The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

An Iranian-American journalist is begging for his freedom from an Iranian prison while Donald Trump is on TV insisting the U.S.-Iran war is basically a historical reenactment that already wrapped. The administration is busy selling a not-quite-finished memorandum of understanding as a world-historic peace deal, but somehow hasn't managed the advanced diplomatic maneuver known as "getting our citizen out of jail."

The White House line is that everything is fine, the war is over, and this agreement is a triumph. Meanwhile, the actual human being at the center of this is reduced to pleading through NBC cameras because the president is more focused on victory laps than on hostages. A functioning government might treat wrongful detention as a crisis; this one treats it as background noise in the Trump Show.

So we get the usual split-screen: on one side, Trump declaring total victory and waving around paperwork; on the other, a journalist rotting in a cell, hoping the guy who keeps saying it's all solved might eventually remember he's still there. American power, redefined as a press conference and a shrug.

Oil prices crashed to their lowest point since the first week of the Trump–Iran crisis after Donald Trump announced he was this close to a peace deal with Tehran, having just decided not to launch more military strikes that evening. So global markets are now basically hostage to whether the president wakes up wanting war, peace, or a Fox segment about both.

Brent crude, which had rocketed to $113 a barrel after the US and Israel decided bombing Tehran was a fun way to spend a news cycle, slipped briefly below $85 on hopes that the Strait of Hormuz might reopen over the weekend. Tehran says large parts of a deal are done, Trump says it’s almost there, and analysts say, "we have no idea what’s real but the algorithm likes it." That’s the new basis of global energy security.

Behind the drama: China has cut imports, the IEA had to cough up 400m barrels of emergency crude to stop the earlier panic, and "dark transits" of stealth Gulf oil have been sneaking around the blockade, because when the White House turns the world’s main oil artery into a cosplay war zone, the smuggling industry gets a bull market. Goldman Sachs, ever the optimist, still expects $90 oil later this year, assuming Trump doesn’t tweet another airstrike into existence.

The president is on "rocky ground" politically, so naturally the White House is hosting a UFC event, because when your approval ratings are in the basement, why not turn the executive mansion into a pay-per-view backdrop. Policy? Governing? That’s for suckers. This administration’s answer to every crisis is: have you tried more spectacle?

Instead of dealing with pesky things like investigations, court rulings, and voters noticing the country is on fire, Trump is literally importing a cage match to the South Lawn. It’s not a metaphor anymore; the seat of government is being repurposed as a combat-sports arena so the president can bask in chants and camera angles while pretending the "political headwinds" are just ring-side breezes.

The message is clear: American democracy may be wobbling on its feet, but the show must go on. As long as there are bright lights, blood, and a cheering crowd, who’s going to notice the rule of law getting choked out in the corner?

The Trump White House has discovered a bold new frontier in propaganda: setting images of people being cuffed, loaded into cars, and dumped in detention centers to Ariana Grande’s 2024 hit Bye, then slapping on the caption: “Bye-bye... President Trump has delivered the most secure border in history.” Nothing says “land of the free” like choreographing mass arrests to a Top 40 breakup track.

Grande, apparently not thrilled to have her music turned into a soundtrack for state cruelty, replied on TikTok: “Please do not use my music in relation to this barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense.” The White House response, via spokesperson Abigail Jackson, was to double down and call migrants “criminal illegal aliens” who are the real barbaric ones—because when your policy is caging people, the only logical move is to accuse your victims of the thing you’re doing on camera.

Then, like any confident, totally-not-authoritarian administration, the White House muted the video and removed Grande’s comment. Users quickly noticed that the criticism had mysteriously vanished, leaving behind a silent reel of handcuffs and detention centers, which is honestly a little too on-the-nose as a metaphor for this presidency. The playlist of unwilling collaborators keeps growing—Sabrina Carpenter, ABBA, Céline Dion, Beyoncé—because Trump and his team will respect your intellectual property the same way they respect constitutional limits and basic human dignity: not at all, until they get caught.

House Democrats now want JD Vance to explain, under oath, why the Trump White House treated the Epstein files like a national security crisis instead of, say, a basic public records issue. According to the New York Times, Vance was running around warning of a “huge problem” while senior officials huddled in the Situation Room — often without Trump, which is probably the only responsible decision anyone in that building has made in years.

