trump invents 'fraud czar' to hunt fraud, accidentally describes himself
Colin McDonald, soon-to-be fraud enforcer, practices keeping a straight face while pledging independence from the same White House he’ll have a "direct line" to.
Trump’s Senate just signed off on creating a brand-new Justice Department job: assistant attorney general for fraud enforcement, a role that comes with what JD Vance bragged will be a "direct line" to the White House. Nothing screams "independent law enforcement" like wiring Main Justice straight into Trump’s grievance switchboard.
Democrats and former DOJ officials are gently pointing out that, historically, the Justice Department wasn’t supposed to function as the president’s personal oppo-research firm. But the National Fraud Enforcement Division McDonald will run is being stood up right as the White House launches a Vance-chaired, "government-wide" anti-fraud task force that mysteriously focuses on places like Minnesota — a favorite MAGA punching bag lovingly amplified by Trump-aligned influencers.
Officially, this is all about protecting taxpayers from scams in government programs. Unofficially, it’s a ready-made pipeline for turning TikTok talking points into federal indictments. The White House and DOJ, asked how this new division and Vance’s task force will actually work together, had no answers — which is Washington-speak for "however Trump wants, whenever he wants." The "war on fraud" looks a lot less like good governance and a lot more like building a dedicated office to criminalize your political enemies and call it ethics.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
melania trump to ‘empower children,’ presumably by letting her husband deport them
Melania Trump delivers prepared remarks on ‘empowering children’ while the broader Trump project continues empowering book bans, deportations, and generational trauma.
Melania Trump popped up at a global summit to talk about how much she cares about empowering children through education, which is a bold theme for an administration that treated public schools like a hostile foreign power and migrant children like misplaced luggage. Nothing says "fostering the future" quite like presiding over years of family separations, underfunded schools, and book bans while flying to a conference to read warm words off a teleprompter.
This is the Trump era’s favorite magic trick: break the system, then send out a glossy surrogate to give a speech about hope and opportunity. While Melania gently intones about education and children’s potential, her husband’s allies are busy purging school curricula, terrorizing immigrant families, and turning classrooms into culture-war minefields. It’s less a policy agenda than a branding exercise — a soft-focus ad campaign plastered over a government that keeps using kids as props, pawns, and collateral damage.
So yes, Melania Trump is now a global champion for children’s education. And if that feels a bit like putting the Trump Organization in charge of ethics reform, that’s because it is.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
unpaid tsa, fully paid ice: welcome to airport security under trump
A TSA checkpoint staffed by unpaid officers and freshly imported ICE agents, because nothing says ‘aviation security’ like political hostage-taking and on-the-job training at 30,000 feet.
Six weeks into Trump’s second DHS shutdown in six months, TSA workers are back to the classic MAGA workplace model: mandatory labor, optional paychecks. Over 400 officers have quit, thousands more are calling out, and security lines are stretching longer than Trump’s list of unpaid contractors. The people actually trained to detect explosives are pawning belongings to afford gas, while the White House explains this is all somehow the Democrats’ fault.
Instead of, say, paying the workers who keep planes from exploding, Trump has decided to fly in a different kind of chaos: ICE agents, who are still getting paid and are about as qualified for aviation security as Trump is for the Constitution. The union representing TSA points out that ICE officers aren’t trained or certified to spot aviation threats, but who needs specialized instruction when you’ve got vibes and a gun? As AFGE’s Everett Kelley notes, this doesn’t close a security gap; it creates one.
Democrats are refusing to refund DHS until Republicans agree to rein in ICE, which is currently facing accusations of killing two unarmed U.S. citizens and repeatedly ignoring court orders. Senate Republicans floated a compromise to fund everything except ICE and deal with that mess later. Trump, ever the dealmaker, rejected it—and then his DHS and White House mouthpieces went on TV to blame Democrats for the shutdown he just chose to extend. The same administration that refused a bipartisan funding plan is now scolding workers for quitting because they can’t afford rent.
So TSA officers are working a second unpaid stretch in under a year, still paying off loans from the last shutdown, watching fully funded ICE agents stroll into their checkpoints and collect salaries to not know how to read an X-ray machine. It’s a perfect snapshot of Trump’s America: weaponize ICE, destabilize basic public safety, starve frontline workers, and then angrily insist this is all about “keeping our skies safe.”
