president ‘i don’t think about your money’ escalates iran war anyway
Trump explains that he doesn’t think about the American financial situation, seen here standing in front of the American financial situation he’s not thinking about.
Asked about the economic fallout from his Iran adventure, Donald Trump essentially shrugs and says the quiet part out loud: “I don't think about the American financial situation.” Bold strategy for the guy holding the national checkbook while gas prices, inflation, and global markets are doing their best impression of a roller coaster designed by Boeing.
U.S. intelligence is simultaneously reporting that Iran has retained most of its missile capabilities, so the grand plan appears to be: spend billions, destabilize the region, spike prices at home, and achieve...vibes. Meanwhile, another segment calmly walks viewers through how the war is hammering inflation, because when the president stops thinking about the economy, your grocery bill gets to do all the thinking for him.
This is what passes for "national security strategy" now: ignore the financial fallout, pretend deterrence is working while the missiles are still there, and let ordinary Americans pay for it at the pump and in their paychecks. But don’t worry, he’s definitely still laser-focused on the important stuff, like TV coverage and crowd sizes. The economy can fend for itself, apparently.
#killing-democracy#imperialism#money
nebraska democrats speedrun election jenga while gop eyes the rulebook shredder
Nebraska’s ‘blue dot’ seen here moments before a pack of very concerned Republicans try to color-correct it into oblivion.
Nebraska Democrats just pulled off the rare feat of winning a primary specifically so they can drop out. Cindy Burbank beat William Forbes — a "Democrat" who just happens to be a Trump-voting, anti-abortion pastor Republicans were totally not trying to sneak into the ballot like a church pamphlet under your windshield — and now plans to step aside so independent Dan Osborn can take on GOP senator Pete Ricketts head-to-head.
Meanwhile, the real fun is in Omaha’s "blue dot" second congressional district, where John Cavanaugh and Denise Powell are locked in a too-close-to-call primary for a seat Democrats desperately want. Why? Because if Cavanaugh wins in November, Republican governor Jim Pillen gets to appoint his replacement to the state legislature — potentially handing the GOP just enough votes to finally kill Nebraska’s split electoral vote system and erase that pesky Democratic electoral vote that keeps popping up every few presidential cycles.
So on one side, Democrats are contorting themselves to block a fake Democrat and prop up an independent to stop a MAGA senator. On the other, Republicans are working on the long game of "what if we just change how votes count?" so they never have to worry about that annoying little blue dot again. It’s not outright ballot-stuffing, but as practice rounds for dismantling representative democracy go, it’s remarkably on brand.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump considers trading taiwan for a hug and cheaper oil
Workers frantically polish the Temple of Heaven so it’s shiny enough for Trump to admire his reflection while contemplating whether to pawn off Taiwan for a handshake and a headline deal.
Donald Trump is heading to Beijing for the first US presidential visit in nearly a decade, mostly because starting a war with Iran has gone about as well as you’d expect when your foreign policy team is three generals, a podcaster, and Elon Musk on speakerphone. The Iran conflict is in its third month, the strait of Hormuz is effectively a hostage situation, and Trump is now reduced to asking Xi Jinping for help while insisting to reporters that the US has Iran "very much under control" and will "win it one way or the other – peacefully or otherwise." Always reassuring when the commander-in-chief talks about war like he’s describing a football game with optional nukes.
The White House is openly dangling the thing Beijing actually wants – weaker US support for democratic Taiwan – as the unspoken price for Chinese "assistance" in getting Tehran to reopen a chokepoint that handles a fifth of the world’s oil. While US officials quietly beg China to lean on its top oil client, Trump is flying in with tech billionaires as props, including Elon Musk, because nothing screams "serious diplomacy" like treating a potential world war as a TED Talk with side deals. Meanwhile, Xi is lecturing Washington about "international rule of law" and warning against a return to the "law of the jungle" – which is a fun way of saying that Trump has so thoroughly torched America’s moral authority that the authoritarian in the room now gets to cosplay as the responsible adult.
