The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Vice-president JD Vance has announced that he’ll decide whether to run for president in 2028 after the 2026 midterms, following a serious family conversation with his wife Usha and a less-serious reality show conversation with Donald Trump. He insists he doesn’t sit around plotting a White House run, which is adorable coming from a guy doing a book tour about his religious awakening while floating his presidential ambitions on national TV.

Vance says Trump will be "very supportive" of whatever he decides, which is a polite way of saying that the future of the Republican party will once again be determined by whatever mood the octogenarian strongman is in when Fox & Friends ends. He claims he never brings up 2028 with Trump, but says the president talks about it "a lot"—publicly and privately—because of course the man who tried to overturn an election is "very fascinated" by who gets to sit in his old chair next.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports Vance may delay deciding because his fourth child is due in July, reminding everyone that the would-be heir to Trumpism is busy expanding both his family and his political brand. On the shortlist of other 2028 hopefuls: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr, because nothing says "healthy democracy" like a dynastic primary between the son, the courtier, and the guy who converted to Catholicism and to Trumpism with the same fervor.

The Trump administration has finally found an immigration policy that works: driving Americans out of America. As Republican legislatures carve districts so aggressively that whole liberal neighborhoods basically vanish on paper, actual people with pro-democracy values are vanishing in real life too. At least 180,000 Americans voluntarily left in 2025, EU inflows are at record highs, and DHS proudly reports 2.2 million "self-deportations" – which now apparently includes U.S. citizens leaving with their undocumented family members. You know your democracy is thriving when the census starts to look like a before-and-after ad for authoritarianism.

The people heading for the exits aren’t random. They’re younger, more educated, more open-minded, and more committed to liberal democratic institutions – exactly the folks you’d want around when a twice-impeached, multiply indicted strongman is busy kneecapping checks and balances, gutting reproductive rights, and shrugging off sexual misconduct allegations against his pals. Women 15–44 are leading the Donald Dash, with 40% saying they’d move permanently if they could, while billionaires shop for golden passports and scientists ship their lab coats to countries that still fund research instead of culture wars.

Combine that with collapsing net migration, record numbers dreaming of leaving, and scholars of authoritarianism literally relocating as a group, and you get a neat feedback loop: the more Trump erodes democracy, the more the people most likely to fight back leave – which makes it easier to erode democracy further. It’s like gerrymandering the electorate by convincing your opposition to emigrate. The U.S. isn’t just losing brainpower; it’s bleeding out its democratic immune system, one visa application and Irish ancestry form at a time.

Donald Trump has finally unified the country: across parties, races, and ages, a majority of Americans now agree the United States is headed straight into the dumpster. The new NBC/More Perfect poll finds 56% of registered voters think America’s best years are behind it and nearly 80% say the American Dream is harder to reach than a Trump tax return. So yes, the self-described master dealmaker has apparently negotiated us down to collective pessimism and vibes-based decline.

Politically, Democrats hold a modest 5-point edge on the generic congressional ballot, which counts as a landslide in a system gerrymandered to within an inch of its life. Trump’s approval is down to 42% among registered voters — 39% among all adults — with independents bolting and young and Latino voters who flirted with him in 2024 now filing for a restraining order. Republicans are still mostly clinging to Dear Leader, but GOP approval has slid since March, suggesting that even some MAGA die-hards are starting to notice that four more years of chaos, corruption, and fascist fanfic might not be the path to national greatness.

Meanwhile, confidence in the federal government and Congress is circling the drain, which is what happens when one party spends a decade insisting that government is evil and then proves it every time they get the keys. So Democrats have a small but real advantage, Trump’s numbers are rotting like a Mar-a-Lago buffet shrimp tray, and the electorate is depressed, exhausted, and convinced the future is worse. Truly, the perfect environment for a man whose entire brand is selling grievance, fear, and gold-plated failure.

Cory Doctorow sends Donald Trump an 80th birthday card that doubles as a geopolitical autopsy report. He politely thanks "Comrade Trump" for doing more than any US leader to blow up the dollar’s dominance, shove countries off fossil fuels, and convince entire continents that maybe letting American tech oligarchs run the internet was a terrible idea. The takeaway: Trump promised to make America great again and instead became the world’s most chaotic retirement planner for a post-American century. Stellar work, if your campaign slogan is "MAGA: But For China and the EU".

Then Piers Morgan shows up to polish the Dear Leader’s portrait. He lovingly recites Trump’s greatest hits: shot, prosecuted, impeached twice, divorced twice, financially face-planted, lost power, clawed it back, and is still somehow stomping around the White House like a particularly vindictive mall Santa. Morgan calls it "extraordinary resilience"; everyone else might call it a living indictment of a political system that cannot eject a man who keeps failing upward through every guardrail of democracy. At 80, Trump is being toasted by admirers and roasted by critics, but the real punchline is that the rest of the planet is now building parallel financial, energy, and digital systems just to survive the next time America elects a reality TV arsonist.

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.