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
oil markets briefly fooled by trump’s imaginary iran peace talks
Trump explains his detailed Iran peace plan, which appears to consist of vibes, a Sharpie, and whatever Fox segment he half-watched that morning.
Trump strolls out and announces that actually, there are peace talks with Iran now, which is news to Iran, U.S. diplomats, and anyone who has ever seen a map. Oil prices, ever the optimists, twitch downward for a hot second on the assumption that the President of the United States might be tethered to reality.
Then reporters, diplomats, and basic facts show up. Skepticism spreads, experts note that Iran is still firing missiles and not sending fruit baskets, and the market slowly remembers who’s talking: the guy who once declared North Korea denuclearized because he felt like it. Prices "settle" not because peace is at hand, but because traders decide they can’t keep repricing crude every time Trump free-associates about war and peace on television.
So U.S. foreign policy is now a live-action pump-and-dump theater where the Commander-in-Chief ad-libs global stability, oil futures jump, and the rest of the world has to guess whether he’s describing a secret diplomatic breakthrough or just narrating the movie in his head. Meanwhile, actual diplomats are left doing damage control for a president who treats nuclear standoffs like a ratings stunt.
#killing-democracy#national-security#full-stupid
trump deploys ai to do what he does best: crush states, please donors
Trump signs an AI executive order flanked by lobbyists, proving once again that the only intelligence he trusts is artificial and heavily subsidized.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new use for artificial intelligence: as a pretext to kneecap state governments and shower tech barons with regulatory immunity. In December, Trump signed an executive order telling his administration to both sue and financially punish any state that dares regulate AI – even though more than 70% of voters want more AI oversight at both state and federal levels, and Congress already rejected a similar moratorium almost unanimously. When democracy and oligarchs clash, this White House knows exactly which side it’s on.
What’s sold as “innovation policy” is just federal muscle being flexed on behalf of industry lobbyists terrified that someone, somewhere, might ask their algorithms not to ruin people’s lives quite so aggressively. The self-branded MAGA “populist” movement is now openly trading in its blue-collar cosplay for VIP ballroom time with tech moguls, as Trump’s project fuses government power with corporate AI interests and strips states of consumer protections. Local communities across Maryland, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and beyond are revolting against massive, power-hungry data centers, but the administration’s position is clear: if your town doesn’t want to be turned into a GPU furnace, that’s adorable – and irrelevant.
So while voters across red and blue states line up against unchecked AI and its physical sprawl, Trump is busy welding Washington to Big Tech’s wish list and calling it freedom. The supposed populist warrior against elites has managed to turn AI into yet another tool for centralized, top-down punishment of any state that won’t play ball. Regulatory states’ rights? Only when they’re banning books and abortion, not when they’re inconveniencing billionaires.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
trump slaps sanctions on human rights and calls it freedom
Trump and Marco Rubio bravely defending freedom by sanctioning anyone who talks to the people investigating war crimes.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to defend "Western civilization": financially strangle a UN human rights expert and terrify American academics into silence. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, recommended ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant and suggested maybe – just maybe – companies helping commit war crimes should face consequences. For this unspeakable crime of doing her job, the White House hit her with sanctions so sweeping they amount to a bureaucratic excommunication: no US bank account, no selling her DC house, no salary from American universities. Civil liberties, meet civil death.
The fun doesn’t stop there. Trump signed an executive order threatening criminal prosecution for anyone who provides "funds, goods, or services" to Albanese or Palestinian human rights organizations – language so vague a Maine university canceled an academic conference because she was going to Zoom in for free. Marco Rubio, now playing cosplay Secretary of State, piled on by sanctioning ICC prosecutors, judges, and Palestinian NGOs, because nothing says "land of the free" like punishing people for investigating war crimes and genocide.
The result: professors and students across US campuses are now afraid to share research with Albanese or the ICC, lest they end up fined or arrested for the crime of emailing a PDF. The Supreme Court has spent six decades saying this kind of "chilling effect" on speech is unconstitutional; Trump’s response is to crank the thermostat down to freezer-burn and dare the courts to stop him. Human rights lawyers and academics are filing briefs to challenge the order, arguing that criminalizing contact with a UN expert for criticizing an ally’s atrocities is not exactly what the First Amendment had in mind. But hey, on the bright side, at least we finally know what "free speech absolutism" means in Trump’s America: you’re absolutely free to shut up.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump dusts off cold war law to drill california, not iran
Trump’s energy team, seen here trying to convince a federal judge that a 2015 oil spill was actually a patriotic act of national defense.