Susie Wiles allegedly thought Vance had "bought into the conspiracy theories", which is rich coming from an administration that uses conspiracy theories the way normal governments use policy memos. The same crack team — Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, Steve Cheung, Taylor Budowich, and Karoline Leavitt — reportedly debated various "transparency" options and then wandered straight into the most on-brand idea imaginable: maybe trot out Ghislaine Maxwell to defend Trump in an interview with Tucker Carlson. Bold plan: fight a scandal about a sex-trafficking operation by booking its co-pilot for a media tour.

The real panic wasn’t about justice or victims, of course, but about keeping the MAGA base from noticing that their anti-elite warrior might have been sending Epstein a "bawdy" birthday note with a naked silhouette doodle. When the DOJ said there was no secret "client list" and Congress pushed the Epstein Files Transparency Act anyway, Trump’s response was to go full purge. Marjorie Taylor Greene got hounded into resignation, Nancy Mace lost her primary, and Thomas Massie — a lifelong Republican — was tossed out after Trump personally recruited his challenger, all for the crime of supporting file disclosure.

So now Democrats want Vance in the witness chair to explain why the administration turned a records issue into a classified melodrama, why the Situation Room became the Epstein spin room, and why anyone thought "Operation Free Ghislaine" was a good idea. The public is supposed to believe this was all about responsible stewardship of sensitive information, not a frantic attempt to protect one very nervous president and his very fragile base. Sure. Pull the other Epstein file, it’s got a redaction on it.

The U.S. health apparatus is currently being run like a group project where the one competent kid dropped the class. Key posts across HHS, CDC, FDA and other agencies are sitting empty or filled with temps while the Trump administration discovers you can quietly kneecap public health without ever passing a law—just never hire anyone qualified and let the vacancies do the work. It’s governing by out-of-office reply.

This isn’t some accidental HR snafu. Keeping leadership posts vacant while pandemics, drug shortages, and insurance chaos loom is a feature, not a bug. A hollowed-out HHS can’t regulate industry, can’t push back on junk science, and definitely can’t contradict whatever health wisdom Trump picked up from cable news and a MyPillow promo code. The fewer experts at the table, the easier it is to pretend the table doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, career staff are left trying to steer a jumbo jet using sticky notes and vibes while political appointees float in and out long enough to collect a title and maybe a consulting prospect. Public health becomes one more arena where the administration’s core philosophy shines through: why openly attack protections when you can just unplug the smoke detectors, fire the fire chief, and then shrug when the building burns?

Senate Democrats are now doing tabletop exercises for scenarios that used to belong in dystopian fiction: federal agents hovering around polling places, ballots being seized in swing states, and foreign interference as the garnish on this democracy-collapse sundae. Chuck Schumer, apparently now the nation's emergency preparedness coordinator, says Trump keeps talking about stealing, violating, and perverting the election, so maybe we should, you know, take that seriously.

While pro-democracy groups point out that the real fraud is a president who lies about elections for sport, Trump is busy "inventing fraud" in California’s primary to preemptively delegitimize any result he doesn’t like. At the same time, he’s demanding another $350bn for the Pentagon via yet another reconciliation bill, trying to install an unqualified political attack dog as acting DNI, and casually bragging on Fox about firing 49 Tomahawks at Iran and promising to "bomb the shit out of them again" tomorrow. Authoritarians usually have to choose between domestic repression and reckless militarism; Trump, ever the overachiever, is going for the combo pack.

And when confronted with 4.2% inflation, the president helpfully announces "I love the inflation," forcing Speaker Mike Johnson into the familiar GOP role of Humiliation Translator, explaining that what Trump really meant was that it’ll be fun to compare economic wreckage later. So while Democrats sit around gaming out how to defend elections from their own president and his federal goons, the administration’s message is clear: the only unacceptable outcome is one where voters actually hold them accountable.

America’s premier law enforcement agency now needs a support group because the president and his handpicked attack dog Kash Patel are trying to remodel it into the KGB, but make it MAGA. Former and current FBI agents have launched an “FBI Support Network” to help colleagues who’ve been fired, forced out, or morally bludgeoned into quitting as Trump tries to convert the Bureau from an investigative agency into his personal retribution concierge service.

Former cyber-crime agent Kayla Staph says agents are suffering “moral injuries” from being pressured to trash their own values, while as many as 2,800 agents — including a huge chunk of leadership — have headed for the exits since Trump returned to office. That’s not a staffing issue; that’s a hostile takeover. Brian Driscoll, briefly acting director before being canned for protecting agents who worked on Trump-related cases like January 6, is now on video basically telling the remaining agents, “Blink twice if you’re being held hostage.”

