The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

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.

Ray Epps, a former Trump-loving, Oath Keepers–adjacent, Fox News superfan, discovered the hard way that being part of the MAGA hive doesn’t mean they won’t turn around and accuse you of being a secret government plant. After Fox and Tucker Carlson pushed the fantasy that Epps was an undercover fed sent to frame Trump supporters for the January 6 insurrection Trump actually incited, Epps and his wife got so many threats they sold their ranch and fled into an RV. You know, the classic American dream: serve in the Marines, watch Fox religiously, then get chased out of your life by people who think you’re Antifa in a cowboy hat.

A federal judge has now dismissed Epps’s defamation lawsuit against Fox for the second time, ruling that he didn’t show the network acted with “actual malice” — the legal standard that basically requires you to prove a cable host looked straight into camera and said, “I am knowingly lying to you right now.” Despite years of Fox texts, emails, and on-air brain-melting that suggest a professional-level disregard for reality, the court said Epps hadn’t plausibly shown Carlson or his show knew the conspiracy theory was false or recklessly ignored the truth. Legally speaking, Fox’s brand of weaponized paranoia apparently still counts as protected speech.

Fox issued a victory lap statement about how this ruling “preserves press freedoms,” which is a poetic way of saying: we can call a random Trump fan a government psy-op who engineered a coup to frame other Trump fans, and as long as we do it in the service of the broader project of rewriting January 6 for the base, it’s just journalism now. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have been clear Epps was never an FBI asset, he pled to a misdemeanor, did a year of probation, and then got swept up in Trump’s mass January 6 pardon spree — a kind of bulk discount absolution for the mob that tried to keep him in power.

The moral here is not that Fox will someday feel bad. It’s that the right-wing propaganda machine can help incite an attack on democracy, invent a scapegoat to deflect blame from Trump and the GOP, sic its audience on one of its own viewers, and still get to wrap itself in the First Amendment like a flag it definitely hasn’t been dragging through the mud. Epps asked the court to hold the network accountable; the system replied: you signed up for this ecosystem, and the ecosystem bites.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in "public lands management": turning national parks and refuges into mixed-use shooting galleries. Interior secretary Doug Burgum quietly ordered agencies to rip out "unnecessary" barriers to hunting and fishing, which apparently include such radical ideas as not shooting along trails, not damaging trees with stands, and not turning park bathrooms into DIY slaughterhouses. Visitor safety and wildlife protection, once considered core National Park Service values, are now treated like fussy suggestions from the deep state.

Under the new regime, hunting seasons get stretched into spring and summer at Cape Cod National Seashore, hunters at Lake Meredith in Texas can clean carcasses in the restrooms, and Jean Lafitte National Historical Park in Louisiana becomes an alligator shooting gallery. Former park officials note that current rules were forged through years of stakeholder input and science-based management; the Trump team responds with its usual governing philosophy: don’t ask, don’t study, just deregulate and issue a press release about "commonsense" freedom.

All of this is happening to rescue a pastime practiced by about 4.2% of Americans over 16, but somehow sold as a sacred national tradition that must override everyone else’s ability to visit a park without dodging bullets or entrails. Conservation groups aligned with hunters dutifully applaud the "streamlining" of regulations and "vital role" of duck hunters, while people who thought national parks were for, say, hiking with their grandkids are told to enjoy the view—just ignore the gutted elk being dragged across the visitor center parking lot. Under Trump, even a quiet walk in the woods has to become a culture war front.

Virginia’s Supreme Court just discovered a powerful new tool for protecting democracy: retroactive paperwork audits. A 52–48 voter-approved constitutional amendment that would have let Democrats redraw the state’s congressional map was tossed out because the legislature supposedly messed up the “multi-step process” and didn’t obey a 1902 notice rule that might as well have required posting it on MySpace and carving it into a stone tablet at the courthouse.

The court solemnly declared that these procedural sins “irreparably undermine” the referendum and therefore the will of actual living voters is null and void, but the existing GOP-friendly map is just fine and pure as the driven snow. The result: Virginia keeps the Trump-era districts that help Republicans cling to the House, while Trump’s mid-decade redistricting arms race in Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and friends keeps racking up seats like it’s a rigged carnival game.

Normally, states redistrict once a decade after the census. Under Trump, we’re doing rolling emergency map surgery every time Republicans get nervous about losing power. A bipartisan commission written into the Virginia constitution was supposed to prevent this kind of partisan map-rigging, but voters briefly handed redistricting power to the legislature to push back against Trump’s gerrymander spree. The court’s response: nice democracy you tried to have there, shame about that scheduling error from last year.