The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Trump’s chief economic adviser Kevin Hassett went on Fox News to unveil the bold new White House economic theory: if you’re maxing out your credit cards on groceries and gas, that’s not desperation, that’s confidence. Americans watching their paychecks dissolve at the supermarket are, according to Hassett, just expressing deep optimism about the future, like a nation of involuntary venture capitalists betting big on eggs and rent.

To explain away the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index dropping to its lowest level since 1952, Hassett helpfully announced that the survey has “nothing to do with the economy” and is merely a place for Democrats to be mean to Donald Trump. The fact that people across parties are miserable about prices is, inconveniently, in the data – so the solution is to declare the data fake and blame vibes. Classic Trump-era science: when reality conflicts with the narrative, fire reality.

Trump, for his part, has streamlined the administration’s messaging by admitting he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation – or, as he added, “I don’t think about anybody.” Meanwhile Secretary of State Marco Rubio, already auditioning for 2028, tells Americans to feel “very fortunate” as fuel prices soar, like a landlord explaining that your rent hike is actually a growth opportunity. The ruling class sets your money on fire, then insists the smell of burning cash is the aroma of prosperity. Groceries may be unaffordable, but at least you’re getting a masterclass in authoritarian gaslighting for free.

The Trump White House has decided that if anyone is going to get early access to world-breaking AI models, it sure as hell better be the federal government that already can’t secure a PDF. Trump quietly signed an executive order asking companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to hand over their most powerful AI systems 30 days before they share them with other "trusted partners" — because nothing says "national security" like giving the Pentagon, Treasury, and CISA a first look at tools that can find catastrophic software vulnerabilities.

To reassure everyone this definitely won’t morph into an AI permission slip regime, the order explicitly bans mandatory licensing or pre-clearance. It’s all "voluntary collaboration" — just the government politely asking the companies whose entire regulatory fate it controls to let it poke around in their most dangerous models. Totally casual. Just pals sharing doomsday tech.

This comes after Anthropic’s Mythos Preview model demonstrated superhuman skill at uncovering critical vulnerabilities in the world’s most-used operating systems, which apparently convinced Scott Bessent and JD Vance that the real solution is to centralize early access to that capability inside the same government that routinely leaks classified material like it’s a hobby. Trump previously killed a stronger version of the order because it might hurt U.S. competitiveness with China, then turned around and signed this softer version — a perfect compromise where corporations keep the profits and the state gets the toys.

The Biden team originally claimed doctors examined him "days" after his catastrophic 2024 debate with Trump. Jill Biden now casually mentions on NPR that, actually, the doctors checked him moments after he left the stage because she thought he might be having a stroke. So the medical care was prompt; the truth, not so much.

Jill calls the performance "inexplicable," says she's never seen him like that before or since, and waves away staff accounts that it wasn't a one-off. Meanwhile, we find out Biden once planned to be a one-term president but changed his mind after everyone told him the midterms were good and he had to keep going — a bold strategy that delivered President Trump 2.0 and a Kamala Harris memoir subtitled "107 Days of Cleaning Up Other People's Choices."

So the public got a secretly immediate medical exam, a publicly delayed explanation, and a campaign run on "he's fine" right up until he wasn't a candidate anymore. American democracy remains a shining beacon where voters are informed of critical facts about their leaders' health on the traditional schedule: years later, in someone’s book tour.

The Department of Justice has informed the world that it will, for the moment, pretend to follow a court order and pause President Trump’s so‑called “anti-weaponization” fund — a pot of money designed to protect Americans from the terrifying menace of prosecutors doing their jobs. NPR’s Leila Fadel asks Rep. Tom Suozzi to play the role of Responsible Adult and explain why the executive branch can’t just conjure up a political defense fund and call it constitutional.

This magical fund was pitched as a shield against the ‘weaponization’ of government, which is a very polite way of saying: money to sabotage investigations that might inconvenience Donald Trump and friends. Now a court has temporarily blocked it, and DOJ is publicly promising to obey, as though respecting judicial rulings is some bold new innovation rather than the bare minimum for a functioning democracy.

So we’re left with a White House trying to launder its personal legal paranoia through federal coffers, a Justice Department awkwardly caught between law and loyalty, and Congress members like Suozzi pointing out that if you need an ‘anti-weaponization’ fund to stop investigations, maybe the problem isn’t the weapons. It’s what you’re trying so hard to keep them from finding.

Huntington Beach, the self-branded "Maga-nificent" coastal enclave that banned the Pride flag and treats state housing mandates like Sharia law, may soon be represented by Robert Garcia: gay, immigrant, Democrat, and professional Trump aggravation device. Thanks to a new California redistricting measure, the city that proudly flies exactly zero rainbows could end up sending one to Congress.

The irony is doing cartwheels. Trump spent 2024 screaming at Texas to mid-decade gerrymander itself into a deeper shade of red, which helped normalize the whole "just redraw the maps whenever you feel like losing" strategy. California voters then said, "Fine, we can play that game too," passed Prop 50, and now Huntington Beach gets folded into a district where the leading contender is a Trump-critic House oversight Democrat whose job is literally to investigate the executive branch. Outstanding work, everyone.

