Patriotic onlookers gather to watch workers perform the rarest of Washington rituals: removing Trump’s name from something instead of slapping it on like a branding rash.
The Kennedy Center spent the night getting an emergency decontamination, as workers quietly pried "The Donald J Trump and" off the facade like a bad tattoo you got during a four-year blackout. This followed a federal judge ruling that Trump’s little rebranding exercise was, minor detail, illegal, because Congress named the place for John F. Kennedy and you actually can’t just Sharpie your own name over history because your hand-picked board clapped for it.
Trump, having already staged his own arts coup in February by firing all 18 Biden-appointed trustees, installing loyalists, and crowning himself chair, also wanted to close the Kennedy Center for two years of "renovations"—presumably to add gold toilets and a mandatory standing ovation for Dear Leader. Judge Christopher Cooper blocked that too, and then rejected a last-minute emergency appeal by Trump and his new pet board to keep his name bolted on a building he doesn’t own.
The Department of Justice, now moonlighting as Trump’s signage protection service, argued that removing the name might be inconvenient if they somehow win on appeal, then pivoted to blaming thunderstorms for missing the deadline. The crowd outside was not buying the weather-based authoritarianism extension request, chanting "Shame!" and "Take it down" as workers, under tarps and cover of darkness, restored the words "John F. Kennedy" to the building and briefly, briefly, to American reality.
Screengrab of the president’s new favorite genre: drone strike snuff film, now streaming exclusively on Truth Social.
Donald Trump hopped on Truth Social to announce that, at his personal direction, US Southern Command carried out a "swift and lethal kinetic strike" to kill Héctor "Niño" Guerrero Flores, a leader of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Along with the statement, he helpfully posted a video of the strike, because nothing says "constitutional republic" like the president posting kill shots as social content while declaring the gang "one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth".
Trump bragged that the operation was coordinated with "our friends in Venezuela," a fun new label for the same regime he spent years depicting as a narco-dictatorship, and which the US just physically removed Nicolás Maduro from in January to face US drug charges. He’s been insisting for months that Tren de Aragua operated under Maduro’s control, a claim a declassified US intelligence assessment contradicted, but why let your own intelligence community ruin a good foreign-army-at-the-border narrative?
In between flexing about drone strikes and terrorism charges, Trump used the announcement to smear Joe Biden as the man who "opened our Southern Border to millions of Illegal Criminals" and "allowed this foreign army" to terrorize Americans. He name-checked two murder cases involving undocumented immigrants as political props, just to really drive home that every national security decision is now also a Fox chyron. Meanwhile, the guy who just ordered a cross-border killing and then turned it into campaign content has nominated the same US attorney who prosecuted Tren de Aragua, Jay Clayton, to be director of national intelligence. So yes, the intelligence community is now being staffed by the president’s favorite character witnesses for his next episode of America’s Got Airstrikes.
Spencer Pratt, fresh off losing an election he insists he totally didn’t want anyway, announces he’s now at war with both democracy and campaign finance law.
Donald Trump’s favorite Los Angeles cosplay candidate, former reality TV villain Spencer Pratt, has conceded the LA mayor’s race and immediately pivoted to the post-democratic influencer phase of his career: declaring “war” on the two actual candidates who advanced. Despite Trump loudly insisting the race was “rigged” and “crooked,” Pratt conspicuously did not contest the results, presumably because even he couldn’t sell that script without laughing.
Instead, he announced he’s ditching those pesky “campaign laws” and moving into a more "interesting phase" where he can, as he put it, wage war without being “hamstrung.” He’s teasing supposed secret recordings that could force one of the “exalted candidates” — Karen Bass or Nithya Raman — to resign in shame, because nothing says “public servant” like openly bragging you were sitting on blackmail material for maximum political leverage.
Pratt, a registered Republican trying to win in deep-blue LA with Trump’s endorsement and zero governing experience, somehow lost to an actual city councilmember and the sitting mayor. Now he’s promising to keep “exposing this corrupt machine,” sneering that they can enjoy their “worthless meetings at city hall,” and escalating the rhetoric all the way to: “If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to fucking kill me.” Trumpism has reached its logical endpoint: failed candidates turning their campaigns into permanent revenge content channels, treating democracy as just another season of The Hills — but with more threats and fewer writers.
