grandma goes to yellowstone, trump’s ice sends her to jail
Come for the national parks, stay for the indefinite detention by a giant, screaming Donald Trump with a badge and a quota spreadsheet.
Karen Newton, a 65-year-old British grandmother with a valid US tourist visa, went to see bison and geysers and wound up getting the full Trump-era police state sampler. After Canadian border officials bounced her and her husband back over a paperwork issue with their car, US officials discovered his visa had expired and responded with the calm, proportionate measure you’d expect from an $85bn deportation machine: they handcuffed and shackled her too, then locked her in a cell and drove her 12 hours through the night to an ICE detention center.
Karen, who has no criminal record and apparently the wild, radical lifestyle of a retired primary school admin who does cross-stitch, spent six weeks in ICE custody despite having all the legal paperwork she needed to be in the country. Guards allegedly told her that ICE officers get paid per head they detain, which really clarifies why the agency is suddenly treating tourists like bounties in a dystopian loyalty program. Trump’s second-term ICE, now fattened from a $6bn budget to $85bn and showering new hires with up to $50,000 signing bonuses, has been ordered to crank daily arrests up to 1,200–1,500 — so sure, the math checks out: your valid visa is now just a cover charge for entering the for-profit detention arcade.
Karen joins a growing list of international travelers — German tourists, a British backpacker, a Canadian actor, a New Zealander and her six-year-old son — who learned the hard way that under Trump, legal entry status is mostly a suggestion and the real immigration policy is "how many warm bodies can we throw in a cell today." The message from America’s tourism board has never been clearer: visit the US, see the sights, try the cuisine, maybe get disappeared into an $85bn immigration gulag because someone needs to hit their quota.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
trump doj to federal judges: nice statute you’ve got there, shame if we ignored it
Todd Blanche hits “send tweet” to fire a court-appointed U.S. attorney, proving once again that under Trump, constitutional law is just content for the feed.
The Eastern District of Virginia got about three hours of lawful leadership before the Trump DOJ kicked it to the curb. Federal judges unanimously appointed veteran litigator James Hundley as interim U.S. attorney — a guy with 30+ years of experience, complex criminal and civil work, and an actual argument before the Supreme Court under his belt. Chief Judge M. Hannah Lauck swore him in, paperwork filed, oath taken, the whole quaint "rule of law" ritual.
Then Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche hopped onto X like a reality show contestant with a badge and declared, "Here we go again. EDVA judges do not pick our US Attorney. POTUS does. James Hundley, you’re fired!" Federal law explicitly lets judges appoint a U.S. attorney when the president’s nominee hasn’t been confirmed within 120 days — but the Trump administration has apparently moved on to a new constitutional theory: the statute doesn’t count if it inconveniences Dear Leader’s patronage network.
This is now a pattern, not a glitch. Hundley was stepping in after a judge ruled that Trump stan Lindsey Halligan — an insurance lawyer with zero prosecutorial experience whose main qualification was hating Letitia James and James Comey — was serving unlawfully. Same story in New Jersey, where Pam Bondi axed judge-appointed Desiree Leigh Grace to protect Trump ally Alina Habba’s turf, and in the Northern District of New York, where Donald Kinsella got an email from the White House informing him the president had personally ordered his removal. Federal judges follow the law, replace illegally installed loyalists, and the Trump team responds by yanking the replacements and reasserting political control over prosecutions.
So yes, the Department of Justice is now openly treating judicial appointments authorized by statute as optional suggestions, while blasting out "you’re fired" posts on social media like it’s 2017 and the Constitution is just a Terms of Service pop-up. The message to the bench is clear: you can rule our cronies are unlawful all you want — we’ll just keep firing anyone who isn’t a Trump foot soldier until the only qualification for U.S. attorney is "willing to prosecute the president’s enemies on command." Independent justice has officially been replaced with at-will employment, Mar-a-Lago edition.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
dhs forgets to mention it killed a us citizen during trump’s big immigration crackdown
DHS agents managing traffic, public safety, and the occasional undisclosed fatal shooting, all without the burden of telling the public what actually happened.