As Washington slaps sanctions on Chinese firms for helping Iran and Beijing invokes blocking statutes to tell the US to go sanction itself, the summit is less "high-stakes diplomacy" and more a live demonstration of what happens when you blow up a region, alienate allies, and then wander over to another authoritarian government hoping they’ll bail you out if you hand them a piece of the free world. The stakes aren’t just oil prices; it’s whether Trump tries to trade away Taiwan’s security for a photo op, a "big, fat hug," and a chance to pretend his Iran disaster is all part of some 4D chess master plan instead of exactly what it looks like: ad-libbed foreign policy with a body count.
#killing-democracy#imperialism#national-security
trump’s sore-loser cult still trying to ‘find’ raffensperger
Brad Raffensperger campaigns for governor while checking whether the venue has Wi‑Fi, chairs, and a bomb squad on standby — the standard package in Trump’s GOP.
Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state whose unforgivable sin was not fabricating votes for Donald Trump in 2020, is now running for governor and — surprise — facing an "active threat". Mississippi cops reportedly received a multipage manifesto with Raffensperger’s face and the word “boom” scrawled across it, because nothing says "healthy democracy" like interstate fan mail for people who wouldn’t help steal an election.
While law enforcement swept a "suspicious object" at Middle Georgia Regional Airport — conveniently, the site of a scheduled Raffensperger campaign stop — his team was busy beefing up security and not releasing the suspect’s name or the contents of the manifesto. Totally normal campaign logistics in the post-Trump GOP: yard signs, mailers, and a risk assessment about who might try to blow you up for certifying the actual vote count.
Raffensperger’s opponent, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, is one of those fun "fake electors" who pretended Trump won Georgia and has Trump’s endorsement, because of course he does. So voters get a clear choice: the guy who said no to Trump’s "find 11,780 votes" shakedown, or the guy who happily play-acted an alternate reality slate of electors — while the background noise of this primary is literal threats of violence against the one who upheld the law. American democracy isn’t just on the ballot; it’s apparently on a bomb threat list.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
marco rubio defeats chinese sanctions using the power of spelling
Marco Rubio, bravely standing up to Beijing by entering China under a slightly different name like a teenager sneaking back onto Twitter after a ban.
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.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
only republicans who crossed dear leader are the ones voters can’t reach
Bill Cassidy, seen here contemplating the career prospects of a Republican who once acknowledged reality.
Bill Cassidy is about to learn the first rule of Trump’s GOP: you can have a conscience, or you can have a career, but you absolutely cannot have both. Louisiana ditched its old "jungle primary" system and switched to a closed GOP primary, which is a very polite way of saying: only the most committed MAGA die-hards get to decide whether the senator who voted to convict Trump after Jan. 6 is allowed to keep his job. Voters who might actually like that he didn’t side with the coup attempt? They’re locked outside the clubhouse.
The data is brutally consistent. Of the Republicans who impeached or convicted Trump, the only ones who politically survived did so in open or jungle primaries where normal humans were allowed to participate: Dan Newhouse, David Valadao, Lisa Murkowski. Once you confine the electorate to just Republicans marinating in Fox, Facebook, and whatever Elon is rage-posting that day, the outcome is simple: they either retire or get purged. Cassidy now gets to play the game show where his opponents, Julia Letlow and John Fleming, compete to prove who loves Trump more while he stands there holding the receipt from his impeachment vote.
Meanwhile, Susan Collins glides through a basically uncontested GOP primary in Maine because even Trump understands that if he sends a full-MAGA candidate up there, Democrats will turn them into electoral mulch. So the guy who demands absolute loyalty in red states suddenly discovers “pragmatism” in blue-leaning ones. The principle is clear: it’s not about rule of law or the Constitution, it’s about where Trump can afford to be vindictive and where he has to pretend to be strategic. The party of Lincoln has become the party of ‘you crossed the boss, enjoy retirement.’
So yes, the ranks of pro-impeachment Republicans are dwindling. Not because Jan. 6 was secretly fine, but because the internal rules, primary systems, and Trump’s endorsement machine are all working together to send a message: uphold your oath, lose your seat. It’s a loyalty test dressed up as democracy, and the scantron only has one acceptable answer: Trump was wronged, the coup wasn’t that bad, and anyone who says otherwise can be replaced by someone who won’t make that mistake again.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump doj discovers true enemy of extremism: the people fighting it
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel proudly announce that, after years of white supremacist violence, they’ve finally brought the hammer down on the true menace: the people who keep suing white supremacists.