Census Bureau headquarters, where statisticians are informed that the best way to protect privacy now is to stop producing useful statistics.
The Trump administration has finally found a way to stop inconvenient facts from hurting Republicans at the ballot box: just make the facts disappear. Commerce dropped a new order banning the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis from using long‑standing “noise infusion” techniques that protect people’s privacy while still letting the public see detailed data. That leaves two options: blur the numbers into useless mush or don’t release them at all. Take a wild guess which way this is going.
Instead of modern privacy methods, Team Trump is forcing “coarsening” — stripping out neighborhood‑level detail so aggressively that data for small counties, rural areas, and minority communities may simply vanish from public statistics. The very numbers used for redistricting, resource allocation, and research into inequality get gutted, while the administration pretends this is about protecting privacy. Former Census chief scientist John Abowd politely translated the order as: your 2030 redistricting data is going to be so degraded most mapmakers can’t use it.
So on one hand, you have a legal requirement to keep respondents anonymous. On the other, you have an administration that’s allergic to any data that might document racial disparities, rural poverty, or partisan gerrymandering. The solution they landed on is elegant in its nihilism: if detailed numbers create accountability, then detailed numbers must die. It’s not voter suppression if you just erase the voters from the statistics, right?
Scott Turner heroically defends taxpayers from the grave threat of poor people having roofs over their heads.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new strategy to fight homelessness in Los Angeles: take away the money that keeps people housed. HUD, led by Secretary Scott Turner, abruptly suspended federal funding to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) over alleged fraud and mismanagement, proudly declaring that taxpayers will no longer bankroll the "homeless industrial complex". Only minor detail: those funds currently help keep actual human beings in housing, but sure, let’s do performance accountability politics on the backs of people sleeping in cars.
Local officials have been openly critical of LAHSA for years and have already yanked hundreds of millions in local money while building new oversight structures. But while Los Angeles is trying to reform a flawed system without tossing tens of thousands of vulnerable people into the street, Trump’s HUD has chosen the "publicity first, lives later" model. County supervisor Lindsey Horvath called the move a stunt; Mayor Karen Bass warned people will literally lose their lives; and Nithya Raman pointed out that this is exactly what she’d feared: the feds using funding as a political cudgel while pretending it’s about good governance.
This latest hit fits neatly into the administration’s broader "California punishment tour", where high-speed rail, sex education programs, and public universities have all watched their federal support get kneecapped whenever Trump doesn’t like how the state behaves. Los Angeles has actually managed to reduce homelessness for two years running, but that apparently counts for less in Washington than Trump’s long-running feud with California Democrats and the city’s voters refusing to elect his preferred reality TV mayor. Nothing says "serious about results" like sabotaging the city that’s finally bending the curve down, then blaming them for the fallout.
State-of-the-art U.S. hostage policy: let them plead for help on cable while the president declares mission accomplished.
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.
GOP candidates lining up to prove who is the most aggressively pro-Trump, like a talent show where the prize is control of a state government and the talent is authoritarian boot-licking.
Republicans in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina are heading into runoffs where the core issue is not "policy" or "governing" but which candidate can cosplay as the purest vessel of Donald Trump’s ego. In Alabama, Rep. Barry Moore has the official Trump blessing, but his opponent Jared Hudson is branding himself as a "warrior for President Trump’s America First Agenda," because nothing says independent legislative branch like promising to be a loyal infantryman in the president’s personality cult.
Georgia’s GOP is running its own experiment in late-stage democracy, where Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, armed with a Trump tele-rally, faces billionaire Rick Jackson, who has spent over $90 million of his own money to tell voters he is basically Trump, but with a fresher warranty. South Carolina rounds it out with Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and AG Alan Wilson both citing their devotion to Trump, Wilson bragging about defending the president’s agenda in court as if the job description for state attorney general is "personal legal bouncer for the White House."
