who handles logistics and paperwork. Unofficially, she’s the “human printer,” constantly glued to Trump’s side with a portable printer like some cursed Office Depot angel, deciding which headlines and social posts get beamed directly into the presidential brainstem.

This isn’t just quirky office culture. Whoever controls the paper flow to a president who barely reads and only trusts praise has massive power over what he believes is happening in the world. Harp also ghostwrites his Truth Social posts, typing in his voice while he watches Kamala Harris speeches and rants, which means some of those unhinged presidential statements aren’t just from Trump’s id — they’re co-produced fan fiction. Reporters and insiders describe her as his “gatekeeper,” “comfort blanket,” and, per Maggie Haberman, basically his emotional support staffer on secret national-security flights, because apparently the nuclear codes travel with a binky now.

When Senator Jon Ossoff’s questions put a spotlight on her influence, the White House responded not with transparency, but with a toddler-grade meltdown on X, calling CNN’s Kristen Holmes a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment” and predicting her own children will be “sickened” by her journalism. So the public learns that a devoted election denier — who reportedly once wrote to Trump, “You are all that matters to me” — is filtering his information, scripting his posts, and flying on sensitive trips, and the official response is to threaten reporters’ future family therapy bills. Totally normal, healthy democracy stuff.

Global health experts spent months warning that the Ebola outbreak in the DRC could outstrip the 2014–16 crisis. Now it has: more than 2,300 dead, the deadliest Ebola outbreak the country has ever seen, driven by a rare Bundibugyo strain with no effective vaccine, conflict zones, and attacks on treatment centers fueled by misinformation. So naturally, this was the perfect moment for Washington to take a chainsaw to the very institutions designed to stop this kind of thing.

Back in 2014, Barack Obama went to the UN, rallied the world, and let USAID do what it actually exists to do: train local health workers, do contact tracing, and build vaccination programs. Under Trump, we got the cosplay version: Elon Musk, self-appointed efficiency messiah and de facto head of the now-defunct "Department of Government Efficiency", was handed the controls and promptly dismantled USAID. The result in the DRC: weaker health systems, gutted surveillance, and the loss of hard-won institutional expertise – all because the world’s richest guys and their pet president decided competence was for losers.

Just to make sure the disaster had proper sequel energy, the US then withdrew from the World Health Organization, one of its biggest donors walking away in the middle of a century defined by pandemics. Europe, never one to miss a chance to copy the worst ideas available, also treated aid as optional charity instead of basic global survival infrastructure, with the UK planning to slash its aid budget even further. After a decade of solemn speeches about "global health security" and "lessons from Covid", governments chose the lesson "cut everything and hope nothing bad happens".

The DRC is now living with the bill for that ideological experiment. International aid wasn’t just some feel-good vanity project; it was the thin, boring, bureaucratic line between a containable outbreak and a spiraling catastrophe. The Trump-Musk efficiency project proved one thing with brutal clarity: when you blow up the fire department to save money, the fire doesn’t become more efficient – it just spreads.

Wyoming Republicans have decided that once you take out Liz Cheney for the crime of acknowledging a coup attempt, you deserve a promotion. Rep. Harriet Hageman, the Trump-anointed Cheney slayer, just won the GOP primary for the state’s open Senate seat in a place where Democrats haven’t been seen since rotary phones were cutting-edge technology.

Trump, naturally, bestowed his “complete and total endorsement” from the safety of Truth Social, calling Hageman a “TOTAL WINNER!” which, in this era, mostly means she didn’t vote to impeach him or investigate an attack on Congress. Her main credential isn’t policy, lawmaking, or oversight; it’s demonstrating that if you cross Trump on impeachment or Jan. 6, you get replaced by someone who will never make that mistake again.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis is retiring, allegedly because she doesn’t have six more years in her, and Wyoming seems poised to swap a standard-issue conservative for a more reliable cog in the Trump loyalty machine. With just under 577,000 people, the least-populated state in the country is on track to send another guaranteed vote for whatever election-denying, accountability-dodging agenda Trump world dreams up next. Representation: two senators per state, one functioning democracy not included.

Florida Democrats briefly tripped and fell into something resembling democracy when Angie Nixon, an underfunded democratic socialist who actually organizes and gets arrested for protesting DeSantis’s gerrymander, beat Alexander Vindman and his $16m nostalgia tour for that one time he mildly inconvenienced Trump. Turns out voters preferred the person who shows up to their neighborhoods over the guy who wouldn’t even show up to a debate.