The Department of Homeland Security apparently decided that killing a 23-year-old US citizen during Trump’s second-term immigration purge was just a minor paperwork issue, not something the public needed to know about. Newly released, heavily blacked-out ICE documents show that Ruben Ray Martinez was shot and killed by a Homeland Security Investigations agent on South Padre Island in March 2025 during a traffic encounter that DHS somehow forgot to publicly disclose for 11 months. Local outlets reported a shooting at the time, but nobody mentioned that federal immigration agents were involved, because transparency is for governments that aren’t running a nationwide crackdown.
According to DHS, Martinez “intentionally ran over” an HSI agent, prompting another agent to fire “defensive shots” through the driver’s window. According to Martinez’s mother – and, awkwardly, a Texas Rangers investigator – there’s video that contradicts the federal agents’ story. That state investigation was reportedly finished in October and supposed to go to a grand jury, yet DPS now says the case is still “active”, which is bureaucrat for “we’re all waiting to see how much political heat this causes”. Meanwhile, the agents’ names are redacted, the only person who definitely died is a US citizen who went to the beach for his birthday, and the shooting is just one of at least six deadly federal encounters since Trump 2.0’s immigration dragnet kicked off. Law and order, it turns out, mostly means you don’t get to know who killed your kid or why.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
trump fails to cancel history, congress briefly remembers spine
Congress briefly pretends to value art and history, pauses Trump’s culture purge for one fiscal year only.
Donald Trump tried to defund reality again, this time by going after the Smithsonian, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and museums that dare acknowledge women, Black Americans, Latinos, and Indigenous people exist. He even slapped an executive order with the extremely normal title “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” on it, accusing the Smithsonian of being corrupted by a "race-centered ideology"—because nothing says truth and sanity like demanding history be less accurate and more flattering to white grievance.
Congress, in a rare moment of wanting to look slightly less like an authoritarian book club, quietly restored funding in a January bill, keeping the IAIA and other targeted institutions alive. This didn’t happen because Republicans suddenly discovered the humanities, but because students, alumni, and advocates launched a relentless pressure campaign, writing letters, talking to the press, and explaining that maybe erasing Indigenous and minority culture from public life is bad. IAIA president Shelly C Lowe calls the funding a "relief"; the catch is that everyone now has to spend their time lobbying just to not be deleted from the federal budget every year like a line item in Trump’s ego spreadsheet.
So the Institute of American Indian Arts gets $13.5m to keep its doors open and continue proving that Indigenous art, culture, and economic impact are real. The trade-off is that they, and every other cultural institution Trump targeted, now live in a world where federal support for history and art is a recurring hostage situation. The good news: advocacy worked. The bad news: they’ll have to keep fighting, because the president still wants the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities to go the way of his attention span.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
supreme court discovers spine, gently removes trump’s tariff bat
The U.S. Supreme Court, briefly moonlighting as a co-equal branch of government instead of Trump’s emergency rubber stamp.
The Supreme Court has finally looked at Trump’s "everything is an emergency if I say so" tariff regime and decided: actually, no, the president does not get to run the global economy like a casino he’s already bankrupted. In a 6-3 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court ruled that Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to slap massive, wildly fluctuating tariffs on imports is unconstitutional. That’s Trump’s signature economic policy, vaporized — and not even on the shadow docket this time.
Trump had jacked tariffs to at least 10% on most imports, up to 145% for China, and 25–35% on supposed "allies" like Canada and Mexico, because nothing says strategic genius like declaring trade war on maple syrup. Businesses, somehow unthrilled by having their supply chains tied to the president’s mood ring, sued, arguing he’d blown past his legal authority. After years of rubber-stamping Trump’s power grabs on the emergency docket, the justices finally took a real case, did full briefing, and told him no. Roberts plus five others sided with the Constitution; Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh dissented, presumably from an alternate universe where "emergency powers" means "whatever the guy with the loudest rally crowd wants."