Local officials are, of course, furious. City councilman Pat Burns denounces this as "California ugly-ass politics"—which is rich coming from a city council that calls itself the Maga-nificent Seven while banning non-government flags to make sure no one accidentally experiences visible tolerance. They fought masks, they fought housing, they fought Pride flags, and now their big reward might be a congressman who talks about infrastructure, healthcare, and rooting out corruption instead of owning the libs at city council meetings.

Garcia, for his part, is out here saying extremely radical things like, "People basically want decent services and less corruption." Meanwhile, the MAGA establishment in Huntington Beach is discovering the downside of normalizing partisan map-rigging: sometimes the gerrymander boomerang comes back and hits you right in the culture war.

Colorado’s most famous ex-clerk and part-time password-leaker Tina Peters just walked out of prison after serving less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence, thanks to a presidential intervention that would make any autocrat nod in professional respect. Convicted for helping a MyPillow-adjacent "expert" copy Dominion server data, leak passwords, and fuel Trump’s 2020 election lies, Peters was supposed to be the cautionary tale for local officials who treat voting systems like open mic night at Mike Lindell’s conspiracy symposium.

Instead, she’s the latest recipient of the Trump Loyalty Rewards Program. Because federal law wouldn’t let him pardon her state conviction, Trump simply leaned on Democratic governor Jared Polis until something snapped: public shaming on social media, yanking Polis from a White House governors’ meeting, and dangling federal revenge like a mob boss with nukes – including plans to dismantle Colorado’s National Center for Atmospheric Research and yank US Space Command to Alabama. Polis obliged with a commutation, calling the original sentence "extremely unusual and lengthy", while his own secretary of state, Jena Griswold, accurately described the whole spectacle as selling out Colorado’s justice system for Trump.

So the message from the Trump era’s sequel is now crystal clear: if you sabotage election infrastructure to help the guy in the Oval Office, the full weight of the presidency will be used – not to protect democracy, but to protect you. Commit the crime, undermine the vote, and if you’re sufficiently loyal and loudly delusional, the president will personally make sure consequences are someone else’s problem. American rule of law, meet your new boss: presidential tantrums and interstate extortion.

Representative Maxine Dexter, an actual doctor in a Congress full of Fox News medical experts, went to a Texas facility in San Benito to check on pregnant, unaccompanied migrant girls. She was allowed to see the walls, the furniture, the staff – pretty much everything except the actual children. The Office of Refugee Resettlement and HHS responded to basic questions like "Where are the kids?" and "Are they alive and getting medical care?" with the standard Trump-era policy answer: bureaucratic static and a hard stare at the floor.

The numbers don’t add up. Local attorneys say 11 girls, the facility tells Dexter seven, and when Joaquin Castro visited weeks earlier there were 17. ORR’s own system could answer exactly where they went, but mysteriously no one will. A former ORR official calmly notes the obvious: the most likely scenario is that the girls have been shipped out of the country, along with their newborns who – awkward detail – are US citizens. So while Trump’s birthright-citizenship executive order is still being litigated in the real world, it’s apparently already being enforced off the books on terrified pregnant kids.

All of this is happening in Texas, where abortion is effectively banned and reproductive care is so scarce that even adults struggle to find an OB-GYN, let alone raped 13-year-olds in federal custody. The same facility had its detentions halted in 2024 for inadequate healthcare, and the big fix now appears to be: "We went from 15 days between appointments to five" – which is not how you describe a high-risk obstetrics program, but very much how you describe pretending to care while you shuffle minors onto planes in the dark. Meanwhile, hunger strikes, pepper-ball attacks on Senator Andy Kim, and blocked inspections at other ICE sites round out the picture: a government that treats migrants as disposable lab rats in a sadism experiment.

So to recap: the Trump administration concentrates pregnant migrant children in a medically inadequate state that bans abortion, blocks elected officials from seeing them, can’t keep its story straight on how many there are, and then quietly makes them – and their US-citizen infants – disappear across a border. It’s family separation 2.0: now with extra forced birth, less transparency, and the same signature Trump touch – cruelty first, law later, paperwork never.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created in 1964 to fight entrenched workplace discrimination. Under Trump, it's now trying a bold new strategy: abolish the evidence. The agency is moving to kill its long-standing EEO‑1 data collection — the boring-but-crucial demographic reports that let the government see where women and people of color mysteriously never seem to get hired or promoted. If you don't count the bodies, there was never a crime. Inspirational.

As a bonus, Trump-appointed chair Andrea Lucas is also pushing to scrap a 1979 regulation that gave employers a legally sound roadmap for voluntary affirmative action — mentoring, hiring targets, and other race- and gender-conscious steps that the Supreme Court itself blessed in United Steelworkers v. Weber. For nearly half a century, that guidance told companies how to fix discrimination without breaking the law. The new plan is simpler: pretend Title VII requires total colorblindness while also making sure no one collects the data that proves systemic bias exists.

Lucas has been out on the conference circuit insisting that "the way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race. The end. Full stop." Meanwhile, the agency she runs is busy yanking away both the x‑ray machine (the data) and the treatment plan (the affirmative-action guidance). It's a "more beautiful vision" of the country, sure — as long as you’re the one doing the discriminating and you’d like the federal civil rights cops to show up unarmed and blindfolded.