Trump, for his part, waves away his rare Iowa endorsement loss by claiming he wasn’t given the "proper information" and that the winner was "much more Trump" anyway. So the message to Republican voters is clear: elections are no longer about ideas, competence, or even basic sanity — they’re about choosing which ambitious climber can most convincingly promise to help one man cling to power. Representative democracy has been replaced with a casting call.
Trump, surrounded by people pretending this is fine, explaining that the deal he bragged about yesterday doesn’t exist today.
Trump spent Thursday bragging that negotiators had "just made a great settlement" with Iran to end the war he helped start with wide-ranging US and Israeli strikes back in February. Less than a day later, he’s back in the Oval Office declaring that Iranian leaks about the alleged deal "bear no relation to the truth" and that Tehran are "very dishonorable people" who need to "get their act together, and FAST!" Diplomatic masterclass: announce mystery peace, threaten new attacks, then rage-tweet when the other side describes something you don’t recognize.
Iranian media published purported terms that sounded like, well, Iran’s wish list: lifting the US naval blockade, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and at least $300 billion in compensation for the damage from US and Israeli strikes. They also want a UN Security Council resolution backing the final deal, sanctions relief, and half their frozen assets released before final talks begin. Washington, meanwhile, is telling the BBC that actually the deal means Iran destroys and removes nuclear material, dismantles its program, stops funding Hezbollah and other proxies, and only then maybe gets some economic relief — no upfront cash, definitely no pallets of money, cross their hearts and hope JD Vance trends on X.
So we have two governments at war, under a "ceasefire" that still features intermittent missile exchanges, each describing totally different "agreements" while Pakistan tries to play marriage counselor. Trump insists there’s "no such thing as dealing in good faith" with Iran, which is an interesting line from a guy who announces peace deals that don’t appear to exist, then blames the other side for "leaks" of terms that may just be them negotiating in public. The White House’s position boils down to: Iran gets nothing until it does everything; Iran’s position is: the US un-chokes our economy before we even finish talking. What could possibly go wrong when a volatile president with a track record of tearing up nuclear agreements is improvising Middle East war and peace on live TV?
Vice President JD Vance popped up to assure everyone that the Iranians are "not receiving any cash" just for showing up and that the deal is "structured" to prioritize US and allied concerns — a comforting claim, given that the administration can’t even agree with itself on whether there is a deal. While Israel, whose strikes helped kick this off, is pointedly not in the talks, Trump’s team is trying to micromanage Iran’s regional behavior, nuclear program, oil exports, and frozen assets all at once, using a blockade and airstrikes as leverage. But hey, at least there’s one constant: the US keeps stretching war powers like legal taffy, and Trump keeps insisting everything is "great" until someone reads the fine print out loud.
Trump, surrounded by loyalists, carefully editing his presidential legacy with a giant Sharpie labeled "NOT IMPEACHED IF YOU SQUINT."
Donald Trump, twice-impeached and eternally aggrieved, is now asking Congress to pass a resolution to symbolically erase both impeachments from history, because when you can’t overturn an election you might as well try overturning the Congressional Record. Even the White House admits this has no legal effect, but it would let Trump strut around claiming victory over the Constitution like he just beat it in small claims court.
Republicans are being invited to reopen Ukraine extortion and January 6 right before the midterms, a political strategy so inspired even SE Cupp is on TV basically begging them to stop self-immolating. Democrats like Ted Lieu and Adam Schiff, meanwhile, are practically offering to bring popcorn to the hearings: "Please, please make every swing-district Republican vote on whether inciting an insurrection was actually fine, actually."
Constitutional scholars point out that there is no mechanism to "un-impeach" a president, because the Framers, tragically, did not anticipate a future in which a party would try to retroactively launder a president’s abuses via vibes resolution. The White House, through spokesperson Abigail Jackson, insists this is all just about "undoing shameful actions" by "Trump-deranged Democrats" and that Trump is focused on "what’s best for the American people"—which, coincidentally, remains perfectly aligned with whatever keeps him from feeling like a loser.
The historical record will still say: impeached for shaking down Ukraine, impeached for stoking an insurrection. Trump’s plan is to staple a Post-it over that page that reads "NUH-UH," and have House Republicans call it statesmanship.