The upshot: Trump’s trade policy — a chaotic protectionist cosplay justified by perpetual "emergency" — just hit a constitutional wall. The Court, which has spent years enabling his authoritarian cosplay, has now drawn at least one line: you don’t get to rewrite global trade law by executive order and call it Tuesday. Whether this slows the broader project of turning emergency powers into a permanent presidential cheat code is unclear, but for today, the imperial presidency took a rare loss.
#killing-democracy#trade-war
federal judge to white house: stop running an immigration terror cell
ICE and Border Patrol agents stand around looking for the nearest constitutional right to ignore while the White House speed-runs the "authoritarian regime" checklist.
US district judge Sunshine Sykes has looked at Trump’s immigration machine, compared it to the rule of law, and concluded: yeah, this is terror. Not metaphorical, not vibes-based – she explicitly describes the White House as terrorizing immigrants and "extending its violence" to its own citizens, after ICE and Border Patrol officers killed two US citizens in Minneapolis who were protesting. You know your democracy is thriving when a federal judge has to write the words "the executive branch" and "killing American citizens" in the same sentence.
The administration, having been told in December that its mandatory detention scheme was illegal, responded with the maturity and restraint we’ve come to expect: it just kept doing it. Sykes ordered DHS to actually tell detainees they might be eligible for bond, and then – stay with me here – let them use a phone to call a lawyer within an hour. The government’s response was to wave around an immigration court ruling she has now tossed in the trash and to brag through DHS that the supreme court keeps "overruling" lower courts, as if "we break the law until our guys in robes rescue us" is a normal enforcement strategy.
While Trump’s people insist they’re targeting the "worst criminals", Sykes notes the obvious: most of the people they’re locking up for months without hearings don’t fit that description at all. More than 20,000 habeas petitions have been filed since Trump took office – a number you usually associate with failed states and war zones, not a country that prints "due process" on the brochure. Judges from Minnesota to New Jersey are now holding administration lawyers in contempt and demanding to know why court orders are treated as optional suggestions. Sykes spells it out: denying immigrants basic due process is shredding families, communities, and "the fabric of this very nation" – which, to be fair, appears to be exactly the point.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
president with five deferments calls injured olympian a 'real loser'
Gus Kenworthy, seen here doing actual athletic feats, as opposed to logging on to bully Olympians from a gold-plated couch.
Donald Trump, a man whose most strenuous athletic achievement is walking down a ramp at a 3% incline, decided to spend the first week of the Winter Olympics calling U.S. halfpipe skier Hunter Hess a "real loser" for having complicated feelings about representing his country under, well, him. Shockingly, the presidential meltdown unleashed a torrent of online abuse, turning what should have been the pinnacle of Hess’s career into what he describes as "the hardest two weeks of my life."
Instead of issuing an apology like a normal adult, the Commander in Chief of the Culture War just left a 27-year-old to deal with threats and harassment while he competed with a haematoma, bone bruising, possible broken hand, and knee pain — and still qualified for the final while flashing an L-sign and deadpanning, "Apparently I am a loser. I am leaning into it." Hess, who has repeatedly said he loves the United States and is proud to represent Team USA, learned the hard way that in Trump’s America, patriotism isn’t about sacrifice or performance; it’s about never deviating from the script.
Hess compared notes with fellow target Gus Kenworthy, who committed the unpardonable sin of writing "Fuck ICE" in the snow and was rewarded with violent, homophobic threats from the president’s fanbase. Kenworthy’s takeaway? Anyone who spends their free time posting rage comments at Olympic athletes probably isn’t the defender of American greatness they think they are. But sure, let’s keep pretending the real threat to the country is a skier with mixed feelings and a busted shoulder, not a president who treats citizens like enemies for failing the flag-worship vibe check.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
dan crenshaw begs for trump’s love, gets ghosted anyway
Steve Toth, seen here auditioning for the role of ‘Most Obedient Backbencher,’ explains that Dan Crenshaw’s real crime was momentarily acknowledging who actually won the 2020 election.
Donald Trump has endorsed every House Republican running in the early 2026 primaries except one: Dan Crenshaw, who is now spending a pile of money on TV ads insisting that he actually does love Big Brother. Texas state Rep. Steve Toth is challenging him from the ultra-MAGA right, arguing that Crenshaw’s occasional brush with reality on Ukraine and the 2020 election disqualifies him from serving in a party where the top policy priority is personal loyalty to Trump.
