The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump Administration is reportedly toying with the idea of physically evicting the White House press corps from the White House, because nothing screams totally normal functioning democracy like banishing reporters from the seat of executive power. The New York Times says they're considering moving the briefing room circus somewhere else, presumably to a place where the only tough question is whether the Dear Leader wants one scoop of ice cream or two.

This isn't media criticism; it's a logistical coup against transparency. If you can't stop the questions, you just move the question-askers out of the building and call it an efficiency upgrade. Authoritarians from Orbán to Erdoğan would be proud: first you label the press the enemy, then you wall them off, and eventually you're down to a handful of loyal bootlickers asking the president how he manages to be so strong and so humble at the same time.

Meanwhile, NPR solemnly reminds listeners it doesn't accept money for coverage, which is adorable in an era when access itself is the currency. The White House is busy trying to turn the briefing room into a private members-only club, and independent outlets are outside shaking the door to see if the hinges are still attached to the First Amendment.

Donald Trump popped up on Meet the Press to defend Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to drag Ohio health official Amy Acton’s elderly mother into a political ad, because of course the guy who doxes private citizens from a rally stage thinks weaponizing someone’s mom is just good, clean campaign fun. The ad attacks Acton — who helped lead Ohio’s Covid response — by trotting out her mother to criticize her, and Trump’s contribution to the civic discourse was essentially: looks fine to me.

This is where the GOP is now: not just targeting public servants for doing their jobs during a pandemic, but turning their families into props for revenge politics while the party’s leader shrugs and cheers from the sidelines. Instead of any pretense of policy or governance, we get a former president validating public shaming as a legitimate tactic against anyone who once tried to keep people alive. American democracy was already on life support; Trump and his fan club are now arguing over which family member gets to pull the plug on camera.

With wars, climate disasters, and democratic backsliding all competing for his attention, President Donald Trump has bravely chosen to focus on the true existential crisis: LeBron James gently fidgeting during the national anthem. Trump hopped onto social media to declare that James had “disrespected our Country!” by not standing motionless enough, demanding an apology to "Great American Warriors and Heroes who died for the American Flag"—because nothing honors the fallen like a 79-year-old president rage-posting about a basketball player’s pregame warmup.

The clip shows LeBron miming a golf swing and a few basketball motions while the anthem plays, an act that—while mildly goofy—somehow triggered the full presidential outrage machine. Teammates stood still, LeBron lightly moved, and Trump treated it like the burning of Fort McHenry in reverse. He followed up by calling James “no good, a TOTAL DISGRACE,” extending their years-long feud where Trump periodically suggests LeBron isn’t smart, might be “a racist,” and, crucially, fails the only moral test that matters in Trumpworld: “I only like people that like me.”

This is the same guy who once helped blacklist Colin Kaepernick out of the NFL for kneeling against police brutality and then later pretended to be magnanimous about giving him “another shot.” The anthem, under Trump, isn’t a civic ritual; it’s a loyalty test wrapped in a marketing opportunity. As always, the message from the White House is clear: systemic racism and political violence are debatable, but any Black athlete who doesn’t perform state-approved stillness during the song is a national threat.

Trump’s “reality-TV presidency” has officially reached the late-season Sharknado crossover phase: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth floated a live-streamed execution like it was a sweeps-week stunt, Trump initially loved it, then backed away once someone apparently explained that using the Pentagon as Twitch for state killings might be a bad look. When your administration is workshopping snuff content for engagement, you’ve left “unserious” and arrived at “authoritarian fan service.”

Not satisfied with just weaponizing death as appointment viewing, Trump is now pitching the electorate on a game show deal: $5,000 for every adult American — but only if the midterm results “go his way.” That’s less public policy and more a tacky cash giveaway segment from a failing show, except TV producers actually have to pay out the prize money and follow rules. He’s also promising mystery cash awards to whistleblowers to feed his endless “fraud” obsession, turning law enforcement into a bounty-hunter side quest for his paranoia.

