The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Congress has reached the "please, we’ll take the corporate lawyer who thinks U.S. elections are a disaster" phase of the Trump era. Jay Clayton, currently U.S. attorney for SDNY and formerly a Wall Street-friendly lawyer, is gliding into his confirmation hearing to replace acting DNI Bill Pulte — a man whose main qualification appears to be enthusiastically investigating Trump’s enemies and hacking away at the intelligence workforce like it’s a government jobs piñata.

Democrats and Republicans alike are suddenly swooning over Clayton as a “safe pair of hands,” mostly because the current guy is an unqualified political hitman with zero national security background. Meanwhile, the White House is running a side quest: a task force has vacuumed up thousands of pages of intelligence documents to selectively declassify, teeing up Trump to recycle his favorite fairy tale about massive election fraud that no court, expert, or basic reality has ever found. Clayton helpfully told CNBC that the U.S. is doing an “absolutely terrible job” on election integrity and singled out California’s mail voting system as fraud-friendly — a claim not backed by, minor detail, evidence.

While this is happening, Trump is preparing a big speech on “election integrity,” Democrats are warning about misuse of intel and law enforcement ahead of the midterms, and Congress is holding FISA reauthorization hostage until Pulte is swapped out. Trump, ever the personnel genius, even yanked Clayton’s first hearing at the last minute because he wanted Clayton’s SDNY replacement lined up first — priorities. Tulsi Gabbard is gone, Pulte is busy downsizing the DNI like it’s a failing startup, and the intelligence community is being treated as campaign content production for Trump’s 2020 grievances.

So yes, the bar is now so low that the bipartisan dream candidate to protect U.S. democracy is a corporate lawyer-turned-prosecutor with limited intel experience who publicly agrees that Americans are right to question their elections, nominated by a president actively mining the intelligence agencies for material to undermine them. The director of national intelligence was created after 9/11 to fix catastrophic information failures; the Trump administration is repurposing it to fix the catastrophic problem of elections occasionally not going his way.

Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia grad student who became the unwilling poster child for Trump’s "foreign policy is whatever Stephen Miller saw on X last night" approach to dissent, is now suing the Trump administration and a grab bag of pro-Israel surveillance outfits for allegedly running a coordinated campaign to punish pro-Palestine speech. The lawsuit says the White House, Marco Rubio’s State Department, and Kristi Noem’s DHS didn’t just coincidentally all decide to ruin his life — they allegedly teamed up with Canary Mission, Betar, and the Heritage Foundation to turn immigration law into a political bludgeon.

The complaint says Heritage cooked up something called Project Esther, a handy little blueprint for identifying pro-Palestinian non-citizen students and scholars so the feds could arrest and deport them, while private groups bragged about submitting “thousands of names” for similar treatment. ICE even assembled a special team told, quite literally, to use Canary Mission’s blacklist as their homework. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, was detained for 104 days, missed the birth of his child, and is still fighting deportation because Rubio decided his views had “adverse foreign policy consequences” — which is a poetic way of saying "he disagreed with us in public."

The kicker: Khalil is suing under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, because nothing screams "constitutional originalism" like a president and his think-tank buddies allegedly reviving a Reconstruction-era anti-vigilante law by turning it on themselves. The White House, naturally, claims this is all about visa fraud and totally not about blacklists, ideological purges, or a public-private partnership to criminalize Palestinian solidarity. Sure. And those "deportation lists" were just very intense book club invitations.

The president of the United States, who is famously a doctor, forensic pathologist, and FBI supervisory special agent in his own mind, announced that the Bureau is "wasting their time" investigating the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham. Trump says he’s reviewed the medical reports, been briefed by his White House doctors, and concluded there’s "not a lot of evil there" — which is certainly a reassuring standard for federal death investigations: if Donald doesn’t "see" evil, case closed.

While nearly 20 FBI and federal agents are at Graham’s home taking photos and doing that annoying "rule of law" thing, Trump is on Newsmax workshopping conspiracy theories about Russia and then dismissing them with his "racehorse theory" of genetics. Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel insists the Bureau is merely "assisting local authorities" and that there’s no current evidence of foul play — which apparently is still not enough for Trump, who feels compelled to personally lean on the scale from the Oval Office and tell investigators their work is pointless.

So we now have the president publicly undermining his own law enforcement agencies in real time during an active investigation into the sudden death of one of his closest political allies — a senator who had just been in Kyiv pushing tougher sanctions on Russia. But sure, let’s have the guy who spoke to Graham right before he died, has a long history of attacking the FBI, and treats national security like a Fox & Friends segment, declare the matter effectively resolved. America: where the separation of powers goes to die of natural causes, according to Trump’s gut.

Donald Trump has apparently decided that if he can’t win elections cleanly, he’ll at least try to win knockout rounds. US striker Folarin Balogun had his World Cup red card magically suspended after Trump bragged that he personally intervened with FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who is supposed to follow political neutrality rules that now exist mainly as decorative suggestions.