Crenshaw, who once dared to say the stolen-election fantasy was a "lie meant to rile people up," is now flooding the airwaves with footage of Trump calling him "great" and telling voters that if they think he’s not MAGA enough, they just aren’t stalking his social media hard enough. He’s bragging about defending Trump’s policies "in extremely hard places" like The View and Bill Maher, while simultaneously touting his hardline immigration stance, cartel war cosplay, and repeated attempts to strip Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care for minors to prove he’s on-brand authoritarian where it counts.
The punchline: even after signing on to Ken Paxton’s doomed legal stunt to overturn Biden’s win, Crenshaw still committed the unforgivable sin of voting to certify the election. So now his reward is a primary where both candidates are racing to prove who can worship Trump more convincingly, while Trump himself dangles a possible endorsement like a reality show rose. Policy, governance, democracy — all demoted to background extras in the ongoing casting call for Trump’s favorite congressional sidekick.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump turns nato into a protection racket, europe starts learning krav maga
Map of the Baltic Sea, also known as the body of water NATO members now have to defend from both Russia and whatever Trump’s mood is this week.
Europe joined NATO to be protected from Russia, not to have Donald Trump wake up one morning and threaten to carve off Greenland like it’s a Trump golf course with icebergs. After the "Greenland crisis"—in which the most powerful NATO member floated seizing territory from another member—Baltic Sea states quietly realized that the alliance’s biggest wildcard isn’t Moscow’s rusting navy, it’s the guy in Washington treating Article 5 like a gym membership he can cancel if the Europeans don’t "pay up".
So the Baltic countries did the unthinkable: they acted like responsible adults. Finland and its neighbors built a joint maritime surveillance center, spun up an AI system called Nordic Warden to watch over undersea cables and pipelines, and created a nonstop patrol—Baltic Sentry—to guard infrastructure that the US used to pretend to care about. While Trump is out there announcing that if allies don’t hit his arbitrary spending number he’ll just let Russia have a snack, these countries are patching the security holes he’s punching in the system.
Meanwhile, ordinary Europeans have noticed that the "leader of the free world" now talks about NATO like it’s a casino comp program. Only a quarter of Swedes think the US would actually show up if they were attacked, and most Britons doubt Washington would defend the Baltics at all. So regional mini-alliances are forming, France is boarding shady Russian tankers, and everyone is quietly preparing for a future where the United States is less a guarantor of security and more an unstable landlord threatening eviction. NATO may survive this, but it won’t be thanks to Trump—it’ll be because everyone else decided to do the grown-up work while the arsonist keeps playing with matches.
#killing-democracy#national-security
trump slaps his face on the justice department
The Justice Department, now featuring its new logo: Donald Trump’s face where blindfolded Lady Justice used to be.
The Justice Department just debuted its new look: a giant Trump banner draped over its headquarters like a third-rate casino promo, helpfully clarifying that the "independence" part of law enforcement has been discontinued. The slogan: "Make America Safe Again" — which here apparently means "safe for the president from consequences". Nothing says rule of law like the defendant hanging his own promo poster on the courthouse.
Pam Bondi, now attorney general and full-time presidential bodyguard, has ditched the old-fashioned idea that the AG shouldn’t act like the president’s personal lawyer. Instead, DOJ is proudly “celebrating 250 years” of American justice “at President Trump’s direction” — a phrase that would normally be a red flag, but is now just printed on official letterhead. While they insist they’re not weaponizing the department, they’re busy launching investigations into Trump’s perceived enemies: Letitia James, James Comey, Democratic lawmakers who warned troops about illegal orders, Jerome Powell for saying words in Congress, and random Minnesota officials for not being cruel enough on immigration.
Authoritarian regimes usually ease into the whole personality cult thing. This one skipped straight to hanging the leader’s face on the justice ministry while opening revenge probes against critics, then pretending it’s all just good governance. The banner says "Make America Safe Again"; the fine print reads: for Trump, not for democracy.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
cia lady vs chaos muppet: state of the union remix
Abigail Spanberger preparing to follow Trump’s State of the Union, also known as the annual ‘I definitely didn’t try to overthrow this place’ variety show.
