The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The 2026 World Cup final in New Jersey was supposed to be Spain v Argentina. Instead, it’s Trump v Basic Functioning Society. Because the president insists on helicoptering in to hand over a trophy he didn’t win, the match has been declared a National Special Security Event, which in American translates to: nobody gets in on time and everything becomes a perimeter.

US Secret Service is individually searching all 82,500 fans, staff are funneled through a single entrance like cattle with lanyards, and even Jürgen Klopp is stuck in the world’s most expensive airport-security cosplay. Thousands of agents, helicopters overhead, and airport scanners everywhere so Trump can bask in the spotlight for five minutes and pretend the crowd’s roar isn’t for Messi.

To really honor the spirit of the beautiful game, New Jersey Transit has reportedly jacked train fares from Manhattan to $98, turning basic access to a public event into a paywall for the already well-off. FIFA’s logistical nightmare has been upgraded to a full-on presidential vanity siege, where public space, public transit, and a global tournament all bend around one man’s need to be the center of the universe. Democracy may be wobbling, but the security theater industry is doing great.

Donald Trump has managed to turn Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and half the global economy into his own personal rage-therapy sandbox. Having started an unlawful war without consulting Congress, allies, or reality, he’s now stuck in an unwinnable forever war that’s pummeling Iranian civilian infrastructure, supercharging hardliners in Tehran, and casually flirting with war crimes. The stated goals — nukes gone, militias crushed, regime changed — are further away than ever, but don’t worry, the president says he’s “winning big,” so obviously everything’s fine.

This is the same heroic commander-in-chief who dodged Vietnam with bone spurs but somehow thinks he can bluff an entire region into surrender. He signed a 60‑day “memorandum of understanding” he barely understood, accidentally nodded toward Iranian control over the world’s oil chokepoint, then freaked out when the consequences arrived right on schedule. Now it’s daily bombing runs, threats of maritime tolls announced and reversed within 24 hours, and open talk that the strikes on civilian infrastructure might qualify as war crimes — all while Congress tells him to stop or seek authorization and he simply…doesn’t.

True to form, Trump is also replaying his greatest hits from Gaza and Ukraine: big, empty “peace plans,” zero follow-through, bullying the weaker side to surrender, and endless attempts to appease Vladimir Putin for reasons that remain lodged somewhere between his ego and his wallet. Allies are horrified but cowed, global markets are spooked, famine risks are rising in developing countries, and the U.S. reputation sinks with every missile launch. The world was told Iran was the existential threat; turns out the real one is a narcissistic TV landlord with the nuclear codes and the attention span of a TikTok reel.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has announced that federalism is canceled and the new national pastime is threatening state election officials with prison unless they use a DHS immigration database that a federal judge has already blocked as illegal and error-riddled. Mullin says DHS has found 250,000 supposed noncitizens on voter rolls in four blue-ish states, but somehow can’t say how many of them have actually voted, or how many are just newly naturalized citizens the system keeps falsely flagging. Minor detail when you’re busy turning the Department of Homeland Security into the Department of Vibes-Based Voter Purges.

Not content with hounding U.S. attorneys for noncitizen voting cases that mysteriously never exist, Trump’s crew is now dangling federal grants over states’ heads and warning that if they don’t play along with the junk-database purge game, they could face fines and prison. At the same time, Trump has gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and decapitated the Election Assistance Commission, because if you’re going to scream about election integrity, you obviously start by firing the people who actually secure elections. Mullin swears this isn’t about rehashing 2020, just about making Americans ‘trust’ the system by raiding election hubs, suing states for voter data, and threatening local officials on TV. Truly, nothing restores confidence in democracy like the federal government promising to ‘scrub’ the rolls while holding a baseball bat behind its back.

The Department of Homeland Security reportedly looked at two immigrants shot dead by ICE during traffic stops, one man killed fleeing another stop, and thought: maybe we should dial this back a bit. Then Donald Trump opened Truth Social, mashed the caps-lock key, and policy was instantly reversed. So much for deliberation, investigations, or basic humanity — the president declared that "THE TRAFFIC STOP" is one of ICE’s most important crime-fighting tools, as though summary roadside executions are just another line item in the law-and-order budget.