Balogun admits he knew Trump’s meddling would cause “a lot of controversy” and could feel his teammates’ nerves, presumably because nothing calms a locker room like realizing your eligibility now depends on the whims of a chronically online ex-president and a FIFA boss with the ethics backbone of overcooked pasta. FIFA’s disciplinary chair Mohammad Al Kamali then single-handedly reversed the ban, something he had never done as a solo act in any previous published case, and FIFA has provided exactly zero explanation.

Human rights group FairSquare has filed a complaint to the IOC alleging multiple breaches of political neutrality rules by Infantino, adding this to a growing stack of ignored ethics complaints about his bromance with Trump and the US co-hosts. The Norwegian FA and fifty members of the European Parliament have all begged FIFA’s ethics committee to do something, which is adorable given that “FIFA ethics” is already the punchline. But hey, on the bright side, we’ve now fully merged American strongman politics with FIFA’s corruption circus. Truly a global game.

An American humanitarian worker who caught Ebola while trying to help people in the DRC has been flown to Germany for treatment, because apparently if you want functioning public health infrastructure you now go to Europe. Germany calmly notes there’s "no danger for the general population" and that they were asked to help because of their Ebola expertise and the shorter flight time. Imagine having a government that responds to a deadly virus with competence instead of press conferences.

Back in Washington, the Trump administration looked at this complex outbreak and decided the real enemy is… Americans with valid passports. Using a transportation authority called Title 49, the White House is blocking US citizens in or recently out of the DRC from boarding commercial flights to the United States, shoving them onto a "do-not-board" list until they’ve spent 21 days in some other country. You know, the classic constitutional principle: "No American shall be allowed back into America until they’ve proven they can loiter in a random third nation first."

About two dozen Americans who thought they lived in a country that would let them come home in a crisis are now discovering that "support" from the State Department means, at best, paperwork and vibes while they wait out a de facto quarantine in places that are not the United States. Public health experts have long warned about Ebola’s lethality; they probably didn’t anticipate the part where the US government would treat its own citizens like contaminated FedEx packages that need to be rerouted through a different hub.

America’s finest legal minds have done it again: in Trump v Slaughter, the supreme court took a 91-year-old precedent protecting independent agencies, stared straight into the heart of the civil service, and said, "what if the president could just fire everyone who annoys him?" In a 6-3 ruling, they effectively handed Trump and every future president a loyalty-test button for watchdogs, regulators, and anyone else whose job used to be "follow the law" rather than "please the guy on Truth Social."

Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic FTC commissioner Trump himself appointed in 2018, learned she’d been fired while helping with her kid’s Beauty and the Beast rehearsal, which is almost too on the nose. She and fellow commissioner Alvaro Bedoya were both canned, sued, briefly won reinstatement, and then watched as the Court turned their case into a constitutional permission slip for presidential purges. Slaughter calls it a "dagger in the heart" of the civil service; the Federalist Society calls it Tuesday.

The ruling doesn’t just nuke one FTC commissioner’s job, it invites a future where every independent agency—those pesky entities that regulate markets, enforce antitrust, and occasionally inconvenience billionaires—knows that crossing a president or his donors can get them instantly fired. Slaughter is openly warning about a pay-to-play government where wealthy backers get favors and regulators get pink slips. So yes, the United States still has agencies with fancy seals and mission statements; they’re just now one angry president away from becoming set dressing for an oligarchy.

Marco Rubio, now secretary of state and apparently also secretary of no consequences ever, has launched a full-blown campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court because it might one day inconvenience US soldiers, Border Patrol agents, or the occasional allied prime minister accused of bombing civilians. He’s out here warning that American officials could be “dragged before an international court” by scary foreign judges whose radical agenda includes such extremist concepts as "don’t commit war crimes in other people’s countries."

The State Department plan is as subtle as a Trump tweet: pressure countries to abandon the ICC or face US sanctions, travel bans, and visa revocations. So if your government wants US aid, you’re expected to help kneecap the only court on Earth that can prosecute atrocities when local systems won’t. As Kenneth Roth helpfully notes, Rubio is just slapping a "sovereignty" sticker on what is transparently a quest for blanket impunity for American and allied war crimes. Minor detail: the ICC doesn’t even claim jurisdiction over crimes committed inside the US.

The Trump-Rubio axis has already sanctioned the ICC prosecutor, his deputies, six judges, a UN special rapporteur, and three Palestinian human rights groups for the high crime of documenting possible Israeli and US war crimes. Now they’re floating sanctions on the entire tribunal, which would make it illegal for Americans, banks, and companies to work with the court at all. According to human rights advocates, this isn’t just hypocrisy; it may itself amount to obstruction of justice under the Rome Statute. So yes, the administration’s strategy for avoiding war-crimes charges is to commit more crimes against the system that prosecutes war crimes. Bold.

Rubio insists he’s saving the “rules-based international order” by smashing the only institution that occasionally enforces any rules on powerful countries. As one advocate put it, he’s not dismantling the ICC brick by brick so much as kicking over what was left of the post–World War II legal order to make sure that from Ukraine to Sudan to Palestine, anyone with enough firepower and a Washington lobbyist can go back to the simpler era where the only real international law was "who’s going to stop us?"