Donald Trump is getting another taxpayer-funded therapy session in front of a joint session of Congress, and Democrats have decided to answer it by rolling out Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer whose entire career is basically one long no, actually, this is not normal to Trumpism. While Trump will be busy declaring his own perfection, Spanberger is set to talk about "rising costs" and "chaos in their communities" — also known as the Trump 2.0 governing agenda. One side brings flags and fantasies; the other brings someone who can pronounce "Ukraine" without needing Putin’s permission first.
Spanberger’s résumé is a walking subtweet of the Trump era: flipped a Republican district in 2018 during the first backlash to his rule, helped push Pelosi over the edge on impeaching him for extorting Ukraine, then crushed Republican Winsome Sears for governor by nearly 16 points — triple Kamala Harris’ 2024 margin over Trump in Virginia. So yes, the Democratic response is being delivered by a woman whose entire political rise is powered by the nuclear waste of Trump’s corruption, and she’s now being handed prime time to explain why people are tired of living in his perpetual crisis carnival.
Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer also tapped Sen. Alex Padilla to give the Spanish-language response, while Jeffries politely summarized Trump’s speech in advance as a live performance of lying, deflecting, and blaming everyone else for his failed presidency. Notably passed over: New York City’s socialist-flavored mayor Zohran Mamdani and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill — because when you’re running against a would-be autocrat who already tried to overthrow the government once, the party has decided maybe let’s go with the ex-spook who helped impeach him for abusing foreign aid. Polls show Trump bleeding support on the economy and immigration, so Democrats are studying the Spanberger/Sherrill "competent boring person vs. flaming dumpster of fascist vibes" model for the midterms. Bold strategy: offering governance against a guy still selling grievance and gold sneakers.
#killing-democracy#losses
trump discovers even he has to praise someone who actually did things
Jesse Jackson marching for voting rights while the GOP frantically looks for new ways to draw a line around democracy and call it a ‘safe district.’
Donald Trump, lifelong huckster and part-time strongman enthusiast, briefly stepped out of character to call Jesse Jackson a “force of nature” — which is MAGA for, “this guy actually organized people and won things without lying about crowd sizes.” Reverend William Barber’s tribute walks through Jackson’s life of actual public service: nonviolent direct action, boycotts against corporate greed, rainbow coalitions, and that terrifying concept so hated by Republicans everywhere: registering poor people to vote.
Then we snap back to present-day America, where Trump loses an election during a pandemic, screams “fraud” into every available microphone, and turns belief in the big lie into a mandatory GOP blood oath. State-level Republicans, desperate to keep Jackson’s multi-racial coalitions from ever mattering again, respond the only way they know how: gerrymander Texas into abstract art and let Trump literally order a gerrymander in North Carolina to try to cling to House power. Jackson, already sick, is still out marching in the heat while the supposed tough guys of the right are busy redrawing maps so they never have to face actual voters.
Barber’s whole point is that Jackson bet on love, fusion politics, and democracy, while Trumpism is betting on coercion, propaganda, and a Sharpie on the electoral map. One side registered millions of new voters; the other side is frantically figuring out how to make sure those voters’ ballots are worth about three-fifths of a district. The lion of love is gone, and in his place we have a spray-tanned zookeeper frantically moving the cages around so the animals can’t vote.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
strongmen’s punchcard loyalty club rebrands as ‘board of peace’
World leaders line up in Washington to join Trump’s Board of Peace, a groundbreaking initiative where the people bombing Gaza help decide how to rebuild it, and the Palestinians are politely asked to die off-screen.
Donald Trump has launched his very own off-brand United Nations, the "Board of Peace" – a kind of Costco for authoritarians where strongmen, military regimes and assorted democracy enthusiasts (ranked helpfully by Freedom House as not that into rights) gather in Washington to "solve" Gaza. Palestinians, whose territory has been bombed into the Stone Age and now needs an estimated $70bn to rebuild, are not on the board. Israel, which still controls more than half the strip from behind a cute little "yellow line" border, is on the board. Truly, a bold experiment in conflict resolution: talk about a people’s future, just don’t invite the people.
