The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Republican senators have discovered a shocking new concept: if President Trump wants tens of billions more dollars for his Iran adventure, he might actually have to ask Congress to, you know, authorize the war. The conflict is now at day 75 of what Trump promised would be a four-to-five week joyride, Iran is choking the Strait of Hormuz, fuel prices are spiking, and the White House’s grand strategy appears to be: insist hostilities are over while U.S. forces keep getting shot at.

Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Rand Paul briefly emerged from the Senate’s Witness Protection Program to vote with Democrats on a War Powers resolution telling Trump to stop playing Commander-in-God and get authorization or get out. Murkowski even pointed out the awkward detail that the administration claims hostilities have ended, which would neatly erase any excuse for keeping troops in danger without Congress signing off. Meanwhile, House Republicans keep barely blocking similar efforts, proving that nothing unites the party like refusing to do its constitutional job.

Out in the real world, the Navy is warning it’ll have to start cutting training, operations, and personnel by July because the Iran war, charmingly branded Operation Epic Fury, wasn’t even budgeted for. At the same time, Central Command quietly took its civilian-harm reduction office from ten people to one just months after a U.S. strike on an Iranian school. So yes, the administration is burning through cash it doesn’t have on a war it hasn’t authorized, while dismantling the tiny bit of infrastructure meant to stop it from killing kids. But don’t worry, Trump says Xi Jinping promised not to ship weapons to Iran, and if there’s one thing you can bank on in this administration, it’s totally unverifiable promises from authoritarian pals.

The Supreme Court, having spent the last few years lighting reproductive rights on fire, has now graciously agreed to pour a thimble of water on the blaze. In a 7-2 shadow-docket special, the justices said mifepristone can keep being mailed nationwide, at least until they find a more procedurally convenient way to torture pregnant people. Louisiana’s big legal theory was essentially: "We banned abortion here, so obviously we get to control the mail for the entire country." Even this court had to squint and say, yeah, that’s not how standing works.

Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, naturally, dissented from reality. Thomas declared that mailing abortion pills is a "criminal enterprise" and tried to resurrect the 1873 Comstock Act, because nothing screams "modern constitutional jurisprudence" like dusting off Victorian anti-smut laws to control your uterus. Alito whined that keeping mifepristone available by mail "undermines" Dobbs, as if the real constitutional injury is that women haven’t suffered quite enough yet under his magnum opus.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration chose the bold strategy of… not responding to a lawsuit against its own FDA, leaving drug manufacturers and former FDA officials to do the grown-up work. The same Christian nationalist law shop, Alliance Defending Freedom, is once again trying to let a single red state override federal drug regulation for everyone, because why stop at abortion when you can blow up the entire pharmaceutical approval system? The Court punted the case back to the Fifth Circuit clown car, so everyone can look forward to Round Two: Now With Even More Theocracy, in a future term.

For now, medication abortion — which accounts for about two-thirds of abortions and has been safely used for decades — survives another trip through the Republican pain machine. Providers are already planning backup regimens in case the justices change their minds later, because when your healthcare depends on a court that misses its own deadlines while quoting 19th-century obscenity laws, "temporary" is the best you’re allowed to hope for.

Once upon a time, Republicans swore the government had no business messing with what broadcasters put on the air. Ronald Reagan’s FCC chair Mark Fowler said there was “no room” for the agency to play national hall monitor for TV content. Fast-forward to 2026 and Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC chair, proudly announces, “This isn’t Ronald Reagan’s F.C.C. — and that’s a good thing,” which is a fun way of saying: we’ve moved from deregulation to state-approved comedy.

Trump’s FCC has now warned late-night hosts that if they keep mocking the president and then dare to book political candidates, they’d better cough up “equal time” for the opponents or face retaliation. They’re even investigating The View on the same theory, so apparently the full might of the federal government is now deployed against Joy Behar. The legal hook is a dusty “equal opportunities” statute that was supposed to prevent broadcasters from rigging access to candidates, not to force Jimmy Kimmel to hand out participation trophies to whichever Republican just got roasted in his monologue.

Conservatives spent decades insisting the Fairness Doctrine was Soviet tyranny; Trumpworld has essentially rebuilt a pettier, dumber version of it, targeted not at fairness but at hurt presidential feelings. The old line was “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas.” The new line is: mock Trump on TV, and the FCC shows up with a ruler and a copy of the U.S. Code. It’s less a communications policy than a federally subsidized safe space for the most powerful man in the country.