California AG Rob Bonta is suing the Trump energy department because Energy Secretary Chris Wright apparently read the Defense Production Act and thought, "Ah yes, my do whatever I want button." Using powers handed to him by a Trump executive order, Wright tried to resurrect the long-disputed Sable Offshore pipeline system—shut down after a 2015 spill dumped over 100,000 gallons of crude into the Pacific—as if state law, state court orders, and a federal settlement were just optional side quests.
California is asking a federal court to remind the Trump administration that the constitution still exists and that "national defense" doesn’t mean "let’s reopen the oil leak from hell." The state wants the court to block the restart order and bar DOE from operating the Santa Ynez platform and pipelines under this Cold War cosplay. Meanwhile, Sable Offshore is already bragging about shipping hydrocarbons again and ramping up to 50,000 barrels a day, because why wait for rulings when you’ve got an oil-friendly White House writing you permission slips?
Gavin Newsom helpfully pointed out that Trump literally started a war with Iran, admitted it would spike gas prices, and is now using the crisis he engineered to jam open California’s coastline for his industry buddies. It’s disaster capitalism with extra tar balls: manufacture an international crisis, jack up prices, then scream "energy emergency" while you bulldoze state authority and environmental protections. The administration is also trying to rebrand a pipeline that never leaves California as "interstate," because if the facts don’t fit your power grab, you can always just relabel the map.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
millions of peasants rudely interrupt trump’s monarchy cosplay
Americans rudely declining their assigned role as extras in Trump’s ICE propaganda reel, armed with cardboard, markers, and an outdated belief in democracy.
The Trump administration’s dream of a comfy little elected monarchy keeps running into the same problem: tens of millions of people who stubbornly insist they’re citizens, not subjects. The third nationwide No Kings protests are set to blanket more than 3,000 cities and towns, with organizers expecting what could be the largest protest in US history — all because Donald really, really wants to play Commander-in-Chief and King George III at the same time.
At the center of this round: Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where residents had the absolute nerve to watch ICE operations in their own communities, and were rewarded when federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti for the crime of observing their government. ICE and DHS are now widely described as running a “reign of terror,” which is a fun way of saying the federal government has decided due process is for suckers and accountability is for other countries.
The protests are fueled by a double feature of Trump-era lawlessness: an allegedly illegal war on Iran and a mass deportation campaign at home, all wrapped in criminalization of dissent and attacks on voting rights. Indivisible, 50501, the ACLU, labor, and civil rights groups are coordinating what they insist will be nonviolent, organized resistance — because when the White House is flirting with authoritarianism, someone has to model responsible behavior. While Trump’s people build a police state with ICE and DHS, millions are showing up to remind them that “No Kings” wasn’t supposed to be a controversial concept in a country literally founded on that idea.
So on 28 March, Bernie Sanders, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers, and a few million of their closest friends will gather to do the thing this administration fears most: peaceful, visible, sustained pro-democracy organizing. The White House keeps acting like the constitution is optional; the streets are sending back a very large, very loud second opinion.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump moves to rename kennedy center after his favorite president: himself
The Kennedy Center, seen here moments before being reimagined as a marble-and-gold tribute to one president’s ego and another president’s ghost rolling his eyes.
Conservation and preservation groups are suing to stop Donald Trump from turning the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into the Trump–Kennedy Center, because apparently we’re just stapling his name onto American history like it’s another failed casino. The lawsuit says Trump and his handpicked board are rushing a $250 million "renovation" that will "hastily gut" the place down to its steel studs while blowing off the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and that pesky detail where Congress never actually authorized a Trump-branded architectural vanity project.
The plaintiffs point out that the Kennedy Center is a living memorial to JFK, not a blank canvas for a septuagenarian real-estate critic to test out his "beautiful, beautiful marbles" theory of governance. They’re asking a judge to rule that last year’s $256 million appropriation for repairs and security doesn’t magically include "new structures" and aesthetic makeovers that would make the lobby look like a Palm Beach steakhouse. Meanwhile, the board has already started mucking around with the site, including slapping Trump’s name on the signage before the legal fights are even over, because the first step in any infrastructure project is, of course, branding.