Traditional US allies like the UK, Germany and France took one look at this fee-paying members’ club for aspiring mini-Trumps and RSVP’d with a firm "absolutely not," worried – correctly – that this is an attempt to sidestep the UN and replace it with a body run on the whims of a single man whose foreign policy expertise consists of yelling on social media. The Board of Peace has a UN security council–blessed mandate to oversee demilitarisation and reconstruction in Gaza, but its first big achievement is pledging $5bn – roughly couch-cushion change compared with the $70bn the UN says is needed. So the plan is: cement a US-led, Trump-chaired parallel institution, pack it with dictators, starve reconstruction, and call it peace.
Meanwhile, a Lancet study quietly points out that more than 75,000 people were killed in the first 16 months of the war, with 3–4% of Gaza’s population killed violently and the majority of deaths being women, children and the elderly – exactly the kind of numbers you’d expect to inspire humility and accountability. Instead, we get a glitzy summit of the world’s least democratic governments cosplaying humanitarianism while debating how to "demilitarise" a shattered enclave they helped turn into rubble. When you build a new international order around autocrats and call it the Board of Peace, you’re not ending war – you’re beta-testing the subscription model for killing democracy.
#killing-democracy#fascism
rubio goes to munich, europe applauds its own decline
Marco Rubio explains the importance of defending white Christian civilisation to a roomful of Europeans whose grandparents spent a century learning why that’s a bad idea.
Marco Rubio flies to the Munich Security Conference as Trump’s slightly more house-trained emissary and delivers a speech about defending "white, western, Christian civilisation" from allegedly contaminating brown people. European elites respond by giving him a standing ovation, because nothing says "we learned from the 20th century" like politely clapping along to civilisational race talk in a German conference hall.
Rubio coats the message in soothing words about "sovereignty" and border protection, but the core is the same old white-supremacist fever dream that powered the war on terror: Muslims and migrants as the existential threat, Europe and America as a fragile, superior club under siege. Meanwhile, the Trump State Department is reportedly gearing up to bankroll "policy-aligned" European thinktanks and charities, so Washington can export Maga brainworms directly into EU policy circles instead of just relying on Fox News clips and Orbán fan mail.
While Spain’s Pedro Sánchez tries the radical approach of acknowledging migrants as human beings with rights, Brussels fixates on "simpler and more effective return procedures" – bureaucratese for EU-wide ICE cosplay, complete with raids, surveillance, and offshore dumping of undocumented people. European leaders, who allegedly know something about where dehumanizing rhetoric leads, are mostly too busy nodding along to Rubio’s flattery about their glorious colonial past to say: "We’ve heard this script before, and last time it didn’t end great."
The punchline: language that once would have been recognised as explicitly racist and dangerous is now treated as respectable statesmanship, provided it’s delivered in a blazer and not a red hat. Trump and Rubio get to launder Maga’s xenophobic ideology through NATO cocktail hours, and Europe’s political class, terrified of losing Washington’s favor, smiles, applauds, and pretends this isn’t how democracies rot from the inside.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#fascism
trump’s eeoc bravely protects men from a networking buffet
The EEOC bravely stands between American men and the mortal threat of a women’s networking mixer at a casino.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, now moonlighting as the Department of Fragile Male Feelings, has filed its first lawsuit targeting a workplace diversity program since Trump returned to office. The alleged civil rights emergency? A Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast networking event that let about 250 women go to a Connecticut casino for two days of team-building, speakers, and not having to listen to Steve from sales explain Bitcoin.
This is the test case for Trump-world’s new religion: DEI is discrimination. EEOC chair Andrea Lucas and friends have been loudly insisting that common diversity, equity and inclusion programs are actually “reverse discrimination”, and now the agency is putting federal muscle behind that narrative. They’re already investigating Nike and Northwestern Mutual, and demanding DEI data from 20 big law firms; the Coke bottler suit is just the first time they’ve decided that a women’s networking retreat is the line where civil rights must be heroically defended.