Trump’s Department of Justice, having apparently run out of actual crime, decided to go full surveillance state on trans kids’ medical records. They sent sweeping subpoenas to Rhode Island’s largest hospital for gender-affirming care, demanding birthdates, Social Security numbers, home addresses, intake forms, guardian authorizations – basically everything short of a GPS tracker for every trans child treated in the last five years. All under the noble banner of investigating ‘misbranding’ and ‘fraud,’ because nothing says careful law enforcement like using Texas prosecutors to hunt down patients in Rhode Island.

US district judge Mary McElroy took one look at this fishing expedition and hit the brakes, noting that while DOJ has “immense prosecutorial authority,” it has “proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.” That is a federal judge saying, as politely as possible, that the Trump administration’s law enforcers cannot be trusted not to abuse their power. She also pointed out the obvious: the administration has publicly smeared gender-affirming care for minors as “abuse,” ordered DOJ to wipe it out, and then “celebrated” when hospitals curtailed care under subpoena pressure. Totally normal behavior for a government that swears this is all just about pharma compliance, and not about building a handy list of trans kids and their parents to harass.

Meanwhile, at least seven other courts have already swatted down or narrowed similar subpoenas hurled at more than 20 doctors and hospitals, 11 families have launched a class-action suit to stop DOJ from grabbing their kids’ records, and NYU Langone just revealed it got its own grand jury subpoena from Texas for info on trans youth care. Major medical groups keep saying gender-affirming care is essential, evidence-based treatment; the Trump administration keeps responding by treating it like contraband and deploying federal prosecutors like morality police with subpoena printers. Call it what it is: not healthcare policy, but a federalized harassment campaign against trans kids dressed up as law enforcement.

Sebastian Gorka has finally unveiled his long-teased “life’s work” on counterterrorism, and it turns out the magnum opus is… a typo-riddled 16-page Trump valentine that treats intelligence assessments like fake news. The new U.S. counterterrorism strategy declares Latin American drug cartels the top threat, demotes Islamist militants to second place, and then pulls a full where’s Waldo on far-right extremism — the thing the FBI keeps saying is the leading domestic danger. Neo-Nazis and militias don’t even get a shout-out, but a relatively tiny slice of militant leftists is elevated to cosmic supervillain status, on par with al-Qaida.

What used to be a sober, bipartisan national security document is now a campaign brochure with classified letterhead. The strategy gushes over Trump’s greatness, recycles his conspiracy theories about a stolen election and an alleged genocide of Christians, and warns darkly about “alien cultures” threatening Western civilization. It even finds room to mention Biden seven times, just in case anyone forgot who the designated villain is. Actual data? That’s for losers and Democrats.

This is the logical sequel to Trump’s mass pardons for more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, including people who assaulted police, all while Republicans pretended that focusing on far-right violence was an attack on “conservative organizing.” Now the White House has codified that delusion into national strategy, explicitly hunting for “violent leftist antifascists and anarchists” while pretending the guy who Googled Hitler and Nazis before a campus shooting is just a statistical rounding error. The message is clear: if you’re a right-wing extremist, you’re a misunderstood patriot; if you’re on the left, you’re the new ISIS.

Asked about the glaring holes and partisan tilt, the White House did what passes for accountability in Trump’s America: they sent a spokesperson to email a slogan about “crushing terrorist threats” and pointed reporters back to Gorka’s own glowing self-promo. America’s top counterterrorism document now functions less as a security roadmap and more as a loyalty test. Who needs evidence-based threat assessments when you can just criminalize your critics and call it strategy?

Vice President JD Vance, freshly crowned "fraud czar" like a podcast host LARPing as Eliot Ness, announced the Trump administration is freezing $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California because the state allegedly isn’t prosecuting fraud with enough righteous MAGA fury. As a bonus threat, he says the White House is ready to yank Medicaid Fraud Control Unit funding from all 50 states if they don’t start cracking down harder, and hints they’ll start turning off other Medicaid money too. Nothing says "we care about vulnerable patients" like holding their healthcare funding over a political trash can and asking the governor if he feels lucky.

To really drive home the seriousness of this crusade, the administration rolled out Dr. Mehmet Oz as head of CMS, because when you think sober stewardship of federal health programs, you obviously think "daytime TV miracle berry guy." Oz claims California’s records raised "major red flags" — including $630 million in billing questions, $500 million in home health services, and $200 million in "questionable expenditures" tied to coverage for undocumented immigrants, who are, technically, not Medicaid-eligible. The solution? Don’t fix eligibility rules, don’t clarify policy, just hit pause on $1.3 billion and see how many low-income people can be used as leverage before Sacramento crawls.