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.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump administration heroically defends cancer’s right to roam free
EPA headquarters, where ‘environmental protection’ has been rebranded as ‘please don’t harsh industry’s carcinogenic vibe.’
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.
#killing-democracy#anti-science
the fda discovers a bold new treatment: suppressing its own science
FDA headquarters, where scientific manuscripts go to peer review, get accepted, and then are quietly escorted to the same farm upstate where your childhood dog went.
The FDA commissioned massive vaccine safety studies on nearly 12 million people, got the answers, had them peer-reviewed and accepted by journals, and then political appointees essentially said: "thanks, now bury it." One Covid study found basically one serious signal — anaphylaxis at about one in a million Pfizer doses — and another confirmed already-known rare risks like febrile seizures and myocarditis. A Shingrix study confirmed a small uptick in Guillain-Barré risk that's literally been on the label for years. So naturally, the response from leadership was to yank the manuscripts rather than let doctors or the public see reassuring data. Science, but make it hostage negotiation.
The best part? While these big, well-designed studies get blocked for being too reassuring, an internal memo linking 10 child deaths to Covid vaccination — with no substantiated evidence — sails right through and becomes headline fodder. So fear-driven, weakly supported claims get a red carpet, while robust data that might calm people down is held to a standard no paper on Earth could meet. That’s not caution, that’s regulatory capture with a side of propaganda.
All of this is happening just in time for the World Cup to dump millions of humans into under-vaccinated North America during a measles resurgence, while CDC hemorrhages staff and has its flagship journal and dashboards politically edited like they’re campaign ads. Doctors on the front lines are now stuck practicing medicine in a fun new game called "guess what data the government decided you’re not mature enough to see this week." Public health used to mean "tell clinicians what you see." The new model is closer to "tell them what polls well and hide the rest." What could possibly go wrong at a mass international gathering in the middle of multiple outbreaks when the surveillance system is busy muzzling itself?
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
trump’s doj declares war on seashells
The offending contraband: a deadly arrangement of seashells that somehow survived two world wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror, but not Donald Trump’s ego.
The Trump administration has now reached the ‘prosecute a beach photo’ stage of authoritarian decline. James Comey has been indicted again, this time because he posted an Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “8647,” which Trump’s Justice Department insists is a “serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” America: where free speech is protected, unless a retired FBI director offends the guy who still rage-posts in all caps.
Comey, whose family members have already been pushed out of federal prosecutor jobs after criticizing Trump, calls this exactly what it is: retaliation from a president with a “bottomless desire” for revenge. The case was cooked up by a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney and a newly hired GOP operative-turned-AUSA, then wrapped in outdated "reasonable recipient" threat language that ignores current Supreme Court precedent requiring actual intent to threaten. Legal experts across the spectrum are politely screaming that the case is built on sand while the administration stares at a seashell arrangement like it’s the Zapruder film.
The indictment follows a previous Comey case that collapsed after a judge ruled Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was improperly appointed. Having learned absolutely nothing, the administration has simply tried again with a new batch of loyalists and an even dumber theory. Comey’s lawyers say they’ll move to dismiss the case as selective and vindictive prosecution, while warning that the country is going numb to this level of DOJ abuse. When criminal law is reduced to decoding restaurant slang in beach art, you’re not just off the rails—you’ve melted down the rails and indicted them too.
Meanwhile, the White House has no comment, presumably because it’s busy reviewing other dangerous threats to the presidency, such as crossword puzzles that spell "RESIGN" and latte foam that looks like the 14th Amendment. This is not normal. It is, however, extremely on brand.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
supreme court speedruns minority rule while virginia begs for a map
The Supreme Court, seen here carefully weighing whether voters or Republican cartographers should pick Congress for the next decade.
Virginia Democrats are now reduced to asking the same US supreme court that helped gut the Voting Rights Act to please, sir, may we have a functioning democracy. After voters in April actually approved a Democratic-backed ballot measure to redraw the state’s congressional map and flip four GOP seats, the Virginia supreme court swooped in on 8 May and declared that, sorry, the procedure was wrong, so the will of the voters will just have to wait behind Republican control of Congress.