Acting general counsel Catherine Eschbach announced that excluding a protected class like men from an employer event is illegal and that the EEOC is committed to “equal access” for everyone. Fascinating how that fierce commitment to equality mainly kicks in when it’s time to kneecap programs designed to help historically excluded groups. Under Trump, the civil rights agency isn’t dismantled; it’s repurposed as a precision tool to make sure corporate America understands that the only discrimination this government truly cares about is the kind that inconveniences the already comfortable.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump threatens funds, hospital cuts off trans kids
NYU Langone, bravely standing up for trans kids by handing them a copy of the HHS rule and showing them the door.
NYU Langone just announced it’s shutting down its Transgender Youth Health Program, blaming the "regulatory environment" – which is a very polite way of saying "the Trump administration showed up with a baseball bat labeled ‘federal funding’." After Trump’s executive order declaring the government won’t "fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support" the so‑called transition of a child, the hospital started quietly canceling appointments for trans kids, until New York AG Letitia James had to step in and remind them that state anti‑discrimination laws are still a thing.
That temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s directive? Cute theory. The Department of Health and Human Services simply followed up with a proposed rule to strip Medicare and Medicaid money from any hospital offering "sex‑rejecting procedures" to anyone under 18 – i.e., gender‑affirming care endorsed by every major medical association that’s read a science book this century. So NYU Langone folded, local officials and advocates pointed out that yanking ongoing care from trans youth is dangerous and potentially life‑threatening, and the administration achieved its goal without passing a single law: terrorize providers until they do the discrimination for you.
Now 40 hospitals across the country have paused or ended some form of gender‑affirming care for young people since Trump’s return, while the White House sits in dignified silence, presumably too busy drafting the next executive order about which kids are allowed to exist. But sure, tell us more about how this is all about "protecting children" while you deliberately cut them off from medically necessary treatment and call it a win for family values.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america#racism
trump unveils the save america (from voters) act
Trump explains that the best way to ‘save America’ is to make sure fewer Americans get a say in it.
Trump’s SAVE America Act is the latest Republican brainstorm where the problem is "too many eligible voters" and the solution is, naturally, to make sure fewer of them can actually vote. NBC reports the bill could impact millions of eligible voters, which in Trumpworld is not a bug, it’s the entire product roadmap.
Instead of, say, investing in election security or modernizing voting systems, the plan is to wrap mass voter disenfranchisement in patriotic branding and call it "integrity." The same crowd that tried to overturn the last election is now pitching itself as the guardian of democracy, which is like putting Rudy Giuliani in charge of hair-dye safety standards.
What this really does is formalize the 2020 strategy: if you can’t win over voters, just make sure they never make it to the ballot box. Target the young, the poor, Black and brown communities, and anyone else statistically unlikely to chant "TRUMP!" at a rally, then pretend it’s all about "confidence in our elections." American democracy remains on the menu, and the SAVE America Act is the carving knife.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump econ guy demands detention for bad thoughts about tariffs
Kevin Hassett explains that when the data contradicts Trump, the data goes to the re-education camp.
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council and full-time reality-denial specialist, has decided that Federal Reserve economists should be "disciplined" for the high crime of doing math. Their New York Fed paper found that about 90% of Trump's tariffs are being paid by US firms and consumers, which is awkward when the official White House line is "foreigners are paying, don't look at your grocery bill."
Hassett went on CNBC to declare the paper "an embarrassment" and "the worst" in Fed history, which is a bold statement from an administration that treats numbers the way Elon treats NDAs. He insisted consumers are actually better off because prices fell, inflation dropped, and "real wages" rose, a miraculous outcome where Americans somehow get richer by paying more for imports. The economists who pointed out this basic incidence-of-tariffs problem, he says, should be punished for producing analysis that "wouldn't be accepted in a first-semester econ class"—a fascinating critique from the political team that thinks the deficit is just a vibe.