Traders stare at a chart trying to price in the geopolitical risk of one man’s impulse control issues.
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 White House, seen here warming up for its undercard bout against basic democratic norms.
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?
Steve Hilton explains how California needs to be liberated from big government by a guy endorsed by the man who tried to overthrow the government.
California is apparently so broken that it now needs to be "saved" by Steve Hilton, the former David Cameron aide turned Fox News populist turned Trump hype man. Having helped sell the UK on the "Big Society" austerity fairy tale, he’s washed up in Huntington Beach to explain that the cure for the world’s fifth-largest economy is… tax cuts, deregulation, and more drilling. Truly groundbreaking stuff — Reaganomics with a ring light.
Hilton is pitching himself as a "rebel" outsider while bragging about his endorsement from President Donald Trump, insisting that being Trump’s favorite British errand boy is actually an "asset" for Californians. The plan: slash regulations, expand energy production, and roll back California’s sanctuary-state protections, all while claiming to be the champion of "legal immigrants" — a phrase that in MAGA-speak usually means "people we can safely use as a prop while we help ICE." Civil-liberties concerns about non-criminal immigrants getting detained? Don’t worry, he says, that can all be fixed with "better co-ordination" with federal authorities. What could possibly go wrong?
On elections, Hilton swears he hasn’t seen evidence of voter fraud, but for some reason he’s all-in on a Republican-backed voter ID ballot measure and wants to end universal mail ballots for 23 million Californians. Totally coincidental that this just happens to line up with Trump’s long-running war on voting access and his favorite talking point that counting ballots is suspicious if it takes longer than a Fox News segment. Democrat Xavier Becerra is out here warning that Hilton would hand the state over to Trump; Hilton, for his part, is basically campaigning on the promise to do exactly that, while calling it "common sense" and "pragmatism." Democracy, but make it client-state.
Ariana Grande, accidentally drafted into the role of soundtrack supervisor for Trump’s TikTok Deportation Cinematic Universe.
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.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, temporarily cosplaying as the Trump Ego Annex until the court-ordered power-washing crew arrives.
Donald Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center board is staging a last-minute legal tantrum to keep his name bolted to a building he didn’t legally get to rename. A federal judge already ruled that slapping “Trump” onto the John F. Kennedy Center was illegal because only Congress can change the name of the federal arts institution, and ordered all references to the Orange Add-On scraped off by Friday. Rather than comply with the law, the board voted to seek a stay so they can keep pretending the Kennedy Center is just Mar-a-Lago with better acoustics.
The same crew also tried to shut the whole place down for two years of “renovations” until Judge Christopher Cooper blocked that too, apparently deciding that turning America’s premier arts venue into a construction-themed personality cult was a bit much. After Trump ignored the Kennedy Center for most of his first term, his second-term speedrun has been pure institutional capture: ousting leadership, installing loyalists, naming himself chairman, parachuting in Ric Grenell, and reprogramming the lineup to feature Trump-friendly content like Melania’s documentary, because nothing says national cultural heritage like a vanity film about the first lady’s Instagram era.
Artists and staff have responded the way you might expect when a historic arts center gets annexed by a reality show presidency. Issa Rae, Béla Fleck, Louise Penny and others bailed on appearances, consultants like Ben Folds and Renée Fleming resigned, and the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra fled to Los Angeles. Internally, staff were told to go back to calling it the John F. Kennedy Center and the website quietly erased Trump’s name, while the board simultaneously passed a resolution praising his “commitment to uphold this cherished American institution.” Outstanding work: turning a living memorial to a slain president into a test case for whether a sitting president can just Sharpie himself onto federal property and dare the courts to stop him.
So now the Kennedy Center sits at the intersection of law, culture, and one man’s obsession with plastering his name on anything that doesn’t move. Congress says it names the building, the judge says Trump’s board broke the law, and Trump’s trustees say: what if we just ignore that and file something on Friday? The rule of law meets the rule of vibes, and the arts community gets front-row seats to the authoritarian matinee.