The administration insists this is all about creating the finest performing arts facility in the world, which is an interesting claim from a president whose signature cultural contribution is rage-posting through felony indictments. A federal judge has already had to step in just to let Rep. Joyce Beatty attend (but not vote in) the board meeting that rubber-stamped the two-year closure, while another part of her challenge is still pending. The conservation groups have a simpler request: stop the White House from taking a chisel to the building’s historic fabric just so Trump can add another monument to himself and call it public service.
#killing-democracy#corruption
trump to gop: no laws unless fewer people can vote
Trump, moments before explaining that the only real voter fraud problem is too many people voting against him.
Donald Trump has issued his latest royal decree to the Republican Party: no deals with Democrats unless they jam voter ID into it. Not "fight for better healthcare," not "fix the economy"—the non-negotiable demand is making it harder to cast a ballot. The man who tried to overturn an election is once again explaining, very loudly, that the only acceptable compromise is one where fewer of the wrong people vote.
This isn’t policy, it’s strategy: hold the entire legislative process hostage until you can rig the rules of the next election. Republicans, who swear they love "election integrity," are being told—by the guy with more indictments than coherent sentences—to prioritize voter ID over literally everything else. Governing is optional; voter suppression is mandatory.
So while normal democracies negotiate over budgets and public safety, Trump’s GOP is negotiating over how many hoops Black, brown, young, and poor voters have to jump through to participate in elections at all. Democracy is supposed to be one person, one vote; Trump’s version is more like one party, all the vetoes—until the electorate is sufficiently "managed" to guarantee the right outcomes.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump turns voice of america into voice of dear leader
Kari Lake discovers that when you can’t win ratings, you can always try state television.
Voice of America journalists are suing Trump administration starlet and failed-TV-anchor-turned-state-media-enthusiast Kari Lake, alleging she’s been using VOA as her own Farsi-language MAGA infomercial. While she’s supposed to safeguard the outlet’s editorial independence, the lawsuit says she’s instead pumping out pro-Trump propaganda and shredding the legal firewall that’s supposed to keep U.S. government media from turning into a taxpayer-funded campaign channel. You know, that pesky "not literal authoritarian state TV" rule.
Not content with just flattering Trump on VOA’s Persian service, Lake reportedly followed Trump’s March 2025 order to hack the network down to its “smallest legal size” by firing contractors, putting more than 1,000 staff on paid leave, and gutting 49 language services down to six. Because when Iran is in crisis and authoritarian regimes are tightening their grip, what better time to kneecap one of the few sources of independent news and then stuff what’s left with administration talking points? Veteran journalists — represented by Norm Eisen — are now asking the courts to remind Lake, Michael Rigas, and the rest of the “US Agency for Global Maga” that federal law and the First Amendment still exist, even if the Trump crew would prefer a more North Korea–chic media environment.
VOA was literally created during World War II to counter Nazi propaganda by telling uncomfortable truths, including Allied failures, to build credibility. Eighty-plus years later, the Trump administration’s contribution to that legacy is: fire the journalists, slash the languages, and send Kari Lake on air to gush about the president to audiences living under repressive regimes. The U.S. once used VOA to model a pluralistic society where politicians don’t dictate the news agenda; now the model on display is "what if we tried the propaganda thing, but with worse production values?"
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s favorite ‘traitor’ won’t stay exiled
Alex Vindman, seen here committing the unforgivable offense of believing presidents shouldn’t extort foreign allies for campaign dirt.
Alexander Vindman, the guy who heard Trump try to shake down Ukraine like a mob boss with bone spurs, has decided that sitting quietly in Florida while the people who smeared him as a "traitor" run the place into the ocean is not really his vibe. Instead, the retired lieutenant colonel and Purple Heart recipient is running for US Senate in Florida — a state currently governed like a Fox News green room by Ron DeSantis and represented by Ashley Moody, a DeSantis appointee whose main qualification appears to be signing whatever the hard-right puts in front of her.
Rather than cashing in on a bestseller and consulting gigs, Vindman is voluntarily walking back into the same political meat grinder that got him purged from the National Security Council for the high crime of reporting that the president was abusing his office. Trump and his GOP chorus spent years calling him a "traitor" for telling the truth under oath; now those same geniuses are still using the line as he campaigns on ending "chaos" and "crushing corruption" — a pretty on-the-nose slogan for the guy who literally reported presidential corruption at the highest level.
