The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Andrew and Tristan Tate — the misogynist influencers turned alleged rapist–sex trafficker duo — didn’t just wander into America. They were effectively airlifted in, after some suspiciously well-timed “diplomatic moves” from the Trump administration helped them leave Romania, where they were under house arrest on serious charges, and resettle in the U.S. Their lawyer all but winked into the camera: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.” Now they’ve been re-arrested in Miami and face extradition to the UK, but not before enjoying a comfy stint as imported culture-war mascots for MAGA.

On the right, the Tates aren’t an aberration; they’re the user manual. Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” presidency normalized a politics where male supremacy is the glue holding together Christian theocrats, Silicon Valley eugenics bros, podcast warlords, and every guy whose personality is just three hours of YouTube rage. Tate’s alleged real-world violence simply matches the rhetoric: domination of women as entertainment, business model, and political identity.

The punchline: Democrats are mostly treating this as a scheduling conflict rather than a political gift. Instead of hanging Trump with his own pet predators and making the Tate saga Exhibit A in how MAGA’s hatred of women bleeds into hatred of democracy, party strategists are busy panic-fundraising $20m for “Speaking with American Men” and recruiting “manly man” candidates to reassure fragile dudes that feminism won’t steal their truck. The result is a stunning bipartisan consensus: male supremacy is a serious, structural problem … that no one in power actually wants to confront.

The First Circuit just told Donald Trump that, regrettably, the Constitution still applies even when he’s mad about mail-in ballots. A federal appeals court refused to let his administration roll out an executive order in 23 states that would have let Washington muscle into state-run elections, rewrite mail voting rules on the fly, and call it “security” while it quietly kneecapped turnout.

Trump’s Department of Justice argued the lawsuits were premature because agencies hadn’t fully implemented his scheme yet – the legal equivalent of, “You can’t arrest me for planning the heist, I haven’t robbed the bank yet.” The court responded that when the president sets hard deadlines forcing states to scramble to comply with new voting procedures right before elections, that’s not hypothetical, that’s a live grenade.

The order would have had DHS building federal voter eligibility lists, USPS turning into a ballot gatekeeper that only delivers to people on approved lists, and DoJ prioritizing prosecution of local election officials who didn’t fall in line. Judge Indira Talwani – apparently having read the Constitution at least once – pointed out that the president has no authority to commandeer state election systems, USPS has no power to regulate voting, and the federal government doesn’t get to intimidate local officials with criminal charges for not using “necessarily incomplete” citizenship lists.

So the man who still insists 2020 was stolen tried, yet again, to rewrite election rules from the Oval Office to stop the next one from slipping away by mail. The courts, for now, are still that annoying branch of government that keeps reminding him this isn’t a reality show where he can just executive-order the voting public off the island.

Donald Trump, a man whose relationship with facts is purely theoretical, has now ordered warning labels slapped on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to alert visitors to alleged “inaccurate information.” Yes, the guy who tried to Sharpie a hurricane map is accusing the historians of lying. The executive order instructs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the National Park Service to put up official U.S. government signage outside the museum basically saying, “Don’t believe the museum, believe the White House report we wrote about how the museum is bad.”

This is the latest episode in Trump’s campaign to turn the Smithsonian into a taxpayer-funded MAGA Heritage Foundation gift shop. After a July 4 White House report declared that museum leaders are “radical activists” who can’t be trusted to tell America’s story “honestly and in a way that is inspiring,” Trump is now using federal agencies and “all available authorities” to enforce his March 2025 order targeting funding for exhibits with “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology.” Translation: history that mentions racism, inequality, or non-triumphalist reality must be punished.

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch politely replied that the institution is actually driven by “scholarship, accuracy and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story,” which is exactly the kind of dangerous extremism this White House cannot abide. Instead, visitors will now be helpfully directed to government-approved “locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history” — presumably somewhere between Trump’s Truth Social feed and the gift shop’s new Dear Leader: A Totally Not Divisive History of America coloring book.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s favorite Fox News cosplayer now LARPing as defense secretary, has decided the key to American military dominance is not strategy, logistics, or alliances, but checking every man over 30 for low T and juicing them up. Welcome to the High-T Department of War, where the solution to every problem is more hormone gel and a war crimes vibe check. If your testosterone is a little droopy, Uncle Sam is thrilled to subsidize your midlife crisis.

There’s just one tiny snag: a federal judge noticed that this same Pentagon insists hormone treatment is a fatal flaw that justifies banning transgender troops. Judge Ana Reyes, apparently still capable of basic logic, has ordered Hegseth & friends to explain why cis soldiers get taxpayer-funded testosterone replacement therapy, while trans troops are told that needing hormones makes them unfit for service. Trump’s own executive order is on the record demanding troops meet standards “without the benefit of routine medical treatment” – unless, apparently, that treatment is part of the administration’s masculinity pageant.