Even the ghost of Robert Mueller shows up via video, calmly talking about the FBI’s legacy while Trump celebrates his death on social media like a cartoon villain who finally caught the meddling detective. Meanwhile, national security veterans warn that this whole project is aimed at turning U.S. law enforcement into a Stasi cosplay operation. When the people who usually are the backstop for democracy are starting support groups to survive the president’s policies, it’s less ‘law and order’ and more ‘authoritarianism with HR paperwork.’

Congress spent months trying to hammer out a careful, bipartisan deal on renewing FISA Section 702, the NSA’s favorite legal fig leaf for gobbling up foreigners’ communications (and plenty of Americans’ by accident-on-purpose). Then Trump lobbed a Truth Social grenade and announced that the nation’s new acting Director of National Intelligence would be… the 38-year-old housing regulator who used his social media clout to harass Trump’s enemies and once tried to get the Fed chair fired. Because when you think ‘overseeing the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus,’ you obviously think ‘guy who went viral for Twitter giveaways.’

Bill Pulte, heir to a homebuilding fortune and self-branded ‘Inventor of Twitter Philanthropy,’ made his name offering cash bounties for retweets and dangling $30,000 for veterans if @realDonaldTrump would hit the share button. Trump, naturally, loved it. Now that same online attack dog, who has zero national security experience and a clear record of weaponizing his position against perceived foes, is being handed the keys to the surveillance state precisely while Congress decides how much spying power to extend. Democrats are openly saying they won’t back a 702 extension with Pulte in the chair, which appears to be the point: sabotage the process, keep the chaos, and make sure any intelligence authority that survives is run by a loyalist whose main qualification is knowing how to farm engagement for an unstable president.

The Trump administration is pushing a 250-foot "Triumphal Arch" at the main entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, because nothing says "honor the fallen" like a giant campaign billboard welded onto hallowed ground. The official line is that it will "celebrate the triumphs of the American people" and "beautify" D.C.; the unofficial line is: it’s a presidential vanity project no one asked for, especially not the people who actually fought in the wars.

Veterans and families of the dead are livid, as you might imagine. Three Vietnam vets and an architectural historian are suing, arguing Trump can’t just drop a massive monument into Memorial Circle without congressional authorization — a step Trump has already bragged he neither needs nor intends to seek. So we’ve reached the stage of American democracy where a president is trying to install his own triumphal arch in front of Arlington while daring Congress to stop him, and it falls to octogenarian Vietnam veterans and Public Citizen to explain basic respect and separation of powers to the guy with the nuclear codes.

As Navy veteran Shaun Byrnes, 83, politely notes, monuments to actual great presidents were built by a grateful nation after those presidents were dead, not commissioned by the subject while he’s still rage-posting online. The arch would also wreck the symbolic sightline between Arlington and the Lincoln Memorial, because why preserve a powerful national vista when you can replace it with a 250-foot reminder that one man’s ego is now a federally prioritized infrastructure project?

Once upon a time, a citizenship ceremony ended with a pocket Constitution and a judge telling you that you were now equal to every other American. Under Trump 2.0, you get the same ceremony, plus an unspoken asterisk: "unless we later decide you’re inconvenient." The administration has cranked denaturalization from a rare, last-resort legal tool into a mass-production line, guided by a memo that basically says DOJ can target any naturalized citizen it "determines to be sufficiently important"—which is a poetic way of saying whoever Trump’s people don’t like this week.

For context: between 1990 and 2017, there were 305 denaturalization cases total, many of them, you know, actual Nazis. Biden did 64 in four years. Trump’s first term did 168. Now internal guidance talks about 100–200 denaturalization cases per month, while DOJ files to strip dozens of Americans of their citizenship on the back of categories that immigration lawyers politely describe as "ripe for political abuse" and less politely translate as "this is how you build an authoritarian state." You don’t even need a conviction—"pending criminal charges" or just being labeled a "national security threat" is enough. Very convenient when your critics tend to be immigrants.

The targets will, shockingly, be immigrants of color, in an administration that gutted refugee resettlement except for white South Africans and put Greg Bovino—fresh off headlining a European "Remigration Summit" about expelling non-white people—in charge of immigration enforcement. Over at D-Day commemorations, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is busy comparing modern immigration to an "invasion," because why not desecrate the memory of people who actually fought fascism while you quietly import its playbook into U.S. law? This isn’t "border security"; it’s turning citizenship into a revocable privilege for the wrong kind of American, administered by men whose big ideas barely clear the intellectual bar at a Telegram channel.