His likely opponent, Senator Ashley Moody, comes pre-packaged as a DeSantis-installed rubber stamp whose track record includes helping turn Florida’s insurance market into a flaming sinkhole while protecting big insurers from having to, you know, pay claims. Vindman is pitching himself as the anti-chaos, anti-corruption alternative in a state where single-party rule has produced sky-high costs, broken systems, and a steady stream of Republican officials who treat public office like a loyalty test to Trump and his mini-mes. So the choice is shaping up nicely: the whistleblower who tried to stop an extortion plot, versus the party that punished him so they could keep the chaos flowing.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#retribution
trump fishes a racist statue out of the harbor and gives it a white house address
Contractors carefully install a marble tribute to genocide so it can "peacefully shine" under taxpayer-funded security, unlike the people it commemorates.
The Trump administration has now literally salvaged a Christopher Columbus statue from the trash heap of history and parked a replica right next to the White House, on the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The original? That was the one Baltimore protesters tossed into the harbor in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder, during a nationwide reckoning with racism and colonial violence. Trump saw that as a teachable moment — the lesson being that if people try to move past genocide and conquest, the federal government should step in and give the genocidal guy better real estate.
Instead of using the power of the presidency to, say, address ongoing violence against Indigenous communities, Trump is using it to cosplay as Defender of 15th-Century White Feelings. The White House proudly announced on X that "Christopher Columbus is a hero" and will be honored "for generations to come," because nothing says "forward-looking democracy" like aggressively centering a man whose greatest hits include enslavement, mutilation, and kickstarting centuries of land theft. Meanwhile, Italian American lobbying outfits get a victory lap, Indigenous Peoples Day gets sneered at as "left-wing arson," and the federal government literally enshrines colonial nostalgia on public land.
So yes, in Trump’s America, statues torn down by protesters as symbols of oppression don’t just get replaced — they get upgraded to federal shrine status. Historical revisionism isn’t a bug; it’s the branding strategy.
#killing-democracy#racism
trump keeps losing in court, tries yelling at judges instead
A federal district judge, bravely attempting to explain ‘you actually have to follow the law’ to an administration that thinks contempt of court is a campaign strategy.
American democracy’s latest defense system is… a bunch of exhausted district court judges who signed up to interpret statutes, not fend off a wannabe caudillo with Wi-Fi. While Trump shreds norms like they’re classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, trial judges across the country keep smacking down his executive orders: attempts to kill birthright citizenship, punish disfavored law firms and universities, gut election laws, slash the civil service, and freeze funds all keep running into this annoying obstacle known as the Constitution.
The numbers are almost slapstick. More than 650 lawsuits against Trump executive actions, plaintiffs winning more than twice as often, and judges using phrases like “deliberately ignorant,” “chilling harm of blizzard proportion,” and “an assault on constitutional rights” to describe what the White House insists is just bold leadership. At least 95 times since August, judges have had to ask federal officials why they shouldn’t be held in contempt for just… not following court orders. One conservative Bush-appointed judge, Patrick Schiltz, dryly noted he can’t recall another moment in U.S. history where a federal court had to threaten contempt “again and again and again” to make the government obey the law. Strong words for a branch that usually communicates in footnotes.
Naturally, the president responded like any responsible head of state: by trying to sic the mob on the refs. Judges have been doxxed, SWAT-ed, and showered with death threats while Trump rants about “Crooked Judges,” calls for impeachment of those who rule against him, and has his DOJ file a farcical misconduct complaint against a judge who dared insist Venezuelan migrants get a hearing before being dumped in a Salvadoran hell-prison. One judge was targeted on the dark web by someone looking up his address so “Smith & Wesson” could “pay him a visit.” Law and order, Trump-style, means law for you, orders for him.
Of course, these rulings aren’t always the last word; appellate courts and a Supreme Court stacked with Republican appointees often ride to Trump’s rescue like a Federalist Society Uber. But while Congress enjoys a 14‑month spa retreat and the president auditions for Strongman Idol, a scattered corps of district judges is quietly doing what everyone else keeps pretending is optional: enforcing the Constitution. They’re the modern heirs to the judges who enforced Brown v. Board—only now the segregationists show up in red hats and the threats come with tracking numbers and livestreams. These are the guardrails, and they’re made of flesh, blood, and a frankly heroic tolerance for reading Trump’s briefs without screaming.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
the man who politely suggested maybe crimes happened has died
Robert Mueller, who wrote a meticulous 448-page cautionary tale about presidential lawlessness that America treated like optional homework, 1944–2026.