Medical experts, meanwhile, are standing off to the side like, "Hi, yes, just to be clear, blasting unnecessary testosterone into thousands of people can actually harm readiness, fertility, and long-term health." The Pentagon, which has spent years clutching its pearls about the supposed cost of gender-affirming care, is now tripping over itself to bankroll mass TRT for cis men because it polls well with the Joe Rogan demographic. Equal protection, military cohesion, evidence-based medicine – all sacrificed so the commander in chief can turn the armed forces into a taxpayer-funded podcast comment section.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to honor American history: by making it dramatically easier to demolish it. To clear the path for Trump's proposed 250-foot triumphal arch on the National Mall, his allies are moving to weaken Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act — the boring little rule that currently forces federal agencies to consider whether they're about to pave over sacred tribal land, Black neighborhoods, or, say, anything older than a Trump casino bankruptcy.

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which oversees this process, just happens to be stacked with Trump loyalists — he controls 21 of its 24 seats — and is now poised to "reinterpret" the law in a way that would make decades of preservation protections about as sturdy as a Trump University diploma. The council chair seat is conveniently vacant, so acting vice chair Travis Voyles is running the show while pushing through draft language to water down what counts as an "adverse effect" and what agencies actually have to do about it.

Preservation experts warn this isn't just about one gaudy arch; it's an open invitation to blast through historic neighborhoods, cultural landmarks, burial grounds, and tribal sites nationwide with fewer guardrails and less input from the people most affected. The White House and Interior Department, naturally, had nothing to say to NPR — presumably too busy designing the font for the gold-plated plaque on Trump's future arch while the rest of the country’s heritage gets put on the clearance rack.

The House has once again tried to break up with Trump's deeply illegal Iran war, passing a resolution 214–208 to remove U.S. forces from hostilities that Congress never actually authorized. This is the second time they've done this, because nothing says "functioning republic" like repeatedly reminding the president that wars are not supposed to be a solo project. Naturally, the measure is nonbinding, because the only thing more symbolic than congressional oversight is congressional backbone.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal calls it an "illegal war" with no mission, no strategy, and no end goal — so basically the foreign policy version of Trump's Twitter feed, but with 18 dead U.S. troops and nearly 500 injured since February. Trump, who campaigned on ending "forever wars," is now fully committed to starring in one, dismissing war powers votes as "meaningless" and blaming it all on "Trump Derangement Syndrome," which is a bold way of describing Congress reading the War Powers Resolution out loud.

Over in the Senate, Democrats tried their own war powers move and lost 47–49, because a few Republicans are still deeply committed to the radical notion that the president should be able to lob the country into war like it's a reality show season finale. The Senate even briefly passed a war powers resolution last month, then reversed itself after Trump complained — a helpful live demonstration of how separation of powers becomes separation of spine the moment the Dear Leader tweets.

Brett Kavanaugh has finally found his calling: not as a neutral arbiter of law, but as Trump’s in-house idea factory for turning authoritarian fantasies into semi-plausible legal doctrines. While Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito do the full cosplay originalism routine, Kavanaugh skips the Latin and goes straight to the point: if Trump wants it, it’s just "common sense". Racial profiling by ICE? Totally reasonable. Tariffs by presidential tantrum? Historically normal, if you close your eyes and make up the history.

His solo concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo blessed what are now charmingly known as “Kavanaugh Stops” – a legal green light for ICE to grab anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and has the audacity to work a low-wage job. The result: U.S. citizens “dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot,” kids locked up, and multiple people killed, including citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Legal scholars called his reasoning “factual revisionism” and “preposterous”; the government called it a policy manual.

After getting roasted by everyone who can read, Kavanaugh tried to sneak a quiet walk-back into a random footnote in an unrelated case, suddenly discovering that maybe race-based immigration stops are bad actually. Unfortunately for him, Stephen Miller doesn’t govern by footnote, so the Kavanaugh Stops roll on, now with a higher body count and more shattered families. Meanwhile, on the trade front, Kavanaugh’s dissent in Learning Resources v. Trump helpfully rewrote decades of law so Trump could pretend emergency powers cover whatever tariffs he dreamed up on cable news.

When the Court told Trump no, Kavanaugh basically left a breadcrumb trail of alternative statutes he could abuse, and Trump followed it within hours, slapping on a global surcharge that was swiftly ruled illegal. Trump called the justices who stopped him “fools” and “lap dogs,” but reserved rare praise for Kavanaugh: the one guy on the Court willing to turn the Constitution into a choose-your-own-dictatorship adventure. The separation of powers is hanging by a thread, and Kavanaugh’s busy knitting Trump a safety net.