Staffing, naturally, is still run through Central Casting and Vibes. Trump plucked Katie Zacharia as press secretary because she praised him on TV and looked camera-ready, then fired her in under half a Scaramucci once reality intruded. This is exactly how producers described The Apprentice: Trump made random, often nonsensical decisions, and the professionals had to edit the footage to make him look like he wasn’t a complete idiot. The difference now is there’s no helpful editor between his whims and the nuclear arsenal — just a country being dragged through the desperate gimmick phase of a show that should have been canceled years ago.

Donald Trump, a man constitutionally incapable of seeing a body of water without trying to slap his name on it, told a South Carolina rally he called Google CEO Sundar Pichai to ask if Google Maps could rename the Atlantic Ocean after himself or America. This follows his executive order rebranding the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and his ongoing tantrum campaign to turn Lake Ontario into “Lake America” on official US maps, because foreign policy is now just real estate branding with extra warships.

Even Google, which already caved to his earlier demands by showing “Gulf of America” and “Lake America” to US users, apparently found a line somewhere around "renaming an entire ocean." Trump says Pichai told him oceans "cover… a lot of countries" and declined to play cartographic make-believe at global scale. So the president of the United States bragged onstage about trying to pressure a tech giant into rewriting geography, then magnanimously announced he would "probably pass" and let the Atlantic keep its centuries-old name. Strong leadership: he fought the ocean, and the ocean won.

This is the same guy who has floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz to "TRUMP STRAIT" during an active war with Iran, because nothing cools down a volatile maritime chokepoint like slapping a narcissist’s surname on it. The administration’s foreign policy doctrine has officially evolved from "America First" to "Cartographers Last," with Google Maps functioning as a sort of state propaganda sandbox—until, apparently, the coastline gets too long.

Brendan Carr, Trump’s pet enforcer at the FCC, has discovered a bold new regulatory principle: if the polls say Republicans are losing, the polls are fake and TV stations might be violating federal rules by mentioning them. Citing a real FCC concept called “news distortion,” Carr hopped on X to warn broadcasters that airing the wrong kind of numbers could be treated as a "Broadcast Hoax" — which is a fun way of saying he’s flirting with using government power to punish media outlets for reporting inconvenient data.

There are some genuinely fake, likely AI-generated polls floating around — mostly grifts aimed at betting markets — but rather than target the scammers, Carr is effectively telling newsrooms to think twice before reporting any polls that harsh Trump’s vibe. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez had to play the role of the one adult in the building, reminding everyone that the rules don’t apply to stations that report polls in good faith, even if those polls turn out to be wrong. Minor detail Carr left out while auditioning for Minister of Truth.

All this just happens to line up beautifully with the broader Trump project: declare unwanted facts to be hoaxes, hint that the state might punish anyone who repeats them, and then scream about "election interference" when the numbers look grim. Speaker Mike Johnson is on X yelling "IGNORE THE POLLS" and "SAVE AMERICA" like a late-night televangelist, while Senate Intel Democrats are already warning that Trump is likely to cry "foreign interference" the moment the midterms don’t go his way. The polling isn’t the hoax here; the hoax is an administration trying to turn federal regulators into an election-protection racket for one guy’s ego.

Kansas, the state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since radio was cutting-edge tech, is suddenly in play because the Trump administration turned farm country into a live-action stress test for how much economic pain people can take before they start questioning tariffs, forever war, and ICE raids. Sen. Roger Marshall is out here warning that if he loses, Chuck Schumer might get a promotion, while his opponent Adam Hamilton is sprinting away from Democrats so fast he’s about one soundbite away from endorsing himself as a third-party candidate named "Not That Kind of Democrat."

Marshall is loyally parroting Trump on everything from the Iran war to the price of diesel, blaming Ukraine for energy costs while gently side-eyeing Trump’s brilliant plan to buy Russian diesel and somehow call it "peace." He insists he’s independent-minded because he mildly objected to ICE raids and a beef import waiver that nuked Kansas farmers, which is sort of like bragging you pushed back on arson by asking the firebug to at least avoid the nursery. Hamilton, meanwhile, promises to "force" Trump to end the Iran war, trashes tariffs, calls ICE "militarized," and still bends over backward to prove he won’t vote for Schumer or touch anything that looks like a progressive idea with a ten-foot pole.