White House officials gather in the Situation Room to discuss the grave national emergency of potentially embarrassing paperwork.
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.
HHS, seen here cosplaying as a fully functioning agency while the leadership chart looks like a ghost town on LinkedIn.
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?
Artist’s impression of the 'Golden Dome' missile defense system: a giant, shiny vault where Trump locks away voting rights and fills the rest with defense contracts.
Donald Trump has discovered a new two-for-one special in authoritarian governance: use budget reconciliation to max out Pentagon spending and sneak in a nationwide voter-suppression package, the so-called Save America Act. He jumped on Truth Social to order Republicans to "IMMEDIATELY" pass a $350bn reconciliation bill that would fund his personal line of war toys — the "Golden Dome" missile defense system, a "golden fleet" of Trump-class battleships, and the F-47 fighter jet (because of course the model number has to match his place in history) — while also trying to make it harder for Americans to vote.
Even some Republicans are blinking at this speedrun of procedural abuse. Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins, who have spent careers perfecting the art of quiet sabotage, are suddenly worried that using a third reconciliation bill to lock in $350bn of one-off defense money is fiscally reckless and destabilizing. Notably, they’re less rattled by the democracy-strangling part than by the prospect that the cash spigot might not be permanently welded open for the contractors building Trump’s golden navy.
The Save America Act itself is the usual voter-suppression greatest hits album: stricter ID requirements, forcing states to hand voter rolls to DHS, and threatening election officials with legal liability if someone is "improperly" registered — a chilling incentive to toss eligible voters rather than risk prosecution. The problem for Trump is that almost none of this actually fits within reconciliation rules, and it doesn’t have the 60 votes needed to survive the filibuster. So the White House is trying to duct-tape an unconstitutional election crackdown to a gold-plated weapons binge and daring Republicans to call it what it is: a desperate bid to buy more missiles and fewer voters before the clock runs out.
Chuck Schumer studies a flowchart labeled “What to do when the president sends federal agents to steal ballots,” while Trump circles the word ‘election’ and writes ‘MINE’ in Sharpie over it.
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.
Cleta Mitchell and Heather Honey, seen here workshopping new ways to redefine 'election integrity' as 'we only count the votes we like.'
The "Foundation For Accountability Integrity & Research In Elections Fund" — or Fair Elections Fund, for short, because irony is now tax-deductible — quietly pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign telling local officials that certifying elections is basically optional. Certification is not optional, but when you’re building an election-subversion starter kit for Trump’s 2024 do-over tour, accuracy is more of a suggestion than a requirement.
At the center of this are Cleta Mitchell, Trump’s favorite coup-curious lawyer, and Heather Honey, a professional wrong-about-elections person who somehow now works at the Department of Homeland Security on elections. Their nonprofit sluiced money to the American Principles Project Foundation, which paid for "Follow the Law" ads that strongly hinted officials could just… not certify results, plus letters to clerks nudging them to stop being "rubber-stamps" and start being handier tools for authoritarian power grabs.
The Fair Elections Fund didn’t stop there. It handed $1.875 million to Mike Davis–linked Article III Foundation for Spanish-language scare ads about non-citizen voting, paid Urban Legend Media to juice support for the failed voter-suppression "Save Act" via a "paid influencer ecosystem" (John Thune’s words, not ours), and shoveled money into Honey’s own outfits, Election Research Institute and Verity Vote. All of this was bankrolled largely by the Conservative Partnership Institute, Trumpworld’s DC hub for people who think the real problem with elections is that voters keep ruining them.
Watchdogs describe this as part of Trump’s "election takeover playbook": build a well-funded, self-referential ecosystem that manufactures fake fraud claims, spreads them through astroturf campaigns and influencers, then pressures officials and Congress to restrict voting and sabotage certification. It looks like a tangled web of groups and grants until you connect the dots and realize it’s just the same handful of election deniers paying themselves to keep democracy permanently on trial.
Former FBI agents form a support group to cope with the trauma of watching the Bureau get remodeled into Trump’s personal secret police, because apparently American democracy now needs group therapy too.
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.’