This is all unfolding while Trump is already pressuring the Fed to slash interest rates, cheering on a criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell over building renovations, and trying to push out Fed governor Lisa Cook. Meanwhile, every serious analysis—from the Kiel Institute to the National Bureau of Economic Research—confirms the same thing: the US is paying almost all the tariff costs. So naturally, instead of rethinking the policy, the White House is floating professional consequences for economists whose charts don't worship the Dear Tariff Leader. Independent central bank? Cute 20th-century concept.
#killing-democracy#fascism#trade-war
trump tries to trade tunnel money for naming rights like a broke dictator
Artist’s rendering of a rail tunnel heroically surviving both Hurricane Sandy and four years of Trump trying to name it after himself.
The Trump administration has finally released $127m in overdue federal funds for the New York–New Jersey Gateway rail tunnel, plus another $127m on top, after a federal judge basically reminded them that "president" is not a synonym for "ransom broker." Construction on the country’s largest infrastructure project can now restart, because the White House temporarily stopped treating a critical tunnel used by 200,000 daily commuters like a prop in a reality show.
This sudden burst of compliance comes after Trump spent months withholding $205m in reimbursements, running the project out of cash and forcing work to stop. During his little funding hostage situation, he allegedly demanded that Washington Dulles airport and New York’s Penn Station be renamed after him in exchange for unfreezing the money. So yes, the sitting president tried to swap essential infrastructure funding for personal branding opportunities, like a discount Mussolini with a merch store.
Governor Kathy Hochul and Chuck Schumer are calling it a huge win for workers, commuters, and the regional economy, because when the bar is on the floor, "the president obeyed a court order and stopped sabotaging a rail tunnel" now counts as a triumph. Trump, naturally, is still raging on Truth Social that Gateway is a future "boondoggle" and "financially catastrophic" — which is rich coming from the man who thinks the real emergency is that there aren’t enough buildings and airports named after him.
The bottom line: a century-old, Sandy-damaged tunnel finally gets repaired not because the administration cares about safety or transit, but because a judge and a political backlash briefly made it more painful to keep breaking things than to let one project proceed. Rule of law 1, petty autocrat 0 — at least until the next appeal.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
board of peace, brought to you by the highest bidder
World leaders file into the Donald J Trump Institute of Peace, where peace is theoretical but the $1bn membership fee is extremely real.
Donald Trump has discovered a bold new diplomatic innovation: a "Board of Peace" that looks suspiciously like a pay‑to‑play geopolitical country club with a minimum $1bn cover charge. The inaugural summit at the freshly rebranded Donald J Trump Institute of Peace is being sold as a Gaza reconstruction fundraiser, with Trump bragging about $5bn in pledges and "thousands" of promised stabilization troops. On the ground in Gaza, however, aid is still a trickle, the 100‑day Jared Kushner peace-and-recovery plan is face‑planting in real time, and the technocrats of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza are stuck in Cairo, wondering who they work for, what their budget is, and whether they’re supposed to be anything more than props.
Europe took one look at this operation and collectively said: absolutely not. Ursula von der Leyen, plus the leaders of the UK, Germany, and France, all declined to join, while Trump yanked Canada’s Mark Carney’s invite after Justin Trudeau hurt his feelings in Davos. Even the Vatican bailed, with Pope Leo XIV’s team politely pointing out that international crises are kind of the UN’s job, not whatever this donor-tiered peace pyramid scheme is. Critics note the whole thing appears designed to sideline existing international institutions and maybe, just maybe, give Trump a personal global power platform he can chair even after he’s out of office.
Instead of key allies, the guest list is stacked with Middle Eastern governments and a grab bag of states apparently hoping to curry favor with the Trump administration by buying themselves a “permanent seat” for a cool billion. Meanwhile, the "International Stabilization Force" exists mostly as an empty office door with ISF on it and an unused barracks for 8,000 Indonesian troops who haven’t actually been deployed. Diplomats quietly warn that without things like a plan for Hamas disarmament or IDF withdrawal, this whole security architecture is doomed. But don’t worry, Trump still has the optics: a glossy summit, big pledge numbers, and an ad hoc shadow peace board that does a lot of motion with very little movement—exactly the kind of foreign policy theater this administration specializes in.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