The Republican lawsuit won on a neat little technicality: Democrats "rushed" the referendum last year, so obviously the only fair solution is to keep the GOP-friendly map that just happens to preserve their narrow House majority. Now Don Scott and Virginia Democrats are telling the US supreme court that the state ruling has "deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth" of their lawfully enacted map, citing a 2023 decision warning state courts not to grab power from legislatures. The twist: that same conservative 6–3 court already paved the road for this mess by gutting a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, letting Republican-led southern states dismantle majority-Black and Latino districts.
Meanwhile, Trump has been egging on Texas Republicans to tear up their maps mid-decade to flip up to five Democratic seats red, which the Guardian politely calls a "tit-for-tat" battle. One side dismantles civil rights protections and hardwires minority rule; the other tries a voter-approved ballot measure and gets slapped down for moving too fast. American democracy is now a game of "who can redraw the lines faster" while the Supreme Court stands by as the nation’s most powerful cartographer, busy turning representative government into an advanced gerrymandering practicum.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
white house correspondents’ dinner gets the full banana-republic treatment
White House Correspondents’ Dinner guests crouch under tables as America’s political system does the same.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner — traditionally a night of bad jokes and worse access journalism — has now upgraded to live-fire exercise. Cole Tomas Allen, a California teacher and engineer, pleaded not guilty to four federal counts, including attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump, after allegedly sprinting toward the event with multiple guns, knives, and enough gear to cosplay "tactical midlife crisis". A Secret Service officer was shot in the chest but survived thanks to a ballistic vest, which is more than you can say for the illusion that this is a stable democracy.
Prosecutors say Allen traveled cross-country by train, checked into the hotel, took a selfie in his murder outfit, and sent his family a manifesto apologizing and ranting about Trump and "administration officials" as targets. So yes, the country is now at the stage where people are openly workshopping assassination plans like they're pitching a startup. Meanwhile, his sister says he made radical comments and talked about a plan to "fix the world" while secretly stockpiling guns — because nothing screams "functional system" like a guy with clear issues gliding through the background-check universe.
The legal circus is just getting started. Allen’s defense team is already moving to bounce the entire U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. from the case because it’s overseen by none other than U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who apparently has a "supervisory role" in the prosecution. So the attempted assassination of Trump is being overseen by Trump-world’s favorite screaming TV judge, and we’re all supposed to pretend that sounds normal and impartial. The only thing missing at this point is a commemorative coin and a Truth Social promo code.
Allen didn’t expect to survive, told the FBI as much, and landed briefly on suicide watch — which is what passes for a coherent endgame in a political environment where everything is permanently set to "escalate." The press, the president, and half the Cabinet diving under tables at the Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t just a security failure; it’s a bleak little preview of a country that’s busy turning every political event into a potential war zone while its leaders argue over who gets to grandstand on cable news about it.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump discovers due process is optional when xi is your cop buddy
Trump and Xi, seen here deciding which rights are negotiable this week and which arrests make the best campaign B-roll.
U.S. and Chinese authorities have announced a joint drug bust just days before Donald Trump’s big state visit to Beijing, because nothing sets the mood for a summit like synchronized policing with a one-party surveillance state. Three Americans and two Chinese suspects were arrested in an operation spanning Florida, Nevada, and two Chinese provinces, with Beijing loudly congratulating itself on the "major achievement" while U.S. agencies have yet to formally confirm anything. Apparently the new standard for transparency is: trust the Chinese state broadcaster, the DEA will get back to you.
This comes on the heels of the U.S. quietly extraditing a Chinese drug suspect back to Beijing last month, a "rare" move that somehow became a lot less rare once Trump decided he wanted tariff concessions and a fentanyl photo op. China pledges crackdowns, Trump lowers his fentanyl-related tariffs, and suddenly we’re trading away leverage and human rights concerns for a press release about protonitazene and bromazolam. World peace and development, according to the Chinese foreign ministry; "look, I made Xi arrest some guys," according to the White House.
As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent does his pre-summit tour through Japan and South Korea, the message is clear: U.S. law enforcement is now a bargaining chip on Trump’s trade-and-drugs deal sheet. When you’re coordinating arrests with a government that disappears lawyers and jails journalists, the line between legitimate cooperation and outsourced repression gets very blurry, very fast. But hey, if the fentanyl tariffs go down and the campaign talking points go up, why worry about pesky things like due process, transparency, or who actually controls the handcuffs?