Across the state, the GOP’s gerrymandered wonderland is working as designed: Debbie Wasserman Schultz smoothly relocates to a brand-new, safely blue district carved by Republicans, because when DeSantis and friends warp the map, establishment Dems don’t fight it, they just shop for the best seat. Black voters get a plurality district that used to be represented by a Black Democrat; now they get a white DNC lifer who’s already learned the first rule of Florida politics: never let a racist map go to waste.

Meanwhile, Jared Moskowitz, the centrist who proudly became the first Democrat to back Trump’s "Department of Government Efficiency" — the DOGE fever dream that gutted USAID like it owed Elon Musk money — cruises to victory over a democratic socialist calling for healthcare and free college. Moskowitz also backed a Republican law supercharging ICE’s detention powers and votes against restraining U.S. military adventures in Iran, because nothing says "moderate" like cheering on deportation squads and open-ended war.

So Nixon’s win is the glitch in the system: a grassroots left candidate emerging from a landscape engineered for oligarchy, gerrymandering, and bipartisan enthusiasm for Trumpworld’s demolition of government. One race hints at resistance; the rest of the map is still MAGA-flavored, corporate-approved, and very efficient at making sure power never accidentally ends up with the people.

The Trump administration has decided that if you can't beat war-crimes charges, you should just sanction the people trying to bring them. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions on International Criminal Court President Tomoko Akane and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, because their unforgivable offense was doing their jobs and investigating alleged atrocities by U.S. and Israeli officials. When your foreign policy doctrine is "American exceptionalism, but make it untouchable by law," this is what passes for statesmanship.

Rubio helpfully explained that the ICC is a "corrupt and fatally politicized" court that "assaults state sovereignty" by investigating genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. So naturally, the U.S. is freezing the judges' assets, banning their travel, and cutting off basic financial services—because nothing says "rule of law" like using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to financially kneecap foreign judges who had the audacity to treat American and Israeli officials like they’re subject to the same rules as everyone else.

While Trump sulks silently in the background, Rubio is out front demanding all 125 ICC member states withdraw and join his "dismantle it brick by brick" tour. Human rights groups and even ICC judges are now suing the administration in U.S. courts, arguing that Washington is illegally weaponizing sanctions to punish and coerce independent jurists. Human Rights Watch summed it up: the administration is chasing a global "get-out-of-jail-free card" for anyone it likes. The message to the world is clear: commit war crimes, get political cover; investigate war crimes, get sanctioned.

ABC just sued Brendan Carr’s Trump-era FCC for turning broadcast licenses into a political obedience test. The network says the administration forced its eight local stations into early license renewal as part of a long-running campaign to punish ABC for the unforgivable crime of airing journalism the White House doesn’t like. Apparently the first amendment now comes with an asterisk: void where Trump is mad at your coverage.

Former FCC officials from both parties have already sounded the alarm, warning that this stunt is meant to send a “chilling message” to every broadcaster: criticize the president, and your license suddenly becomes very theoretical. Meanwhile, conservative attack shops like the Center for American Rights and the Media Research Center have helpfully filed petitions urging the FCC to yank ABC’s licenses because its reporting is “politically biased” — which is rich coming from people whose primary contribution to media ethics is yelling “fake news” whenever facts are inconvenient.

So we’ve arrived at the part of the show where the federal communications regulator is allegedly being repurposed as a content police force, and license renewals hinge on whether your anchors sufficiently flatter Dear Leader. State TV without the efficiency, censorship without the paperwork, and a nice little message to every newsroom in America: your broadcast future depends on how generously you edit the president’s feelings.

The Trump White House, ever allergic to accountability, has now upgraded from screaming "fake news" to threat-modeling a reporter’s kids. CNN’s Kristen Holmes asked Donald Trump a basic question: respond to Jon Ossoff’s criticism that he’d rather swan around in his Qatar-gifted flying palace with Natalie Harp than do his actual job. Trump responded like any serious statesman: by calling Ossoff a "Pee-wee Herman lookalike" and barking "Quiet, quiet, quiet" at Holmes before defaulting to his favorite line of constitutional theory: "You’re fake news."