As Vance helpfully explained, the real problem is that "mostly blue states" aren’t taking fraud seriously enough. Red states, of course, are doing great — no notes, no follow-up questions, please. Meanwhile, CMS is slapping a six-month nationwide moratorium on new Medicare enrollment for hospices and home health agencies while it "intensifies investigations" and boots suspected bad actors. So yes, the administration’s anti-fraud strategy is: punish California, threaten every state, freeze legitimate providers out of the system, and hope patients somehow don’t notice that their care got turned into a campaign prop.

Marco Rubio, formerly the Senate's self-appointed Supreme Defender of Human Rights in China, is now flying to Beijing with Donald Trump thanks to a handy little magic trick: change a Chinese character in his name and – poof – those pesky sanctions and travel bans suddenly don’t apply anymore. Turns out you don’t need diplomacy, leverage, or principle when you’ve got the geopolitical equivalent of logging in with an alt account.

The man who once pushed sweeping sanctions over Uyghur forced labor and Hong Kong repression is now dutifully backing Trump’s “Xi is my friend” narrative, where human rights are a footnote and the real show is trade, Taiwan, and AI photo-ops. Beijing gets to pretend its sanctions were very serious and very real, Rubio gets to pretend he’s still tough on China while literally walking through a door labeled "sanctioned people not allowed" under a slightly different name, and Trump gets another entourage member for his authoritarian buddy tour.

Nothing screams “unprecedented adversary” like quietly letting your supposedly ironclad moral stand be erased by a clerical adjustment in transliteration. Taiwan gets a verbal assurance they won’t be sold out for a trade deal, while the rest of the world watches Washington and Beijing demonstrate that, at the top, the rules are flexible, the lines are blurry, and even sanctions are mostly for the little people who can’t just rebrand themselves in another alphabet.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has survived Klan firebombs, neo-Nazi death threats, and decades of far-right rage, but now it’s facing something truly existential: Todd Blanche and Kash Patel playing DOJ and FBI dress-up. The Trump 2.0 Justice Department has indicted the SPLC for allegedly funding white supremacists — not by, say, hosting them at Mar-a-Lago, but by paying confidential informants inside extremist groups. In the new MAGA legal universe, infiltrating hate groups is now indistinguishable from supporting them, which is very convenient if your political base overlaps heavily with the guest list.

Prosecutors claim the SPLC misled donors by saying it was fighting extremism while actually "funding" it through informant payments and placements. The SPLC, which has spent 50+ years suing the Klan into oblivion, calls the charges "outrageous" — because they are — and notes that it’s being attacked by a government whose senior officials have spent years trying to redefine "extremist" to mean "anyone who notices fascism happening in real time." Former and current staff tell NPR the group is already weakened by internal turmoil and a political environment where the extremists they track now have badges, gavels, and West Wing visitor passes.

The message could not be clearer: if you expose white supremacists, the Trump DOJ will treat you like the criminal enterprise. The administration that shrugs at armed militias, pardons loyal crooks, and platforms January 6 rioters has decided that the real national security threat is… a civil rights nonprofit in Montgomery with too many receipts. This isn’t law enforcement; it’s regime protection — and a warning shot to every other organization that still thinks "multi-racial democracy" is something the federal government is interested in having around.

The Trump EPA has discovered an exciting new legal theory: if the Clean Air Act doesn’t explicitly say you can protect people from a known carcinogen again after new science shows it’s 60 times worse than you thought, then obviously you’re legally obligated to shrug and let the cancer gas flow. The administration is moving to rescind Biden’s 2024 ethylene oxide (EtO) rule that would’ve cut emissions by about 90% from 89 facilities, protecting some 2.3 million people, mostly in low-income neighborhoods. On the plus side, it would save industry a whopping $47 million a year, which is apparently the going price for mass involuntary participation in a long-term toxicology experiment.

This isn’t just about one chemical; it’s a blueprint for kneecapping the EPA’s ability to ever tighten hazardous air rules when science discovers that, surprise, breathing poison is bad. Harvard analysts note the Trump EPA is arguing that statutory silence means the agency can’t do additional health-based reviews, locking in a future where the government is legally blindfolded while industry sprays whatever it wants. As a bonus, Trump is dusting off a never-before-used “national security / technology not available” exemption to free about half of all commercial medical sterilizers from EtO standards—without providing evidence that the exemption is needed, or that the technology doesn’t exist, or that national security now depends on super-carcinogenic pacemaker sterilization.

NRDC and others are suing, because someone has to object when the president uses obscure legal provisions to exempt chemical plants from hazardous air pollutant rules and then forgets to bring facts. Public health experts call it a broad strategy to gut cancer protections; the Trump team calls it Tuesday. The EPA has even stopped calculating the costs of increased cancer, which is one way to make the numbers look good: if you don’t count the bodies, the policy is practically a miracle of efficiency.