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump finally finds a fed chair who can’t say who won 2020
Kevin Warsh practices central bank independence by seeing how long he can dodge the question "Who won in 2020?" without losing his nomination.
The Senate is poised to hand Donald Trump the keys to the world’s most important central bank by confirming Kevin Warsh, a man who somehow managed to serve on the Fed for years yet cannot say whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Always comforting when the person in charge of interest rates treats basic reality like a trick question. Democrats are calling Warsh Trump’s “sock puppet,” which is unfair to socks, most of which have some structural integrity.
Warsh built his brand as an inflation hawk during the 2008 crisis, but now that Trump wants dirt-cheap money to juice his second-term miracle economy, Warsh has discovered that actually, rates are too high and the Fed’s leadership is “broken.” Fortunately for Trump, he’s already been running a live-fire loyalty test on Fed independence: launching a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell over building renovations that went over budget, then watching the Justice Department quietly drop it once a Republican senator threatened to stall Warsh’s nomination. Totally normal stuff in a healthy democracy.
Powell, who is apparently still under the impression that laws matter, is clinging to a board seat until the bogus investigation is "well and truly over" and keeps politely pointing out that the Fed is now having to sue the executive branch just to be allowed to do monetary policy without political orders from Mar-a-Lago. Meanwhile, Warsh promises he’ll be an “independent actor” while refusing to acknowledge who won the last election and auditioning for the role of Trump’s rate-cut concierge. The markets wanted stability; they’re getting a central bank chair who treats Fed independence like a negotiable line item in a loyalty oath.
#killing-democracy#fascism#forever-grifting
men discover democracy is a group project
A rare sighting of men at a pro-democracy meeting, lured in with pizza, beer, and the faint hope that someone else will still do most of the work.
American democracy is collapsing under Trump 2.0, but don’t worry, women have it covered while a large chunk of men have apparently decided that authoritarianism is a ladies’ hobby. Saul Austerlitz describes his Brooklyn activist group, now about 80% women, frantically trying to hold the line while many men either slide right, burn out, or retreat into the safe space of craft beer and vinyl. After all, as long as Dobbs, ICE violence, and creeping autocracy mostly hit everyone else, a lot of white guys figure they’ll be "personally OK" – the political equivalent of hanging a cubicle sign that reads, "Your Emergency Is Not My Crisis."
Instead of waiting for a magical Male Conscience Awakening, Austerlitz and his (all female) co-leaders are resorting to the radical tactic of personally inviting men to care about their own democracy. They’re targeting fathers who allegedly don’t want to abandon their kids to Trump’s slow-motion constitutional bonfire, hosting pizza-and-beer resistance salons where the ask is painfully modest: text three annoyed dudes you know and convince them to show up next time. The big strategic vision for defeating authoritarianism in 2026 America? Not a robust rule-of-law response or institutional reform – just hoping enough guys can be coaxed off the couch and into a meeting before the "No Kings" rallies become a historical reenactment.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
trump auditions crown princes: hillbilly elegy vs. marco polo
Two grown men with decades in politics gamely competing for the role of Trump’s favorite "kid," as American democracy sighs in the background.
Trump is reportedly wandering around the Oval Office, Mar-a-Lago, and whatever patio he’s currently monetizing, asking the same deeply constitutional question: “What do you think? JD or Marco?” Because nothing says healthy democracy like the president treating the 2028 GOP nomination as a game of ‘pick your favorite heir’ between two men he literally calls his “kids.”
While the party pretends primaries still exist, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is using an actual war with Iran as B‑roll for a campaign-style video, then jetting off to Italy to hand Pope Leo XIV a crystal football like he’s a booster trying to flip a five-star recruit who took a vow of poverty. He then meets Giorgia Meloni, another elected leader Trump has publicly berated for insufficient obedience on the war, before tagging along with Trump to China, presumably to collect more foreign-policy footage for the 2028 sizzle reel.