The White House “rapid response” account then heroically stepped in to defend the honor of the man with the nuclear codes, calling Holmes a "disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment" and labeling journalists "scumbags" for the crime of quoting a sitting senator to the president. Not satisfied with just professional smears, they went full authoritarian fan fiction, publicly telling Holmes that one day her children will find her "disgusting and inhumane question" and be "sickened and embarrassed" by their mother. Nothing says "confident democracy" like state power being used to intimidate a reporter by explicitly weaponizing her kids.

Communications director Steven Cheung, presumably paid with your tax dollars, joined the statesmanlike discourse by calling Ossoff "Jon Jackoff" and "the biggest cuck loser in politics" on social media, because apparently the administration’s official messaging strategy is now 4chan comments with a press badge. This all slots neatly into Trump’s long record of misogynistic attacks on women in the press corps—calling a Bloomberg reporter "piggy", branding CNN journalists "corrupt", and bailing on NBC’s Meet the Press after deciding the moderator was "crooked or stupid". The free press asks questions; the Trump White House responds by trying to publicly shame and endanger them. Truly, killing-democracy in real time, one tantrum at a time.

Donald Trump, noted expert in third-hand anecdotes, announced that the USS Abraham Lincoln is "beautifully maintained" and "beautifully taken care of" because an unnamed retired admiral allegedly told him so. Actual reporting from Navy Times and Stars and Stripes — you know, the outlets that talk to people who have actually been on the ship — describes water shortages, plumbing failures, and multiple sailors so desperate during this record-breaking deployment in the Strait of Hormuz that they’ve tried to go overboard. But Trump has "other people" (also unnamed, of course) who supposedly proved it’s all fine, so reality loses.

When a CNN reporter dared to ask about this tiny discrepancy between "everything is beautiful" and "my loved one is trying not to jump off a nuclear carrier," Trump snapped at her to "be quiet" and dismissed it all as fake news. The commander-in-chief’s message to sailors stuck at sea for over 250 days and their families watching them crumble under the Iran war’s strain is crystal clear: your mental health crisis is an inconvenience to his narrative.

Families of Lincoln crew members, who grew up being told to respect the military’s sacrifices, are now watching the president and defense secretary Pete Hegseth call their relatives’ experiences lies. One sister, speaking anonymously out of fear of retribution — always a great sign in a healthy democracy — says she’s "really angry" that the people with the power to help are instead pretending everything is fine. Trump gets his "beautiful" talking point, Hegseth gets to play tough-guy patriot on TV, and the sailors get to wonder how many more months they’ll be floating in a barely functioning metal pressure cooker so the White House can keep insisting nothing’s wrong.

Jared Kushner, the real estate failson who once pitched peace in the Middle East as a kind of zoning variance, has resurfaced as Trump's "Middle East envoy" to personally fix Gaza. This time he's doing it under the banner of Trump's self-appointed "Board of Peace" — an "international organisation" that appears to consist of Trump, some letterhead, and whoever still answers Kushner's texts. The Board claims it has an agreement for the "complete disarmament" of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, plus an Israeli troop withdrawal and a shiny new civilian Palestinian administration, which is a lot of words for a plan Israel has already publicly torched.

Undeterred by reality, Kushner held rare talks in Egypt with Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, alongside Nickolai Mladenov and, because we apparently live in a cursed reboot of 2005, Tony Blair. They reportedly discussed how to actually dismantle Hamas's arsenal, get Israeli forces out, and rebuild a strip of land that has already seen more than 73,000 people killed and 1.9 million displaced. Israel's answer remains: no withdrawal until full disarmament first — and also a flat rejection of Trump's 15-point plan, just to really underline how much respect they have for America's new freelance peace corporation.

Meanwhile, eight Muslim-majority countries — Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia — issued a joint statement saying Israel's rejection threatens Trump's peace efforts, which is a polite diplomatic way of saying, "We are all pretending this Board of Peace is a real thing now, apparently." Trump, naturally, chairs this pseudo-institution himself, having expanded it from a Gaza project to a global conflict fixer, because when you've already broken American democracy, why not cosplay as the UN too? The ceasefire technically still exists, the IDF is still conducting strikes, Hamas is still accused of violations, and into this meat grinder strolls Jared Kushner, armed with vibes, spreadsheets, and his father-in-law's delusions of imperial grandeur.