Karoline Leavitt dutifully marched into the briefing room to announce that, yes, vehicle stops are continuing, and that “verbal guidance” has gone out nationwide — always comforting when lethal force policy is updated like a rumor in a high school hallway. DHS, asked for clarification, simply pointed reporters back to the White House, because why pretend this is anything but Trump personally directing a nationwide deportation-and-gunfire campaign. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Joan Durán Guerrero in Maine, and a man in Florida who died fleeing an ICE stop are now collateral damage in the administration’s favorite pastime: proving how tough they are on “the worst of the worst” by terrorizing anyone who looks like they might not have been born in the right ZIP code.

Evidence for DHS’s claims that these shootings were necessary? None provided. Independent accounts that contradict ICE’s story? Ignored. But the message from Trump’s White House is loud and clear: traffic stops stay, bodies pile up, and if you question any of it, you’re just “playing right into the criminal’s hands.” The government of the United States is now openly treating deadly, discretionary roadside encounters with immigrants as a non-negotiable feature of national security — not a bug, a strategy.

The Trump Department of Transportation, led by Secretary Sean "DEI Bike Lanes" Duffy, has quietly scrubbed bike lanes, speed cameras, and other tools that actually reduce crashes from the Federal Highway Administration’s list of "Proven Safety Countermeasures." Because when you say you’re "putting safety first," what you really mean is deleting the parts of the website that make drivers slightly inconvenienced and oil donors mildly annoyed.

Former FHWA acting administrator Stephanie Pollack notes these are evidence-based strategies that save lives, which is precisely why the current crew wants them gone. Instead, the agency says it’s reversing policies that "decreased lane capacity and increased congestion" — Washington-speak for "we’re done pretending people outside of cars deserve to live." The Trump DOT then proudly redirected $1.73 billion in grants away from bike and pedestrian projects, framing basic street safety as a "DEI" social experiment rather than the reason children don’t die in crosswalks.

So the official position of the federal government is now: speed cameras and bike lanes are woke, traffic deaths are freedom, and if you want to survive your commute, you’d better get yourself a three-ton truck and some thoughts and prayers. Vision Zero has been replaced with Vision What If We Just Hit The Gas.

Jay Clayton, Trump’s latest nominee to run the entire U.S. intelligence community, showed up to the Senate to answer a very simple question: will you use the nation’s spy apparatus to prop up the president’s fantasy fanfic about a stolen election? Senators, apparently tired of watching Trump turn every sensitive post into a loyalty oath dispenser, pressed him on whether he accepts reality or prefers the Mar-a-Lago Telegram channel version of events.

The hearing boiled down to whether the prospective director of national intelligence thinks his job is to present facts or to nod along while Trump screams "rigged" into the nearest camera. Because nothing says "healthy democracy" like having to interrogate the would-be top intel official about whether he’ll manipulate classified assessments to soothe one man’s electoral ego. Totally normal confirmation process for a totally normal administration.

Global opinion has done the unthinkable: it looked at Xi Jinping’s China, looked at Donald Trump’s America, and said, "yeah, we’ll take the surveillance state with fewer nukes on hair trigger, thanks." A new Pew survey finds that in 25 of 36 countries, people now view China more favorably than the U.S., and in 22 of them Xi is polling better than Trump. When you’ve managed to turn Canada into a country that prefers Beijing to Washington, you’re not doing diplomacy, you’re doing performance art.

This is the first time in two decades of Pew tracking that China beats the U.S., and it’s not because China suddenly became cuddly; it’s because Trump is busy turning American foreign policy into a live-fire reality show. A U.S.-Israel war with Iran, a military snatch-and-grab of Venezuela’s president, demands to "take over" Greenland, and Gaza policy that enraged half the planet have convinced allies that Washington is less "leader of the free world" and more "guy who shows up drunk to the summit and starts a bar fight." Even Americans now view China and the U.S. almost equally, which is what happens when your president openly fantasizes about annexing other countries while slapping tariffs on your closest neighbors and calling Canada the "51st state."

Pew even found that China is increasingly seen as the more "reliable partner" that contributes to peace and stability, which is a sentence that would’ve sounded like satire in 2016 and now just reads like a State Department autopsy report. The U.S. still leads on personal freedoms, but the gap is shrinking, and not because Xi suddenly discovered civil liberties. Trump’s White House didn’t respond to requests for comment, presumably because it’s hard to spin "the world likes Xi better than you" unless you’re ready to declare another trade war or invade an island.