At the University of North Texas, an exhibit by Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez lasted about as long as due process at an ICE check-in. His show, Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá — Neither from Here Nor from There, featured giant Mexican paleta sculptures with handcuffs, replica guns, rosaries, and popsicle sticks stamped with a parody ICE logo reading: "U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement". You know, a factual statement.

The exhibit had already run peacefully at Boston University, but once it hit Texas, it apparently triggered the state’s Standing Your Ground Against Metaphor statute. Within days, students started pinging the artist: the show was suddenly shut down, works quietly removed, and administrators started speaking fluent Bureaucratic Passive Voice about "concerns" and "procedures." Translation: you can enroll, pay tuition, and live with the consequences of immigration policy — you just can’t visually criticize the people enforcing it.

So on a campus where a quarter of the students are Hispanic, an artist who literally grew up in East Dallas was told, effectively, that his experience of U.S. immigration enforcement is too spicy for the gallery walls. The message from the state that worships "free speech": by all means, celebrate tacos and folklórico — but the minute you mention cages, handcuffs, or the agency doing the caging, the First Amendment gets deported.

Lindsey Graham, who spent the last decade as the Senate’s most accomplished political weather vane, has died at 71 after what his office calls a sudden illness. The retired air force reserve JAG, famous for loving every war he met and wanting to meet several more, went from calling Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic bigot" in 2016 to becoming one of his loudest hype men once the base made it clear they preferred the bigot over the hawk.

Washington reporters are already workshopping solemn tributes about his "independence" and "bipartisanship", carefully skipping the part where he helped launder Trump’s authoritarian impulses through the Senate, defended every new executive power grab, and treated constitutional checks like a suggestion box. The GOP, meanwhile, loses a reliable vote for forever war abroad and judicial extremism at home – and Trump loses one of his most practiced cable-news defense attorneys.

His death leaves an open Senate seat in South Carolina and a temporary vacuum in the "I used to have principles, then I met Donald" caucus. Expect a brisk primary among aspiring mini-Grahams, all eager to prove they, too, can go from calling Trump unfit for office to swearing eternal loyalty the moment it looks politically useful. The legacy of enabling doesn’t die; it just waits for the next host.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that if you can’t secure Air Force One, you can at least try to secure the narrative. After New York Times reporters revealed that Trump’s shiny new $400m Qatar-gifted presidential jet might be missing basic antimissile protections, the Justice Department helpfully showed up at their homes with grand jury subpoenas. Because nothing says “state-of-the-art security” like sending federal agents to intimidate the people who noticed you forgot the flares.

Press freedom groups are, shockingly, not thrilled that federal prosecutors are dragging journalists toward a secret grand jury for the crime of reporting on whether the president’s foreign-donated plane is a flying bullseye. Times lawyer David McCraw called the doorstep visits from federal agents an assault on the Constitution, which is generous, since this White House mostly treats the First Amendment like a suggestion box it can set on fire.

The White House insists the new Air Force One is totally safe and “state-of-the-art,” while also bragging that they use “distraction and misdirection” as security tools — which is one way to describe subpoenaing reporters who expose your security gaps. This comes on the heels of Trump’s team trying (and in other cases temporarily succeeding) to subpoena journalists at the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, prosecuting Don Lemon and other journalists for covering a protest, and greenlighting an FBI raid on a Post reporter’s home. The message is clear: the press is free to report anything it wants, as long as it’s flattering, pre-cleared, and doesn’t question the presidential warplane gifted by a friendly petro-monarchy.

The Department of Justice, now operating as the legal help desk for Trump’s favorite insurrectionists, has moved to toss out the seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys leaders who helped turn January 6 into a fascist cosplay riot with real blood and broken glass. Federal judge Timothy Kelly — a Trump appointee, because of course — agreed to dismiss the case only after the appeals court had already vacuumed up the convictions at DOJ’s request, and then helpfully wrote a seven-page memo explaining that this is happening not because of the law or the facts, but because Donald Trump wants his goons off the hook.

Kelly painstakingly recites that Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rehl were convicted of multiple serious crimes, and that Dominic Pezzola famously smashed a Capitol window to let the mob pour in — you know, the thing we all saw on video. He calls January 6 a "perilous event," an attack on police, Congress, and the peaceful transfer of power, then shrugs and signs off on the dismissal because the executive branch now prefers sedition-friendly outcomes. The judge basically says: the government’s motive is transparently Trump’s desire to excuse his own supporters’ violence, but hey, separation of powers means I can’t stop the president from torching the rule of law.

The result: a Trump-initiated prosecution of Trump’s own shock troops, brought while he was still in office, is now being undone by Trump’s second-term DOJ on orders from the same guy who incited them in the first place. Kelly ends with a solemn lecture about preserving the "miracle" of peaceful transfer of power, right after greenlighting the demolition crew that’s ripping it out by the foundation. It’s less a court ruling and more a historical exhibit: Here Lies the Justice System, We Knew Exactly What We Were Doing.