Robert Mueller, the special counsel who spent two years painstakingly documenting how Trump welcomed Russian election interference and then tried very hard not to call it a crime, has died at 81. The former FBI director’s family announced his passing, closing the chapter on the last time the political class pretended that facts, evidence, and 448-page reports might still matter.
Mueller was appointed in 2017 by Rod Rosenstein to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties to the Trump campaign, a probe that produced indictments, convictions, and one legendary moment where Mueller told Congress that yes, a president could be charged after leaving office. Washington responded by doing absolutely nothing about it, thereby proving that no one obstructs justice more effectively than a cowardly Congress.
The Guardian obit is short on detail so far, but the outline is already clear: a decorated Marine, former FBI director, and institutionalist spent his final major act trying to warn a country that its president was at least obstruction-curious and very Russia-friendly. The institutions he devoted his life to responded by issuing sternly worded tweets. Mueller is gone; the report is gathering dust; and the people it exposed are still on TV yelling that it totally exonerated them. Hell of a legacy for the rule of law.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
pro-life means never having to say you're sorry (for bombing kids)
Pro-life leaders thoughtfully weighing the sanctity of life against the pressing need to drop another bomb on a school.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new interpretation of "pro-life": protect every fertilized egg in Georgia, vaporize actual children in Lebanon and Iran. Since Trump and his bestie in Tel Aviv kicked off their Iran adventure on 28 February, more than 1,800 children have been killed or injured across the region, with Lebanon now losing a classroom’s worth of kids a day on top of the 20,000 children already killed in Gaza. Asked about a U.S.-linked bombing of an elementary school in Iran, Trump basically shrugged and said he could "live with that report" – because of course the man who thinks windmills cause cancer is very chill about mass child death as long as it’s happening somewhere with brown people and oil.
Back home in the shining city on a hill, the same movement that treats foreign kids as acceptable blast radius is furiously criminalizing anyone with a uterus. Since Roe fell, at least 412 pregnancy-related prosecutions have been launched, with Georgia now charging 31-year-old Alexia Moore with murder after she allegedly took abortion pills. She’s sitting in jail without bond so the "small government" crowd can feel spiritually fulfilled. Meanwhile, six-week bans based on what doctors politely describe as "sporadic electrical impulses" are sold as "heartbeat" laws, and Republican states are trying to outlaw traveling for out-of-state abortions, because freedom is for guns, not for women.
The result is a neat two-track system: abroad, U.S. policy helps fill graves with children whose names we’ll never learn; at home, it stuffs prisons with women whose medical histories are now criminal evidence. The "culture of life" turns out to be a culture of surveillance, forced birth, and drone strikes. The fetus is sacred, the pregnant person is disposable, and once that baby is born in the wrong country or the wrong zip code, it’s just another acceptable casualty in the administration’s ongoing war on both human rights and basic arithmetic.
#killing-democracy#pro-life#imperialism
senate can't fund tsa without tipping extra for the secret police
Senators bravely debate whether TSA workers should get paid before or after they underwrite ICE’s right to kick in your door without a name tag.
Senate Republicans have discovered a bold new innovation in governance: if the public gets angry enough about airport lines, maybe they’ll happily subsidize a slightly more polite secret police. The bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security failed again because Democrats declined to rubber-stamp full DHS funding that shovels more money to ICE, the agency currently under fire for its role in the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Chuck Schumer is pushing a clean TSA-only bill so people can get to their flights, while John Thune is out here acting like everyone is equally to blame for tying paychecks for TSA workers to ICE’s right to kick in doors without a warrant.
Behind closed doors, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan is meeting with senators, trying to salvage the administration’s favorite toy: a "rogue agency," as Patty Murray politely called it, that Democrats now want to subject to such radical leftist ideas as wearing name tags, not wearing masks, and getting a warrant before busting into people’s homes. In response, the White House is offering cosmetic tweaks – more body cameras (except when things are sensitive, or inconvenient, or Tuesday) and promising to tone it down a bit at hospitals, schools, and churches. Also, Trump fired Kristi Noem as DHS secretary and dumped Tom Homan directly onto Minneapolis like that’s a reform instead of a threat.