Back home, Vice President JD Vance is dispatched to an Iowa factory to shore up a vulnerable House Republican, delivering the usual culture-war TED Talk about how Democrats care more about “gender transition” than workers’ paychecks, while serving in an administration that has spent years treating labor protections like a personal insult. The White House political shop is essentially a pre-primary production studio, and Trump’s big strategic insight is that maybe Rubio and Vance should just run together in 2028, like a unity ticket for people who think the only branch of government that matters is whichever one has his name on the door.
So the Republican Party, once allegedly a collection of institutions and voters, is now a vibes-based monarchy where the sitting president casually workshopped his successor between golf rounds, and the top contenders audition by turning foreign trips, wartime briefings, and taxpayer-funded travel into campaign trailers. Succession planning is less about policy than about who can best promise to keep the Trump show running in syndication.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
fox news accidentally eats one of its own, court says 'burp, that's legal'
Fox News explaining that accusing a random Trump supporter of being a deep-state mastermind is just robust political discourse, not a televised witch hunt.
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.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump council bravely declares war on americans who just got flooded
FEMA worker helping a hurricane survivor in 2024, back when the federal government still occasionally pretended to care if you survived the next storm.
Trump’s handpicked “Fema Review Council” has decided that, as the planet literally catches fire and drowns at the same time, this is the perfect moment to “close the chapter on Fema.” The 12-member panel, co-chaired by Markwayne Mullin and Pete Hegseth, wants to turn the nation’s disaster agency into a kind of disaster call-center: locally executed, state managed, federally ghosted. Translation: if your town gets wiped off the map by a climate-fueled hurricane, please direct your complaints to your underfunded county office that doesn’t have an emergency management department.
The council’s 150-point “upgrade” plan mostly consists of raising the bar for federal disaster declarations, dumping evacuation and sheltering entirely on local governments, and slashing payouts to homeowners and renters. The theory is that FEMA’s role should be "supporting"—as in, they’ll support you from a distance while you dig your own house out of the rubble. Experts politely note that small governments are nowhere near equipped for this, but the administration has already done its best to break FEMA, so why stop at sabotage when you can move on to burial?
All of this is wrapped in the usual buzzwords about efficiency, transparency, and cutting costs, as if the real problem with climate catastrophe is that poor people whose homes flooded are too expensive. As extreme weather disasters accelerate, the federal government’s new position is essentially: good luck out there. The climate crisis is national and global, but Trump’s team has discovered a bold new solution—pretend it’s a zoning issue and send the bill to your city council.
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
trump and elon reinvent the courts as a deportation conveyor belt
Former immigration judge David Koelsch, pictured moments after realizing that in Trump’s America, "judicial independence" is grounds for termination.
The Trump administration looked at the already rickety immigration court system and decided the real problem was too much independence. So since January 2025, they’ve fired more than 113 immigration judges, shoved others out with "buyouts" helpfully designed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (because nothing says impartial justice like DOGE), and swapped them for military lawyers and political appointees who understand the sacred legal principle of "whatever Stephen Miller’s burner account wants."
Former judge David Koelsch, who once investigated terrorism cases and granted asylum based on, you know, the law, bailed early rather than wait to be purged for the crime of not rubber-stamping deportations fast enough. He went from taking the same oath as ICE and CBP agents to watching them gas civilians on a Minneapolis street after the killing of Alex Pretti, and realizing the oath now apparently comes with complimentary tactical cosplay and zero accountability. Judges with higher asylum grant rates suddenly found themselves "biased in favor of the alien" – which is a very normal thing for a government to say when it’s definitely not trying to rig the courts.
Inside the system, current judges are begging for anonymity because they reasonably fear retaliation from an administration that treats due process as a rounding error in its deportation stats. The message is clear: align your rulings with the White House’s enforcement goals or enjoy early retirement and maybe a Target gift card. And while Koelsch points out that Biden’s numbers-massage via prosecutorial discretion also treated people as backlog fodder, Trump and Musk have upgraded the model: why quietly shuffle cases when you can openly remake the courts into a loyalty test and call it "efficiency"? If this is what they do to immigration courts, imagine what the rest of the justice system looks like once DOGE finishes its "optimization" pass.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#fascism
because nothing says 'family vacation' like gunfire by the bathrooms
A peaceful national park trail, thoughtfully redesigned as a shared space for hikers, wildlife, and guys dragging carcasses to the nearest restroom.
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.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