The ethics portion of the evening was a real crowd-pleaser: Marshall had to explain why a New York Times story says he chased poor former OB/GYN patients into court and toward arrest over medical debt, which he frames as standard industry practice and actually kind of generous, if you squint hard enough. Trump then helpfully defended him at a Wichita rally by saying Marshall’s been unfairly made out to be a "Shylock"—because when you’re already running a war in Iran and cutting diesel deals with Russia, why not sprinkle in some classic antisemitic tropes for flavor? Hamilton, for his part, is stuck explaining his church’s mishandling of a 2005 child sex abuse case at a youth camp—conceding he should have made sure the abuser never got near kids again, a bar so low even this Senate race managed to trip on it.

Now millions of dollars are flooding Kansas, early voting is spiking, and at least 100 Republican leaders (including Trump’s own ex–press secretary Stephanie Grisham) are backing Hamilton, because apparently even lifelong GOP loyalists are tired of living inside the Trump-Marshall economic and moral demolition derby. The choice for Kansas voters is clear: a Trump-aligned senator defending endless war, ICE crackdowns, and medical debt arrests—with bonus antisemitic cleanup from Trump himself—or a "moderate Democrat" who spends half his time promising he’ll never actually act like one. American democracy continues to shine, in the way a four-alarm dumpster fire shines.

Wisconsin’s lone governor debate featured Democrat David Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany arguing over who loves Wisconsin more and who loves democracy less. Crowley pointed out that Tiffany happily voted for Trump’s 2025 "big, ugly" tax-and-spending monstrosity that showered benefits on high earners while taking a chainsaw to healthcare and food assistance, then stuffed his campaign coffers with cash from Republican megadonors. Tiffany, naturally, responded that he’s just a man of the people who wants to "put more money in taxpayers’ pockets" — a touching way to describe transferring public services into billionaire bank accounts.

The real show, however, came when Tiffany was asked why he voted to overturn the 2020 election. His answer: Zuckerbucks. Yes, the sitting congressman seeking to be governor calmly explained that he tried to throw out hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin votes because he didn’t like how Mark Zuckerberg spent money on election administration — donations that have been repeatedly debunked as some secret Biden plot. Crowley helpfully translated this for viewers: Tiffany is willing to toss your ballot in the trash over a Facebook-fueled conspiracy theory. Strong pitch for chief executive of a swing state.

On abortion, Tiffany suddenly discovered moderation, promising to uphold Wisconsin’s 20-week law despite his record of backing six-week federal bans in Congress. Crowley said he’d push to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, and very politely declined to play the Republicans’ favorite game of "let’s invent an extreme bill you’ll never see and demand you answer for it." So voters now get a clear choice: a guy who wants to protect your vote and your bodily autonomy, versus a guy who thinks both are negotiable if Donald Trump or a billionaire donor has hurt feelings.

Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Insecurity sent 10 to 15 agents to pound on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s door at 6am, rummage through her home for nearly five hours, and walk off with 17 items, including her phones. The alleged crime? Failing to be white, Christian, and sufficiently adoring of Dear Leader while being the subject of a years-old rightwing fanfic about marrying her brother.

Omar says the raid was designed to "freak" her out and toss red meat to Trump’s base, which has been marinating in these baseless immigration-fraud conspiracies since they oozed out of a random Somali blog and into the brains of Fox-addled influencers. Trump, never one to waste a good lie, followed up the raid by telling reporters that Omar is a "sick, very dishonest person who hates our country" and casually spitballed that she could be deported or jailed. Just the president of the United States publicly fantasizing about exiling an elected representative over paperwork he can’t describe—totally normal, very stable democracy stuff.

While Omar reminds everyone that she has a legal right to be a member of Congress, the administration appears focused on a different legal innovation: using federal law enforcement as a personal harassment service for the guy who lives in the White House and rage-watches cable news. Rule of law has officially been downgraded to "rule of whatever conspiracy Trump saw on TV last night."