Out on the Senate floor, Republicans insist they’ve made a “very fair, reasonable offer,” which apparently means: pay TSA, fund the rest of DHS, and stop asking why ICE gets to cosplay as an unmarked militia. Democrats want to reopen TSA while they keep negotiating over whether ICE has to follow the Fourth Amendment, which is being treated as some radical bargaining demand instead of the baseline of a functioning democracy. Meanwhile, TSA workers are still on the job without pay, call-outs are climbing, airport lines are stretching, and the message from Washington is clear: your right to fly is now collateral in the ongoing dispute over how unaccountable the domestic security apparatus gets to be.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
rfk jr discovers you actually have to follow laws to persecute trans kids
RFK Jr. attempts to practice medicine, law, and authoritarianism without a license; a federal judge prescribes a hard dose of "read the statute."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s favorite anti-vax podcaster turned Health Secretary, just learned the hard way that "because I feel like it" is not a valid legal standard for federal healthcare policy. A judge in Oregon ruled that Kennedy overstepped his authority when he dropped a 12-page decree declaring gender-affirming care "unsafe" and threatening to kick doctors out of Medicare and Medicaid for treating trans youth. You know, just a casual attempt to weaponize the entire federal health system against a marginalized group, no big deal.
Judge Mustafa Kasubhai basically looked at Kennedy’s stunt and said: this is not how any of this works. The court found that RFK Jr. blew past required procedures, tried to skip rulemaking, and raised what the judge politely called "questions about democracy"—which is judicial code for "are you people allergic to the rule of law?" Twenty-one states and DC sued, and won relief for providers so kids can still get care while the administration figures out how to lose this case more thoroughly.
As a bonus humiliation, this is Kennedy’s second legal faceplant in a week, after a Boston judge temporarily blocked his vaccine policy changes. So the guy whose entire brand is medical misinformation is now running HHS and getting bench-slapped for abusing federal power to intimidate doctors. Truly a banner era for "small government" conservatives: the state shouldn’t help you get healthcare, it should just decide which kinds you’re allowed to have.
#killing-democracy#healthcare
strongman president can’t quite remember the story he’s telling
Trump, mid-sentence, attempting to negotiate with objective reality and losing the deal badly.
Trump is out here demanding concessions from everyone — Democrats, Republicans, and entire countries — like a guy who lost the plot three seasons ago but insists he’s the main character. According to NPR, he’s been struggling to "rewrite the narrative" on major issues, which is a very polite way of saying the gaslighting isn’t landing like it used to.
Instead of governing, he’s trying to negotiate reality by sheer volume: pressure the opposition, lean on his own party, and shake down foreign partners until the facts finally agree with him. Authoritarian fan fiction meets real-world policy, and somehow the only thing he’s successfully rewritten is the definition of "normal" in American politics.
#killing-democracy#fascism#forever-grifting
trump demands $1bn from harvard, threatens cancer research until feelings improve
Trump stares at a Harvard crest like it’s a past-due invoice, while a stack of cancer-research grants sits helpfully labeled “LEVERAGE.”
The Trump administration has decided that the best way to protect civil rights is to hold $9bn in future Harvard research funding hostage until the university stops being insufficiently deferential to the Dear Leader’s preferred politics on Israel and Gaza. After a federal court already ruled that canceling $2.2bn in grants to punish Harvard for not nuking DEI and "leftwing" teaching was unlawful, the White House is back with a fresh lawsuit accusing the school of turning a blind eye to antisemitism and demanding the right to effectively police campus protest.
Trump, who recently announced he wanted a cool $1bn payout from Harvard for its alleged antisemitism like he’s sending an invoice for hurt vibes, now has his DOJ arguing that Title VI should be interpreted as "give us control of your campus or we shoot your science in the head." If they win, the government could block billions in research money and claw back past grants, which Harvard says would cause multiple cancer and heart disease projects to "come to a halt midstream"—a small price to pay so the president can micromanage student encampments from his golf cart.
Harvard’s president Alan Garber has already countersued, accusing the administration of trying to seize academic decision-making and vowing not to surrender the university’s constitutional rights. In response, the administration has sued Harvard twice in a month, tried to ban its foreign students from entering the US, and is now using Jewish and Israeli students’ safety as the latest pretext to keep hammering away at a disfavored institution. Protecting students from harassment apparently now means turning the Justice Department into a campus discipline office and tying life-saving medical research to whether Trump approves of your faculty meetings.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
